As a teen, he earned a scholarship to attend a seminary in the nearby city of Tblisi and study for the priesthood in the Georgian Orthodox Church. In , Stalin was expelled from the seminary for missing exams, although he claimed it was for Marxist propaganda. After leaving school, Stalin became an underground political agitator, taking part in labor demonstrations and strikes.
He adopted the name Koba, after a fictional Georgian outlaw-hero, and joined the more militant wing of the Marxist Social Democratic movement, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin. Stalin also became involved in various criminal activities, including bank heists, the proceeds from which were used to help fund the Bolshevik Party. He was arrested multiple times between and , and subjected to imprisonment and exile in Siberia. Ekaterina perished from typhus when her son was an infant.
They had two children, a boy and a girl his only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva , caused an international scandal when she defected to the United States in Nadezhda committed suicide in her early 30s.
Stalin also fathered several children out of wedlock. Three years later, in November , the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The Soviet Union was founded in , with Lenin as its first leader. During these years, Stalin had continued to move up the party ladder, and in he became secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party , a role that enabled him to appoint his allies to government jobs and grow a base of political support.
After Lenin died in , Stalin eventually outmaneuvered his rivals and won the power struggle for control of the Communist Party. By the late s, he had become dictator of the Soviet Union. Starting in the late s, Joseph Stalin launched a series of five-year plans intended to transform the Soviet Union from a peasant society into an industrial superpower.
His development plan was centered on government control of the economy and included the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which the government took control of farms. The forced collectivization also led to widespread famine across the Soviet Union that killed millions.
Stalin ruled by terror and with a totalitarian grip in order to eliminate anyone who might oppose him. He expanded the powers of the secret police, encouraged citizens to spy on one another and had millions of people killed or sent to the Gulag system of forced labor camps.
During the second half of the s, Stalin instituted the Great Purge , a series of campaigns designed to rid the Communist Party, the military and other parts of Soviet society from those he considered a threat. Additionally, Stalin built a cult of personality around himself in the Soviet Union. Cities were renamed in his honor. Soviet history books were rewritten to give him a more prominent role in the revolution and mythologize other aspects of his life.
He was the subject of flattering artwork, literature and music, and his name became part of the Soviet national anthem. He censored photographs in an attempt to rewrite history, removing former associates executed during his many purges. His government also controlled the Soviet media. Stalin then proceeded to annex parts of Poland and Romania, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He also launched an invasion of Finland. Stalin had ignored warnings from the Americans and the British, as well as his own intelligence agents, about a potential invasion, and the Soviets were not prepared for war.
As German troops approached the Soviet capital of Moscow, Stalin remained there and directed a scorched earth defensive policy, destroying any supplies or infrastructure that might benefit the enemy.
The tide turned for the Soviets with the Battle of Stalingrad from August to February , during which the Red Army defeated the Germans and eventually drove them from Russia. As the war progressed, Stalin participated in the major Allied conferences, including those in Tehran and Yalta His iron will and deft political skills enabled him to play the loyal ally while never abandoning his vision of an expanded postwar Soviet empire.
Joseph Stalin did not mellow with age: He prosecuted a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to labor camps and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing all dissent and anything that smacked of foreign—especially Western—influence. He established communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, and in led the Soviets into the nuclear age by exploding an atomic bomb. Stalin, who grew increasingly paranoid in his later years, died on March 5, , at age 74, after suffering a stroke.
By some estimates, he was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people during his brutal rule. Start your free trial today. As war clouds gathered over Europe in , Stalin made a seemingly brilliant move, signing a nonaggression pact with Germany's Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Stalin was convinced of Hitler's integrity and ignored warnings from his military commanders that Germany was mobilizing armies on its eastern front.
When the Nazi blitzkrieg struck in June , the Soviet Army was completely unprepared and immediately suffered massive losses. Stalin was so distraught at Hitler's treachery that he hid in his office for several days. By the time Stalin regained his resolve, German armies occupied all of the Ukraine and Belarus, and its artillery surrounded Leningrad.
To make matters worse, the purges of the s had depleted the Soviet Army and government leadership to the point where both were nearly dysfunctional. After heroic efforts on the part of the Soviet Army and the Russian people, the Germans were turned back at the Battle of Stalingrad in By the next year, the Soviet Army was liberating countries in Eastern Europe, even before the Allies had mounted a serious challenge against Hitler at D-Day.
Stalin had been suspicious of the West since the inception of the Soviet Union , and once the Soviet Union had entered the war, Stalin had demanded the Allies open up a second front against Germany. President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that such an action would result in heavy casualties.
This only deepened Stalin's suspicion of the West, as millions of Russians died. As the tide of war slowly turned in the Allies' favor, Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin to discuss postwar arrangements. At the first of these meetings, in Tehran, Iran, in late , the recent victory in Stalingrad put Stalin in a solid bargaining position.
He demanded the Allies open a second front against Germany, which they agreed to in the spring of In February , the three leaders met again at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea.
With Soviet troops liberating countries in Eastern Europe, Stalin was again in a strong position and negotiated virtually a free hand in reorganizing their governments. He also agreed to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated.
The situation changed at the Potsdam Conference in July Roosevelt died that April and was replaced by President Harry S. British parliamentary elections had replaced Prime Minister Churchill with Clement Attlee as Britain's chief negotiator. By now, the British and Americans were suspicious of Stalin's intentions and wanted to avoid Soviet involvement in a postwar Japan.
The dropping of two atomic bombs in August forced Japan's surrender before the Soviets could mobilize. Convinced of the Allies' hostility toward the Soviet Union, Stalin became obsessed with the threat of an invasion from the West. Between and , he established Communist regimes in many Eastern European countries, creating a vast buffer zone between Western Europe and "Mother Russia.
In , Stalin ordered an economic blockade on the German city of Berlin, in hopes of gaining full control of the city.
The Allies responded with the massive Berlin Airlift , supplying the city and eventually forcing Stalin to back down. Earlier, he had ordered the Soviet representative to the United Nations to boycott the Security Council because it refused to accept the newly formed Communist People's Republic of China into the United Nations. When the resolution to support South Korea came to a vote in the Security Council, the Soviet Union was unable to use its veto.
It's estimated that Stalin killed as many as 20 million people, directly or indirectly, through famine, forced labor camps, collectivization and executions.
Some scholars have argued that Stalin's record of killings amount to genocide and make him one of history's most ruthless mass murderers. Though his popularity from his successes during World War II was strong, Stalin's health began to deteriorate in the early s. After an assassination plot was uncovered, he ordered the head of the secret police to instigate a new purge of the Communist Party.
Before it could be executed, however, Stalin died on March 5, He left a legacy of death and horror, even as he turned a backward Russia into a world superpower.
Stalin was eventually denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev , in However, he has found a rekindled popularity among many of Russia's young people.
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