Who Was Joseph Stalin?

1. From Gori to the revolutionary movement

Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili on 18 December 1878 in Gori, a town in Georgia in the Russian Empire, to Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ekaterina Jughashvili. His birth date was traditionally given as 21 December 1879, but records in the Communist Party central archives confirmed the 1878 date. He grew up in poverty, was injured in childhood accidents that left his left arm impaired, and was a strong student at the church school in Gori. He won a scholarship to the theological seminary in Tiflis, now Tbilisi, where he began reading banned political literature and joined the Marxist movement.

Stalin was educated at the church school in Gori and then at the theological seminary in Tiflis from 1894. He was expelled from the seminary in 1899 for missing examinations and for his political activity. He had no further formal education and learned politics through the revolutionary movement. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901, sided with the Bolshevik faction, and was arrested and exiled to Siberia several times. The experience of prison and exile was shared by many revolutionaries of his generation, and it shaped a movement that was secretive, disciplined and suspicious of outsiders.

He took part in the October Revolution of 1917 and held posts in the new Soviet government. Unlike some of his fellow revolutionaries, Stalin was not a theorist or a public orator; his strength was organisation. He built networks of supporters, kept files on his colleagues, and took control of the party's administrative machinery. When Lenin died in 1924, that machinery was the instrument by which Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals, above all Leon Trotsky, and became the dominant leader of the Soviet Union. The struggle for the succession took several years, and it was fought through party meetings, appointments and alliances rather than through open debate.

2. The struggle for power after Lenin

After the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals and became the dominant leader of the Soviet Union, holding the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952 and serving as premier from 1941 to 1953. The post of General Secretary sounded administrative, but Stalin turned it into the centre of power, because it controlled appointments to party posts across the country. By placing his supporters in key positions, he built a majority that his rivals could not overcome, and by the late 1920s he had removed Trotsky, who was exiled in 1929, and the other leading figures of the revolution from positions of influence.

The methods of the struggle are well documented. Stalin formed temporary alliances with one group of rivals against another, then turned on his former allies. He used the party's disciplinary procedures to expel opponents, and he controlled the flow of information to the party's members. Lenin, in a document known as his Testament, had warned that Stalin was too rude and too fond of power, and had suggested that he be removed as General Secretary. The warning was not acted on, and Stalin's supporters suppressed it. The episode is often cited as evidence that the party had a chance to stop him and did not take it.

By 1928 Stalin was the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. The country he inherited was poor, largely agricultural and still recovering from civil war and revolution. His programme for it was radical: to replace Lenin's New Economic Policy, which had allowed some private farming and trade, with a centralised command economy under five-year plans, forcing agriculture into collective farms and building heavy industry at great speed. The decision would transform the Soviet Union and cost millions of lives, and it is the central fact of his rule.

3. Five-year plans, collectivisation and famine

From 1928 Stalin replaced Lenin's New Economic Policy with a centralised command economy under five-year plans, forcing agriculture into collective farms and building heavy industry at great speed. The first five-year plan, launched in 1928, set targets for steel, coal, electricity and machinery that were far beyond what the economy could produce, and the plans were enforced through the party apparatus, with managers and workers punished for failing to meet them. The plans did build heavy industry, railways and new cities, and by the end of the 1930s the Soviet Union had become one of the world's major industrial powers. The cost was paid by the population.

Collectivisation caused a great famine in 1932-1933, worst in Ukraine, where it is known as the Holodomor, and in Kazakhstan. The policy forced peasants to give up their land and livestock and join collective farms, and those who resisted, the better-off peasants known as kulaks, were deported or killed. Grain was taken from the villages to feed the cities and to export for industrial equipment, and when the harvest failed, there was nothing left. Historians estimate that millions of people died in the famine, and the question of whether it was a deliberate policy or the result of a policy pursued with indifference to its consequences remains a subject of debate among historians.

The debate about the famine is one of the most contested in the history of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian historians and the Ukrainian government describe the Holodomor as a genocide, a deliberate attempt to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. Other historians argue that the famine was the result of a policy that was pursued recklessly and without regard for human life, but that it was not designed as a genocide. The Russian government has rejected the genocide description. What is not disputed is the scale of the deaths, the fact that the famine followed collectivisation, and the fact that the Soviet government continued to export grain while people starved. The famine is recorded here as it is recorded by the historians cited in the sources below.

4. The Great Purge and the Gulag

Between 1936 and 1939 Stalin ordered the Great Purge, in which at least 700,000 people were executed and more than a million were imprisoned, many in the Gulag system of forced labour camps. The Purge began with the trial and execution of the old Bolshevik leaders, men who had been at the centre of the revolution, and spread through the party, the armed forces, the civil service and the population at large. People were arrested on the basis of denunciations, confessions obtained under torture, and quotas set by the security services. The trials were public spectacles, in which the accused confessed to crimes they had not committed, and the executions were carried out in secret.

The Gulag was the Soviet system of forced labour camps run by the state security services. About 18 million people passed through the camps between 1930 and 1953, and historians estimate that between about 1.5 and 1.7 million people died in them, from hunger, cold, disease and overwork. The camps were spread across the Soviet Union, above all in Siberia and the far north, and the prisoners built canals, railways, mines and factories. The camp system was both a means of repression and a part of the economy, and it continued after Stalin's death, although on a smaller scale.

Historians' estimates of the total number of deaths from repression under Stalin's rule range from about 4 million to nearly 10 million, not counting famine deaths in some counts. The range is wide because the records are incomplete and because historians disagree about what should be counted. The figures come from work with Soviet archives after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, when historians were able to examine the records of the security services for the first time. The archive-based estimates are lower than the figures that circulated during the Cold War, which were based on emigre testimony and on extrapolation, but they are still in the millions, and they are the figures used in this article.

5. The Second World War: pact, invasion and victory

In 1939 Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Eastern Europe between the two powers and allowed Germany to invade Poland without facing a war on two fronts. The pact was a surprise to the world, because the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were ideological enemies, but it served both leaders' purposes: Hitler wanted a free hand in the west, and Stalin wanted time to prepare for war and territory in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland, the Baltic states and parts of Romania under the terms of the pact, and the two regimes cooperated for almost two years.

In June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union, in the largest military operation in history, and Stalin led the Soviet war effort through the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-1943 to victory in Berlin in 1945, at the cost of very large Soviet losses. The Soviet Union lost more people in the war than any other country, with estimates of total Soviet war deaths at around 27 million, a figure that includes both military and civilian deaths. The Battle of Stalingrad, fought from August 1942 to February 1943, was the turning point of the war in Europe, and the Soviet advance from Stalingrad to Berlin took two more years of fighting.

Stalin's leadership during the war is assessed in different ways by historians. His supporters point to the victory over Germany, the central military achievement of the Soviet Union, and to his role in holding the country together in 1941, when the German advance brought them to the gates of Moscow. His critics point to his mistakes before the war, above all his refusal to believe the warnings that Germany was about to invade, and to the cost of the victory, which was achieved with enormous losses and with the same methods of compulsion that had marked his peacetime rule. The alliance with Britain and the United States, led by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, was a marriage of convenience, and it broke down as soon as the war ended.

6. The post-war years and the Cold War

After the war Stalin extended Soviet control over Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union became a nuclear power in 1949. The countries of Eastern Europe, liberated from German occupation by the Red Army, were brought under Communist governments loyal to Moscow, and the division of Europe into two blocs, which became known as the Cold War, was the direct result. Stalin's foreign policy was driven by the desire for security: the Soviet Union had been invaded twice in thirty years, from the west, and he wanted a buffer of friendly states between the Soviet Union and Germany. The Western powers saw the same actions as expansion, and the two views were never reconciled.

At home, the post-war years brought a return to repression. The Gulag system continued, new campaigns were launched against writers, scientists and Jews, and the party's control over daily life tightened. Stalin's health declined in his final years, and his behaviour became more erratic, with new purges planned at the time of his death. He died on 5 March 1953 in Moscow after a stroke. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced his rule in 1956 in a process known as de-Stalinisation, revealing the scale of the Purge and the camps to the party for the first time.

The Soviet Union that Stalin left behind was an industrial power and a nuclear-armed superpower, but it was also a society built on fear, with an economy that was inefficient and a political system that could not reform itself. The five-year plans had built heavy industry, but they had not built a consumer economy, and the collective farms had not solved the problem of food production. The achievements were real, and the costs were real, and the two are inseparable in any assessment of his rule.

7. Legacy and the debate that continues

Stalin is remembered both as the leader who industrialised the Soviet Union and led it to victory in the Second World War, and as a dictator whose policies killed millions of his own citizens. His supporters point to industrialisation, the defeat of Germany and the rise of the Soviet Union to superpower status; the historical consensus, recorded by Britannica and by historians working with Soviet archives, is that these were achieved through collectivisation, famine, the Great Purge and the Gulag. After his death his successor Khrushchev denounced his rule, and debate about his record continues in Russia and elsewhere.

The debate is sharpest in Russia, where Stalin's reputation has been rehabilitated in part by those who emphasise the victory in the war and the industrial achievement, and criticised by those who emphasise the repression. Polls in Russia have shown that a large part of the population views Stalin positively, a fact that historians attribute to the emphasis on the war in Russian public memory and to the lack of a full public reckoning with the repression. In Ukraine, by contrast, Stalin is remembered above all for the Holodomor, and the famine is commemorated as a national tragedy. The difference between the two memories is itself part of the history.

The comparison with other dictators of the period is instructive. Adolf Hitler, who led Germany at the same time, was responsible for the Holocaust and for a war that killed more than 50 million people, and Mao Zedong, who led China after the war, was responsible for deaths on a comparable scale. The three regimes differed in their ideology and their methods, but they shared a pattern: the concentration of power in one leader, the removal of checks on that power, and the use of terror against their own populations. The study of Stalin's rule, alongside those of Hitler and Mao, is the study of how dictatorship works, and of how it can be prevented. That is why his life is still taught, and why the archives of his rule, opened after 1991, are still being studied by historians.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Joseph Stalin
• Wikipedia — Joseph Stalin
• Biography.com — Joseph Stalin
• Wikipedia — Great Purge

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• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.