Joseph Stalin

**Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin** (born **Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili**); (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a communist revolutionary and politician who led the Soviet Union from 1924 to his death.   

In the Soviet Union, Stalin created a totalitarian political system now called Stalinism. He also used Marxism–Leninism and made it the Soviet Union's official political ideology. 

After World War II, Stalin gained control over all of Eastern Europe, including part of Germany. There he set up a series of loyal Marxist-Leninist single-party states. This made the Soviet Union a superpower. Stalin's policies turned the Soviet Union into a powerful, relatively modern country that was the largest on Earth. 

Stalin was known as a brutal leader who was responsible for the deaths of over 50 million people in what was called the Holodomor. 

## Name
Stalin was born as **Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili** or **Iosif Dzhugashvili**. He began calling himself "Stalin" in 1912.
* In  - ; born  - .
* In  - 
* 

## Early life
On 18 December 1878, Stalin was born in a small one-room house in Gori, Georgia, which was then a region in the Russian Empire that is now in Georgia. His parents had two other children, but both died. was an abusive alcoholic. 

### Health problems 
Stalin was born with two fused toes on his left foot. (Later, in the Soviet Union, photos of Stalin were often changed to hide those scars. It is also possible that he had a birth injury or Erb's Palsy. He was an active student who read many books. He especially liked books that were not allowed by the seminary, including Karl Marx's writings.

In 1898, Stalin joined a Marxist group called the *Mesame Dasi*, or Group Three. 

Soon, he escaped from Siberia, which led to many later claims that he was a police spy. Those beliefs increased after the arrest of Stephan Shaumyan, a Bolshevik rival of Stalin.

### General Secretary 
 (left side) in 1922]]
Stalin was a member of the Bolshevik Party, but he did not do much in the Russian Revolution of 1917. 

Stalin held a number of organizational jobs in the Communist Party. In 1922, he became General Secretary, which allowed him to give jobs to people he liked in the Communist Party. 

### Mass executions 
 killed during Stalin's rule]]
To eliminate "enemies of the working class", Stalin instituted the "Great Terror" (also called the "Great Purge"). His government executed at least 700,000 people and sent over a million others to gulags between 1934 and 1939. 

Stalin executed most of the generals in the Red Army because he saw them as a threat to his rule. That caused his army to be greatly weakened when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Two years before, the Soviets and the Germans had signed a mutual non-aggression pact, promising not to fight with each other. However, Hitler hated communism. After taking over France, he sent the Wehrmacht to invade the Soviet Union.

After the Nazis invaded, the Soviet Union began working with the Western Allies to defeat Germany. Germany eventually lost the war, but the USSR had more casualties than any other country during the war.

### Postwar 
Under Stalin, the Soviet Union became the largest country in the world. After Germany had been defeated, Stalin gained control over East Germany and most of the rest of Eastern Europe. 

The Soviet Union grew to include today's countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. 

Stalin's government forced those countries to obey him even though the American and British governments protested. Other countries (like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary) became satellite states of the Soviets and adopted communism.

In 1947, the Cold War had begun, and Stalin militarized the Soviet Union by focusing its time and energy on weapons, military vehicles, and the armed forces.

## Policies 
### Food and agriculture 
*Also see: Collectivization* during the 1941 October Revolution Parade]]
Stalin collectivized farms in the Soviet Union, which meant cancelling the private property rights of the people who owned them. Stalin's government took land away from individual farm owners and created large government-run farms. People were required to work on large farms and to turn their harvests over to the government.

Collectivization did not work well. Farmers were not paid much money, and whatever they grew went to the state. That made the workers not try their best. In 1932-1933, there was a famine, and millions of people starved notably in Ukraine, which is called the Holodomor.

Peasants were given very small bits of land to grow whatever they liked and keep what they grew. The best farming in the Soviet Union came from those small pieces of land. In 1938, they made up just 4% of Soviet farmland but grew 20% of its produce.

There was a second great famine in the Soviet Union in 19461947. It was caused by drought and made worse by the devastation caused by the war. In 1946, the Soviet Union produced 39.6 million tons of grain: barely 40% of what it had produced in 1940.

## Death
 on 9 March 1953]]
In his later years, Stalin's health declined. He had cardiovascular problems  high blood pressure, and a series of strokes. According to official records, he died on 5 March 1953 after a stroke. They thought Stalin had a brain bleed because he was given warfarin, a powerful blood thinner that was used as a rat poison during Stalin's time.

However, Stalin was in his mid-seventies when he died. According to his autopsy, he had severe atherosclerosis. Modern medicines for high blood pressure did not exist at the time. 

In a 2023 scientific paper, Dr. Matthew Turner concluded:*After examining the evidence, [I think] Stalin’s disease course and the properties of warfarin make it highly unlikely that he was deliberately assassinated.*

### De-Stalinization 
Nikita Krushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1953-1964, began a process of "De-Stalinization," which meant taking apart much of the political system that Stalin made. Stalin was denounced as a tyrant. After outsmarting and defeating his rivals, Krushchev established a personal control over the government  that was comparable to Stalin's own.

## Legacy
Stalin is a controversial figure in history. Many historians see him as a ruthless dictator, but some praise him as the Father of the Soviet State. Stalin has been criticized for his role in the Holodomor. 

In 2006, a poll stated that almost half the adults in Russia thought that Stalin was a good person. Two years later, another poll listed him as the third most popular person in Russian history. 

He ruled Russia for more than 29 years, longer than any other Russian leader in the 20th century.

## Related pages
* Vladimir Lenin
* Leon Trotsky

## Notes
## References