Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) was the head of the Communist party at the death of Lenin and dictator of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death.

Early Career to 1918

Stalin was born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on Dec. 6 (Old Style; Dec. 18, New Style), 1878, at the remote village of Gori, Georgia, then part of the Czarist Empire. His father, a poor uneducated shoemaker was an alcoholic who beat the boy; he died in a brawl in 1890. Stalin's mother Ekaterina, a washerwoman, was a major influence, pushing the boy toward the priesthood. Young Stalin was given to identifying with hero-figures such as the fictional mountain bandit and rebel Koba, whose name he chose as a nickname. Poverty gave him ambition while his Georgian environment stressed brutality and vengeance. Stalin studied at a church school in Gori and at the Georgian Orthodox seminary in Tiflis. At the age of 16, he began to take part in the work of Social Democratic circles in Georgia. He was expelled from the seminary for bad behavior. He became a full time agitator, promoting revolutionary activity throughout the Caucasus region, including Tiflis, Baku and Batumi. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898 and, after it split in 1903, sided with the Bolshevik rather than the Menshevik faction. "Stalin" and "Koba" were his party names. He went underground in 1901.

As a professional revolutionary, Stalin organized workers' strikes and demonstrations, published underground newspapers, and raised funds by armed robberies. Arrested in 1902 he was exiled to Siberia, but he soon escaped. He met Lenin for the first time in 1905, at the First Conference of the RSDLP, in Finland. Later he took part in the Fourth and Fifth congresses of the RSDLP, at Stockholm and London, respectively. At the Sixth (Prague) Conference of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) Stalin joined the party's central committee and became a member of the committee's Russian Bureau. He began to use the name Stalin, meaning "man of steel." In 1912, Stalin (with the aid of Nikolai I. Bukharin), wrote a major essay, "Marxism and the National Question." Henceforth he was a leading party expert on national and ethnic issues in the multinational Russian Empire. He was arrested and exiled to Siberia, where he spent four years, until the beginning of the February Revolution in 1917.

The victory of the February Revolution and the fall of the Czars allowed the exiled Bolsheviks to return to Petrograd and Moscow, including Stalin and Lenin. The Bolsheviks rapidly restored their centralized party organization, the membership of which grew tenfold in only six months, reaching 250,000 by late 1917. Lenin called for the transfer of all power in the country to the soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies and advocated transforming the "bourgeois-democratic" February Revolution into a proletarian socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks skillfully exploited the discontent of the populace with the failures of Russia in the world war, and the weaknesses of the other left parties. In 1917 Stalin joined the party's central committee and took editorial control of the party newspaper, Pravda. The Bolsheviks successfully overthrew the government on October 25-26 (November 7-8) in Petrograd. Power in the capital, and later in most of Russia, passed into the hands of the local soviets, which the Bolsheviks largely controlled. In 1918 Lenin formed a Soviet government with Stalin as people's commissar for nationalities affairs (1917-23).

1918-1925: Lenin years

In 1922, without fanfare, Stalin became general secretary of the party's Central Committee, giving him control of the party's nationwide apparatus, and the chance to handpick people for major roles in the party and government.

1945-1953: Cold War

The devastation of the war necessitated a massive recovery program involving the rebuilding of industrial plant, housing and transportation, as well as the demobilization and migration of millions of soldiers and civilians. In the midst of this turmoil during the the winter of 1946–1947 the Soviet Union experienced the worst natural famine in the 20th century. There was no serious opposition to Stalin, as the secret police continued to send possible suspects to the "Gulag."

Relations with the US and Britain went from friendly to hostile; they denounced Stalin's political controls over eastern Europe and his blockade of Berlin. By 1947, the Cold War had begun. Stalin himself believed that capitalism was a hollow shell and would crumble under increased non-military pressure exerted through proxies in countries like Italy. He greatly underestimated the economic strength of the West, and instead of triumph saw the West build up alliances designed to permanently stop or "contain" Soviet expansion. In early 1950 Stalin gave the go-ahead for North Korea's invasion of South Korea, expecting a short war. He was stunned when the Americans entered and defeated the North Koreans, putting them almost on the Soviet border. Stalin supported China's entry into the Korean war, which drove the Americans back to the prewar boundaries, but which escalated tensions. The US decided to mobilize its economy for a long contest with the Soviets, built the hydrogen bomb, and strengthened the NATO alliance that covered western Europe.

According to Gorlizki and Khlevniuk (2004), Stalin's consistent and overriding goal after 1945 was to consolidate the nation's superpower status and, in the face of his growing physical decrepitude, to maintain his own hold on total power. Stalin created a leadership system that reflected historic czarist styles of paternalism and repression, yet was also quite modern. At the top personal loyalty to Stalin counted for everything. However, Stalin also created powerful committees, elevated younger specialists, and began major institutional innovations. In the teeth of persecution, Stalin's deputies cultivated informal norms and mutual understandings which provided the foundations for collective rule after his death.

Bibliography

• Blank, Stephen. The Sorcerer as Apprentice: Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, 1917-1924. (1994) online edition
• Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992), a double biography covering each man in separate but parallel chapters
• Daniels, R. V., ed. The Stalin Revolution (1965)
• Davies, Sarah, and James Harris, eds. Stalin: A New History, (2006), 310pp, 14 specialized essays by scholars
• De Jonge, Alex. Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union (1986)
• Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin: A Political Biography, 2d ed. (1967), good older biography replaced by Tucker and Service
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed. Stalinism: New Directions, (1999), 396pp excerpts from many scholars
• Gaddis, John. A New History of the Cold War (2006)
• Gorlizki, Yoram, and Oleg Khlevniuk. Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (2004) online edition
• Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (1990)
• Lee, Stephen J. Stalin and the Soviet Union. (1999) online edition
• Lewis, Jonathan. Stalin: A Time for Judgement (1990)
• McNeal, Robert H. Stalin: Man and Ruler (1988)
• Marsh, Rosalind. Images of Dictatorship: Stalin in Literature, (1989)
• Medvedev, Roy A. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (1971)
• Radzinsky, Edvard. Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives. (1997)
• Seaton, Albert. Stalin as Military Commander, (1998) online edition
• Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography (2006)
• Trotsky, Leon. Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, (1967), an interpretation by Stalin's worst enemy
• Tucker, Robert C. Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929 (1973)
• Tucker, Robert C. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1929-1941. (1990) online edition
• Wood, Alan. Stalin and Stalinism, (2004), 105pp online edition
• Ulam, A. B. Stalin (1973), good older biography replaced by Tucker and Service

Primary Sources

• Bialer, Seweryn, ed. Stalin and His Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs of World War II (1984);
• Butler, Susan, ed. My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin. (2006)
• Djilas, Milovan. Conversations with Stalin (1963) by a Yugoslav leader