Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, holding the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952 and serving as the nation's premier from 1941 to 1953. Initially part of a collective leadership within a one-party system, he ultimately consolidated personal power to become the country's de facto dictator by the 1930s. Ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin helped to formalise these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies became known as Stalinism. Born into a poor Georgian family in Gori, Russian Empire, Stalin began his revolutionary career as a youth by joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Active in the Caucasus, he raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through robberies and other crimes, and was repeatedly arrested and exiled to Siberia. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin joined the party's Politburo and served as the People's Commissar for Nationalities. He began his rise to power after Lenin's death in 1924, using his role as general secretary to outmaneuver his rivals. Under Stalin's policy of "Socialism in One Country" and his five-year plans from 1928, the country underwent rapid agricultural collectivisation and industrialization, replacing the New Economic Policy with a centralised command economy. State policy contributed to a major famine in 1930–1933, with Ukraine and Kazakhstan most affected. To eliminate his political rivals and those deemed "enemies of the working class", Stalin oversaw the Great Purge between 1936 and 1939, during which at least 700,000 people were executed and over a million were imprisoned in the Gulag system. Stalin's government promoted Marxism–Leninism abroad through the Communist International and supported anti-fascist movements in Europe during the 1930s, particularly in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, it signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, resulting in their joint invasion of Poland and the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states. Germany ended the pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941; despite initial setbacks, the Red Army repelled Axis forces and captured Berlin in 1945, ending World War II in Europe. The Soviets helped establish aligned governments in Central and Eastern Europe, China and North Korea, forming the Eastern Bloc and emerging as a world superpower. Stalin led his country through its reconstruction and the start of the Cold War with the United States, overseeing its development of nuclear weapons in 1949. In these years, the country experienced another major famine and a new wave of political purges. Stalin died in 1953 and was ultimately succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced his predecessor and initiated a campaign of de-Stalinisation throughout Soviet society. Widely considered one of the most significant figures of the 20th century, Stalin was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international Marxist–Leninist movement, for whom he was a champion of socialism and the working class. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, he has retained popularity in Russia as a victorious wartime leader who established the Soviet Union as one of the world's foremost great powers. Conversely, Stalin's totalitarian regime has been widely condemned for overseeing a system marked by mass repression, ethnic cleansing, and the deaths of millions.

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