Russian revolution of 1917 stalin biography

Wikidata item. Overview of Joseph Stalin during — This article is part of a series about. Early life Residences Antisemitism Death and state funeral Bibliography. Leader of the Soviet Union. Political ideology. Stalinism Comparison to Nazism Marxism—Leninism atheism. Poetry " Anarchism or Socialism? Background [ edit ]. Main article: Early life of Joseph Stalin.

Role during the Russian Revolution [ edit ]. Further information: Russian Revolution of Supporting revolution and saving Lenin [ edit ]. Coup of General Lavr Kornilov in August [ edit ]. October Revolution [ edit ]. Establishing government [ edit ]. Role in the Russian Civil War, — [ edit ]. Further information: Russian Civil War. Role in the Polish-Soviet War, — [ edit ].

Further information: Soviet-Polish War. References [ edit ]. Citations [ edit ]. Young Stalin. ISBN New York : Alfred A. Joseph Stalin: a biographical companion. Stalin: A Biography. Bibliography [ edit ]. Joseph Stalin. The couple shared a tumultuous relationship, exacerbated by Stalin's increasing commitments to the revolutionary movement.

Tragically, Kato succumbed to tuberculosis in , an event that deeply affected Stalin. He was known to have loved her dearly, and her death reportedly hardens his heart, contributing to the ruthless persona he developed in later years. Their marriage was fraught with difficulties, including Stalin's infidelities and Nadezhda's struggles with mental health.

She eventually died by suicide in , leaving a deep scar on Stalin's psyche. Despite his authoritarian rule, Stalin was noted for being loving toward his children, although this was often overshadowed by his volatile nature and political ambitions. The legacy of his personal relationships, marked by loss and turmoil, mirrored the chaos of the era he helped shape.

Joseph Stalin not only transformed the Soviet Union into a formidable world power but also accumulated substantial personal wealth through a combination of political maneuvering and state control of resources. While specific figures regarding his net worth vary, it is clear that as the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the de facto leader of the USSR, Stalin had access to vast state resources which he could exploit for personal gain.

His influence was far-reaching, allowing him to control key industries and dictate economic policies that favored the Communist regime. This power dynamic created an environment where personal wealth could be amassed through the very machinery of the state he governed. Stalin's earnings were not just limited to financial assets; his influence extended to the lives and well-being of millions in the Soviet Union and beyond.

The policies he enacted, including rapid industrialization and collectivization, were meant to propel the nation forward economically but often resulted in catastrophic consequences. The human cost of his authority and decision-making remains a subject of discussion, as millions suffered from famine, forced labor, and executions under his regime.

The legacies of his policies continue to shape discussions about governance, power, and economic management, highlighting the dual nature of his impact as both a leader who propelled the USSR to superpower status and a ruler whose reign was marked by terror and repression. We assure our audience that we will remove any contents that are not accurate or according to formal reports and queries if they are justified.

The October Revolution of placed the Bolsheviks in power and Lenin became the new ruler of Russia. Lenin had come to admire Stalin for his loyalty and his organizational talents, particularly the way he could get things done, and he named Stalin to his cabinet as Commissar of Nationalities. In his book, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, Robert Conquest quotes an insight into Stalin's particular set of strengths made by American communist John Reed , who observed that Stalin was "not an intellectual….

He's not even well informed, but he knows what he wants. He's got the willpower, and he's going to be at the top of the pile some day. Beginning in , Lenin set up a number of agencies to manage government affairs. Stalin volunteered to be a member of various party committees and newly formed agencies. The most important of these new agencies was the Secretariat, which grew from thirty members in to more than six hundred in That year, Lenin made Stalin general secretary of the party Central Committee.

Under Stalin, the Secretariat became the Communist Party 's real center of power. As general secretary, he had the power to appoint local secretaries who would, in turn, select delegates to party congresses. In this manner, Stalin gradually packed the party's legislative bodies and staff with his own supporters. In May , Lenin suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes.

Later that year, he expressed second thoughts about having given Stalin so much power. In a document that severely criticized Stalin "Testament, " , Lenin said: "After taking over the position of General Secretary, Comrade Stalin has accumulated in his hands immeasurable power and I am not certain whether he will always be able to use this power with the required care….

Stalin is excessively rude. Lenin was faulted by the Bolsheviks for allegedly compromising on some of the Communist Party 's ideals, and political turmoil began to brew in the Soviet Union even before his death in January After Lenin died, the party, now called the All-Union Communist Party, was headed by a collective leadership that included Stalin; Leon Trotsky — , who had organized the Red Army the official name of the Soviet Army and still headed it; Lev Kamenev — and Grigory Zinovyev — , the party bosses in Moscow and Leningrad the newly named St.

Petersburg , respectively; and Nikolay Bukharin — , the party's leading theorist. Each of these men was ambitious and hoped to serve as the party's next leader. A shrewd and ruthless politician, Stalin was able to maneuver his opponents out of power by skillfully manipulating their jealousies and personal rivalries. First, he aligned himself with Kamenev and Zinovyev against Trotsky, who was soon ousted as head of the army.

He was later driven into exile and killed by one of Stalin's agents in Mexico City , Mexico. Next, Stalin teamed up with Bukharin in order to move against Kamenev and Zinovyev. Meanwhile, Stalin's agents within the party undermined popular support for Kamenev and Zinoviev. Delegates at the Fourteenth Party Congress in voted to expel them both.

Stalin then turned against Bukharin, who met secretly with Kamenev and Zinovyev, warning that Stalin would eventually strangle them if not stopped. However, it was much too late: Stalin had gained absolute control of the party. He later had Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin shot. Stalin was of short stature and had black hair, black eyes, a short skull, and a large nose.

He was often crude and cruel, cunning and distrustful. He was also vengeful to the point of paranoia, experiencing obsessive suspicions and delusions that others were bent on doing him harm. In political life he tended to be cautious and slow-moving, dealing with powerful people behind closed doors rather than with the public. He was not a popular or charismatic speaker.

But Stalin possessed boundless energy and a phenomenal capacity for absorbing detailed knowledge. Stalin seems always to have been a lonely man. His first wife, a Georgian girl named Ekaterina Svanidze, died of tuberculosis. His second wife, Nadezhda Alleluyeva, committed suicide in , presumably in despair over Stalin's dictatorial rule of the party.

The two children from his second marriage outlived their father, but they were not always on good terms with him. The son, Vasili, an officer in the Soviet air force, drank himself to death in The daughter, Svetlana, fled to the United States in the s. Once in control of the Soviet Union, Stalin began to push a plan for rapid, forced industrialization: the development of industries through systemized manufacturing or refinement of products by many people in one place, usually a factory or plant.

Stalin's Five-Year Plan for industrialization officially began in Factories, dams, and other enterprises were constructed all across the Soviet Union. By late , Soviet factories were producing basic industrial products such as steel, machine tools, and tractors. However, these achievements had a high cost and caused much suffering for the Russian people.

Workers were paid low wages, sometimes only enough to buy the basic necessities of life. Consumer goods and food were often scarce. Changing jobs without permission became illegal, and interior passports were issued to restrict free movement among citizens. Much of the construction work on canals, mines, and other enterprises was performed by political prisoners who were sent by the millions into the Gulag, a network of labor camps for people accused of committing crimes against the state.

Anyone accused of sabotage deliberate destructive acts by a discontented employee against an employer or wrecking could be shot. Meanwhile, in late , Stalin instigated the collectivization of agriculture, in which farmers would be forced to abandon their individual farms and move onto state-owned collective farms. His extreme policy included executing or deporting the more prosperous peasants, who were called kulaks tightwads.

The rest of the peasants were to be placed on state-controlled communal farms. This program met with massive resistance from the farmers, who resented being driven from their land, but the government was ruthless. Millions of kulaks were shot or sent to labor camps. In Ukraine, southern Russia, and Khazakstan, millions more died in artificial famines created when Soviet officials confiscated the farmers' grain.

By , most of Soviet agriculture had been collectivized. In all, twenty-six million farmers were placed on , collective farms, but it had cost more than ten million lives. Stalin developed a so-called cult of personality around himself, meaning that his rule was to be perceived as that of an almost godlike father, beloved and obeyed without question by his people.

Dozens of cities, towns, and villages were named after him, as was the tallest mountain in the Soviet Union. In books and movies, he was compared to the sun, moon, and stars. In one famous poem of the s, as quoted in the Houston Chronicle, he was called the "Genius of all mankind" who "didst give birth to man … who didst make fertile the earth.

Behind Stalin's power lay a monstrous policy of terror. It reached its height between and , when Stalin and his secret police carried out mass arrests, executions, and deportations. Stalin claimed that throughout the country traitors were masking as loyal citizens. Countless millions of innocent people perished or spent long years in forced labor camps.

Victims included top party and government elites, army officers, artists, writers, scientists, and even children. From the party's Central Committee elected in , 98 out of members were shot. Stalin had an irrational fear of his enemies. In December , Sergey Kirov — , one of his old supporters, was murdered. Kirov's popularity among some Communist Party leaders may have angered Stalin and prompted him to arrange his death, although it has never been proven.

Stalin blamed the death on his old enemies Kamenev and Zinovyev. Using the murder as his reason to go after traitors, he then launched a series of purges to eliminate unwanted individuals in which millions of people were eventually shot or sent to the Gulag. Stalin personally signed orders for the execution of thousands of Soviet citizens. In a move that seriously impaired the Soviet Union's ability to defend itself, Stalin ordered a purge of the armed forces in that took the lives of most of the country's marshals, generals, and admirals.

When World War II broke out a few years later, the Soviet Union would suffer severely for its lack of trained military leaders. In , Stalin worked out a nonaggression treaty with German leader Adolf Hitler — The initial Soviet losses were devastating, for Stalin had ignored warnings that an attack was coming. For nearly two weeks after the attack, Stalin secluded himself, apparently suffering a nervous breakdown.

He reemerged to take personal command of the war effort, and in October , with German troops at the gates of Moscow, he refused to leave the city. By the end of the war in , Stalin stood at the height of his power and fully shared in the glory of the victory. During the war, he had insisted on conducting diplomacy himself. At the wartime conferences, he won the respect of the Allied leaders U.

President Franklin D. The Soviets, having secured the status of a major world power, demanded and received control over much of Eastern Europe. Churchill and Roosevelt accepted the provisional Polish government supported by Moscow in return for the promise of free elections for the Polish people. At the Potsdam Conference in July , the three leaders divided Germany into occupation zones.

Stalin wanted to cart off as much of Germany's industry as he could, both to help rebuild the Soviet economy and to prevent Germany's recovery. The other Allied powers sought to rehabilitate Germany economically, knowing that not to do so would mean costly Western aid in the future. Stalin was not interested in rehabilitating Germany.

Stalin's postwar foreign policy was a continuation of his wartime goals. In Eastern Europe , he wanted to gain political control over the areas the Soviet army was occupying to form a Soviet bloc of nations. In the end, the Soviets maneuvered themselves into control in these nations and began transforming the various economies and societies into copies of the Soviet model.

Stalin had trouble with the Chinese Communists.

Russian revolution of 1917 stalin biography

The Russians were drawn to the larger and better organized Nationalist group, which had been founded by revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen — Although a Nationalist, Sun Yat-sen had welcomed help from the Soviets. With their assistance, he had built the Kuomintang party along Soviet lines. For several years they did. In , however, Chiang, who succeeded Sun as leader of the Nationalists, turned his army on the Communists, slaughtering thousands, and beginning the long and bloody war between the two groups.

Mao continued to fight the Nationalists, and the Communists eventually came to power on October 1, Stalin continued to provide economic assistance to the Chinese in the hope of ensuring Chinese dependency, but the relationship continued to be marked by mistrust. By , the British and Americans had merged their occupation zones in Germany in anticipation of German statehood, a merger to which Stalin strenuously objected.

On June 18 of that year, the Soviets stopped all surface traffic between the West and the capital city of Berlin, also divided, citing technical problems with the routes. Western leaders like President Harry S. Truman and the British prime minister Winston Churchill refused to acquiesce in the expansion of Soviet influence over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, and the cooperation of the war years dis-integrated into two camps, each armed with atomic weapons.

In his last years, enfeebled by strokes, Stalin was arguably the most powerful man in the world. As he deteriorated physically and mentally, the entire country—its foreign policy, internal politics, cultural life, and economic slowdown—reflected the moods of its leader and was affected by his growing isolation, arbitrariness, and inactivity.

No one could feel secure. The ruling elite was concerned with plots, intrigues, the rivalries among Stalin's closest associates, and the rise and fall of clients and patrons. As long as he trusted us to a certain degree, we were allowed to go on living and working. But the moment he stopped trusting you, Stalin would start to scrutinize you until the cup of his distrust overflowed.

Khrushchev overheard him say, "I'm finished. I trust no one, not even myself. Stalin's legacy was a powerful state with a crudely industrialized economy, a country in which millions had died to build his idea of socialism and other millions to defend their country against the enemies of communism. Almost immediately after his death, his successors began to dismantle many of the pillars of Stalinism.

They ended the mass terror, closed down the slave-labor camps, introduced a degree of "socialist legality," and opened the country to the West. In Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes, and eventually Stalin's body was removed from its place of honor in Lenin's mausoleum. Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov, eds. Translated by Benjamin Sher.

New Haven , Conn. A collection of documents on the Stalin Terror and the Great Purges. Siegelbaum, Lewis, and Andrei Sokolov. Translated by Thomas Hoisington and Steven Shabad. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Oxford, U. An extraordinary social-historical study of peasants and their strategies in the wake of collectivization. A sensitive reconstruction of life in Soviet towns and cities during Stalinism's first decade.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed. Stalinism: New Directions. London and New York , A collection of essays using the archival materials available after the disintegration of the USSR. Gorlizki, Yoram, and Oleg Khlevniuk. An archivally based account of the inner workings of Stalin's postwar government. Holloway, David. New Haven, Conn. A brilliant reconstruction of Stalin's foreign policy in the early atomic age.

Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin, eds. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge, U. Exercises in comparative history. Lewin, Moshe. New York , A classic social history of Stalin's transformation of Soviet society and economy. Suny, Ronald Grigor. An exploration of Stalin's early life that contests the psychoanalytic approach to biography.

Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Terry Martin, eds. New York, A collection of essays on the construction of nations in interwar USSR. Tucker, Robert C. A psychoanalytical biography of the young Stalin. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, — The story of Stalin's revolution retold.