Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held office as general secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952 and as premier from 1941 until his death. Despite initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he eventually consolidated power to become a dictator by the 1930s. Stalin codified the party's official interpretation of Marxism as Marxism–Leninism, and his version of it is referred to as Stalinism.
Born into a poor Georgian family in Gori, Russian Empire, Stalin attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary before joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through bank robberies and other crimes, and edited the party's newspaper, Pravda. He was repeatedly arrested and underwent several exiles to Siberia. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin served as a member of the Politburo, and from 1922 used his position as General Secretary to gain control over the party bureaucracy. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin won the leadership struggle over rivals including Leon Trotsky. Stalin's doctrine of socialism in one country became central to the party's ideology, and his five-year plans starting in 1928 led to forced agricultural collectivisation, rapid industrialisation, and a centralised command economy. His policies contributed to a famine in 1932–1933 which killed millions, including in the Holodomor in Ukraine. Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin executed hundreds of thousands of his real and perceived political opponents in the Great Purge. Under his regime, an estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag system of forced labour camps, and more than six million people, including kulaks and entire ethnic groups, were deported to remote areas of the country.
Stalin promoted Marxism–Leninism abroad through the Communist International and supported European anti-fascist movements. In 1939, his government signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, enabling the Soviet invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. Germany broke the pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, leading Stalin to join the Allies. The Red Army, with Stalin as its commander-in-chief, repelled the German invasion and captured Berlin in 1945, ending the war in Europe. The Soviet Union established Soviet-aligned states in Eastern Europe, and with the United States emerged as a superpower, with the two countries entering a period of rivalry known as the Cold War. Stalin presided over post-war reconstruction and the first Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. During these years, the country experienced another famine and a state-sponsored antisemitic campaign culminating in the "doctors' plot". In 1953, Stalin died after a stroke. He was succeeded as leader by Georgy Malenkov and eventually Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin's rule and began a campaign of "de-Stalinisation".
One of the 20th century's most significant figures, Stalin has a deeply contested legacy. During his rule, he was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international Marxist–Leninist movement, which revered him as a champion of socialism and the working class. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Stalin has retained a degree of popularity in some of the post-Soviet states as an economic moderniser and victorious wartime leader who transformed the Soviet Union into an industrialised superpower. Conversely, his regime has been widely condemned for overseeing mass repression and man-made famine which resulted in the suffering and deaths of millions of Soviet citizens.
Early life
Stalin was born on in Gori, Georgia, then part of the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire. An ethnic Georgian, his birth name was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. His parents were Besarion Jughashvili and Ekaterine Geladze; Stalin was their third child and the only one to survive past infancy. After Besarion's shoemaking workshop went into decline, the family fell into poverty, and he became an alcoholic who beat his wife and son. Ekaterine and her son left the home by 1883, moving through nine different rented rooms. In 1888, Stalin enrolled at the Gori Church School where he excelled. He faced health problems: an 1884 smallpox infection left him with facial scars, and at age 12 he was seriously injured when he was struck by a phaeton, causing a lifelong disability in his left arm.In 1894, Stalin enrolled as a trainee Russian Orthodox priest at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, enabled by a scholarship. He initially achieved high grades, but lost interest in his studies. Stalin became influenced by Nikolay Chernyshevsky's pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done?, and Alexander Kazbegi's The Patricide, with Stalin adopting the nickname "Koba" from its bandit protagonist. After reading Das Kapital, Stalin focused on Karl Marx's philosophy of Marxism, which was on the rise as a variety of socialism opposed to the Tsarist authorities. He began attending secret workers' meetings, and left the seminary in April 1899.
1899–1905: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
During October 1899, he worked as a meteorologist at the Tiflis observatory. He attracted a group of socialist supporters, and co-organised a secret workers' meeting where he convinced many to strike on May Day 1900. The empire's secret police, the Okhrana, became aware of Stalin's activities and attempted to arrest him in March 1901, but he went into hiding during which he lived off donations from friends. He helped plan a demonstration in Tiflis on May Day 1901, at which 3,000 marchers clashed with the authorities. Stalin was elected to the Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, a Marxist party founded in 1898, in November 1901.That month, he travelled to Batumi. His militant rhetoric proved divisive among the city's Marxists, some of whom suspected that he was an agent provocateur. Stalin began working at the Rothschild refinery storehouse, where he co-organised two workers' strikes. After the strike leaders were arrested, he co-organised a mass demonstration which led to the storming of the prison. Stalin was arrested in April 1902 and sentenced to three years exile in Siberia, arriving in Novaya Uda in November 1903. After one failed attempt, Stalin escaped from his exile in January 1904 and travelled to Tiflis, where he co-edited the Marxist newspaper Proletariatis Brdzola with Filipp Makharadze. During his exile, the RSDLP had become divided between Vladimir Lenin's "Bolshevik" faction and Julius Martov's "Mensheviks". Stalin, who detested many Mensheviks in Georgia, aligned himself with the Bolsheviks.
1905–1912: Revolution of 1905 and aftermath
In January 1905, government troops massacred protesters in Saint Petersburg and unrest spread across the Empire in the Revolution of 1905. Stalin was in Baku in February when ethnic violence broke out between Armenians and Azeris, and he formed Bolshevik "battle squads" which he used to keep the city's warring ethnic factions apart. His armed squads attacked local police and troops, raided arsenals, and raised funds via protection rackets. In November 1905, the Georgian Bolsheviks elected Stalin as one of their delegates to a Bolshevik conference in Tampere, Finland, where he met Lenin. Although Stalin held Lenin in deep respect, he vocally disagreed with his view that the Bolsheviks should field candidates for the 1906 election to the State Duma; Stalin viewed parliamentary process as a waste of time. In April 1906, he attended the RSDLP's Fourth Congress in Stockholm, where the party—then led by a Menshevik majority—agreed that it would not raise funds using armed robbery. Lenin and Stalin disagreed with this, and privately discussed continuing the robberies for the Bolshevik cause.Stalin married Kato Svanidze in July 1906, and in March 1907 she gave birth to their son Yakov. Stalin, who by now had established himself as "Georgia's leading Bolshevik", organised the June 1907 robbery of a bank stagecoach in Tiflis to fund the Bolsheviks. His operatives ambushed the convoy in Erivansky Square with guns and homemade bombs; around 40 people were killed. Stalin settled in Baku with his wife and son, where Mensheviks confronted him about the robbery and voted to expel him from the RSDLP, but he ignored them. Stalin secured Bolshevik domination of RSDLP branch and edited two Bolshevik newspapers. In November 1907, his wife died of typhus, and he left his son with her family in Tiflis. He then reassembled his gang, which attacked Black Hundreds and raised money through racketeering, counterfeiting, robberies and kidnapping the children of wealthy figures for ransom.
In March 1908, Stalin was arrested and imprisoned. He led the imprisoned Bolsheviks, organised discussion groups, and ordered the killing of suspected informants. He was sentenced to two years of exile in Solvychegodsk in northern Russia, arriving there in February 1909. In June, Stalin escaped to Saint Petersburg, but was arrested again in March 1910 and sent back to Solvychegodsk. In June 1911, Stalin was given permission to move to Vologda, where he stayed for two months. He then escaped to Saint Petersburg, where he was arrested again in September 1911 and sentenced to a further three years of exile in Vologda.
1912–1917: Rise to the Central Committee and ''Pravda''
In January 1912, the first Bolshevik Central Committee was elected at the Prague Conference. Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev decided to co-opt Stalin to the committee, which Stalin agreed to. Lenin believed that Stalin, as a Georgian, would help secure support from the empire's minority ethnicities.In February 1912, Stalin again escaped to Saint Petersburg, where he was tasked with converting the Bolshevik weekly newspaper, Zvezda into a daily, Pravda. The new newspaper was launched in April 1912 and Stalin's role as editor was kept secret. In May 1912, he was again arrested and sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia. In July, he arrived in Narym, where he shared a room with fellow Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov. After two months, they escaped to Saint Petersburg, where Stalin continued work on Pravda.
After the October 1912 Duma elections, Stalin wrote articles calling for reconciliation between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; Lenin criticised him and he relented. In January 1913, Stalin travelled incognito to Vienna, where he researched the "national question" of how the Bolsheviks should deal with the Empire's national and ethnic minorities. His article "Marxism and the National Question" was first published in the March, April, and May 1913 issues of the Bolshevik journal Prosveshcheniye under the pseudonym "K. Stalin". The alias, which he had used since 1912, is derived from the Russian for steel, and has been translated as "Man of Steel". In February 1913, Stalin was again arrested in Saint Petersburg and sentenced to four years of exile in Turukhansk in Siberia, where he arrived in August. Still concerned over a potential escape, the authorities moved him to Kureika in March 1914.