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Joseph Stalin

Surname Stalin Given Name Joseph Born 21 Dec 1879 Died 5 Mar 1953 Country Russia, Georgia Category Government Gender Male

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseIoseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili was born in Gori, Georgia Governorate, Russian Empire into a poor family. His father was cobbler Besarion Jughashvili, a Georgianized Ossetian; his mother was Ketevan Geladze who worked as a launderer on occasion. The couple's first two children, Mikhail and Georgy, both died in infancy, thus the third child, nicknamed Soso, was especially loved. Besarion Jughashvili was a violent alcoholic, which might have caused his son's birth defect of having two webbed toes; he was also very abusive toward his wife and son. Ketevan Geladze later recalled that his husband once beat Ioseb Jughashvili so violently that the child had traces of blood in his urine for several days. The abusive father along with the rough culture of Gori (where organized brawls were held regularly through history as unofficial military training) were both cited as reasons for his ruthlessness later in life. Ketevan Geladze also regularly beat her son for disciplinary reasons, but, unlike beatings from his father, Ioseb Jughashvili would recall beatings from his mother almost fondly. The Jughashvili moved many times due to financial hardship. Like almost all children in Gori, young Ioseb Jughashvili was a member of his neighborhood gang and often participated in fights. At the age of seven, he contracted with smallpox, which left his face scarred for the remainder of his life. In 1888, he was enrolled in the church school in Gori by his mother, who had hoped that he would one day become a bishop; his father was against the idea, wanting his son to follow his footsteps as a cobbler, and often interfered with the studies especially while drunk. Although Besarion Jughashvili would abandon his family around this time, he would continue to interfere with the religious studies on occasion. At the church school in Gori, he attained excellent grades and was a noted as a gifted choir singer. During his childhood, he was struck by horse drawn carriages twice; the first caused permanent damage to his left arm, and the second took him out of school for several months. In 1894, he enrolled in the Tiflis Theological Seminary in the Georgian capital. He devoted much of his time to academic preparations, a habit that would remain with him for the rest of his life, and a habit that he would impose on his future followers. Around this time, he became writing poetry in Georgian, and some of his works were published. As his literary boundaries grew, so did his thirst for knowledge in other fields, which, against the rules of the seminary, soon included novels by Victor Hugo, works by Charles Darwin, and other such works that quickly converted him Marxist, nationalist, and Marxist. Having caught Jughashvili with these banned books many times (and having suffered in punishment cells many times as a result), the seminary administration, not wanting to expel him outright, raised school fees to a level so that poor Jughashvili could no longer pay for the tuition. He stopped attending classes in early 1899, and in May of that year, after he failed to appear in the examinations as he had stopped attending classes, he was officially expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary. In Dec 1899, he began working at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory. After being employed as a staff writer for the socialist Georgian newspaper Brdzola Khrna Vladmir, he joined the Social Democratic Labor Party in 1901. In 18 Apr 1902, he was exiled to Siberia, Russia after spending 18 months in prison for coordinating a strike at a factory. In Siberia, he joined the Bolsheviks, Vladmir Lenin's faction of the party. In 1904, he escaped and returned to Tiflis to organize more strikes and demonstrations, through which he would come to the attention of Lenin himself, who arranged to meet him in Finland in 1905. In late 1907, his first wife Ekaterina Svanidze passed away from typhus or tuberculosis, possibly coupled with another common ailment such as pneumonia, in Tiflis; it was said to affected Jughashvili greatly, causing him to lay low for several months, but he returned with greater dedication to the revolutionary cause. His father passed away in 1909 in Tiflis. Having moved to Baku on the Caspian Sea, he operated Bolshevik cells and raised funding for Lenin through protection rackets, bank robberies, piracy, kidnapping, and the occasional donation from wealthy Baku businessmen.

ww2dbaseAs a revolutionary and outlaw, Jughashvili used many pseudonyms, particularly during his travels and with his poetic and political writings. Among his earliest names was Koba, after the main character of Alexander Kazbegi's 1883 novel The Patricide ; Koba was to be used very often in his later pseudonyms, at times shortened to just the letter "K". A womanizer, many of his pseudonyms were derived from the names of his lovers; some of these examples include Koba Kato (after his first wife Ekaterina Svanidze) and Koba Stefin (after girlfriend Stefania Petrovskaya). In 1910, he signed some letters with the acronym K. St.; in the following two or three years, the names K. Safin and K. Solin were used. The name K. Stalin appeared for the first time with a published article in Mar 1913 that he had written in the previous month. While the name Stalin had a close approximation to "Man of Steel" in the Russian language, it was unlikely the driving reason for the coinage of this name. Given his previous track record of using the name of the women in his life to create pseudonyms, it was likely that the name K. Stalin came from the name of his girlfriend Ludmilla Stal. Later, once in power, he would combine his pseudonym with his original given name and another often-used pseudonym during the revolutionary years to form Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.

ww2dbaseStalin was arrested again in 1913 for his political activities, and once again exiled to Siberia, this time with a life term. He would return, however, as Tsar Nicholas II's Russian Empire was overthrown. In a conflict within the revolutionary party, Stalin once again sided Lenin, and was named the Commissar of Nationalities by Lenin as a reward. With this title, Stalin was in charge to manage all the minority groups in Russian, making up 65 million of the nation's population. Very soon, Lenin would change his philosophy of self-governance, and adopt a policy of a strong authoritative central government. Stalin would continue to back Lenin. In April 1922, Stalin would be named the General Secretary of the state. Very soon afterwards, Lenin's health would deteriorate after a blood vessel rupture in his brain left him paralyzed on the right side of his body. The General Secretary, what was meant to be the party leader's spokesperson, became a position of power. He used this new found power to remove party members who opposed him. In 1922, Stalin disagreed with Lenin in a major manner for the first time, and the bed-found Lenin wrote to Trotsky, a rival of Stalin's, asking for his support against Stalin. Stalin's wife Nadya Alliluyeva, who worked in Lenin's office, found this letter to Trotsky and informed Stalin, which worsened their relationship. Lenin tried to remove Stalin from his position, but died before action was taken. Stalin became the the sole leader of the Soviet Union.

ww2dbaseDuring the next few years, Stalin would scheme within his own government to remove all those who he did not trust or those who opposed him. It was not until 1928 he started to put effort into developing the nation, which did not have an industrial base even at pre-WW1 levels. The Five Year Plan that he signed in 1928 concentrated on the development of various industries, including iron, steel, machine tools, electric power, transportation, and coal production. The plan was backed by terror, as those workers who did not meet production goals would be sent to Siberia or the Baltic Sea as forced labor. The New Economic Policy pushed Soviet Union forward, however in the realm of science the Russians did not advance as much comparatively, as scientific research was under strict ideological control (along with art and literature), although free Soviet education system improved general literacy rate. In June 1937, after purging the party once again of his political opponents, he purged the army as well, charging commanders of conspiracy, and installing his loyal supporters in charge. Finally, he would remove those closest to him who knew too much about his purges. In this period (1930s), Stalin's concept of non-antagonistic classes changed Communist theory. Workers and kolkhoz peasantry were the two different classes under Stalin's communist state. Unlike Lenin's classes, these two classes did not struggle against each other in the same society.

ww2dbaseOn 28 August 1939, Russia signed a non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany. Shortly after, Russian troops occupied parts of Poland that the country had lost after WW1. In 1939, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. Stalin was now fearful of a German attack on Russia, seeing that Germany had accomplished its conquest of continential Western Europe in such a short time. He sent Molotov to Berlin to commit to long discussions with Hitler, however Hitler made unreasonable demands that quickly dismissed Molotov. While Stalin believed that Germany would not be rash enough to invade Russia in 1941, for the risk of the brutal Russian winter, Hitler's Operation Barbarossa launched in summer 1941, surprising Russia.

ww2dbaseThe first few months of war was costly on Russia. The German forces surrounded Leningrad, and advanced on Moscow. Kiev was under siege, was was later taken by the German troops. However, the time earned at Kiev allowed Moscow to build up its defenses for the inevitable German assault. Seeing the winter was coming, in September Stalin ordered a scorched earth policy where as Russian front backed, anything that could be used by the German troops were destroyed. All German supplies had to come from the heart of German due to this policy. By October 1941, German troops were as close to Moscow as 15 miles. Two million people fled the city within two weeks and headed east, but Stalin stayed in the Kremlin, in a underground bomb shelter. In November, German army attacked Moscow, but the Russian troops stood ground. A Russian counterattack called for by Stalin, which was doubted by military leaders, pushed back the Germans for 200 miles by January. The German troops would never approach so close to Moscow again. Stalin believed in recruiting fresh troops as much as possible, and attack German troops very frequently. It seemed to have worked until the spring thaw, when German troops gathered from the losses in the winter and advanced on Stalingrad. Stalin again used rule by fear policies, denouncing troops that retreated against orders, especially those who left behind equipment that could be used by the Germans. Russian troops deemed "traitors" were executed. In February 1943, at Stalin's namesake city Stalingrad, German troops under the command of Field Marshall Paulus surrendered. At this city, German army lost 1.5 million men, at the cost of an even greater Russian loss, but this would mark as the tide-turning event that put Germany on the downhill on the Russian front. At Tehran in November 1943, Stalin requests that Churchill and Roosevelt created a second front to divert Germany's military from the Russian front. The Invasion of Sicily and later the Normandy landings were a direct result. Stalin was convinced that without a second front, Russia would eventually succumb to Germany's military forces.

ww2dbaseEven before the war ended, Churchill began to become concerned of Communist influence in Eastern Europe. At Moscow in October 1944 and Yalta in February 1945, Stalin discussed with Churchill and Roosevelt to draw boundaries of postwar Communist influence, forming what would eventually become the boundaries of the Cold War after WW2. At the Potsdam Conference and beyond, the western powers no longer treated Russia with the same sympathy as it had in the previous meetings, as the United States had developed the atomic bomb, and the end of the war was potentially in sight; Stalin felt he was betrayed by Roosevelt, which further contributes to his untrustfulness of the capitalist west.

ww2dbaseAfter the war, Stalin set up communist governments in Eastern European nations of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Russian troops remained in East Germany, and maintained a Communist regime there as well. The 1948 showdown at Berlin, where Stalin established an economic blockade, heightened the seriousness of the Cold War. Stalin also backed Kim Il Sung's invasion from North Korea into the South, but Stalin's miscalculation of US entering the war resulted in Kim almost losing the entire North, until China interfered.

ww2dbaseAs Stalin's health deteriorated in his seventies, he discovered that several of his doctors were plotting to assassinate him, which further developed into a plot backed by American and British intelligence agencies. This resulted in yet another purge in the Soviet Union to rid of Stalin's political rivals, however the purge was very quickly brought to a halt as Stalin fell into a coma in February 1953. He regained consciousness, but was far from able to return to power. He fell into another coma as a nurse spoonfed him. His last action was raising his left arm and pointed, which Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, interpreted as Stalin placing a curse on the people in the room. He died four days later on 5 March 1953 at the age of 73. Officially, his death was attributed to a cerebral hemorrhage. In 1993, memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov were published, in which he claimed that Stalin was murdered by being given warfarin, a flavorless rat poison.

ww2dbaseStalin left a legacy of being responsible for the execution of about one million people during his purges in 1935-38, 1942, and 1945-50, along with sending millions of people to labor camps in those periods. However, he was also responsible for transforming Russia from an agricultural society to a superpower that withstood the attack of Germany, and then rose to challenge the United States.

ww2dbaseAs an aside, although Stalin (as well as state records) insisted his birth date was 21 December 1879, birth records at Uspensky Church in Gori, Georgia showed that Stalin was born on 6 December 1878.

ww2dbaseSources:

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin

Wikipedia



Last Major Revision: Jan 2005

Famous Quote(s)

"This war is not an ordinary war. It is the war of the entire Russian people. Not only to eliminate the danger hanging over our heads, but to aid all people groaning under the yoke of Fascism."

» On the German invasion, 22 Jun 1941

» On the German invasion, 22 Jun 1941 "The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages...onward, to victory!"

» 1 Jul 1941

» 1 Jul 1941 "We secured peace for our country for one and a half years, as well as an opportunity of preparing our forces for defense if fascist Germany risked attacking our country in defiance of the pact. This was a definite gain to our country and a loss for fascist Germany."

» On the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 3 Jul 1941

Joseph Stalin Timeline

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