One
of the most powerful and murderous dictators in history, Stalin was the supreme
ruler of the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century. His regime of terror
caused the death and suffering of tens of millions, but he also oversaw the war
machine that played a key role in the defeat of Nazism. Iosif Vissarionovich
Dzhugashvili was born on 18 December 1879 in Gori, Georgia,
which was then part of the Russian empire. His father was a cobbler and Stalin
grew up in modest circumstances. He studied at a theological seminary where he
began to read Marxist literature. He never graduated, instead devoting his time
to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. He spent the next
15 years as an activist and on a number of occasions was arrested and exiled to
Siberia.
Stalin
was not one of the decisive players in the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917,
but he soon rose through the ranks of the party. In 1922, he was made general
secretary of the Communist Party, a post not considered particularly significant
at the time but which gave him control over appointments and thus allowed him
to build up a base of support. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin promoted
himself as his political heir and gradually outmanoeuvred his rivals. By the
late 1920s, Stalin was effectively the dictator of the Soviet Union. His forced
collectivisation of agriculture cost millions of lives, while his programme of
rapid industrialisation achieved huge increases in Soviet productivity and
economic growth but at great cost. Moreover, the population suffered immensely
during the Great Terror of the 1930s, during which Stalin purged the party of
'enemies of the people', resulting in the execution of thousands and the exile
of millions to the gulag system of slave labour camps.
After
World War Two, the Soviet Union entered the nuclear age and ruled over an
empire which included most of eastern Europe. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin
died of a stroke on 5 March 1953.
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