Joseph Stalin

I

Introduction

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), general secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1953, the despotic ruler who more than any other individual molded the features that characterized the Soviet regime and shaped the direction of Europe after World War II ended in 1945.

Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in the town of Gori, Georgia, which at the time was part of the vast Russian Empire. He was the third and only surviving child of a cobbler and a housecleaner. In 1888 Stalin began attending the Gori Church School, where he learned Russian and excelled at his studies, winning a scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in the Georgian capital in 1894.

II

Young Revolutionary

Stalin began his studies at the seminary as a devout believer in Orthodox Christianity. He was soon exposed to the radical ideas of fellow students, however, and began to read illegal literature based on the works of German political philosopher Karl Marx. In 1899, just as he was about to graduate, he gave up his religious education to devote his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. While employed as an accountant in Tbilisi, Stalin spread Marxist propaganda among railway workers on behalf of the local Social Democratic organization. After moving to the seaport of Bat’umi, where he organized a large workers’ demonstration in 1902, Stalin was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police. A year later he was sentenced to exile in the Russian region of Siberia. He soon managed to escape, however, and was back in Georgia by early 1904.

When the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in 1903, Stalin was drawn to the more militant Bolsheviks, who were led by Vladimir Lenin. In Georgia, where Menshevism predominated, Stalin soon gained a reputation as a belligerent and staunch follower of Lenin, whom he had first met in 1905 at a conference in Finland.

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In 1905 Stalin married Yekaterina Svanidze, a Georgian woman who died two years later. Stalin was arrested and exiled by imperial police in 1908 because of his illegal underground activities. His escape the next year was followed by further arrests, exiles, and secret trips abroad during the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1912 Lenin elevated Stalin, who by this time had adopted the Russian pseudonym meaning “man of steel,” to the leading Bolshevik Party body, the Central Committee. At Lenin’s behest, Stalin wrote his chief theoretical work, Marxism and the National Question. Stalin was arrested and sent to Siberia before the essay was published in 1913.

Stalin was released from exile upon the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in the February (or March, in the New Style calendar) phase of the Russian Revolution. He went to Petrograd (later Leningrad; now Saint Petersburg), where he became a member of the party’s Central Committee bureau. He then asserted editorial control over the party newspaper, Pravda (Truth).

Although he did not play a prominent role in the Bolshevik takeover of the government in October (November, New Style), Stalin became a member of the new government’s Soviet (Council) of People’s Commissars (Russian acronym, Sovnarkom), heading the Commissariat for Nationality Affairs. Given the vital importance of nationality issues at a time when the Bolsheviks were trying to keep the territories of the former Russian Empire under their power, Stalin’s post was crucial to the Bolshevik victory in the ensuing Russian Civil War (1918-1921). He was elected a member of the Communist Party’s highest decision-making body, the Politburo, and the Central Committee’s Orgburo (Organizational Bureau) in 1919. As a political commissar in the Red Army during the height of the civil war, Stalin supervised military activities against the counterrevolutionary White forces along the western front that were led by General Pyotr Wrangel. During the war between Russia and Poland from 1920 to 1921, his decisions as a political commissar ended in disaster and led to a long-standing conflict with Commissar of War Leon Trotsky. Meanwhile, Stalin, whose first wife had died in 1907, married Nadezhda Alliluyeva in 1918 and moved with the government from Petrograd to Moscow.

III

Soviet Dictator

After the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, Stalin threw himself into organizational work and administrative tasks. Having served as commissar for state control since 1919, he continued this post until 1923, while in 1922 he was elected general secretary of the Communist Party, a position that gave him control over appointments and established a base for his political power. Stalin’s rude and aggressive behavior brought him into conflict with the ailing Lenin, who shortly before his death in 1924 wrote his political “testament” in which he voiced misgivings about Stalin. In the testament Lenin expressed doubt whether the party’s general secretary would use his authority with sufficient caution, and he called for Stalin’s removal from the post. Adroit political maneuvering enabled Stalin to have Lenin’s testament discounted and suppressed, however, while Lenin’s death freed Stalin to establish a ruling coalition with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinovyev, excluding Stalin’s rival Trotsky from the succession struggle. Stalin reversed his course in 1925 and joined with Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov in a new coalition against his former partners, who in turn joined with Trotsky in 1926 to form an intraparty bloc against Stalin known as the “Left Opposition.” Once Stalin had succeeded in defeating these opponents, in 1928 he then turned against his former allies Bukharin and Rykov. By the end of 1929 Stalin had succeeded in political maneuvers that eliminated his political opponents and established him as the supreme leader of the USSR.

IV

Domestic Policies

In the late 1920s Stalin decided the New Economic Policy (NEP), which Lenin had introduced in 1921 to facilitate postwar economic recovery by encouraging limited private enterprise, no longer worked. The rate of economic growth was declining and peasants were not producing enough grain to satisfy demand. Instead of giving the peasants economic incentives to raise production, Stalin chose a policy that forced them into state-owned collective farms. Simultaneously, he pressed forward with a program of rapid industrialization, which began with the ambitious first Five-Year Plan in 1928. Stalin believed the Soviet Union had to industrialize rapidly in order to strengthen the Communist regime and enable the country to defend itself against foreign enemies. The plan, which was financed by exploiting resources in the countryside, resulted in the near collapse of Soviet agriculture and the deaths of millions of peasants from famine. Industrialization was achieved, but at great cost.

Although his hold on absolute power was unchallenged by the early 1930s, Stalin worried about potential conspiracies against him, especially after the suicide of his second wife in late 1932. Stalin set in motion a massive purge of the party following the assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergey Kirov in December 1934, which many have speculated was masterminded by Stalin because he viewed Kirov as a threat. Although the purge began gradually, with selective arrests in 1934 and 1935, by 1936 the Soviet secret police were arresting and executing party members by the thousands. Highly publicized trials of leading party figures—including Kamenev, Zinovyev, and Bukharin—were staged in Moscow and resulted in their swift execution on trumped-up charges. In 1937 and 1938 the terror spread to all of Soviet society, including the military high command. Estimates of those arrested and executed from 1936 to 1938 in the Great Purge range between 1.5 million and 7 million. Countless others were imprisoned in forced labor camps. Winding down at the end of 1938, the purge left Stalin with a new generation of officials loyal to him alone. However, the decimation of the military ranks left the country more vulnerable to the threat from Adolf Hitler’s Germany during World War II.