Short answers, pulled from the story.
Joseph Stalin was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952 and as premier from 1941, consolidating power to become a dictator by the 1930s. He codified the party's interpretation of Marxism as Marxism-Leninism, a version known as Stalinism.
Joseph Stalin was born into a poor Georgian family in Gori, a city in the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire. His birth name was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, Russified as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. His parents were Besarion Jughashvili and Ekaterine Geladze, and he was the only one of their three children to survive past infancy.
Joseph Stalin used his position as General Secretary, granted in 1922, to control the party bureaucracy and implant loyalists. After Lenin died in January 1924, he defeated rivals including Leon Trotsky, first allying with Kamenev and Zinoviev in a triumvirate, then turning on them. Trotsky was removed from the Central Committee in 1927 and deported in 1929.
The famine of 1932-1933 followed Stalin's forced collectivisation and rapid industrialisation, killing between five and seven million people. The worst-affected areas were Ukraine, where it was called the Holodomor, along with Southern Russia, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus. Historians debate whether the Ukrainian famine was intentional, and no documents show Stalin explicitly ordered starvation.
The Great Purge, between 1936 and 1938, was Stalin's campaign to execute hundreds of thousands of real and perceived political opponents. The Moscow Trials sent figures such as Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Rykov to execution, and "national operations" targeted ethnic groups including Poles, Germans, and Koreans. More than 1.6 million people were arrested and 700,000 were shot.
Joseph Stalin died on the 5th of March 1953 after a stroke. He was succeeded as leader by Georgy Malenkov and eventually Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin's rule and began a campaign of de-Stalinisation.