We explain who Joseph Stalin was and how he came to power in the Soviet Union. We also explain his totalitarian regime and his role in World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.
Stalin established a totalitarian regime in the USSR after his rise to power in 1924.
Who was Joseph Stalin?
Joseph Stalin was a communist leader who led the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1952 and ruled the Soviet Union from Lenin’s death in 1924 until his own death in 1953Although he initially ruled alongside other Bolshevik leaders, he soon concentrated power and He established a totalitarian regime based on the cult of personality and political persecution.
Stalin promoted “socialism in one country” against the ideas of the “permanent revolution” of Leon Trotsky, who had to go into exile in 1929. His program of five-year plans He promoted industrialization through state planning of the economy and the forced collectivization of agricultural production. This process led to the death of millions of peasants, especially in Ukraine, due to famine and state repression.
The political violence of Stalin’s regime reached its peak during the Great Purge of communist officials between 1936 and 1938. In 1941, due to the German invasion of the Soviet Union In the context of the Second World War (1939-1945), Stalin allied himself with the Western powers and led the Soviet military effort against the Axis powers.
Following the Allied victory in World War II, Stalin managed to impose Soviet rule over the countries of central and eastern Europe, governed by “popular democracies” headed by local communist parties. In this context, he led the communist bloc at the beginning of the Cold War against the Western capitalist bloc led by the United States. He died in Moscow on March 5, 1953.
Stalin’s early years
Joseph Stalin He was born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in the city of Gori, in present-day Georgia. (then part of the Russian Empire), on December 18, 1878 (December 6 of the Julian calendar that was used in those years in the region).
He was the son of a poor shoemaker, who suffered from alcoholism and beat him, and of a very religious domestic worker and dressmaker, who wanted Iosif to become a priest. Iosif learned Russian and entered the parish school in Gori in 1888.
He graduated in 1894 and entered the Tiflis Theological Seminary, a secondary school of the Russian Orthodox Church. During his years in the seminary he began to secretly read the work of Karl Marx and to associate with revolutionary groups.
In 1898 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. and in 1899 he left or was expelled from the seminary. He got a job as an employee of the Tbilisi observatory, He participated in strikes and demonstrations and was imprisoned several times.
Stalin’s marriages and children
Stalin He was first married to Yekaterina Svanidze in 1906, with whom he had a son named Yakov.. Yekaterina died in 1907 and Stalin married for the second time to Nadezhda Alliluyeva in 1919, who committed suicide in 1932. They had two children: Vasili, born in 1921, and Svetlana, born in 1926.
Stalin He also had two illegitimate children with Lidia Perepryginaa young girl from a Siberian village. The first was born in 1914 but died soon after. The second was born in 1917 and was given the name Alexander. He was adopted by Pereprygina’s later husband and given the surname Davydov.
Stalin’s rise in the Bolshevik faction
Stalin began to concentrate power when Lenin’s health deteriorated in 1922.
In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party divided into two factions (Mensheviks and Bolsheviks), and Stalin joined Lenin’s Bolsheviks. He participated in bank robberies or “expropriations” to raise funds for the Bolsheviks and, in 1912, Lenin appointed him to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik faction by “co-option” (i.e., without election by the party congress).
At this time he began to use the pseudonym Stalin (from the Russian stalwhich means “steel”). In January 1913, he published in Vienna the essay Marxism and the national questionin which he expounded his ideas on the relationship between Marxism and nationalism. In February he was arrested in St. Petersburg and between July 1913 and March 1917 he lived in forced exile in Siberia.
When the Russian Revolution of March 1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II, Stalin left Siberia and arrived in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg), where He became editor of the Bolshevik newspaper PravdaDuring the years of coexistence of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, Stalin accepted Lenin’s idea that the Bolsheviks should take power by force.
He participated in the October Revolution (in November 1917) which installed the Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin, in governmentSince then, he served in political and military roles during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) and held ministerial positions in the government.
In 1922 he was appointed general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Russia (created in 1918), which later changed its name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
With Lenin ill, Stalin began to concentrate more and more power, while in December 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was created through the signing of a treaty between Russia, Ukraine, Transcaucasia and Belarus. All Soviet republics, which at one point expanded to fifteen, came under the authority of the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who at that time was Stalin.
The death of Lenin and the Stalin dictatorship
After Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin became the main leader of the Soviet Union. Initially he took care of marginalizing his rival Leon Trotsky and formed a triumvirate with the leaders Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. He then allied himself with Nikolai Bukharin and confronted Zinoviev and Kamenev, whom he removed from office.
In 1929 he expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union. and he also dismissed Bukharin. Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were all executed years later during the Great Purge carried out by Stalin between 1936 and 1938. Trotsky was assassinated in exile in Mexico in 1940.
Since 1925, The Communist Party adopted the policy of “socialism in one country” advocated by Stalinwhich raised the need to strengthen communism within the Soviet Union through economic centralization and industrialization with the aim of competing with Western capitalist powers.
This policy was opposed to the “permanent revolution” defended by Trotsky.who considered it necessary to promote revolution in the industrialized countries of Europe to avoid the isolation of the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s economic planning and totalitarianism
Former allies of Stalin, such as Alexei Rykov, Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin, were victims of the Great Purge.
In 1928, Stalin abandoned the NEP (New Economic Policy), a mixed economic system implemented by Lenin in 1921. which combined state control of some areas of the economy with private investment and a market economy. Stalin moved to a system of state planning based on forced collectivization (expropriation of land and creation of collective farms under state control) and state-run heavy industry (coal, oil, iron, steel, machinery, etc.).
This system was organized into five-year plans (with five-year goals) and favored the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Unionwhich soon became a world power.
However, forced collectivization caused the death of millions of peasants, especially in Ukraineboth due to the effect of the famine and due to the repressive policy against those who resisted, which included executions, deportations and internment in forced labor camps.
The totalitarian nature of Stalin’s regime was also manifested in political measures such as the persecution of dissent (through the NKVD or secret police), the administration of a system of concentration camps and forced labor (called Gulag) and the cult of personality of the leader.
Between 1936 and 1938 the Great Purge took placewhich consisted of the prosecution and deportation or execution of around one million government, party and Red Army officials who were accused of “treason” or considered “enemies of the people.” The elimination of all possible political opposition and permanent surveillance through the secret police reinforced the concentration of power in the person of Stalin.
Stalin’s foreign policy before World War II
After establishing his dictatorship, Stalin practiced a changing international policy. Since 1928 he promoted a policy called “class against class”, which stated that the interests of the workers were opposed to those of the bourgeoisie and, therefore, rejected any alliance with sectors outside communism. This provoked a frontal conflict with European social democracy and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
Faced with the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, Stalin turned to a new foreign policy. He secured the Soviet Union’s entry into the League of Nations in 1934 and supported the strategy of popular fronts, concretized at the VII Congress of the Communist International in 1935. This strategy promoted the alliance of communists with other leftist sectors to confront fascism.
Now it was about approaching Western democracies to try to stop Nazi expansionism.Maksim Litvínov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union between 1930 and 1939, was the best representative of this new political direction, which had its greatest example in the popular fronts formed in France and Spain.
Stalin in World War II
At Potsdam, Stalin negotiated with the other Allied leaders on the organization of the postwar world.
Faced with Nazi expansionism before World War II, the United Kingdom and France promoted the policy of appeasement, which consisted of accepting some of Hitler’s territorial claims to avoid direct confrontation. The clearest example was the Munich Pact, which accepted the German annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938.
These events precipitated a radical change in Soviet policy towards Nazism.: the search for a compromise with Hitler. The dismissal of Litvinov and his replacement by Vyacheslav Molotov in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May 1939 marked the new course that It led to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939.
The immediate consequence of…