Joseph Stalin he was one of the great characters that marked the history of mankind. Born in Georgia, he became a Marxist in his youth and devoted years of his life to overthrowing the tsarist monarchy. He joined the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917 and became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1927, a post he maintained until 1953.
Stalin engraved his name as one of the bloodiest dictators who ever lived and was at the head of a totalitarian regime that killed millions of people. Another achievement of his was that he led the resistance that defeated the Nazis in Second World War. His crimes were reported after he passed away.
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birth and youth
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin's birth name) was born on December 18, 1878, in the city of gori, located in present-day Georgia, a country in the Caucasus region and one of the 15 nations that formed the Soviet Union. His parents were called Vissarion Dzhugashvili (father) and Ekaterina Georgievna Geadze (mother).
Stalin was the only child of Vissarion and Ekaterina to survive childhood and grew up in a troubled family environment. Vissarion was a shoemaker and frequently beat his wife and son. His father and mother never got along about Stalin's craft, with his father wishing he would become shoemaker, and his mother, to follow the religious career.
Her husband's violence and disagreement over their son's future caused Stalin's parents to separate. At age 17, he entered a theological seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia's capital). In childhood he was called “Soso”, and in youth “Koba”, influenced by a Georgian writer.
Stalin's biographers recount that he was a young man with a strong and rebellious personality. Since then he declared himself an atheist, despite having studied at a religious school. He came into contact with Marxist ideals when he joined a secret organization, which defended Georgia's independence, called MessamDasi (“third group”).
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Stalin as revolutionary
Stalin's contact with other socialists converted him to Marxism and turned him into a revolutionary. Still living in Tiflis, he got a job at the city's meteorology observatory and became involved with the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, who wanted to overthrow the tsarist monarchy in Russia.
His work within that party led the secret police of the Russian empire (Okhrana) to pursue him. Later he was elected to the committee of the Social Democratic Party of which he was a member, but as he was wanted by the police, he was stuck and sent to the exile in Siberia, in 1902, fleeing from him a short time later (an attitude he repeated throughout his life).
![Stalin became a revolutionary during his youth in Georgia. [1]](/f/3451af168f5133ac13779849a04e8517.jpg)
While in exile, Stalin's party split into two groups: Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Stalin sided with the Bolsheviks, a group that had more radical ideas about the future of Russia. During the 1905 revolution, he was involved with a peasant organization and, after that, with a series of illegal activities such as bank robberies.
The robberies were carried out to finance the revolutionary movement of the Bolsheviks. During this period Stalin was arrested and sent into exile in Siberia several times, and in all of them he fled and returned to revolutionary activity. An important point in his revolutionary trajectory was having known vladimirLenin, in December 1905, during a Bolshevik conference organized in Finland.
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Russian revolution
Between 1905 and 1917, Stalin's revolutionary actions made him gain importance within the party. In 1912, while in exile, he was invited to join the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks and took up the post of editor of a revolutionary newspaper called Pravda.
It was as a Pravda editor that he started using “Stalin” as a pseudonym. The term in Russian means “made of steel,” And that became his assignment for the rest of his life. Between 1913 and 1917 he remained in exile, and in 1914 when the first war broke out, was released from military service.
In February 1917, the Russian monarchy was ousted from power by the Mensheviks and then the governmentprovisional. In March Stalin moved to Petrograd, and there he again took part in the revolutionary actions of the Bolsheviks. He remained at the head of Pravda and helped in the revolutionary actions that led to the Bolsheviks taking power in Russia in October 1917.
The October Revolution took place when Bolshevik forces carried out an armed revolt in Petrograd, until then capital of Russia, they took the main points of the city and put an end to Alexander's rule. Kerensky. There are historians who claim that Stalin, during the event of October Revolution, he was involved only with bureaucratic functions; others, however, say that he played an important role in the revolution.
After the revolution Stalin became one of the most important people in the party and, with Trotsky, he was one of the closest people to Lenin, the country's ruler between 1917 and 1924. He served as commissioner of nationalities from 1918 to 1922 and directly fought counterrevolutionary activities during the WarCivilRussian.
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rise to power
From 1922, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (PCUS). In exercising this position, he gained great prestige, especially within the party. In 1923, Lenin's health began to decline and the dispute for succession to power in the Soviet Union grew.
Stalin disputed the succession to Russian power with figures such as Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, but, as he had much more prestige within the party than the three mentioned, he imposed himself and consolidated himself in the government when the three were expelled from the CPSU in 1927. Stalin's prestige was mainly due to his role as a bureaucrat who guaranteed him sufficient support within the party. He realized that this support was far more important than popular support for his political rise.
Stalinism
Like ruler, Stalin imposed a terror regime in the Soviet Union. Through totalitarianism, he promoted radical reforms and persecuted opponents and ethnic minorities, which caused the death of millions of people (de 10 to 20 million).
Under the Soviet government, he persecuted ethnic minorities, such as the Poles and Ukrainians, and waged class warfare, persecuting the country's rich classes. In addition, it promoted large-scale industrialization of the Soviet Union and carried out agricultural reforms that cost the deaths of millions of people.
THE collectivization of agriculture led to the creation of collective farms, arising from the appropriation of private property. Changes in Soviet agriculture caused the death of millions of people from starvation. There were also the purges over the nearly three decades of the regime, mainly between 1937 and 1938.
The purges showed Stalin's little affection for dissent. All groups perceived as opposing or a threat to their dictatorial power were persecuted and eliminated. Those who were persecuted could be sent to forced labor camps or else be summarilyshot.
Stalin's purges even turned against important people who helped or supported him in times past. An example is Jan Sten, philosopher hired to be his private tutor and teach him basic lessons of the Hegelian dialectic between 1925 and 1928. Almost 10 years later, Sten was accused by Stalin of spreading Menshevik ideals and was executed in 1937.
Stalin sought to promote a cultural revolution in the Soviet Union and end the country's religious tradition. It did not accept criticism and created a strong cult of your personality. As a result, portraits and statues of him were spread across the country.
Second World War
Insofar as the Nazism strengthened in Germany, it became evident that that country and the Soviet Union would come into conflict in the near future. In 1939, Stalin had other plans for his country, besides believing that the Soviets would not be ready for a war against the Germans until 1942.
In May 1939, the Soviet and German authorities began negotiations on a non-aggression agreement. Thus was born the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which determined that the Soviets and Germans would keep the peace if war was started in Europe. This agreement gave Stalin time to focus on his desire to invade Finland and Poland.
Ignoring the warnings of his spies, Stalin did not prepare for the german attack which began in June 1941. Throughout the war against the Germans, he authorized the transfer of soviet industries to the east of the country and ordered the summoning millions of soldiers who were sent to war without much preparation, but with the order not to retreat.
Stalin led a resistance against the Germans and believed that victory should be won no matter what the cost. In April 1945, the Soviets invaded Berlin and defeated the Nazis definitively. The cost of the war was high, but Stalin emerged a hero. About 25 million Soviets died during the conflict.
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Death
On March 1st 1953, Stalin suffered a leakage and, after a few days of agony, he died in March 5th, at 74 years of age. In the last years of his life, his problematic health made him more and more absent from government affairs. So he retired on long vacations, gave few public speeches, and published few writings.
His death didn't put an end to his personality cult and his body was embalmed and exposed for a few days. his successor was Nikita Khrushchev, who, during his government, extinguished the cult of Stalin denouncing the crimes committed by the Georgian during the time he ruled the Soviet Union — this became known as de-Stalinization.
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marriages and children
Over the course of his life Stalin married twice and had three recognized children. his first wife was Ekaterina Svanidze, a young Georgian woman and the sister of a classmate of his while he attended religious school. Stalin's marriage to Ekaterina extended from 1904 to 1907, and during those years they had a child: Yakov Dzhugashvili.
Stalin's first wife died in 1907 of typhus. Stalin's son was raised by Ekaterina's family and was never close to his father. He became a prisoner of the Germans and died in a concentration camp, in 1943.
In 1919, Stalin married for the second time, now with Nadezhda Alliluyeva, a young woman born in Azerbaijan. At the time, Nadezhda was his secretary and their marriage yielded two children: Vasily Dzhugashvili and SvetlanaAlliluyeva. Nadezhda's marriage was unhappy, and on November 9, 1932, she committed suicide.
Stalin's biographers also comment on little-known relationships he forged throughout his life. In 1914, while in exile in Siberia, then aged 35, he became involved with a 13-year-old girl and impregnated her twice. The girl was called Lidia Pereprygina and met Stalin in Kureika.
Lidia's first child died shortly after birth, but the second was born healthy and survived infancy. Stalin abandoned both, and reports say that he never helped his son. Later, Lidia married a local man who took on Alexander as his own son.
Image credits
[1]bissig and Shutterstock
By L.do Daniel Neves
History teacher
