Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin was born under the name Ioseb "Soso" Jughashvilli on December 18, 1878 in the town of Gori, Georgia, which was then part of the Russian Tsarist Empire. Unlike other leading figures of the Communist Revolution, who came from wealthy backgrounds, Soso was born into a childhood of suffering and poverty. His mother had previously had two sons who died as infants. His father was a shoemaker who developed a drinking problem as his business began failing, and abused his wife and son regularly. Soso contracted small pox as a child, and was run over by a carriage, permanently disfiguring his left arm. He was the first of his family to attend school at the age of 10, thanks to his mother's determination and the help of a family friend. Soso was an excellent student, gifted in the areas of art and drama, and was reported to have a beautiful singing voice.
In 1894, Soso entered the Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis (the capitol of Georgia) on a partial scholarship in the hope of becoming a priest. While he continued to excel academically, it was during this period that he was exposed by fellow students to Marxist ideology and began his career as a radical, attending secret workers' meetings and declaring himself an atheist. He gave himself a new nickname, "Koba", after a Georgian literary folk hero. Koba left the seminary in 1899.
Koba began teaching socialist theory and developed a following, organizing meetings and agitating for independence from Russia. He went into hiding to elude the empire's secret police, settling in Batumi, Georgia. He found employment at a refinery, where he promptly began organizing worker strikes and demonstrations. Koba was arrested in 1902, and shipped off to Siberia in 1903 to serve a three year sentence. He escaped to Tiflis, where he became an editor of a Marxist newspaper. During the widespread civil unrest following the Revolution of 1905, Koba created Bolshevik Battle Squads to resist local police, steal weapons and printing equipment, and commit robberies to fund the cause. He was also elected as a delegate to attend a Bolshevik conference in Finland, where he first met Vladimir Lenin.
He married his first wife, Kato, in 1906, and a year later they had a son, Yakov. After leading an armed robbery of a bank convoy which killed forty people, he took his wife and son to live in Baku. His wife soon died of typhus, sending Koba into a deep depression, his grief overcoming him. He left his young son in the care of Kato's family in Tiflis while he continued his crime spree in Baku, running kidnappings, protection rackets, and more armed robberies to raise money for the Bolshevik Party. He would spend the next few years getting arrested, organizing the other inmates, then getting exiled, escaping, then getting arrested, starting the cycle all over again. During this time he had a string of affairs, producing at least three more children, though one died in infancy.
He began using the pseudonym "Stalin" around 1912, derived from the Russian word for "steel".
Russia entered WWI while Stalin was in exile, and he was drafted into the Russian Army in 1916. He was soon declared unfit to serve, though, because of his crippled arm. He was back in exile when the February Revolution erupted in 1917. Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate the throne, leaving in power the Provisional Government. Stalin traveled to Petrograd (formerly Saint Petersburg) where he came in third in elections for the Bolshevik's Central Committee, right behind Lenin and Zinoviev. He later joined Lenin in directing the October Revolution, deposing the provisional government and securing power for the Bolsheviks. Lenin called the new government the "Council of People's Commissars", led by himself, Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Yakov Sverdlov (who died in 1919). Lenin's new government relocated to Moscow in March of 1918 and pulled out of the Great War, sacrificing large swaths of land to the Central Powers in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Russian Civil War broke out soon after. Stalin was placed in charge of securing a food supply in southern Russia, and quickly took control of the local Red Army divisions. He used his authority to quash counter-revolutionary activities, ordering executions without trial, purging military agencies, and burning villages.
Stalin married his second wife, Nadezhda, at some point after the formation of the new government (the date is not recorded). She gave birth to a son, Vasily, in 1921. His older son, Yakov, came to Moscow to live with them at this time. His daughter, Svetlana, was born in 1926.
Lenin nominated Stalin to the post of the Party General Secretary at the 1922 Party Congress, over some objections that he would have too much power. The appointment was made, however, and Stalin accepted his new position.
In May of the same year, Lenin suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Stalin became a regular visitor to his dacha, where he was confined by his disability. Although Stalin became Lenin's primary contact to the government in Moscow, the two men disagreed on many policy issues concerning the administration of the Soviet State. By the time the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) was formed and ratified in December of 1922, their personality conflict had really taken its toll on their partnership. Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, came forward with letters supposedly written by Lenin that were increasingly critical of Stalin's thirst for power and boorish behavior, some even suggesting he be removed from his post as General Secretary. It is not clear whether the letters were written by Lenin or Krupskaya, who made no secret of her contempt for Stalin. After Lenin's death in January of 1924, the letters were read aloud at the 13th Party Congress. Stalin offered his resignation, but party officials were impressed by his show of humility, and he was allowed to keep his job.
Stalin spent the next few years consolidating his power, filling government positions with friendly comrades. Trotsky and Zinoviev aligned themselves against Stalin, calling their faction the "United Opposition". Stalin used his authority to begin removing supporters of the United Opposition from their posts. After much infighting, Trotsky and Zinoviev were both removed from the Central Committee in 1927 . Trotsky, who had always been Stalin's primary rival, was later deported from the U.S.S.R. Stalin also faced personal tragedies during this time, with the attempted suicide of his son, Yakov, and the suicide of his wife, Nadezhda.
The late 1920's and early 1930's were marked by forced collectivization and class warfare, beginning with Stalin's accusations that the kulaks (land owning peasants) were hoarding grain during a food shortage. He ordered their crops seized, and arrested or exiled mass numbers of kulaks in an effort to eliminate them as a class. Other classes of peasants were coerced into collective farming, and agricultural productivity dropped in response to central planning, triggering shortages and famines. Any resistance to collectivization was swiftly crushed by the Red Army. Ukraine was affected the worst, with five to seven million starving to death, and survivors cannibalizing the dead.
Political opposition was also suppressed with a series of arrests and show trials designed to intimidate ordinary citizens. Landlords, business owners, aristocrats and intellectuals were imprisoned, exiled, or executed at an increasing pace, culminating in the Great Purge of 1938 which claimed an estimated 700,000 lives. All major religions were marginalized, with their members facing persecution. Ethnic minorities were exiled or deported. Stalin wielded control over newspapers, education, arts and science in his pursuit of a cultural revolution. He used the Communist International (Comintern) to expand Soviet influence and Marxist ideology to other countries, exerting control over their local communist organizations.
In the late 1930's, as Adolph Hitler was expanding his dominance through the invasion of Austria and Czechoslovakia, Stalin was hoping to stay out of the approaching Second World War. The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty with Germany in 1939, only to be invaded by Germany in June of 1941. The German Wehrmacht steamrolled the Soviet borderlands and nearly captured Moscow, thwarted only by the arrival of a harsh winter. The Soviet Union joined the alliance with Great Britain and the United States. A turning point in the war came at the Battle of Stalingrad, where the Red Army fought for eight months before German troops finally surrendered in February of 1943. Soviet forces went on the offense, and by April of 1945, the Red Army had captured Berlin. Stalin, who wanted to catch Hitler alive, was disappointed to learn that he had committed suicide.
After the Allied Victory in WWII, Stalin enjoyed a newfound popularity among his people and an expanded control of territory in eastern Europe. With the decline of Great Britain, the United States and the U.S.S.R. were left standing as the world's new superpowers. He relaxed a few laws in Russia, even while "Sovietizing" the new satellite nations under his control in Europe. In 1949, the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb, intensifying the Cold War that was already underway with the United States.
As his health deteriorated in the early 1950's, his paranoia began to increase. He bugged the apartments of those officials closest to him, and demoted some senior party members and military officers, fearing a coup. One doctor was arrested in 1952 after recommending that Stalin retire for health reasons; several more (Jewish) doctors were rounded up later that year and tortured. They were accused of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders.
Joseph Stalin suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on March 1, 1953, and remained in a semi-conscious state for several days. He passed away on March 5, 1953, leaving no protocol for a transfer of power to a successor. The Central Committee restored the old Collective Leadership.
Stalin's legacy is a bloody one, but an accurate death count is hard to pin down, due to the secrecy and closed nature of his totalitarian regime. Combining executions, deaths in prison from torture or other inhumane conditions, and mass famines, estimates of deaths under Stalin range from three million to nearly sixty million. In the years following his death, Stalin's successors worked hard to reform, undo, or simply paper over the most oppressive parts of his legacy, but his shadow remains large in the record of history.
*This work is sourced from the following biographies:
Kotkin, Stephen. 2014 "Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928" London: Allen Lane
Khlevniuk, Oleg. 2015 "Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator" New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Montefiore, Simon Sebag. 2003 "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" London: Weidenfield & Nicholson
Service, Robert. 2000 "Stalin: A Biography" London: Macmillan
*Death toll estimates are from Wikipedia.