Joseph Stalin

Biography

Stalin was born Ioseb Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia, in 1878. He joined the Marxist movement as a young man, became a Bolshevik organiser in the Caucasus, and was arrested and exiled many times. After the October Revolution he became People's Commissar for Nationalities, served as a political commissar in the Civil War, and in 1922 became General Secretary of the Communist Party.

After Lenin's death in 1924 he outmanoeuvred his rivals and by the end of the decade was the dominant figure in the Soviet Union. His Five-Year Plans forced rapid industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture, which caused the famine of 1932–33. In the Great Purge of 1936–38 hundreds of thousands of people were executed and many more sent to the Gulag.

In 1939 he signed the non-aggression pact with Germany and divided Eastern Europe with Hitler. After the German invasion in 1941 he took direct control of the war as Premier, People's Commissar for Defence and head of the State Defence Committee. The Red Army's victories at Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk led to the capture of Berlin in 1945.

After the war he set up communist governments across Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union entered the Cold War with the West. He died in Moscow in 1953. Three years later Khrushchev denounced his rule and the cult of personality around him.