Stalin would continue a cycle of getting arrested and excelled to Siberia eight times between 1902 and 1917. He escaped six times. This is where he developed his new last name Stalin, or "man of steel".
When Stalin was not in jail he was very busy from 1902-1919. He married his first wife Yekaterina Svanidze, in 1904, but she unfortunately died in 1910, only after six years of marriage. He also became known as an up and comer follower for the Bolshevik party, and helped organize a bank robbery in 1907 to help finance his party. Stalin was always respected for his practical contributions to the party, and he was rewarded with a seat in the Bolshevik's Central Committee in 1912.
During the first world war, moral was low in the Russian Army. Many soldiers resented that they where fighting a war for someone else. Their resentment peaked in February 1917, when a group of soldiers took over the town of St. Petersburg. The Czar Nicholas II knew his time was up and fled Russia a few days later, ending a 300 year old legacy. The temporary government was put in place, sharing some power with the revolutionaries. Lenin the leader of the Bolshevik party, started to rally the people, and by October, they had seized power of the government. Stalin didn't really have much to do with the revolution, he wrote a few editorials for a popular Russian newspaper, but his contributions where minimal at best. He would of course have history rewritten giving him a bigger role when he becomes dictator.
From 1918 to 1920 civil war broke out between the Bolsheviks (know as the Reds) and the Counter Revolutionaries (know as the Whites). The Whites wanted to take control from the Bolsheviks, and it turned out to be a very brutal, bloody war. Stalin was giving the position Commissariat of Nationality Affairs. His job was to help decide on all emergency issues during the very difficult fist period of the civil war. Joseph was also a war commander on several fronts.