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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin [f] (born Dzhugashvili; [g] 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a communist revolutionary and Soviet politician who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953.
- Overview
- Early years
- Stalin’s rise to power
Joseph Stalin was born on December 18, 1878. His birth date was traditionally believed to be December 21, 1879, but the 1878 date was confirmed by records in the Communist Party central archives.
When did Joseph Stalin die?
Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, in Moscow. His death triggered a leadership scramble within the Soviet Communist Party, and Nikita Khrushchev ultimately emerged as Stalin’s successor.
What was Joseph Stalin’s childhood like?
Joseph Stalin was raised in poverty in provincial Georgia. A bout of childhood smallpox scarred his face, and his left arm was mangled, most likely in a carriage accident. Although his mother doted on him, Stalin’s father was a drunk who routinely beat him.
Where was Joseph Stalin educated?
Stalin was of Georgian—not Russian—origin, and persistent rumours claim that he was Ossetian on the paternal side. He was the son of a poor cobbler in the provincial Georgian town of Gori in the Caucasus, then an imperial Russian colony. The drunken father savagely beat his son. Speaking only Georgian at home, Joseph learned Russian—which he always spoke with a guttural Georgian accent—while attending the church school at Gori (1888–94). He then moved to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he secretly read Karl Marx, the chief theoretician of international Communism, and other forbidden texts, being expelled in 1899 for revolutionary activity, according to the “legend”—or leaving because of ill health, according to his doting mother. The mother, a devout washerwoman, had dreamed of her son becoming a priest, but Joseph Dzhugashvili was more ruffianly than clerical in appearance and outlook. He was short, stocky, black-haired, fierce-eyed, with one arm longer than the other, his swarthy face scarred by smallpox contracted in infancy. Physically strong and endowed with prodigious willpower, he early learned to disguise his true feelings and to bide his time; in accordance with the Caucasian blood-feud tradition, he was implacable in plotting long-term revenge against those who offended him.
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In December 1899, Dzhugashvili became, briefly, a clerk in the Tiflis Observatory, the only paid employment that he is recorded as having taken outside politics; there is no record of his ever having done manual labour. In 1900 he joined the political underground, fomenting labour demonstrations and strikes in the main industrial centres of the Caucasus, but his excessive zeal in pushing duped workers into bloody clashes with the police antagonized his fellow conspirators. After the Social Democrats (Marxist revolutionaries) of the Russian Empire had split into their two competing wings—Menshevik and Bolshevik—in 1903, Dzhugashvili joined the second, more militant, of these factions and became a disciple of its leader, Lenin. Between April 1902 and March 1913, Dzhugashvili was seven times arrested for revolutionary activity, undergoing repeated imprisonment and exile. The mildness of the sentences and the ease with which the young conspirator effected his frequent escapes lend colour to the unproved speculation that Dzhugashvili was for a time an agent provocateur in the pay of the imperial political police.
Dzhugashvili made slow progress in the party hierarchy. He attended three policy-making conclaves of the Russian Social Democrats—in Tammerfors (now Tampere, Finland; 1905), Stockholm (1906), and London (1907)—without making much impression. But he was active behind the scenes, helping to plot a spectacular holdup in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) on June 25 (June 12, Old Style), 1907, in order to “expropriate” funds for the party. His first big political promotion came in February (January, Old Style) 1912, when Lenin—now in emigration—co-opted him to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which had finally broken with the other Social Democrats. In the following year, Dzhugashvili published, at Lenin’s behest, an important article on Marxism and the national question. By now he had adopted the name Stalin, deriving from Russian stal (“steel”); he also briefly edited the newly founded Bolshevik newspaper Pravda before undergoing his longest period of exile: in Siberia from July 1913 to March 1917.
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In about 1904 Stalin had married a pious Georgian girl, Ekaterina Svanidze. She died some three years later and left a son, Jacob, whom his father treated with contempt, calling him a weakling after an unsuccessful suicide attempt in the late 1920s; when Jacob was taken prisoner by the Germans during World War II, Stalin refused a German offer to exchange his son.
Reaching Petrograd from Siberia on March 25 (March 12, Old Style), 1917, Stalin resumed editorship of Pravda. He briefly advocated Bolshevik cooperation with the provisional government of middle-class liberals that had succeeded to uneasy power on the last tsar’s abdication during the February Revolution. But under Lenin’s influence, Stalin soon switched to the more-militant policy of armed seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. When their coup d’état occurred in November (October, Old Style) 1917, he played an important role, but one less prominent than that of his chief rival, Leon Trotsky.
(Read Leon Trotsky’s 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)
Nov 12, 2009 · Learn about the life and rule of Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union who transformed it into an industrial and military superpower but also killed millions of his own citizens. Explore his rise to power, his role in World War II and the Cold War, and his death and legacy.
A timeline of Stalin's life, the man that oversaw the war machine that helped defeat Nazism and who was the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century.
Apr 3, 2014 · Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for more than two decades, instituting a reign of death and terror while modernizing Russia and helping to defeat Nazism.
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5 days ago · As war leader, Stalin maintained close personal control over the Soviet battlefronts, military reserves, and war economy. At first over-inclined to intervene with inept telephoned instructions, as Hitler did, the Soviet generalissimo gradually learned to delegate military decisions.
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was the dictatorial leader of the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century, from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Stalin’s mistrust of Western governments, his insincere negotiations at the end of World War II and his determination to expand Soviet communism into eastern Europe were significant causes of the ...
