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Joseph Stalin was a Georgian Marxist revolutionary leader and later dictator
of the USSR. He was born in Gori, Georgia. He studied at Tiflis Orthodox where
he was expelled from in 1899. After joining a Georgian Social Democratic
organization in 1898, he became active in a revolutionary underground, and he
was twice sent to Siberia. As a leading Bolshevik he played an active role in
the October Revolution. In 1922, he became general secretary of the Party
Central Committee, a position that he held until the day of his death. Stalin
also occupied other key positions, which enabled him to build up enormous
personal power in the government. This is a key point in Stalin’s life where he
was enormously confident about himself which led him to do things that were no
acceptable in today’s standard life.
After the death of Vladimir I. Lenin in
1924 Stalin became leader of the Soviet Union where he made many changes to
agriculture and industry. He believed that the Soviet Union was one hundred
years behind the West and that they had to catch up as quickly as possible. This
is where the idea of his “Five Year Plan,” came about. The five-year plan
basically got the people involved and motivated them into a modern life. From
the 5-year plan, 25 million farms were produced which were only big enough to
feed the families that were harvesting them. The more successful peasants were
called the Kulaks. Along with the five-year plan, Stalin launched a campaign for
the “collectivization of agriculture,’’ where millions of peasants were
recognized as part of the civilization. Between 1934 and 1938 he built up a
government, and armed forces in which millions of people were imprisoned,
exiled, or shot. In 1938 he signed a Non- Aggression Pact with Hitler which
bought the Soviet Union two years after the involvement in World War Two. After
the German invasion in 1941, the USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance, and
Stalin, as was leader, took the name of Generalissimo. He took part in the
conferences of Tehran, Yelta, and Potsdam that resulted in Soviet military and
political control over the liberated countries of postwar E and C Europe. Much
of the blame of the concentration camps and German invasion are blamed on Adolph
Hitler, but in the lost shadows is this man, Joseph Stalin.
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