[459] A week later, Germany invaded Poland, sparking the UK and France to declare war on Germany. To eradicate accused "enemies of the working class", Stalin instituted the Great Purge, in which over a million were imprisoned, largely in the Gulag system of forced labour camps, and at least 700,000 executed between 1934 and 1939. [735] Throughout his life, he used various nicknames and pseudonyms, including "Koba", "Soselo", and "Ivanov",[736] adopting "Stalin" in 1912; it was based on the Russian word for "steel" and has often been translated as "Man of Steel". [897] After the dissolution of the Union in 1991, the rest of the archives were opened to historians, resulting in much new information about Stalin coming to light,[898] and producing a flood of new research. [555] Various East European communists also visited Stalin in Moscow. [638] In September 1952, several Kremlin doctors were arrested for allegedly plotting to kill senior politicians in what came to be known as the Doctors' Plot; the majority of the accused were Jewish. [349] The first major show trial in the USSR was the Shakhty Trial of 1928, in which several middle-class "industrial specialists" were convicted of sabotage. [255] Residing at his Gorki dacha, Lenin's main connection to Sovnarkom was through Stalin, who was a regular visitor. [48] They attempted to arrest him in March 1901, but he escaped and went into hiding,[49] living off the donations of friends and sympathisers. [50] Remaining underground, he helped plan a demonstration for May Day 1901, in which 3,000 marchers clashed with the authorities. [478] He formed a State Defense Committee, which he headed as Supreme Commander,[479] as well as a military Supreme Command (Stavka),[480] with Georgy Zhukov as its Chief of Staff. [684] According to scholar Robert Service, Stalin's "few innovations in ideology were crude, dubious developments of Marxism". [432], During the 1930s and 1940s, NKVD groups assassinated defectors and opponents abroad;[433] in August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, eliminating the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. [177] According to the historian Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin "filled an important role [in the October Revolution] as a senior Bolshevik, member of the party's Central Committee, and editor of its main newspaper";[178] the historian Stephen Kotkin similarly noted that Stalin had been "in the thick of events" in the build-up to the coup. [364] Religion retained an influence over much of the population; in the 1937 census, 57% of respondents were willing to admit to being religious. [550] Soviet forces continued to expand until they occupied all their territorial concessions, but the U.S. rebuffed Stalin's desire for the Red Army to take a role in the Allied occupation of Japan. Initially Stalin refused to repeal the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1945, which significantly benefited the Soviet Union over China, although in January 1950 he relented and agreed to sign a new treaty between the two countries. Updated on September 12, 2019 After his death in 1953, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's remains were embalmed and put on display next to those of Vladimir Lenin. [454], As Britain and France seemed unwilling to commit to an alliance with the Soviet Union, Stalin saw a better deal with the Germans. [542], In April 1945, the Red Army seized Berlin, Hitler committed suicide, and Germany surrendered in May. [172] In the early hours of 25 October, Stalin joined Lenin in a Central Committee meeting in the Smolny Institute, from where the Bolshevik coup the October Revolution was directed. His long reign finally ended. Stalin was Georgian, but during his revolutionary campaigns, adopted the Soviet Nationality law and also changed his Georgian name to a Russian Name. [847], Stalin's second wife was Nadezhda Alliluyeva; theirs was not an easy relationship, and they often fought. [410] With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, the Soviet Union and China signed a non-aggression pact the following August. Yet he is increasingly paranoid and purges the Communist party and Army of anyone who might oppose him. [514], By November 1942, the Soviets had begun to repulse the important German strategic southern campaign and, although there were 2.5million Soviet casualties in that effort, it permitted the Soviets to take the offensive for most of the rest of the war on the Eastern Front. [934], Some positive sentiment can also be found elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. [129], After the October 1912 Duma elections, where six Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks were elected, Stalin wrote articles calling for reconciliation between the two Marxist factions, for which Lenin criticised him. [39] Stalin devoted himself to Marx's socio-political theory, Marxism,[40] which was then on the rise in Georgia, one of various forms of socialism opposed to the empire's governing tsarist authorities. [59] Held first in Batumi Prison[60] and then Kutaisi Prison,[61] in mid-1903 he was sentenced to three years of exile in eastern Siberia. [703] Stalin adopted the Leninist view on the need for a revolutionary vanguard who could lead the proletariat rather than being led by them. [664] That month featured a surge in arrests for "anti-Soviet agitation," as those celebrating Stalin's death came to police attention. [457] Stalin saw this as an opportunity both for territorial expansion and temporary peace with Germany. We must close that gap in ten years. [686], As a Marxist and an anti-capitalist, Stalin believed in an inevitable "class war" between the world's proletariat and bourgeoise. Stalin ruled up until his own death in 1953. [467] In June 1940, the Red Army occupied the Baltic states, which were forcibly merged into the Soviet Union in August;[468] they also invaded and annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, parts of Romania. However, as many of the following . [437] Such functionaries often carried out a greater number of arrests and executions than their quotas set by Stalin's central government. [342], Many of major construction projects, including the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Moscow Metro, were constructed largely through forced labour. [299], Stalin was now the party's supreme leader,[300] although he was not the head of government, a task he entrusted to his key ally Vyacheslav Molotov. [126] After two months, Stalin and Sverdlov escaped back to Saint Petersburg. [217] He was reprimanded by Lenin at the 8th Party Congress for employing tactics which resulted in far too many deaths of Red Army soldiers. [31] As he grew older, Stalin lost interest in priestly studies, his grades dropped,[32] and he was repeatedly confined to a cell for his rebellious behaviour. leader Sanjay Raut to join Rahul Gandhi's 'padyatra' in J&K . [673], Stalin claimed to have embraced Marxism at the age of fifteen,[677] and it served as the guiding philosophy throughout his adult life;[678] according to Kotkin, Stalin held "zealous Marxist convictions",[679] while Montefiore suggested that Marxism held a "quasi-religious" value for Stalin. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the former Bolshevik Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, died on the 21st of January in 1924. [56] After several strike leaders were arrested, he co-organised a mass public demonstration which led to the storming of the prison; troops fired upon the demonstrators, 13 of whom were killed. [918] Gorbachev saw the total denunciation of Stalin as necessary for the regeneration of Soviet society. [112] There he had affairs with at least two women; his landlady, Maria Kuzakova, later gave birth to his second son, Konstantin. [572] Academia and the arts were also allowed greater freedom than they had prior to 1941. [261] Stalin believed this would encourage independence sentiment among non-Russians, instead arguing that ethnic minorities would be content as "autonomous republics" within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Stalin is too crude, and this defect which is entirely acceptable in our milieu and in relationships among us as communists, becomes unacceptable in the position of General Secretary. [890] Kotkin observed that Stalin's ability to remain in power relied on him having a majority in the Politburo at all times. Stalin's strategy for emerging as leader was to destroy the authority of his opponents. However these factors aided him to become future leader of Russia. [656] An autopsy revealed that he had died of a cerebral haemorrhage and also that his cerebral arteries were severely damaged by atherosclerosis. [569] The NKVD recorded that between 26 and 27 million Soviet citizens had been killed, with millions more being wounded, malnourished, or orphaned. [711] Stalin's doctrine held that socialism could be completed in Russia but that its final victory there could not be guaranteed because of the threat from capitalist intervention. [927] The Center, in 2019, reports that around 70% of Russians believe that Stalin played a positive role in their homeland. [65] His second attempt, in January 1904, was successful and he made it to Tiflis. [604] He demanded that war reparations be paid by Germany and its Axis allies Hungary, Romania, and the Slovak Republic. [507] While Red Army generals saw evidence that Hitler would shift efforts south, Stalin considered this to be a flanking move in a renewed effort to take Moscow. [533] In 1944, the German armies were pushed out of the Baltic states (with the exception of the Ostland), which were then re-annexed into the Soviet Union. Serving in the Russian Civil War before overseeing the Soviet Union's establishment in 1922, Stalin assumed leadership over the country following Lenin's death in 1924. [877] Various biographers have described him as a dictator,[878] an autocrat,[879] or accused him of practising Caesarism. [348] He warned of a "danger from the right", including in the Communist Party itself. The details of the assassination still remain a mystery, but much circumstantial evidence indicates that the head of the Soviet secret police planned Kirov's murder on orders from Stalin. [358] He oversaw proliferation of schools, newspapers, and libraries, as well as advancement of literacy and numeracy. [888], McDermott nevertheless cautioned against "over-simplistic stereotypes"promoted in the fiction of writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, and Anatoly Rybakovthat portrayed Stalin as an omnipotent and omnipresent tyrant who controlled every aspect of Soviet life through repression and totalitarianism. [230] Stalin lost the argument, after which he accepted Lenin's decision and supported it. [118] Shortly after the conference, Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev decided to co-opt Stalin to the committee. In 1939, his regime signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, resulting in the Soviet invasion of Poland. We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. Stalin's chief ideological hatchet man, Andrey Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee, began a reign of terror in the Soviet artistic and intellectual world; foreign achievements were derided, and the primacy of Russians as inventors and pioneers in practically every field was asserted. [678] According to Montefiore, Stalin's embrace of the Russian nation was pragmatic, as the Russians were the core of the population of the USSR; it was not a rejection of his Georgian origins. [914] In October 1961, Stalin's body was removed from the mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, the location marked by a bust. The first step in Stalin's rise to power was to eliminate his opponent. [719], Ethnically Georgian,[720] Stalin grew up speaking the Georgian language,[721] and did not begin learning Russian until the age of eight or nine. "[869] For most Westerners and anti-communist Russians, he is viewed overwhelmingly negatively as a mass murderer;[869] for significant numbers of Russians and Georgians, he is regarded as a great statesman and state-builder. [652] He was moved onto a couch and remained there for three days. [516] By the end of 1943, the Soviets occupied half of the territory taken by the Germans from 1941 to 1942. [880] He has also been labelled a "red fascist". [241], Stalin's native Caucasus posed a particular problem because of its highly multi-ethnic mix. He was good at backroom political maneuvering. [488] In June 1941, he ordered a scorched earth policy of destroying infrastructure and food supplies before the Germans could seize them,[489] also commanding the NKVD to kill around 100,000 political prisoners in areas the Wehrmacht approached. [665] The Chinese government instituted a period of official mourning for Stalin's death. [637], In his later years, Stalin was in poor health. [432] His personal writings from the period were according to Khlevniuk "unusually convoluted and incoherent", filled with claims about enemies encircling him. [424] By late 1937, all remnants of collective leadership were gone from the Politburo, which was controlled entirely by Stalin. Born: December 8, 1878 in Gori, Georgia. [421] The first Moscow Trial took place in August 1936; Kamenev and Zinoviev were among those accused of plotting assassinations, found guilty in a show trial, and executed. [782], Stalin was ruthless,[783] temperamentally cruel,[784] and had a propensity for violence high even among the Bolsheviks. [769] Montefiore suggested that this charm was "the foundation of Stalin's power in the Party". Pathos and Ethos in Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates and in "Letter From Birmingham Jail" [64] He made two escape attempts: On the first, he made it to Balagansk before returning due to frostbite. [292] At the 14th Party Congress in December, they launched an attack against Stalin's faction, but it was unsuccessful. [642] That same month, a much publicised trial of accused Jewish industrial wreckers took place in Ukraine. 1922 (29th December) The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was created. [143], In adulthood, Stalin measured 1.70m (5feet 7inches). [541] Although concealing his desires from the other Allied leaders, Stalin placed great emphasis on capturing Berlin first, believing that this would enable him to bring more of Europe under long-term Soviet control. Hundreds of thousands of people came to see the Generalissimo in the mausoleum. [545] Stalin refused to punish the offenders. [648] There, he emphasised what he regarded as leadership qualities necessary in the future and highlighted the weaknesses of various potential successors, particularly Molotov and Mikoyan. [764] According to biographer Montefiore, "it is clear from hostile and friendly witnesses alike that Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood". [864], It was long rumored that Stalin married a sister of Lazar Kaganovich. [376], Within the Soviet Union, there was widespread civic disgruntlement against Stalin's government. It nevertheless clashed with established Bolshevik views that socialism could not be established in one country but could only be achieved globally through the process of world revolution. Firstly, the divisions within the party, made his task of eliminating people less complicated, he only had individuals, not groups of people against him. [868] According to historian Kevin McDermott, interpretations of Stalin range from "the sycophantic and adulatory to the vitriolic and condemnatory. He was good at coercing people. [608] There, he offered advice on their ideas; for instance he cautioned against the Yugoslav idea for a Balkan federation incorporating Bulgaria and Albania. Submitted by sgel on June 17, 2011. Iosif Stalin, Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow. [168] In Lenin's absence, Stalin continued editing Pravda and served as acting leader of the Bolsheviks, overseeing the party's Sixth Congress, which was held covertly. [825] Service cautioned that there was "no irrefutable evidence" of anti-Semitism in Stalin's published work, although his private statements and public actions were "undeniably reminiscent of crude antagonism towards Jews";[826] he added that throughout Stalin's lifetime, the Georgian "would be the friend, associate or leader of countless individual Jews". [733] He rarely spoke before large audiences, and preferred to express himself in written form. [369] After Bukharin's departure, Stalin placed the Communist International under the administration of Dmitry Manuilsky and Osip Piatnitsky. Asatar Bair, a self . [318] Bukharin and several other Central Committee members were angry that they had not been consulted about this measure, which they deemed rash. [856] After Stalin's death, Svetlana changed her surname from Stalin to Alliluyeva,[674] and defected to the U.S.[857], After Nadezhda's death, Stalin became increasingly close to his sister-in-law Zhenya Alliluyeva;[858] Montefiore believed that they were lovers. [849] It is unclear if Stalin ever had a mistress during or after his marriage to Alliluyeva. [92] In March 1907 she bore a son, Yakov. [378] In May 1932, he introduced a system of kolkhoz markets where peasants could trade their surplus produce. [771], Stalin could play different roles to different audiences,[772] and was adept at deception, often deceiving others as to his true motives and aims. [166] After the demonstration was suppressed, the Provisional Government initiated a crackdown on the Bolsheviks, raiding Pravda. "[838] Montefiore described Stalin's favoured types as "young, malleable teenagers or buxom peasant women,"[839] who would be supportive and unchallenging toward him. 6 December]1878[1] 5 March 1953) was a Georgian-born[h] Soviet revolutionary and political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. [549] These events led to the Japanese surrender and the war's end. [913] He repeated these denunciations at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1962. [359] Socialist realism was promoted throughout arts,[360] while Stalin personally wooed prominent writers, namely Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. [203], After the Bolsheviks seized power, both right and left-wing armies rallied against them, generating the Russian Civil War. [271] During the 13th Party Congress in May 1924, "Lenin's Testament" was read only to the leaders of the provincial delegations. "[546], With Germany defeated, Stalin switched focus to the war with Japan, transferring half a million troops to the Far East. [369] At its 6th Congress in July 1928, Stalin informed delegates that the main threat to socialism came not from the right but from non-Marxist socialists and social democrats, whom he called "social fascists";[370] Stalin recognised that in many countries, the social democrats were the Marxist-Leninists' main rivals for working-class support. [816] As an infant, Stalin displayed a love of flowers,[817] and later in life he became a keen gardener. [597] He sent Molotov as his representative to San Francisco to take part in negotiations to form the United Nations, insisting that the Soviets have a place on the Security Council. [487], Going against the advice of Zhukov and other generals, Stalin emphasised attack over defence. The Truth Stalin suffered a major stroke on March 1, 1953, but treatment was delayed from reaching him as a direct result of his actions over the previous decades. [249] Stalin also agreed to supervise the Department of Agitation and Propaganda in the Central Committee Secretariat. [204] To secure access to the dwindling food supply, in May 1918 Sovnarkom sent Stalin to Tsaritsyn to take charge of food procurement in southern Russia. [88] At the conference, the RSDLP then led by its Menshevik majority agreed that it would not raise funds using armed robbery. Stalin promotes an image of himself as a great benevolent leader and hero of the Soviet Union. [27] He joined 600 trainee priests who boarded there,[28] and he achieved high grades. Theories proposed Stalin's involvement with Vladimir's death, in which Stalin later admitted to via letter.
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