Stalin, Joseph, real name Iosif Vissarionovic Dzhugashvili

b. 1879; d. 1953

Dictator of Russia and of the world Communist movement. A Georgian (or possibly an Ossete) by birth, son of an artisan, he was educated at the theological seminary at Tiflis, but was expelled in 1898 on account of his revolutionary connections. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1898 and the Bolshevik faction in 1903, and worked underground in Transcaucasia as an active but minor follower of Lenin until 1913, when Lenin and Zinoviev, desperately short of collaborators, co-opted him into the Bolshevik central committee. This did not mean much at the time, but ensured his formal seniority when he returned to St Petersburg from the banishment after the February Revolution in 1917 (he had been banished six times, but escaped five). He was then second in the Bolshevik hierarchy in the capital, after Kamenev, and became editor of the party's newspaper 'Pravda'.

Stalin followed Kamenev's conciliatory policy towards the Provisional Government, but when Lenin arrived from abroad accepted his plans for the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. After the October Revolution he was commissar for the nationalities' affairs in the Soviet government 1971-23, and commissar for workers and peasants inspectorate, 1919-22. After the crisis over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, in which the Left Communists and Trotsky opposed Lenin, Stalin became, apart from Sverdlov, Lenin's closest collaborator. During the Civil War he was, like other leading Communists, a senior political commissar in the Red Army. He was a member of the Politburo from its foundation and in 1922 became general secretary of the Party's Central Committee. Stalin's rudeness and high-handedness disturbed Lenin, who shortly before his final illness made plans to remove Stalin from his position of power.

By the time Lenin died, however, Stalin had consolidated his hold on the party apparatus. In the inner-party struggle that ensued he joined forces with Zinoviev and Kamenev and defeated Trotsky, using the slogan of 'building socialism in one country first' as against Trotsky's 'permanent revolution'. He then, together with Bukharin and Rykov, defeated the 'new opposition' of Zinoviev and Kamenev and the 'combined opposition' of these two with Trotsky, and finally defeated the Right Opposition of Bukharin and Rykov with the help of his own followers, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze, and Kirov, whom he gradually promoted to the Politburo. He ruled together with them as undisputed leader of the victorious clique from 1929 until 1934, launching the Five-Year Plans, the Collectivisation of Agriculture, and the so-called 'cultural revolution' i.e. large-scale replacement of old intellectuals, whether liberal, technocratic, Populist or ex-Menshevik, by new ones hastily trained from among uneducated party members.

From 1934 when an opposition emerged among his own followers led by Kirov, Stalin abandoned 'collective leadership' and established his personal rule. Constant purging of the party and state apparatus culminated in the Great Purge, aimed at the extermination of all potential and imaginary opponents. Henceforth Stalin's rule was a reign of terror. In 1940 Stalin became officially the head of the government, in 1941 chairman of the State Defence Committee, commissar (later minister) of defence and supreme commander-in-chief of the Soviet armed forces. He interfered personally with the work of the military commanders, and assumed the ranks of marshal and, later, generalissimo. The comparative relaxation of the political atmosphere in the war years was followed from 1946, by complete restoration of Stalinism as it had developed before the war and its imposition on the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. The last years of Stalin'' rule were characterised by extreme obscurantism, xenophobia, chauvinism, and anti-Semitism. His works include History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course (ed. by Stalin), 1939, Problems of Leninism (11th ed.), 1940.

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