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Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich 1879–1953, Soviet Communist leader and
head of the USSR from the death of V. I. Lenin (1924) until his own
death, b. Gori, Georgia. His real name was Dzhugashvili (also spelled
Dzugashvili or Djugashvili); he adopted the name Stalin (“man of
steel”) about 1913.
Early Career
The son of a shoemaker, Stalin studied (1894–99) for the priesthood at
the theological seminary at Tiflis, but was expelled. While still a
divinity student, he became a convert to Marxism and joined the Social
Democratic party in the Caucasus. He became a disciple of Lenin after
the split (1903) of the party into factions of Bolshevism and
Menshevism.
Stalin attended party congresses abroad (at Stockholm in 1906 and at
London in 1907), but unlike Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and other
revolutionists he did not choose prolonged exile abroad. Under the
alias of Koba, taken from the name of a famous Georgian outlaw, he
remained in the Caucasus. He was especially active in the party press.
Between 1902 and 1913 he was arrested five times and each time
escaped.
In 1911 he left the Caucasus for St. Petersburg, where in 1912 he
became one of the first editors of Pravda [truth], then a small paper
devoted to doctrinal disputes, later the official daily of the
Communist party of the USSR. Stalin was arrested in 1913 and was exiled
for life to N Siberia, where he remained until an amnesty was granted
after the February Revolution of 1917. Back in St. Petersburg (by then,
renamed Petrograd), he edited Pravda jointly with Lev Kamenev.
Rise to Power
After the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin, already a member of the
central committee since 1912, entered the Soviet cabinet as people’s
commissar for nationalities and began to emerge as a leader of the new
regime. During the civil war from 1918 to 1920 he played an important
administrative role on the military fronts and in the capital. He was
elected (1922) general secretary of the central committee of the party,
enabling him to control the rank-and-file members and to build an
apparatus loyal to him. 5
Stalin’s significance in the revolutionary movement and his relation to
Lenin have been subjects of great controversy. He was highly regarded
by Lenin as an administrator but not as a theoretician or leader.
Toward the end of his illness, which began in 1922, Lenin wrote a
testament in which he strongly criticized Stalin’s arbitrary conduct as
general secretary and recommended that he be removed. However, he died
before any action could be taken, and the testament was suppressed.
On Lenin’s death, Stalin, Kamenev, and Grigori Zinoviev formed a
triumvirate of successors allied against Trotsky, who was a strong
contender to replace Lenin. After Trotsky was ousted (1925) as
commissar of war, Stalin, now allied with Nikolai Bukharin, turned on
Kamenev and Zinoviev. In a desperate attempt to counter Stalin’s power,
Zinoviev and Kamenev joined forces with Trotsky. Their efforts failed
and they were forced to resign from the central committee of the
Communist party. Stalin subsequently broke with Bukharin and engineered
his fall from power.
A primary issue around which these party struggles centered was the
course of the Russian economy. The right wing, led by Bukharin, favored
granting concessions to the peasantry and continuing Lenin’s New
Economic Policy (NEP). The left, represented by Kamenev and Zinoviev,
wished to proceed with industrialization on a large scale at the
expense of the peasants. Stalin’s position wavered, depending on the
political situation, and the NEP continued until 1928 with considerable
success. Then Stalin reversed this policy and inaugurated
collectivization of agriculture and the Five-Year Plan. Ruthless
measures were taken against the kulaks, the farmers who had risen to
prosperity under the NEP.
Soviet Leader
Prewar Years
The political and cultural aims of Stalin’s regime were to identify the
totalitarian rule of the Communist party with stability and legitimacy.
The basic Marxist tenet of the ultimate “withering away” of the state
was all but repudiated. Instead the state was glorified. The shift to
the right was also manifest in the reorganization of the armed forces
along disciplinarian lines reminiscent of the reign of Czar Nicholas I;
in the official return to conservative divorce and abortion laws; in
the gradual replacement of intransigent measures against the Russian
Orthodox Church by a policy that made the church an instrument of the
state; in the abandonment of experimental education in favor of rigid
instruction; in the insistence on political criteria in the arts; and,
most important, in the rebirth of nationalism and the mounting distrust
of the West and of internationalism.
Stalin maintained that his program of consolidating “socialism in one
country” (i.e., Russia), although demanding immense sacrifice and
discipline, would render the USSR immune to attacks by capitalist
nations and would demonstrate the superiority of the socialist system.
He thus repudiated, for the time being, the role of Russia as
torchbearer of world revolution.
This process was accompanied by repressive measures and terror, which
reached their height in the political purges of the 1930s. Stalin made
his dictatorship absolute by liquidating all opposition within the
party. The purge was touched off by the murder (1934) of S. M. Kirov,
Stalin’s lieutenant, which led to prosecutions for an alleged
plot—vast, Trotsky-inspired, and aided by Nazi Germany—to overthrow
Stalin’s government. In the purge trials many old Bolsheviks, including
Kamenev, Zinoviev, Aleksey Rykov, and Bukharin, were accused, pleaded
guilty, and were executed.
The purge extended even to the head of the secret police, G. G. Yagoda,
and to some of the highest army officers, notably Marshal Tukhachevsky.
The terror reached its height under the Yezhovshchina, the period
(1937–38) when N. I. Yezhov directed the secret police. As the purges
drew to a close (1939), the efforts of the secret police were
concentrated on eliminating those elements of the population that might
be disloyal in case of war. The Soviet system of forced labor camps,
the Gulag, was hugely expanded during this period.
In internal policy, Stalin promulgated a new constitution in 1936 (see
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Although it contained symbols of
democratic institutions, effective political power was reserved to the
Communist party as the vanguard of the working people. Although it
reaffirmed the Soviet principle of autonomy for the various
nationalities, the constitution in effect made it impossible for
republics or other national groups to secede from the union.
Wartime and After
Until 1934, Stalin had pursued the policy, initiated by the Treaty of
Rapallo (see Rapallo, Treaty of, of friendship with Germany. After
Adolf Hitler became (1933) chancellor of Germany, Stalin strove for
international acceptance and cooperation, joining (1934) the League of
Nations and attempting a rapprochement with Great Britain and France.
The failure of such a rapprochement and the growing danger of war led
Stalin to conciliate Hitler. 14
The nonaggression pact with Germany (Aug., 1939) was designed to keep
the USSR out of World War II. The territorial concessions and strategic
advantages granted the Soviet Union by Germany at the expense of other
East European nations contributed to Stalin’s underestimation of the
German threat. The Nazi invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, took
Stalin—who in May had taken over the premiership from V. M. Molotov—by
surprise; it temporarily paralyzed his leadership and nearly led to the
collapse of the Soviet army. 15
The extent to which Stalin as a military leader subsequently
contributed to Soviet victory has been fiercely debated among Soviet
and Western authors; his forceful leadership was probably a greater
asset than his military capability. He directed the war effort from the
Kremlin, where he remained when the rest of the government was
evacuated. He was voted the rank of marshal of the Soviet Union (1943)
and of generalissimo (1945).
At the Tehran Conference (1943) and the Yalta Conference (1945) with
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and at the Potsdam
Conference (1945), Stalin proved an astute diplomat. His diplomatic
skill led to the recognition by the Western powers of a Soviet sphere
of influence in Eastern Europe. Having further strengthened his
personal power in the course of World War II, Stalin used it ruthlessly
to consolidate his control within the Soviet Union and the emerging
Soviet empire against what he perceived as renewed capitalist threats.
Always suspicious of Communist movements outside his control, he tried
unsuccessfully to dissuade the Chinese Communists from taking power
after World War II and broke with Josip Broz Tito in 1948 over the
question of Yugoslavia’s independent Communist policies.
Stalin’s paranoia during the last years of his life led to increased
repression and persecution of his closest collaborators, reminiscent of
the purges of the 1930s. His public appearances, which had always been
rare, became even less frequent in the late 1940s and early 50s. His
remoteness only stimulated the public worship bestowed upon him, which
verged on apotheosis.
Stalin died Mar. 5, 1953, of a cerebral hemorrhage. His body was
entombed next to Lenin’s in the mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow.
Little is known of Stalin’s private life except that he married twice
and that both wives died (the second, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva,
by suicide in 1932). Yakov, his son by his first wife, died in Nazi
captivity. He had a son and a daughter by his second wife. His son,
Vasily, was an officer in the Soviet air force before his death in
1962. His daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the United States
in 1967.
Denunciation
At the 20th All-Union Party Congress in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev and
other Soviet leaders attacked the cult of Stalin, confirming many
accusations long current outside the USSR. They did not repudiate
Stalin’s economic policies, but accused him of tyranny and terror,
falsification of history, and self-glorification. In 1961 the 22d Party
Congress voted to remove Stalin’s body from the Lenin mausoleum; he was
then interred in the heroes’ cemetery near the Kremlin wall. The term
Stalinist, first used to distinguish Stalin’s policies from those of
Trotsky and others, came to mean a brand of Communism that was both
national and repressive. Since Stalin’s death the tyrannical
implications of the term have become primary.
Bibliography
Stalin’s writings form no cohesive body of political theory, although
he claimed to represent the pure interpretation of Leninism and
Marxism. Among Stalin’s writings translated into English are Leninism
(tr., 2 vol., 1928–33), Problems of Leninism (tr. 1934), The Great
Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (tr. 1945), Stalin’s Works (tr.
1952–55), and other collections of speeches, articles, and reports.
There are numerous biographies of Stalin, some adulatory, such as that
of H. Barbusse (tr. 1935), some severely critical of him, such as that
by Trotsky (tr. 1946, rev. ed. 1967). See A. Orlov, The Secret History
of Stalin’s Crimes (1953); A. B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era
(1973, repr. 1989); G. Urban, Stalinism (1982); A. E. Arthur, Stalin
and His Times (1986); A. DeJonge, Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet
Union (1986); R. H. McNeal, Stalin (1988); R. A. Medvedev, Let History
Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (2d ed. 1989); K. N.
Cameron, Stalin (1989); R. C. Tucker, Stalin in Power (1990); R.
Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1991) and Stalin: Breaker
of Nations (1991); D. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (1991);
E. Radzinsky, Stalin (1996); S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (1999);
M. Amis, Koba the Dread (2003); S. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court
of the Red Tsar (2004); R. J. Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany,
Stalin’s Russia (2004).
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05.
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