Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili on December 18, , or December 6, , according to the Old Style Julian calendar although he later invented a new birth date for himself: December 21, , in the small town of Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian empire.
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.
In , 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 and , and subjected to imprisonment and exile in Siberia. Ekaterina perished from typhus when her son was an infant.
They had two children, a boy and a girl his only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva , caused an international scandal when she defected to the United States in Nadezhda committed suicide in her early 30s. Stalin also fathered several children out of wedlock. Three years later, in November , the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The Soviet Union was founded in , with Lenin as its first leader.
During these years, Stalin had continued to move up the party ladder, and in 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 , Stalin eventually outmaneuvered his rivals and won the power struggle for control of the Communist Party.
By the late s, he had become dictator of the Soviet Union. Stalin so strongly believed that he and Hitler had an understanding that he refused to listen to his military advisors' warnings in that the Wehrmacht was massing for an attack, and purged any one who dared utter such blasphemy.
As a result, when the attack came, the Soviet army was completely unprepared and suffered horrible defeats, while Stalin spent the first several days after the attack holed up in his office in shock. Because the military had been purged of its best minds in the mids, it took some time, and many lives, before the Soviets were able to regroup and make a credible defense.
By then, all of the Ukraine and Belarus were in German hands, Leningrad had been surrounded and besieged, and Nazi artillery was entrenched only a few miles from the Kremlin. After heroic efforts on the part of the whole country, the tide eventually turned at Stalingrad in , and soon the victorious Red Army was liberating the countries of Eastern Europe--before the Americans had even begun to pose a serious challenge to Hitler from the west with the D-Day invasion. During the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences, Stalin proved a worthy negotiator with the likes of Roosevelt and Churchill, and managed to arrange for the countries of Eastern Europe, which had been liberated by the Red Army to remain in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as securing three seats for his country in the newly formed UN.
The Soviet Union was now a recognized world superpower, with its own permanent seat on the Security Council, and the respect that Stalin had craved all his life.
Still, he was not finished. The military quickly lost control of the situation, and the Czar was forced to abdicate.
When the Czar was dethroned, Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia after being exiled for anti-Czar plots. Other revolutionaries including Leon Trotsky also returned to Russia to seize the opportunity. The two established the Bolshevik party, a communist party that was staunchly opposed to the War, which continued to wreak havoc on the unstable nation.
However, when the Bolsheviks gained only 25 percent of votes in the elections, Lenin overturned the results and used military force to prevent democratic assembly.
He established several state-centered government programs and policies that would continue, in some form, throughout the reign of the Soviet Union. His plan for national economic recovery, the GOLERO Plan was the first of this type and was designed to stimulate the economy by brining electricity to the whole of Russia.
Lenin established a national free healthcare system and free public education. He also established the Cheka, a secret police force to defend the success of the Russian Revolution and censor and control anti-Bolshevik newspapers and activists. He left a legacy of death and horror, even as he turned a backward Russia into a world superpower. Stalin was eventually denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev , in However, he has found a rekindled popularity among many of Russia's young people.
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