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Joseph Stalin, one of the most feared men of the 20thcentury- both by his enemies and his own citizens, many of which he in fact considered his enemies. Responsible for sequestering off large parts of Europe under the Iron Curtain, and for fueling fears of international nuclear war, just how did this man come to be one of the most notorious figures in history? Born in 1878 as Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, Stalin grew up an only child and son of a poor peasant family.
His father was a shoemaker and alcoholic who vented his frustrations out on his son with regular beatings, and his mother was a laundress, doing laundry for others to earn enough for the family to survive. Contracting smallpox as a child, Stalin would be disfigured for life with his signature facial scars which only added to his tough exterior demeanor. Surprisingly, Stalin earned a scholarship as a teen to a seminary school in Tbilisi, where he began to study for the priesthood in the Georgian Orthodox Church.
However while in seminary Stalin began to secretly read German social philosopher Karl Marx's “Communist Manifesto”. Influenced by the social, economic, and political turmoil of 19thcentury Europe, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the infamous Manifesto in response to the persecution and exploitation of the common man by the bourgeoisie, who benefited greatly off the hard labour of the proletariat who's only real wealth and power was their labor. Marx and Engels called for the proletariat to unify and use their only asset- the labor the bourgeoisie exploited overwhelmingly for their own gain- to barter for more equitable employment terms.
A teenage Stalin was immediately hooked on Marx and Engel's words, and became interested in the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy which treated its citizens as serfs who held few if any rights. In 1889 Stalin was expelled from his seminary for missing his exams, but he would go on later to claim that his expulsion was for the discovery of what was deemed Marxist propaganda. Whatever the real reason, Stalin's expulsion set him on a collision course with history, and perhaps if a group of priests had been a bit more tolerant then history, and Russia itself, would have been spared untold catastrophes to come.
Immediately upon his expulsion Stalin dove head-first into political activism, becoming an underground political agitator and taking part in labor demonstrations and work strikes. At this time he adopted the name of Koba, after a fictional, Robin-Hood like Georgian outlaw-hero, and became a prominent member of the Marxist Social Democratic movement's more militant chapter, the Bolsheviks. At the time the Bolsheviks were being led by Vladimir Lenin, whom Stalin would immediately idolize for his fiery passion and determination to set Russia's workers free.
Stalin eagerly shared in Lenin's dream of a Russia free of the greed and corruption of capitalism who's workers shared equitably in the profits of their labor. In order to fund this revolutionary movement however, Stalin became involved in various criminal enterprises to include bank heists, the proceeds of which all went to fund the Bolshevik Party. In 1906 Stalin married Ekaterina “Kato” Svanidze, though tragically she would go on to die a year later shortly after the birth of Stalin's son, Yakov, from typhus.
Yakov himself would meet a similarly tragic fate, dying during World War II as a prisoner in Germany. In 1912, Lenin, who was in exile in Switzerland, appointed Stalin to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, securing Stalin's first true grip on power in what would be the future Communist party of the Soviet Union. A year later Stalin was arrested and exiled to Siberia- but in 1917 revolution swept across Russia in what would come to be known as the Russian Revolution, with Stalin playing a prominent role.
A vote of the Bolshevik's Central Committee of 10-2 prompted the Bolsheviks to start planning an armed insurrection, after Lenin told committee members that revolution was inevitable. What followed was a struggle that would see the ruling Tsar and his family ousted from power and then executed, with Lenin leading the way in creating the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state. Seen by Lenin as a tough character who could get things done behind the scenes- or in plainspeak a thug who wasn't afraid to kill political enemies or commit atrocities in the name of the cause- Lenin appointed Stalin to a prominent position during the Red Army's invasion of Georgia, where he got the reputation for being specially brutal against any opposition.
Eventually with the Bolshevik Party's expansion of power it became necessary to expand the scope for the Central Committee, and at the 11t hCongress the position of Secretariat of the Central Committee was formed, to which Lenin appointed Stalin on the 3rd of April, 1922. From then on until his death, Stalin would always be known as General Secretary- though the position was never intended to be as powerful, or dictatorial, as Stalin would make it into. Briefly disappointed with his appointment after not being given a heavy ministerial post, and seeing the early iteration of the General Secretary as a relatively weak political position, Stalin quickly learned how to use the new office to influence and gain advantage over other key persons within the Bolshevik Party.
Eventually Stalin would grow the power of the office, taking it far outside the scope that Lenin or any of the party's members had ever envisioned for it. A few weeks after Stalin's appointment, Lenin suffered a stroke and was forced into semi-retirement. Initially fully supportive of Stalin as General Secretary, Lenin's support would eventually wane when he learned of Stalin's brutality against political opponents, abuse of power, and growing internal party struggles.
A report from the invasion in Georgia of violent atrocities committed in the name of the party by supporters of Stalin also soured Lenin's view on his one-time protege. Knowing his death was imminent, Lenin drafted a political will between December 1922 and January 1923, containing some harsh criticisms of Stalin and fear of the fragmentation of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin would go on to die in 1924, throwing the Bolsheviks into disarray and a struggle for power.
Stalin however took advantage of his position as General Secretary to fan the flames of antagonism between political rivals. Stalin had his eye on power the whole time, but his greatest enemy would be Leon Trotsky, a prominent member of the party who was the creator of the Soviet Union's Red Army and was widely considered as intellectually superior to Stalin and a better orator. Stalin however would pit other members of the party against Trotsky, cleverly keeping himself out of Trotsky's direct line of fire and coming off as a mediator.
Ultimately though the failure of socialist revolutions across Europe led to Stalin's idea of “Socialism In One Country”- wherein the Soviet Union should focus on strengthening itself- being preferred over Trotsky's “Permanent Revolution”- wherein the revolution should be exported to non-socialist nations because the Soviet Union would never survive alone in a Capitalist world. When revolutions across Europe failed and it became obvious they would never succeed, Trotsky's fate was sealed and he was removed from power and eventually expelled from the Communist Party and exiled to Kazakhstan. Having allied with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to oust Trotsky and other rivals, Stalin desired to oust his two former companions and thus began to court the far right elements of the Bolshevik Party, eventually ensuring that his former allies would be sent to the Gulag.
Stalin then turned on his second set of allies and ousted them as well, leaving Joseph Stalin as the sole autocratic ruler of the entire Soviet Union. Up until this point Stalin had not yet thought about outright killing his political opponents, but that, and a great deal of things, would quickly change. With the reins of the Soviet Union firmly in his grasp, Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili changed his name to Joseph Stalin, meaning “man of steel”.
Yet Stalin had taken leadership of a troubled nation. Economicaly and industrially the Soviet Union lagged behind the rest of the European powers, and poor management of crops was leading to a pending famine- 1927 had produced only 70% of the grain that 1926 had yielded. The signs were clear, radical change was needed, and needed immediately.
Unfortunately for the citizens of the Soviet Union, that change would come in the wrong form. Blaming the kulaks- affluent peasants- and the Nepmen- small business owners- for the poor economic state of affairs, stalin traveled to Novosibirsk and claimed that the kulaks were hoarding grain for themselves, and ordered the kulas be arrested and their grain confiscated, which Stalin promptly brought back with him to Moscow. Having tested the limits of his power and finding no significant blowback to his cruel actions, Stalin immediately ordered the creation of grain procurement squads across much of the growing regions of the Soviet Union, and violence immediately broke out between these government thieves and the peasants defending their rightfully grown and earned grain.
Some of the Central Committee members were horrified at these measures, but in January 1930 the Politburo approved the liquidation of the entire kulak class. Accused kulaks were rounded up and exiled or thrown into gulags, with many dying on their way to their prison camps. At about the same time Stalin initiated the policy of mass collectivisation of agriculture, which set up collective farms made up of formerly privately owned property.
Peasants reluctantly joined these collective farms for fear of suffering the same fate as the kulaks. Due to resentment at the loss of their privately owned land and low morale, productivity plummeted and famines broke out. Large armed uprisings arose throughout the Soviet Union, which were brutally put down by the Red Army, which killed almost as many of its own citizens as the Nazis would a decade later.
Opposition to Stalin and his brutal policies arose from within the Politburo, but these opponents were in the minority and quickly removed from power. Stalin claimed to be building the Communist utopia he dreamed of as a youth, replacing exploitative capitalist practices with equality and granting workers a fair share of the prosperity they generated. This too was Karl Marx’s dream- industrialization had made it possible to generate incredible amounts of wealth, and yet workers received, and to this day still receive, very little of the wealth that they generate through their labor.
In the end though Stalin simply enacted policies that allowed him to remain in power, and excused the continued exploitation of the working man’s labor as necessary during the lower stages of socialism. In the end, Stalin either didn’t understand or simply didn’t care about Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engel’s philosophy of Communism, and his actions would lead to a world that would forever confuse true Communism as Stalinism, and make it all but impossible for the dream of workers receiving an equitable share of the wealth they generate to come true. Today the disparity between the rich and poor, even in the most developed countries, is so severe that for some, revolution seems inevitable.
Could Marx’s dream of a workforce that was treated fairly and given an equitable share of the wealth they generated ever truly have happened? What turned Joseph Stalin from an idealistic youth wanting to make his country a better place for the working poor into a murderous autocrat? We want to give a big thank you to the sponsor of this video, World of Warships.
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