BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH STALIN

PART - 1

By

SIDDHANT AGNIHOTRI

B.Sc (Silver Medalist)

M.Sc (Applied Physics)

Facebook: sid_educationconnect

WHAT WE WILL STUDY?

• CHILDHOOD

• THE RISING

• IN POLITICS

• GENOCIDE

CHILDHOOD

• On December 18, 1879, in the Russian peasant village of Gori, Georgia,

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (later known as Joseph Stalin) was born.

The son of Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ketevan Geladze, a

washerwoman, Joseph was a frail child.

• Childhood was not easy and he faced emotional as well as physical abuse

by his father.Once he was beaten so much that his elbow was damaged

and could not be repaired throughout his life.

• He also developed a cruel streak for those who crossed him. Joseph's

mother, a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, wanted him to become a

priest. They were ethnically Georgian and Stalin grew up speaking the

Georgian language

• 1888, she managed to enroll him in church school in Gori. Joseph did well

in school, and his efforts gained him a scholarship to Tiflis Theological

Seminary in 1894

• As he grew older, Stalin lost interest in his

studies. his grades dropped and he was

repeatedly confined to a cell for his rebellious

behaviour.

• Teachers complained that he declared himself

an atheist. For a time, he found work as a tutor

and later as a clerk at the Tiflis Observatory.

• In 1901, he joined the Social Democratic Labor

Party and worked full-time for the revolutionary

movement.

• Meanwhile between 1901-05 he was

continously involved in revolautionary activity

and protests.

YOUNG STALIN

• In November 1905, the Georgian Bolsheviks elected Stalin as one of their

delegates to a Bolshevik conference in Saint Petersburg. On arrival, he

met Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, who informed him that the venue

had been moved to Finland. At the conference Stalin met Lenin for the first

time.

• Though never a strong orator like Vladimir Lenin or an intellectual like

Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin excelled in the mundane operations of the

revolution, calling meetings, publishing leaflets and organizing strikes and

demonstrations.

GAINING MOMENTUM

• In March 1908, Stalin was arrested and interred in Bailov Prison, where he

led the imprisoned Bolsheviks, organised discussion groups, and ordered

the killing of suspected informants.

• In February 1912, Stalin escaped to Saint Petersburg, tasked with

converting the Bolshevik weekly newspaper, Zvezda ("Star") into a

daily, Pravda ("Truth"). The new newspaper was launched in April 1912,

although Stalin's role as editor was kept secret.

GAINING MOMENTUM

RISE OF STALIN

• In February 1917, the Russian Revolution began.

By March, the tsar had abdicated the throne and

Lenin formed his government.

• Stalin executed suspected counter-

revolutionaries, sometimes without trial. His use

of state violence and terror was at a greater

scale.

• In 1922, Stalin was appointed to the newly

created office of general secretary of the

Communist Party. Though not a significant post at

the time, it gave Stalin control over all party

member appointments, which allowed him to build

his base.

• After Lenin's death, in 1924, Stalin set out to

destroy the old party leadership and take total

control and the reign of terror began.

POLITICAL CONTROL

• At first, he had people removed from power through bureaucratic shuffling

and denunciations.Further paranoia set in and Stalin soon conducted a

vast reign of terror, having people arrested in the night and put before

spectacular show trials.

• Potential rivals were accused of aligning with capitalist nations, convicted

of being "enemies of the people" and summarily executed. Stalin saw

Trotsky as the main obstacle to his rise to dominance within the

Communist Party.

• By the latter half of the 1920s, the Soviet Union was still lagging behind

the industrial development of Western countries. There had also been a

shortfall of grain supplies; 1927 produced only 70% of grain produced in

1926.

DICTATORSHIP

• In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin reversed the Bolshevik agrarian policy by

seizing land given earlier to the peasants and organizing collective farms.

• Stalin believed that collectivism would accelerate food production, but the peasants

resented losing their land and working for the state. Millions were killed in forced

labor or starved during the ensuing famine.

• Stalin also set in motion rapid industrialization that initially achieved huge

successes, but over time cost millions of lives and vast damage to the environment.

Any resistance was met with swift and lethal response; millions of people were

exiled to the labor camps of the Gulag or were executed.

• Stalin faced problems in his family life. In 1929, his son Yakov unsuccessfully

attempted suicide. His relationship with Nadya was also strained amid their

arguments and her mental health problems. In November 1932, after a group dinner

in the Kremlin in which Stalin flirted with other women, Nadya shot herself.

Death is the solution to all

problems. No man - no

problem

TO BE CONTD…

BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH STALIN

PART - 2

By

SIDDHANT AGNIHOTRI

B.Sc (Silver Medalist)

M.Sc (Applied Physics)

Facebook: sid_educationconnect

GENOCIDE

• Within the Soviet Union, there was widespread civic disgruntlement

against Stalin's government Social unrest, previously restricted largely to

the countryside, was increasingly evident in urban areas, prompting Stalin

to ease on some of his economic policies in 1932.

• As a result, an estimated 7,000,000 persons perished in this farming area,

known as the breadbasket of Europe, with the people deprived of the food

they had grown with their own hands.

• By mid 1932, nearly 75 percent of the farms in the Ukraine had been

forcibly collectivized. On Stalin's orders, mandatory quotas of foodstuffs to

be shipped out to the Soviet Union were drastically increased in August,

October and again in January 1933, until there was simply no food

remaining to feed the people of the Ukraine.

• By the end of 1933, nearly 25 percent of the population of the Ukraine,

including three million children, had perished. The Kulaks as a class were

destroyed and an entire nation of village farmers had been laid low

GENOCIDE

• Among those farmers, were a class of people called Kulaks by the

Communists. They were formerly wealthy farmers that had owned 24 or

more acres, or had employed farm workers.

• Declared "enemies of the people," the Kulaks were left homeless and

without a single possession as everything was taken from them, even their

pots and pans. It was also forbidden by law for anyone to aid

dispossessed Kulak families.

• Some researchers estimate that ten million persons were thrown out of

their homes, put on railroad box cars and deported to "special settlements"

in the wilderness of Siberia during this era, with up to a third of them

perishing amid the frigid living conditions.

• Men and older boys, along with childless women and unmarried girls, also

became slave-workers in Soviet-run mines and big industrial projects.

REIGN OF TERROR

• Regarding state repressions, Stalin often provided conflicting signals. In

May 1933, he ordered the release of many criminals convicted of minor

offenses from the overcrowded prisons and ordered the security services

not to enact further mass arrests and deportations.

• In 1935, the NKVD was ordered to expel suspected counter-

revolutionaries, particularly those who had been aristocrats, landlords, or

businesspeople before the October Revolution.

• Stalin orchestrated the arrest of many former opponents in the Communist

Party: denounced as Western-backed mercenaries, many were

imprisoned or exiled internally.The first Moscow Trial took place in August

1936; Kamenev and Zinoviev were among those accused of plotting

assassinations, found guilty in a show trial, and executed.

• There were mass expulsions from the party in August 1940, Trotsky was

assassinated in Mexico, eliminating the last of Stalin's opponents among

the former Party leadership.

IN WORLD WAR 2

• As war clouds rose over Europe in 1939, Stalin

made a seemingly brilliant move, signing a

nonaggression pact with Adolph Hitler and Nazi

Germany.

• Stalin was convinced of Hitler's integrity and

ignored warnings from his military commanders that

Germany was mobilizing armies on its eastern

front.

• After heroic efforts on the part of the Soviet Army

and the Russian people, the Germans were turned

back at Stalingrad in 1943. the recent victory in

Stalingrad put Stalin in a solid bargaining position.

• In April 1945, the Red Army seized Berlin, Hitler

committed suicide, and Germany surrendered

unconditionally.Stalin was annoyed that Hitler was

dead, having wanted to capture him alive.

1945-1950

• Within the Soviet Union he was widely regarded as the embodiment of

victory and patriotismThe NKVD were ordered to catalogue the scale of

destruction during the war.

• It was established that 1,710 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages had been

destroyed. They recorded that between 26 and 27 million Soviet citizens

had been killed, with millions more being wounded, malnourished, or

orphaned.

• Stalin's health was deteriorating, and heart problems forced a two-month

vacation in the latter part of 1945. In August 1949, the bomb was

successfully tested in the deserts outside Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan and

cold war started between USSR AND USA.Stalin also initiated a new

military build-up; the Soviet army was expanded from 2.9 million soldiers,

as it stood in 1949, to 5.8 million by 1953.

LATER YEARS

• In April 1949, the Western powers established the North

Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), an international

military alliance of capitalist countries. Within Western

countries, Stalin was increasingly portrayed as the "most

evil dictator alive" and compared to Hitler.

• In his later years, Stalin was in poor health. He took

increasingly long holidays. Stalin nevertheless mistrusted

his doctors.

• There, he emphasised what he regarded as leadership

qualities necessary in the future and highlighted the

weaknesses of various potential successors.

• In 1952, he also eliminated the Politburo and replaced it

with a larger version which he called the Presidium

DEATH

• On 1 March 1953, Stalin's staff found him semi-conscious on the bedroom

floor of his Volynskoe dacha, having urinated on himself. He had suffered a

cerebral hemorrhage.

• Stalin's death was announced on 6 March. The body was embalmed for

long-term preservation,and then placed on display in Moscow's House of

Unions for three days. Crowds were such that a crush killed around 100

people.

• The subsequent funeral involved the body being laid to rest in Lenin's

Mausoleum in Red Square on 9 March. Hundreds of thousands attended.

• Stalin was eventually denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in

1956. However, he has found a rekindled popularity among many of

Russia's young people.

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