| Georgian Marxist revolutionary and later virtual dictator of the USSR (1928–53), born in Gori, C Georgia,
the son of a cobbler and ex-serf. He studied at Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary, from which he was expelled in 1899.
After joining a Georgian Social Democratic organization (1898), he became active in the revolutionary underground, and was
twice exiled to Siberia (1902, 1913). As a leading Bolshevik he played an active role in the October Revolution (1917), and
became people's commissar for nationalities in the first Soviet government and a member of the Communist Party Politburo.
In 1922 he became general secretary of the Party Central Committee, a post he held until his death, and also occupied other
key positions which enabled him to build up enormous personal power in the party and government apparatus.
After Lenin's death (1924) he pursued a policy of building ‘socialism in one country’, and gradually isolated
and disgraced his political rivals, notably Trotsky. In 1928 he launched the campaign for the collectivization of agriculture
during which millions of peasants perished, and the first 5-year plan for the forced industrialization of the economy. Between
1934 and 1938 he inaugurated a massive purge of the party, government, armed forces, and intelligentsia in which millions
of so-called ‘enemies of the people’ were imprisoned, exiled, or shot. In 1939 he signed the Non-Aggression Pact
with Hitler which bought the Soviet Union two years respite from involvement in World War 2. After the German invasion (1941),
the USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance, and Stalin, as war leader, assumed the title of generalissimo. He took
part in the conferences of Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam which resulted in Soviet military and political control over the liberated
countries of post-war E and C Europe. From 1945 until his death he resumed his repressive measures at home, and conducted
foreign policies which contributed to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West.
He was posthumously denounced by Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress (1956) for crimes against the Party and for building
a ‘cult of personality’. Under Gorbachev many of Stalin's victims were rehabilitated, and the whole phenomenon
of ‘Stalinism’ officially condemned by the Soviet authorities. While many regard Stalin as a brutal dictator possibly
equalled only by Hitler in the scale of the terror he wreaked, others question whether the Soviet Union would have survived
to win victories in World War 2 under a more liberal leader. |
