Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower

After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin ultimately emerged as the Soviet Union’s de facto leader, confounding those around him who had misjudged his political acumen.

During the 1930s, his Five-Year plans drastically altered the socioeconomic makeup of the USSR at a terrible human cost. His innate paranoia then instigated a bloody purge of his one-time comrades in the Communist Party as he sought to consolidate his grip on power.

Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the most vulnerable point in his dictatorship. Nevertheless, allied with Britain and America, the Soviet dictator would play a major role in reshaping the world following the defeat of Hitler’s regime in 1945.

By the time of his death in 1953, Stalinism – the ideology synonymous with his approach to statecraft and culture – had transformed the Soviet Union into a superpower. But not without cost: estimated tens of millions had perished due to his decisions. This would ensure his criticism by successors.

Where and when was Stalin born?

Josef Stalin was born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. Located in the mountainous Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas, Georgia was part of the Russian empire at the time.

However, some sources specify that he was born in 1879. Stalin preferred to “stay fairly quiet about most of his background”, says Service, choosing to indulge an aura of mystery.

When did Josef Stalin pick the name ‘Stalin’ – and what does it mean?

During his initial foray into radical politics, Stalin, like other revolutionaries, adopted a series of nicknames. One of his earliest ones was ‘Koba’, inspired by the bandit protagonist in Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 novel, The Patricide.

‘Stalin’, meaning ‘man of steel’, was a revolutionary nom de guerre he adopted in 1912. It spoke to his desire to be considered formidable, as well as being, says Service, “a Russian name, not a Georgian one”.

That was important because “he was increasingly identifying with the wider Russian revolutionary movement”.

• Read more | Russia’s revolutions: How 1917 shaped a century

What was Stalin’s childhood like?

Stalin’s upbringing was rough, “involving fist fights in the streets and little gangs of boys,” says Service.

Nevertheless, he was a precocious child and an adept student. This convinced his mother that he should enrol at the Tiflis (now called Tbilisi) Theological Seminary and train to become an Orthodox priest in 1894.

How did Josef Stalin become a revolutionary?

It was via Georgian nationalism that Stalin first embraced radical politics. His teachers at the Tiflis found him to be increasingly rebellious and he quit the seminary before he could qualify as a priest. “He was a rebel and he turned from faith in God to faith in revolution,” says Service.

At the turn of the 20th century, while employed at the Meteorological Observatory, Stalin began to immerse himself in key Marxist texts and the Caucasus’s revolutionary scene.

His activities soon attracted the attention of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana.

“Georgian Marxists were notorious for blackmailing and intimidating industrialists in the Georgian capital,” says Service. “He got involved in all of this and [therefore] wasn’t quite as clean-handed a Marxist as other young revolutionaries were in Russia itself. He had a reputation for combining being a Marxist with being something of a Georgian patriot, and he was definitely someone who was involved with gangsters”.

When did Stalin meet Lenin?

Stalin met Vladimir Lenin in 1905 during the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist organisation, in Tampere, Finland (then part of the Russian empire). This occurred four years after Stalin had joined the party.

In 1903, the party had split along ideological differences, into Mensheviks (the ‘minority’) led by Julius Martov, and Bolsheviks (the ‘majority’) headed by Lenin. Both factions would later form breakaway parties during 1912.

Over the following years, Stalin’s revolutionary activities would lead to him being arrested and exiled to the far-flung reaches of the tsarist realm several times.

What role did Josef Stalin play during the Russian Revolution of 1917?

Stalin, like many Bolsheviks, was living in exile (in his case Siberia rather than abroad) when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. The collapse of the Russian monarchy followed.

Though nobody knew it at the time, this February Revolution was just one of two major convulsions that would take place that year.

Émigrés and internally exiled radicals (meaning those detained in Russia’s bleak hinterlands) flocked to major cities like Moscow and the then-capital, Petrograd (now called St Petersburg). Stalin was among them.

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Upon his arrival, Stalin “barged into the leadership that already existed in a small kernel of men and women in the capital,” says Service. “He basically took over the central Bolshevik party apparatus until Lenin [who had been living in Switzerland alongside other revolutionaries] returned in April 1917.

“When difficult jobs had to be done throughout that year, whether it was running the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, or helping to set strategy in the central committee of the party, Stalin was there. He wasn’t a man who ‘missed the revolution’, as his enemies always later claimed”.

Later that year, after the Bolsheviks took power during the October Revolution, Lenin made Stalin People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. This post gave him responsibility over the new regime’s governance of the non-Russian peoples living within the wreckage of the former tsarist empire.

What was Stalin’s relationship with Lenin like?

Their working relationship following the October Revolution was relatively fruitful, though not without some disagreements. “Lenin tended to use Stalin for a lot of the dirty and difficult jobs that needed doing,” says Service. “Stalin was a bruiser and the chief trouble-shooter of the Bolshevik leadership”.

By the 1920s, Lenin’s health – and his ability to engage in statecraft – was increasingly debilitated after a series of strokes. This would leave him largely bedridden until the end of his life in January 1924. Before Lenin's death, he recognised that both Leon Trotsky – architect of the Red Army and a convert to Bolshevism from the Menshevik faction – and Stalin, were emerging as likely successors to his leadership.

Lenin tended to use Stalin for a lot of the dirty and difficult jobs that needed doing... Stalin was a bruiser and the chief trouble-shooter of the Bolshevik leadership

“Lenin found that the man [Stalin] that he had promoted to high party office had ideas of his own. Now, he had always had ideas of his own, but Lenin had been able to control him, moderate him when he thought necessary,” says Service.

By late 1922, the two men fell out over the position of Georgia within the forthcoming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This vast new multinational polity, spanning northern Eurasia, fused the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) with Soviet republics in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) on 30 December.

According to Service, Lenin “decided that if Stalin ever got into a position where he might be his successor, that would be a disaster for the party as a whole, and for the revolution itself”.

Therefore, Lenin dictated a so-called ‘testament’ that urged party comrades to remove Stalin from the post of party General Secretary. Its contents shocked Stalin and it was subsequently suppressed from wider circulation.

How did Stalin come to preside over the Soviet Union?

Following Lenin’s death, the factions within the upper ranks of the Soviet Communist Party hardened. Trotsky rallied party officials against what was perceived to be the creeping bureaucratisation of Soviet politics, which became synonymous with Stalin himself.

As well as Trotsky, a contingent of leading Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin also looked down on Stalin, says Service, because they thought he was an “ignorant provincial”. One contemporary, Nikolai Sukhanov, famously dismissed Stalin as “a grey blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace”.

Stalin, for his part, played up to this image. While the others pushed for worldwide revolution, Stalin struck a much more cautious tone.

• Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster

Service says that “this appealed to numbers of Bolsheviks after the Russian Civil War who were war weary and shared Stalin’s zeal to make the revolution a success at home first before turning their eyes towards Europe”.

By the late 1920s, Stalin had outflanked his rivals within the Communist Party by forging and betraying alliances with key party figures and playing each group off against the other.

Eventually, his greatest adversary, Trotsky, was ousted from the Soviet government and first subjected to internal exile, before banishment overseas. Stalin’s rise to power also hinged on his canny self-appointment as ‘high priest’ of the emerging cult of Leninism after the Bolshevik founder’s death.

Although Stalin’s eventual mastery of the Soviet Union was contingent on this policy of ‘socialism in one country’, Service maintains that Stalin really did believe in spreading the revolution once the USSR was in a strong enough domestic position to coordinate such an offensive.

What is Stalinism?

Stalin’s dictatorship would lead to the emergence of his own cult of personality, as well as a new ideology: Stalinism.

This new phenomenon, says Service, was “a brutal extension of Leninism” and he acknowledges that “for some people this is controversial… they think that Leninism and Stalinism are totally different things. I don’t.”

Service affirms that Stalinism consolidated Leninism’s commitment to a one-party state premised on state terror and the ultimate objective of communism’s victory throughout the world. It is synonymous with the dictator’s ubiquitous presence in official propaganda, the system of state surveillance, detention and mass murder, as well as the demonisation of ‘Trotskyite’ subversion.

As a totalitarian ideology, it permeated every facet of life within the Soviet Union, from literature and painting to architecture and the naming of cities, prompting Tsaritsyn to be renamed Stalingrad (today it is Volgograd).

What was the Five-Year Plan – and how did it lead to the Holodomor?

In 1928, Stalin launched the first Five-Year Plan – a colossal effort to rapidly industrialise the Soviet Union and bring agriculture under state control and central planning. This latter aspect, known as Collectivisation, marked a definitive break with the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted by Lenin in 1921.

The cumulative impact of the First World War, revolutionary turmoil and civil war that had engulfed Russia for much of the 1910s, levied a heavy toll on the nascent Soviet economy. Adopted in March 1921, the NEP marked a tactical retreat from the Bolsheviks’ socialist measures.

It held sway for much of the ensuing decade and reintroduced limited private ownership and commerce under the supervision of the Soviet state to bolster the economy.

Always envisaged as a temporary measure, Service points out that by the late 1920s, the regime believed that the NEP had enabled “too many nationalists, street traders and priests” to gain influence within Soviet society.

The cumulative impact of the First World War, revolutionary turmoil and civil war that had engulfed Russia for much of the 1910s, levied a heavy toll on the nascent Soviet economy

Part of the Five-Year Plan entailed individual private farms being consolidated into larger units under the supposed collective ownership of peasants known as a ‘kolkhoz’. Similarly, ‘sovkhoz’ were farms under the direct control of the state.

This also enabled Stalin to bring the class struggle (fundamental to Bolshevik ideology) to the countryside, as the previous better-off peasants – known as ‘kulaks’ – were pilloried for exploiting the poorer peasants and thus became the subject of intense persecution, including deportation from the village and, in many cases, execution.

In Ukraine, collectivisation led to mass starvation and the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants – a famine known as the ‘Holodomor’ (meaning ‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian).

Although the policy also led to famine conditions in other parts of the Soviet Union, “the Ukrainians felt, with some reason, that they were being punished for being Ukrainians, as well as for being peasants,” says Service.

Why did Stalin launch the Great Terror?

The Great Terror (or Great Purge) began in 1936 and ran until 1938. It was a period marked by high profile show trials of the leading cadre of Bolsheviks that had been active during and since the October Revolution. The suspects were accused of conniving with Trotsky to sabotage the Soviet state and murder Stalin.

As Service explains, the Great Terror’s “main purpose was to annihilate any kind of opposition, real or potential”.

Confessions were typically extracted under torture and the guilty were subsequently executed as ‘enemies of the people’ or sentenced to long periods of servitude in labour camps. The wave of terror later spread to the Red Army and members of the intelligentsia – the educated group of Soviet society.

Stalin was a deeply suspicious individual by nature. He was also aware that the violent methods inflicted on the Soviet Union during the first and second Five-Year Plans, had made some of his comrades within the Communist Party deeply uneasy.

In December 1934, one of Stalin’s most loyal comrades in the regime, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated in Leningrad. His murder was blamed on a Trotskyite plot whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Stalin himself.

Some historians have suggested, however, that Kirov’s murder was ordered by Stalin who had come to regard him as a potential rival. Kirov’s demise also provided Stalin with the pretext to point the finger at alleged traitors within the state apparatus.

Convinced that his grip on power was under threat, Stalin moved to purge his erstwhile comrades. The ‘Old Bolsheviks’ like Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev were among the most notable victims of this shocking episode. “He thought that he could replace them with a new young elite that he would train to fulfil the industrial, agricultural, commercial and political tasks of the new Soviet state”, says Service.

Furthermore, Service explains that the Great Terror was a reflection of “the most terrible human pessimism by Stalin, combined with an extreme optimism that you could do this to a country… and come out at the other end of the tunnel with a new state that would be more pliable, more obedient, and would be able to present itself to the rest of the world as offering a vision of the communist future”.

The latter half of the 1930s became “a very gruelling period, a tormenting period in which nearly all the close associates of Lenin were exterminated… Trotsky was the last” – he was assassinated in exile in 1940.

Convinced that his grip on power was under threat, Stalin moved to purge his erstwhile comrades. The ‘Old Bolsheviks’ like Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev were among the most notable victims of this shocking episode

But the Great Terror was not solely reserved for the party’s upper echelons. Wherever you were in the party, you stood a high chance of being arrested and thrown into a labour camp, or shot after being beaten up, tortured and forced to sign a confession.

At its height, an estimated 2.5 million people languished in the Soviet Union’s extensive penal system – the notorious ‘Gulag archipelago’. Gulag is the Russian abbreviation for the Main Administration of Correctional-Labour Camps. This supplied a constant stream of slave labour to the state’s industrial and economic drive.

How many people perished under Stalin’s rule?

The precise number of people who were killed during Stalin’s rule is difficult to ascertain with any precision, but Stalin is acknowledged as one of the most brutal leaders in history.

“It’s in the tens of millions,” says Service. “It’s a staggering number of people, and it’s not just those who were executed or thrown into the Gulag. There are also people who died as a result of the catastrophic effects of the economic and social policies that he unleashed from the end of the 1920s onwards”.

Why did Stalin sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler?

In summer 1939, Stalin shocked communists around the world by signing a non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The years leading up to that point had seen Stalin increasingly perturbed by the rise of fascism in Europe. Nazism, and its overtly anti-Bolshevik agenda, was of acute concern to the Soviet Union’s security.

Stalin had aided and abetted the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), who were fighting a military rebellion backed by Europe’s fascist powers. When it became apparent that the Spanish Republic was doomed, he estimated that his best chance of avoiding trouble with Hitler lay in diverting Hitler’s focus westwards to the capitalist states.

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A key part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact entailed the two powers invading and dividing Poland between them. Just over two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, triggering the Second World War, the Soviet Union began annexing eastern Poland on 17 September 1939.

As Red Army forces surged into the occupied territory, they began targeting leading Polish intellectuals, army officers and other luminaries. “Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, the secret police, [had] concocted a plan to round them all up,” explains Service.

This led to the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940, during which approximately 22,000 members of the Polish elite and intelligentsia were systematically murdered. The bodies were then dumped in mass graves inside the Katyn forest.

How did the Second World War impact Stalin?

When Hitler ultimately acted on his ideological conviction of attacking the Soviet Union, and launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Stalin was stunned.

“He would not take advice in 1941 that Hitler really did mean to launch an invasion,” says Service, “He thought that he was being misled either by Western powers who sought to involve him in their war against Hitler, or there were just saboteurs inside the Soviet Union against the communist leadership. He got it catastrophically wrong”.

After initial paralysis and the loss of vast swathes of territory, the Soviet elite persuaded Stalin to lead the fightback. He was forced to forge an alliance with his sworn capitalist enemies – notably the dogged anti-Bolshevik British prime minister, Winston Churchill.

• Read more | The eastern front in WW2: how it all went wrong for the Germans

Appeals to Russian nationalism suffused wartime propaganda, while many of the Soviet Union’s great cities – from Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to Kyiv and Stalingrad endured staggering hardship at the hands of Nazi aggression.

The Nazis’ discovery of the mass graves within the Katyn forest in April 1943 was used by Hitler to try and drive a wedge between the Allies. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile, and the atrocity was later covered up and blamed on the Nazis themselves (a line that Moscow stuck to until 1990) once the Red Army had wrested back control of the area.

Although the Soviet Union had lost over 27 million lives since 1941 and was among the most battered powers to have fought Nazi Germany, on 9 May 1945, it proclaimed victory over the Third Reich, with much of Eastern and Central Europe now under Stalin’s control.

What role did Stalin play during the Cold War?

The Soviet Union emerged from the war as one of the two new superpowers that would hold sway over the world for the next four decades. Initially, Stalin hoped that the wartime alliance would somehow endure.

According to Service, Stalin anticipated that the Soviet Union “would be allowed to more or less do as it wanted in Eastern Europe without interference from the Western powers, and he hoped that he might get economic assistance from America in the short term, even though he expected there to be trouble with the United States in the longer term”.

However, by the late 1940s, the Marshall Plan – the US aid package designed to revive Europe’s post-war economies – was quickly perceived by Stalin as a threat to the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe.

“From that point on, there was a clash between the US and the USSR [but] both sides wanted to avoid a hot war,” says Service. “Stalin then put his foot down on the throat of all the existing half-freedoms in Eastern Europe and fully communised those countries in a brutal period of trials, arrests and the suppression of rival political parties across half of the European mainland”.

How did Stalin die?

In the early hours of 1 March 1953, Stalin suffered a stroke while staying in one of his dachas (a countryside retreat) in Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. His staff, who were too frightened to disturb him, eventually found Stalin unconscious, lying on the floor.

High-ranking members of the Soviet government such as Beria, Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov, flocked to the dacha. “They decided that the best thing to do was not to touch him,” says Service.

The rationale behind this was that, if by some miracle, he recovered, then none of them could have been accused of having held a gun to his head or of having plunged a knife into his back. Despite this, rumours that the dictator was poisoned persist today.

Stalin dwindled over the next few days before succumbing on 5 March 1953, aged 74.

His death triggered a surge of grief within the Soviet Union. “As much as many millions of people hated him, perhaps the same people also somehow thought that something had been pulled out of their lives, too,” explains Service. He was embalmed and displayed alongside Lenin’s preserved body in the mausoleum on Red Square.

In 1956, Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the Soviet Communist Party, in which he denounced Stalin’s murderous excesses and cult of personality, led to de-Stalinisation.

Finally, in 1961, Stalin’s remains were removed from the mausoleum and buried in a grave along the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

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