Биография И.В. Сталина
Joseph Stalin became the preeminent Soviet leader
after the death of Vladimir I. LENIN in 1924. From 1929 until his
own death in 1953, Stalin held absolute authority. Outwardly
modest and unassuming and intellectually unimpressive, he applied
a shrewd, practical intelligence to political organization and
manipulation. Because he rarely appeared to be what he was,
Stalin was consistently underestimated by his opponents, who
usually became his victims. He brought his country to world power
status but imposed upon it one of the most ruthless regimes in
history.
Early Life and Career
Stalin was born Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili on Dec. 21
(N.S.), 1879, in the Georgian hill town of Gori. His father, a
poor, unsuccessful shoemaker, was an alcoholic who beat his son
unmercifully and who died in a brawl when the boy was 11 years
old. Stalin's mother, Ekaterina, was a washerwoman, hopeful that
her sole surviving child would be a priest. According to Robert
Tucker, a recent biographer, her attentiveness encouraged Stalin
toward self-idealization, while the deprivations of his childhood
may have made a compensatory fantasy life psychologically
indispensable. In any event, young Stalin was given to
identifying with hero-figures. His early nickname, Koba, was that
of a fictional mountain bandit and rebel; if his family's squalor
gave him ambition and an acute class consciousness, his Georgian
background also taught him brutality and vengeance.
At the age of 14, Stalin entered the Tiflis Theological Seminary.
By his own testimony, the discipline there was another impetus
toward revolutionary activism. In 1898 he became involved in
radical political activity. The next year he left the seminary
without graduating and became a full-time revolutionary
organizer. A member of the Georgian branch of the Social
Democratic party by 1901, Stalin roamed the Caucasus, agitating
among workers, helping with strikes, and spreading socialist
literature. He had no oratorical skills or charisma but showed
great talent at practical organizational activity. His dull,
pockmarked appearance also concealed a genuine intelligence and a
particularly acute memory.
When the Social Democrats split (1903) into two groups, the
BOLSHEVIKS AND MENSHEVIKS, Stalin supported the more radical
Bolsheviks and their leader, V. I. Lenin. Lenin appreciated
Stalin's familiarity with Russian nationality problems and his
intense personal loyalty. Between 1902 and 1913, Stalin was
arrested many times but escaped repeatedly to continue working as
a Bolshevik organizer. During these years he also staged
robberies to obtain funds for the Bolsheviks.
The Road to Absolute Power
In 1912, Lenin rewarded Stalin by naming him to the Bolshevik
Central Committee. From there, Stalin rapidly gained influence
and power among the Bolsheviks and served as the first editor of
Pravda, the party newspaper. He also began to use the name
Stalin, meaning "man of steel." Exiled (1913-17) to
Siberia by the tsarist government, he returned after the March
Revolution had overthrown the monarchy (see RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS
OF 1917). Stalin played an important organizational role in the
party after the first unsuccessful Bolshevik attempt to seize
power (the "July days") when the Bolshevik Leon TROTSKY
was arrested and Lenin was forced into hiding. Following the
successful November Revolution, Stalin was appointed to seemingly
mundane administrative posts such as commissar of nationalities
(1917-23) and commissar of workers' and peasants' inspection
(1919-23), but in 1922, without fanfare, Stalin became general
secretary of the party's Central Committee.
He now controlled appointments, set agendas, and could transfer
thousands of party officials from post to post at will. He was
also nourishing a hatred of intellectuals, a disdain for educated
"specialists," and an insatiable thirst for power.
After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin used his control of the party
apparatus to crush his opponents. For his de-emphasis on world
revolution under the slogan "socialism in one country"
and his moderate economic policies, the general secretary was
attacked by Trotsky, who was belatedly joined by Lev KAMENEV and
Grigory ZINOVIEV. By 1928, Stalin had driven this leftist
opposition from its party posts. Then, whether for political or
economic reasons, he adopted such leftist programs as
agricultural collectivization and rapid industrialization and
smashed the party's right, which was led by Nikolai BUKHARIN, for
opposing measures that he himself had recently attacked. By the
end of 1929, Stalin was the undisputed master of the USSR.
THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE STALIN REGIME
The ultimate winner in these intraparty disputes was Joseph
STALIN. While other leaders were busy giving speeches, Stalin
used his position as general secretary of the party to work on
the nuts and bolts of party rule: appointments and coordination
of policy at all levels of the huge Soviet state. What his
opponents saw as machine politics was viewed by supporters as
practical concern for the unity of the party. Stalin was not an
eloquent speaker, but he did embody the party's will to
"catch up and overtake" the advanced western countries
by building "socialism in one country"--Russia.
By 1929, Stalin was in undisputed control, and in a position to
give his own response to the dilemmas facing the party. He
decided that certain key Bolshevik aims had to be maintained even
if it meant the sacrifice of all others. These aims were rapid
industrialization, unity in party and society, and vigilance
against class enemies.
Industrialization
Stalin pushed for industrialization at a rate faster than anyone
in the party had earlier dreamed was possible. He maintained that
the inhuman tempo of growth was necessary if Russia did not want
to be beaten by its many enemies. Other socialist values such as
equality or democracy would have to wait until the period of
"primitive socialist accumulation" was over, and Russia
had a thriving industrial economy. To maintain growth at the
desired tempo, Stalin insisted on what he called a temporary
"tribute" from the peasants in the form of food and
agricultural raw materials. This tribute was incompatible with
the maintenance of friendly relations with the peasantry. While
searching for ways around this problem, Stalin came to a
momentous decision: to impose a COLLECTIVE FARM structure on the
peasantry before industrialization provided the necessary
technical base for such a change in the form of electrification
and tractors.
Forced collectivization led to an upheaval in the age-old peasant
way of life. The violent and hasty way collectivization was
carried out magnified the costs of the process. In late 1929
Stalin decreed "the liquidation of the kulak as a
class." Kulak was the Bolshevik term for the better-off
peasant who had become the scapegoat for all difficulties.
Millions of peasants were uprooted from their farms and deported
to remote regions. The replacement of individual peasant farms
with collective ones was done so rapidly that massive
disorganization resulted. Despite temporary retreats, the process
of collectivization was pushed on unrelentingly. The government's
refusal to relax the pressure or even to admit the existence of a
problem turned the harvest failure of 1933 into a famine in which
millions perished.
Elimination of Dissent
Stalin was aware that these radical and costly policies were
viewed with grave misgivings by many within the party. His
fanatical insistence on party unity, coupled with his suspicious
and resentful personality, led him to deal with real and
suspected opposition by means of the GREAT PURGE, a campaign of
terror that reached its climax in 1937-38. The decimation of the
country's political and economic elite was only the tip of the
iceberg. In the course of the purge millions of Soviet citizens
were executed or sent to forced labor camps.
Insistence on unity and centralized control was not confined to
the party. All manifestations of "nationalism"--which
to Stalin meant any attempt to attain genuine administrative
autonomy--were stamped out. Cultural life fell under the control
of central organizations such as the Union of Writers; writers
and artists were told that SOCIALIST REALISM was the only
permissible style.
Stalin and his supporters justified the violence inherent in
policies such as de-kulakization and the great purge by the need
for vigilance against malevolent and seemingly ubiquitous class
enemies. The emphasis on vigilance meant a great increase in
power for the secret police organization set up in the early days
of the revolution to deal with sabotage and counterrevolution.
Under various names this organization (see KGB) lasted through
the entire history of the Soviet Union and indeed may have
outlasted it. Owing to the extraordinary terror of the 1930s, the
secret police became the administrators of a vast empire of
forced labor camps in which millions worked under inhuman
conditions. The Russian acronym for the Main Administration of
Camps (GULAG) became known throughout the world because of the
description by Aleksandr SOLZHENITSYN of the camp system in The
Gulag Archipelago (1973).
Collectivization and Industrialization
Stalin's program of farm collectivization began late in 1928 when
he suddenly ordered the expropriation of the lands of the
middle-class farmers, or KULAKS. The party managed to seize total
control of the harvest, deport about 5 million kulaks as
"bourgeois residue" from the countryside, and secure
enough capital (through the export of the forcibly seized grain)
to finance a massive industrialization drive. Brutally
suppressing peasant resistance, Stalin refused to slacken the
pace despite a famine in 1932 and mounting opposition within his
own party. Disaffection with Stalin was manifest at the 17th
Party Congress in January-February 1934, when Leningrad party
leader Sergei Kirov, a favorite of moderate delegates, received
an ovation equal to Stalin's. Peasant resistance was quashed,
however, and collectivization proved a success in terms of
facilitating rapid industrial growth. Soviet industrialization
was achieved by means of three 5-year plans, lasting from 1928
until World War II interrupted the last one in 1941.
The Great Purges
Having mastered the economic front, Stalin felt free to turn on
all those who appeared to have doubted his wisdom and ability. In
December 1934, Kirov was assassinated, probably at the behest of
Stalin, who used the murder as the pretext for arresting--within
the year--virtually all major party figures as saboteurs. From
1936 to 1938 he staged the Moscow show trials, at which prominent
old Bolsheviks and army officers were convicted of implausibly
monstrous crimes. By 1937, Stalin's blood purge extended through
every party cell in the country. By 1939 a total of 98 of the 139
central committee members elected in 1934 had been shot and 1,108
of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress arrested. The
secret-police reign of terror annihilated a large portion of
every profession and reached down into the general population.
Deaths have been estimated in the millions, including those who
perished in concentration camps. At the same time, Stalin began
promoting a cult of adulation that proclaimed him a genius in
every field of human endeavor. By the time the terror eased in
1938, Stalin's dictatorship had become entirely personal,
unrestrained by the party or any other institution.
World War II Leadership
In world affairs, Stalin began to fear the growing power of Nazi
Germany. After abortive attempts to reach an accord with the
Western democracies, he concluded (1939) a nonaggression treaty
(see NAZI-SOVIET PACT) with Hitler. After Germany invaded Poland
at the start of World War II, Stalin acted to expand Soviet
influence in Europe by occupying eastern Poland and attacking
Finland (see RUSSO-FINNISH WAR). The nonaggression pact with
Germany, however, proved short-lived when German troops invaded
the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Taking personal control of the armed forces, Stalin expended
troops as easily as he had executed kulaks, but the USSR's
industrial plant produced enormous quantities of sophisticated
armament and weaponry. Much more so than the other principal
Allied leaders, U.S. president Franklin D. ROOSEVELT or British
prime minister Winston CHURCHILL, Stalin also commanded his army
directly on a day-to-day basis, impressing foreign observers
tremendously with his grasp of detail. He proved a skillful
negotiator at the major Allied conferences (see TEHRAN
CONFERENCE; YALTA CONFERENCE; POTSDAM CONFERENCE).
Last Years
In 1945, Stalin was at the height of his power and prestige,
regarded as his country's savior by millions of his subjects. The
period between 1945 and his death in 1953, however, saw a new
wave of repression and some of Stalin's worst excesses. Returned
prisoners of war were incarcerated in concentration camps. New
duties on peasants reduced many to the status of serfs, and his
imposition of Communist regimes on Eastern European nations
helped create the perilous climate of the COLD WAR. Stalin now
turned on many of his closest associates. In early 1953 he
announced that he had uncovered a plot among the Kremlin's corps
of doctors; new arrests seemed imminent, and many feared another
great purge. Stalin suddenly died, however, on Mar. 5, 1953.
Stalin's reputation declined in the USSR after Nikita KHRUSHCHEV
revealed many of Stalin's crimes in 1956. In the post-Khrushchev
period, however, notably that of Leonid BREZHNEV, anti-Stalinist
rhetoric was downplayed. In China and part of the Third World he
was often regarded as a strong revolutionary leader who
modernized his nation's economy.
In the early years of the Gorbachev period, official opinion on
Stalin vacillated between praise and criticism. But in the
atmosphere of GLASNOST (a policy of encouragement of candor and
openness), artists, intellectuals, and even political figures
began to speak openly of the horrors of the Stalin years.
Repentance, a 1986 film thinly disguised as fiction, concerned a
dictator who was a composite of Stalin and Lavrenti BERIA, the
Soviet KGB chief. In a major speech in November 1987, Gorbachev,
addressing 6,000 Communist party officials and others, said that
Stalin had been guilty of "enormous and unforgivable"
crimes that were a "lesson for all generations." In
February 1988, the Soviet government rehabilitated the reputation
of Nikolai Bukharin and 19 others purged by Stalin, and in May
the government officially announced a posthumous rehabilitation
of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Karl Radek, and others who had
been executed. In Nedelya, a weekly supplement to the Soviet
government newspaper Izvestia, an April 1988 article declared
that Stalin's policy of forced collectivization between 1929 and
1933 had cost 25 million lives. Pravda, the Soviet Communist
party newspaper, reported in January 1989 that 25,000 victims of
Stalin's purges had been posthumously rehabilitated. TASS, the
Soviet news agency, reported in March that a huge mass grave near
the city of Kiev contained the remains of as many as 300,000
people, killed in the 1930s under Stalin.
