The future dictator of the Soviet Union was born Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili to illiterate peasant parents in Georgia in the southern Caucuses. Some historians have attributed his tyrannical temperament to the frequent beatings he received from his father when he was growing up. His mother encouraged him to become a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, and he studied for the priesthood until he was almost 20. However, he fell under the sway of Karl Marx rather than God, and he was expelled from the seminary in 1899. He then became involved in the socialist underground, distributing Marxist propaganda and serving as a labor agitator. Dzhugashvili was arrested by the czarist police in 1903 and sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia, but he was back in Georgia within a year. When the Social Democrats split into two factions (Mensheviks and Bolsheviks), he joined the more militant Bolsheviks under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. In 1908 he was arrested again and sent into exile but managed to escape. The next several years were marked by other arrests, narrow escapes, and secret trips abroad on behalf of Lenin to raise support for the Bolsheviks. During this period Dzhugashvili assumed the pseudonym Stalin (meaning “man of steel”) and was elevated by Lenin to the Central Committee, the highest body of the Bolshevik Party (later the Communist Party).
In 1913 Stalin was again arrested and again exiled to Siberia, to be freed only when the monarchy was toppled by revolution in 1917. He then established a base in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and became editor of Pravda, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece. In 1919 he was elected a member of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s most important decision-making body. He also became head of the Commissariat for Nationality Affairs, a position that was of crucial importance because the new Soviet regime was struggling to maintain control over the country’s disparate ethnic groups and nationalities in the midst of civil war, which lasted from 1918 to 1921. Stalin was directly involved in planning military strategy against counterrevolutionary forces—the Whites—as well as against Polish forces in the war between Russia and Poland (1920–21). His decisions were disastrous and put him at loggerheads with Leon Trotsky, the commissar of war and heir apparent to Lenin.
After the Communist victory, Stalin quietly built up organizational strength. In 1923 he was elected general secretary of the Communist Party, a position he used as his power base. Lenin, who was seriously ill at this point, was beginning to harbor deep misgivings and wrote a “testament” in which he cautioned against allowing Stalin to succeed him. But Stalin continued his inexorable rise to power after Lenin’s death in 1924. For the next few years he was obliged to outmaneuver a number of rivals, including Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev. But it was only after he had succeeded in marginalizing Trotsky, Stalin (left) with top Soviet leader Sergey Kirov (later assassinated) (Library of Congress) who was forced into exile, that he was able to secure uncontested power. (Trotsky was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in Mexico City in 1940.) Thereafter, from 1928 until his death in 1953, Stalin was effectively in complete control over the party and the country.
With the economy in a state of decline, Stalin abandoned Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed some free-market commerce, in favor of a policy of collectivization of the agricultural sector to raise output and bolster efficiency. Although the policy was promoted as a boon to peasants, it was vigorously resisted by small farmers, known as kulaks, who were now being called upon to sacrifice their land and become members of a collective farm. The new policy threatened not only their livelihood but a traditional way of life that had endured for generations. Stalin forcibly suppressed opposition, characterizing the kulaks as capitalist parasites and using special Shock Brigades to bring them to heel. The kulaks were either shot or sent to Siberia.
Between 1929 and 1933, as collectivization was being carried out, millions of people lost their lives—5 million in the Ukraine alone, according to some estimates—mostly on account of a famine that resulted from the massive disruption to agricultural production. At the same time, Stalin moved rapidly to industrialize Russia—regarded as one of the poorest nations in Europe before 1914—introducing a succession of five-year plans. The ramped-up production levels did yield extraordinary gains that exceeded Germany’s pace of industrialization in the 19th century and Japan’s earlier in the 20th century. To subsidize this ambitious program, Stalin relied to a great degree on wealth he appropriated from the people. However ruthless his regime, he is also credited with improving the health of the Soviet populace with aggressive immunization campaigns against typhus, cholera, and malaria and improving and expanding the educational system. In the early 1930s Stalin consolidated absolute power by carrying out purges of political opponents, real or imagined— among them many old Bolsheviks. Between 1936 and 1937—a period known as the Great Terror—several once-powerful Communist Party officials were convicted in “show trials” and either shot or sent to the GULAG—the camps in Siberia and elsewhere. There were four major purge trials during these years: the Trial of the Sixteen; the Trial of the Seventeen; the Trial of the Red Army Generals; and finally, in March 1938, the Trial of the Twenty-One.
The KGB, the successor to the NKVD (the Soviet secret police under Stalin), estimated that 681,692 people were shot between 1937 and 1938, although this figure might be an undercount. Millions of people were arrested, often in the dead of night, on the basis of trumped-up charges or none at all. (Historians are divided as to how many million victims there actually were, with estimates ranging from eight to 20 million; some put the number as high as 50 million.)
Stalin is thought to have personally signed as many as 40,000 death warrants of political opponents. For all his cunning, Stalin appears to have been taken in by Adolf HITLER’s assurances that the Germans had no territorial designs on the Soviet Union. In 1939 he agreed to a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), which also contained a secret appendix that carved up Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany and allowed the USSR a free hand in the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In 1940 Stalin effectively decapitated the Polish leadership, ordering the execution of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest after they had been captured by the Red Army, which had seized its share of the country under the terms of the nonaggression pact. The Kremlin later tried to cover up responsibility and laid the blame on the Germans for the atrocity.
In 1941 the Germans, taking Stalin by surprise, launched Operation Barbarosa, the code name for their invasion of the Soviet Union. Initially Germany scored major gains. The Red Army was at a disadvantage because its leadership had been crippled by Stalin after he had purged so many of his top generals. There is no doubt that the Soviets suffered the most during World War II and yet were responsible in large part for Germany’s ultimate defeat. Approximately 22 million people (13 percent of the Soviet population)—7 million of them civilians—were killed in the war. Ironically, German aggression united the Soviet people behind Stalin against a common invader, even after so many years of misrule. Stalin cleverly played the nationalist card, downplaying ideology, to mobilize resistance to the invader. The 1943 surrender of General von Paulus’s Sixth Army to the Red Army at Stalingrad is generally considered the turning point of the war, making the German defeat inevitable.
Even before the end of the war, Stalin began to plan for the expansion of Soviet influence well beyond the borders of the USSR. As a vital wartime ally, he wrested concessions from an ailing President Franklin Roosevelt that allowed the Soviets to carve out a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe after the war. Between 1945 and 1948, the Soviets extended their influence over East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. (An independent communist regime under Josip Broz [Tito] was established in Yugoslavia.) These puppet “people’s republics” formed a military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact, which was dominated by Moscow. In a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, British prime minister Winston Churchill declared that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe. The phrase stuck. What became known as the cold war between the Communist empire and the West had begun.
In the early 1950s Stalin increasingly showed signs of mental and physical disability. His megalomania was only matched by his paranoia. Those closest to him were fearful, never knowing when he would single them out for disloyalty, which could mean either imprisonment or execution. In early 1953 he ordered the arrests of several Kremlin doctors whom he accused of plotting against his life. As many of these doctors were Jewish, his action raised fears that he was about to initiate an anti-Semitic campaign throughout the country. But if he were planning such a pogrom, he never lived long enough to order it. On March 1, 1953, Stalin collapsed after an all-night dinner whose guests included Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police, and Nikita Khrushchev, who would later become Soviet premier. He died four days later, having never regained consciousness. Officially the cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, but Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister, claimed in his memoirs that Beria had poisoned Stalin.
Since Stalin’s death, historians have quarreled about how he should be judged. For example, in his biography Stalin: Breaker of Nations, Robert Conquest found that there was “something in [Stalin’s] character best thought of as an absence of life in its fullest sense.” He characterized Stalin as a “vast, dark figure looming over the century,” who was incapable of any sort of sympathetic human relationship. On the other hand, Robert Service in his portrait of the Soviet dictator, Stalin: A Biography, argues that while indeed Stalin was “as wicked a man as has ever lived” and someone who suffered from a “dangerously damaged” personality, he was nonetheless “hard-working,” “capable of kindness to relatives,” a “ruler of great assiduity,” a “fluent and thoughtful writer,” and “a delightful purveyor of jokes and mimicry.” In addition, Service finds him “a thoughtful man” who “tried to make sense of the universe as he found it.” Service allows that he could be guilty of trying to humanize Stalin but points out that “[i]f the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot are represented as having been ‘animals,’ ‘monsters’ or ‘killing machines,’ we shall never be able to discern their successors.” In Russia, too, Stalin’s reputation has undergone a resurrection of sorts. Denounced by Khrushchev for his excesses at a famous speech delivered in secret to the 20th Communist Party Congress, Stalin has enjoyed renewed popularity among some Russians who see him as a symbol of former Soviet glory. In 2005 the government announced a plan to erect a statue of Stalin in Moscow after a long period in which his once-ubiquitous image had been stripped from practically all public places. The backers of legislation to raise the statue maintained that Stalin should be honored for his leadership in World War II.
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