Stalin, Josef

Stalin, Josef (1879–1953) secretary general of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and premier of the Soviet Union, born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili in the Soviet republic of Georgia, Stalin in his youth was a Marxist revolutionary, allying himself with the Bolshevik group within the Social Democratic party. He was imprisoned and exiled several times for revolutionary activities. Lenin, in exile, named him to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, which had split from the more moderate wing of the Social Democrats, and in the 1917 revolution Stalin played a major role. In 1922 he was named secretary general of the Communist party, a post he held until his death and that he used to consolidate his power and to outmaneuver his opponents, who usually underestimated his cunning and his intelligence. After Lenin's death in 1924 , he ousted his rivals and soon instituted a program of centralized, state-run economic planning for the Soviet Union, herding peasants onto collective farms; those who resisted were arrested, tortured, exiled to brutal concentration camps, or murdered. An estimated 10 million people died in the resulting famine. He also instituted a state-run program of industrialization, which was marginally less brutal and which did succeed in industrializing an agrarian country in record time. In 1934 he launched a bloody purge of the Communist party, creating a parade of show trials; those who opposed him were convicted and later executed. In 1939 he concluded a pact with Adolf Hitler; in its wake, Stalin annexed several East European countries, including Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Poland. Then, in 1941, Hitler launched an unprovoked invasion of the Soviet Union; Stalin appointed himself supreme commander in chief and personally led the Soviet resistance, at Stalingrad and at Kursk; despite devastating losses, the Soviets prevailed, and Hitler capitulated in May 1945. Stalin met during the war with the Allied leaders, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at Tehran (1943) and at Yalta (1945). After the war, Stalin extended Soviet control over Eastern Europe, installing nominally independent puppet regimes in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries; he cast the United States and Britain at his enemies, setting the stage for the Cold War.