Joesph+Stalin



**Birth:** December 21, 1879 **Death:** March 5, 1953
 * __Joseph Stalin(1879-1953)__ **
 * Area of Birth:** Gori Area Georgia, Russia
 * Area of Death:** Moscow Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
 * Nationality:** Georgian
 * Occupation:** General secretary (government)

//**__Stalin's Childhood__ **//

Pictured on the left is the **Tiflis Theological Seminary** and pictured on the right is **Gori Area Georgia, Russia**
 * Joseph Stalin, Soviet dictator from 1929 until his death in 1953, rivals Adolf Hitler as the twentieth century's most infamous political figure.
 * Stalin was a son of a poor cobbler. His father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, drinks and beats him every day. Stalin's mother, Ekaterina, a religious and illiterate peasant woman, sent her teenage son to Gori Church School where Stalin prepared for the ministry.
 * During Stalin's stay at the church school, he learned how to speak Russian with a guttural Georgian Accent. He then was transfer over to Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he secretly read [|Karl Marx], the chief theoretician of international [|Communism], and other forbidden texts.
 * He was expelled from the school for revolutionary means. His mother had dreamed of her son becoming a priest, but Stalin was more ruffianly than clerical in appearance and outlook.


 * 1900 he joined the political underground, fomenting labour demonstrations and strikes in the main industrial centres of the Caucasus; but his excessive zeal in pushing duped workers into bloody clashes with the police antagonized his fellow conspirators.
 * Social Democrats (Marxist revolutionaries) of the Russian Empire had split into their two competing wings— [|Menshevik]and [|Bolshevik]—in 1903, Stalin joined the second, more militant, of these factions and became a disciple of its leader, [|Lenin].

Here is a picture of Lenin (left) and Stalin (right) posing for a picture.​




 * Stalin spent his first years after the revolution building his post as general secretary secretly into the most powerful one in the communist party. After Lenin's death in 1924, a triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev governed against Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin.
 * Stalin switched sides and joined with [|Bukharin]. Together, they fought a new opposition of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin's supremacy was complete. From this year, he could be said to have exercised control over the party and the country (although the formailities were not complete until the Great Purges of 1936-1938).
 * The final stage of Stalin's rise to power was the ordered assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, where he had lived since 1936 (he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929.). Indeed, after Trotsky's death only two members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) remained - Stalin himself and his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.



​ //** __Purges and mass murders__ **//


 * Stalin consolidated his power base with the Great Purges against his political and ideological opponents, most notably the old cadres and the rank and file of the Bolshevik Party. Measures used against them ranged from imprisonment in work camps ( [|Gulags]) to assassination (such as that of [|Leon Trotsky] and [|Sergei Kirov]). Several show trials were held in Moscow, to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewere in the country. There were four key trials from 1936 to 1938, The Trial of the Sixteen was the first (December 1936); then the Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); then the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938.
 * Under the pretext of constructing `[|socialism] in one country', Stalin terrorized large segments of the Soviet population, such as the [|Kulaks], a term for prosperous farmers who were disinherited when agriculture was collectivized. He also orchestrated a massive famine in the Ukraine in which an estimated 5 million people died. It is believed that with the purges, forced famines, state terrorism, labor camps, and forced migrations, Stalin was responsible for the death of as many as 40 million people within the borders of the Soviet Union. According to former National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, [|Zbigniew Brzezinski], Stalin murdered an estimated 20 million people.

** //__World War II__// **


 * In 1939, Stalin made the [|Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact]with Nazi Germany which divided Eastern Europe between the two powers. The official Allied' version has been: In 1941, however, [|Hitler]broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union. Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Red Army put up fierce resistance, but were ineffective against the advancing Nazi forces.
 * Stalin was up to this point very wary of the Germans, and would not permit his armies to even assume defensive positions for fear of sending the wrong signals to Hitler. Up to the final moment, and the invasion by the Germans, he held out hope that the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact would buy him time to modernize and strengthen his military (recently weakened by purges).
 * The Germans reached the outskirsts of Moscow in December, but were stopped by an early winter and a Soviet counter-offensive. At the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, after sacrificing an estimated 1 million men, the Red Army was able to regain the initiative of the war. With military eqipment aid of their allies the Soviet forces were able to regain their lost territory and push their over-stretched enemy back to Germany itself.
 * From the end of 1944 large sections of eastern Germany came under Stalin's Soviet Union occupation and on May 2, 1945, the capital city Berlin was taken.
 * By some estimates, one quarter of the Russian population was wiped out in the war. There was, then, a huge shortage of men of the fighting-age generation in Russia. As a result, to this day, World War II is remembered very vividly in Russia, and May 9, Victory Day, is one of its biggest national holidays.
 * Stalin is often credited with successfully industrializing the Soviet Union. What can be said without controversy is that by the time of World War II, the Soviet economy had been industrialized to the point that the Soviets could resist the German invasion. That Stalin or his policies are to be credited for this is contended. Stalin is also generally credited with destroying the concept of communal socialism(communism) and with "stealing the revolution".

//__Timeline__//

 * December 21, 1879:** ·birth of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, later known as Stalin
 * September 1888:** ·Stalin enters Gori Church School
 * September 1894:** ·Stalin enrolls in Tiflis Theological Seminary
 * March 1898:** ·First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
 * May 29, 1899:** ·Stalin is expelled from the Seminary
 * April 5, 1902:** ·Stalin arrested for the first time, exiled to Siberia
 * Summer 1903:** ·the Social Democrats split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
 * January 5, 1904:** ·Stalin escapes from Siberia, the first of many escapes from exile in the following decade.
 * 1905:** ·Revolution in Russia. Nicholas II announces constitutional reforms, and the creation of the Duma, or elected assembly. Stalin marries Yekaterina Svanidze.
 * December 1905:** ·Stalin goes as a delegate to Bolshevik conference in Finland, meets Lenin for the first time.
 * March 1907:** ·Birth of Stalin's first child, Yakov
 * October 1907:** ·Death of Yekaterina
 * 1913:** He changes his name to Stalin, which translates to 'Man of Steel'.
 * January 1912:** ·Bolsheviks officially separate from Social Democrats, Stalin appointed to the Party's Central Committee by Lenin.
 * January 1913:** ·Stalin co-writes, with Lenin, "Marxism and the National Question"
 * August-September 1914:** ·Outbreak of World War I.
 * March 1917:** ·Beginning of Russian Revolution. The Tsar's government falls, replaced with a Provisional Government. Bolsheviks, including Stalin, hasten to St. Petersburg
 * April 1917:** ·Lenin returns from Switzerland, rebukes Stalin for taking a conciliar line with the Provisional Government.
 * November 1917:** ·Bolsheviks overthrow Provisional Government, seize power. Stalin plays only a minor role.
 * February 1918:** ·Stalin marries Nadezhda Alliluyeva
 * 1918-1920:** ·Civil war in Russia. Trotsky organizes Red Army; Stalin commands forces in Tsaritsyn, Petrograd (St. Petersburg), and elsewhere.
 * 1921:** ·Birth of Stalin's second child, Vasily
 * 1922:** ·Official founding of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
 * April 1922:** ·Stalin elected General Secretary of the Communist Party
 * May 25, 1922:** ·Lenin suffers his first stroke
 * January 4, 1923:** ·Lenin, in a postscript to his Testament, warns the Party to remove Stalin from his position of power.
 * March 7, 1923:** ·Lenin suffers final stroke, loses his powers of speech
 * January 21, 1924:** ·Death of Lenin. Stalin survives the reading of the Testament by the Central Committee in May.
 * 1924-25:** ·Stalin publicly attacks Trotsky for being unfaithful to "Leninism."
 * December 1924:** ·Stalin publicly articulates his theory of "Socialism in One Country."
 * December 1925:** ·Allied with Bukharin and the "Rightists," Stalin begins attacks on Zinoviev.
 * February 28, 1926:** ·Birth of Stalin's third child, Svetlana
 * October-November 1926:** ·At the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin attacks the "United Opposition" of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky.
 * 1927:** ·Beginning of the first Five-Year Plan
 * November 1927:** ·Kamenev and Zinoviev expelled from the Party; Trotsky expelled and sent to Central Asia.
 * April 1929:** ·Stalin begins assault on Bukharin
 * November 1929:** ·Bukharin removed from the Politburo
 * December 1929:** ·Stalin announces "liquidation of the kulaks as a class"; collectivization begins in earnest.
 * 1931-32:** ·Terrible famine across the Soviet Union; millions die
 * November 8, 1932:** ·Suicide of Nadezhda
 * December 1, 1934:** ·Murder, by Stalin's agents, of Sergei Kirov. Beginning of "Great Terror," which continues until 1938.
 * January 1935:** ·Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others are arrested, accused of complicity in Kirov's assassination.
 * August 1936:** ·First "Show Trial." Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their allies confess and are executed.
 * January 1937:** ·Second Show Trial
 * June 1937:** ·Purge of the army begins, top generals are tried and executed
 * March 1938:** ·Third Show Trial, conviction and execution of Bukharin, Rykov, others.
 * March 1939:** ·At Eighteenth Party Congress, Stalin announces end of the Great Terror.
 * August 23, 1939:** ·Nazi-Soviet Pact is signed in Moscow
 * September 1939:** ·Outbreak of World War II
 * August 20, 1940:** ·Trotsky assassinated, by Stalin's agents, in Mexico City.
 * June 21, 1941:** ·Hitler invades Soviet Union
 * August 1942-February 1943:** · Battle of Stalingrad. Germans are defeated, marking the turning point in the war.
 * November 1943:** · Stalin meets with Roosevelt and Churchill in Teheran
 * February 1945:** ·Stalin meets with Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta
 * April 31, 1945:** ·Hitler commits suicide in bombed-out Berlin, ending war in Europe. Red Army controls all of Eastern Europe.
 * August 1945:** ·United States uses atomic bomb against Japan, bringing an end to the war in the Pacific.
 * February 1948:** ·Communists seize power in Czechoslovakia, cementing Soviet control of Eastern Europe.
 * Summer 1948:** ·Soviets blockade East Berlin.
 * 1949:** ·Communists, under Mao, are victorious in Chinese Civil War.
 * September 1949:** ·Soviets explode their first atomic bomb.
 * December 1949:** ·Stalin celebrates his seventieth birthday.
 * February 1950:** ·Sino-Soviet Treaty signed
 * 1950-53:** ·Korean War
 * January 1953:** ·Announcement of Jewish "Doctors' Plot" against Stalin, plans for new wave of terror.
 * March 5, 1953:** ·Death of Stalin


 * //__ Comparisons __//**

__//**
 * 1) Joseph Stalin is really similar to Napoleon.
 * 2) Joseph Stalin uses the secret police like how Napoleon uses the dogs on Page 37.
 * 3) Napoleon Oppose the windmill plan to get rid of Snowball similar to what Stalin did when he oppose industrialization to get rid of Leon Trotsky.
 * 4) Stalin stole the plans of industrialization similar to how Napolean stole the windmill plans from Snowball.

Work Cited **//__

Stalin, Joseph. ( 2009). In //Encyclopædia Britannica.// Retrieved November 18, 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online School Edition: []

"Joseph Stalin, General Secretary, Soviet Communist Party, 1929--1953." //The Cold War, 1945-1991//. 3 vols. Edited by Benjamin Frankel. Gale Research, 1992. Reproduced in //Biography Resource Center//. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009. [|http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC]