Stalin, Joseph (1879–1953)

Josef Stalin, Franklin D Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill sitting together at the Tehran Conference, Persia, 1943.

The communist leader Joseph Stalin, who forged the Soviet Union into a major 20th century power. His ruthless political purges removed all internal opposition and by the mid-1930s his leadership was undisputed.

Soviet politician. A member of the October Revolution committee of 1917, Stalin became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin sought to create ‘socialism in one country’ and clashed with Trotsky, who denied the possibility of socialism inside Russia until revolution had occurred in Western Europe. Stalin won this ideological struggle by 1927, and a series of five-year plans was launched to collectivize industry and agriculture from 1928. All opposition was eliminated in the Great Purge 1936–38. During World War II, Stalin intervened in the military direction of the campaigns against Nazi Germany. He managed not only to bring the USSR through the war but to help it emerge as a superpower, although only at an immense cost in human suffering to his own people. After the war, Stalin quickly turned Eastern Europe into a series of Soviet satellites and maintained an autocratic rule domestically. His role was denounced after his death by Khrushchev and other members of the Soviet regime.

Stalin was born in Georgia, the son of a shoemaker. Educated for the priesthood, he was expelled from his seminary for Marxist propaganda. He became a member of the Social Democratic Party in 1898, and joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1903. He was repeatedly exiled to Siberia 1903–13. He then became a member of the Communist Party's Politburo, and sat on the October Revolution committee. Stalin rapidly consolidated a powerful following (including Molotov); in 1921 he became commissar for nationalities in the Soviet government, responsible for the decree granting equal rights to all peoples of the Russian Empire, and was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. As dictator in the 1930s, he disposed of all real and imagined enemies. His anti-Semitism caused, for example, the execution of 19 Jewish activists in 1952 for a ‘Zionist conspiracy’.