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after the United States had launched its first satel-
lite,
Explorer-1.
In orbit for almost 700 days,
Sput-
nik-3
carried the first space laboratory and used
solar power for the first time as its source of
energy. For the next two years, the Soviet space
program concentrated on its lunar exploration
program and developed the
Luna
vehicles.
Sput-
nik-4,
launched in May 1960 and equipped with
a dummy passenger and ejector seat, resumed
the Sputnik program but it veered off course,
eventually disintegrating in October 1965. The
fifth and sixth Sputniks, launched in August and
December 1960, both carried dogs, but whereas
the dogs in
Sputnik-5
returned safely to earth and
landed on parachutes, those in
Sputnik-6
were
killed when the satellite burned as it sought to
change orbit.
Sputnik-7
and
Sputnik-8
were both
launched in February 1961 with the mission of
probing the planet Venus, but they encountered
problems and were lost. The last two Sputniks
were launched two weeks apart in March 1961
with dogs aboard and served as working models
for the
Vostok
spacecraft to be used in Gagarin's
April 1961 flight.
Siberia several times. In 1912 he was elected to
the Bolshevik Central Committee and, perhaps
because of his non-Russian background, sent on
a mission to western Europe to meet exiled party
leaders and gather materials for a study of Bol-
shevik policy toward ethnic nationalities in Rus-
sia. He was again arrested soon after his return to
Russia in 1913 and sentenced to Siberian exile.
Stalin returned to Petrograd after the Febru-
ary Revolution of 1917 and edited with Lev
KAMENEV
the party newspaper
Pravda,
which at
first adopted a relatively conciliatory policy
toward the Provisional Government that was
later denounced by Lenin. After the Bolshevik
revolution of October, Stalin became commissar
for nationalities and, later, commissar for state
control. During the civil war he served as a trou-
bleshooter traveling to various fronts. His enmity
with Leon
TROTSKY
, then commissar of war, dates
from their many clashes over matters of policy.
In 1922, he was appointed secretary-general of
the Central Committee of the Communist Party,
a relatively unglamorous position that other Bol-
sheviks thought was well suited for a solid, hard-
working party bureaucrat. Even before Lenin's
death in 1924, however, Stalin began to use this
position to build a power base, successfully
avoiding an attempt to remove him because of
his rudeness toward others. In the complex
power struggle that followed Lenin's death,
Stalin gradually emerged as the power broker
outmaneuvering his better-known rivals such as
Trotsky, Kamenev, Grigorii
ZINOVIEV
, and finally,
by 1928, his one-time ally, Nikolai
BUKHARIN
.As
the leader of an ambitious and devoted group of
younger Bolsheviks, Stalin sought to bring into
life his slogan of “socialism in one country,” by
embarking the Soviet Union on a crash program
of industrialization, based on the forceful collec-
tivization of the peasantry.
By 1934, after the completion of the First
Five-Year Plan and a ruthless implementation of
collectivization, Stalin and his group had dramat-
ically transformed the Soviet Union. Soon after,
however, following the assassination of one of
his main lieutenants, Sergei Kirov, in December
Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich
(1879-1953)
(Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili)
leader of the Soviet Union
The successor to Vladimir
LENIN
as leader of the
Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin ruled the USSR for
almost 25 years, creating in the process one of the
most repressive regimes of the 20th century.
Stalin was born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugash-
vili in the Georgian village of Gori, the son of an
abusive cobbler and a housecleaner. In 1894 he
enrolled in the Orthodox Theological Seminary
in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, but was expelled
four years later for revolutionary activities. A
member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party since 1898, Stalin sided with the
BOLSHEVIKS
in 1903, even as most Georgian Marxists opted
for the Mensheviks. Known as Koba, in his early
revolutionary years, he worked in the Bolshevik
underground, was arrested, and was exiled to
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