Despots of World War II: Joseph Stalin

Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili hardly had the credentials of someone who would become a world leader when he was born in Gori, Georgia ((then a part of the Russian Empire) in 1878. He was the single child of a hardworking laundress. His father was an alcoholic shoemaker, who regularly beat the boy and generally made life hard for Josef and his mother. In addition, as a boy, he was stricken with smallpox, which left him with severe facial scars. We know him by the name he took when he was in his 30s -- Joseph Stalin (which means Man of Steel in Russian)

Josef was a bright lad and earned a scholarship to a seminary, on the road to becoming a priest in the Georgian Orthodox Church. However, during his time at the seminary, he began to secretly read the "Communist Manifesto", by the German philosopher, Karl Marx. When it was discovered that he was more in tune with Marx's writings than that of the church, he was expelled from the seminary.

In 1899, after leaving school, Stalin became involved with the Bolsheviks, the militant arm of the Communist Party, led by Vladimir Lenin. These men were involved in numerous strong-arm tactics, including criminal activities, like robbing banks, to bankroll their political activities. Stalin, arrested numerous times, even served a time as an exiled prisoner in Siberia.

For the next years leading up to WW I Stalin's cunning ways, and his skill in turning potential rivals against one another catapulted Stalin into the inner ring of the Bolsheviks. By 1917, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czarist royalty in Russia, Stalin had become one of a handful of close advisors to their undisputed leader, Vladimir Lenin. As Secretary of the Communist Party Stalin was able to appoint his cronies to key jobs, which served to cement Stalin's hold on the Communist Party. In 1924, when Lenin died, Stalin outmaneuvered his rivals in the party to succeed Lenin and assume the top job in the new Bolshevik led USSR.

Stalin was a bold and ruthless leader, one who made many changes in Russia and the USSR. He very quickly instituted a series of 5-year plans, with the intent to turn what had been primarily a peasant agricultural society to one which made the Soviet Union into one of the great super industrial powers in the world. This all came at a steep price to the Russian people.

Stalin's plan was for the government to own all the land, and the peasant farmers would all work for the government on huge collective farms. Russian farmers were like American farmers in their independence and millions resisted losing their land. Stalin's answer to these millions was quick -- and brutal. Millions of those peasant farmers were shot on the spot or exiled to Siberia. Stalin's collective farms, though more mechanized, turned out to be not as productive as were the old, individually owned, peasant farms. This led to widespread famine in the USSR, taking millions of more victims of starvation.

Stalin's reign in the Soviet Union was strictly totalitarian, geared to eliminate anyone who might oppose him. He expanded the secret police, encouraged people to spy on their neighbors and report deviant behavior to the police. Millions were killed or exiled to forced labor camps in Siberia, In the second half of the 1930s, Stalin instituted "The Great Purge", designed to rid the Communist Party, the military, and Russian society in general of persons that Stalin considered a threat to his regime. It has been estimated that perhaps as many as 20 million were eliminated (executed or exiled) during Stalin's time in office (to his death in 1953.)

In the 1930s Stalin gradually turned the Soviet Union into a personality cult around himself. His name became part of the national anthem, cities were renamed in his honor, Soviet history books were re-written, giving him a greater role in the Bolshevik revolution. He gradually took over the Soviet press, and books and music were written extolling him as the father of his country.

By 1939 Stalin, in the name of the Communist Party, and Hitler, under the banner of the Nationalistic Party (Nazi), were succeeding in changing their respective countries into aggressive dictatorships. They seemed to be on a collision course in gobbling up European countries.

However, Stalin and Hitler stunned the world when, on the eve of World War II, the two signed a non-aggression pact, seeming to put the two into a sort of partnership. Stalin used that as an excuse to annex parts of Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and invaded Finland.

Stalin's aggression inevitably threatened Hitler's plans, and in June 1941 Hitler broke the Soviet-Nazi Pact and invaded Russia. Stalin seemed to be caught off guard by the invasion and the first German gains were fast and great. Hitler's army seemed to be on the threshold of victory -- at the very gates of Moscow. However, Stalin was relentless and instituted a scorched earth policy, destroying everything that might aid the enemy. (Hitler also made a huge error in believing that the millions of Germans who had settled in Russia would rise up to help the Nazi invaders. This did not happen to any meaningful extent.) At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviets finally turned the tide against the Germans.

The battles of the German invasion of Russia are generally considered the largest military confrontation in history. They are characterized by the "unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, exposure, disease, and massacres. Of all the estimated casualties of World War II, 70 million, almost half, over 30 million, occurred on the eastern front -- the German invasion of Russia.

Quite rightly, the Soviet stop of the German invasion is considered a key element in the Allied victory over the German Reich, in the European part of World War II. Fighting on two fronts proved to be too much for Hitler to manage. Though the US and Britain supplied no fighting men for the Russian resistance, both supplied substantial material aid for the USSR.

During the latter years of World War II Stalin played a large role in the major Allied wartime conferences, such as Tehran and Yalta, with Britain's, Churchill, and the US's, President Roosevelt (clearly in declining health.) At these conferences much of the post-war planning for Eastern Europe took place. As he had done for all his career, Stalin's "iron will and deft political skills" allowed him to play the loyal ally, while never abandoning his vision of an expanding role for the USSR in the post-war era. These skills also changed the Far East, when the USSR delayed its entry into the Pacific war against Japan until two days after Hiroshima.

Joseph Stalin did not mellow with age after World War II. He continued to prosecute his reign of terror in the USSR -- purges, executions, exiles to forced labor camps, suppressing all forms of dissent and anything that smacked of foreign, especially Western influence on the USSR.

He established Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe. In 1949 he led the USSR into the nuclear age when the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb. In 1950 he gave his blessing to North Korea's Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea, leading to the Korean War.

Stalin grew more and more paranoid in his later years, suspecting everyone of treachery. He died in 1953 as a result of a massive stroke. His body was preserved and on display in Lenin's tomb in Moscow's Red Square until 1961, when, as a part of Nikita Khrushchev's

de-Stalinization policy, the body was removed and buried near the Kremlin walls.

There is still a strong element in Russia today that reveres Joseph Stalin, as the "Man of Steel", who brought Russia into the modern age and made Russia a world power. But we can never forget the truth, that Stalin was the man who was responsible for the loss of those 20 million human lives during his brutal reign.

Source: Joseph Stalin History.com