Joseph Stalin
by Jennifer Remeta“Biography of a Supreme Dictator”
Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in December of 1879, and later known as Joseph Stalin, a provincial country boy with a distinct problem with authority would later emerge as one of the Soviet Union’s most powerful and most feared leaders.
Georgian by birth, Stalin did not speak Russian until introduced to the language in his early school years. As a teenager, he attended a theological seminary school and avidly studied the teachings of Karl Marx. Shortly thereafter he was expelled from the school for participating in revolutionary activities. He quickly joined the ranks of the Bolshevik Party and spent much of the next decade robbing banks to provide the party with needed funds and generally instigating strikes wherever he could. Angered when he did not advance through party ranks as quickly as he would have liked, he stored his hatred for other party members away, already plotting their overthrow for some time in the future. Finally promoted to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, in 1912, it was around this time that he chose to change his name from Dzhugashvili to Stalin, meaning, “the man of steel”. Throughout this period of his life, Joseph Stalin was frequently caught and exiled for his radical activities. His longest period of exile was spent in Siberia, and lasted from 1913 to 1917. Returning to Russia in 1917, and active in the Civil War that spanned from 1918 to 1920, he quickly schemed and maneuvered his way up the ladder of power. Because of his humble background, as well as the fact that he was provincial and coarse in his actions, his rivals mistakenly paid him little heed. By 1922 he had established himself in the newly created position of Secretary General for the entire Bolshevik party. When the current leader of the Soviet regime (Vladimir Lenin) died in 1924, Stalin aligned himself with two other powerful government figures of the time, Lev Kamanev and Grigory Zinoviev in order to oust Lenin’s expected successor, Leon Trotsky. Successful in that endeavor, Stalin then turned his attention to his co-conspirators and by 1926 had succeeded in exiling them both. An expert at telling party leaders and the public exactly what they wanted to hear, and regardless of whether those ideas contradicted, he assumed complete power of the Soviet Union in 1928.
With Joseph Stalin in control, the Soviet Union began a period of radical social and economic change, punctuated with cruel executions and deportations of the upper classes. The lower classes were then forced into group farms, to guarantee the nationalization of the entire economy. Millions died from famine and the resulting food shortages, but the Soviet Union’s most feared leader staunchly stuck to his political ideals, and met all resistance with still more deportations and executions.
In 1934 Stalin was notified of a secret movement within the party to replace him with another party leader, Sergei Kirov. Within days of this discovery, he had Kirov killed, and with the help of his secret police began a reign of terror that resulted in the deaths of virtually all political leaders and high ranking military of the time. This left Stalin in control of the entire Soviet Union with literally no one to answer to. He had successfully created a supreme dictatorship.
In Europe another man was gaining great power. His name was Adolph Hitler. When the Second World War brought Hitler’s armies to the city of Moscow in 1941, Stalin was ready. Falling back on his unflappable ability to sway the public to his side, he began instigating incredible propaganda (patriotic propaganda was a preferred tool of both Hitler AND Stalin) in support of the mother country. The Russians, impassioned by a sense of patriotism, bravely ousted the Germans, making them one of the few countries to succeed against Adolph Hitler’s advances. Comparable in their leadership decisions, Hitler and Stalin shared brutal and unforgiving natures, a tendency to meet resistance with bloodshed, and both maintained radical dictatorships over their respective countries. In another interesting and somewhat scary similarity, during their formative years, Hitler and Stalin both considered entering the priesthood. After World War II, Stalin once again turned his attentions inward, developing and instituting additional political policies to further nationalize the USSR. He began yet another round of purging the political and military leaders, but his efforts in this were cut short when he died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage on March 5th of 1953. The impact he left on the Soviet Union however, ran deep. Though the country went through some serious changes following his death, including the revoking of many of his economic and foreign policies, decades still passed before the authoritarian political party system was altered in any significant way. To this day there are those who will argue that Joseph Stalin was the worst, and yet still somehow the best leader ever to have led the USSR.
