• Glossary
• About this site
• Print this page

Warlords

Home | The warlords | Under scrutiny | The book | Find out more

Hitler | Stalin | Roosevelt | Churchill

The warlords: Joseph Stalin

In the early hours of the morning on 6 March 1953, a drum roll interrupted radio broadcasts in the USSR. Iosif Vissarionovic Dzhugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (1922-53) and premier of the Soviet Union (1941-53), was dead. At his funeral, a few days later, up to four million people crowded into Red Square and the surrounding streets in Moscow. While his body lay in state, scores, perhaps hundreds, of people were crushed to death as they rushed to pay their last respects.

All over the country, people mourned the passing of the man who had led them to victory in the 'Great Patriotic War' against Nazi Germany and who they had come to know as the 'Great Leader'. Despite being responsible for the deaths of upwards of 20 million Soviet citizens – including the executions of more than one million – during his time in power, Stalin inspired real and widespread love, as well as fear, in the people he ruled. It's said that even some of those he had imprisoned or sent to distant labour camps wept at the news of his death.

Childhood and youth

The son of former serfs, Iosif Dzhugashvili was born on 21 December 1879 in Gori, a small town in Georgia (then part of Russia), the only one of four children to survive into adulthood. His father Vissarion became a cobbler, briefly running his own shoe shop before going bankrupt and taking up a job in a shoe factory. He was a heavy drinker and frequently violent towards his wife and son. One of Iosif's childhood friends later wrote, 'Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father.'

In 1888, when 'Soso', as the young Iosif was nicknamed, was only eight years old, his father abandoned the family. It's thought that he was killed in a drunken brawl three years later. Iosif's mother Ekaterina took in laundry and did housecleaning to make ends meet.

Ekaterina wanted her son to become a priest, and around the time that his father left, Iosif Dzhugashvili started at the Gori Church School, where he excelled in his studies and in sport. He was awarded a scholarship to the Russian Orthodox Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1894, but proved more interested in revolutionary politics than religion. He became the leader of a secret Marxist group, resulting in his expulsion from the seminary in 1899, after which he worked as a tutor and a clerk.

Politics, exile and a pseudonym

Dzhugashvili became increasingly involved in revolutionary politics, having joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1898 and its Bolshevik faction in 1903. Working underground as a party organiser in the Caucasus mountains, he was arrested and exiled for his activities on a number of occasions, but always quickly returned.

As a delegate to the Social Democrats' first national conference, held in Finland in 1905, he met the Bolshevik leader Lenin for the first time. Seven years later, in 1912, Lenin co-opted him on to the central committee of the fledgling Bolshevik Party and put him on the board of Pravda, the party newspaper.

This didn't mean a great deal at the time, not least because Dzhugashvili – who now adopted the pseudonym 'Stalin', 'man of steel' – was exiled to Siberia the following year. Despite having escaped from five previous spells of exile, he couldn't find a way back from this one for four years. The Bolsheviks were also just a tiny group, one among many operating in the maelstrom of Russian politics in the early 20th century.

War and revolution

Although Russia remained one of the great European powers militarily, it was a very backward society economically, politically and culturally. The tsar (emperor) and his family presided over a hugely unequal, brutal and undemocratic society that was tottering on the brink of revolution.

The killing and turmoil of the First World War brought the raging discontent to a head. In March 1917, the first of the two revolutions that year led to Stalin's return from exile when a political amnesty was declared following the tsar's abdication. His presence on the Bolshevik central committee now took on real significance because of the seniority it bestowed on him within the party. With Lenin still abroad, he was second only to Lev Kamenev among the Bolsheviks in Moscow, and he acquired additional influence when he became editor of Pravda.

Stalin initially backed Kamenev's conciliatory policy towards the all-party provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky, which had been set up after the tsar's abdication. But when Lenin returned from abroad, the Georgian backed his leader's plans for a second revolution and the armed seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, which took place in November 1917.

The people's commissar

Stalin became people's commissar for the nationalities affairs in the new Soviet government, a post he held from 1917 to 1923, and then people's commissar for the workers' and peasants' inspectorate (1919-1922), which gave him the authority to investigate every official in the country. It was an authority that he was to use to his advantage, in combination with his position as a founder member of the Communist Party's Politburo, the inner circle that effectively determined all policy and decision-making in the new Soviet Union.

By the time Stalin became general secretary of the Communist Party central committee in 1922, he had control over all party appointments and dismissals. And when Lenin was incapacitated by a stroke in May 1922, he became one of the 'troika', together with Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, who took over the leadership of the party.

Lenin's testament

The Georgian had been one of Lenin's closest collaborators and had earlier sided with him during disagreements with Leon Trotsky and others. However, shortly before his death on 21 January 1924, Lenin criticised Stalin – and favoured Trotsky – in a testament that was subsequently suppressed by the Communist leadership.

In particular, Lenin recommended Stalin's removal as general secretary, describing him as 'too rude' and noting that he had 'unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution'. Later events proved Lenin to have been a good judge of Stalin's character, but he died before he was able to act on his reservations.

In the inner-party struggles that followed Lenin's death, Stalin managed always to finish on the winning side. Politically, his notion of 'building socialism in one country first' triumphed over Trotsky's 'permanent revolution', and during the latter half of the 1920s, he removed opponents on, first, the left and then the right of the party until he and his followers emerged with total control.

Collectivisation and cultural revolution

In 1928, Stalin introduced a massive state-led programme of industrialisation and forced collectivisation of agriculture, in which family farms were replaced by state-controlled farm units. Most property was now nationalised or held collectively by the peasants. The first 'five-year plan' centralised all economic decision-making and set hugely ambitious development targets. 'We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries,' Stalin declared in 1931. 'We must cover this distance in 10 years. Either we do this or they will crush us.'

Whether or not the Soviet Union would have been crushed without this programme, Stalin certainly crushed any hint of internal opposition. Kulaks – wealthy peasants – and anyone else who was deemed not to be cooperating with collectivisation were arrested in huge numbers. Many were executed, and millions more were exiled to the gulag – an acronym in Russian for 'chief administration of corrective labour camps' – in Siberia and other remote regions, where a large proportion of them died. Forced collectivisation also created terrible famines, as did the transfer of food supplies for industrial and military needs. This was particularly true in Ukraine in 1932-3, where as many as five million peasants may have starved to death.

Stalin's purges included a so-called 'cultural revolution' (an idea which Mao Zedong later borrowed for use in China), when old Bolsheviks, Communist intellectuals and technocrats were systematically rooted out and replaced, often by uneducated peasants from within the party ranks. The purges continued even when Stalin had eliminated all significant opposition in favour of his own supporters.

Suicide and assassination

In 1932, Stalin's second wife Nadezhda (Nadya) Alliluyeva committed suicide. Stalin was said to have wept uncontrollably. But as well as killing herself, Nadya had left a note condemning Stalin's policies. It was a sign of how Stalin's policies were alienating even those closest to him.

Two years after Nadya's suicide, his closest colleague Sergei Kirov, party secretary in Leningrad (St Petersburg), was assassinated. He had become far more popular than Stalin, and it is likely that the general secretary, who until then had been careful to act only as part of a collective leadership, had ordered Kirov's murder and then assumed absolute power.

Political leadership by extermination

After Kirov's assassination, Stalin's subsequent elimination of all possible opponents (and a very great many imaginary ones) culminated in the Moscow show trials and 'Great Purge' of 1936-8. By the beginning of World War II, almost every leading Bolshevik from the 1917 revolution had been killed, among them Kamenev and Zinoviev, former members of the ruling troika that, with Stalin, had taken over from Lenin.

In all, more than one million people were executed in Stalin's purges. At least 9.5 million more were exiled or imprisoned in labour camps, where five million or more may have died. Trotsky, speaking from exile in Mexico, where in 1940 he was murdered by a Stalinist assassin, said that a 'river of blood' now separated Stalin's rule from that of Lenin.

At the same time, Stalin carried out a purge of the Red Army, significantly weakening it in the run up to the war. Some 36,671 officers were executed, imprisoned or dismissed, including about half of the 706 with the rank of brigade commander or higher. Three of the army's five marshals and 15 of its 16 top commanders were also executed.

It was political leadership by extermination, but it didn't stop Stalin being hailed by the world Communist movement as a 'great teacher and friend' and the 'hope of the future'. And as the purges finally drew to a close at the end of the 1930s, the world was plunged into a war during which Stalin's reputation would soar in the most unlikely of places – the democracies of the United States and western Europe.

The Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact

Throughout the 1930s, the conflicting political philosophies of fascism and Communism had confronted each other across Europe. Many observers had seen a war between Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union as inevitable. Then, on 23 August 1939, the two countries signed what might qualify as the biggest ideological volte face in history: the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact.

The pact divided eastern Europe into different spheres of interest and paved the way for the Nazi invasion of Poland and the Soviet takeover of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and (after a fierce fight) Finland. The USSR also seized territory in eastern Poland and Romania.

From Stalin's perspective, it was a tactical alliance, prompted in large part by his (to some extent justified) fear that the capitalist powers wanted nothing better than a war between Germany and the Soviet Union. It also bought time for Soviet industry and the Red Army, weakened as it was by Stalin's purges, to prepare for any eventual conflict.

World War II

Nonetheless, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 and invaded the Soviet Union, it still caught Stalin by surprise. Ignoring intelligence warnings from Britain of the impending attack, which he thought were a ruse by Churchill to draw the USSR into the war, he prohibited his generals from mobilising their forces in anticipation. He is even said in some accounts to have refused to believe the attack was actually underway until events on the ground made it impossible to argue otherwise. The Germans, with three million troops committed to the invasion, advanced rapidly across a massive front.

Stalin's response, as ever, was to blame others and to take on even more power. Having already appointed himself as Soviet premier earlier in 1941, he now made himself commissar of defence and supreme commander (later generalissimo) of the Soviet armed forces. He issued orders to adopt a 'scorched earth' policy in the face of the German advance to prevent them obtaining 'a single engine, or a single railway truck, and not a pound of bread nor a pint of oil'. His infamous order no. 227 said that no one could retreat, even for tactical reasons, and order no. 270 prohibited any soldier from surrendering: 'There are no Russian prisoners of war, only traitors,' he declared. When his own son Yakov was taken prisoner, he announced: 'I have no son called Yakov.'

Gradually, the huge resources and workforce of the Soviet Union – combined with the rapid industrialisation enacted before the war – began to pay military dividends. The German advance was halted in September at Leningrad (which then endured a 29-month siege) and outside Moscow in December 1941, and then the Germans suffered a devastating, and decisive, defeat in February 1943 following the five-month battle of Stalingrad (now Volgograd).

The tide of the entire war was eventually turned by a colossal expenditure of Soviet lives and hardware. More than seven million Soviet troops and 20 million civilians paid the ultimate price in the Great Patriotic War. Stalin noted: 'One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.'

The Cold War

By the end of the war, Stalin had cultivated a productive relationship with the United States, where his public image was that of a smiling 'Uncle Joe' to stand aside the homely 'Uncle Sam'. The two superpowers were to dominate the post-war world, but the wartime alliance would not last long. As Winston Churchill warned in a speech on 5 March 1946, an 'iron curtain' had descended across Europe. Stalin was in the process of imposing his will – and de facto Soviet rule – on most of eastern and central Europe.

The relative relaxation of political controls in the USSR during the war against Germany ended once the war was over. More than 1.5 million Red Army soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans were sent to Soviet prison camps, and a new wave of purges eliminated even those who had played vital roles during the war. These included, in 1949, most of the Communist leadership in Leningrad, whose independence from Stalin during the 900-day siege of the city, now made them dangerous.

Internationally, the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948-9 was followed by the partition of Germany, and a 'Cold War' developed between Stalin's Soviet Union and his wartime allies. In 1950, it became a hot war, when Stalin backed a North Korean invasion of South Korea. Three million were to die there over the next three years.

The 'Doctors' plot'

At home, Stalin's rule was characterised by increasing paranoia, national chauvinism and repression. On 1 December 1952, he announced: 'Every Jew is a nationalist and potential agent of the American intelligence.' This was followed by accusations in Pravda that some of the most prestigious doctors, including Stalin's own personal physician, were part of a plot to poison the Soviet political and military élite – and almost all the doctors were Jewish. Hundreds were arrested and interrogated. (After Stalin's death, it was admitted that the charges against the Jewish doctors had been entirely invented by him and his associates.)

The wartime victory, the USSR's military prowess and the extension of its influence, however, had made Stalin seem unassailable, while continuing advances in heavy industry and science, in particular, maintained an illusion of economic strength and development way beyond the reality. But in reality Stalin was growing old, and with no one feeling safe from his paranoia and purges, he was becoming vulnerable.

Crimes discovered

His death, on the evening of 5 March 1953, was officially reported to have been the result of a cerebral haemorrhage, although it has been suggested that he was poisoned by Soviet secret police chief Lavrenty Beria. In any event, because the guards were too afraid to upset him (or because Beria prevented them), he was left unattended for many hours after he first became ill, until his recovery was impossible.

Regardless of its cause, the citizens of the Soviet Union heaved no collective sigh of relief on the death of one of the worst tyrants the world has ever known. Rather, the predominant emotion was one of great grief. Only in the years to come was the USSR and the rest of the world to discover the extent of Stalin's crimes. And when it did, the discovery broke not only the reputation of Iosif Vissarionovic Dzhugashvili but also the moral backbone of the world Communist movement.

Top