http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/JosefStalin

"What exactly is your job anyway, Josef?"

"I'm... do you remember the Tsar? I'm like a Tsar."

—Stalin and his mother "You would have done better to have become a priest."

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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, rendered as Josef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili in Russian, 18 December 1878  5 March 1953) was a Georgian who ruled the Soviet Union from 1925 until his death in 1953, the second undisputed ruler after Vladimir Lenin. His official title changed from time to time, but he was generally referred to officially as "Comrade Stalin" and unofficially as "Vozhd"—literally translated as "The Chief" (Sometimes rendered in English as "The Boss"). He was born on 18th of December 1878 (Old Russian Calender —December 6th) but he changed his birthday in 1925 (to the 21st of December 1879, Old Russian — December 9th, for reasons that are still unknown). He was fluent in Georgian and Russian; proficient in German and French; could read Ancient Greek, and knew a smattering of English. He never bought a pair of shoes in his life, making and repairing his own from a young age. He could speed-read at an incredible pace, had over 20,000 books in his personal library (and read all of them, as evidenced by numerous notes on 90% of these books) had an excellent memory, never forgot anyone's name, and had an early photograph in which he appeared to be reading with his finger suppressed. He liked to sing tenor, loved Tolstoy, and would frequently write to his favourite contemporary authors to complain about spelling or grammatical errors. He could recite Walt Whitman's poetry verbatim in multiple languages, was a huge fan of Charlie Chaplin, and was an avid gardener. He made a number of lifelong friendships, was eminently charismatic when he put his mind to it, and managed to match wits with H.G. Wells himself in a face-to-face interview. Politically and diplomatically, he was marked by a remarkably astute practice of Realpolitik.

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He was also an extraordinarily flawed (if not damaged) human being, prone to insecurity and low self-esteem because (unlike the other Old Bolsheviks) he had rarely traveled abroad, was not truly fluent in French or German (or English), always spoke with a noticeable Georgian accent and was more self-consciously provincial than cosmopolitans like Lenin and Leon Trotsky. He did not take insults lightly, held grudges for decades until he could act upon them, and delighted in the suffering and the deaths of his enemies and victims. Politically, he was steadfast believer in the paramount importance of Marxist-Leninist ideological purity even when this created enormous practical problems and human suffering. He made gross errors which almost brought about the destruction of the Soviet Union (Collectivisation, Great Purges). Josef Stalin was ultimately responsible for the avoidable deaths of some 10-12 million Soviet civilians because he believed that (as Lenin put it) "that which is good for the Revolution is good". He was also a big fan of the Klingon Promotion, as evinced by the chiefs of his State Sec (Lavrenti Beriya's first act as chairman of the NKVD was to personally execute his predecessor, Nikolai "The Bloody Dwarf" Yezhov, who had done the same to his own predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda, who hadn't done the same to his old bossnote Vyacheslav Menzhinksy died of natural causes, though at his show trial, Yagoda was forced to claim he had poisoned Menzhinsky).

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His personal life was as turbulent as his political career. He was by all accounts very much in love with and loyal to his first wife Ekaterine "Kato" Svanidze, and was devastated when she died just two years into their marriage. On the other hand, he was an absolute bastard to his much-younger (he was 39 on their wedding day; she was 16) second wife Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, whom he abused emotionally and physically, and habitually cheated on until she killed herself in 1932. He was a mixed bag with his children as well. His daughter Svetlana was the absolute center of his universenote Young Svetlana attended a Christmas party at the British embassy in Moscow in 1939 and loved the Christmas Tree, asking her father afterwards why she had never seen one in Russia (Stalin had brutally repressed the Russian Orthodox Church, though he would dial it back a bit during the war). Stalin immediately ordered a new national custom of "New Year's Fir Trees" for her, which has since evolved into the modern Russian custom of celebrating Christmas in January. Stalin also genuinely panicked at one point in 1943 when he found out that Svetlana was alone in a house with NKVD chief and known serial rapist Lavrenti Beriya, frantically sending an NKVD hit team to the house with orders to shoot Beriya on the spot if they suspected he might have put a finger on her. Vicious predator though he was, Beriya was smart enough to realize that harming his boss's Morality Pet would not end well for him, and kept his hands to himself. Svetlana was creeped out but otherwise fine, he had healthy relationships with his second son Vasilynote Though he did beat Vasily to a bloody pulp when he learned that the boy had tried to use his name to neglect his studies. This changed after Yakov's death, after which Vasily became the target for all of the abuse previously heaped on his brother. This drove Vasily to self-destructive alcoholism, and he drank himself to death at age 39 and adopted son Artyomnote When young Artyom accidentally shot him while playing with a pistol, Stalin's response was to teach the boy how to shoot properly. He treated his eldest son Yakov like crapnote Yakov unsuccessfully attempted suicide when his father disapproved of his marriage to his Jewish girlfriend, Zoya Ganina. All Stalin had to say about the incident was "The idiot can't even shoot straight." Yakov joined the Red Army when the Germans invaded, and was captured at the Battle of Smolensk. The Germans immediately offered to exchange him for Field Marshal Paulus, which Stalin flatly refused, saying "A lieutenant is not worth a Marshal" (Soviet propaganda revised this into Stalin magnanimously declaring all Soviet POWs to be his sons and refusing to take only one back if he couldn't get them all). Despite this, he was very upset when he learned that Yakov later died in captivity. He is known to have sired at least two illegitimate children with his female housekeepers; more are suspected, but can't be conclusively proven. He also stood only 5'4" (to the surprise of Harry Truman) and wore platform shoes to appear taller, and had his speeches read by a voice actor to hide his squeaky voice and Georgian accent. And while he was not averse to personal risk (ironic considering his paranoia), he was terrified of flying, going up in an airplane only twice in his life: to and from the Tehran Conference.

While Stalin was ultimately responsible for the human cost of his rule, as we have documentary evidence that he was fully aware of it, approved of it and conceived or ordered actions that contributed to it, there is considerable room for quibbling over the role played by his subordinates. An entire generation of idealistic and opportunistic bureaucrats, including Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, encouraged Stalin's paranoid and ruthless tendencies out of genuine belief, for personal gain, and/or both. After Stalin's death these men attempted to pin sole responsibility upon Stalin to avoid implicating themselves, with Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress on the 25th of March 1956 inaugurating this development. Western European scholarship of the time took this assertion and ran with it, but from the late 1990s onward (after the opening of the Soviet Archives) scholars began to appreciate that much of Stalin's policies had a sizable consensus among party elites and even the peoples of the Soviet Union. Here we should distinguish very clearly between the Collectivisation measures of the Second Five-Year Plan of 1928-1933 and the Purges of 1935-38. Stalin pushed the former from above over the objections of experts and Regional governments, but in the latter was met halfway by Local government figures (like Nikita Khrushchev) and even some ordinary citizens trying to remove experts and Regional government figures so they could rise through the ranks and make the regional governments responsive to central control.

The historiography of Stalin has changed over time, shifting from him being an all-knowing sadist, an "Oriental despot", or a neo-Tsar who embodied the recidivism of a backward people (Pre-Cold War view and one that was shared by Stalin's enemies inside the USSR, and also partly by Stalin himself); a largely oblivious puppet of the Soviet bureaucracy (Dissident and Trotskyist view, which was aimed to separate Stalin from "real" Marxism and "real" Communism); a mad ideologue who was Socialism and Marxism taken to the logical extreme (Cold War view which meant that all Communists in every nation past, present, and future were future Stalins). The fact that USSR was an isolated closed society, and that the government maintained controls on information and education, means that a full picture untethered by political and ideological biases had to wait for the end of the USSR to really form itself. A lot of the documents from the Stalin era are still under wraps. Today the best living biographers of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin and the brothers Roy & Zhores Medvedev, among others, put the number of 'avoidable' deaths under Stalin's leadership at about 10-12 million. This can be broken down into some 6-8 million dead in the 1932-4 famines resulting from the forcible collectivisation of agriculture note which motivated many independent farmers to destroy their tools and herds, hitting the Ukraine (where pre-collectivisation membership in traditional village communes was just 25%) and central Asia particularly hard and lack of national-level provision of food aid, about 2 million from disease and overwork as state prisoners during WWII (as the Soviet State prioritized the importation of rare materials necessary for war production over the high-calorie-content food products necessary to keep prisoners alive), about 1 million dead in the 1946-7 famines which resulted from the wartime overuse of poor soils and poor provision of food-aid, 750k dead in the Purges of 1935-38, and several tens of thousands more dead in prison or from execution by the NKVD/NKGB during Stalin's tenure. Additionally, retrospective analysis of Stalin's purges indicates genocidal intent against Ukrainians, Kazakhstanis, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachay, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Volga Germans, Baltics, Crimean Tartars, and especially Poles. Documentation of Stalin's sociopolitical opinions indicates that he held a fierce prejudice against Poles in particular (outright calling them filth) and consciously wished to eradicate them by any means necessary. The full extent and casualties of Stalin's genocidal policies are a considerable source of controversy, especially when compared to Hitler's policies of genocide (with some alt-right groups attempting to use the severity of Stalin's atrocities to downplay Hitler's, particularly via the argument that Stalin killed more peoplenote which is technically true if you tally up the total deaths from all his ethnic cleansing policies combined, but nonetheless should not imply that the Holocaust was anything to sneeze at— 29 million deaths under Hitler is still 29 million deaths Furthermore, as Time pointed out, the overall purpose of the Holocaust arguably makes it worse: "Stalin killed indiscriminately for the sake of his paranoia of state crimes, Hitler had a million babies die for the crime of existing.), but regardless, the general point of consensus is that both Hitler and Stalin were genocidal megalomaniacs.

Popular memory of Stalin revolves around his post-1928 paranoia note When his personal bodyguard was expanded from just one person, to several. Stalin's later paranoia extended to his dacha, or summer home, in Sochi, which has been preserved as a Russian museum. Features include: an exterior painted with camouflage to hide it among the trees; curtains purposely cut short to prevent anyone from hiding behind them unseen; all chairs and couches with backs and sides high enough to remain unseen from any direction but the front, reinforced with bulletproof material; all floors made of wood to prevent anyone from sneaking around (shoes were mandatory while within the dacha). On the other hand, much of this paranoia was foisted upon him by others - he actually had to be convinced by the Politburo that wandering around the streets of Moscow without an escort was a bad idea , his stance on religion note Like many young men in Georgia, he was raised by Orthodox Christian parents and was a seminary student, who like other young men of his time found the Church corrupt and hypocritical, and sought alternatives in politics and science. He was a militant atheist like many Bolsheviks/Anarchists/SR and even some Mensheviks, which factored into his violent persecution of religion such as ordering or approving the founding of the organization "The League of Militant Atheists" and approving the publication and distribution of anti-religious propaganda, accompanied by a campaign of terror against religious people, proscription of clergy and demolition of Church property. He later, though for cynical and nationalist reasons, helped enable a revival of the Orthodox church during World War II and withdrew persecution of Clergy after the War, and this is remembered by some clergy even today, leading to instances of Churches featuring Stalin on religious icons . , and his role as a Leader of an Allied country during the War, where he became etched as Hitler's Arch-Enemynote His famous response on hearing of Hitler's suicide, "So the bastard's dead? Too bad we didn't capture him alive!". The supposed circumstances of his death, dying slowly and painfully of a treatable stroke because his personal bodyguard were too afraid to disturb him and left him alone for twelve hours, before ultimately being found lying dead in a puddle of his stale urine, were actually a fabrication. This is the only detail common to all four of the falsified accounts of Stalin's final hours (by Nikita Khruschev, Anasatas Mikoyan, the chief of Stalin's MGB guard detail Colonel Starostin, and Starostin's deputy-chief Lozgachev). The current most accepted guess of Roy and Zhores Medvedev is that Starostin left Stalin untreated out of a pragmatic desire to benefit from the timing of Stalin's crippling or death. Stalin was ultimately, it seems, too amiable and trusting with his staff. note This was not without precedent. The Kremlin staff had cleaned his office and served him food and drink for years, unsupervised, when it was discovered that many of them hated him personally and had had connections to the former nobility. Many had worked there since the time of the Tsar

It's a topic of debate and controversy whether his policies are a reversal of Lenin or merely an extension of the most dubious aspects of his administration, if his regime was evidence of a backward country asserting itself over a revolutionary and modernizing project, or a symptom and extension of the same drive towards modernization. His Cult of Personality and posthumous elevation of Lenin as a founding figure, legitimated the regime and extended its lifespan to the extent the Soviet Union lasted 37 years after his death. His policies of rapid industrialization played a crucial role in the Soviet Union's victory over the Nazis, in their rise to a superpower and their building of nuclear weapons. Stalin's rule lasted for 30 years, so he was the longest-lasting ruler of the group of Nations comprising the Soviet Union, and in addition to that, he remains for the present moment, the longest-lasting ruler of Russia since Catherine the Great who reigned for 34 yearsnote His closest competitor is Tsar Nicholas I who ruled for 29 years, Tsar Alexander II who ruled for 26, Tsar Nicholas II ruled for 23 years, and recently Vladimir Putin who's been in some capacity or the other, in charge of Russia for some 17 years and counting.

There's a growing cottage industry of books on Stalin. The most famous books written during the Cold War is by the poet-historian Robert Conquest whose The Great Terror while considered Dated History today in some parts, nonetheless brought attention to the much larger scope of Stalin's purge, which formerly had focused on the highly publicized show trials of the "Old Bolsheviks". More authoritative works were written by the Soviet dissident brothers, Roy and Zhores Medvedev, who published archival material on Stalin. Recently, the American historian, Stephen Kotkin has won acclaim for the first of his projected three-part biography Stalin: Paradoxes of Power which focuses on the geopolitical context of Stalin's origins, background and impact. In America and Western Europe, Stalin is the embodiment of evil, one step below Hitler, and the two are often paired or compared to each other as they overlooked Stalin's war effort against the latter. Internationally, in different parts of the world, Stalin's reputation is more mixed and neutral, with condemnation for his crimes balanced with respect and praise for his role as a war leader. Modern Russia has fully made public and acknowledged his crimes and involvement in the purges, The Gulag and collectivization, but this is balanced with, especially under the Putin administration, appreciation for his role as a populist reforming autocrat in the vein of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, who ruthlessly modernized a nation to better defend it against foreign invasion, first against the Nazis and then the West during the Cold War.

Compare/contrast with Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, other infamous, genocidal leaders who were generally considered Stalin's fascist and imperialist counterparts (although in most cases, both Stalin and Churchill were viewed as lesser evils compared to Arch-Enemy Hitler).

Appears in the following works:

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Comic Books

Underground Comics artist, Spain Rodriquez wrote a short comic titled simply Stalin for Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith's Arcade: The Comics Revue. The comic is a favourite of Alan Moore and it features Stalin's weird habits such as his insistence on living in a tiny room in the Kremlin and then having that room recreated to the tiniest detail in every place of residence he stayed or passed by. Joseph Stalin, Soviet Man of Steel. How many died unnecessarily in his performance of history's dreadful task? After many years, questions still stir his uneasy grave.

In Superman: Red Son, Communist Superman initially reported to Stalin, before taking over leadership of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death ("The Man of Steel is dead!").

Appears as part of The Terror's Legion of Doom on The Tick. Or rather, a guy who really looks like Joseph Stalin and has done some research on him. For The Terror, that's close enough for him to make the team.

Nero visited Stalin in The Peace Initiative of Nero to convince him to become a pacifist. He holds a peace elixir under Stalin's nose causing him to suddenly want to make an end to the Cold War. Unfortunately Nero starts argueing which one of them is the greatest peacemaker and thus Stalin throws him into a dungeon, ending Nero's peace initiative.

The French comic "La Mort de Staline" (The Death of Stalin) recounts the events between Stalin's death and Beria's execution. The film adaptation takes a distinctively comedic turn.

Stalin is featured in Über, which is set in an alternate timeline where the Nazis were saved in the Battle of Berlin by the titular super-soldiers they created. The Soviets acquire the substance needed to make their own Ubers to fight in the war and Stalin sacrifices hundreds of thousands of soldiers to make a few hundred by forcing them to take it without being tested for compatibility. When the most powerful one turns against the Soviets after they betray her, she kills Stalin by transforming him into a statue made of said substance .

. Appears in his seminarist days in Helboy where he defeats the Baba Yaga.

Fan Fiction

Stalin is the main antagonist of the second half of The Prayer Warriors Threat of Satanic Commonism, in which a group of fundamentalist Christians travel back in time to prevent the Communists from coming to power and killing Christians. There are too many historical inaccuracies to list, but the fact that his predecessor is called "John Lennon" should give some idea of what kind of work this is.

Film

The extraordinarily weird American propaganda film Mission to Moscow (1943) features a Stalin who is an enlightened, wise leader bringing Russia into a freer, more democratic future.

Orson Welles' spy thriller Mr. Arkadin modeled the title character on Stalin's personality and character.

Robert Duvall played him in Stalin, an HBO movie.

The 1998 Russian film, Khrustalyov, My Car! by director Aleksei German is set in the final days of Stalinist Russia in the climate of the anti-semitic crackdown of the "Doctor's Plot". We get a glimpse of Stalin's ugly, messy Karmic Death

Played by Aleksey Petrenko in the 2009 HBO wartime biopic of Churchill Into the Storm (2009).

Played by Colin Blakeley in the 1983 TV film Red Monarch. Based on Soviet dissident Yuri Krotkov's essays, it satirizes Stalin's paranoid leadership style in the final years of his life.

Played by Michael Caine in the TV miniseries When Lions Roared.

The 1996 Australian comedy film Children of the Revolution revolves around Joe, the lovechild of a brief affair between Stalin and an Australian woman who meets him while on a study trip to the USSR shortly before his death. Stalin is played by F. Murray Abraham.

Shows up as a fresh-faced, gregarious young revolutionary and acolyte of Lenin in Nicholas and Alexandra.

The Death of Stalin is a comedic adaptation of the French comic of the same name.

Mr Jones (2019) is set in 1933-1934 and starts when the protagonist (British journalist Gareth Jones, a real person) goes to Soviet Union with the intent of getting an interview of Stalin, to get answers about how the country's economy is so strong while the rest of the world is struggling with the Great Depression.

Jokes

Shows up often in Russian Humor, oddly enough. A man is arrested by the political police and is brought before Stalin by the arresting officer. Stalin: Why was this man arrested?

Officer: He was shouting "Death to that mustache-wearing bastard!" in the street, Comrade Premier!

Stalin (to prisoner): And who were you referring to?

Prisoner: I was talking about Hitler, Comrade Premier!

Stalin (to officer): And who were you referring to? Stalin is giving a speech in a packed auditorium when someone sneezes in the middle of a dramatic pause. "Who sneezed?" No one answers. "Who sneezed!?" Still no answer. "Tell me who sneezed or I will have the first row shot!" Still no answer, the guards open fire on the first row, but still no one will own up to sneezing. Stalin orders the second, third, and fourth row executed, when finally someone in the fifth row breaks down and says "It was me, Comrade Premier!" To which Stalin responds: "Gesundheit, comrade!" "Comrade Stalin! Is it true that you collect political jokes?" "I do, comrade." "And how many do you have so far?" "Three and half gulags." After Stalin's death, Khrushchev is giving a speech emphasizing the importance of de-Stalinizing the Soviet Union. Someone in the audience jeeringly asks why Khrushchev didn't do anything about it while Stalin was alive, at which point Khrushchev pounds the lectern and demands "Who said that!?" while throwing a Death Glare around and the police officers unholster their weapons. After thirty seconds of unbroken silence, Khrushchev relaxes and says "Now you understand why I did nothing then."



Literature

Live-Action TV

Sent up here by Eric Idle, Henry Woolf and David Batley in Rutland Weekend Television. A genial Stalin played by Eric Idle shows you how to cook Omelette Stalin, in Communist Kitchen. note Joseph Stalin is currently appearing with Cilla Black at the Talk of the Town, Newquay. Whenever you've shot all the people to shoot, and you've shot the firing squad too...

Radio

Stalin has been a subject of Accent Adaptation. In 2017, the BBC is producing and broadcasting a series of plays commemorating the centenary of the Russian Revolution. In a dramatisation of the life of Lenin, it is very noticeable that charaters have been given a range of British regional accents to symbolise when they are from other parts of Russia and not natives of St Petersburg/Moscow note City natives get London/RP English accents of various sorts according to their social class ). Lenin's personal driver, for instance, is broad Welsh. And when a thuggish Georgian bank-robber called J.V. Djugashvili enters the play, ''his' accent is Violent Glaswegian, no doubt to symbolise that Georgia is a different country and separate from Russia...

Tabletop Games

In GURPS Technomancer, Stalin did not die in 1953, he was merely put into magical stasis-sleep-type-thing to be awakened when Motherland will be in danger. He awoke in 1996, after Communism fell, and started a civil war to oust democrats and capitalists from his country.

Theatre

In the 1938 musical Leave it to Me!, Stalin appears at the end of the first act to give "Comrade Alonzo" (the American ambassador) a kiss on the cheek.

Appears in Robert Bolt's 1977 play State of Revolution, unsurprisingly as the villain (with Lenin and Trotsky as protagonists). Stalin's Establishing Character Moment has him confronting the leader of the Georgian Communist Party, coolly telling him "I am here to purge your party."

Video Games

Webcomics

The man himself shows up in Axis Powers Hetalia as Russia's leader during the WW2 strips, where he's shown as being an abusive, manipulative prick. Though Ivan does turn the tables on him by the end. Especially since it's implied that Russia himself actually kills him off-screen.

And of course, Stalin Vs. Hitler .

Web Original

Western Animation