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---. Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Kevin Cunningham, 2006

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in december 6th 1878 joseph was born

Outside Source #1
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Josef_Stalin

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Place of Birth

Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire

Place of Death

Moscow, USSR

Iosif Vissarionovič Stalin, born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, December 18, 1878 (O.S. December 6) - March 5, 1953, usually transliterated Josef Stalin, consolidated power to become the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union between 1928 and his death in 1953. Stalin held the title General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1953), a position that did not originally have significant influence, but through Stalin's ascendancy, became that of party leader and de facto leader of the Soviet Union.

Stalin was responsible transforming the Soviet Union from an agricultural nation into a global superpower and did not see the elimination of millions of lives as an impediment to the achievement of this goal. Many intellectuals, dissidents and even many allies were put to death under Stalin. Stalin's expansionism at the conclusion of World War II resulted in the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by the West. In turn, Stalin gathered the Eastern European nations that were absorbed into the Soviet sphere after the Second World War under the umbrella of the Warsaw Pact. This, in turn, led to the Cold War and to the periodic international crises and the endless exchanges of hostile rhetoric in United Nations leadership circles until the final years of the Soviet Union.

Introduction

Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Stalin became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, he successfully maneuvered to defeat Leon Trotsky in a leadership struggle. Throughout his long period in office, he deftly built useful alliances within the Party, identified potential threats to his rule and established a reputation for eliminating those who did not share his convictions. Even Leon Trotsky fell victim to Stalin's assassins in 1940 when he was brutally stabbed to death in Mexico in 1940.

Stalin's rule was even more repressive and brutal than Lenin's. Unlike Lenin, Stalin encouraged and fostered a cult of personality, which portrayed Lenin as the father of the nation and Stalin as the faithful one who brought Lenin's dreams closer to fruition. Stalin's tactics and methodology or Stalinism, as it has come to be known, had long range effects on the features that characterized the Soviet state. Although Mao Zedong had serious issues with Stalin and the way in which Stalin treated him, Maoists, anti-revisionists and some others maintained, following Nikita Khrushchev's rise to power, asserted that Stalin was actually the last legitimate Socialist leader in the Soviet Union's history. Stalin claimed his policies were based on Marxism-Leninism, but there can be no doubt that Stalin actively sought to establish his own special place in world history.

Soon after assuming power, Stalin replaced Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s, which allowed for some privatization, with Communist Party guided Five-Year Plans in 1928 and he implemented collective farming at roughly the same time, which resulted in millions dying of hunger in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union made significant progress from its former status as a predominantly peasant society to the status of a major world power by the end of the 1930s.

Stalin was duped by Adolf Hitler and saw the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 as a commitment in which Hitler and Stalin recognized that they shared common ideological views on a number of matters. The pact was seen by Stalin as a guarantee against a Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. However, when things did not go well for Hitler in his war against Britain, he caught Stalin by surprise when he attacked the Soviet Union in 1940. The Soviets bravely resisted; however, they bore the brunt of the Nazis' attacks (around 75 percent of the Wehrmacht's forces). Soviet forces under Stalin and with massive military aid from the West, made a decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II (known in the USSR as the "Great Patriotic War," 1941-1945). After the war, the USSR established itself under Stalin as one of the two major superpowers in the world, a position it maintained for the next four and a half decades.

Stalin's rule - reinforced by a cult of personality - fought real and alleged opponents mainly through the security apparatus, such as the NKVD. Nikita Khrushchev, one of Stalin's supporters in life and his eventual successor, chose to denounce Stalin's rule, his cult of personality and his brutal, genocidal rule at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1956. Khrushchev initiated the "de-Stalinization" and Mao used Khrushchev's handling of Stalin as one of the rationales for the Sino-Soviet Split, which took place in 1960.

Childhood and early years

Reliable sources about Stalin's youth are few; however even those sources were subjected to censorship, a common practice during Stalin's reign. Some consider the writings of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva to be the most reliable sources, since they were not censored.

Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire to Vissarion Dzhugashvili and Ekaterina Geladze. In 1913, he adopted the name "Stalin," which is derived from the Russian (stal') for "steel." His mother was born a serf. Stalin's three siblings died young; "Soso" (the Georgian pet name for Joseph), was effectively an only child. According to the official version, his father Vissarion was a cobbler. He opened his own shop, but quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis. Rarely seeing his family and drinking heavily, Vissarion is said to have been physically abusive toward his wife and small son Josef. One of Stalin's friends from childhood later wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry.

Another of his childhood friends, Ioseb Iremashvili, felt that the beatings by Stalin's father gave him a hatred of authority. He also said that anyone with power over others reminded Stalin of his father's cruelty. Stalin had broken his arm several times in the course of his life. There have been reports of Stalin having one arm shorter than the other. He also survived smallpox, that left pockmarks on his face.

One of the people for whom Ekaterina did laundry and house-cleaning was a Gori Jew, David Papismedov. Papismedov is said to have given Josef, who would help his mother, money and books to read, and encouraged him. Decades later, Papismedov came to the Kremlin to learn what had become of little "Soso." Stalin surprised his colleagues by not only receiving the elderly man, but happily chatting with him in public places.

In 1888, Stalin's father left to live in Tiflis, leaving the family without support. Rumors said he died in a drunken bar fight; however, others said they had seen him in Georgia as late as 1931. At the age of eight, "Soso" began his education at the Gori Church School.

When attending school in Gori, "Soso" was among a very diverse group of students. Joseph and most of his classmates were Georgian and spoke mostly Georgian. However, at school they were forced to use Russian. Even when speaking in Russian, their Russian teachers mocked Joseph and his classmates because of their Georgian accents. His peers were mostly the sons of affluent priests, officials, and merchants.

During his childhood, Joseph was fascinated by stories he read telling of Georgian mountaineers who valiantly fought for Georgian independence. His favorite hero in these stories was a legendary mountain ranger named Koba, which became Stalin's first alias as a revolutionary. He graduated first in his class and at the age of 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the Seminary of Tiflis, a Jesuit institution (one of his classmates was Krikor Bedros Aghajanian, the future Grégoire-Pierre Cardinal Agagianian, which he attended from 1894 to 1899. Although his mother wanted him to be a priest (even after he had become leader of the Soviet Union), he attended seminary not because of any religious vocation, but because of the lack of locally available university education. Stalin received a small stipend from the seminary for singing in the choir.

Stalin's involvement with the socialist movement (or, to be more exact, the branch of it that later became the communist movement) began at the seminary at the age of 15. The discipline and regime of the institution no doubt contributed to his determination to become revolutionary. During these school years, Stalin joined a Georgian Social-Democratic organization, and began propagating Marxism. Stalin quit the seminary in 1899 just before his final examinations; official biographies preferred to state that he was expelled. He then worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus, experiencing repeated arrests as well as exile to Siberia between 1902 and 1917.

Stalin supported Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of professional revolutionaries versus the less disciplined views of Karl Kautsky. His personal meetings with Lenin led him to embrace Bolshevism and Lenin's belief that the Soviet Union could precede smoothly under communist rule from a feudal to a socialist state without ceding power to accomodate a capitalist state prior to the emergence of socialism as the Mensheviks proposed. Stalin and Lenin attended the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London in 1907

In the period after the failed Revolution against the Czar in 1905 Stalin is said to led "fighting squads" in bank robberies to raise funds for the Bolshevik Party. His practical experience made him useful to the party, and gained him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912.

Stalin's major contribution to the development of the Marxist theory was a treatise, written while he was briefly in exile in Vienna, Marxism and the National Question. It presents an orthodox Marxist position (c.f. Lenin's On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination). This treatise may have contributed to his appointment as People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution, as he was seen as a specialist in national problems.

In 1901, the Georgian clergyman M. Kelendzheridze wrote an educational book on language arts and included one of Stalin's poems, signed by 'Soselo'. In 1907 the same editor published "A Georgian Chrestomathy, or collection of the best examples of Georgian literature"; Volume 1 included a poem of Stalin's dedicated to Rafael Eristavi, on page 43. His poetry can still be seen in the Stalin Museum in Gori.

Marriages and family

Stalin's first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died in 1907, only four years after their marriage. At her funeral, Stalin allegedly said that with her death died also his last warm feelings for humankind. Only she had succeeded in melting his 'stony heart'. To him, her life was the only thing that made him happy. They had a son together, Yakov Dzhugashvili, with whom Stalin did not get along in later years.

Stalin's son Yakov is said to have shot himself because of the mistreatment he endured from his father. Nevertheless he did survive. Yakov served in the Red Army during World War II and was captured by the Germans. They offered to exchange him for Fieldmarshal Paulus, but Stalin turned the offer down, allegedly saying "A lieutenant is not worth a general." Others credit him with saying "I have no son," to this offer, and Yakov is rumored to have been accidentally electrocuted in the German prison camp where he was being held.

According to an article December 13, 2001 in The New York Times, "Of the roughly 30,000 wartime victims at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Nazi Germany, most were Russian prisoners of war, among them Stalin's oldest son." Stalin may have hesitated to seek a special arrangement to spare his son because he feared that it would have undermined support for his war efforts.

His second wife was Nadezhda Alliluyeva-Stalina, who died in 1932; she may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly political".

Officially, she was said to have died of an illness. Stalin had two children with his second wife: a son, Vassili, and a daughter, Svetlana.

Vassili rose through the ranks of the Soviet air force and died in 1962. He distinguished himself in World War II as a capable airman. Svetlana emigrated to the United States in 1967 and later returned to the Soviet Union.

In his book The Wolf of the Kremlin, Stuart Kahan] claimed that Stalin was secretly married to a third wife named Rosa Kaganovich. Rosa was the sister of Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet political leader. However, the claim is unproven and many have disputed this claim, including the Kaganovich family, who deny that Rosa and Stalin ever met.

Stalin's mother died in 1937; he did not attend the funeral but instead sent a wreath.

In March 2001, Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson living in Novokuznetsk. Yuri Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage, but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet. The Soviet dissident writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had mentioned a son being born to Stalin and his common-law wife, Lida, in 1918 during Stalin's exile in northern Siberia.

Rise to power

In 1912 Stalin was assigned to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the Prague Party Conference. In 1917 Stalin was editor of Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were in exile.

Following the February Revolution, Stalin and the editorial board took a position in favor of supporting Alexander Kerensky's provisional government and, it is alleged, went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown.

In April 1917, Stalin was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest vote total in the party and was subsequently elected to the Politburo of the Central Committee (May 1917); he held this position for the remainder of his life.

According to certain accounts, Stalin only played a minor role in the Revolution of 1917. However, the distinguished Harvard professor Adam Ulam argues that each man in the Central Committee had a specific assignment. Upon his return to Russia in July 1917 Lenin argued that a great opportunity existed to seize power from the Kerensky government, merely by arresting its members. Party leadership did its best to organize and coordinate each key leader's role in such a way as to assure the success of the October Revolution. However, Stalin's role may have been less central to the effort than the role taken by others such as Trotsky.

The following summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in Pravda, November 6, 1918:

"All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized."

Later, in 1924, Stalin himself created a myth around a so-called "Party Centre" which "directed" all practical work pertaining to the uprising, consisting of himself, Yakov Sverdlov, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, Moisei Uritsky, and Andrei Bubnov. However, no evidence was ever shown for the activity of this "centre," which would, in any case, have been subordinate to the Military Revolutionary Council, headed by Trotsky.

During the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War, Stalin was a political commissar in the Red Army at various fronts. For some time he was in charge of defense of the town Tsaritsino, where he displayed a tendency toward strong measures and unjustified arrests. At some point Trotsky had to telegraph to Lenin requesting permission to remove Stalin from leadership because military efforts were going badly in spite of military superiority. At that time Stalin was recalled to Moscow. However, in spite of repeated requests from Trotsky to keep Stalin away from military affairs, Lenin did use him because of his ability to seek tasks to completion.

Stalin's first government position was as People's Commissar for Nationality Affairs (1917-1923). He was also People's Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspection (1919-1922), a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (1920-1923) and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (from 1917).

Campaign against the Left and Right Opposition

On April 3, 1922, Stalin was made general secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party ( Bolsheviks), a post that he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country by using it to cultivate supporters. It has been claimed that he initially attempted to decline the post, but was refused. This position was seen to be of a technical nature, a minor one within the party (Stalin was sometimes referred to as "Comrade Card-Index" by fellow party members) but actually had potential as a power base as it allowed Stalin to fill middle echelon positions of the party with his allies. As a result, in collective voting, Stalin's position on any issue became decisive.

As Stalin's popularity grew within the Bolshevik party he gained plenty of political power. This took the dying Lenin by surprise - their relationship had deteriorated over time and in his last Testament Lenin famously called for the removal of the "rude," "disloyal" and "capricious" Stalin. However, this document was voted on for adoption by the Party in a Congress resulting in a unanimous vote against endorsing Lenin's position because he was deemed by this time to be very ill.

After Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin, Lev Borisovich Kamenev, and Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev together governed the party, placing themselves ideologically between Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin (on the right). During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building "Socialism in One Country," in contrast to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. Stalin argued that the Soviet Union lacked the military and economic power to pursue revolution elsewhere and argued that such a policy would only create enemies for the Soviets and lead to the destabilization of the U.S.S.R.

In the struggle for leadership it was evident that whoever assumed power had to be viewed as loyal to Lenin and to Lenin's principles. Stalin organized Lenin's funeral and made a speech professing undying loyalty to Lenin, in almost religious terms. He undermined Trotsky, who was sick at the time, possibly by misleading him about the date of the funeral. Thus although Trotsky was Lenin's associate throughout the early days of the Soviet regime, he lost ground to Stalin. Stalin made great play of the fact that Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks just before the revolution, and publicized Trotsky's pre-revolutionary disagreements with Lenin. Another event that helped Stalin's rise was the fact that Trotsky came out against publication of Lenin's Testament in which he pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of Stalin and Trotsky and the other main players, and suggested that he be succeeded by a small group of people.

An important feature of Stalin's rise to power was his skill in manipulating his opponents and playing them off against each other. Stalin formed a " troika" of himself, Zinoviev, and Kamenev against Trotsky. When Trotsky had been eliminated Stalin then joined Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev, emphasizing their vote against the insurrection in 1917. Zinoviev and Kamenev then turned to Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya; they formed the "United Opposition" in July 1926.

In 1927 during the 15th Party Congress Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and Kamenev lost his seat on the Central Committee. Stalin soon turned against the "Right Opposition," represented by his erstwhile allies, Bukharin and Rykov.

Stalin gained popular appeal through portraying himself as a 'man of the people,' with his roots in the humblest social class. The Russian people had tired from the world war and the civil war, and Stalin's policy of concentrating on building " Socialism in One Country" was viewed as a practical antidote to war (compared to Trotsky's calls for Permanent Revolution)

Stalin took great advantage of a ban on factionalism. This ban prohibited any group from openly opposing the policies of the leader of the party because that would constitute a de facto opposition. By 1928 (the first year of the institution of the Five-Year Plans for economic development) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year Trotsky was exiled because of his opposition to Stalin. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivization and industrialization, Stalin succeeded in exerting control over the party and the country.

However, as the popularity of other leaders such as Sergei Kirov and the so-called Ryutin Affair were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute power until the Great Purge of 1936-1938.

Stalin's secret police and espionage activities

No reference to Joseph Stalin can be made without reference to his unmatched ability to use his intelligence services and the secret police. Though the Soviet secret police, the Cheka (later, the State Political Directorate GPU and OGPU), had already evolved into an arm of state-sanctioned murder under Lenin, Stalin took the use of such forces to a new level in order to solidify his hold on power and eliminate all enemies, real or perceived.

Stalin also vastly increased the foreign espionage activities of Soviet secret police and foreign intelligence. Under his guiding hand, Soviet intelligence forces began to set up intelligence networks in most of the major nations of the world, including Germany (the famous Rote Kappelle spy ring), Great Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Stalin saw no difference between espionage, communist political propaganda actions, and state-sanctioned violence, and he began to integrate all of these activities within the NKVD, which preceded the KGB. Stalin made considerable use of the Communist International movement in order to infiltrate agents and to ensure that foreign Communist parties remained pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin.

Stalin and changes in Soviet society

Industrialization

The Russian Civil War and wartime communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13 percent of that in 1914. A recovery followed under Lenin's New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism.

Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for highly ambitious state-guided "crash" industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

With no seed capital, little international trade, and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization by both restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the kulaks.

In 1933, worker's real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. There was also use of the unpaid labor of both common and political prisoners in labor camps and the frequent "mobilization" of communists and Komsomol members for various construction projects. The Soviet Union also made use of foreign experts, e.g. British engineer Stephen Adams, to instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.

In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While there is general agreement among historians that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate of this growth is disputed.

Official Soviet estimates placed it at 13.9 percent, Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8 percent and even 2.9 percent. Indeed, one estimate is that Soviet growth temporarily was much higher after Stalin's death.

Collectivization

In the first years of collectivization, it was estimated that industrial and agricultural production would rise by 200 percent and 50 percent respectively, however, agricultural production actually dropped. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks only made up 4 percent of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the moderate middle peasants who took the brunt of violence from the State Political Directorate (OGPU) and the Komsomol. The middle peasants were about 60 percent of the population). Therefore those defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were ordered by Stalin to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.

The two-stage progress of collectivization-interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, "Dizzy with success" and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" -is a prime example of Stalin's capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.

During the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine and the Kuban region, now often known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, not only "kulaks" were killed or imprisoned. Stephane Courtois' Black Book of Communism and other sources document that all grain was taken from areas that did not meet targets. This even included the next year's seed grain. Peasants were, nevertheless, forced to remain in these starving areas. Sales of train tickets were halted and the Political Directorate of the State created barriers and obstacles to prevent people from fleeing the starving areas.

However, famine also affected various other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people. Such figures are difficult to square with population figures for the period (which are accepted in the West) that show the population increasing from 147 million in 1926 to 164 million in 1937 although figures such as Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution has written on the famine in great detail. During this same period the Soviet Union was exporting grain.

Soviet authorities and other historians have argued that tough measures and the rapid collectivization of agriculture were necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians such as Alexander Nove, who claim that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than thanks to, its collectivized agriculture.

Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control, along with art and literature. In the Soviet Union, Marxism-Leninism was truly the "Queen of the Sciences," especially during Stalin's rule. On the positive side, there was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic-the most notable examples being attacks on the "bourgeois pseudosciences" of genetics and cybernetics.

Linguistics was one area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that language is a class construction and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, felt he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work discussing linguistics is a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions."

Although no great theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics; his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that could have dominated this arena.

It should be recognized, nevertheless, that much progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and technology. His leadership laid the groundwork for the famous achievements of Soviet science in the 1950s, such as the development of the BESM-1 computer in 1953 and the launching of Sputnik in 1957.

Indeed, many politicians in the United States expressed a fear, after the "Sputnik crisis," that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet Union in science and in public education.

Social services

The Soviet people also benefited from a great degree of social liberalization. As never before, females were given equal education opportunities and women had equal rights in employment that contributed to improving lives for women and families. Women began to occupy leadership roles in industry and education. To assist them, state wide daycare systems were gradually developed. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which vastly increased the lifespan for the typical Soviet citizen and the quality of life. Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people universal access to health care and education, effectively creating the first generation free from the fear of typhus, cholera, and malaria. The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record-low numbers, increasing life spans by decades.

Soviet women under Stalin were also the first generation in Russia to give birth in a hospital, with access to prenatal care. Education also improved as the economic development of the U.S.S.R. continued under Stalin. The generation born during Stalin's rule was the first generation where almost was literate. The social program "LicBez" (from Russian 'Licvidatsiya Bezgramotnosti' for 'elimination of illiteracy') was devised to eliminate illiteracy. The Soviet regime required each child had to attend school (four years in the beginning, then progressively eight and later ten years of required formal schooling) free of charge. This was also made available to Civil War, and later World War II orphans.

This represented the first time in Russian history that a coordinated effort was made to improve orphans' lives by providing basic care and professional education. Publicity campaigns were developed to encourage young men and women to study engineering as preparation for a career in engineering in various industries relating to chemistry, metallurgy and aviation. Engineers were sent abroad to study modern industrial technology and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract. Transportation systems were also improved, as many new railways and roads were constructed. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovites, were rewarded with incentives for their efforts. They were thus in a better position to purchase goods in the expanding Soviet economy.

With industrialization and due to the heavy human losses resulting from World War II as well as the repression and genocide suffered by the generation that lived under Stalin, a manpower shortage resulted that especially opened up new job opportunities for women.

Culture and religion

During Stalin's reign the official and long-lived style of Socialist Realism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama and literature. Previously fashionable "revolutionary" expressionism, abstract art, and avant-garde experimentation were discouraged or denounced as "formalism." Careers were made and broken, some more than once. Famous figures were not only repressed, but often persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them Isaac Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold) and "non-conformists" (for example, Osip Mandelstam).

A minority, both representing the "Soviet man" (Arkady Gaidar) and remnants of the older pre-revolutionary Russia (Konstantin Stanislavski), thrived. A number of former émigrés returned to the Soviet Union, among them Alexei Tolstoi in 1925, Alexander Kuprin in 1936, and Alexander Vertinsky in 1943.

The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general and specific developments has been assessed variously. His name, however, was constantly invoked during his reign in discussions of culture as in just about everything else. In several famous court cases, his opinion sealed the fate of the defendants.

Stalin's occasional beneficence showed itself in strange ways. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov was driven to poverty and despair; yet, after a personal appeal to Stalin, he was allowed to continue working. His play, The Days of the Turbins, with its sympathetic treatment of an anti-Bolshevik family caught up in the Civil War, was finally staged, apparently also on Stalin's intervention, and began a decades-long uninterrupted run at the Moscow Arts Theater.

Some insights into Stalin's political and aesthetic thinking might perhaps be gleaned by reading his favorite novel, Pharaoh, by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus, a historical novel on mechanisms of political power. Similarities have been pointed out between this novel and Sergei Eisenstein's film, Ivan the Terrible, produced under Stalin's tutelage.

In architecture, a Stalinist Empire Style (basically, updated neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by the seven skyscrapers of Moscow) replaced the constructivism of the 1920s.

An amusing anecdote has it that the Moskva Hotel in Moscow was built with mismatched side wings because Stalin had mistakenly signed off on both of the two proposals submitted, and the architects had been too afraid to clarify the matter. In actuality the hotel had been built by two independent teams of architects that had differing visions of how the hotel should look.

Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled or used as clubs, offices, storage space, or as museums. Ceremonial artifacts and vessels were confiscated. Religious icons were burned. Tens of thousands of priests and other religious leaders were persecuted. Many nuns were said to have been raped. During World War II, however, the Church was allowed a revival (winter 1941-1942) as a patriotic organization, after the NKVD had recruited the new metropolitan, the first after the revolution, as a secret agent. Thousands of parishes were reactivated, until a further round of suppression took place during Khrushchev's rule.

The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia that remains not fully healed to the present day.

Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect on the numerous indigenous cultures that made up the Soviet Union. The politics of the Korenization ("enrootment") and forced development of "Cultures National by Form, Socialist by their substance" allowed minorities to survive and integrate into Russian society at some cost to their identity.

The attempted unification of cultures in Stalin's later period was very harmful. Political repressions and purges had even more devastating repercussions on the indigenous cultures than on urban ones, since the cultural elite of the indigenous culture was often small. The traditional lives of many peoples in the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian provinces was upset and large populations were displaced and scattered in order to pre-empt nationalist uprisings.

Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches. Thousands of clergy were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.

Purges and deportations

Left: Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities."
Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (affirmative).
Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin.

As head of the Politburo, Stalin consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party, justified as an attempt to expel 'opportunists' and 'counter-revolutionary infiltrators'. Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps and to execution after trials held by NKVD operatives.

The Purges commenced after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the popular leader of the party in Leningrad. Kirov was very close and loyal to Stalin and his assassination sent chills through the Bolshevik party. It is disputed among historians whether Kirov's assassination was masterminded by Stalin due to Kirov's growing popularity. Stalin took advantage of the Kirov assassination to begin tightening security, (and in effect to remove those who might have threatened Stalin's leadership). He initiated efforts aimed at identifying alleged spies and counter-revolutionaries.

Most notably in the case of alleged Nazi collaborator Tukhachevsky, many military leaders were convicted of treason. The shakeup in command may have cost the Soviet Union dearly during the German invasion of 22 June, 1941, and its aftermath. Stalin's Show Trials also saw the execution of key Soviet leaders who had been with Lenin from the start including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Trotsky.

No segment of society was left untouched during the purges. Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited "anti-Soviet activities," was interpreted and applied in the broadest manner. Initially, the execution lists for the enemies of the people were confirmed by the Politburo.

Over time the procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. People would inform on others arbitrarily, to attempt to redeem themselves, out of envy and plain dislike, or to gain some retributions or benefits. A worker would report on his boss, son on his father, and a young man on his brother. The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "Enemy of the People," starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam and one of the key memoirists of the Purges, recalls being shouted at by Akhmatova: "Don't you understand? They are arresting people for nothing now?" The Russian word troika - initially a sledge driven by the power of three horses - gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to the NKVD. Often perpetrators of the purges - NKVD staff - used it as an opportunity for promotion, to enrich themselves, settle old grudges etc. Since entire families were swept away, women often became object of sexual abuse during interrogation process and in labor camps.

Towards the end of the purge, the Politburo relieved NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov, from his position for overzealousness. He was subsequently executed. Some historians such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest postulate that Stalin had Yezhov and his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda, removed in order to deflect blame from himself.

In parallel with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed to a story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.

Deportations

Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union.

Over 1.5 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations. Many non-Russian ethnic groups were deported completely or partially. Stalin's Russification policies were similar to those of the Tsars. Stalin has been called the 'Red Tsar'.

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles, and reversed most of them, although it was not until as late as 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhs and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic States, Tatarstan and Chechnya, even today.

Numbers of victims

Early researchers of the number killed by Stalin's regime were forced to rely largely upon anecdotal evidence, and their estimates range as high as 60 million. After 1991, hard evidence from the Soviet archives finally became available, and such estimates became more difficult to sustain. The archives record that about 800,000 prisoners were executed (for either political or criminal offenses) under Stalin, while another 1.7 million died of privation or "other causes" in the Gulags and some 389,000 perished during kulak resettlement - a total of about three million victims.

Debate continues however, since some historians believe the archival figures are unreliable. It is generally agreed that the data are incomplete, since some categories of victim were carelessly recorded by the Soviets - such as the victims of ethnic deportations, or of German population transfer in the aftermath of World War II.

These numbers are by no means the full story of deaths attributable to the regime however, since at least another 6 to 8 million victims of the 1932-1933 famine must be added. Again, historians differ, this time as to whether or not the famine victims were purposive killings - as part of the campaign of repression against kulaks - or whether they were simply unintended victims of the struggle over forced collectivization.

It appears that a minimum of ten million deaths (four million by repression and six million from famine) are attributable to the regime, with a number of recent books suggesting a probable figure of somewhere between 15 to 20 million. Adding 6-8 million famine victims to Erlikman's estimates above, for example, would yield a figure of between 15 and 17 million victims. Robert Conquest meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million. Others, however, continue to maintain that their earlier (much higher) estimates are correct.

World War II

After the failure of Soviet and Franco-British talks on a mutual defense pact in Moscow, Stalin realized that war with Germany was inevitable and negotiated a non-aggression pact with Germany. In his speech on August 19, 1939, Stalin prepared his comrades for the great turn in Soviet policy, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. According to a controversial Russian emigre specializing in Soviet military history, Viktor Suvorov, Stalin expressed in the speech an expectation that the war would be the best opportunity to weaken both the Western nations and Nazi Germany, and make Germany suitable for "Sovietization." Whether this speech was ever delivered to the public and what its content was is still debated.

Officially a non-aggression treaty only, the Pact had a "secret" annex according to which Central Europe was divided into the two powers' respective spheres of influence. The USSR was promised an eastern part of Poland, primarily populated with Ukrainians and Belorussians in case of its dissolution, as long as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland were recognized as parts of the Soviet sphere of influence. Another clause of the treaty was that Bessarabia, then part of Romania, was to be joined to the Moldovan ASSR, and become the Moldovan SSR under control of Moscow.

Both Stalin and Hitler intended to outwit each other. While Wermacht and Red Army had joined small scale tactical exercise and maneuvers, Stalin tried to get some time to prepare Red Army and raise new leadership, and Hitler wanted to free his hands for Europe and delude Stalin. While Russia was sending trainloads of provision, nonferrous metals and other important raw materials to Germany, Germany was developing Operation Barbarossa.

On September 1, 1939, the German invasion of Poland started World War II. Stalin then decided to intervene, and on September 17 the Red Army entered eastern Poland and the Baltic states and annexed these territories.

In November 1939, Stalin sent troops over the Finnish border provoking war. The Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland proved to be more difficult than Stalin and the Red Army were prepared for, and the Soviets sustained high casualties. The Soviets prevailed in March, 1940, but the problems of the Soviet army had been revealed to the rest of the world, including Germany.

On March 5, 1940, the Soviet leadership approved an order of execution for more than 25,700 Polish "nationalist, educators and counterrevolutionary" activists in the parts of the Ukraine and Belarus republics that had been annexed from Poland. This event has become known as the Katyn Massacre. Official Soviet archive records, opened in 1990 when glasnost was still in vogue, show that Stalin had every intention of treating the Poles as political prisoners. Treating the executed as Prisoners of War would require prosecution for the surviving perpetrators of the crime; so the matter was dropped.

In June 1941, Hitler broke the pact with Stalin and, after reaching an impasse with Britain, opened a second front ( Operation Barbarossa) and invaded the Soviet Union. Although expecting an eventual war with Germany, Stalin was unprepared for this invasion when it occurred. Even though Stalin received intelligence warnings of a German attack, he sought to avoid any obvious defensive preparation which might further provoke the Germans, in the hope of buying time to modernize and strengthen his military forces. In the initial hours after the German attack commenced, Stalin hesitated, wanting to ensure that the German attack was sanctioned by Hitler, rather than the unauthorized action of a rogue general.

The Germans initially made huge advances, capturing and killing millions of Soviet troops. The Soviet Red Army put up fierce resistance during the war's early stages, but they were plagued by an ineffective defense doctrine against the better-equipped, well-trained and experienced German forces. Hitler's experts had expected eight weeks of war, and early indications appeared to support their predictions. However, the invading German forces were eventually driven back in December 1941 near Moscow.

Stalin met in several conferences with Churchill and/or Roosevelt in Moscow, Tehran, and Yalta, to plan military strategy; ( Truman taking the place of the deceased Roosevelt).

In these conferences, his first appearances on the world stage, Stalin proved to be a formidable negotiator. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary noted:

"Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all. Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated."

His shortcomings as strategist are frequently noted regarding the massive Soviet loss of life and early Soviet defeats. An example is the summer offensive of 1942, which led to even more losses by the Red Army and recapture of initiative by the Germans. Stalin eventually recognized his lack of know-how and relied on his professional generals to conduct the war. Unfortunately during his purge, Stalin had eliminated thousands of Soviet military officers.

Yet Stalin did rapidly relocate Soviet industrial production east of the Volga River, far from Luftwaffe-reach, to sustain the Red Army's war machine with astonishing success. Additionally, Stalin was well aware that other European armies had utterly disintegrated when faced with Nazi military efficacy. Stalin responded effectively by subjecting his army to galvanizing terror and unrevolutionary, nationalist appeals to patriotism. He even appealed to the Russian Orthodox Church and invoked the national Russian heroes of the past. On November 6, 1941, Stalin addressed the whole nation of the Soviet Union for the second time (the first time was earlier that year on July 2).

According to Stalin's Order No. 227 of July 27, 1942, any commander or commissar of a regiment, battalion or army, who allowed retreat without permission from above was subject to military tribunal. The Soviet soldiers who surrendered were declared traitors; however most of those who survived the brutality of German captivity were mobilized again as they were freed. Between 5 and 10 percent of them were sent to gulags.

In the war's opening stages, the retreating Red Army also sought to deny resources to the enemy through a "scorched earth" policy of destroying the infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize them. Unfortunately, this, along with abuse by German troops, caused inconceivable starvation and suffering for the civilian population that was left behind.

According to recent figures, of an estimated four millions Prisoners of War taken by the Russians, (including Germans, Japanese, Hungarians, Romanians and others), some 580,000 never returned, presumably victims of privation or the Gulags. Returning Soviet soldiers who had surrendered were viewed with suspicion and some were killed compared with 3.5 million Soviet POW that died in German camps.

The Soviet Union suffered the second highest number of civilian losses (20 million) and the highest number of military losses (at least 8,668,400 Red Army personnel) in World War II. The Nazis considered Slavs to be "sub-human," and many people believe the Nazis killed Slavs as an ethnically targeted genocide. This concept of Slavic inferiority was also the reason why Hitler did not accept into his army many Soviet citizens who wanted to fight the regime until 1944, when the war was lost for Germany.

In the Soviet Union, World War II left a huge deficit of men of the wartime fighting-age generation. To this day the war is remembered very vividly in Russia, Belarus, and other parts of the former Soviet Union as the "Great Patriotic War," and May 9, "Victory Day," is one of Russia's biggest national holidays.

Post-war era

Domestically, Stalin was presented as a great wartime leader who had led the Soviets to victory against the Nazis. By the end of the 1940s, Russian nationalism increased. For instance, some inventions and scientific discoveries were reclaimed by ethnic Russian researchers. Internationally, Stalin viewed Soviet consolidation of power as a necessary step to protect the USSR by surrounding it with countries with friendly governments, to act as a cordon sanitaire (buffer) against possible invaders (while the West sought a similar buffer against communism).

He had hoped that American withdrawal and demobilization would lead to increased communist influence, especially in Europe. Each side might view the other's defensive actions as destabilizing provocations and these security dilemmas frayed relations between the Soviet Union and its former World War II western allies and led to a prolonged period of tension and distrust between East and West known as the Cold War.

The Red Army ended World War II occupying much of the territory that had been formerly held by the Axis countries:

In Asia, the Red Army had overrun Manchuria in the last month of the war and then also occupied Korea above the 38th parallel north. Mao Zedong's Communist Party of China, though receptive to minimal Soviet support, defeated the pro-Western and heavily American-assisted Chinese Nationalist Party in the Chinese Civil War.

The Communists controlled mainland China while the Nationalists clung only to the island of Formosa (now Taiwan). The Soviet Union soon after recognized Mao's communist People's Republic of China, which it regarded as a new ally although Mao felt that he did not receive proper treatment or appreciation from Stalin when he visited the Soviet Union after he assumed control of the Chinese mainland.

In Europe, there were Soviet occupation zones in Germany and Austria. Hungary and Poland were under practical military occupation. From 1946-1948 communist governments were imposed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria and home-grown communist dictatorships rose to power in Yugoslavia and Albania.

These nations became known as the "Communist Bloc." Britain and the United States supported the anti-communists in the Greek Civil War and suspected the Soviets of supporting the Greek communists although Stalin ended his support while his then ally, Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, continued his support of the Greek communists. Albania remained an ally of the Soviet Union, but Yugoslavia broke with the USSR in 1948. Greece, Italy and France were under the strong influence of local communist parties, which were at the very least friendly towards Moscow.

Both Superpowers viewed Germany as key. Once again, Stalin's pathological investment in foreign intelligence and espionage bore fruit. Armed with intelligence from the British traitor Donald Duart Maclean and other British and American espionage agents, Stalin was well aware that the United States possessed neither a sufficient atomic bomb arsenal nor the production capacity needed to produce atomic weapons to destroy Soviet or Communist land forces either in Europe or the Far East. He therefore ordered a blockade of West Berlin, which was under British, French, and U.S. occupation, to force these powers into surrendering their occupation zones in the city. He also began extensively arming Kim Il Sung's North Korean army and air forces (with military equipment and advisors far in excess of that required for defensive purposes) in order to facilitate Kim's 1950 invasion of South Korea.

The Berlin Blockade failed due to the unexpected massive aerial resupply campaign carried out by the Western powers known as the Berlin Airlift. In 1949, Stalin conceded defeat and ended the blockade. After West Germany was formed by the union of the three Western occupation zones, the Soviets declared East Germany a separate country in 1949, ruled by the communists.

Stalin originally supported the creation of Israel in 1948. The USSR was one of the first nations to recognize the new country and saw the creation of Israel as a way to reduce the British presence in the Middle East. Golda Meir came to Moscow as the first Israeli Ambassador to the USSR that year. But Stalin later changed his mind and came out against Israel. Right before his death in June 1953 Stalin was planning an anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish campaign in the USSR and another blood purge of the government.

Stalin as theorist

Stalin contributions to Communist (or, more specifically, Marxist-Leninist) theory included his emphasis on the need to establish a communist hegemony in one state prior to attempting to extend to other states. Another of Stalin's contributions was his "Marxism and the National Question," a work praised by Lenin. His "Trotskyism or Leninism," was a factor in the "liquidation of Trotskyism as an ideological trend" within the CPSU(B). Stalin also attempted to refine the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of dialectical and historical materialism and those refinements continued to appear in Soviet writings on Marxism-Leninism until the demise of the Soviet State.

Stalin's Collected Works (in 13 volumes) was released in 1949. A subsequent 16 volume American Edition appeared, in which one volume consisted of the book "History of the CPSU(B) Short Course," although when released in 1938 this book was credited to a commission of the Central Committee.

On March 1, 1953, after an all-night dinner with interior minister Lavrenty Beria and future premiers Georgi Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin collapsed in his room, having probably suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body. Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage. His body was preserved in Lenin's Mausoleum until October 31, 1961, when his body was removed from the Mausoleum and buried next to the Kremlin walls as part of the process of de-Stalinization.

It has been suggested that Stalin was assassinated. The ex-Communist exile Avtorkhanov argued this point as early as 1975. The political memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claimed that Beria had boasted to Molotov that he poisoned Stalin: "I took him out."

Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after the stroke, gone about "spewing hatred against [Stalin] and mocking him," and then, when Stalin showed signs of consciousness, dropped to his knees and kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria immediately stood and spat.

In 2003, a joint group of Russian and American historians announced their view that Stalin ingested warfarin, a powerful rat poison that inhibits coagulation of the blood and so predisposes the victim to hemorrhagic stroke (cerebral hemorrhage).

His demise arrived at a convenient time for Beria and others, who feared being swept away in yet another purge. It is believed that Stalin felt Beria's power was too great and threatened his own. Whether or not Beria or another usurper was directly responsible for his death, it is true that the Politburo did not summon medical attention for Stalin for more than a day after he was found.

Cult of Personality and Legacy

Under Stalin's rule the Soviet Union was transformed from an agricultural nation to a nuclear superpower but at the cost of millions of lives. The USSR's industrialization was moderately successful and with the help of the United States' provision of supplies under the Lend Lease Plan, the country was able to defend against and eventually defeat the Axis invasion in World War II, though at an enormous cost in human life. Other historians claim that the USSR was bound for industrialization, and that its speed along this course was not necessarily improved by Bolshevik influence. It has also been argued that Stalin should be held accountable for the initial military disasters and enormous human casualties during WWII, because Stalin eliminated many military officers during the purges, and especially the most senior ones, and that he rejected the massive amounts of intelligence warning of the German attack.

Stalin's political, social and economic policies as well as his great negotiating skills and his intelligence network laid the foundations for the USSR's emergence as a superpower. The harshness with which he conducted Soviet affairs was subsequently repudiated by his successors in the Communist Party leadership, notably in the denunciation of Stalinism by Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956. In his "Secret Speech," On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, delivered to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his cult of personality, and his regime for "violation of Leninist norms of legality."

Stalin's immediate successors, however, continued to follow the basic principles of Stalin's rule - the political monopoly of the Communist Party presiding over a command economy and a security service able to suppress dissent. The large-scale purges of Stalin's era were never repeated although political repression continued. This was seen by some as a perpetuation of the Stalinist legacy.

1. Although there is an inconsistency among published sources about Stalin's year and date of birth, Iosif Dzhugashvili is listed in the records of the Uspensky Church in Gori, Georgia as born on December 18 (Old Style: December 6) 1878. This birth date is maintained in his School Leaving Certificate, his extensive tsarist Russia police file, a police arrest record from April 18, 1902 which gave his age as 23 years, and all other surviving pre-revolution documents. Stalin himself listed December 18, 1878 in a curriculum vitae as late as 1920, in his own handwriting. However after his coming to power in 1922, the date was changed to December 21, 1879 (December 9, Old Style), and that was the day his birthday was celebrated in the Soviet Union. Russian playwright Edvard Radzinsky argues in his book Stalin that he changed the year to 1879 to have a nation-wide birthday celebration of his 50th birthday. He could not do it in 1928 because his rule was not absolute enough. Stalin I. V. State and Power. Retrieved July 31, 2013.

2. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York, NY: Vintage, 2003, ISBN 1400032202), 133; Adam Bruno Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989, ISBN 080707005X), 354, in a footnote he quotes the press announcement as speaking of her "sudden death"; he also cites his daughter Svetlana's book, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1967, ISBN 0060100990), 103-105 (in Russian).

3. Note: Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book The October Revolution issued in 1924, it was expunged in Stalin's Works released in 1949. The October Revolution by J.V. Stalin.marxists.org. Retrieved February 23, 2009.

4. Joseph V. Stalin (1950-06-20), "Concerning Marxism in Linguistics," Pravda. Available online as Marxism and Problems of Linguistics including other articles and letters published (also in Pravda) soon after February 8 and July 4, 1950. Retrieved July 31, 2013.

5. Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm Retrieved July 31, 2013.

6. SOVIET STUDIES and other sources soveitinfo.tripod.com. Retrieved February 22, 2009.

7. Niall Ferguson, June 12, 2005, Stalin's Intelligence.The New York Times. Retrieved February 23, 2009.

8. Anthony Eden, Memoirs: The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965).

9. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia. 568-569.

References

Alliluyeva Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. (English ed.) New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1967. ISBN 0060100990

Amis, Martin. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. New York, NY: Vintage, 2003. ISBN 1400032202

Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York, NY: Anchor, 2004. ISBN 1400034094

Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. London: Fontana Press, 1998. ISBN 0006863744

Boterbloem, Kees. Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945-1953. Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. ISBN 0773518118

Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. London: Hutchinson, 1990. ISBN 0091742935

Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. London: Hutchinson, 1986. ISBN 0091637503

Courtois, Stephane et al. Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, translated from the French by Jonathan Murphy. Harvard University Press, 1999. ISBN 0674076087

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin: A Political Biography. (1966) reprint Kessinger Pub. 2007. ISBN 1432579002

Eden, Anthony. Memoirs: The Reckoning. London: Cassell, 1965.

Gill, Graeme J. Stalinism. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1998. ISBN 031217764X

De Jonge, Alex. Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union. New York, NY: William Morrow & Co., 1986. ISBN 0688047300

Ilic, Melanie, and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, ed. Stalin's Terror Revisited. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 1403947058

Iremashvili, Ioseb. Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens. Berlin: 1932. (in German)

Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Stalin. New York, NY: Pearson/Longman, 2005. ISBN 0582784794

Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. ISBN 0044407696

Mace, James E. "The Man-Made Famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine." 1-14 in Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko, ed. Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933. Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986. ISBN 0920862438

McDermott, Kevin. Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 0333711211

Medvedev, Roy A., and Zhores A. Medvedev. The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death and Legacy, Translated by Ellen Dahrendorf. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2004. ISBN 1585675024

Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York, NY: Knopf : Dist. by Random House, 2004. ISBN 1400042305

Overy, Richard. Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2004. ISBN 0393020304

Radzinsky, Edvard. Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives, Translated by H.T. Willetts. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1996. ISBN 0385473974. Chapter 1 washingtonpost.com. is available online. Retrieved February 21, 2009.

Rayfield, Donald. Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him. New York, NY: Random House, 2004. ISBN 0375506322

Rummel, R.J. Death By Government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994. ISBN 1560001453

Rummel, R.J. Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. Transaction Publishers, 1990. ISBN 1560008873

Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 0674016971

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956. NY: HarperPerennial, 2002. ISBN 0060007761

Tucker, Robert C. Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929; A Study in History and Personality. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1973. ISBN 039305487X

Tucker, Robert C. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1990. ISBN 039302881X

Ulam, Adam Bruno. Stalin: The Man and His Era. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989. ISBN 080707005X

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Place of Birth Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire Place of Death Moscow, USSR Iosif Vissarionovič Stalin, born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, December 18, 1878 (O.S. December 6) - March 5, 1953, usually transliterated Josef Stalin, consolidated power to become the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union between 1928 and his death in 1953.

# data[].attributes.body
in 1902 Stalin was arrested for the first time

Evidence #1:
"Stalin was arrested for revolutionary activities for the first time in April 1902 and spent eighteen months in local prisons before being sent to sibera for the first time." (29)

# data[].attributes.body
he was enrolled into a religious school that was really strict and they had punishements for not following the rules. the punishments would be like a rod across the knuckles. the school was later on closed because the principal of the school was murdured.

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1905 was when Stalin had a small role in the revolution of 1905. he had to go to a conference and the main goal of it was to reunify Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

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Stalin took his first trip to the russian empire and he traveled to the Social Democrat conferece that was being held at Stockholm, Sweden.

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His next few years were not really known because he was doing an underground activity, in prison cells, and in Siberian exile.

evidence #2
"Stalin's next few years were a blur of underground activity, prison cells, and Siberian exile. sometime along the way, he got married, perhaps from 1905 to 1906. Remarkably, the atheist agreed to a church ceremony at his wife's request. his new wife, Ekaterina Svandiza, was a seamstress and the sister of a local revolutionary."(42)

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Stalin and his wife had a kid and named him Yakov but then unfortunately his wife got really sick and passed away not long after.

Outside Source #2
"Born 18 March 1907, Yakov Stalin (or Dzhugashvili) was the son of Joseph Stalin and Stalin’s first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze."

https://rupertcolley.com/2015/03/18/yakov-stalin-a-brief-biography/

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Yakov Stalin – a brief biography - Rupert Colley

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Born 18 March 1907, Yakov Stalin (or Dzhugashvili) was the son of Joseph Stalin and Stalin’s first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze. Stalin certainly didn’t harbour particularly warm feelings for his son. Deprived of his father’s affections and upset by a failed romance, Yakov, or Yasha as Stalin called him…

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Joseph Djugashvili, also known as Koba and Stalin/ man of steel, was ordered by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to visit Vienna for research purposes. he returns to Russia and was arrested and sentenced to 4 years.

Outside Source #3
"He was arrested multiple times between 1902 and 1913, and subjected to imprisonment and exile in Siberia."

https://www.history.com/topics/russia/joseph-stalin

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Young Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili on December 18, 1878, or December 6, 1878, according to the Old Style Julian calendar (although he later invented a new birth date for himself: December 21, 1879). He grew up in the small town of Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian empire. When he was in his 30s, he took the name Stalin, from the Russian for "man of steel."

Did you know? In 1925, the Russian city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad. In 1961, as part of the de-Stalinization process, the city, located along Europe's longest river, the Volga, became known as Volgograd. Today, it is one of Russia's largest cities and a key industrial center.

Stalin grew up poor and an only child. His father was a shoemaker and an alcoholic who beat his son, and his mother was a laundress. As a boy, Stalin contracted smallpox, which left him with lifelong facial scars. As a teen, he earned a scholarship to attend a seminary in the nearby city of Tblisi and study for the priesthood in the Georgian Orthodox Church.

While there he began secretly reading the work of German social philosopher and Communist Manifesto author Karl Marx, becoming interested in the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. In 1899, Stalin was expelled from the seminary for missing exams, although he claimed it was for Marxist propaganda.

After leaving school, Stalin became an underground political agitator, taking part in labor demonstrations and strikes. He adopted the name Koba, after a fictional Georgian outlaw-hero, and joined the more militant wing of the Marxist Social Democratic movement, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin.

Stalin also became involved in various criminal activities, including bank heists, the proceeds from which were used to help fund the Bolshevik Party. He was arrested multiple times between 1902 and 1913, and subjected to imprisonment and exile in Siberia.

Children

In 1906, Stalin married Ekaterina "Kato" Svanidze, a seamstress. The couple had one son, Yakov, who died as a prisoner in Germany during World War II. Ekaterina perished from typhus when her son was an infant.

In 1918 (some sources cite 1919), Stalin married his second wife, Nadezhda "Nadya" Alliluyeva, the daughter of a Russian revolutionary. They had two children, a boy and a girl (Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, caused an international scandal when she defected to the United States in 1967). Nadezhda committed suicide in her early 30s. Stalin also fathered several children out of wedlock.

Rise to Power

In 1912, Lenin, who was then in exile in Switzerland, appointed Stalin to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Three years later, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power during the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922, with Lenin as its first leader.

During these years, Stalin had continued to move up the party ladder, and in 1922 he became secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a role that enabled him to appoint his allies to government jobs and grow a base of political support.

After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin eventually outmaneuvered his rivals and won the power struggle for control of the Communist Party. By the late 1920s, he had become dictator of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union Under Stalin

Starting in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin launched a series of five-year plans intended to transform the Soviet Union from a peasant society into an industrial superpower. His development plan was centered on government control of the economy and included the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which the government took control of farms.

Millions of farmers refused to cooperate with Stalin's orders and were shot or exiled as punishment, particularly the kulaks, the more-prosperous farmers who owned land and hired paid workers. The forced collectivization soon led to widespread famine across the Soviet Union that killed millions.

Stalin ruled by terror, with a totalitarian grip in order to eliminate anyone who might oppose him. He expanded the powers of the secret police, encouraged citizens to spy on one another and had millions of people killed or sent to the Gulag system of forced labor camps.

During the second half of the 1930s, Stalin instituted the Great Purge, a series of campaigns designed to rid the Communist Party, the military and other parts of Soviet society from those he considered a threat.

Additionally, Stalin built a cult of personality around himself in the Soviet Union. Cities were renamed in his honor. Soviet history books were rewritten to give him a more prominent role in the revolution and mythologize other aspects of his life.

Stalin was the subject of flattering artwork, literature and music, and his name became part of the Soviet national anthem. He censored photographs in an attempt to rewrite history, removing former associates executed during his many purges. His government also controlled the Soviet media.

Joseph Stalin and World War II

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Joseph Stalin and Germany's Nazi Party dictator Adolf Hitler signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Stalin then proceeded to annex parts of Poland and Romania, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He also launched an invasion of Finland.

Then, in June 1941, Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet pact and invaded the USSR, making significant early inroads. (Stalin had ignored warnings from the Americans and the British, as well as his own intelligence agents, about a potential invasion, and the Soviets were not prepared for war.)

As German troops approached the Soviet capital of Moscow, Stalin remained there and directed a scorched earth defensive policy, destroying any supplies or infrastructure that might benefit the enemy. The tide turned for the Soviets with the Battle of Stalingrad from August 1942 to February 1943, during which the Red Army defeated the Germans and eventually drove them from Russia.

As the war progressed, Stalin participated in the major Allied conferences, including the Tehran Conference (1943) and the Yalta Conference (1945). His iron will and deft political skills enabled him to play the loyal ally while never abandoning his vision of an expanded postwar Soviet empire.

Later Years

Joseph Stalin did not mellow with age: He initiated a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to labor camps and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing all dissent and anything that smacked of foreign-especially Western-influence.

He established communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, and in 1949 led the Soviets into the nuclear age by exploding an atomic bomb. In 1950, he gave North Korea's communist leader Kim Il Sung permission to invade United States-supported South Korea, an event that triggered the Korean War.

How Did Joseph Stalin Die?

Stalin, who grew increasingly paranoid in his later years, died on March 5, 1953, at age 74, after suffering a stroke. His body was embalmed and preserved in Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square until 1961, when it was removed and buried near the Kremlin walls as part of the de-Stalinization process initiated by Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971).

How Many People Did Joseph Stalin Kill?

By some estimates, Joseph Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 6 million to 20 million people during his brutal rule, either though political executions or indirectly as a result of Stalin's policies. The killings first began in the 1930s, as a wave of executions swept the Soviet Union during Stalin's Great Purge.

"In some cases, a quota was established for the number to be executed, the number to be arrested," said Stanford University history professor Norman Naimark in a 2010 interview. "Some officials overfulfilled as a way of showing their exuberance."

Millions more were killed in the horrific famine that struck Ukraine in 1932-1933 and the Kazakh region from 1930 to 1933, as a of Stalin's cruel efforts to impose collectivism of agriculture and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism. Estimates vary, but about 4 million men, women and children are believed to have starved to death during the Holodomor (a combination of the Ukrainian words for "starvation" and "to inflict death").

Sources

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). PBS.
Joseph Stalin: National hero or cold-blooded murderer? BBC.
Stalin killed millions. A Stanford historian answers the question, was it genocide? Stanford News.

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Joseph Stalin: Death, Quotes & Facts | HISTORY

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Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953. Through terror, murder, brutality and mass imprisonment, he modernized the Soviet economy.

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In March of 1908, Stalin was sent to exile in central Siberia for two years for underground organizations.

Evidence #3
"in late march 1908, authorities charged Stalin with leading an underground organization. he was sent to two years' exile in central Siberia."(43)

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After Stalin's sentence was up he moved to Vologda in Moscow in June 1911. He did not stay there for long because then in February he escaped Vologda and went back to St. Petersberg.

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In August of 1914 Stalin once again was on the run. He escaped from the artic and the government was on a search for him. Stalin would use dogsleds, reindeer-sleigh, and go by foot to escape. then he stayed in Achinsk until 1917

E vidence #4
"world war I. which began in August 1914, provided Stalin an escape from the artic. the government began calling up political prisoners to serve in the army. Stalin traveled via dogsled, reindeer-sleigh, and on foot to take the required physical. his injured left arm kept him out of the service, but he soon got out the rest of his time in Achinsk, a town on the trans-Siberian railroad. there he was able to re-establish ties with the social democratic movement. he remained in Technik until 1917."(49)

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Stalin marries Nadya Alliluyeva

Outside Source #4
"Following the October Revolution of 1917, Nadya became Stalin’s personal assistant as he embarked on his job as the People’s Commissar for Nationalities and joined him in the city of Tsaritsyn during the Russian Civil War. They married in 1919 and had two children."
https://rupertcolley.com/2015/09/22/nadezhda-alliluyeva-stalins-second-wife-a-summary/

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Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife - a summary - Rupert Colley

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Joseph Stalin married twice. His first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died in December 1907, aged 22, from typhus. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, shot herself and died on 9 November 1932, aged 31. As a two-year-old in 1903, Nadezhda, or Nadya, Alliluyeva was reputedly saved from drowning by the vi…

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the Russian Civil War started and Stalin used brutal methods to stablize the istuation in Tsaritsyn.

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Stalin becomes general secretary.

evidence #5
"dispite stalin's personal shortcomings, he worked harder then anyone else. he was appointed general secretary of the communist party of april 3 1922, which put him in charge of day-to-day operations."(85)

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Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev ally with Stalin again Trotsky.

evidence #6
"The battle for power resumed. in April 1929, Zinoviev and Kamenev asked their old ally for help." (100)

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Stalin became a radical tandformation of agriculture. He had obsticles tho. His first obsitcle was the kulaks. He came up with a plan.

evidence #7
"for rapid indurstilaizarion to suceed, the preasents had to produce more food. at the end of 1929, stalin begam a radical transofrmation of agriculture. the first obscle was the kulaks, whcoh had begun to prosper uner NEP. usually hardworking and enterprigin, amny had brought plots of land to add to their existing farms and hired farmhands....a farmer who was labled a kulak lost everything. those who resisted faced execution or a logn sentance in on eo f the forced labor camps...hinger and exposure killed tens of thousands along the way."(109)

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Stalin's second wife Nadya Alliluyeva passes away of suicide

Evidence #8
"Stalin's relationship with Nadya was also strained... however her depression had worsened over the past few years. whether this was medical, stress-related, or due to despair over her marriage remains unclear. Nadya traveled to Germany to be examined by experts. their diagnosis remains unknown, and she continued to suffer and fight with Stalin... The newspapers said Nadya died of appendicitis. Stalin allowed his children to believe the story. for the rest of the year he wen into seclusion."(115-116)

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Stalin appoints Nikolai Yezhov as the head of the NKVD, launching the most intense period of the great terror.

Evidence #9
"Stalin had a new man in mind as head of the NKVD. Nikolai Yezhov had led the Kirov investigation and the Zinoviev- Kamenev frame-up....slain, of course, knew and participated at every level of the great terror. sentencing people to die was part of his workday. records show his signature on execution lists with thousands of names, his lieutenant Molotov had similar powers, as did Yezhov and others in the inner circle."(131-132)

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Stalin wanted to get all of Berlin so he made an attempt. But his plan failed because his plan was to starve West Berlin but the US and Britain airlifted supplies.

Evidence #10
" after 1947, a series of events accelerated tensions betwee the USSR and the west. Stalin wanted to control all of Berlin, which was divided into sectors, east and west. his attempt to starve west berlin into submissions failed when the US and Britain airlifted supplies into the city."(177)

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Soviets succestfully tested an atomic bomb it exploded.

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on March 1st, 1953 Stalin suffers a stroke and he passes away on March 5th 1953.

Outside Source #5
"That night, Stalin’s iron-fisted 30-year rule over the Soviet Union ended. His death was recorded at 9:50 p.m."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-death-stalin-180965119/

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Near the end of his life, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had taken to spending almost all of his free time at his dacha in the Moscow suburb of Kuntsevo. Easily depressed when left on his own, he regularly summoned four members of his inner circle to join him there for a movie and a meal.

Stalin's "comrades-in-arms" at that time included Georgy Malenkov, Stalin's likely successor and deputy premier; Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's influential chief of secret police, who was also jockeying for power; Nikita Khrushchev, whom Stalin had summoned to Moscow to balance the power dynamics of Malenkov and Beria; and Nikolai Bulganin, Stalin's defense minister.

"As soon as he woke up, he would ring us- the four of us-and either invite us to see a film or start some long conversation about a question that could have been resolved in two minutes," Khrushchev later recounted.

The move was in part for company, in part to keep an eye on them.

In 1953, Stalin was 73. He suffered either a heart attack or a series of strokes in 1945, and his health hadn't been the same since. His paranoia, too, was at an all-time high.

When he had gone in for his regular check-up in 1951, his doctor told him to rest more and work less, words that Stalin did not take well, biographer Roman Brackman wrote in The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life. "[T]hree decades earlier, plotting to hasten [Premier Vladimir] Lenin's death and pretending to worry about his health, [Stalin] had insisted that Lenin be kept from his daily duties," he explained.

The doctor was arrested and charged with working as a spy for British intelligence. But whether Stalin wanted to admit it or not, his health was indeed flagging. When he summoned a Communist Party Congress-the first in over a decade-in 1952, those attending expected it to outline the roadmap of party succession. Instead, New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote, "If it had seemed for a short time that the great roles at the party congress were to go to Malenkov and Khruschev, such ideas were quickly dispelled. The great role, the only important one at the congress, was played by Stalin himself."

Rather than chart a clear course forward, Stalin proceeded to shake up the Kremlin hierarchy, appointing in a host of young, relative unknowns in positions in ways that were "designed to conceal and confuse the lines of succession rather than clarify," wrote Salisbury.

When it came to members of his inner circle, he especially wanted to remind them they were all disposable. "He liked to repeat to us, you are blind like kittens," Khrushchev recalled. "Without me the imperialists will throttle you."

But in the final months of his life, watchers of the Soviet Union could detect something more was going on with Stalin. As rumors swarmed about who held court in his chain of command, in the winter of 1953, Stalin turned his attention toward the Soviet Jews in a campaign that foreshadowed a new wave of purges and party upheaval reminiscent to the Great Terror of the 1930s that had the potential to shake the foundations of the Soviet Union and its leadership.

The situation was such that it's possible it may have caused his "comrades-in-arms" to risk poisoning Stalin on the night of February 28, 1953.

Late that evening, Stalin summoned Malenkov, Beria, Khruschev and Bulganin like normal to watch a movie. After, they retired to Stalin's Kuntesvo dacha, where they sat down to a meal, during which Stalin inquired whether confessions had been extracted for a trial he would soon oversee. That winter, Stalin had been waging a witch hunt against Kremlin physicians, many of whom were Jewish, claiming they murdered top Soviet officials in a "doctors' plot. The trial against the Kremlin doctors was to commence within weeks.

According to Khrushchev's account of the night, they finished around 5 or 6 in the morning. "We said goodbye to Comrade Stalin and departed," he wrote. "I remember that when we were in the entrance hall Stalin came out as usual to see us off. He was in a jocular mood and joked a lot. He waved his index finger or his fist and prodded me in the stomach, calling me Mikola. He always used the Ukrainian form of my name when he was in good spirits. Well, we left in good spirits too, since nothing had happened during the dinner. Those dinners did not always end on a happy note."

But perhaps all wasn't so rosy the night of the 28th. "[H]ad some great row finally broken out?" Salisbury asked in his memoir. "Were they prepared to let events move forward and possibly engulf them all? Three of them - Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev - were as crafty, as skilled, as tough as any figures to be found in Russia. Did those three march down the path to the precipice without making a move to save themselves?"

The next day, a Sunday, Khrushchev says he remained at home, expecting Stalin to call to extend an invitation for that evening. But Stalin did not call him, or anyone else for that matter. He didn't ring for food, nor had the sensors installed in Stalin's rooms detected movement.

According to later interviews, those working at the dacha claimed they were too scared to disturb Stalin. But in The Unknown Stalin, historians Zhores Medvedev and Roy Medvedev are suspicious of that narrative: "[I]t would not have been normal for the staff to be afraid of entering Stalin's room or even to ring him on the house line," they wrote.

It took until around 10:30 at night for someone to check on Stalin. According to one account, one of the guards, Peter Lozgachev was the one who finally entered Stalin's quarters, ostensibly to drop off official mail from the Kremlin. Other accounts say it was the longtime maid.

Whoever entered the room found the dictator on the ground in his pajamas, the floor soaked with urine. An empty glass and mineral water were on the table, and it appeared as though Stalin had gotten out of bed to get water, but then had a stroke.

Members of the dacha staff carried him onto the dining room sofa, where they covered him with a rug. While the consensus among those present was to call a doctor, the officers on guard wanted to wait on instructions from the party leadership. Eventually, they got Beria on the phone, who demanded they tell no one of Stalin's illness.

Beria and Malenkov arrived first at the dacha. According to testimony compiled by Miguel A. Faria in the journal Surgical Neurology International, Lozgachev said that Beria, upon seeing Stalin snoring, asked, "Lozgachev, why are you in such a panic? Can't you see, Comrade Stalin is sleeping soundly. Don't disturb him and stop alarming us."

Even if no one had poisoned Stalin the night before, Simon Sebag Montefiore in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar suggested they could have observed the state he was in, and made a decision there to hasten his death. Signs pointed to Beria having fallen out of Stalin's good graces-and thus he potentially stood to gain the most from the leader's death. But Beria could have also believed what he was saying; to an untrained eye, Stalin may very well have appeared to be sleeping. And with the doctors' plot trial in the offing, no one wanted to have to be the one to call a doctor. "[The inner circle was] so accustomed to his minute control that they could barely function on their own," Montefiore added.

Intentionally or not, it took until around 7 in the morning for the members to reach a decision to call the Minister of Health to select doctors for an initial look. When the doctors finally arrived, they found Stalin unresponsive, his right arm and leg, paralyzed, and his blood pressure at the alarmingly high rate of 190/110. "They had to examine him, but their hands were too shaky. To make it worse, the dentist took out his dentures, and dropped them by accident," according to Lozgachev's testimony. They ordered complete quiet, put leeches behind his ears, a cold compress on his head and recommended he not eat.

Two days after the doctors first saw him, Radio Moscow made the announcement, revealing Stalin had suffered a stroke on Sunday night.

The message said he was receiving suitable medical treatment under the close eye of party leaders, worded in such a way to reassure a public frenzied by the doctors' plot allegations that none of the doctors treating Stalin were in any way connected to the alleged conspiracy. (Ironically, those consulted actually did include several imprisoned Kremlin doctors, according to Joshua Rubenstein in The Last Days of Stalin. One, a pathologist named Aleksandr Myasnikov, said he was mid-interrogation when his captors suddenly started asking for medical advice instead.)

On March 5, Stalin vomited blood and his stomach started hemorrhaging, a detail cut from the final report issued to the Central Committee, until scholars Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov unearthed the detail in 2003.

The long-buried evidence could suggest a cover up. It's known that on the night of February the 28, Stalin drank "fruit juice" (diluted Georgian wine). Poison, perhaps in the form of the poisonous, tasteless blood thinner warfarin, could have easily been slipped in Stalin's drink and could have caused his stomach hemorrhaging, Faria writes. But whether that's the case will likely forever remain a matter of speculation, Brent and Naumov concluded in Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953. That night, Stalin's iron-fisted 30-year rule over the Soviet Union ended. His death was recorded at 9:50 p.m.

During his three decades in power, the Soviet Premier commanded not just the party leadership, but also the hearts and minds of the Russian public. His personality cult was such that in spite of his reign of terror that caused tens of millions to die, he remained "Uncle Joe," the "father" of all Russians to his final days.

Upon Stalin's death, Beria, with his network of spies and contacts, seemed poised to take over. But he fatally underestimated his opponents. As Khrushchev, the outsider, would soon show, the struggle for who would fill the power vacuum left in Stalin's absence was just beginning.
*Editors' note, March 7, 2022: This story has been edited to reflect that some of the details about Stalin's death were uncovered by scholars in 2003, not 2013 as originally stated.

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Near the end of his life, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had taken to spending almost all of his free time at his dacha in the Moscow suburb of Kuntsevo. Easily depressed when left on his own, he regularly summoned four members of his inner circle to join him there for a movie and a meal.