Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; 6 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a communist revolutionary and politician who led the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1924 until his death in 1953.

Generalissimo Joseph Stalin Marshal Vozhd HSU HSL HM
Иосиф Сталин იოსებ სტალინი
Official portrait, 1950
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
In office 3 April 1922 – 16 October 1952
Preceded by	Vyacheslav Molotov (as Responsible Secretary)
Succeeded by	Nikita Khrushchev (as First Secretary)
2nd Leader of the Soviet Union
In office 21 January 1924 – 5 March 1953
President	Mikhail Kalinin Nikolai Shvernik
Premier	Alexei Rykov Vyacheslav Molotov Himself
Preceded by	Vladimir Lenin
Succeeded by	Georgy Malenkov
4th Premier of the Soviet Union
In office 6 May 1941 – 5 March 1953
President	Mikhail Kalinin Nikolai Shvernik
First Deputies	Nikolai Voznesensky Vyacheslav Molotov Nikolai Bulganin
Preceded by	Vyacheslav Molotov
Succeeded by	Georgy Malenkov
Minister of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union
In office 19 July 1941 – 3 March 1947
Premier	Himself
Preceded by	Semyon Timoshenko
Succeeded by	Nikolai Bulganin
People's Commissar for Nationalities of the Russian SFSR
In office 8 November 1917 – 7 July 1923
Premier	Vladimir Lenin
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Office abolished
Personal details
Born	Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (1878-12-06)6 December 1878 Gori, Russian Empire (present-day Georgia)
Died	5 March 1953(1953-03-05) (aged 74) Moscow, Soviet Union
Resting place	Lenin's Mausoleum, Moscow (1953–1961) Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow (since 1961)
Political party	CPSU (from 1912)
Other political affiliations	RSDLP (1898–1912) Bolshevik (faction from 1903)
Spouse(s)	Ekaterine Svanidze ​ ​ (m. 1906; died 1907)​ Nadezhda Alliluyeva ​ ​ (m. 1919; died 1932)​
Children	Yakov Dzhugashvili Vasily Stalin Artyom Sergeyev (adopted) Svetlana Alliluyeva
Parents	Besarion Jughashvili (father) Ekaterine Geladze (mother)
Alma mater	Tiflis Theological Seminary
Awards	Full list
Signature
Military service
Nickname(s)	Koba Soso
Allegiance	Soviet Russia Soviet Union
Branch	Red Army
Years of service	1918–1920
Rank	Generalissimo (from 1945)
Commands	Soviet Armed Forces (from 1941)
Battles/wars	Russian Civil War Polish–Soviet War World War II

In the Soviet Union, Stalin created a totalitarian political system now called Stalinism. He also created Marxism–Leninism and made it the Soviet Union's official political ideology.

After World War II, Stalin gained control over all of Eastern Europe, including part of Germany. There he set up a series of loyal Marxist-Leninist single-party states. This made the Soviet Union a superpower. Stalin's policies turned the USSR into a powerful, relatively modern country, the largest on Earth.

Name

Stalin was born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili or Iosif Dzhugashvili. He began calling himself "Stalin" in 1912.

• In Russian: Ио́сиф Виссарио́нович Ста́лин - Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin; born Джугашвили - Dzhugashvili.
• In Georgian: იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილიი - Ioseb Jughashvili
• Joseph Stalin 

Early life

The house where Stalin was born, in Gori, Georgia

On 18 December 1878, Stalin was born in a small one-room house in Gori. This was a region in the Russian Empire that is now called Georgia. His parents had two other children, but both died.

Stalin's father, a shoemaker, was an abusive alcoholic.

Health problems

Stalin was born with two fused toes on his left foot. During childhood, he had smallpox, which left permanent scars. (Later, in the Soviet Union, photos of Stalin were often changed to hide these scars.)

As a child, Stalin also had measles and scarlet fever. Three times, he was in traffic accidents.

Stalin's left arm was around 5.5 cm shorter than his right arm, for unclear reasons. According to Stephen Kotkin, it was shortened in a January 1890 injury, when Stalin was hit by a sports carriage. It is also possible that he had a birth injury or Erb's Palsy.

Revolutionary activities

Stalin in 1902

Early activities

Stalin was educated at the Gori church school. Then he studied to be a priest at a seminary in Tbilisi. He was an active student who read many books. He especially liked books that were not allowed by the seminary, including Karl Marx's writings.

In 1898 Stalin joined a Marxist group called the Mesame Dasi, or Group Three. The next year, he left school and got a job at the Tbilisi Physical Institute. He joined groups that were trying to start a revolution to remove the Tsar and change the government.

The police raided Stalin's house in 1901 while hunting for people who opposed the government. Stalin escaped and went into hiding so the police could not find him. He continued to organize anti-government activities such as May Day marches and protests.

Stalin became a Bolshevik. He supported a violent revolution, and opposed the Mensheviks.

Arrests & exiles

The secret police arrested Stalin in April 1902 and exiled him to Siberia without any trial. There, Stalin lived in the village of Novaya Uda.

Soon, he escaped from Siberia. This led to many later claims that he was a police spy. These beliefs increased after the arrest of Stephan Shaumyan, a Bolshevik rival of Stalin's.

At the end of 1905, Stalin went to a meeting in Finland and met Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin was not what Stalin had expected.

In the next ten years, the government arrested and exiled Stalin several times. This increased his power in the Bolshevik party. In 1912, he was elected to its Central Committee and promoted to a position in St. Petersburg.

General Secretary

Stalin (right side) with Lenin (left side) in 1922

Stalin was a member of the Bolshevik Party, but he did not do much in the Russian Revolution of 1917. At the time, he was writing and editing Pravda, the party's newspaper.

Stalin held a number of organizational jobs in the Communist Party. In 1922 he became General Secretary. This allowed him to give jobs to people he liked in the Communist Party. These supporters helped him become the leader of the Soviet Union after Vladimir Lenin died in 1924.

Leading the USSR

After Lenin's death, Stalin fought for power of the Soviet Union. In 1929 he declared himself dictator and became the second leader of the Soviet Union.

Mass executions

Mass graves of victims killed during Stalin's rule in Belarus

To eliminate "enemies of the working class", Stalin instituted the "Great Terror" (also called the "Great Purge"). His government executed at least 700,000 people and sent over a million others to gulags between 1934 and 1939.

Stalin executed most of the generals in the Red Army because he saw them as a threat to his rule. For this reason, his army was greatly weakened when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

World War II

Stalin with Churchill and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in February 1945

The Nazis began their invasion on 22 June 1941. This offensive, called Operation Barbarossa, was the largest military invasion in human history.

Two years before, the USSR and Nazi Germany had signed a mutual non-aggression pact, promising not to fight with each other. However, Hitler hated communism. After taking over France, he sent the Wehrmacht to invade the Soviet Union.

After the Nazis invaded, the Soviet Union began working with the Western Allies to defeat Germany. Germany eventually lost the war, but the USSR had more casualties than any other country during the war.

Post-WWII

Under Stalin, the Soviet Union became the largest country in the world. After Nazi Germany was defeated, Stalin gained control over East Germany and all of Eastern Europe.

The Soviet Union grew to include today's countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Stalin's government made these countries follow Marxism-Leninism, even though the American and British governments protested. Other countries (like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary) became satellite states of the USSR and adopted communism.

In 1947 the Cold War began. Stalin militarized the USSR by focusing its time and energy on weapons, military vehicles, and the armed forces.

Policies

Food and agriculture

Also see: Collectivization

Stalin Giving a speech to the Red Army during the 1941 October Revolution Parade

Stalin collectivized farms in the Soviet Union. This meant cancelling the private property rights of the people who owned them. Stalin's government took land away from individual farm owners and created large government-run farms. People were required to work on these large farms and turn their harvests over to the government.

Collectivization did not work well. Because farmers were not paid much money, and whatever they grew went to the state, the workers did not try their best. In 1932-1933 there was a famine, and millions of people starved.

Peasants were given very small bits of land where they could grow whatever they liked and keep what they grew. The best farming in the Soviet Union came from these small pieces of land. In 1938 they made up just 4% of Soviet farmland, but grew 20% of its produce.

There was a second great famine in the Soviet Union in 1946–1947. It was caused by drought, made worse by the devastation caused by World War II. In 1946 the Soviet Union produced 39.6 million tons of grain: barely 40% of what it had produced in 1940.

Death

Stalin's funeral in Moscow on 9 March 1953

In his later years, Stalin's health declined. He had cardiovascular problems , high blood pressure, and a series of strokes. According to official records, he died on 5 March 1953 after a stroke.

Conspiracy theory

In 2003 a group of Russian and American historians claimed Stalin was poisoned, possibly by the men who took over the government after Stalin died. They thought Stalin had a brain bleed because he was given warfarin, a powerful blood thinner (used as a rat poison during Stalin's time).

However, Stalin was in his mid-seventies when he died. According to his autopsy, he had severe atherosclerosis. Modern medicines for high blood pressure did not exist at the time.

In a 2023 scientific paper, Dr. Matthew Turner concluded:

After examining the evidence, [I think] Stalin’s disease course and the properties of warfarin make it highly unlikely that he was deliberately assassinated.

De-Stalinization

Nikita Krushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1953-1964, began a process of "De-Stalinization". This meant taking apart much of the political system that Stalin made. Stalin was denounced as a tyrant. After outsmarting and defeating his rivals, Krushchev established a personal control over the government comparable to Stalin's own.

Legacy

Museum of Stalin in his hometown of Gori

Stalin is a controversial figure in history. Many historians see him as a ruthless dictator; however, some praise him as the Father of the Soviet State. Stalin has been criticized for his role in the Holodomor.

In 2006, a poll stated that almost half the adults in Russia thought Joseph Stalin was a good person. Two years later, another poll listed him as the third most popular person in Russian history.

He ruled Russia for more than 29 years - longer than any other Russian leader in the 20th century.

Related pages

• Vladimir Lenin
• Leon Trotsky

References

Preceded by Post created Previous party leader: Vladimir Lenin	General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party 1922–1953	Succeeded by Nikita Krushchev
Preceded by Vyacheslav Molotov	Prime Minister of the Soviet Union 1941–1953	Succeeded by George Malenkov