Joseph is wracked with grief. He leaves his son to be cared for by his wife’s parents and throws himself into his revolutionary work. He adopts the name 'Stalin' which means 'steel' in Russian.

Joseph Stalin’s actions in 1939 ... By his first wife he had a son, Yasha Djugashvili, now in his thirties, an obscure engineer in Moscow. Father and son do not hit it off.