The childhood and youth of Joseph Stalin
The actual date of birth of Joseph Dzhugashvili (the alias, which over time became a more well-known surname, emerged no earlier than 1912) is uncertain. For a long time it was thought that tiny Soso was born on December 9, 1879, until in the early 1990s. scholars have not shown that a far more plausible date of his birth is December 6, 1878. There are less differences regarding the location of birth of the future leader – Tiflis province, the city of Gori.
Joseph’s father was a poor shoemaker Vissarion Ivanovich Dzhugashvili (c. 1850–1909) from the hamlet of Didi-Lilo, his mother Ekaterina Georgievna Geladze (1858–1937) was born in the town of Gambareuli near Gori. Both of the boy’s parents hailed from serfs. Joseph became the third child in the family, but his older brothers George and Mikhail perished in infancy. Stalin’s father died while the youngster was just 11 years old. By this time, he drank a lot, often raised his hand on his wife and kid, and finally entirely left the family. Joseph’s mother exerted herself doing day labor to obtain a portion of food for herself and her son. She doted on the youngster, but she nurtured him in strictness.
In 1886, young Joseph, at the urging of his mother, took the first step towards a vocation as a priest. He sought to enroll the primary Orthodox theology school in Gori, but the first attempt failed – the youngster did not speak the Russian language at all. After extended sessions with the children of a local priest in 1888, Joseph promptly entered the second preparation course. Six years later, in 1894, the young man finished from primary school and attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary, but failed to graduate. Already in his fifth year, in 1899, Joseph Dzhugashvili was expelled for failing to appear for exams, but the real reason was the revolutionary activity of the young man – he did well in all subjects, but since 1895 he was associated with Marxists and conducted appropriate propaganda among seminarians.
Path to power
The early years of Stalin’s party career were spent in Transcaucasia. After his expulsion, the dropout seminarian made his livelihood by providing individual lessons and functioned as a computer-observer at the Tiflis Physical Observatory, but most of his time was devoted distributing illegal publications and organizing many protests and strikes. Soon Joseph Dzhugashvili came to the notice of the police. In March 1901, following a search at the observatory, he went underground, ultimately becoming an underground revolutionary with the party moniker “Koba.”
In the fall of the same year, on the proposal of Dzhugashvili, the first illegal Social Democratic newspaper in the Georgian language, Brdzola (Struggle), began to be published in Baku. Joseph became the editor and author of the editorial of the first edition. At the beginning of November 1901, in Tiflis, Dzhugashvili was chosen a member of the local committee of the RSDLP, and at the end of the month he traveled for Batum to create a branch of the party there too.
In April 1902, the first arrest followed, and in the fall of 1903, the first exile to the Irkutsk province. Over the following 10 years, arrests, imprisonments, exiles and escapes will follow one after another. In between his freedom, Joseph Dzhugashvili managed to join the Bolsheviks following the split of the RSDLP in 1903, and in 1905 he met V.I. Lenin, participated in the party conferences in 1906 in Stockholm and 1907 in London.
In January 1912, Joseph Dzhugashvili was elected in absentia to the Central Committee and the Russian Bureau of the RSDLP. Once in St. Petersburg, he worked in the editorial office of the newspaper Pravda. In May 1912, another arrest and banishment to the Tomsk province occurred, from whence Joseph escaped after 40 days. Returning to the city, he visited overseas multiple times. At the beginning of 1913 in Austria, Joseph Dzhugashvili produced a journal article “Marxism and the National Question,” which not only won him a reputation as a specialist on national problems, but also became the first piece published under the alias “Stalin.”
In March of the same 1913, in St. Petersburg, Stalin was once again imprisoned and banished to the Turukhansky district of the Yenisei province, and subsequently to Achinsk near Krasnoyarsk. After the February Revolution in early March 1917, he went to Petrograd, where he took an active part in plotting a new coup.
Stalin’s career following the October Revolution
Immediately after the triumph of the Bolsheviks, on October 26 (November 8), 1917, Stalin entered the established Council of People’s Commissars as People’s Commissar for Nationalities, and thereafter, jointly with V.I. Lenin, L.D. Trotsky, Ya.M. Sverdlov – to the Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), empowered with emergency powers. Immediately after the commencement of the Civil War, Stalin became a member of the Revolutionary Military Council and was continuously at the fronts, organizing the war against both internal and external adversaries.
On April 3, 1922, Joseph Stalin was chosen General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). In conjunction with the postmortem disclosure of Lenin’s political testament (the so-called “Letter to the Congress”), in which he recommended to remove Stalin from power, in May 1924 at the XIII Congress of the RCP (b), he resigned, which was not accepted. In the 10 years of bitter intra-party battle that began, Stalin, in collaboration with L.B. Kamenev and G.E. Zinoviev initially managed to eradicate L.D. from all major roles. Trotsky, and then these transitory friends. In 1934, during the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, it was stated that there was no longer any resistance in the party. The vanquished opponents of Stalin openly recognized their sins and repented, which subsequently did not rescue any of them.
The emergence of Stalinism. Period of repression
At the end of 1934, with the death of Stalin’s close friend, the first secretary of the Leningrad regional committee of the CPSU (b) S.M. Kirov’s trend towards relative peaceful cohabitation with the internal opposition terminated. Massive repressions, known as the Great Terror, raged over the country, climax in 1937–1938. The flywheel of repression, begun at the very top, looked unstoppable: the internal affairs authorities churned out new criminal cases based on the evidence of people engaged in prior cases and the wave of denunciations that swamped the country.
During the years Stalin was in power, nearly 3.8 million individuals were detained and convicted under “political” articles, of which about 700 thousand were condemned to death penalty. Taking into consideration those who perished in jails and camps, this yielded more than a million victims. All levels of the populace, from agriculture and the army, to science and culture, were cleansed of phantom and actual “enemies of the people,” while the most fanatical perpetrators of the purges themselves disappeared into the running system.
Collectivization and industrialization
In 1928, Stalin authorized the first five-year plan for the industrialization of the USSR. Within this framework, it was intended to establish more than 1,500 new facilities and industries. New industrial facilities were developed throughout the country, from the western boundaries to the Far East. It was planned to raise finances for such large-scale building by whatever available methods, from strengthening the export of natural resources to the sale of cultural property. To raise the productivity of agricultural output, collectivization began, to improve mining, large-scale geological investigation of new reserves, etc.
During collectivization, various blunders and miscalculations were committed. According to a number of scientists, the country was then on the edge of widespread upheavals and a new civil war. However, in general, the set of steps adopted allowed the USSR, albeit at the expense of huge sacrifices, to swiftly change from a backward and civil war-ravaged agrarian country into a rather robust industrial state capable of battling a strong foreign opponent.
Stalin is the commander in chief. The Great Patriotic War
The Second World War was foreseen from the very beginning of the establishment of the USSR, and Stalin took all feasible efforts to improve the defensive capabilities of the state. Under his direct supervision and administration, both army reforms and the creation of new types of weaponry took place. With the declaration of war on June 22, 1941, Stalin became the leader of the State Defense Committee, People’s Commissar of Defense and Supreme Commander-in-Chief.
After the commencement of hostilities, the senior Soviet military leadership and Stalin himself made several strategic blunders, which resulted in large-scale defeats, multimillion-dollar deaths and material losses in the opening stage of the conflict. Stalin might be accused for missing intelligence signals concerning the exact date of the commencement of German aggression, openly denying the mere prospect of war with the Third Reich, the encirclement of the Red Army around Kiev, Vyazma, Kharkov and some other miscalculations of 1941–1942.
At the same time, it was under the leadership of Stalin that the tough situation on the fronts was not only reversed, but also secured unconditional triumph. In 1945, in acknowledgment of his military honors, Stalin was granted the highest military position of Generalissimo of the USSR, the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and was twice bestowed the highest military order of Victory.
Stalin’s reforms
During Stalin’s time in power, the “new economic policy” announced by Lenin was curtailed, the collectivization of agriculture, the industrialization of industry and numerous army reforms, the administrative reform of the USSR itself, which had grown to 16 republics, and the monetary reform of 1947 were carried out.
In addition, one might mention the ideological reform of culture and science in the 1930s and 1940s, the agricultural reforms of 1947–1950, and the post-war transfer of the military-industrial complex and the army to peaceful lines. Stalin’s last reform supposedly provided for the separation of the party nomenklatura from the real control of the country, but it remained unfulfilled.
Stalin’s internal and foreign policy
During the initial years of his rule, Stalin constructed a formidable state, developing its economic and ideological capabilities, relentlessly dealing with anyone who interfered with this or even theoretically may interfere. The primary features of domestic policy were the growth of the horizontal authority, the eradication of any resistance, collectivization, industrialization, and countless changes in nearly all fields.
Stalin’s foreign policy was highly active and aimed at restoring both the borders of the USSR itself to the old limits of the Russian Empire and enlarging its sphere of influence. Despite the clear expansionist aim, it was marked by significant flexibility and awareness not just of the current moment, but also of prospective long-term implications.
Taking advantage of the defeat of Poland in 1939, the Soviet Union regained some of the territory that belonged to the Russian Empire. As a result of the Soviet-Finnish conflict, the boundary in the northern direction was dramatically pushed back. In the same year, Bessarabia and the Baltic nations returned to the state with the foundation of four new union republics.
In February 1945, the Yalta Conference was conducted in Crimea with the participation of the US President and the British Prime Minister, at which concerns of the post-war organization of the globe were discussed. After winning the war, the USSR consolidated its reputation as a superpower for several decades, and its sphere of influence spanned extensive territories of Eastern Europe and Asia. The world has become bipolar.
Stalin’s family and personal life
Joseph Stalin was married twice. The first wife in 1906 was Ekaterina Semyonovna Svanidze (1885–1907), who came from a bankrupt noble family. Less than a year after the wedding, she died of typhoid disease, having given birth to her son Yakov. Stalin met his second wife, the daughter of a Bolshevik worker Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva (1901–1932), at the height of the Civil War. The wedding took place in 1919. In November 1932, Nadezhda shot herself – there are various accounts regarding the reasons for suicide, but none of them can be regarded trustworthy today.
Joseph Stalin had three children. The son Yakov Dzhugashvili (1907–1943) from his first marriage after the death of his mother was nurtured by his grandmother, Stalin’s mother, and he had practically little contact with his father. Having acquired an engineering education, at the urging of his father, he later graduated from the military academy. At the beginning of the war he commanded a howitzer battery, was arrested in July 1941 and died in a German prison camp in April 1943.
The middle son from his second marriage, Vasily Stalin (1921–1962), became a military pilot. During the war, he led a fighter air division with the rank of colonel, and in the post-war years he ascended to the position of lieutenant general and head of aviation in the Moscow Military District. After the death of his father, Vasily went into shame and exile, suffered from drunkenness and died very early, at the age of 40.
The youngest daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926–2011), became a philologist and translator and went to the USA in 1967. She left behind many books of memoirs, notably about her father. In addition to his own children, Stalin’s family reared an adopted kid – Artyom Fedorovich Sergeev (1921–2008), the son of Stalin’s close friend and party member F.A. Sergeev, known under the party moniker “Artyom”.
In ordinary life, Stalin was marked by tremendous restraint – he had a tiny wardrobe, lived in very humble residences and dachas. The leader appreciated fine food and quality wines, however, even in this situation, he rather valued the company at the table and wanted to treat people more. During these feasts, many key state issues were settled, and access to dinner with Stalin represented the highest degree of his confidence.
Death and burial of Stalin
Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953 in the government dacha at the age of 73 (74) years due to a cerebral hemorrhage that developed on March 1 against the background of the development of hypertension and atherosclerosis. The formal news of death followed the next day. The country went into mourning. The funeral, arranged on an unprecedented magnitude for the country, took place on March 9, 1953 in Red Square in Moscow.
During the burial, due to enormous throngs of people, the stampede killed, according to various accounts, from 100 to more than 400 persons. Initially, the casket holding the body of I.V. Stalin was placed in the tomb close to V.I. Lenin, however, in 1960, after exposing the “cult of personality,” the bones were reburied in the earth near the Kremlin wall.
Results of Stalin’s efforts
Finding himself the president of the USSR at a particularly difficult period, when the country that had barely concluded the Civil War found itself surrounded by unfriendly enemies, I.V. Stalin succeeded not only to retain the state, but also to strengthen it, and also to enlarge its area. It was under his direction, and frequently on his direct commands, that practically all the alterations in the state took place – both positive and negative. The deeds of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin as a state still provoke great dispute and are unlikely to obtain a clear judgment in the foreseeable future that most of society will be willing to accept.