Joseph Stalin


Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvil (December 21, 1879 - March 5,
1953), better known as Joseph Stalin was the second leader of the
Soviet Union. He was also known as Koba (also a Georgian folk hero; see:
Koba). The name Stalin (derived from combining Russian stal, "steel" with
Lenin) originally was a conspiratorial nickname; however, it stuck with him
and he continued to call himself Stalin after the Russian Revolution. Stalin
is also reported to have used at least a dozen other names for the purpose
of secret communications, but for obvious reasons most of them remain unknown.

Stalin is widely regarded as one of history's worst tyrants, responsible for
massive repression of his people and for millions of deaths. However, many
Russians, especially elderly Russians, see Stalin as a national hero and a
great leader.

Childhood and early years

Born in Gori, Georgia to illiterate peasant parents (who had been serfs at
birth), his harsh spirit has been blamed by some on severe beatings by his
father, inspiring vengeful feelings towards anyone in a position to wield
power over him (perhaps, it is speculated, also a reason he became a
revolutionary). His mother set him on a path to become a priest, and he
studied Russian Orthodox Christianity until he was nearly twenty.

His involvement with the socialist movement began at seminary school, from
which he was expelled in 1899. From then on he worked for a decade with the
political underground in the Caucasus, facing repeated arrest and exile to
Siberia between 1902 and 1917. He adhered to Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a
strong centralist party of "professional revolutionaries". His practical
experience made him useful in Lenin's Bolshevik party, gaining him a place
on its Central Committee in January 1912.

Rise to power

Initially opposed to the overthrow of Aleksandr Kerensky's provisional
government in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was won over to Lenin's
position following the latter's return from exile in April, but played only
a secondary role in the Bolsheviks' seizure of power on November 7. Stalin
spent his first years after the Revolution in a number of senior
administrative posts within the government and party apparatus, becoming in
April 1922 general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, a post which he
subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country.

After Lenin's death in January 1924, a triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and
Zinoviev governed the party, placing themselves ideologically between
Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin (on the right).

During this period, Stalin advanced the policy of building Socialism in One
Country, in contrast to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution and
prioritisation of revolution in other countries. Stalin would quickly switch
sides and join with Bukharin. Together, they fought a new opposition of
Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year
Plans) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year,
Trotsky was exiled. From then on, Stalin can be said to have exercised
control over the party and the country, although this was not complete until
the Great Purge of 1936-1938.

Stalin and Changes in Soviet Society

Stalin replaced Lenin's market socialist New Economic Policy with a system
of centrally-ordained Five-Year Plans, which called for a highly ambitious
program of state guided crash industrialization, and collectivization of
agriculture. In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two
Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialisation from a very low economic
base. Russia, generally ranked as the poorest nation in Europe before 1914,
now industrialized at a phenomenal rate, far surpassing Germany's pace of
industrialization in the 19th century and Japan's earlier in the 20th.

With no seed capital, little foreign trade, and barely any modern industry
to start with, Stalin's regime financed industrialisation by both
restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure
capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of
wealth from the peasantry.

Stalin's regime moved to force collectivisation of agriculture. The theory
behind collectivisation was that it would replace the small-scale
un-mechanised and inefficient farms, that were then commonplace in the
Soviet Union, with large-scale mechanised farms that would produce food far
more efficiently.

Theoretically, landless peasants were to be the biggest beneficiaries from
collectivisation, it promised an opportunity to take an equal share in the
labour, and in its rewards. For those with property, however,
collectivisation meant giving it up to the collective farms and selling most
of the food that they produced at artificially low prices (set by the state)
with only the bare minimum left for themselves.

Collectivisation meant the destruction of a centuries-old way of life, and
alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivisation also
meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced
widespread and often violent resistance among the peasantry.

In an attempt to overcome this resistance Stalin's regime used shock
brigades to coerce reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms
between 1929 and 1933 . In response to this many peasants preferred to
destroy their animals rather than give them over to collective farms, which
produced a major drop in food production.

Stalin blamed this drop in food production on Kulaks (rich peasants) who he
believed were capitalistic parasites who were organising resistance to
collectivisation. All Kulaks who resisted collectivisation were to be shot,
transported to Gulag prison camps or deported to remote areas of the
country. In reality however, the term "Kulak" was a loose term to describe
anyone who opposed collectivisation, which included many peasants who were
anything but rich.

Most historians agree that the disruption caused by collectivization was
largely responsible for major famines which caused up to 5 million deaths in
1932-33, particularly in Ukraine and the lower Volga region, at a time when
the Soviet Union continued to export millions of tonnes of grain on world
markets.

Stalin's regime placed heavy emphasis on the provision of basic medical
services. Campaigns were carried out against typhus, cholera, and malaria;
the number of doctors was increased as rapidly as facilities and training
would permit; and death and infant mortality rates steadily decreased.
Education was also dramatically expanded, with many more Russians learning
to read and write, and higher education expanded. The generation that grew
up under Stalin also saw a major expansion in job opportunities, especially
for women.

Purges

Stalin consolidated near-absolute power afterwards with the Great Purge
against his suspected political and ideological opponents, most notably the
old Bolshevik cadres. Measures used against them ranged from imprisonment in
work camps of the Gulag prison administration to execution after show trials
or assassination (such as that of Trotsky and, some allege, Leningrad party
chief Sergei Kirov). Thousands of people merely suspected of opposing
Stalin's regime were killed or imprisoned. Stalin is said to have personally
signed 40,000 death warrants of suspected opponents of the regime.

During this period, the practice of mass arrest, torture, and imprisonment
or execution without trial of anyone suspected by the secret police of
opposing Stalin's regime became commonplace. By the KGB's own estimates,
681,692 people were shot during 1937-38 (although many historians think that
this was an undercount) and millions of people were transported to Gulag
work camps.

Several show trials were held in Moscow to serve as examples for the trials
that local courts were expected to carry out elsewere in the country. There
were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August
1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of Red Army
generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial
of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938.

Trotsky's August 1940 assassination in Mexico, where he had lived in exile
since 1936, eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party
leadership. Only two members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) now
remained - Stalin himself and his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.

It is believed by most historians that with the famines, forced migrations,
state terrorism, prison and labor camp mortality and political purges,
Stalin and his colleagues were responsible for the deaths of millions. How
many millons died under Stalin is greatly disputed. Although no official
figures have been released by the Soviet or Russian governments, most
estimates put the figure at between eight and twenty million. Comparison of
the 1926-39 census results suggests 5-10 million deaths in excess of what
would be normal in the period, mostly through famine in 1931-34. The highest
estimates put the figure as high as 50 million from the 1920s to the 1950s.

World War II

In August 1939 Stalin agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi
Germany which divided Eastern Europe into the two powers' respective spheres
of influence. In June 1941, however, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the
Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Stalin had not expected this and the
Soviet Union was largely unprepared for this invasion. Until the last
moment, Stalin had sought to avoid any obvious defensive preparation which
might provoke German attack, in the hope of buying time to modernize and
strengthen his military forces. Even after the attack commenced Stalin
appeared unwilling to accept the fact and, according to some historians, was
too stunned to react appropriately for a number of days.

The Nazis initially made huge advances, capturing or killing hundreds of
thousands of Soviet troops. The earlier execution of many of the Red Army's
experienced generals in the Red Army had a severely negative effect on
Russia's ability to organise defences. In response on November 6, 1941,
Stalin addressed the Soviet Union for only the second time during his
three-decade rule (the first time was earlier that year on July 2). He
stated that even though 350,000 troops were killed in German attacks so far,
that the Germans have lost 4.5 million soldiers (a wildly false lie) and
that Soviet victory was near. The Soviet Red Army did in fact put up fierce
resistance, but during the war's early stages was largely ineffective
against the better-equipped and trained Nazi forces until the invaders were
halted and then driven back before Moscow (December 1941).

Stalin's Order No. 227 of July 27, 1942 illustrates the ruthlessness with
which he sought to stiffen army resolve: all those who retreated or
otherwise left their positions without orders to do so were to be summarily
shot. In the war's opening stages, the retreating Red Army also sought to
deny resources to the enemy through a scorched earth policy of destroying
the infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize
them. Unfortunately, this, along with abuse by German troops, caused
starvation and suffering among the civilian population that was left behind.

The Soviets bore the brunt of civilian and military losses in World War II.
Between 21 and 28 million Soviets, most of them civilians, died in the
"Great Patriotic War", as the Soviets called the German-Soviet conflict.
Civilians were rounded up and burned or shot in many cities occupied by the
Nazis. The Nazis considered Slavs to be "sub-human", ranking the killings in
the eyes of many as ethnically targeted mass murder, or genocide. The
conflict left a huge deficit of men of the wartime fighting-age generation
in Russia. As a result, to this day, World War II is remembered very vividly
in Russia, and May 9, Victory Day, is one of its biggest national holidays.

Post-war era

Following World War II Stalin's regime installed friendly Communist-led
satellite governments in the countries that the Soviet army had occupied,
including Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and
Bulgaria, the later "Communist Bloc" allied from 1955 in the Warsaw Pact.
Stalin saw this as a necessary step to protect the Soviet Union, and ensure
that it was surrounded by countries with freindly "puppet" governments, to
act as a "buffer" against any future invaders, a reversal of inter-war
western hopes for a sympathetic Eastern European Cordon sanitaire against
Communism.

But this action convinced many in the west that the Soviet Union intended to
spread communism across the world. The relations between the Soviet Union
and its former World War II western allies soon broke down, and gave way to
a prolonged period of tension and distrust between east and west known as
the Cold War.

At home Stalin presented himself as a great wartime leader who had led the
USSR to victory against the Germans. Internally his repressive policies
continued, but never reached the extremes of the 1930s. Stalin had,
according to some, prepared a new wave of arrests and executions aimed at
"cosmopolitans," a code word for Jews, in 1953, but died before implementing
his plans.

On March 1, 1953, after an all-night dinner with interior minister Lavrenty
Beria and future premiers Georgi Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita
Khrushchev, Stalin collapsed. He died four days later, on March 5, 1953, at
the age of 73. Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral
hemorrhage. His body was left in state in Lenin's Tomb until October 31,
1961. The political memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993,
claimed Beria had boasted to Molotov that he poisoned Stalin.

Policies and accomplishments

Under Stalin the Soviet Union was industrialized to the point that by the
time of World War II the Soviet industrial-military complex was able to help
resist the German invasion. Unfortunately, this had been achieved at a
staggering cost in human lives.

While the social and economic transformations over which he presided laid
the foundations for the USSR's emergence as a global superpower, much of
Stalin's conduct of Soviet affairs was subsequently repudiated by his
successors in the Communist Party leadership, notably in his denunciation by
Khrushchev in February 1956. His successors were not, on the other hand,
able to wean themselves from the basic principles on which Stalin based his
rule -- the political monopoly of the Communist Party presiding over a
command economy, relying on force to maintain its position at home and abroad.