Joseph
Stalin (help·info)
(Russian,
in full: Иосиф
Виссарионович
Сталин [Iosif Vissarionovich
Stalin]; December
18 [O.S.
December 6] 1878[1]
– March
5, 1953)
was the leader of the Soviet
Union from mid-1920s to his death in 1953 and General
Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1953),
a position which had later become that of party leader.
Born Ioseb
Jughashvili, Stalin became general
secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922. Following the
death of Vladimir
Lenin, he prevailed over Leon
Trotsky in a power struggle during the 1920s. In the 1930s
Stalin initiated the Great
Purge, a period of police terror that reached its peak in 1937.
Stalin's rule
molded the features that characterized the Soviet regime from the
era of his rule to its collapse in 1991 — though Maoists,
anti-revisionists
and some others say he was actually the last legitimate socialist
leader in the Soviet Union's history. Stalin's policies were based
on Marxism-Leninism
but are now often considered to represent a political and economic
system called Stalinism.
Stalin replaced the
New
Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with Five-Year
Plans in 1928 and collective
farming at roughly the same time. The Soviet Union was
transformed from a predominantly peasant society to a major world
industrial power by the end of the 1930s. Confiscations of grain and
other food by the Soviet authorities under his orders led to a
famine between 1932 and 1934, especially in Ukraine
(see Holodomor),
resulting in up to ten million deaths. Many peasants resisted
collectivization and grain confiscations, and Stalin ordered violent
repression against peasants deemed "kulaks."
A hard-won victory
in World War II (the Great
Patriotic War, 1941–45),
for which the Soviet Union was arguably unprepared, was made
possible in part through the capacity for production that was the
outcome of industrialization, as well as significant Lend-Lease
gifts, primarily by the United States. In the postwar years, Stalin
laid the groundwork for the formation of the Warsaw
Pact and established the USSR as one of the two major world
powers, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following
his death in 1953.
Stalin's rule was
characterized by a strong cult
of personality, an extreme concentration of power, and little
concern for the harsh consequences of strict policies. Stalin tried
to crush all opposition by establishing a ruthless security
apparatus that killed tens of millions of perceived state enemies.
In addition to the purges and the famine, many were killed in the Gulags
and in deportations. Lasting over a period of nearly 23 years, many
of its proponents fell victim to it in turns. Nikita
Khrushchev, Stalin's eventual successor, denounced his mass
repressions and cult of personality in 1956, initiating the process
of "de-Stalinization"[2]
which later became part of the Sino-Soviet
Split.
Childhood and
early years
Joseph Stalin was
born Iosif
Vissarionovich Djugashvili in Gori,
Georgia,
to Vissarion
Jughashvili and Ekaterina
Geladze. His mother and father were born serfs. Their other
three children died young; "Soso" (the Georgian pet name
for Joseph), was effectively the only child. Vissarion was a former
serf who, when freed, became a cobbler. He opened his own shop, but
quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis
(Archer 11).
Rarely seeing his
family and drinking heavily, Vissarion often beat his wife and small
son. One of Stalin's friends from childhood wrote, "Those
undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless
as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw
him cry (Hoober 15).
Another of his
childhood friends, Iremashvili, felt that the beatings by Stalin's
father gave him a hatred of authority. He also said that anyone with
power over others reminded Stalin of his father's cruelty.
One of the people
for whom Ekaterina did laundry and housecleaning was a Gori Jew,
David Papismedov. Papismedov gave Joseph, who would help out his
mother, money and books to read, and encouraged him. Decades later,
Papismedov came to the Kremlin
to learn what had become of little Soso. Stalin surprised his
colleagues by not only receiving the elderly man, but happily
chatting with him in public places.
In 1888, Stalin's
father left to live in Tiflis,
leaving the family without support. Rumors said he died in a drunken
bar fight; however, others said they had seen him in Georgia as late
as 1931. At the age of eight, Soso began his education at the Gori
Church School.
When attending
school in Gori, Soso was among a very diverse group of students.
Stalin and most of his classmates were Georgian and spoke mostly
Georgian. However, at school they were forced to use Russian.
Even when speaking
in Russian, their Russian teachers mocked Stalin and his classmates
because of their Georgian accents.
His peers were mostly the sons of affluent priests, officials, and
merchants.
Although Stalin
later sought to hide his Georgian origins,
during his childhood he was fascinated by Georgian folklore.
The stories he read told of Georgian mountaineers who valiantly
fought for Georgian independence.
Stalin's favorite hero of these stories was a legendary mountain
ranger named Koba, which became his first alias as a revolutionary.
He graduated first in his class and at age 14 he was awarded a
scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, a Russian
Orthodox institution which he attended from 1894 and onward.
Young
Stalin’s poems have attracted attention. In 1901, the Georgian
reactionary clergyman M. Kelendzheridze wrote an educational book on
language arts, including one of Stalin’s poems, signed by
Soselo, and described as among the best examples of Georgian
classics. In 1907 the same M. Kelendzheridze published “A
Georgian chrestomathy,
or collection of the best examples of Georgian literature”. In
Volume 1, page 43, he included a poem of Stalin’s dedicated to
Rafael Eristavi.
In addition to the
small stipend
from the scholarship he was also paid for singing in the choir.
Although his mother wanted him to be a priest (even after he had
become leader of the Soviet Union), he attended seminary not because
of any religious vocation, but because it was one of the few
educational opportunities available as the Tsarist
government of Russia was wary of establishing a university in
Georgia.
Stalin's
involvement with the socialist
movement (or, to be more exact, the branch of it that later became
the communist
movement) began at the seminary. During these school years, Stalin
joined a Georgian Social-Democratic organization, and began
propagating Marxism.
Stalin was expelled
from the seminary in 1899 for these actions. He worked for a decade
with the political underground in the Caucasus,
experiencing repeated arrests and exile to Siberia
between 1902 and 1917.
He adhered to Vladimir
Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of professional
revolutionaries. It was during this time, after the Revolution
of 1905, that he led "fighting squads" in bank
robberies to raise funds for the Bolshevik
Party. His practical experience made him useful in Lenin's Bolshevik
party, gaining him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912.
Some historians
have suggested that, during this period, Stalin was actually a Tsarist
spy, who was working to infiltrate
the Bolshevik
party, but there are no reliable documents to substantiate this.
In 1913 he adopted the name Stalin, which is derived form the
Russian word for "steel".
His only
significant contribution to the development of the Marxist theory at
this time was a treatise, written while he was briefly in exile in
Vienna, Marxism and the national question. It presents an orthodox
Marxist position on this important debate. This treatise may have
contributed to his appointment as People's
Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution (see
Lenin's article On
the Right of Nations to Self-Determination for comparison).
Marriages and
family
Stalin's first wife
Ekaterina
Svanidze died in 1907, only three years after their marriage. At
her funeral, Stalin said that any warm feelings he had had for
people died with her, for only she could mend his heart. They had a
son together, Yakov
Dzhugashvili, with whom Stalin did not get along in later years.
His son finally
shot himself because of Stalin's incredible harshness toward him,
but survived. After this, Stalin said "He can't even shoot
straight". Yakov served in the Red Army and was captured by the
Germans. They offered to exchange him for a German General, but
Stalin turned the offer down, allegedly saying "A lieutenant is
not worth a General"; others credit him with allegedly saying
"I have no son," to this offer, and Yakov is said to have
died running into an electric fence in the camp where he was being
held.
This, however, is
the "official report," and to this day his cause of death
is unknown. Nonetheless, there are many who believe his death was a
suicide. Since many families of the Soviet Union had sons in German
camps, Stalin could not have exchanged his son without losing public
support. He may have sacrificed his son as a demonstration that he
was one with the people.
His second wife was
Nadezhda
Alliluyeva, who died in 1932; she may have committed suicide by
shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note
which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly
political".[2]
Officially, she
died of an illness, but some rumors claimed that Stalin killed her.
With her, he had two children: a son, Vassili,
and a daughter, Svetlana.
Vassili rose
through the ranks of the Soviet Air
Force, but died an alcoholic death in 1962. He distinguished
himself in World War II as a capable airman. Svetlana emigrated to
the United
States in 1967.
Stalin's mother
died in 1937; he did not attend the funeral but instead sent a
wreath.
In March 2001,
Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown
grandson living in Novokuznetsk.
Yuri Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage,
but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was
in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet.
Soviet dissident
writer, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, had mentioned a son being born to Stalin and his common
law wife, Lida, in 1918 during Stalin's exile in northern Siberia.
Rise to power
In 1912 Stalin was
co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the Prague
Party Conference. In 1917 Stalin was editor of Pravda,
the official Communist newspaper, while Lenin and much of the
Bolshevik leadership were in exile.
Following the February
Revolution, Stalin and the editorial board took a position in
favor of supporting Kerensky's
provisional
government and, it is alleged, went to the extent of declining
to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government
to be overthrown. When Lenin returned from exile, he wrote the April
Theses which put forward his position.
In April 1917,
Stalin was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest
vote total in the party and was subsequently elected to the Politburo
of the Central Committee (May 1917); he held this position for the
remainder of his life.
According to many
accounts, Stalin only played a minor role in the revolution
of November
7. Other writers such as Adam Ulam stressed that each man in the
Central Committee had a job he was assigned to do.
The following
summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in Pravda,
November 6th 1918:
All practical
work in connection with the organisation of the uprising was done
under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of
the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the
Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for
the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and
the efficient manner in which the work of the Military
Revolutionary Committee was organised.
Note: Although this
passage was quoted in Stalin's book The October Revolution
issued in 1934, it was expunged in Stalin's Works released in
1949.
Later, in 1924,
Stalin himself created a myth around a so-called "Party Centre"
which "directed" all practical work pertaining to the
uprising, consisting of himself, Sverdlov, Dzherzhinsky, Uritsky,
and Bubnov. However, no evidence was ever shown for the activity of
this "centre", which was anyway, subordinate to the
Military Revolutionary Council, headed by Trotsky.
During the Russian
Civil War and Polish-Soviet
War, Stalin was a political
commissar in the Red
Army at various fronts.
Stalin's first government position was as People's
Commissar of Nationalities Affairs (1917–1923).
Also, he was
People's Commissar of the Workers
and Peasants Inspection (1919–1922), a member of the Revolutionary
Military Council of the republic (1920–23) and a member of
the Central
Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (from 1917).
Campaign against
the Left and Right Opposition
On April
3, 1922,
Stalin was made general
secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian
Communist Party (Bolsheviks), a post (he attempted to decline,
although this was refused) that he subsequently built up into the
most powerful in the country.
This position was
an unwanted one within the party (Stalin was sometimes referred to
as "Comrade Card-Index" by fellow party members) but
actually had potential as a power base. The position had great
influence on those who joined the party. This allowed him to fill
the party with his allies.
Stalin's
accumulation of personal power increasingly alarmed the dying Lenin,
and in his
last writings he famously called for the removal of the
"rude" Stalin, also stating that Stalin's views were too
extreme and violent.
However, this
document was suppressed by members of the Central
Committee, many of whom were also criticised by the Bolshevik
leader in the testament.
After Lenin's
death
in January 1924, Stalin, Kamenev,
and Zinoviev
together governed the party, placing themselves ideologically
between Trotsky
(on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin
(on the right).
During this period,
Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international
revolution in favor of a policy of building "Socialism
in One Country", in contrast to Trotsky's theory of Permanent
Revolution.
In the struggle for
leadership one thing was certain, whoever ended up ruling the party
had to be considered very loyal to Lenin. Stalin fostered a cult of
personality around Lenin, and emphasized his own close relationship
with the dead leader. Stalin organized Lenin's funeral and made a
speech professing undying loyalty to Lenin, in almost religious
terms.[3]
He undermined
Trotsky, who was sick at the time, by misleading him about the date
of the funeral. Therefore despite the fact that Trotsky was
Lenin’s associate throughout the early days of the Soviet
regime, he lost ground to Stalin. Stalin made great play of the fact
that Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks just before the revolution,
and publicized Trotsky's pre-revolutionary disagreements with Lenin.
Stalin also
undermined Zinoviev and Kamenev by emphasising their vote against
the insurrection in 1917. Stalin had another advantage in that was
that he was considered to be a man of the people because he came
from a poor background.
Another event that
helped Stalin's rise was the fact that Trotsky came out against
publication of Lenin's
Testament in which he pointed out the strengths and weaknesses
of Stalin and Trotsky and the other main players, and suggested that
he be succeeded by a small group of people.
An important
feature of Stalin’s rise to power is the way that he
manipulated his opponents and played them off against each other.
Stalin formed a "troika" of himself, Zinoviev, and Kamenev
against Trotsky. When Trotsky had been eliminated Stalin then joined
Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev. Zinoviev and
Kamenev then turned to Lenin's widow, Krupskaya;
they formed the United Opposition in July 1926.
In 1927 during the
15th Party Congress Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the
party and Kamenev lost his seat on the Central Committee. Stalin
soon turned against the "Right
Opposition", represented by his erstwhile allies, Bukharin
and Rykov.
A key role in
Stalin's success was in the power that his position as Secretary
General gave him of being able to place people he trusted in key
positions.
Another aspect that
helped Stalin come to power was the fact that the people were tired
from the world war and the civil war and that Stalin's policy of
concentrating in building "Socialism in One Country" was
seen as a respite from war.
Stalin took great
advantage of the ban on factionalism which meant that no group could
openly go against the policies of the leader of the party because
that meant creation of an opposition.
Stalin's rise to
power was helped by the fact that his adversaries, particularly
Trotsky, underestimated Stalin's political skills, and his ability
to form key strategic alliances.
By 1928 (the first
year of the Five-Year
Plans) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the
following year Trotsky was exiled because of his opposition. Having
also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating
collectivization and industrialization, Stalin can be said to have
exercised control over the party and the country.
However, as the
popularity of other leaders such as Sergei
Kirov and the so-called Ryutin
Affair were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute
power until the Great
Purge of 1936–38.
Stalin and changes
in Soviet society
Industrialization
-
Main article:
Industrialization
of the USSR
The Russian
Civil War and War
communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy.
Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery
followed under the New
Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility
within the context of socialism.
Under Stalin's
direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained
"Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for a
highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and
the collectivization of agriculture.
With no seed
capital, little international
trade, and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's
government financed industrialization by both restraining
consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure that
capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless
extraction of wealth from the peasantry.
In 1933, worker's
real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. There was
also use of the unpaid labor of both common and political prisoners
in labor
camps and the frequent "mobilization" of communists
and Komsomol
members for various construction projects. The Soviet Union also
made use of foreign experts, e.g. British engineer Stephen Adams, to
instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.
In spite of early
breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved
rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While there
is general agreement among historians that the Soviet Union achieved
significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate
of this growth is disputed.
Official Soviet
estimates placed it at 13.9%, Russian and Western estimates gave
lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that
Soviet growth temporarily was much higher after Stalin's death.[4]
[5]
Collectivization
Stalin's regime
moved to force collectivization
of agriculture. This was in order to increase agricultural output
from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more
direct political control, and to make tax collection more efficient.
Collectivization
meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the
abolition of serfdom in 1861, and alienation
from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also
meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it
faced violent reaction among the peasantry.
In the first years
of collectivization, it was estimated that industrial and
agricultural production would rise by 200% and 50%,[3]
respectively; however, agricultural production actually dropped.
Stalin blamed this
unexpected drop on kulaks
(rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. Therefore those
defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later
"ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag
labor
camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on
the charge.
The two-stage
progress of collectivization — interrupted for a year by
Stalin's famous editorial, "Dizzy
with success" (Pravda,
March 2, 1930), and "Reply
to Collective Farm Comrades" (Pravda, April 3, 1930)
— is a prime example of his capacity for tactical retreats.
Many historians
agree that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely
responsible for major famines[citation needed]
(Chairman Mao
Zedong of China would trigger a similar famine in 1959 to 1961
with his Great
Leap Forward).
During the Holodomor
in Ukraine
and the Kuban
region not only "kulaks" were killed. The controversial Black
Book of Communism and other sources document that all grains
were taken from areas that did not meet targets, including the next
year's seed grain.
It also claims that
peasants were forced to remain in the starving areas, sales of train
tickets were stopped, and the State
Political Directorate set up barriers to prevent people from
leaving the starving areas.
The Soviet Union
exported grain while millions of Soviet citizens were starving to
death. In Ukraine today the 1932–1933 famine is often
described as "the Holodomor" (Ukrainian:
Голодомор), or
the "Ukrainian Genocide".
However, famine
also affected various other parts of the USSR. The death toll of the
famine is estimated between five and ten million people. The worst
crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, caused 375,000 to
400,000 deaths.[6]
Soviet authorities
and other historians argued that tough measures and the rapid
collectivization of agriculture were necessary in order to achieve
an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and
ultimately win World War II.
This is disputed by
other historians such as Alec
Nove, who claim that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite
of, rather than thanks to, its collectivized agriculture.
Science
Science in the Soviet
Union was under strict ideological control, along with art and
literature. On the positive side, there was significant progress in
"ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet
education system and state-financed research.
However, in several
cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic —
the most notable examples being the "bourgeois
pseudosciences" genetics
and cybernetics.
In the late 1940s
there were also attempts to suppress special
and general
relativity, as well as quantum
mechanics, on grounds of "idealism."
However, the chief
Soviet physicists made it clear that without using these theories,
they would be unable to create a nuclear
bomb.
Linguistics
was the only area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin
personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's
rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai
Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that language is a class
construction and that language structure is determined by the
economic structure of society.
Stalin, who had
previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for
Nationalities, felt he grasped enough of the underlying issues to
coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's
ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal
work discussing linguistics is a small essay, "Marxism and
Linguistic Questions."[4]
Although no great
theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were
there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics;
his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of
ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics.
Scientific research
was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to labor
camps (including Lev
Landau, later a Nobel
Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939) or
executed (e.g. Lev
Shubnikov, shot in 1937). They were persecuted for their dissident
views, not for their research.
Nevertheless, much
progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and
technology. It laid the ground for the famous achievements of Soviet
science in the 1950s, such as the development of the BESM-1
computer in 1953 and the launching of Sputnik
in 1957.
Indeed, many
politicians in the United
States began to fear, after the "Sputnik
crisis," that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet
Union in science and in public education.
Social services
Stalin's government
placed heavy emphasis on the provision of free medical services.
Campaigns were carried out against typhus,
cholera,
and malaria;
the number of doctors was increased as rapidly as facilities and
training would permit; and death and infant
mortality rates steadily declined.
Education in
primary schools continued to be free and was expanded, with many
more Soviet citizens learning to read and write, and higher
education also expanded. Stalin was the only ruler in the history of
Russia and Soviet Union who established fees for secondary education
in public schools.
With the
industrialization and heavy human losses due to the World
War II and repressions the generation that survived under Stalin
saw a major expansion in job opportunities, especially for women.
