Josef Vissarionovich Stalin ( Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili ; 1879–1953) Biography

Born in Gori, Georgia, the son of a shoemaker, Stalin attended a theological seminary in Tiflis but was expelled in 1899 for expounding subversive views. As a member of the Social Democratic Party (he joined in 1898 ), he became actively involved in revolutionary politics, for which he was imprisoned (but escaped) several times between 1903 and 1912 .

Stalin joined the Bolsheviks under Lenin in 1903 . Founding the party's newspaper Pravda in 1911 , he became the leader of the Bolsheviks in the Duma ( 1913 ) but was exiled to Siberia between 1913 and 1917 . He was appointed commissar for nationalities after the October Revolution and distinguished himself by defending Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd) during the civil war. He was elected general secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party in 1922 and succeeded Lenin as chairman of the Politburo in 1924 . He secured enough support within the party to eliminate Trotsky and other rivals, who disagreed with his theory of building socialism in the Soviet Union as a base from which communism could spread. By 1927 he was the uncontested leader of the party and government, and the following year he initiated the first of his five-year plans for the industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. During the 1930s he instigated his infamous ‘purge trials’ to rid himself of his opponents in the government and the army; by the outbreak of World War II he was in complete control of the country. In 1941 he became chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (prime minister) and took command of the armed forces when Hitler violated the 1939 nonagression pact; he assumed the title of marshal in 1943 and generalissimo in 1945 . He attended the Allied conferences at Tehran ( 1943 ), Yalta ( 1945 ), and Potsdam ( 1945 ), emerging from all of them as a dominant figure. After 1945 he maintained his firm grip on the Soviet political machine and attempted to exercise similar control over other socialist states; only Yugoslavia under Tito succeeded in diverging. He died in office in 1953 .

Stalin was a ruthless and authoritarian leader, who governed the Soviet Union with a tyrannical hand. However, at the time of his death the Soviet Union had become the second most important industrial country in the world. After his death, his severe one-man rule, the ‘cult of personality’, was denounced among eastern bloc nations. In 1961 his embalmed body was removed from Lenin's mausoleum and reburied in a nondescript grave adjacent to the Kremlin.