STALIN, JOSEPH (Social Science)

1878-1953

Joseph Stalin (Ioseb Jughashvili) was born in the Georgian town of Gori on December 6, 1878. The son of a shoemaker, he rose through the Russian revolutionary movement to become the unchallenged leader of the Soviet Union. He adopted the name "Stalin" from the Russian word stal’ (steel) and advanced through the Bolshevik ranks after the movement’s leader, Vladimir Lenin, commissioned him to write a pamphlet titled Marxism and the National Question (1913). When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, Stalin was named People’s Commissar of Nationalities. His rivalry with the head of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, contributed to the growing fractures within the party. Just before a stroke incapacitated him in March 1923, Lenin fought with Stalin over the formation of the new Soviet Union, and he advised his comrades to remove Stalin from his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party. The other leaders did not heed Lenin’s warning, however, and most of them paid with their lives a decade and a half later.

Stalin accumulated enormous power within the party through his skillful political manipulation and his willingness to resort to ruthlessness. By the early 1930s he had defeated all of his rivals for power. During the "Stalin Revolution" of 1928 to 1932, the state forced millions of peasants onto collective farms, exiled or killed the most productive peasants (the so-called kulaks), and rapidly industrialized the economy. The height of Stalinist terror was reached in the Great Purges of 1937 and 1938, when approximately 700,000 people were executed and millions more were exiled, imprisoned, or died in labor camps.


Despite Stalin’s industrialization and militarization programs, the Soviet Union was not prepared for the German invasion of June 1941. Ultimately, the war was won by the tenacity and enormous sacrifice of the Soviet people, but Stalin provided inspiration for many, as well as the fear that one step backward would end in death. The Soviets lost some twenty-seven million people, but in the end the triumph over fascism provided the Communists with a new source of legitimation, and Stalin emerged with a new, uncontested authority.

Stalin’s postwar policies were repressive at home and expansive abroad. While he sporadically used repression against individuals and groups and deported ethnic minorities from newly annexed territories, he did not engage in mass killing on the scale of 1937. In dealing with his former allies during the cold war, Stalin attempted to maintain the Grand Alliance with the Western Great Powers while maintaining a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, where he could impose "friendly" governments. Western leaders refused to acquiesce in the expansion of Soviet influence, and the cooperation of the war years disintegrated into two hostile camps, each armed with atomic weapons.

In his last years, Stalin was enfeebled by strokes, and he deteriorated physically and mentally. His growing isolation, arbitrariness, and inactivity affected the entire country. The ruling elite engaged in plots and intrigues, while Stalin threatened his closest associates. He died of a massive stroke on March 5, 1953.

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