Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was a Georgian peasant by origin who rapidly rose to power in the Bolshevik movement before and after the Russian Revolution. By the early 1920s he was close to the centre of power, then wielded by Lenin, and benefited from Lenin’s suspicion of other communist leaders, including Trotsky, so that he was able to use his 1922 appointment as general secretary of the communist party to gradually take ultimate power after Lenin’s death in 1924. Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, his power increasing all the time, from then until his death in 1953. For the latter part of his reign, especially after the mid-1930s, he was a total dictator, whose paranoia led to a huge bloodletting in countless purges of party, military and administrative leaders.
The estimates of death resulting from his reign have been put as high as 20 million, and the major source of his power was his use of the secret police, especially the NKVD, later renamed as the KGB (see police state). His main policies were to force the collectivization of agriculture, this itself meaning the forced mass migration of millions of peasants, and death for many of those who resisted, and the development of heavy industry at the expense of immediate living standards. He controlled the whole social, economic and cultural world in the Soviet Union brutally and totally. His major motivation seems to have been a desperate fear for the security of the revolutionary society once it became apparent that other Western societies were not likely to follow the revolutionary path; indeed he transformed the originally internationalist orientation of Soviet theory, enunciating his own doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ as early as 1924. This led to his trying to arrange an anti-capitalist mutual protection treaty with Hitler, though on Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 Stalin’s energies and efforts led to a costly but ultimately successful war effort, and the acquisition of most of Eastern Europe as a Soviet ‘empire’.
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