Stalin was at first barred from the church school in Gori in 1886 because he didn't know the Russian language but he managed to learn it with the local priest and entered two years later. According to Simon Sebag-Montefiore Stalin was a gifted pupil. He did skip the first grade and had very good marks in mathematics, Greek, theology and Russian. One year after moving to Tbilisi to study at the Theological Seminary he got his Georgian poetry published in a publication edited by the renowned Georgian writers of the day and that's also when he first came into contact with the local Marxist reading circles.

You can google his articles and pamphlets from the early 1900s. They've been published in Georgian language radical press like პროლეტარიატის ბრძოლა (proletaris brdzola = proletarian struggle) in 1904 #4 on the Social Democrat stance on nationalism; in ახალი ცხოვრება (artskhali tskhovreba = new life) in 1906 on labour laws, social democrat polemic against anarchism, explaining some marxian concepts, in განთიადი (gantiadi = the dawn) on parliamentary politics in Russia. In 1905 he also wrote several pamphlets in Russian and when addressing the "Citizens" he would attack the heavy taxation and authoritarianism while appealing to join the upheavals in Poland and in the Ukraine along with those Russian working class in Moscow and Saint Petersburg; when addressing the "Workers of the Caucasus" he'd refer instead to an ongoing Proletarian Revolution having had it's opening act.

Does that make him an intellectual? It's for you to judge. Dr.Roy Medvedev wrote an article on the library of Stalin since 1925. Dr.Игорь Курлядский (what is the proper transliteration?) wrote an article^1 in 2007 on the books Stalin encountered before the Revolution - As a child he read Georgian language "Patricide" novel by Alexander Kazbegi, about Koba, a Robin Hood figure living during the Russian annexation of Georgia at the turn of the 19th century. "Koba" was Stalin's first pseudonym. During his education, both in Tbilisi and in Gori, he will have encountered, according to the curriculum, from amongst the Russians - Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenyev, Goncharov; from amongst the Western writers - Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, Schiller, Homer, Byron, Hugo, Dickens, Thackeray; from philosophers - Kant, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Hegel, Ribot, Spencer, Malthus, John Stuart Mill; from historians - F.C.Schlosser, Solovyov, Klyuchevsky, Macaulay, Guizot. Outside of the curriculum, Stalin himself claims, they were reading "in secret, in the hours reserved for prayer, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Plekhanov and Lenin". Kurlyandskiy adds to that list more judging from Stalin's output: Tugan-Baranovskiy, Herzen, Timiryazev, Metchnikoff, Liebknecht, Bebel, Kautsky, Montesquieu.

^1 Игорь Курляндский: «В Бога и святых он не верил с детства…». «Политический Журнал». 04.06.2007