Joseph Stalin
Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin
prime minister of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Russian in full Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, original name (Georgian)
Ioseb Dzhugashvili
born Dec. 21 [Dec. 9, Old Style], 1879, Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire
died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.
Overview
Soviet politician and dictator.
The son of a cobbler, he studied at a seminary but was expelled for
revolutionary activity in 1899. He joined an underground revolutionary
group and sided with the Bolshevik faction of the Russian
Social-Democratic Workers’ Party in 1903. A disciple of Vladimir Lenin,
he served in minor party posts and was appointed to the first Bolshevik
Central Committee (1912). He remained active behind the scenes and in
exile (1913–17) until the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the
Bolsheviks to power. Having adopted the name Stalin (from Russian stal,
“steel”), he served as commissar for nationalities and for state control
in the Bolshevik government (1917–23). He was a member of the Politburo,
and in 1922 he became secretary-general of the party’s Central
Committee. After Lenin’s death (1924), Stalin overcame his rivals,
including Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Bukharin,
and Aleksey Rykov, and took control of Soviet politics. In 1928 he
inaugurated the Five-Year Plans that radically altered Soviet economic
and social structures and resulted in the deaths of many millions. In
the 1930s he contrived to eliminate threats to his power through the
purge trials and through widespread secret executions and persecution.
In World War II he signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (1939),
attacked Finland (see Russo-Finnish War), and annexed parts of eastern
Europe to strengthen his western frontiers. When Germany invaded Russia
(1941), Stalin took control of military operations. He allied Russia
with Britain and the U.S.; at the Tehrān, Yalta, and Potsdam
conferences, he demonstrated his negotiating skill. After the war he
consolidated Soviet power in eastern Europe and built up the Soviet
Union as a world military power. He continued his repressive political
measures to control internal dissent; increasingly paranoid, he was
preparing to mount another purge after the so-called Doctors’ Plot when
he died. Noted for bringing the Soviet Union into world prominence, at
terrible cost to his own people, he left a legacy of repression and fear
as well as industrial and military power. In 1956 Stalin and his
personality cult were denounced by Nikita Khrushchev.
Main
secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–53)
and premier of the Soviet state (1941–53), who for a quarter of a
century dictatorially ruled the Soviet Union and transformed it into a
major world power.
During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Soviet
dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than
any other figure in history. Stalin industrialized the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivized its agriculture,
consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat
Germany in 1941–45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of
eastern European states. Chief architect of Soviet totalitarianism and a
skilled but phenomenally ruthless organizer, he destroyed the remnants
of individual freedom and failed to promote individual prosperity, yet
he created a mighty military–industrial complex and led the Soviet Union
into the nuclear age.
Stalin’s biography was long obscured by a mendacious
Soviet-propagated “legend” exaggerating his prowess as a heroic
Bolshevik boy-conspirator and faithful follower of Lenin, the founder of
the Soviet Union. In his prime, Stalin was hailed as a universal genius,
as a “shining sun,” or “the staff of life,” and also as a “great teacher
and friend” (especially of those communities he most savagely
persecuted); once he was even publicly invoked as “Our Father” by a
metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church. Achieving wide visual
promotion through busts, statues, and icons of himself, the dictator
became the object of a fanatical cult that, in private, he probably
regarded with cynicism.
Young Stalin, circa 1894, age 16
The young revolutionary
Stalin was of Georgian—not Russian—origin, and persistent rumours claim
that he was Ossetian on the paternal side. He was the son of a poor
cobbler in the provincial Georgian town of Gori in the Caucasus, then an
imperial Russian colony. The drunken father savagely beat his son.
Speaking only Georgian at home, Joseph learned Russian—which he always
spoke with a guttural Georgian accent—while attending the church school
at Gori (1888–94). He then moved to the Tiflis Theological Seminary,
where he secretly read Karl Marx, the chief theoretician of
international Communism, and other forbidden texts, being expelled in
1899 for revolutionary activity, according to the “legend”—or leaving
because of ill health, according to his doting mother. The mother, a
devout washerwoman, had dreamed of her son becoming a priest, but Joseph
Dzhugashvili was more ruffianly than clerical in appearance and outlook.
He was short, stocky, black-haired, fierce-eyed, with one arm longer
than the other, his swarthy face scarred by smallpox contracted in
infancy. Physically strong and endowed with prodigious willpower, he
early learned to disguise his true feelings and to bide his time; in
accordance with the Caucasian blood-feud tradition, he was implacable in
plotting long-term revenge against those who offended him.
In December 1899, Dzhugashvili became, briefly, a clerk in the Tiflis
Observatory, the only paid employment that he is recorded as having
taken outside politics; there is no record of his ever having done
manual labour. In 1900 he joined the political underground, fomenting
labour demonstrations and strikes in the main industrial centres of the
Caucasus; but his excessive zeal in pushing duped workers into bloody
clashes with the police antagonized his fellow conspirators. After the
Social Democrats (Marxist revolutionaries) of the Russian Empire had
split into their two competing wings—Menshevik and Bolshevik—in 1903,
Dzhugashvili joined the second, more militant, of these factions and
became a disciple of its leader, Lenin. Between April 1902 and March
1913, Dzhugashvili was seven times arrested for revolutionary activity,
undergoing repeated imprisonment and exile. The mildness of the
sentences and the ease with which the young conspirator effected his
frequent escapes lend colour to the unproved speculation that
Dzhugashvili was for a time an agent provocateur in the pay of the
imperial political police.
The information card on "I. V. Stalina",
from the files of the Tsarist secret police in Saint Petersburg, 1911[6]
Rise to power
Dzhugashvili made slow progress in the party hierarchy. He attended
three policy-making conclaves of the Russian Social Democrats—in
Tammerfors (now Tampere, Finland; 1905), Stockholm (1906), and London
(1907)—without making much impression. But he was active behind the
scenes, helping to plot a spectacular holdup in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) on
June 25 (June 12, O.S.), 1907, in order to “expropriate” funds for the
party. His first big political promotion came in February (January,
O.S.) 1912, when Lenin—now in emigration—co-opted him to serve on the
first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which had finally broken
with the other Social Democrats. In the following year, Dzhugashvili
published, at Lenin’s behest, an important article on Marxism and the
national question. By now he had adopted the name Stalin, deriving from
Russian stal (“steel”); he also briefly edited the newly founded
Bolshevik newspaper Pravda before undergoing his longest period of
exile: in Siberia from July 1913 to March 1917.
In about 1904 Stalin had married a pious Georgian girl, Ekaterina
Svanidze. She died some three years later and left a son, Jacob, whom
his father treated with contempt, calling him a weakling after an
unsuccessful suicide attempt in the late 1920s; when Jacob was taken
prisoner by the Germans during World War II, Stalin refused a German
offer to exchange his son.
Reaching Petrograd from Siberia on March 25 (March 12, O.S.), 1917,
Stalin resumed editorship of Pravda. He briefly advocated Bolshevik
cooperation with the provisional government of middle-class liberals
that had succeeded to uneasy power on the last tsar’s abdication during
the February Revolution. But under Lenin’s influence, Stalin soon
switched to the more militant policy of armed seizure of power by the
Bolsheviks. When their coup d’état occurred in November (October, old
style) 1917, he played an important role, but one less prominent than
that of his chief rival, Leon Trotsky.
Active as a politico-military leader on various fronts during the
Civil War of 1918–20, Stalin also held two ministerial posts in the new
Bolshevik government, being commissar for nationalities (1917–23) and
for state control (or workers’ and peasants’ inspection; 1919–23). But
it was his position as secretary general of the party’s Central
Committee, from 1922 until his death, that provided the power base for
his dictatorship. Besides heading the secretariat, he was also member of
the powerful Politburo and of many other interlocking and overlapping
committees—an arch-bureaucrat engaged in quietly outmaneuvering
brilliant rivals, including Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev, who despised
such mundane organizational work. Because the pockmarked Georgian was so
obviously unintellectual, they thought him unintelligent—a gross error,
and one literally fatal in their case.
From 1921 onward Stalin flouted the ailing Lenin’s wishes, until, a
year before his death, Lenin wrote a political “testament,” since widely
publicized, calling for Stalin’s removal from the secretary generalship;
coming from Lenin, this document was potentially ruinous to Stalin’s
career, but his usual luck and skill enabled him to have it discounted
during his lifetime.
Joseph Stalin, 1912.
Lenin’s successor
After Lenin’s death, in January 1924, Stalin promoted an extravagant,
quasi-Byzantine cult of the deceased leader. Archpriest of Leninism,
Stalin also promoted his own cult in the following year by having the
city of Tsaritsyn renamed Stalingrad (now Volgograd). His main rival,
Trotsky (once Lenin’s heir apparent), was now in eclipse, having been
ousted by the ruling triumvirate of Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin.
Soon afterward Stalin joined with the rightist leaders Nikolay Bukharin
and Aleksey Rykov in an alliance directed against his former
co-triumvirs. Pinning his faith in the ability of the Soviet Union to
establish a viable political system without waiting for the support
hitherto expected from worldwide revolution, the Secretary General
advocated a policy of “Socialism in one country”; this was popular with
the hardheaded party managers whom he was promoting to influential
positions in the middle hierarchy. His most powerful rivals were all
dismissed, Bukharin and Rykov soon following Zinoviev and Kamenev into
disgrace and political limbo pending execution. Stalin expelled Trotsky
from the Soviet Union in 1929 and had him assassinated in Mexico in
1940.
In 1928 Stalin abandoned Lenin’s quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy
in favour of headlong state-organized industrialization under a
succession of five-year plans. This was, in effect, a new Russian
revolution more devastating in its effects than those of 1917. The
dictator’s blows fell most heavily on the peasantry, some 25,000,000
rustic households being compelled to amalgamate in collective or state
farms within a few years. Resisting desperately, the reluctant muzhiks
were attacked by troops and OGPU (political police) units. Uncooperative
peasants, termed kulaks, were arrested en masse, being shot, exiled, or
absorbed into the rapidly expanding network of Stalinist concentration
camps and worked to death under atrocious conditions. Collectivization
also caused a great famine in the Ukraine. Yet Stalin continued to
export the grain stocks that a less cruel leader would have rushed to
the famine-stricken areas. Some 10,000,000 peasants may have perished
through his policies during these years.
Crash industrialization was less disastrous in its effects, but it,
too, numbered its grandiose failures, to which Stalin responded by
arraigning industrial managers in a succession of show trials.
Intimidated into confessing imaginary crimes, the accused served as
self-denounced scapegoats for catastrophes arising from the Secretary
General’s policies. Yet Stalin was successful in rapidly industrializing
a backward country—as was widely acknowledged by enthusiastic
contemporary foreign witnesses, including Adolf Hitler and such
well-known writers as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.
Among those who vainly sought to moderate Stalin’s policies was his
young second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, whom he had married in 1919 and
who committed suicide in 1932. They had two children. The son, Vasily,
perished as an alcoholic after rising to unmerited high rank in the
Soviet Air Force. The daughter, Svetlana, became the object for her
father’s alternating affection and bad temper. She emigrated after his
death and later wrote memoirs that illuminate Stalin’s well-camouflaged
private life.
Joseph Stalin
The great purges
In late 1934—just when the worst excesses of Stalinism seemed to have
spent themselves—the Secretary General launched a new campaign of
political terror against the very Communist Party members who had
brought him to power; his pretext was the assassination, in Leningrad on
December 1, of his leading colleague and potential rival, Sergey Kirov.
That Stalin himself had arranged Kirov’s murder—as an excuse for the
promotion of mass bloodshed—was strongly hinted by Nikita Khrushchev,
first secretary of the party, in a speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th
Party Congress in 1956.
Stalin used the show trial of leading Communists as a means for
expanding the new terror. In August 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were
paraded in court to repeat fabricated confessions, sentenced to death,
and shot; two more major trials followed, in January 1937 and March
1938. In June 1937, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, at the time the most
influential military personality, and other leading generals were
reported as court-martialed on charges of treason and executed.
Such were the main publicly acknowledged persecutions that empowered
Stalin to tame the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet elite as a
whole. He not only “liquidated” veteran semi-independent Bolsheviks but
also many party bosses, military leaders, industrial managers, and high
government officials totally subservient to himself. Other victims
included foreign Communists on Soviet territory and members of the very
political police organization, now called the NKVD. All other sections
of the Soviet elite—the arts, the academic world, the legal and
diplomatic professions—also lost a high proportion of victims, as did
the population at large, to a semi-haphazard, galloping persecution that
fed on extorted denunciations and confessions. These implicated even
more victims until Stalin himself reduced the terror, though he never
abandoned it. Stalin’s political victims were numbered in tens of
millions. His main motive was, presumably, to maximize his personal
power.
Role in World War II
During World War II Stalin emerged, after an unpromising start, as the
most successful of the supreme leaders thrown up by the belligerent
nations. In August 1939, after first attempting to form an anti-Hitler
alliance with the Western powers, he concluded a pact with Hitler, which
encouraged the German dictator to attack Poland and begin World War II.
Anxious to strengthen his western frontiers while his new but palpably
treacherous German ally was still engaged in the West, Stalin annexed
eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania; he
also attacked Finland and extorted territorial concessions. In May 1941
Stalin recognized the growing danger of German attack on the Soviet
Union by appointing himself chairman of the Council of People’s
Commissars (head of the government); it was his first governmental
office since 1923.
Stalin’s prewar defensive measures were exposed as incompetent by the
German blitzkrieg that surged deep into Soviet territory after Hitler’s
unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union of June 22, 1941. Khrushchev
claimed that Stalin was shocked into temporary inactivity by the
onslaught, but, if so, he soon rallied and appointed himself supreme
commander in chief. When the Germans menaced Moscow in the winter of
1941, he remained in the threatened capital, helping to organize a great
counter-offensive. The battle of Stalingrad (in the following winter)
and the Battle of Kursk (in the summer of 1943) were also won by the
Soviet Army under Stalin’s supreme direction, turning the tide of
invasion against the retreating Germans, who capitulated in May 1945. As
war leader, Stalin maintained close personal control over the Soviet
battlefronts, military reserves, and war economy. At first over-inclined
to intervene with inept telephoned instructions, as Hitler did, the
Soviet generalissimo gradually learned to delegate military decisions.
Stalin participated in high-level Allied meetings, including those of
the “Big Three” with Churchill and Roosevelt at Tehrān (1943) and Yalta
(1945). A formidable negotiator, he outwitted these foreign statesmen;
his superior skill has been acclaimed by Anthony Eden, then British
foreign secretary.
Joseph Stalin
Last years
After the war, Stalin imposed on eastern Europe a new kind of colonial
control based on native Communist regimes nominally independent but in
fact subservient to himself. He thus increased the number of his
subjects by about a hundred million. But in 1948 the defection of
Titoist Yugoslavia from the Soviet camp struck a severe blow to world
Communism as a Stalin-dominated monolith. To prevent other client states
from following Tito’s example, Stalin instigated local show trials,
manipulated like those of the Great Purge of the 1930s in Russia, in
which satellite Communist leaders confessed to Titoism, many being
executed.
Far from continuing his wartime alliance with the United States and
Great Britain, Stalin now regarded these countries—and especially the
United States—as the arch-enemies that he needed after Hitler’s death.
At home, the primacy of Marxist ideology was harshly reasserted.
Stalin’s chief ideological hatchet man, Andrey Zhdanov, a secretary of
the Central Committee, began a reign of terror in the Soviet artistic
and intellectual world; foreign achievements were derided, and the
primacy of Russians as inventors and pioneers in practically every field
was asserted. Hopes for domestic relaxation, widely aroused in the
Soviet Union during the war, were thus sadly disappointed.
Increasingly suspicious and paranoid in his later years, Stalin
ordered the arrest, announced in January 1953, of certain—mostly
Jewish—Kremlin doctors on charges of medically murdering various Soviet
leaders, including Zhdanov. The dictator was evidently preparing to make
this “Doctors’ Plot” the pretext for yet another great terror menacing
all his senior associates, but he died suddenly on March 5, according to
the official report; so convenient was this death to his entourage that
suspicions of foul play were voiced.
Stalin
Assessment
A politician to the marrow of his bones, Stalin had little private or
family life, finding his main relaxation in impromptu buffet suppers, to
which he would invite high party officials, generals, visiting foreign
potentates, and the like. Drinking little himself on these occasions,
the dictator would encourage excessive indulgence in others, thus
revealing weak points that he could exploit. He would also tease his
guests, jocularity and malice being nicely balanced in his manner; for
such bluff banter Stalin’s main henchman, Vyacheslav Molotov, the
stuttering foreign minister, was often a target. Stalin had a keen,
ironical sense of humour, usually devoted to deflating his guests rather
than to amusing them.
Foremost among Stalin’s accomplishments was the industrialization of
a country which, when he assumed complete control in 1928, was still
notably backward by comparison with the leading industrial nations of
the world. By 1937, after less than a decade’s rule as totalitarian
dictator, he had increased the Soviet Union’s total industrial output to
the point where it was surpassed only by that of the United States. The
extent of this achievement may best be appreciated if one remembers that
Russia had held only fifth place for overall industrial output in 1913,
and that it thereafter suffered many years of even greater
devastation—through world war, civil war, famine, and pestilence—than
afflicted any of the world’s other chief industrial countries during the
same period. Yet more appallingly ravaged during World War II, the
Soviet Union was nevertheless able, under Stalin’s leadership, to play a
major part in defeating Hitler while maintaining its position as the
world’s second most powerful industrial—and now military—complex after
the United States. In 1949 Stalinist Russia signaled its arrival as the
world’s second nuclear power by exploding an atomic bomb.
Against these formidable achievements must be set one major
disadvantage. Though a high industrial output was indeed achieved under
Stalin, very little of it ever became available to the ordinary Soviet
citizen in the form of consumer goods or amenities of life. A
considerable proportion of the national wealth—a proportion wholly
unparalleled in the history of any peacetime capitalist country—was
appropriated by the state to cover military expenditure, the police
apparatus, and further industrialization. It is also arguable that a
comparable degree of industrialization would have come about in any
case—and surely by means less savage—under almost any conceivable regime
that might have evolved as an alternative to Stalinism.
Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture did not produce positive
economic results remotely comparable to those attained by Soviet
industry. Considered as a means of asserting control over the
politically recalcitrant peasantry, however, collectivization justified
itself and continued to do so for decades, remaining one of the
dictator’s most durable achievements. Moreover, the process of intensive
urbanization, as instituted by Stalin, continued after his death in what
still remained a population more predominantly rural than that of any
other major industrial country. In 1937, 56 percent of the population
was recorded as engaged in agriculture or forestry; by 1958 that
proportion had dropped to 42 percent, very largely as a result of
Stalin’s policies.
Another of the dictator’s achievements was the creation of his
elaborately bureaucratized administrative machinery based on the
interlinking of the Communist Party, ministries, legislative bodies,
trade unions, political police, and armed forces, and also on a host of
other meshing control devices. During the decades following the
dictator’s death, these continued to supply the essential management
levers of Soviet society, often remaining under the control of
individuals who had risen to prominence during the years of the
Stalinist terror. But the element of total personal dictatorship did not
survive Stalin in its most extreme form. One result of his death was the
resurgence of the Communist Party as the primary centre of power, after
years during which that organization, along with all other Soviet
institutions, had been subordinated to a single man’s whim. Yet, despite
the great power wielded by Stalin’s successors as party leaders, they
became no more than dominant figures within the framework of a ruling
oligarchy. They did not develop into potentates responsible to
themselves alone, such as Stalin was during his quarter of a century’s
virtually unchallenged rule.
That Stalin’s system persisted as long as it did, in all its major
essentials, after the death of its creator is partly due to the very
excess of severity practiced by the great tyrant. Not only did his
methods crush initiative among Soviet administrators, physically
destroying many, but they also left a legacy of remembered fear so
extreme as to render continuing post-Stalin restrictions tolerable to
the population; the people would have more bitterly resented—might even,
perhaps, have rejected—such rigours, had it not been for their vivid
recollection of repressions immeasurably harsher. Just as Hitler’s
wartime cruelty toward the Soviet population turned Stalin into a
genuine national hero—making him the Soviet Union’s champion against an
alien terror even worse than his own—so too Stalin’s successors owed the
stability of their system in part to the comparison, still fresh in many
minds, with the far worse conditions that obtained during the despot’s
sway.
Stalin has arguably made a greater impact on the lives of more
individuals than any other figure in history. But the evaluation of his
overall achievement still remains, decades after his death, a highly
controversial matter. Historians have not yet reached any definitive
consensus on the worth of his accomplishments, and it is unlikely that
they ever will. To the American scholar George F. Kennan, Stalin is a
great man, but one great in his “incredible criminality . . . a
criminality effectively without limits,” while Robert C. Tucker, an
American specialist on Soviet affairs, has described Stalin as a
20th-century Ivan the Terrible. To the British historian E.H. Carr, the
Georgian dictator appears as a ruthless, vigorous figure, but one
lacking in originality—a comparative nonentity thrust into greatness by
the inexorable march of the great revolution that he found himself
leading. To the late Isaac Deutscher, the author of biographies of
Trotsky and Stalin—who, like Carr, broadly accepts Trotsky’s version of
Stalin as a somewhat mediocre personage—Stalin represents a lamentably
deviant element in the evolution of Marxism. Neither Deutscher nor Carr
has found Stalin’s truly appalling record sufficiently impressive to
raise doubts about the ultimate value of the Russian October
Revolution’s historic achievements.
To such views may be added the suggestion that Stalin was anything
but a plodding mediocrity, being rather a man of superlative,
all-transcending talent. His special brilliance was, however, narrowly
specialized and confined within the single crucial area of creative
political manipulation, where he remains unsurpassed. Stalin was the
first to recognize the potential of bureaucratic power, while the other
Bolshevik leaders still feared their revolution being betrayed by a
military man. Stalin’s political ability went beyond tactics, as he was
able to channel massive social forces both to meet his economic goals
and to expand his personal power.
Ronald Francis Hingley
Ed.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
