Stalin, Iosef Vissarioniovich

Stalin, Iosef Vissarioniovich Dzhugashvili (b. 21 Dec. 1879, d. 5 Mar. 1953). Soviet dictator 1922–53 Born I. V. Dzhugashvili, he was born in Gori, Georgia, and was educated at a Gori church school and the Orthodox seminary in Tbilisi, from which he was expelled for his revolutionary views in 1899. He became active in the revolutionary movement, and joined the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party in 1903. Always a man more of practical bent than of theoretical discourse, he bolstered the regional party by leading several ‘expropriations’, which were in effect bank robberies of millions of roubles. He came to Lenin's attention and was co-opted to the membership of the party's Central Committee in 1912. He became involved in the publication of the party newspaper, Pravda (Truth), and in 1913 received Bukharin's help in writing his first theoretical article on ‘Marxism and the National Question’. He was again arrested in 1913 and sent to Siberia, from where he returned after the Russian Revolution of February 1917.

Although at first sceptical of Lenin's violent opposition to the war and his non-conciliatory attitude towards the Mensheviks, his efficiency and ability to work in the background without offending others gained him the appointment as People's Commissar (i.e. Minister) for Nationality Affairs. During the Russian Civil War, he was also active as a political officer on the western front in the Russo-Polish War. On 3 April 1922, Lenin appointed him General Secretary of the Communist Party. Originally given an adminstrative appointment, he used his new position at the heart of the party to build up speedily a personal power base.

In the power struggles that ensued in the last year of Lenin's life, Stalin thus occupied a central position between what were then seen as the main protagonists, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. By 1927, his position was secure, though he subsequently confirmed his power by removing all possible opposition not just within the party, but in the population at large. His rule was associated with brutal and arbitrary terror throughout, but it peaked at different times. In his fanatical view that the drive towards Communism needed to be completed through the destruction of all private property and large-scale industrialization, he embarked on an ambitious Five-Year Plan in spring 1929 (covering the period October 1928–September 1933).

Through the persecution of kulaks and other peasant proprietors, he destroyed peasant communal agriculture and much of traditional peasant culture. Meanwhile, industrialization was achieved successfully, but only with the help of slave labour and the constant threat of forced labour camps. His drive to eliminate the bourgeoisie everywhere (Stalinism) led to the large-scale expropriation, imprisonment, and execution of industrial managers, university teachers, soldiers, civil servants, and former political opponents in the Great Purge. He sought to escape involvement in a major war through the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which had the added benefit of adding Eastern Europe to his control. By early 1941, he had annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, and parts of Romania.

Calculating that Hitler would be as content with his new possessions as he was, Stalin was completely taken by surprise by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the Barbarossa campaign beginning 22 June 1941. After providing uncharacteristically chaotic leadership in the first year of the war, whose effect was worsened by his execution of many able generals during the Great Purge, he became an able co-ordinator of the war effort. He used the war not only to further his own image as national hero and liberator, but also to weaken the nationalism of the country's different peoples which, as a Georgian, he appreciated only too well. Thus, he forcibly resettled altogether millions of Crimean Tartars, Chechens, and Volga Germans.

After the war, he applied the same methods to the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, when he ‘exchanged’ a large proportion of their ethnic population with a similar number of other Soviet nationalities. Having been victorious in World War II, he successfully manipulated the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences to extend his country's influence towards the states of Eastern Europe. With the exception of Yugoslavia, these had become effective satellite states by 1948, and in the next few years he strengthened his grip over them through encouraging purges, the method he knew best. Towards the end of his life, he became increasingly paranoid, anti-intellectual, and anti-Semitic. A new purge known as the Doctor's Plot was planned but not carried out owing to his death from a cerebral haemorrhage. He was undoubtedly one of the most ruthless and brutal dictators of the twentieth century, second only to Hitler. The survival of the state which he created for another thirty-five years after his death, however, is a testament not just to his brutality, but also to his pragmatism and political ability.