Joseph Stalin

(December 21, 18791–March 5, 1953) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and the second leader of the Soviet Union.

Under Stalin, who replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with five year plans (introduced in 1928) and collective farming, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society to a major world industrial power; meanwhile Stalin consolidated his personal power and eliminated effective political opposition during the 1930s through a combination of beneficence, tactical retreats, and purges (see Gulag) that resulted in millions of deaths.

A hard-won victory in World War II (1945), made possible in part through the discipline and capacity for production that were the outcome of the collectivization, industrialization, and purges, laid the groundwork for the formation of the Warsaw Pact and established the USSR as one of the two major world powers, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following Stalin's death in 1953.

Stalin was born in the town of Gori, Georgia, to a cobbler named Vissarion (Beso) Dzhugashvili. His mother, Ekaterina, was born a serf. Their other three children died young; Joseph was, effectively, an only child. Soso was often severely beaten by his father, usually while he was drunk; beatings were an accepted way of "teaching lessons" to children.

One of the people Ekaterina did laundry and housecleaning for was a Gori Jew named David Pismamedov. Pismamedov gave Joseph, who would help out his mother, money and books to read, and otherwise encourage him. Decades later, Pismamedov came to the Kremlin to learn what had become of little Soso. Stalin shocked his colleagues by not only receiving the elderly Jewish man, but happily chatting with him in public.

Eventually, Beso left for Tiflis, leaving the family without support. Soso began his education at the Gori Church School but when he was 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, a Russian Orthodox institution which he attended from 1894 onward. In addition to the small stipend from the scholarship he was also paid for singing in the choir. Although his mother desired (even after he was leader of the Soviet Union) that he be a priest, attending a seminary was not because of any religious vocation but because it was one of the few educational opportunities available as the Czarist government was leary of establishing a university in Georgia.

Stalin in exile, 1915Stalin's involvement with the socialist movement began at seminary school, from which he was expelled in 1899 after failing to appear at scheduled examinations. He worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus, facing repeated arrest and exile to Siberia between 1902 and 1917. He adhered to Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of "professional revolutionaries". His practical experience made him useful in Lenin's Bolshevik party, gaining him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912. Some historians have argued that, during this period, Stalin was actually a Tsarist spy, who was working to infiltrate the Bolshevik party. In 1913 he adopted the name Stalin, which means "man of steel" in Russian.

His only significant contribution to the development of Marxist theory at this time was a treatise written while briefly exiled in Vienna, Marxism and the national question. It presents an orthodox Marxist position on this important debate; see Lenin's article On the right of nations to self-determination for comparison. This treatise may have contributed to his appointment as People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution.

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