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JOSEPH STALIN
Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on 21 December 1878 in Gori, Georgia, in what was then, the Russian Empire. He was the fourth and only surviving child of a poor and struggling family. His father, a cobbler, was a violent alcoholic who became estranged from the family. His mother was a seamstress. She was devoted to her son, who she nicknamed “Soso”, the diminutive of Joseph.
HERE ARE SOME IMPORTANT DATES AN EVENTS IN HIS LIFE
1894 – Dzhugashvili wins a scholarship to the Tiflis (today called Tblisi) Theological Seminary in the Georgian capital, moving to the city at a time when the empire is racked by dissent and heading closer to revolution. Once resident in Tiflis he joins the city’s Marxist underground and becomes a leader of a clandestine Marxist group at the seminary. However, when his revolutionary activities are discovered, he is expelled.
He takes up work as first a tutor then a clerk, devoting his nights to revolutionary pursuits. In 1898 he joins the Russian Social Democratic Party.
1903 – He joins the Bolsheviks and becomes a specialist in organizing robberies and extortion rackets to help fund the revolutionaries. He is repeatedly arrested and exiled to Siberia for his activities but usually manages to escape.
1907 – Dzhugashvili organizes the armed robbery of a coach full of money in the main square of Tiflis. Forty people are killed and a further 50 wounded during the ambush, which nets about US$3.5 million for the Bolsheviks. Impressed by result, Lenin is reported to say that Stalin “is exactly the sort of person I need.”
1912 – Lenin appoints Dzhugashvili to the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and as one of the leaders of the Bolshevik underground. Later, Lenin places him on the editorial board of ‘Pravda’ (Truth), the Bolshevik’s newspaper.
1913 – Dzhugashvili changes his name to Stalin, which translates to ‘Man of Steel’. During the year he is arrested and exiled to Siberia, where he remains until March 1917, when a general amnesty is proclaimed following the abdication of the Tsar.
1914 – The First World War begins at the start of August. The Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) is fighting against the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). Germany sees in the Bolsheviks an opportunity to further the destabilization of Russia and begins to offer support. In 1917 Lenin is allowed to pass through Germany on his way from Switzerland to Russia. Germany also provides the Bolsheviks with financial aid.
1921 – He is placed in charge of the Communist Party bureau responsible for appointing and dismissing party members.
1922 – Stalin takes charge of the whole party administration when he is given the newly created post of general secretary of the Central Committee, a position that gives him control over party appointments and allows him to develop his power base. He will consolidate his influence further by spying on his colleagues, a tactic that will become a hallmark of his dictatorship.
When Lenin suffers a stroke in May a troika (triumvirate) composed of Stalin, Lev B. Kamenev and Grigorii V. Zinoviev assumes leadership.
Lenin recovers after three months and reasserts control. In letters written at the end of 1922 and beginning of 1923, Lenin singles Stalin out for particular criticism for being too harsh and rude to the “old comrades.” Lenin also criticizes Stalin for using coercion to force non-Russian republics to join the Soviet Union, saying he has behaved like a “vulgar Great-Russian bully.”
1925 – Following Lenin’s death, from a stroke, the Kamenev-Zinoviev-Stalin troika again comes to prominence. Stalin consolidates his power base until he is able to break with Kamenev and Zinoviev. He has the city of Tsaritsin renamed Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and allows the development of a Stalin personality cult and propaganda campaign.
From 1926 to 1930, he ousts all his opponents on the left and right of the party, silencing debate about options for the development of communism and the USSR. By the end of the decade Stalin has emerged as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. He is hailed by cultists as a “shining sun”, “the staff of life”, a “great teacher and friend”, the “hope of the future for the workers and peasants of the world” and the “genius of mankind, the greatest genius of all times and peoples.”
1928 – Stalin introduces the first five year plan, the “revolution from above”, to develop the USSR. “We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries,” he says in 1931. “We must cover this distance in 10 years. Either we do this or they will crush us.”
The state takes control of the economy, introducing a program of rapid industrialization and agrarian consolidation and setting unrealistic goals for development.
Industry and commerce are nationalized. All social, political and regulatory power is centered on the state. Twenty five million peasant farmers are forced to collectivize their property and then work on the new state-controlled farms. Wealthy peasants (kulaks) and the uncooperative are arrested and either executed or deported to work camps in Siberia.
The collectivized farms are required to meet ever increasing production quotas, even if this results in starvation on the farm. In the Ukrainian Republic up to five million peasants starve to death in the famine of 1932-33 when the state refuses to divert food supplies allocated to industrial and military needs. About one million starve to death in the North Caucasus Mountains.
By 1937, the social upheaval caused by the “revolution from above” has resulted in the deaths of up to 14.5 million Soviet peasants.
The Politburo begins to discuss the expansion of the work camp system set up by Lenin following the Bolshevik Revolution. The system will come to be known as the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ or ‘Gulag’. These are the work camps where a millions of Russian, now Soviet, citizens will die.
1939 – On 23 August the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany sign a nonaggression pact carving up Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, with the USSR claiming Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland, part of the Balkans and half of Poland. In Poland, soldiers and others who might resist the Soviet annexation are arrested en masse. By 1941, about two million have been imprisoned or deported to the Gulag. More than 20,000 Polish officers, soldiers, border guards, police, and other officials are executed, including 4,500 military personnel who are buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest near the Russian city of Smolensk.
In December 1939, to celebrate his 60th birthday, he is awarded the Order of Lenin and given the title ‘Hero of Socialist Labor’ and called “Great Comrade Stalin, Hero of All Children.”
1941- Germany begins “Operation Barbarossa” and invades the Soviet Union on 22 June. Stalin is caught completely off guard. Most of the Soviet Air Force is destroyed on the ground; entire Soviet armies are surrounded and surrender. He dismisses most of his generals and takes command of the Soviet forces, appointing himself commissar of defense and supreme commander of the Soviet Armed Forces in what comes to be know in the USSR as the ‘Great Patriotic War’. We call it World War II.
Since the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Russian Tsars had followed a fairly consistent policy of drawing more political power away from the nobility and into their own hands. This centralization of authority in the Russian state had usually been accomplished in one of two ways–either by simply taking power from the nobles and braving their opposition (Ivan the Terrible was very good at this), or by compensating the nobles for decreased power in government by giving them greater power over their land and its occupants. Serfdom, as this latter system was known, had increased steadily in Russia from the time of Ivan the Terrible, its inventor. By the time of Catherine the Great, the Russian Tsars enjoyed virtually autocratic rule over their nobles. However, they had in a sense purchased this power by granting those nobles virtually autocratic power over the serfs, who by this time had been reduced to a state closer to slavery than to peasantry.
By the nineteenth century, both of these relationships were under attack. In the Decembrist revolt in 1825, a group of young, reformist military officers attempted to force the adoption of a constitutional monarchy in Russia by preventing the accession of Nicholas I. They failed utterly, and Nicholas became the most reactionary leader in Europe. Nicholas’ successor, Alexander II, seemed by contrast to be amenable to reform. In 1861, he abolished serfdom, though the emancipation didn’t in fact bring on any significant change in the condition of the peasants. As the country became more industrialized, its political system experienced even greater strain. Attempts by the lower classes to gain more freedom provoked fears of anarchy, and the government remained extremely conservative. As Russia became more industrialized, larger, and far more complicated, the inadequacies of autocratic Tsarist rule became increasingly apparent. By the twentieth century conditions were ripe for a serious convulsion.
At the same time, Russia had expanded its territory and its power considerably over the nineteenth century. Its borders extended to Afghanistan and China, and it had acquired extensive territory on the Pacific coast. The foundation of the port cities of Vladivostok and Port Arthur there had opened up profitable avenues for commerce, and the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (constructed from 1891-1905) linked the European Russia with its new eastern territories.
In 1894 Nicholas II acceded to the throne. He was not the most competent of political leaders, and his ministers were almost uniformly reactionaries. To make matters worse, the increasing Russian presence in the Far East provoked the hostility of Japan. In January of 1905, the Japanese attacked, and Russia experienced a series of defeats that dissolved the tenuous support held by Nicholas’ already unpopular government. Nicholas was forced to grant concessions to the reformers, including most notably a constitution and a parliament, or Duma. The power of the reform movement was founded on a new and powerful force entered Russian politics. The industrialization of the major western cities and the development of the Batu oil fields had brought together large concentrations of Russian workers, and they soon began to organize into local political councils, or soviets. It was in large part the power of the soviets, united under the Social Democratic party that had forced Nicholas to accept reforms in 1905.
After the war with Japan was brought to a close, Nicholas attempted to reverse the new freedoms, and his government became more reactionary than ever. Popular discontent gained strength, and Nicholas countered it with increased repression, maintaining control but worsening relations with the population. In 1912, the Social Democrats split into two camps–the radical Bolsheviks and the comparatively moderate Menshiviks. In 1914, another disastrous war once again brought on a crisis. If the Russo-Japanese war had been costly and unpopular, it was at least remote.
The First World War, however, took place right on Russia’s western doorstep. Unprepared militarily or industrially, the country suffered demoralizing defeats, suffered severe food shortages, and soon suffered an economic collapse. By February of 1917, the workers and soldiers had had enough. Riots broke out in St. Petersburg, then called Petrograd, and the garrison there mutinied. Workers soviets were set up, and the Duma approved the establishment of a Provisional Government to attempt to restore order in the capital. It was soon clear that Nicholas possessed no support, and on March 2 he abdicated the throne in favor of his brother Michael. No fool, Michael renounced his claim the next day. Nicholas and his entire family were murdered by the Bolshviks.
The Provisional Government set up by the Duma attempted to pursue a moderate policy, calling for a return to order and promising reform of worker’s rights. However, it was unwilling to endorse the most pressing demand of the soviets–an immediate end to the war. For the next 9 months, the Provisional Government, first under Prince Lvov and then under Alexander Kerensky, unsuccessfully attempted to establish its authority. In the meanwhile, the Bolsheviks gained increasing support from the ever more frustrated soviets. On October 25, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, they stormed the Winter Palace and deposed the Kerensky government.
Although the Bolsheviks enjoyed substantial support in St. Petersburg and Moscow, they were by no means in control of the country as a whole. They succeeded in taking Russia out of the war (though on very unfavorable terms), but within months civil war broke out throughout Russia. For the next three years the country was devastated by civil strife, until by 1920 the Bolsheviks had finally emerged victorious.
A hugely influential revolutionary thinker and philosopher, Marx did not live to see his ideas carried out in his own lifetime. But his writings formed the theoretical base for modern international communism, which became one of the leading world ideologies of the twentieth century before its ultimate decline in the 1980s and 1990s.
Karl Heinrich Marx grew up in the city of Trier in modern day Germany. The son of a successful Jewish lawyer, he studied law in Bonn and Berlin, but was also introduced to the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach. In 1841, he received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Jena.
In 1843, after a short spell as editor of a liberal newspaper in Cologne, Marx and his wife Jenny moved to Paris, a hotbed of radical thought. There he became a revolutionary communist and befriended his life long collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Expelled from France, Marx spent two years in Brussels, where his partnership with Engels intensified. They co-authored the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto which was published in 1848 and asserted that all human history had been based on class struggles but that these would ultimately disappear with the victory of the proletariat.
In 1849 Marx moved to London, where he was to spend the remainder of his life. For a number of years, his family lived in poverty but the wealthier Engels was able to support them to an increasing extent. Gradually, Marx emerged from his political and spiritual isolation and produced his most important body of work, Das Kapital. The first volume of this ‘Bible of the Working Class’ was published in his lifetime, while the remaining volumes were edited by Engels after his friend’s death.
In his final years, Karl Marx was in creative and physical decline. He spent time at health spas and was deeply distressed by the death of his wife, in 1881, and one of his daughters. He died in March 1883 and was buried at Highgate Cemetery in London.
The thoughts of Marx became increasingly influential in the twentieth century, when communist regimes were established in a number of countries. How Marx would have reacted, had he seen to what use his ideas were put by the likes of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, will remain one of history’s intriguing unanswered questions.
Karl Marx- Father of Modern Socialism/Communism
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