Joseph stalin biography russia

Eventually, one in four Czech party members disappeared during Stalin's reign of terror. Inside the Soviet Union, Stalin obsessed over total party loyalty. He saw an enemy or conspiracy around every corner. Just as in the s when he called on the Soviets to uncover "enemies of the people," Stalin now ordered the addition of more and more labor camps for the Gulag system.

One of the most concentrated, brutal purges occurred against the citizens of Leningrad in Upwards of one thousand party leaders from Leningrad were executed. Stalin's top "henchman" or ally was chief of the KGB the secret police Lavrenty Beria, who was also in charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project. According to Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, her father increasingly and steadily lost touch with reality the last three years of his life.

He completely isolated himself at the Kremlin in Moscow or at his nearby country home in Kuntsevo. Stalin was suspicious of everyone, and at the Nineteenth Party Congress in October , he so feared everyone in the room that he sat alone at the end of a long table. At this time, he was also conjuring up an anti-Semitic Jewish campaign.

Stalin constantly made up stories that his closest staff and even his family were in conspiracies against him. In his last months in early , he was preparing to possibly purge the people, including the doctors, of whom he was suspicious. Stalin suffered a stroke sometime during the night of February 28, He was not discovered until late the next afternoon, for his staff had feared entering his room without his permission.

Stalin died on March 5, Stalin left behind a Soviet Union ruled by a huge government bureaucracy of ministries, party-ruled legislative bodies, and secret police. For many common Soviet citizens, Stalin had been the extremely popular "father" of the Soviet Union. Thousands paid their respects in Moscow, and his body was put on display in the Lenin Mausoleum.

His ultimate successor, however, Nikita Khrushchev —; see entry , was bold enough to reveal the "crimes of Stalin" in a secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in October Partly as a result of this speech, Stalin's body was removed from the mausoleum and buried at the Kremlin Wall. Antonov-Ovseyenko, Anton. The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny.

New York : Harper and Row, Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York : Viking, Isaacs, Jeremy, and Taylor Downing. Cold War: An Illustrated History, — Boston: Little, Brown and Company, Lewis, Jonathan, and Phillip Whitehead. Stalin: A Time for Judgement. New York: Pantheon Books, Tucker, Robert C. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, — New York: W.

Born in southern Russia in Georgia on March 29, , Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria would become head of the KGB, the dreaded Soviet secret police, and the organizational chief of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, often referred to Beria as "my father's evil genius. Young Beria, much as Stalin had been, was caught up in the communist movement sweeping over Russia and joined the Communist Party in , the same year the revolutionary Bolsheviks triumphed over Russia's tsarist government.

Committed to the cause and not averse to brutal tactics, Beria quickly rose by to the leadership of Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB. Between and , he "eliminated" anyone who deviated from communist ideals or orders. Beria specialized in terror, torture, executions, and for the lucky ones, facilitating banishment to the Gulag, the harsh Soviet prison system.

Beria destroyed tens of thousands of lives. Kurchatov —; see entry as the organization's top scientist. Beria constantly bellowed to Kurchatov, "You will be camp dust," if the scientist was unsuccessful in developing the bomb. Upon Stalin's death in March , Beria was one of a handful of leaders assuming they might take over from Stalin. Yet others, including Nikita Khrushchev, saw to it that Beria was falsely accused of being an agent for the West and was shot in late The announcement of his death was made in December Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. J oseph Stalin became the leader of the Soviet Union after the death of Vladimir Lenin, who had led the revolution that removed the Russian czar an all-powerful, hereditary ruler like a king from power and put the Communist Party in charge of the country in Under Stalin, the Soviet Union became one of the world's major powers, but his was a reign of terror as millions of people who displeased Stalin in various ways were executed or sent to labor camps called "gulags.

He was the only one of four children in his family who did not die as a baby. Stalin's father, Vissarion, was a shoemaker and an alcoholic who died from wounds he received in a fight. His mother, Yekaterina, took in washing and sewing and hired out as a housekeeper to support her son, whom she nursed through several serious childhood illnesses, including smallpox.

Called "Soso" as a boy, Stalin spoke only the Georgian language until he was eight. At that age he started school, where he learned Russian the common language of the Russian empire and studied religion, geography, and other subjects. Although she could not read or write herself, Stalin's very religious mother had grand ambitions for her son; in particular, she wanted him to become a priest, and perhaps eventually a bishop.

In Stalin won a scholarship to the theological seminary in Tbilisi the largest city in Georgia. He earned good grades the first year, but during the second year he rebelled against the school's strict rules. He smuggled banned books into the school, and once refused to bow to a school official. It was during these years that Stalin learned about Marxism the theory of Karl Marx that calls for the working class to revolt and create a classless society.

Stalin began reading works by Marxist writers, especially Vladimir Lenin, who would later lead Russia's revolution. In Stalin was expelled from the seminary even after her son became the leader of the Soviet Union, his mother considered him a failure for not entering the priesthood. He continued to dream of revolution, and began calling himself "Koba" which means "The Indomitable" after a hero from Georgian folk tales.

Stalin got a job as a bookkeeper at the Tbilisi observatory, and there he met members of a group called the Social Democrats, who used the observatory as a meeting place. These people were communists believers in a political system in which all citizens own property as a group rather than individually , which was illegal in Russia at the time. Stalin joined the group, and when his employers discovered this he lost his job.

Unemployed, Stalin became an active member of the Social Democratic Party's militant wing and devoted all of his time to revolutionary activities, which mostly involved trying to convince industrial workers to support the group. In he married a peasant girl, Yekaterina Svanidze, but after only three happy years—and the birth of a son, Jacob—she died.

Arrested in for his revolutionary activities, Stalin was sent to Siberia a huge, desolate part of northern Russia where people were often sent as punishment for crimes but escaped two years later and returned to Georgia. In Stalin attended a political meeting in Finland, and there he met Vladimir Lenin for the first time. The Social Democratic Party had split into two parts: the Mensheviks, who believed in gradual change and compromise; and the extremist Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, who called for immediate revolution.

Lenin could see that Stalin was a loyal party member who was good at organizing and at solving practical problems, and he put Stalin to work raising money for the Bolsheviks by robbing banks and government money transports—Lenin did so quietly, however, since this was an activity of which some Bolsheviks might not have approved. After performing such tasks for some time Stalin was in danger of arrest, so he was expelled from his local party, and he disappeared.

He soon resurfaced in Baku, Azerbaijan located near the Caspian Sea , where he tried to convince the area's oil workers to join the Bolsheviks. Constantly in and out of trouble with the police, Stalin spent several periods of exile in Siberia. In Lenin cut his ties with the Social Democrats and formed his own party. Knowing how invaluable Stalin's ruthlessness and intelligence were, Lenin nominated him to his party's central committee.

But Stalin was soon arrested again, and this time he stayed in Siberia for a longer period. He did not return, in fact, until March , when the Russian revolution toppled the czar's all-powerful ruler regime. By this time he was calling himself Stalin, which comes from the Russian word "stal" which means steel. At this period, Russia was made up of a collection of individual republics that would, in , together become the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, however, the country was ruled by a provisional temporary government made up of several different political parties that had worked together to overthrow the czar. In April, Lenin returned to Russia from Switzerland, where he had been living in exile, and announced his dissatisfaction with the new government. After issuing a demand for peace, bread meaning adequate food , and land for the Russian people, Lenin and his followers organized a revolutionary committee and began urging urban workers, rural people, and members of the military to back them.

Over the next few months, the members of the revolutionary committee—who were now calling themselves Communists as well as Bolsheviks—gradually gained influence, so that by October they were able to stage a bloodless takeover of the provisional government. The Communist Party now ruled Russia, with Lenin as its top leader. Lenin now named Stalin Commissar of Nationalities, putting him in charge of placing Communists among all the many ethnic groups in Russia so that the party's power would increase.

Meanwhile, Stalin also attracted his own supporters among the most powerful Communist leaders. During these years Stalin was proving himself to be a strong leader who could make tough decisions and stick with them; he was not considered an intellectual leader, but was determined to get what he wanted. Between and , the Communists and their "Red Army" fought a civil war with those who still resisted their dominance: called the "Whites," these opponents included some who fought for a return to a czarist regime and some who wanted a more democratic government.

Stalin served as a military commander during this conflict. In , when Lenin set up agencies to perform various government tasks, Stalin was made Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate. He became a member of the party secretariat or "Politboro. The couple had two children, Vasili and Svetlana, born in and In , Nadezhda would kill herself, leaving a note that expressed disapproval of Stalin as a man and leader.

Lenin made it clear that he continued to value Stalin when, in , he made him the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This was an important position, because Stalin had the power to give key party jobs to people who were loyal to him. In that way, he was able to staff the party's higher levels with many of his supporters.

In May Lenin had a stroke and his health grew worse and worse. At the same time, he began to express fear about the amount of power that Stalin and others had built for themselves. But Lenin was losing influence in the party, as some members accused him of forgetting some of the ideals around which the Communist Party had been founded. Each of these men would have liked to be Russia's top ruler, but it was Stalin who emerged on top.

He did so by carefully building an image of himself as humble, calm, efficient, and fatherly and by pitting his opponents against each other. First Stalin plotted with Kamenev and Zinoviev to remove Trotsky from power he went into exile in Mexico, where he was eventually killed by Stalin's agents. Then Stalin and Bukharin worked together to get rid of Kamenev and Zinoviev.

Finally Stalin turned against Bukharin. In less than ten years, Stalin was the only one of these original five leaders left alive, thanks to his own ruthless pursuit of power. Stalin now had complete control of the Soviet Union, which he ran with the help of a strong, brutal police force. His main objective was to develop his country's industry and agriculture, and in he proposed the " Five-Year Plan " which was followed by other five-year plans to quickly reach the goals he had set.

Either we do this or they will crush us. Across the Soviet Union, construction began on factories, dams, and other major projects, and within five years the country was producing steel, machine tools, tractors, and other industrial products. Meanwhile, farmers were forced to give up their small family farms and move onto state-owned, collective farms; Stalin did not believe that the government could effectively control smaller farms.

These changes were hard on the Russian people. Factory workers made only enough money for basic necessities, and food and goods were sometimes hard to find. People had to get special permission to change jobs, and special passports to travel. Some farmers did not want to give up their farms, and they were labeled "kulaks" tightwads and killed or sent to the "gulags"—the network of labor camps set up for those accused of crimes against the state.

Other farmers starved when the government punished them by taking their grain. People were afraid to express themselves freely especially if they disagreed with the government , because they knew the penalty would be swift and harsh. By the late s, most of Soviet agriculture had been collectivized, but some of the rules were changed so that people were allowed to keep their own houses and tools and grow private gardens for their own use.

Meanwhile, Stalin was creating a public image of himself as a great hero. Cities, towns, villages, and even the tallest mountain in Russia were named after him, and he was mentioned in the national anthem. Yet he was more and more fearful of enemies and suspicious of everyone around him. In the mids he began a series of purges a practice of getting rid of people by killing them or sending them to prison.

It is estimated that from seventeen to twenty-five million people were sent to the gulags during Stalin's reign; about a million were executed, while about seven million died in the gulags. One purge that Stalin would later have a reason to regret was that of the Soviet armed forces, when most of the country's marshals, generals, and admirals were killed.

During the s, Adolf Hitler had cemented his place as dictator a ruler with absolute power of Germany and was leading his army in conquests of various nearby countries such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Soviet Union was also interested in expanding its territories. In August Stalin signed an agreement with Hitler in which Russia and Germany divided the countries of Eastern Europe between them and promised not to attack each other.

Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were forced to join the Soviet Union and, after a short war of resistance, so was Finland. Although he had been warned by some of his advisors that Hitler would not honor his agreement with the Soviet Union, Stalin was shocked when, in June , the German army invaded Russia. For about two weeks he seemed stunned and unable to do anything; he said, "Everything which Lenin created we have lost forever!

On July 3, , he addressed the Soviet people in a radio broadcast the first time most of them had heard their leader's voice and called on them to resist the enemy with all their might. The Germans quickly moved through the country until they reached the outskirts of two of its biggest cities, Moscow and Leningrad. They had confiscated about half of Russia's industry and agriculture, and about 40 percent of the population was under German control.

In response, Stalin shifted many Soviet industries to the eastern part of the country where they would be safer from the Germans, arranged to borrow supplies and equipment from the other Allied countries, and built morale by stirring up the religious and patriotic feelings of the Soviet citizens. He even relaxed some of the restrictions he had imposed, letting people practice their traditional religion more openly and allowing more artistic expression.

Stalin believed in a "scorched earth" policy which meant that it was better to destroy crops and property than to let the Germans take them and refused to surrender any ground. With the Germans dug in for the winter around Moscow, Stalin ignored the brutally cold weather and called for a counterattack. The Red Army did gain some ground, but at a great cost in casualties people dead or wounded.

More evidence of Stalin's extremism—and, some would say, his deep cruelty—was offered when, in July of , he issued a rule that any Soviet soldier taken prisoner would be considered a traitor to Russia. In fact, Stalin's own son Vasili was captured by the Germans; Stalin responded by disowning him, later refusing an offer by the Germans to exchange Vasili for a captured German officer.

Stalin used the threat of severe punishment to intimidate not only ordinary citizens and foot soldiers but also higher officers and government officials. Nevertheless, most agreed that he ran the war effort well, planning strategies that worked, promoting good commanders, and representing his country at several important war conferences attended by the leaders of the Allied countries.

In January , the Red Army won another long, bloody, and important battle, this time to regain the city of Stalingrad now Volgograd. That summer, they beat the Germans at Kursk, and from then on the Germans were constantly in retreat, pursued by Russian troops back toward the German border. These victories boosted Stalin's image both at home and abroad.

Allied troops referred to him as "Uncle Joe" and considered him a passionate enemy of Nazism, even though he had made agreements with the Nazis just before the war. In only a few years, the rest of the world would realize that Stalin was, in fact, an isolationist someone who does not believe in becoming involved in other nation's affairs with a deep distrust of the non-Communist countries.

In April Russian troops were the first to enter the German capital, Berlin, where Hitler was hiding in an underground bunker. He killed himself on April 30, and the Germans quickly surrendered to the Allies. As the war drew to a close, Stalin used his newfound popularity—and the undeniable contribution the Russian people had made to the Allied victory—to gain rewards for Russia.

In the end, the Soviet Union had control over most of Eastern Europe. Despite hopes that the war's end would change the way Stalin governed, he soon went back to the same harsh measures. This marked the beginning of the "Cold War" between the Soviet Union and western countries especially the United States , a conflict fought not with guns and bombs but with words, suspicion, and threats of aggression and which lasted until the s.

Meanwhile, Stalin's paranoia continued, and he seemed to trust no one, not even his closest friends and family members. He had just started a new series of purges when, in March of , he suffered a stroke and died of internal bleeding. Over the next few decades, the Soviet Union would face a long, slow recovery from the brutal, damaging years of Stalin's reign.

Caulkins, Janet. Joseph Stalin. New York : Franklin Watts, New York : Viking Penguin, Simmonds, George W. Zhukov was born into a poor family in in Strelkovka, a small village located about 60 miles from Moscow. As a young boy he worked as a furrier's apprentice, but in he joined the Russian army. During the revolution and civil war that established Russia as a Communist country, Zhukov joined the new Red Army, serving as a squadron commander until During the s he attended schools for military commanders while rising through the ranks.

Over the course of the s, Zhukov somehow managed to avoid being killed in Stalin's purge of the Soviet military leadership. He made his mark in when he went to Upper Mongolia now part of China where the Japanese were conducting an undeclared war along their border with that region. In February Zhukov was made chief of the Soviet General Staff and deputy commissioner for defense.

After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, Zhukov began to show the leadership qualities that would make him one of the best of all World War II generals. He led the defense of Leningrad in the summer and fall of , then returned to Moscow in December to defend the city against German attack. Successful in that effort, he went on to coordinate the Soviet victories at Stalingrad in and and Kursk in July and August In August Zhukov was made deputy supremecommander in chief of the Red Army and Navy, which meant that he was second in command only to Stalin in terms of military authority.

With the end of the war in Europe in sight, Zhukov led his troops across Eastern Europe toward Germany, and in May they captured Berlin. In world affairs the Stalinist system became isolationist. While paying lip service to the revolutionary goals of Karl Marx and Lenin, Stalin sought to promote good relations with the capitalist countries and urged Communist parties to ally themselves with moderate and middle-of-the-road parties in a popular front against the radical right.

From the middle of the s onward, Stalin personally managed the vast political and economic system he had established. Formally, he took charge of it only in May , when he assumed the office of chairman of the Council of Ministers. After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin also assumed formal command over the entire military establishment.

Stalin's conduct of Russian military strategy in the war remains as controversial as most of his activities. Some evidence indicates that he committed serious blunders, but other evidence allows him credit for brilliant achievements. The fact remains that under Stalin the Soviet Union won the war, emerged as one of the major powers in the world, and managed to bargain for a distribution of the spoils of war that enlarged its area of domination significantly, partly by annexation and partly by the transformation of all the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers into client states.

Stalin died of a cerebrovascular accident on March 5, His body was entombed next to Lenin's in the mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow. After his death Stalin became a controversial figure in the Communist world, where appreciation for his great achievements was offset to a varying degree by harsh criticism of his methods. At the Twentieth All-Union Party Congress in , Premier Nikita Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders attacked the cult of Stalin, accusing him of tyranny, terror, falsification of history, and self-glorification.

A good brief survey of his life is Robert D. Warth, Joseph Stalin Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin are the subjects of Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution Stalin figures prominently in Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs, Khrushchev Remembers trans. Many of the countless books dealing with Soviet affairs between and necessarily must deal with Stalin extensively, particularly such standard works as Edward H.

Carr's massive multivolume study, A History of Soviet Russia 9 vols. Of the numerous works by former Communist leaders who dealt with Stalin and later denounced him, several are noteworthy: Leon Trotsky , Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, edited and translated by Charles Malamuth ; new ed. Various assessments of Stalin and his conduct of Soviet affairs are given in T.

Rigby, ed. As ruler of Russia , Stalin was the leader of world communism for almost thirty years. Stalin's mother, Ekaterina, a religious and illiterate unable to read or write peasant woman, sent her teenage son to the theological seminary in Tpilisi Tiflis , Georgia, where Stalin prepared for the ministry. Shortly before his graduation, however, he was expelled in for spreading subversive views ideas that went against those of the government.

Stalin then joined the underground revolutionary Marxist movement in Tpilisi, a movement devoted to the views of Karl Marx — and Frederich Engels — , who believed in the political system of socialism that gave power to the working class and would ultimately lead to communism, where goods and services would be distributed by the government.

The following year he was arrested, imprisoned, and later exiled forced to move to Siberia , a cold and remote region of Russia. When the Russian Marxist movement split into two factions rival groups , Stalin identified himself with the Bolsheviks. During the time of the — revolution, Stalin made a name for himself as the organizer of daring bank robberies and raids on money transports, an activity that Marxist leader V.

Lenin — considered important due to the party's need for funds. Many other Marxists considered this type of highway robbery unworthy of a revolutionary socialist. Stalin participated in congresses governing parties of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party at Tampere, London, and Stockholm , Sweden , in and , meeting Lenin for the first time at these congresses.

Stalin spent the major portion of the years from to in organizational work for the movement, mainly in the city of Baku, Russia. Eventually, after his return from Vienna , Austria , the police caught him again, and he was exiled to the faraway village of Turukhansk beyond the Arctic Circle. He remained there until the fall of czarism, the Russian rule of a sole leader or king.

He adopted the name Stalin "man of steel" around After the fall of czarism, Stalin made his way at once to Petrograd, Russia, where until the arrival of Lenin from Switzerland he was the senior Bolshevik and the editor of Pravda, the party newspaper. After Lenin's return, Stalin remained in the high councils of the party, but had only a small role in the preparations for the October Revolution , which placed the Bolsheviks in power.

In the first position of the communist Soviet government, he held the post of people's commissar for nationalities in charge of party loyalty. When the party Secretariat was organized, he became one of its leading members and was appointed its secretary general in , where Lenin appreciated Stalin's ability as a politician and as a troubleshooter.

The strength of Stalin's position in the government and in the party was probably anchored by his secretary generalship, which gave him control over party personnel administration — over admissions, training, assignments, promotions, and disciplinary matters. This position also ranked him as the most powerful man in Soviet Russia after Lenin.

During Lenin's last illness and after his death in , Stalin served as a member of the three-man committee that ran the affairs of the party and the country. Stalin represented, for the time, the right wing conservative of the party that wanted to stay true to the ideas of the revolution. He and his spokesman, Nikolai Bukharin — , warned against revolutionaries and argued in favor of continuing the more cautious and patient policies that Lenin had installed with the New Economic Policy NEP.

In Stalin succeeded in defeating the entire opposition and in eliminating its leaders from the party. He then adopted much of its domestic program by starting a five-year plan of industrial development and by executing it with a degree of recklessness that angered many of his former supporters, who then formed an opposition to him. This opposition, too, was defeated quickly, and by the early s Stalin had gained dictatorial total control over the party, the state, and the entire Communist International.

Although always depicted as a towering figure, Stalin, in fact, was fairly short. His personality was highly controversial, and it remains a mystery.

Joseph stalin biography russia

In political life he tended to be cautious and slow-moving, and his writing style was much the same. Stalin was at times, however, a clever speaker and a fierce debater. He seems to have possessed boundless energy and an amazing ability to absorb detailed knowledge. His first wife, a Georgian girl named Ekaterina Svanidze, died of tuberculosis, a terrible disease that attacks the lungs and bones.

His second wife, Nadezhda Alleluyeva, killed herself in , apparently over Stalin's dictatorial rule of the party. In back-to-back five-year plans, the Soviet Union under Stalin began to modernize to accept modern ideas and styles with great speed. Although the military needs of the country drained away precious resources, and World War II brought total destruction to several cities and death to many millions of citizens, the nation by the end of Stalin's life had become an important industrial country in the world, second only to the United States.

It included the destruction of all free enterprise business organizations in both town and country. The transformation of Soviet agriculture in the early s into collectives groups of managed farms tremendously damaged the country's food production. Meanwhile, Stalin jailed and executed vast numbers of party members, especially the old revolutionaries and the leading figures in many other areas.

Stalin created a new kind of political system characterized by severe police control, strengthening of the government, and personal dictatorship. Historians consider his government one of history's worst examples of totalitarianism, or having complete political control with no opposition. In world affairs the Stalinist system became isolationist, meaning the country moved away from building relations with foreign nations.

Formally, he took charge of it in May , when he assumed the office of chairman of the Council of Ministers. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin also assumed formal command of the entire military establishment. Some evidence indicates that he committed serious mistakes, but other evidence gives him credit for brilliant achievements.

The fact remains that under Stalin the Soviet Union won the war, emerged as one of the major powers in the world, and managed to bargain for a distribution of the spoils of war seized land resulting from Soviet victory that enlarged its area of domination significantly. Stalin died of a brain hemorrhage an abnormal bleeding of the brain on March 5, His body was placed in a tomb next to Lenin's in Red Square in Moscow.

After his death Stalin became a controversial figure in the communist world, where appreciation for his great achievements was offset by harsh criticism of his methods. Downing, David. Chicago : Heinemann Library, Radzinskii, Edvard. New York : Doubleday, Joseph Stalin gale. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. Joseph Stalin The Soviet statesman Joseph Stalin was the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union and the leader of world communism for almost 30 years.

First Years of Soviet Rule After the fall of czarism, Stalin made his way at once to Petrograd, where until the arrival of Lenin from Switzerland he was the senior Bolshevik and the editor of Pravda, the party organ. Stalin's Personality Although always depicted as a towering figure, Stalin, in fact, was of short stature. Stalin's Achievements In successive 5-year plans, the Soviet Union under Stalin industrialized and urbanized with great speed.

Judgments of Stalin Stalin died of a cerebrovascular accident on March 5, Stalin, Joseph gale. First Years of Soviet rule After the fall of czarism, Stalin made his way at once to Petrograd, Russia, where until the arrival of Lenin from Switzerland he was the senior Bolshevik and the editor of Pravda, the party newspaper. Rise to power During Lenin's last illness and after his death in , Stalin served as a member of the three-man committee that ran the affairs of the party and the country.

Stalin's personality Although always depicted as a towering figure, Stalin, in fact, was fairly short. Stalin's achievements In back-to-back five-year plans, the Soviet Union under Stalin began to modernize to accept modern ideas and styles with great speed. For More Information Downing, David. Ulam, Adam B. Stalin: The Man and His Era. Expanded ed.

Boston: Beacon Press, Stalin, Joseph oxford. Exiled to Siberia —17 , Stalin returned to join the Russian Revolution , and became secretary of the central committee of the party in On Lenin's death in , he achieved supreme power through his control of the party organization. Stalin outmanoeuvred rivals such as Trotsky and Bukharin and drove them from power.

From , he was virtually dictator. Stalin enforced collectivization of agriculture and intensive industrialization, suppressing all opposition, and, in the s, he exterminated all possible opponents in a series of purges of political and military leaders. During World War 2, Stalin controlled the armed forces and negotiated skilfully with the Allied leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt After the war he reimposed severe repression and forced puppet communist governments on the states of Eastern Europe.

More From encyclopedia. About this article Joseph Stalin All Sources -. Updated Aug 13 About encyclopedia. Joseph Sauveur. Joseph Rudyard Kipling. Joseph Rosh Ha-Seder. The Red Army achieved early successes in the Battle of Elnya and attempted to break the Leningrad siege. However, catastrophe struck at Kiev, resulting in heavy losses. In October , Stalin faced the critical decision of whether to defend Moscow.

Despite initial opposition, he rallied his generals and ordered the defense of the capital. In the fall of , the Soviet army launched successful counteroffensives at Tihvin and Rostov-on-Don. Gorbachev oversaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union , which officially ended in That year, the Russian Federation elected its first president, Boris Yeltsin.

Yeltsin died in ; Gorbachev died in Profile of the former Communist Party leader who stunned the world with his liberalizing "Glasnost", and presided over the dismantling of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States. Your Profile. Email Updates. Joseph Stalin at left seated with U.

During World War II, the three leaders formed an uneasy alliance. Stalin's Purges. Read more. Mikhail Gorbachev signs a landmark arms control treaty with U. President Ronald Reagan in