I | INTRODUCTION |
Joseph
Stalin (1879-1953), general secretary of the Communist Party of the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1953, the despotic ruler who
more than any other individual molded the features that characterized the Soviet
regime and shaped the direction of Europe after World War II ended in 1945.
Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich
Dzhugashvili in the town of Gori, Georgia, which at the time was part of the
vast Russian Empire. He was the third and only surviving child of a cobbler and
a housecleaner. In 1888 Stalin began attending the Gori Church School, where he
learned Russian and excelled at his studies, winning a scholarship to the
Tbilisi Theological Seminary in the Georgian capital in 1894.
II | YOUNG REVOLUTIONARY |
Stalin began his studies at the seminary as a
devout believer in Orthodox Christianity. He was soon exposed to the radical
ideas of fellow students, however, and began to read illegal literature based on
the works of German political philosopher Karl Marx. In 1899, just as he was
about to graduate, he gave up his religious education to devote his time to the
revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. While employed as an
accountant in Tbilisi, Stalin spread Marxist propaganda among railway workers on
behalf of the local Social Democratic organization. After moving to the seaport
of Bat’umi, where he organized a large workers’ demonstration in 1902, Stalin
was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police. A year later he was
sentenced to exile in the Russian region of Siberia. He soon managed to escape,
however, and was back in Georgia by early 1904.
When the Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party (RSDLP) split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in 1903, Stalin was
drawn to the more militant Bolsheviks, who were led by Vladimir Lenin. In
Georgia, where Menshevism predominated, Stalin soon gained a reputation as a
belligerent and staunch follower of Lenin, whom he had first met in 1905 at a
conference in Finland.
In 1905 Stalin married Yekaterina Svanidze, a
Georgian woman who died two years later. Stalin was arrested and exiled by
imperial police in 1908 because of his illegal underground activities. His
escape the next year was followed by further arrests, exiles, and secret trips
abroad during the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1912
Lenin elevated Stalin, who by this time had adopted the Russian pseudonym
meaning “man of steel,” to the leading Bolshevik Party body, the Central
Committee. At Lenin’s behest, Stalin wrote his chief theoretical work,
Marxism and the National Question. Stalin was arrested and sent to
Siberia before the essay was published in 1913.
Stalin was released from exile upon the
overthrow of the Russian monarchy in the February (or March, in the New Style
calendar) phase of the Russian Revolution. He went to Petrograd (later
Leningrad; now Saint Petersburg), where he became a member of the party’s
Central Committee bureau. He then asserted editorial control over the party
newspaper, Pravda (Truth).
Although he did not play a prominent role in
the Bolshevik takeover of the government in October (November, New Style),
Stalin became a member of the new government’s Soviet (Council) of People’s
Commissars (Russian acronym, Sovnarkom), heading the Commissariat for
Nationality Affairs. Given the vital importance of nationality issues at a time
when the Bolsheviks were trying to keep the territories of the former Russian
Empire under their power, Stalin’s post was crucial to the Bolshevik victory in
the ensuing Russian Civil War (1918-1921). He was elected a member of the
Communist Party’s highest decision-making body, the Politburo, and the Central
Committee’s Orgburo (Organizational Bureau) in 1919. As a political commissar in
the Red Army during the height of the civil war, Stalin supervised military
activities against the counterrevolutionary White forces along the western front
that were led by General Pyotr Wrangel. During the war between Russia and Poland
from 1920 to 1921, his decisions as a political commissar ended in disaster and
led to a long-standing conflict with Commissar of War Leon Trotsky. Meanwhile,
Stalin, whose first wife had died in 1907, married Nadezhda Alliluyeva in 1918
and moved with the government from Petrograd to Moscow.
III | SOVIET DICTATOR |
After the Bolshevik victory in the civil
war, Stalin threw himself into organizational work and administrative tasks.
Having served as commissar for state control since 1919, he continued this post
until 1923, while in 1922 he was elected general secretary of the Communist
Party, a position that gave him control over appointments and established a base
for his political power. Stalin’s rude and aggressive behavior brought him into
conflict with the ailing Lenin, who shortly before his death in 1924 wrote his
political “testament” in which he voiced misgivings about Stalin. In the
testament Lenin expressed doubt whether the party’s general secretary would use
his authority with sufficient caution, and he called for Stalin’s removal from
the post. Adroit political maneuvering enabled Stalin to have Lenin’s testament
discounted and suppressed, however, while Lenin’s death freed Stalin to
establish a ruling coalition with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinovyev, excluding
Stalin’s rival Trotsky from the succession struggle. Stalin reversed his course
in 1925 and joined with Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov in a new coalition
against his former partners, who in turn joined with Trotsky in 1926 to form an
intraparty bloc against Stalin known as the “Left Opposition.” Once Stalin had
succeeded in defeating these opponents, in 1928 he then turned against his
former allies Bukharin and Rykov. By the end of 1929 Stalin had succeeded in
political maneuvers that eliminated his political opponents and established him
as the supreme leader of the USSR.
IV | DOMESTIC POLICIES |
In the late 1920s Stalin decided the New
Economic Policy (NEP), which Lenin had introduced in 1921 to facilitate postwar
economic recovery by encouraging limited private enterprise, no longer worked.
The rate of economic growth was declining and peasants were not producing enough
grain to satisfy demand. Instead of giving the peasants economic incentives to
raise production, Stalin chose a policy that forced them into state-owned
collective farms. Simultaneously, he pressed forward with a program of rapid
industrialization, which began with the ambitious first Five-Year Plan in 1928.
Stalin believed the Soviet Union had to industrialize rapidly in order to
strengthen the Communist regime and enable the country to defend itself against
foreign enemies. The plan, which was financed by exploiting resources in the
countryside, resulted in the near collapse of Soviet agriculture and the deaths
of millions of peasants from famine. Industrialization was achieved, but at
great cost.
Although his hold on absolute power was
unchallenged by the early 1930s, Stalin worried about potential conspiracies
against him, especially after the suicide of his second wife in late 1932.
Stalin set in motion a massive purge of the party following the assassination of
Leningrad party chief Sergey Kirov in December 1934, which many have speculated
was masterminded by Stalin because he viewed Kirov as a threat. Although the
purge began gradually, with selective arrests in 1934 and 1935, by 1936 the
Soviet secret police were arresting and executing party members by the
thousands. Highly publicized trials of leading party figures—including Kamenev,
Zinovyev, and Bukharin—were staged in Moscow and resulted in their swift
execution on trumped-up charges. In 1937 and 1938 the terror spread to all of
Soviet society, including the military high command. Estimates of those arrested
and executed from 1936 to 1938 in the Great Purge range between 1.5 million and
7 million. Countless others were imprisoned in forced labor camps. Winding down
at the end of 1938, the purge left Stalin with a new generation of officials
loyal to him alone. However, the decimation of the military ranks left the
country more vulnerable to the threat from Adolf Hitler’s Germany during World
War II.
V | FOREIGN POLICIES |
Although Stalin’s policy in the mid-1930s was
to support the Communist International (Comintern) in forming a popular front
against the rise of fascism in Europe, he gave up the idea of collective
security with the West and in August 1939 decided upon an alliance with Nazi
Germany. The “Secret Protocols” of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact carved
up Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence; the Soviets
allowed Germany to invade Poland in exchange for Hitler’s promised nonaggression
against Soviet territory. Despite warnings, Stalin was taken by surprise in June
1941 when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa, a three-pronged attack
against the USSR. Although the Soviets were poorly prepared for the invasion and
at first suffered huge losses, the country rallied behind Stalin, who assumed
direct leadership of the war effort. Following their defeat at the Battle of
Stalingrad in January 1943, the Nazis lost the initiative and were finally
forced to retreat in 1945, which allowed Soviet troops to move into Eastern
Europe. Having obtained recognition from Allied governments of a Soviet sphere
of influence in these newly liberated countries, Stalin established puppet
Communist regimes and drew the so-called Iron Curtain between Eastern and
Western Europe.
In 1947 the Soviets established the Communist
Information Bureau (Cominform), an international body of Communist leaders that
was to ensure conformity with the Soviet line. Yugoslavia was expelled from the
alliance in 1948 after Stalin condemned renegade Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito
for refusing to follow Soviet orders. That same year Moscow announced a blockade
of Berlin, fueling the Cold War with the West. Stalin was determined to catch up
with the United States in developing the atomic bomb; he ordered that no
resources be spared toward that goal, which was achieved in August 1953, shortly
after his death.
A | Final Years |
By 1950 Stalin’s mental and physical health
had begun to deteriorate and he was absent from the Kremlin, the government
headquarters in Moscow, for long periods of time. His subordinates were fearful
of becoming victims of Stalin’s growing paranoia, which manifested itself in
plans for another purge. In January 1953 Stalin ordered the arrest of a group of
Kremlin doctors on charges of plotting the medical murder of high-level Soviet
officials. Just as a renewal of mass terror seemed imminent, Stalin died of
complications from a stroke in March. Although the nation was plunged into
grief, Stalin’s political successors expressed relief and moved quickly to
reverse some of the most brutal features of his regime. Nikita Khrushchev, who
replaced Stalin as general secretary (called first secretary until 1966) of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), denounced Stalin’s methods of rule
and political theories, known as Stalinism, in his “secret speech” to the 20th
Party Congress in 1956.
B | Evaluation |
Stalin’s historical legacy is
overwhelmingly negative. Although his policies transformed the USSR from an
agrarian-based society into an industrialized nation with a powerful military
arsenal, the transformation was accomplished at the cost of millions of lives.
Stalin’s militant distrust of the West and his assertion of Soviet dominance in
Eastern Europe gave rise to the Cold War. His purges of society through violent
police terror left a permanent scar on the collective memory of the people under
his rule. Although admired by some Russians, most would agree with the
assessment in the West that Stalin was one of the cruelest dictators in
history.
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