Joseph Stalin

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Stalin signed his articles "K. Stalin", an alias drawn from the Russian word for steel, translated as "Man of Steel." The man who chose it was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, into poverty in the small Georgian city of Gori. He trained to be a Russian Orthodox priest. He died on the 5th of March 1953 as the dictator of a superpower, having led the Soviet Union from 1924 until that final stroke. Between the seminary student and the Generalissimo lie bank robberies, Siberian exiles, a doctrine called socialism in one country, and the deaths of millions of his own citizens. How does a poor cobbler's son seize a party bureaucracy and never let go? Why does a man who codified Marxism-Leninism also order entire ethnic groups deported to the far north? And how can one ruler still be revered by some as a moderniser and condemned by others as the architect of man-made famine? This is the story of how the steel was forged, and what it cut.

• 2. Koba The Outlaw

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  An 1884 smallpox infection scarred the young Jughashvili's face, and a phaeton struck him at age twelve, leaving a lifelong disability in his left arm. His father Besarion was a shoemaker whose workshop declined into poverty, and who beat both his wife Ekaterine and his son. Mother and child left the home by 1883 and moved through nine different rented rooms. A scholarship sent him in 1894 to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, where his grades were high before his interest collapsed. Alexander Kazbegi's novel The Patricide gave him the nickname "Koba", taken from its bandit hero. After reading Das Kapital he turned to Karl Marx and left the seminary in April 1899. The outlaw nickname was not just literary. Aligning with Lenin's Bolsheviks, he raised funds through robbery and racketeering. In June 1907 his operatives ambushed a bank stagecoach in Tiflis's Erivansky Square with guns and homemade bombs, and around 40 people were killed. The Okhrana, the empire's secret police, hounded him through repeated arrests. He was sentenced to exile in Siberia again and again, and he escaped again and again, slipping from Novaya Uda, from Solvychegodsk, from Narym, before a four-year sentence finally pinned him in Turukhansk. To reach Vienna in January 1913 he travelled under a false passport bearing the name "Stavros Papadopoulos."

• 3. The General Secretary's Machine

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  In March and April 1922, Lenin nominated Stalin as the party's General Secretary, a post intended as purely organisational. Concerns were raised that it might grant him too much power. They were correct. The office let him appoint his own staff and implant loyalists throughout the party, favouring new members from proletarian backgrounds over the middle-class "Old Bolsheviks." A massive stroke in May 1922 left Lenin partially paralysed at his Gorki dacha, and his main connection to the government ran through Stalin. The two had quarrelled. Lenin disliked Stalin's "Asiatic" manner, told his sister Maria that Stalin was "not intelligent", and was angered when Stalin was rude to his wife Krupskaya by telephone. Krupskaya later circulated Lenin's Testament, which criticised Stalin's rude manners and excessive power and suggested he be removed. When Lenin died in January 1924, Stalin took charge of the funeral and served as a pallbearer. At the 13th Party Congress that May, the Testament was read only to provincial delegation leaders, and Stalin's offer to resign saved him. He then dismantled his rivals one by one. He formed a triumvirate with Kamenev and Zinoviev against Leon Trotsky, then turned on Kamenev and Zinoviev. Trotsky was removed from the Central Committee in October 1927, exiled to Kazakhstan, and deported from the country in 1929. The man Stalin personally despised would be assassinated in Mexico in August 1940, his last major opponent gone.

• 4. Steel And Starvation

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  In early 1928 Stalin travelled to Novosibirsk and alleged that affluent peasants, the "kulaks", were hoarding grain. Grain procurement squads spread across West Siberia and the Urals, and violence broke out with the peasantry. In January 1930 the Politburo approved the "liquidation" of the kulak class. By July 1930 over 320,000 households had been affected; the historian Dmitri Volkogonov called dekulakisation "the first mass terror applied by Stalin in his own country." The first five-year plan, launched in 1928, drove heavy industry and was declared finished a year early in 1932. New mines opened, the city of Magnitogorsk rose from nothing, and the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Moscow Metro were built largely through forced labour. Mass collectivisation followed, with kolkhoz and sovkhoz farms; by 1936 ninety percent of agricultural households were collectivised, and productivity slumped. The human bill came due in the winter of 1932-1933. A major famine killed between five and seven million people, worst in Ukraine, where it was called the Holodomor, and in Southern Russia, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus. Historians debate whether the Ukrainian famine was intentional, and no documents show Stalin explicitly ordered starvation. He blamed saboteurs among the peasants and concealed the catastrophe from foreign observers. For Stalin, the source records, Soviet industrialisation was worth more than peasant lives.

• 5. The Great Purge

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  When Sergei Kirov was murdered in December 1934, Stalin grew obsessed with assassination threats, and repression intensified. He issued a decree creating NKVD troikas that could pass rapid, severe sentences without any courts. In 1936 Nikolai Yezhov took over the NKVD, and the arrests and executions of his remaining party opponents began in earnest. The Moscow Trials followed in sequence. The first, in August 1936, sent Kamenev and Zinoviev to execution. The third, in March 1938, ended with Bukharin and Rykov shot. By late 1937 every trace of collective leadership had vanished from the Politburo. In May 1937 Stalin ordered the arrest of much of the army's high command, and mass arrests in the military followed. The terror then spread past the party to the wider population. From July 1937 the Politburo ordered a purge of "anti-Soviet elements", and Stalin launched "national operations" against non-Soviet ethnic groups including Poles, Germans, Latvians, Finns, Greeks, Koreans, and Chinese. More than 1.6 million people were arrested, 700,000 were shot, and an unknown number died under torture. His personal writings from the period were described as "unusually convoluted and incoherent", filled with claims of enemies encircling him. The purge ended when Lavrentiy Beria, a fellow Georgian loyal to Stalin, replaced Yezhov. Yezhov himself was arrested in April 1939 and executed in 1940, blamed for the very "excesses" Stalin had ordered.

• 6. Pact And Patriotic War

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  On the 3rd of May 1939 Stalin replaced his Western-oriented foreign minister Maxim Litvinov with Vyacheslav Molotov, a signal to Berlin. In August 1939 the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty with a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe. Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September, and on the 17th the Red Army entered the east. In the Katyn massacre of April and May 1940, the NKVD executed around 22,000 people, mostly Polish intellectuals, officers, and police. The pact shattered in June 1941 when Germany invaded. Despite repeated intelligence warnings, Stalin was taken by surprise, and the Soviet air force in the western borderlands was destroyed within two days. He stayed in Moscow as the Wehrmacht closed in, refusing to evacuate to Kuibyshev. His orders were merciless. Order No. 270 branded captured soldiers as traitors, a category that included his own son Yakov, who died in German custody. Order No. 227 sent unauthorised retreaters into "penal battalions" as cannon fodder. The turning point came at Stalingrad, where he ordered the city held at all costs; in February 1943 the German forces there surrendered. He declared himself Marshal of the Soviet Union the next month. The Red Army seized Berlin in April 1945, and Stalin had Hitler's remains brought to Moscow to stop them becoming a relic for Nazi sympathisers.

• 7. Superpower And Suspicion

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  In June 1945 Stalin took the title of Generalissimo and stood atop Lenin's Mausoleum to watch a victory parade through Red Square led by Georgy Zhukov. His armies held Central and Eastern Europe up to the River Elbe, yet at the height of his career he turned suspicion inward. Returning prisoners of war passed through "filtration" camps, where 2,775,700 were interrogated as possible traitors and about half were sent to labour camps. He recalled the 1825 Decembrist Revolt by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars, and feared his own armies who had seen consumer goods in Germany. The Gulag swelled. By January 1953 three percent of the Soviet population was imprisoned or in internal exile, with 2.8 million in "special settlements" and another 2.5 million in camps and prisons. A fresh famine struck from 1946 to 1947, sparked by drought and worsened by the state's choice to stockpile and export food; between one million and 1.5 million people died. The rivalry with the United States hardened into the Cold War. In August 1949 the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested in the deserts outside Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, a weapon Stalin had pursued personally while warning that "atomic weapons can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world." His final years brought a state-sponsored antisemitic campaign and the "doctors' plot." When the stroke took him in March 1953, Georgy Malenkov succeeded him, and then Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced his rule and launched "de-Stalinisation."