Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 - 5 March 1953) was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 3 April 1922 to 16 October 1952, succeeding Vyacheslav Molotov and preceding Nikita Khrushchev. As head of the Communist Party, Stalin was the de facto leader of the Soviet Union, having seized power after a struggle with an enemy of the Soviet state, Leon Trotsky. Stalin advocated his own brand of communism known as Marxism-Leninism which combined communist economic policy with the dictatorship of the proletariat and repression of class enemies.
Biography[]
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was born "Ioseb Besarionis dze Jugashvili" in Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire (now the Republic of Georgia). Jugashvili's alcoholic father left the family after he was exiled for attacking a police chief, and he became an atheist on the first year of his seminary studies, ending his chances of becoming a priest. In 1903, he eagerly joined Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks and distributed propaganda, organized strikes, and raised funds through bank robberies, kidnappings, extortion, and assassinations. He was arrested and sent to Siberia several times, but he managed to escape each time. In 1911, he began to use the name "Stalin" in his writings, and his name meant "steel" in Russian.
Russian Revolution[]
Stalin in 1919
Stalin was rejected from the Imperial Russian Army during World War I due to an arm injury, and he stayed in Achinsk, Siberia. He returned to Petrograd from exile and ousted Vyacheslav Molotov from being the editor of Pravda, supporting Alexander Kerensky's democratic socialist government. However, he supported Lenin after the October Revolution, and he became Commissar for Nationalities' Affairs. He allied with Red Army generals Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, and he began to impose his influence on the military while opposing general Leon Trotsky. Stalin ordered for renegades and deserters to be publicly executed, had former tsarist officers in the Red Army and counter-revolutionaries executed, and had villages burned down to threaten peasants and to discourage bandits from attacking food shipments.
Rise to power[]
A portrait of Joseph Stalin
Stalin resigned from the military in August 1920 after command disasters in Poland, but Lenin named him General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922, with Stalin and Lev Kamenev bringing allied Bolsheviks into power. Stalin went against many of Lenin's policies, treating his homeland of Georgia with a hardline approach after its conquest by the USSR, and he pushed for rapid industrialization and for military expansion. Stalin also wanted for the Communist Party of China to ally with the Kuomintang rather than attempt a communist revolution, and he said that the Kuomintang should be treated like a lemon; squeezed of their usefulness before being discarded. In December 1934, the murder of Sergei Kirov was blamed on Trotsky, forcing him into exile and leading to the "Great Purge" against perceived threats to Stalin's authoritarian rule. All of the surviving members of Lenin's original cabinet were put to death, and 700,000 people were killed by Stalin, who also persecuted Germans, Koreans, and non-Russians; 110,000 Poles were executed. Stalin deported Volga Germans, Koreans, Chechens, and Poles to Kazakhstan and other areas of Central Asia, and he purged the well-off "kulak" peasants in 1930, killing 20,201 of them.
War with Germany[]
Stalin became the face of communism during the 1930s, making the ideology seem like an authoritarian threat. For this reason, the USSR was politically isolated among Western countries, and it formed Comintern to promote cooperation among the few communist and socialist countries of the world. Measures were taken to stop the communist threat in Europe, with several countries signing the Nazi-written Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 and 1937. In 1939, Stalin agreed to a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and he used the pact to occupy the eastern half of Poland. However, Germany blindsided Stalin by launching Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, and the ill-equipped and poorly-led Red Army suffered several defeats until Georgy Zhukov counterattacked at Moscow in December 1941. Stalin would oversee the Soviet counterattack and the conquest of Eastern Europe from the Axis Powers, but he did not take direct command over the Soviet forces.
Cold War[]
Stalin in 1953
After the war's end in 1945, Stalin installed communist governments in the Soviet-occupied lands of Eastern Europe, and he oversaw the division of Europe with the Iron Curtain from Szeczin in the Baltics to Trieste in the Adriatic Sea. Stalin had the USSR crush all opposition to communist rule in Eastern Europe, and he acquired nuclear weapons, making the USSR a world superpower and the rival of the United States. Stalin died of a stroke at age 74 in 1953, ending his rule. His successor Nikita Khrushchev immediately began a campaign of De-Stalinization, removing Stalin and his legacy from the CPSU.