Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953) was the second leader of the Soviet Union. His real name was Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, and he was also known as Koba (a Georgian folk hero) to his intimates. The name Stalin (derived from combining Russian stal, "steel" with Lenin) originally was a conspiratorial nickname; however, it stuck to 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.

Childhood and early years

Born in Gori, Georgia to illiterate peasant parents (who had been serfs at birth), his harsh spirit has been blamed on undeserved and severe beatings by his father, inspiring vengeful feelings towards anyone in a position to wield power over him (perhaps 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 there on he worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus. He soon followed Vladimir Lenin's ideology of centralism and a strong party of "professional revolutionaries". His practical experience made him useful in Lenin's Bolshevik party leading up to the 1917 October Revolution (in which he played no direct part).

Rise to power

Stalin spent his first years after the revolution secretly building his post as general secretary into the most powerful one in the communist party. After Lenin's death in 1924, a triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev governed between Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin (on the right wing of the party). Soon after, Stalin switched sides and joined with Bukharin. Together, they fought a new opposition of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin's supremacy was complete. From this year, he could be said to have exercised control over the party and the country (although the formalities were not complete until the Great Purges of 1936-1938).

The final stage of Stalin's rise to power was the ordered assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, where he had lived since 1936 (he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929.). Indeed, after Trotsky's death only two members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) remained - Stalin himself and his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.

Stalin's Changes in Soviet Society

Stalin replaced Lenin's market socialist "New Economic Policy" with a Five-Year Plan, which called for a highly ambitious program of heavy industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first Five-Year Plan achieved amazing results, mainly because of the heroic sacrifices of the common people. Russia, an inert sleeping giant before 1914, now became industrialized at an unbelievable speed, far surpassing Germany’s pace of industrialization in the nineteenth century and Japan’s earlier in the twentieth.

With industrialization came social advancement. Most observers in the 1920s credited the Stalin regime with abandoning the tsarist policy of persecuting national minorities in favor of a policy of tolerance toward the more than two hundred minority groups in the Soviet Union. Another feature of the Stalin regime that received praise was the extension of medical services. Campaigns were carried out against typhus, cholera, and malaria; the number of doctors was increases as rapidly as facilities and training would permit; and death and infant mortality rates steadily decreased.

Under the pretext of constructing `socialism in one country', Stalin moved against large segments of the Soviet population, such as the Kulaks, who were disinherited when agriculture was collectivized. During this period, kulak sabotage aggravated a massive famine in the Ukraine.

Some argue that collectivization even produced major "man-made famines" in 1932-33, particularly in Ukraine responsible for up to 5 million deaths. Collectivization led to a drop in the already low productivity of Russian farming, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940, or allowing for the further disasters of World War II, 1950. These statistics, and the actual existence of these famines is debated though. Some argue that the famines were generally a hoax. That collectivization was not responsible for millions of deaths and the actual amount of people who died of starvation was much lower and due to other causes. The 1932 dust bowl crisis which occurred not only in the USA, but also in India and the USSR, is commonly cited as one explanation.

Purges

Stalin consolidated near-absolte power afterwards with the Great Purges against his political and ideological opponents, most notably the old cadres and the rank and file of the Bolshevik Party. Measures used against them ranged from imprisonment in work camps (Gulags) to assassination (such as that of Leon Trotsky and Sergei Kirov). 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 from 1936 to 1938, The Trial of the Sixteen was the first (December 1936); then the Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); then the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938.

World War II

In 1939 Stalin agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany which divided Eastern Europe between the two powers. The official Allied version has been: In 1941, however, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union (see Operation Barbarossa). Under Stalin's leadership the Soviet Red Army put up fierce resistance, but were largely ineffective against the better-equipped and trained advancing Nazi forces. Stalin had some success in slowing the German advance by following a scorched earth strategy in which retreating Soviet troops destroyed 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.

Stalin was, up to this point, very wary of the Germans, and would not permit his armies even to assume defensive positions for fear of sending the wrong signals to Hitler. Up to the final moment, and the invasion by the Germans, he held out hope that the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact would buy him time to modernize and strengthen his military forces (recently weakened by purges).

The Germans reached the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941, but were stopped by an early winter and a Soviet counter-offensive. At the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, after sacrificing an estimated 1 million men, the Red Army was able to regain the initiative in the fighting. With military eqipment aid from their allies the Soviet forces regained their lost territory and pushed their over-stretched enemy back to Germany itself.

From the end of 1944 large sections of eastern Germany came under Stalin's Soviet Union occupation and on May 2nd 1945, the German capital city Berlin was taken.

By some estimates, one quarter of the Russian population was wiped out in the war. There was, then, a huge shortage of men of the 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 continued to enact his policies while exerting control over the Soviet Union and its satellite states until his death on March 5, 1953).

Over fifteen million Germans were removed from eastern Germany and pushed into central Germany (later called GDR (German Democratic Republic)) and western Germany (later called FRG (Federal Republic of Germany)). Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs and others were then moved onto German land. Other ethnic groups, like the Crimean Tartars and the Volga Germans, were moved to the Asian part of the Soviet Union. Millions of German POWs and Soviet ex-POWs were sent to the Gulags. The eastern European states occupied by the Red Army were established as communist Satellite states.

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.