Joseph Stalin Biography

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the ruler of the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953. Joseph Stalin was a Gregorian revolutionary and a Soviet political leader. He was a communist and was ideologically committed to Leninist interpretation of Marxism which he formalised as Marxism-Leninism. Being a member of the communist party, he was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union. Although initially, he governed the country as part of collective leadership, he started to centralise power and assumed all the main roles and control of the state, prompting the question was Stalin a dictator. 

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About Stalin

Joseph Stalin was born into an impoverished family in Gori, Georgia, under the Russian Empire. 3rd April 1922 is the date of Stalin’s birthday. Stalin education came from him attending the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary before joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Young Stalin went on to edit the party's newspaper and Pravda to raise money for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction. Comrade Stalin was often jailed and exiled within the country. Stalin became a member of the newly formed Communist Party's governing Politburo when the Bolsheviks seized power during the October Revolution and established a one-party state. Following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin gained control of the country after serving in the Russian Civil War and overseeing the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922. 

Socialism in one country became a major element of the party's theory under Stalin, leading to the creation of new Stalin Russia. The country witnessed agricultural collectivisation and rapid industrialisation as a result of the Five-Year Plans adopted under his leadership, resulting in a centralised command economy. This resulted in serious food production interruptions, which contributed to the famine of 1932–33. Between 1934 and 1939, Stalin conducted the Great Purge to rid the country of alleged "working-class enemies." Over a million people were imprisoned, and at least 700,000 were executed. He acquired complete control of the party and the government by 1937.

During the 1930s, Stalin supported European anti-fascist groups, particularly during the Spanish Civil War, by promoting Marxism–Leninism through the Communist International. His authority struck a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, resulting in the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union. The invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in 1941 brought the alliance to an end. Despite heavy losses and multiple defeats in the early phases of the war, the Soviet Red Army eventually repulsed the German assault and took Berlin in 1945, bringing World War II to a conclusion in Europe. The Soviets conquered the Baltic nations and installed Soviet-aligned regimes throughout Central and Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea as part of their defeat of Germany and her allies.

By the end of WWII, the Soviet Union and the United States had established themselves as worldwide superpowers. The worsening of relations between the Soviet-backed Eastern Bloc and the United States-backed Western Bloc that followed resulted in the Cold War, which lasted until 1989. Stalin presided over the Soviet Union's postwar reconstruction as well as the creation of a Soviet atomic weapon in 1949 during the final years of his presidency. During this time, the country was hit by yet another major famine as well as an antisemitic campaign that culminated in the doctors' plan. Stalin was followed by Nikita Khrushchev after his death in 1953, who criticised Stalin's dictatorship and began the de-Stalinization of Soviet society.

Stalin was the main role model of a pervasive personality cult among the international Marxist–Leninist movement and had a great contribution to the Stalin age of Marxism-Leninism, whose members used to adore him as a champion of the working class and socialism. He was widely regarded as one of the most prominent individuals of the twentieth century. Stalin has remained popular in Russia and Georgia since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as a successful wartime leader who solidified the Soviet Union's standing as a dominant world power. Even so much to the capacity that during his era USSR was also referred to as Stalin Russia in political dialogues. His authoritarian administration, on the other hand, has been internationally denounced for enormous repression, ethnic cleansing, mass deportation, hundreds of thousands of executions, and famines that killed millions.

Stalin’s Beliefs

Stalin was a Marxist who followed Lenin's school of thought. "Leninism is the Marxism of the age of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution," he wrote in his book Foundations of Leninism. He claimed to be a Leninist who was "not a mindlessly obedient Leninist," according to Service. Stalin admired Lenin, but not without reservation, and he spoke out when he thought he was mistaken. During Lenin's revolutionary activity, Stalin saw some of Lenin's thoughts and deeds as the self-indulgent antics of a spoiled émigré and considered them unhelpful for Bolshevik activists located within the Russian Empire.

They continued to have differences after the October Revolution. Whereas Lenin believed that following the proletariat revolution, all countries in Europe and Asia would easily unite as a single state, Stalin argued that national pride would prevent this and that different socialist states would have to be formed; in his opinion, a country like Germany would not readily submit to being a part of a Russian-dominated federal state. Despite this, Stalin biographer Oleg Khlevniuk believes the two formed a "strong affinity" over time, while Kotkin believes Stalin's friendship with Lenin was "the single most important relationship in Stalin's life."

Stalin saw nations as ephemeral entities generated by capitalism and capable of blending into others. He believed that, in the end, all nations would merge into a single, global human community and that all nations were created equal. He said in his essay that "the right of secession" should be provided to the Russian Empire's ethnic minorities but that they should not be pushed to exercise it. He believed that if they became entirely autonomous, they would be ruled by the most reactionary parts of their group; he used the highly illiterate Tatars as an example, who he claimed would be dominated by their mullahs. According to Stalin, Jews had a "national character" but were not a "nation," making them unassimilable. He claimed that Jewish nationalism, especially Zionism, is anti-socialist.

Stalin, according to Khlevniuk, united Marxism with great-power imperialism, and as a result of the empire's expansion, he is worthy of the Russian tsars. According to the Service, Stalin's Marxism was infused with a strong sense of Russian nationalism. Stalin's adoption of the Russian nation, according to Montefiore, was pragmatic because Russians made up the majority of the USSR's population; it was not a repudiation of his Georgian roots. Russian imperialism was accused of Stalin's quest for Soviet westward expansion into eastern Europe. Thus, Stalin’s communism was a result of the strong bias of both Marxist and Leninist theories of governance.

World War II & Stalin

During World War II, Stalin emerged as the most successful of the warring nations' supreme dictators, despite a shaky start. After initially attempting to establish an anti-Hitler alliance with Western powers, he reached an agreement with Hitler in August 1939, encouraging the German dictator to attack Poland and start World War II. Stalin invaded eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and sections of Romania, as well as attacking Finland and extorting territorial concessions, in order to reinforce his western frontiers while his new but palpably treacherous German partner was still involved in the West. Stalin appointed himself the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of the government). This was the start of the Stalin Age. In May 1941, seeing the mounting threat of a German assault on the Soviet Union. It was his first political appointment since 1923.

The German blitzkrieg that swept deep into Soviet territory after Hitler's unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, showed Stalin's pre-war defence measures as ineffective. Stalin, according to Khrushchev, was temporarily stunned into inaction by the onslaught, but he quickly recovered and named himself supreme commander in chief. When the Germans threatened Moscow in the winter of 1941, he stayed in the city, assisting in the planning of a massive counter-offensive. Under Stalin's supreme command, the Stalin USSR’s mighty Soviet Army won the Battles of Stalingrad (the following winter) and Kursk (the summer of 1943), turning the tide of invasion against the retreating Germans, who capitulated in May 1945. Stalin exercised tight personal control over the Soviet battlefronts, military reserves, and war economy as a war leader. The Soviet generalissimo, initially tempted to meddle with poor telephoned commands, as Hitler did, gradually learnt to delegate military choices.

Stalin attended high-level Allied talks with Churchill and Roosevelt, including the “Big Three'' discussions in Tehran (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945). (1945). He outwitted these foreign statesmen as a skilled negotiator, and Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary at the time, praised his superior abilities.

Joseph Stalin Death 

Following the war, Stalin imposed a new type of colonial authority on eastern Europe, based on native Communist administrations that were theoretically independent but in reality subordinate to him. As a result, he boosted his subject population by around a hundred million. However, Titoist Yugoslavia's secession from the Soviet camp in 1948 dealt a significant blow to world Communism as a Stalin-dominated monolith. To dissuade other client governments from following Tito's lead, Stalin staged local show trials, similar to those staged during Russia's Great Purge of the 1930s, in which satellite Communist officials confessed to Titoism and were executed in large numbers.

Stalin may have had a larger impact on the lives of more people than any other historical figure. Stalin’s birthday is still a day of reverence for many people around the world with strong beliefs in communism, so much so that Joseph Stalin quotes are inspirational words for many people committing to communism. However, decades after his death, the assessment of his total accomplishment remains a contentious issue. Historians have yet to reach a definitive agreement on the value of his achievements, and it is improbable that they will ever do so. Stalin represents a lamentably deviant element in the growth of Marxism, according to the late Isaac Deutscher, author of the biography of Trotsky and Joseph Stalin biography—who, like Carr, essentially accepts Trotsky's version of Stalin as a somewhat unimpressive personage.