Joseph Stalin - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com Google Joseph Stalin’s Early Years and Family 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), 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 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. In 1906, Stalin married Ekaterina “Kato” Svanidze (1885-1907), a seamstress.

The couple had one son, Yakov (1907-1943), 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 (1901-1932), the daughter of a Russian revolutionary. They had two children, a boy and a girl. Nadezhda committed suicide in her early 30s. Stalin also fathered several children out of wedlock. Joseph Stalin’s Rise to Power In 1912, Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland, appointed Joseph Stalin to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Three years later, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. 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 Joseph 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. The forced collectivization also led to widespread famine across the Soviet Union that killed millions. Stalin ruled by terror and 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. He was the subject of flattering artwork, literature and music, and his name became part of the Soviet national anthem. 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 German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) signed a 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 those in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (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.

Joseph Stalin’s Later Years Joseph Stalin did not mellow with age: He prosecuted 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 (1912-1994) permission to invade United States-supported South Korea, an event that triggered the Korean War . 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). By some estimates, he was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people during his brutal rule.

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Sign up to view the full document End of preview Upgrade to view the full document The Life Of Joseph Stalin The Man of Steel or Stalin was born in Georgia was educated at the Tiflis Theological Seminary from which he was expelled for propagating Marxism He joined the Bolshevik underground and was arrested and transported to Siberia He escaped in 1904 The ensuing years witnessed his closer identification with revolutionary Marxism his many escapes from captivity his growing intimacy with Lenin and Bukharin his early disparagement of Leon Trotsky and his co-option in 1912 to the illicit Bolshevik Central Committee With the Revolution of 1917 and the replacement of Kerenskys weak Provisional Government by Lenin and the Bolsheviks Stalin was appointed Commissar for Nationalities and a member of the Politburo although his activities throughout the counter-revolution and the war with Poland were confined to organizing a Red terror in Tsaritsin Stalingrad With his appointment as General Secretary to the Central Committee in 1922 Stalin began stealthily to build up the power that would guarantee his control of the Soviet Union after Lenins death When Lenin died in 1924 Stalin took control By 1928 Trotsky had been degraded and banished Stal

ins reorganization of the Soviets resources with its successive Five Year Plans suffered numerous industrial setbacks and encountered consistently stubborn resistance in agriculture where the kulaks refused to accept the principles of collectivization The measures taken by Stalin to discipline those who opposed his will involved the death by execution or famine of at least 10 million peasants 1932-33 The bloodbath which eliminated the Old Bolsheviks and the alleged right-wing intelligentsia and the staged engineers trial were followed by a drastic purge of thousands of the Officer corps including Marshal Tuchachevsky Stalin believed they were all guilty of pro-German sympathies Red Army forces and material went to the support of the Spanish Communist government in 1936 although Stalin was careful not to commit himself too deeply After the Munich crisis Franco-British negotiations for Russian support @Kibin is a lifesaver for my essay right now!!

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HE DIED IN 1890 HAVING SOLD 1 PAINTING; IN 1990 HIS PORTRAIT OF DR. GACHET SOLD FOR $82.5 MILLION The Straight Dope: Was Joseph Stalin once a seminarian? A Straight Dope Classic from Cecil's Storehouse of Human Knowledge Was Joseph Stalin once a seminarian? June 14, 2002 Dear Cecil: Not sure why this comes to mind now, but is it true that Joseph Stalin was once a seminarian? — Mike Toncray, Joliet, Illinois Cecil replies: Yes. No question, you get some unique personalities in seminaries. Take Stalin — an all-powerful despot, venerated by his subjects (in public anyway), accustomed to absolute obedience. If he hadn't wound up as head of the Soviet Union, he'd have made the perfect cardinal archbishop. Stalin's authoritarian bent can't be attributed entirely to his seminary training. Fact is, he was expelled. The sickly son of an alcoholic bootmaker who died in a brawl, Stalin was initially sent to a church school in his native Georgia by his devout mother.

At age 14 he'd done well enough to earn a scholarship to Tiflis Theological Seminary in what is now Tbilisi. If he'd played his cards right, he'd have wound up a priest in the Georgian Orthodox Church, where he could have spent his career terrorizing the altar boys. Not our Joe. He joined a secret society called Messameh Dassy that advocated Georgian independence from Russia (ironically, this goal wasn't achieved until the collapse of the totalitarian regime that Stalin helped create). Some members of the group were socialists who introduced Stalin to radical ideas. It's said he often snuck out to attend revolutionary meetings and organize local workers. This all got to be a bit much for the seminary authorities, who gave Stalin the boot in 1899, when he was 19. Sources differ on exactly what precipitated the break. Some say the future Soviet leader was accused of disrespecting authority and reading forbidden books; others say he skipped an examination. Stalin said he was expelled for advocating Marxism. His mother preferred to believe he left because of ill health.

Obviously she was one of those women you see quoted in the newspapers: "MASS MURDERER'S MOM: 'HE WAS ALWAYS SUCH A GOOD BOY.'" How much Stalin's years at the seminary influenced his later career is debatable. During the civil war following the October Revolution, the eventual ruler of the Soviet Union took to interviewing subordinates on a barge moored in the Volga River. Legend has it that those who answered unsatisfactorily were shot and their bodies dumped over the side. One assumes this was not a literal re-creation of the system of discipline at the seminary. (For one thing, it was nowhere near the Volga.) However, the idea of brooking no dissent and dealing firmly with underlings — you can see where an ecclesiastical education would inculcate an appreciation of these things. Particularly when the ecclesiastical education took place in Georgia, a land where the expression "cutthroat competition" wasn't used metaphorically. A rector at the Tiflis seminary had been murdered during a period of student unrest prior to Stalin's arrival; clearly this was not the sort of academic environment in which the threat of after-school detention would keep the lads in line.

As I say, one doesn't want to make too much of Stalin's time as priest in training. By all accounts he hated the seminary and did his best to stamp out Christianity in the Soviet Union later in life. Still, the parallels are suggestive. While one realizes that the Georgian church follows the Eastern rite, one can easily imagine Stalin admiring the brilliant cloak of a Roman Catholic cardinal and thinking: "You know, I like the color red." — Cecil Adams Joseph Stalin - Biography - IMDb Joseph Stalin Biography Showing all 95 items Jump to: Overview (5) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (3) | Trade Mark (3) | Trivia (71) | Personal Quotes (12) Overview (5) 5' 6" (1.68 m) Mini Bio (1) Joseph Stalin (a code name meaning "Man of Steel") was born Iosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1879 in Gori, Georgia, the Transcaucasian part of the Russian Empire.

His father was a cobbler named Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a drunkard who beat him badly and frequently and left the family when Joseph was young. His mother, Ekaterina Gheladze, supported herself and her son (her other three children died young and Jopseph was effectively an only child) by taking in washing. She managed, despite great hardship, to send Joseph to school and then on to Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tbilisi, hoping he would become a priest. However, after three years of studies he was expelled in 1899, for not attending an exam and for propagating communist ideas and the books of Karl Marx . Since 1898, Stalin became active in the Communist underground as the organizer of a powerful gang involved in a series of armed robberies. After robbing several banks in southern Russia, Stalin delivered the stolen money to V.I. Lenin to finance the Communist Party. Stalin's gang was also involved in the murders of its political opponents; Stalin himself was arrested seven times, repeatedly imprisoned, and twice exiled to Siberia between 1902 and 1913.

During those years he changed his name twice and became more closely identified with revolutionary Marxism. He escaped many times from prison and was shuttling money between Lenin and other communists in hiding, where his intimacy with Lenin and Bukharin grew, as did his dissatisfaction with fellow Communist leader Leon Trotsky . In 1912 he was co-opted on to the illegal Communist Central Committee. At that time he wrote propaganda articles, and later edited the Communist paper, "Pravda" (Truth). As Lenin's apprentice he joined the Communist majority (Bolsheviks), and was responsible for the consolidation of several secret communist cells into a larger ring. Stalin's Communist ring in St. Petersburg and across Russia played the leading role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the revolution the Bolsheviks Communists grabbed the power, then Communists murdered the Tsar and the Russian royal family. Stalin and Lenin took over the Tsar's palaces and used the main one in Kremlin as their private residence. Lenin appointed Stalin the People's Commissar for Nationalities in the first Soviet government and a member of the Communist Politburo, thus giving him unlimited power.

Stalin led the "Reds" against anti-Communist forces known as the "Whites" and also in the war with Poland. He also organized "Red Terror" in Tsaritsin (later renamed Stalingrad). With his appointment as General Secretary to the Party Central Committee in 1922, a post he held for the next 30 years, until his death, he consolidated the power that would ensure his control of the country after Lenin's death in 1924. He also took, or gave himself, other key positions that enabled him to amass total power in the Party and Soviet government. Stalin was known for his piercing eyes and terrifying stare, which he used to cow his opponents into submission during private discussions. In 1927 Stalin requested medical help for his insomnia, anger and severe anxiety disorder. His doctors diagnosed him as having "typical clinical paranoia" and recommended medical treatment. Instead, Stalin became angry and summoned his secret service agents. The next day the chief psychiatrist, Dr. Bekhterev, and his assistants died of poisoning.

In addition, before the doctors' diagnosis about Stalin's mental condition could become known, he ordered the executions of intellectuals, resulting in the murders of hundreds of thousands of doctors, professors, writers, and others. Stalin's policy of amassing dictatorial power under the guise of building "socialism in the country" resulted in brutal extermination of all real and perceived anti-Communist opposition. His purges of the Soviet military brought about the execution of tens of thousands of army officers, many of them experienced combat veterans of the Revolution, the Civil War, the Polish campaigns and other military operations (this decimation of the Russian officer corps would result in the Soviet Union's initial defeats at the hands of Nazi invaders at the beginning of World War II). He also isolated and disgraced his political rivals, notably Trotsky. Stalin's economic policies of strict centralized planning (i.e., the "five-year plans") resulted in the near ruination of the Soviet economy and mass famines in many areas of the Soviet Union, notably in Central Russia and the Ukraine.

Popular resistance to Stalin's policies, such as nationalization of private lands and collective farming, by independent farmers ("kulaks"), brought about brutal retaliation, in which millions of kulaks were either forced off their land or executed outright. Altogether Stalin's economic and political policies resulted in the deaths of up to 10 million peasants during 1926-1934. Between 1934 and 1939 he organized and led massive purge (known as "The Great Terror") of the party, government, armed forces and intelligentsia, in which millions of so-called "enemies of the Soviet people" were imprisoned, exiled or executed. In the late 1930s, Stalin sent some Red Army forces and material to support the Spanish Republican government in its fight against the rebels led by Gen. Francisco Franco and aided by troops and material from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Stalin made the Non-Aggression Pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939, which bought the Soviet Union two years' respite from involvement in World War 2.

After the German invasion in 1941, the USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance and Stalin, as war leader, assumed the title of Generalissimus. He had no formal military training and scorned the advice of his senior officers, due to suspicion and his rising paranoia, actions that resulted in horrific losses to the Russian military in both men and material (not to mention civilian losses). He rejected military plans made by such experienced officers as Marshal Georgi Zhukov , and insisted they be replaced by his own plans, which led to even more horrific losses. Towards the end of WWII he took part in the conferences of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam with Franklin D. Roosevelt , Winston Churchill and Harry S. Truman . The agreements reached in those conferences resulted in Soviet military and political control over the liberated countries of postwar Castern and Central Europe. From 1945 until his death Stalin resumed his repressive measures at home, resulting in censorship of the arts, literature and cinema, forced exiles of hundreds of thousands and the executions of intellectuals and other potential "enemies of the state". At that time he conducted foreign policies that contributed to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West.

Stalin had little interest in family life, although he was married twice and had several mistresses. His first wife (Ekaterina Svanidze, married c. 1904) died three years after their marriage and left a son, Jacob (also known as Yacov), an officer in the Russian army during World War II who was captured by the Nazis and died in a POW camp (his father refused German offers to exchange him for captured German officers). His second wife (Nadezhda Alliluyeva, married 1919) attempted to moderate his politics, but she died by suicide, leaving a daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva , and an alcoholic son, Vasili Stalin , who later died in exile. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin launched attacks on such intellectuals as Osip Mandelstam, Vsevolod Meyerhold , Anna Akhmatova , Dmitri Shostakovich , Sergei Prokofiev , Boris Pasternak , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and many other cultural luminaries. Stalin personally intervened in the fate of "counterrevolutionary" Yiddish writers and changed their sentences from exile to execution.

Thirteen of them were executed by the Soviet secret police; their leader, Perets Markish , was executed in the typical KGB manner by a single gunshot to the head on August 12, 1952, in Moscow. Stalin died suddenly on March 5, 1953, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, after announcing his intention to arrest Jewish doctors, whom he believed were plotting to kill him. The "official" cause of death was announced as brain hemorrhage. Stalin's apprentice, Georgi Malenkov , took the power, but was soon ousted by Nikita Khrushchev . Three years after death, Stalin was posthumously denounced by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 for crimes against the Party and for building a "cult of personality." In 1961 Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's Mausoleum, where it had been displayed since his death, and buried near the Kremlin wall. In 1964 Leonid Brezhnev dismissed Khrushchev and brought back some of Stalin's hard-line policies.

After 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev initiated a series of liberal political reforms known as "glasnost" and "perstroika", and many of Stalin's victims were posthumously rehabilitated, and the whole phenomenon of "Stalinism" was officially condemned by the Russian authorities. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Lester A Dinerstein <lester1@earthlink.net> Spouse (3) Gruff voice Trivia (71) Stalin was diagnosed with "Typical clinical form of paranoia" in 1927, by the leading psychiatrist Doctor Bekhterev and his assistant doctors. Next day Doctor Bekhterev and his assistant died of poisoning. Clinical paranoia explains ruthless killings of millions and brutal treatment of his own wives and children. Was responsible for the most deaths in Europe between the end of World War I and the end of World War II. His legacy of sacrificing soldiers, starving civilians, mass executions and genocide resulted in more deaths than those caused by the regimes of Adolf Hitler , Benito Mussolini , Hirohito , Zedong Mao and Pol Pot . Supported the production of Sergei M.

Eisenstein 's films Battleship Potemkin (1925) (US title: "Battleship Potemkin"), October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1928) (US title: "October") and Alexander Nevsky (1938), but prevented the completion of Eisenstein's trilogy about Czar Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible (1938). Has been portrayed in movies by actors including F. Murray Abraham , Michael Caine , Robert Duvall , José Ferrer , Bernard Hill , and Andro Kobaladze . Much of the early archive footage of Stalin is actually an actor portraying him in scenes taken from October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1928). He was an admirer of the Polish author Boleslaw Prus , in particular his novel "The Pharaoh and the Priest", filmed as Pharaoh (1966). His real birthday is actually December 18, 1878 (or December 6 on the Julian calendar, used in Russia during the 19th century), but he had it changed to December 21, 1879 in official papers for unknown reasons.

First wife died of tuberculosis, second wife committed suicide. Stalin's adopted revolutionary name -- "Stalin" -- literally means "Man of steel" in Russian. His mother called him "Soso," his undercover party nickname was "Koba." Two sons, Yakov (b. 1907, d. 1943 in a Nazi camp) and Vasili Stalin (b. 1921, d. 1962 in exile), and one daughter, Svetlana (b. 1926, d. 2011, defected to USA). Once stated that the happiest time of his life was when he was in exhile in Siberia. There, in the north, Stalin felt that the true spirit of Russia resided. Stalin loved the "Tarzan" movies and often watched them at the Kremlin. For some reason, he was amused by the concept of a man being able to communicate with apes. Stalin ordered an expedition in Africa, which gathered over 100 apes and monkeys for his plans of breeding an obedient soldier. The secret research center was set in Sukhumi for breeding experiments on apes and monkeys under personal patronage of Stalin.

After several years of non-results Stalin ordered the principal scientists executed and lost interest in breeding soldiers from apes. Today this research center is known as "Obeziannii pitomnik" in Sukhumi. Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" (1939) In March 2001, Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson of Stalin, Yuri Davydov, living in Novokuznetsk, Siberia. 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, told him to keep quiet about it. NTV said several historians, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , mention a son being born to Stalin and his common-law wife, Lida, in 1914 during his exile in northern Siberia. At the funeral of his first wife, Ekaterina, Stalin commented that any warm feelings he had for people died with her, for she was the only person who was able to melt his heart. He later ordered Ekaterina's relatives shot. The rate of which the USSR was industrialised under his rule, was the fastest in history.

Health care and education were also dramatically improved. Had two nicknames during his lifetime. His mom called him "Soso," his undercover party nickname was "Koba." His father was an alcoholic who often physically abused his son. As a youth, he was struck down and almost killed by a runaway carriage. The accident left him with a stiff left shoulder and for the rest of his life he was unable to use his left arm. He suffered recurrent bouts of smallpox as a child, which badly disfigured his face as he grew older. He despised his son Yakov so much that when Yakov attempted suicide, Stalin was reported to have said: "Ha! He couldn't even shoot straight!" During their historic meeting he asked Winston Churchill if he ever had any of his subordinates shot. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt thought it was a joke and went along with the "gag", but the question terrified Churchill so much that he allegedly never openly spoke to Stalin again. His body was moved from the Lenin Mausoleum to the Kremlin Wall in 1961. His trademark hat sat atop the coffin at his funeral.

So much was the disbelief at his death that his coffin had a bubble top over his head so that passersby could see it was actually him. Was referred to as "Uncle Joe" by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt . Stalin was not ethnically Russian. He was a native of Georgia, a Transcaucasian part of the Russian Empire and later a Southern part of the Soviet Union. Stalin was bilingual and spoke Russian fluently, but had a heavy Georgian accent. Early in his life, Stalin had entered an Orthodox seminary to study for the priesthood. He left, partly because the priests discovered his dabbling in communist and anarchist thought, as well as his growing resentment towards authority. Among his most heinous crimes was the forced, intentional famine within the Ukraine, meant to force the destruction of the land-owning "kulak" farmers. It is believed that as many as 10 to 30 million died in the wave of famine that ran rampant throughout the late '20s-early '30s. However according to R.J.

Rummel, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii who has studied mass killing Joseph Stalin was responsible for 43 million dead, from 1929-'53. Raised money for the Communist Party by committing several armed robberies. Called "Old Whiskers" behind his back, usually by prisoners in the gulags he sent them to. Staunchly believed Adolf Hitler would honor the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression treaty. When Hitler's forces attacked, Stalin locked himself in his rooms and refused to believe it for several days; his denial caused unnecessary huge numbers of MIAs and millions of Russian civilians taken into Nazi death camps. Stalin had a secret plan to invade Western Europe in 1944. He believed that by then Europe and Germany would be so exhausted by war that it would be an easy conquest. When the full impact of Adolf Hitler 's betrayal of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression treaty struck Stalin, he locked himself in his rooms for several days, leaving the country leaderless. Stalin did not wish to share a historic legacy with anyone, so he ordered the creation of revisionist history which wiped out all mention of Leon Trotsky and actually removed him from existing photographs. Ordered the assassination of Leon Trotsky .

Somewhat ironically, he was a huge fan of movies starring John Wayne , Hollywood's most vocal anti-Communist and a rabid supporter of blacklisting and the McCarthy witch hunts. His mother had the same name as his first wife. His mother was a washerwoman and a seamstress. Even after Stalin's rise to power, his mother refused to leave her home in the Caucasus. When Stalin would enter the Soviet Politburo people would applaud him, sometimes for hours. The reason the clapping went on so long was because everybody was afraid to be the first one to stop. In a testament written just before his death, Lenin denounced Stalin's ambitions and tried to warn the other Soviet leaders about them. Unfortunately, Stalin managed to blunt the effect of the testament and still seized power after Lenin's death anyway. Was known for completely erasing any and all record of a person's existence as punishment and ascribing Their accomplishments to others or himself. In an ironic turn of events, this also happened to Stalin himself after Khrushchev's secret speech to a certain extent (in Yugoslavia this happened to Stalin even earlier, due to the Tito-Stalin split).

While he was never completely written out of history, he was marginalized and became a scapegoat for most problems in the USSR, while his positive achievements were ascribed to Lenin instead. In addition, most of his statues were torn down, and streets and towns named for him were re-named. Finally, his body was removed from Lenin's mausoleum. It is believed by some historians that Stalin's lust for power and the reasons behind many of his decisions and actions were the result of a tendency as a child to slip into fantasies about what he would have done if he were in charge of the country as a means of escaping his abusive father. Was a voracious reader and had a personal library of 20,000 academic books (including a handful of basic German texts), and checked out an annual average of 500 books from state libraries. He personally annotated many drafts of Russian-language texts with 'suggestions', and supported Mikhail Sholokhov and Mikhail Bulgakov, authors of the some of the best Russian-language literature ever produced.

Although known for his stoic, reserved and unemotional demeanor, he was far less reserved in private and noted by his closest underlings and his enemies as being given to explosive rages and crushing depressions. He could be quite kind to people whom he only met in passing. There is one account of him making sure a man was set free from the Gulag after receiving a letter from the man's young daughter. Another instance was when he and some of his staff had to stay at a old lady's cottage for the night while traveling between Moscow and a military headquarters during the war, he ensured the woman was compensated for the trouble despite the lady declaring that she was happy to provide the service for free. The first time Lenin mentioned Stalin in a 1917 memo he forgot his name, mad a guess at it, then scribbled it out and just called him 'that Georgian guy'. Stalin's health deteriorated towards the end of World War II. He suffered from atherosclerosis from his heavy smoking. He had a mild stroke around the time of the Victory Parade, and a severe heart attack in October 1945. Stalin is estimated to have killed far more people than Adolf Hitler .

Documents released at the end of the Cold War showed Stalin was preparing to attack German forces in Eastern Europe. However he did not think Adolf Hitler would invade the Soviet Union until the war in the West had ended. On 25 November 1940 he suggested formally entering World War II on the side of the Axis Powers. However this may have been a delaying tactic as he prepared for war with the European Axis Powers. Violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by annexing Bukovina in 1940. Supplied all the fuel the German Luftwaffe used to blitz the UK in 1940-41. In 1939-40 he invaded Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Bessarabia and Bukovina. These invasions brought him into conflict with the Axis Powers in the Balkans. Deliberately waited until 17 September 1939 before launching his invasion of Poland, knowing that the UK and France would be unable to declare war on both Germany and the Soviet Union.

Although at war with the European Axis Powers from 22 June 1941, Stalin deliberately did not declare war on the Empire of Japan until 9 August 1945 when his forces simultaneously invaded Manchuria. Initially supported the creation of Israel in 1948, as he felt this would weaken the British Empire. However Stalin soon turned against the new country and publicly denounced it. He has been accused of deliberately starving up to 12 million people to death in the Holodomor. If it could be proven that the intention was to destroy Ukrainian nationalism the Holodomor would be considered a genocide. It is officially recognized as a genocide by 25 countries, including independent Ukraine. Held secret talks with the UK and France in 1939 on the possibility of forming an anti-German alliance. However Stalin's demands, which included full Soviet control of eastern Europe and the Baltic States, were considered excessive and no agreement was reached, especially after the Polish government refused to allow Soviet forces to be stationed on its territory. As a result Stalin instead signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, which agreed the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland and eastern Europe.

During World War II he refused to use his huge air force to bomb the death camps. At the end of World War II he wanted to invade Spain, due to the considerable help the Franco regime had given to the Axis from 1940 to 1943. The British and Americans persuaded Stalin to settle for an economic blockade of Spain instead. Publicly denounced the British and French declarations of war against Germany as imperialist actions designed to preserve their colonial empires. He maintained this stance until the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. He was shocked by Winston Churchill 's landslide defeat in the 1945 General Election. Stalin had privately predicted that Churchill would win the election with a large majority of about 70. May have been planning a new holocaust at the time of his death, in the Doctor's Plot. Ordered the Katyn massacre on 5 March 1940. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 he refused to airdrop weapons or provide air cover. He actively prevented Polish and American airplanes from doing that, while arresting Polish underground fighters. Stalin was accused of deliberately halting his forces so the uprising could be crushed.

Supplied all the fuel the Germans used to invade France and the Low Countries in 1940. Admitted deliberately sacrificing 750,000 Soviet troops in order to delay a possible Axis attack on Moscow in the summer of 1941. Vladimir Putin has made unlawful all published mention of the cruelties Stalin's regime inflicted on its own citizens - including executing an estimated 300,000 soldiers for alleged desertion or cowardice - in order to prevail during World War II. Books by Antony Beevor and Max Hastings are banned in Russia because they describe the Red Army's campaign of rape and pillage in Germany. Signed the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement on 11 February 1940. Personal Quotes (12) A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. Death solves all problems. A Biography of Joseph Stalin a Leader of the Soviet Union | Kibin A Biography of Joseph Stalin a Leader of the Soviet Union Sign Up & Access Essays Already a member? Login here Pages: 1 This preview is partially blurred. Sign up to view the full document. Sign Up & Access Essays Already a member?

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Sign up to view the full document End of preview Upgrade to view the full document Joseph Stalin Joseph Stalin was born on Dec 21 1876 in Gori Georgia Joseph Stalins original name was Iosef Vissaronovich Ozhungashvili but he adopted his name to Joseph Stalin which means man of steel World Book 825 His fathers name was Vissarion Ivanovich Djugashvili His father was a drunk and had a job being a shoemaker Since Josephs father didnt make much money Josephs mom Ekaterina Gleladaz Djugaholi who became a washerwoman to help support her family The Stalins lived in a small shack and Joseph was an only child When Joseph was a young boy Stalins father left him In 1888 Stalin was sent to a church school in Gori World Book 825He spent 5 years there and was a brilliant student Stalin received a scholarship at the religious seminary in Tbilisi To a surprise Stalin entered his school to study priesthood in the Georgian Orthodox Church in the year 1984 World Book 825 In 1898 Stalin joined a secret Marxist revolutionary group World Book 825 Stalin

 got expelled from his school for not appearing for an examination Stalin joined a Marxist movement and when it split in 1903 he went with more radical Bolsheviks In 1904 he married but his wife died of tuberculosis after 3 years World Book 825 He married again in 1919 but his 2nd wife killed herself leaving Stalin with a son and daughter World Book 825 The son became an alcoholic and his daughter defected to the United States During Stalins underground career he was arrested at least 6 times and spent time as an exile in Siberia He engaged in robbery murder labor agitation and served as editor and writer for various newspapers where he first used the name Stalin The Red Tsar httpgo2netcom When the communist come to power in 1922 Stalin got a great position as a Secretary General of Communist Party World Book 826 Before Lenin died he thought that Stalin was too vicious @Kibin is a lifesaver for my essay right now!!

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Question: What Soviet "man of steel" was educated for the priesthood but was expelled from the seminary?
Answer: Joseph Stalin