booJoseph Stalin (1879-1953)
Joseph Stalin was born into a dysfunctional family in a poor village in Georgia in 1879. At the time, Georgia was part of the Russian Empire led by the Romanov family. His real name was Joseph Jughashvili but later changed his last name to Stalin which meant “steel” in Russian. As a young boy, Stalin contracted smallpox, which left him with scars for the rest of his life—he also had a slightly deformed arm. These occurrences, along with an alcoholic father, led him to believe he was unfairly treated in life. Because of this, many people believe he developed a strong, romanticized desire for greatness and respect.
Stalin was sent by his mother to a seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, to study to become a priest. However, he never completed his education. He was, instead, drawn into the city’s revolutionary circles. Stalin specialized in the routine of revolutionary activity, helping to organize workers, distribute illegal literature, and robbing trains.
Vladimir Lenin, ruler of the Soviet Union after he led the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war in Russia, valued Stalin’s loyalty and appointed him to various low leadership positions. In 1922, Stalin was appointed as General Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. He used this new position to establish power by controlling all government positions, setting the topics on agendas at meetings and moving around government staff in a way so that everyone who was important owed their position to him! When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin became the leader of the country though Lenin had come to distrust Stalin for fear that he might use power in a negative way…he was right to distrust Stalin… but Lenin had also had problems with another man that could have been the next leader called Leon Trotsky. Stalin outmaneuveredTrotsky to get control of the government and exiled himbecause he had different ideas of what direction the Soviet Union should go. Trotsky was eventually forced to go to Mexico to live and there he was assassinated by NKVD agents sent by Stalin although they would always deny this. The NKVD was the Soviet Union’s secret police at that time.
As leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin slowly destroyed all the old leaders of the Party. At first, these people were removed from their positions and exiled. Later, when he realized they could still make a difference from afar, he began a reign of terror, accusing them as “enemies of the people” and having them executed. This time period was known as the “purges”. These “purges” extended beyond the leaders of the government, reached into every local neighborhood and affected nearly all of the educated “intellectual professions” such as teachers and engineers.
When it came to economics, Stalin’s goal was to have the Soviet Union achieve the goal of rapid industrialization, so that it was equal and could compete with capitalist powers AT ANY COST. He forcefully collectivized land used for agriculture—taking back the land given to peasants by Lenin—because he felt larger, “mechanized” farms would produce more crops than millions of individual farms. When peasants resisted, Stalin responded with violence. Thousands of people were executed and many more were sent to a remote region in the Soviet Union, called Siberia. In Siberia, these Soviets worked, and many times dies in a system of labor camps called Gulags. The Ukraine, an area controlled by the Soviet Union then, especially resisted the collectivization of farms. Stalin punished them by refusing to send food to aid them when a famine struck in 1932. Millions of Ukrainians died.
Another part of Stalin’s plans for strengthening Soviet communism was to modernize the economy. In 1928, he devised a system he called Five Year Plans. In the Five-Year Plans, the government set a goal that each factory and mine had to produce in a five-year time period. As he had hoped, these plans did lead to increases in industrial outputand Soviet production of oil doubled, while coal and steel production quadrupled but it did come at a price. People suffered immensely because turning a large group of people, many who were illiterate, into an industrialized nation was difficult. If workers did not meet the amounts expected or if workers were suspected of “sabotaging” the work necessary for a Five-Year Plan to work they could be executed. Many people also died of starvation because there was not enough food or because they were punished for doing something wrong by having a portion of their food taken away!
Stalin led with totalitarian rule, controlling all aspects of Soviets’ life. Children were encouraged to join youth organizations where they were taught the attitudes and beliefs he wanted them to have. Religion was discouraged and portraits of Stalin decorated public places making Stalin some sort of an idol.