Joseph Stalin: A Great Leader, Yet a Killer of Millions

“It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything”. This quote by Joseph Stalin exemplifies his cynical and distrusting nature. Stalin was a great leader, hardworking, and very street smart, but he unfortunately used these abilities for immoral motives. He used his great leadership to mobilize his country into the industrial age, but he did it in a way that killed millions of his own people and left a legacy of terror and death throughout Europe and the world.Losif (meaning Joseph in Italian) Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was born in Gori, Georgia on the eighteenth of December in 1878. His dad, named Besarion Jughashvili, was a cobbler, and his mother was a washerwoman called Ketevan Geladze. Both of Losif’s parents gave out tough beatings. His father was an alcoholic, while his mother went from a little too affectionate to a strict and harsh punisher on a regular basis. When Losif asked his mother later in life why she had beaten him, she responded “It didn’t do you any harm”.

Meanwhile, Georgian folklore and traditions took over his imagination, connecting him to the republic. When he was seven, Losif got smallpox, which went away, but left his face scarred. To make things worse, a few years later he was in a carriage accident that left his arm deformed. These injuries caused his peers to be rude to him, which installed a wanting of respect and power in Stalin. Later, bad things happened to those who crossed him. Losif’s mother was also an orthodox christian who wanted him to become a priest. She worked really hard, and in 1888 her efforts paid off and Losif got into church school. However, he went against his mother and became an Atheist. He was quoted with saying “You know, they are fooling us, there is no God… all this talk about God is sheer nonsense”. Losif was both smart and violent because in Gori street fights were a principle sport. He did very well in school and was said to have been a fantastic poet. This was noticed by Tiflis Theological Seminary, who in 1894 gave him a scholarship. In 1894 he learned of a secret society that wanted Georgia to be independent. This society wanted was called Messame Dassy, and he joined in 1898. Some socialist members of Messame Dassy showed Losif the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. In 1899 he left school.

Official school reports say that he was unable to pay the tuition, but there are rumors that he had political views against the tsar, Nicholas ll, and was asked to leave.After leaving school, Losif stayed in Tiflis instead of returning home, and used his time to help with the Georgian Revolution. He also found work as a tutor, and then as a clerk. In 1901 he joined Social Democratic Labor Party. Although it is not yet proven, there is strong historical evidence that Losif burned down the Rothschilds’ refinery in the oil boom town Batumi in January of 1902. He probably used this as leverage to bully other oil barons into giving him “protection money”. He coordinated a labor strike, also in 1902, and was exiled to Siberia because of it. This was just the beginning of the many operations that Stalin would plan, some of which ended in his arrest.

The leader of the Georgian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin had like Stalin ever since he had first met him in 1905. Lenin referred to Stalin as a “man of action” opposed to “one of the tea drinkers”. Lenin promised “peace, land and bread” to organize the revolution, and had great success, making a whole party (the Bolshevik party) in no time. Stalin played an important role, running Pravda, the Russian newspaper, and he also helped Lenin escape the Tsar. Because of these things, Lenin appointed Stalin into his inner circle.Losif married Ketevan Svanidze in 1906. Ketevan came from a poor and un-nobile family, and gave birth to Yakov Dzhugashvili in 1907.

After one of Losif’s arrests, the whole family escaped the tsarist (the Nicholas II’s secret police) by going to Baku in Azerbaijan. Unfortunately, Ketevan died to typhus in 1907. This made Losif almost pitiful and a terrible father. He sent Yakov to be cared for by Ketevan parents. He also started working on the revolution even more than before, and it was also at this point that he changed his name to Joseph Stalin (Stalin means steel in Russian).Stalin was not a very good public speaking, nor was he the most intelligent man, but in addition to running Pravda, he was very good at leading day to day operations for the revolution. When he escaped from exile, the tsarist marked him as an outlaw. This did not stop Stalin from continuing his work for the revolution, but he had to do it hiding. Since working for the revolution was not a paying job, he made money for himself and the revolution through robbing, kidnapping, and extortion. He gained fame by being associated with the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, which resulted in multiple deaths and the theft of 250,000 rubles (was equivalent to approximately $3.4 million USD).In February 1917 Nicholas the second’s regime was ended, beginning the Russian Revolution. The Revolutionists liked the provisional government because they thought a smooth transition could be possible, but in April Lenin said that provisional government was bad.

On the contrary, he told the peasants to rise up and take land from the rich and factories from the industrialists. By October the Bolsheviks had completed the revolution and they were in control. This caused a violent struggle between politicians for status in 1922. Stalin was put in the new position of general secretary of the Communist Party. It was not a powerful office, but it gave him the power to choose who was appointed to all party member posts. This allowed him to build a structure. By using his new found power, Stalin was cunning with who he appointed, and sooner or later many important people owed their position to him. Nobody realized how powerful he had become until it was too late. Even Lenin, who was on his deathbed, was unable to regain power from Stalin. Lenin died in 1924. After Lenin died, most thought leader of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, would take over. However, his ideas were idealistic, while Stalin had his own brand of Socialism in one country (he wanted to make the Soviet Union stronger, instead of spreading communism to other countries). Stalin decided to ruin old party leadership and take over the country, which he did at first by removing enemies using underhand tactics. Now he decided to use fear mongering to his advantage.

The secret police enforced Stalin’s commands and he had them arrest rivals in the middle of the night for being aligned with capitalist nations. Then he would put them through show trials, call them enemies of the people, and have them executed. A lot of people were also exiled to Europe and the Americas. Stalin had 93/139 Central Committee members and 81/103 generals and admirals exiled. His eradicating of rivals soon expanded from the party’s elite to officials suspected of plotting against the revolution. Soon he had control of the country, and nobody who would dare to stand up to him would be exiled, killed, or sent to labor camps.Stalin married Nadezhda Alliluyeva 1919. They had two children named Svetlana and Vassil. Unfortunately, Stalin abused Nadezhda, which lead to her suicide in 1932. Stalin ensured her death was on the record as being from appendicitis. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin did the opposite of the Bolshevik agrarian policy. He did this by taking land from the poor which was given to them earlier. He used the land to organize collective farming [grouping together all farms (government owned or private) to be owned by the state]. This turned the former peasants back into peasants and is resisted by millions, who killed livestock and secretly held onto grain. Stalin thought this would make food production go faster. Stalin also got the gears turning on industrialization that at first had huge success. However, this over time killed millions of people who died from forced labor or famine, and did ginormous damage to the environment. Any rebellious people were lethally punished- millions were executed or taken to labor camps in Gulag. One of these people was Leon Trotsky, who was exiled to Mexico City 1929. He, however, kept arguing against Stalin, until he had him murdered with an ice pick 1940.In 1939 WWII began. Stalin made the seemingly brilliant move of signing a treaty with Hitler/The Nazis. In the non-aggression pact, Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide Poland and not attack each other. Stalin was convinced of Hitler’s honesty, and consequently ignored all tip offs that the Nazis were mobilizing armies on its eastern border.

There was a Nazi blitzkrieg against the Soviets in June 1941. USSR was startled and immediately lost tons of soldiers and Stalin was hysterical because of Hitler’s treachery, and hid in his office for multiple days. By the time Stalin was back to his normal self, Ukraine and Belarus had been conquered, and the Nazis were about to invade Leningrad. To make matters worse, The executions and exiles in the 1930s left the army and government in rough shape. The purges affected almost everyone who had an intellectual job. This robbed the USSR of lots of smarts and left Stalin as basically the only smart person in the country. Yakov, Stalin’s first son, was in the Red Army, and was captured early in WWII. The Nazis offered a prisoner swap, but Stalin didn’t accept because he thought his son surrendered on purpose. Yakov died in a Nazi concentration camp 1943. Stalin was credited with saying “Everything's lost, I give up.

Lenin founded our state, and we've screwed it up!” Although the Nazi had practically conquered the Soviet Union, Stalin didn’t leave Moscow because he thought there must be victory at all costs. The tide turned at the battle of Stalingrad. Hitler attacks the city named after Stalin not because it was an especially important city, but instead to embarrass Stalin. Stalin said “Not a step backwards” to the Red Army, and although there are over a million Russian deaths, in 1943, after amazing efforts by militia and the army, the Nazis were pushed back to Stalingrad. By 1944, the Soviets were pushing Nazis out of other countries in Europe. Stalin hadn’t liked the West since the Soviet Union was founded, and he wanted the allies to attack a second German border. Both British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt said this would result in heavy deaths, and this only made Stalin dislike the West more. When the Allies began to win the war, Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt met with Stalin to discuss postwar arrangements. The first of these meetings was in 1943, in Tehran, Iran.

Stalin was in a good position because of the victory in Stalingrad, and used his bargaining power to make the Allies open a second front on Germany, which they did in 1944. They met again in February 1945 in Yalta in the Crimea, and once again Stalin had a lot of bargaining power because the USSR was freeing other countries in Europe. As a result, he got almost complete power over the countries’ governments in exchange for armies in Japan. By the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, however there were new negotiators from Britain and America; Harry S. Truman was now the President of America, and Clement Attlee was the Prime Minister of Britain. Stalin now had a hard time bargaining for two reasons: Both were suspicious of Stalin’s intentions and the atomic bombs ended the war with Japan before the Soviets could help.

Since the USSR hadn’t helped with Japan, and the Allies thought Stalin would try to spread communism to Japan, they didn’t let him do anything with it.WWII made Stalin very popular. The Soviet Union was now one of the most powerful countries in the world, with a permanent place on the Security Council. Returning warriors and people who ran from the war were arrested and executed or sent to labor camps. Entire nationalities that had been exiled as traitors didn’t have a place to call home.Stalin was sure the allies were inimical towards the USSR, and he became paranoid of an invasion from the West, and from 1945 to 1948 he made all the European countries that the Soviets had liberated communist. This created space between the West and “Mother Russia”.

The allies thought this meant Russia wanted to take over Europe, and to combat it, they created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In 1948, Stalin attempted destroying Germany’s capital, Berlin’s, economy to take over all of Germany, but the West used airplanes to supply the city and eventually forced Stalin to stop. The USSR tests its first nuke on 8/29/1949. All these factors caused the Cold War to begin.Stalin got North Korea to invade South Korea and he didn’t think the UN would interfere, but he was wrong. He had recently ordered the Soviet UN representative to leave because the UN wouldn’t let the new Communist People's Republic of China be represented. This meant the Soviet Union didn’t get a vote to decide on whether the UN would help South Korea or not. In the early 1950s Stalin’s heath started getting worse and an assassination plot was uncovered. Because of this he commanded the head of the secret police to put a purge of the Communist Party into effect, but he died on March fifth, 1953, before the purge happened. The dictator after Stalin was Nikita Khrushchev, who condemned Stalin and began de stalinization (a policy that destroyed the influence of Stalin).Joseph Stalin had a huge impact on the world by helping with the Russian Revolution and being dictator of the Soviet Union. He killed millions of his own people, moved the USSR into the industrial age, and stopped Hitler. In the end, Joseph Stalin fulfilled his desire to be respected and feared, and in doing so, revolutionized his country and changed the landscape of the world indefinitely.