Joseph Stalin facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Joseph Stalin


General secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
In office 3 April 1922 – 16 October 1952
Preceded by	Vyacheslav Molotov (as Responsible Secretary)
Succeeded by	Nikita Khrushchev (office reestablished)
Chairman of the Council of Ministers
In office 6 May 1941 – 5 March 1953
First Deputies	Nikolai Voznesensky Vyacheslav Molotov
Preceded by	Vyacheslav Molotov
Succeeded by	Georgy Malenkov
People's Commissar for Defense of the Soviet Union
In office 19 July 1941 – 25 February 1946
Premier	Himself
Preceded by	Semyon Timoshenko
Succeeded by	Nikolai Bulganin after vacancy

Personal details
Born	(1878-12-18)18 December 1878 Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	5 March 1953(1953-03-05) (aged 74) Kuntsevo Dacha, Kuntsevo, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Resting place	Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow (from 31 October 1961)
Nationality	Georgian
Political party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Spouses	Ekaterina Svanidze (1906–1907) Nadezhda Alliluyeva (1919–1932)
Signature

Joseph Stalin (or Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. He replaced Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union. Stalin was a totalitarian ruler, and stayed in power by removing anyone he thought might be a threat to him. His ideas and policies turned the Soviet Union into a powerful, modern nation, the largest on Earth. It also led to the deaths of millions of people. His form of government was later called Stalinism.

Stalin invaded Poland on 18 September 1939. In the subsequent World War II, Stalin stayed neutral but signed a peace deal with Germany's leader Adolf Hitler. He then led a bloody war after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The end of the war saw Stalin gain control of all Eastern Europe including part of Germany. There, a series of loyal Marxist-Leninist single-party states were set up, extending his power and determining the Soviet Union's position as a superpower.

Stalin's name
Early life
Revolutionary
Secretary
Food and agriculture
Mass executions
World War II
Other pages
Images for kids
See also

Stalin's name

Stalin was born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jugashvili, or Iosif Dzhugashvili. He adopted the name "Stalin" later

In Russian: Ио́сиф Виссарио́нович Ста́лин - Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin; born Джугашвили - Dzhugashvili
In Georgian: იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი - Ioseb Jughashvili

Early life

Joseph Stalin

Ioseb Vissarionovich Jugashvili was born in a small one room house in Gori, Georgia. His father made and repaired shoes. He was often abusive to his wife and son. He died in 1890. Joseph had smallpox when he was young. This left his face scarred. Later, photographs were often changed to hide the scars. His left arm was also shorter because of an accident. He was educated at the Gori church school. Stalin studied to be a priest at a seminary (school for priests) in Tbilisi. He was an active student reading many books, especially books that were not allowed by the seminary. This included books by Karl Marx. He joined a Marxist group in 1898, the Mesame Dasi, or Group Three.

Revolutionary

Lenin and Stalin 1922

He left school in 1899 and got a job at the Tbilisi Physical Institute. He joined groups that were trying to start a revolution to remove the Tsar. They wanted a different type of government. The police raided his house in 1901 while hunting for people who opposed the government. Stalin escaped but went into hiding so the police could not find him. He organized anti-government activities such as May Day marches and protests. He became a Bolshevik. He supported a violent revolution, and did not support the Mensheviks. The secret police caught him in April 1902 and exiled him without trial to Siberia. He lived in the village of Novaya Uda.

He soon escaped from Siberia. This led to many later claims that he was a police spy. The arrest of another Bolshevik, Stephan Shaumyan, a rival of Stalin, increased these beliefs. At the end of 1905, he went to a meeting in Finland and met Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin was not what Stalin had expected. The government arrested and exiled Stalin several times in the next ten years. This increased his power in the Bolshevik party and he was elected to the Central Committee of the party in 1912. He was promoted to a position at St.Petersburg.

Secretary

Stalin was a member of the Bolshevik Party, but did not do much in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was writing and editing Pravda, the party newspaper. He had a number of organizational jobs in the Communist Party. In 1922 he became General Secretary. He was able to give jobs to people he liked in the Communist Party. These supporters helped him become the leader after Vladimir Lenin died in 1924.

Food and agriculture

Stalin tried to collectivize farms. Collectivization meant taking the land from owners of all farms and joining it into large farms run by the government. Communist officials then let farmers work the new farms and told them to turn the harvest over to the government.

Collectivization did not work well. There was a famine 1932–33, in which millions died. Because farmers were not paid much money, and whatever they grew went to the state, the workers did not try their best. The best farming worked on very small bits of land given to the peasants to grow what they liked. On these pieces of land, farmers could keep what they grew. In 1938 these parts of land were 4% of Soviet farmland. However, they grew 20% of its produce.

There was a second great famine in the Soviet Union in 1946–1947. The conditions were caused by drought, made worse by the devastation caused by World War II. The grain harvest in 1946 totaled 39.6 million tons - barely 40% of the yield in 1940.

Mass executions

To eliminate "enemies of the working class", Stalin instituted the "Great Purge". Over a million people were imprisoned and at least 700,000 executed between 1934 and 1939. Those executed included most of the generals in the Red Army, whom Stalin saw as a threat to his rule. This greatly weakened the army in the early months of the Wehrmacht's offensive against the Soviet Union in 1941.

World War II

1941 War propaganda portrait of Stalin

Stalin cooperated with German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. However, Hitler hated communism. After invading and neutralising France, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. After the Operation Barbarossa invasion, the USSR began working with the Western Allies to defeat Germany. In the end, Germany lost, but the USSR had more casualties than any other country during the war.

When World War II was over, the Soviet army occupied many countries in Europe, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and part of Germany. They imposed Marxism-Leninism on these countries. This was done against the wishes, and over the protests, of the American and British governments.

Stalin continued to rule over the Soviet Union until he died. He also militarized Russia by focusing the country's time and energy towards weapons, vehicles, and the armed forces.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953. It was officially said to be because of a stroke. In 2003, however, a group of Russian and American historians said that Stalin had been poisoned with powerful rat poison warfarin, possibly by the men who took over the government after Stalin died. Led by Lavrentiy Beria, these were Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov. Nikita Krushchev later began a process called "De-Stalinization", which meant taking apart much of the political system that Stalin made. Stalin was denounced as a tyrant. After outsmarting and defeating his rivals, Krushchev established a personal control over the government comparable to Stalin's own, even if he never went as far in murdering millions of people.

Stalin is a controversial figure in history. Many historians see him as a ruthless dictator, though others praise him as the Father of the Soviet State. He has been criticized for his role in the Holodomor. A recent poll in Russia (2008) listed him as the third most popular person in Russian history. In 2006, a poll stated that almost half the adults in Russia thought Joseph Stalin was a good person.

Other pages

Images for kids

In 1894 Stalin began his studies at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary (pictured here in the 1870s).
Police photograph of Stalin, taken in 1902, when he was 23 years old.
Stalin first met Vladimir Lenin at a 1905 conference in Tampere, in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Lenin became "Stalin's indispensable mentor".
The first issue of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper of which Stalin was editor
Stalin in 1915
(From left to right) Stalin, Alexei Rykov, Lev Kamenev, and Grigori Zinoviev in 1925
Stalin and his close associates Anastas Mikoyan and Sergo Ordzhonikidze in Tbilisi, 1925
Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov with a fellow miner; Stalin's government initiated the Stakhanovite movement to encourage hard work. It was partly responsible for a substantial rise in production during the 1930s.
Photograph taken of the 1931 demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in order to make way for the Palace of the Soviets
Soviet famine of 1932–33. Areas of most disastrous famine marked with black.
Review of Soviet armoured fighting vehicles used to equip the Republican People's Army during the Spanish Civil War
Stalin greeting the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in the Kremlin, 1939
With all the men at the front, women dig anti-tank trenches around Moscow in 1941
The center of Stalingrad after liberation, 2 February 1943
The Big Three: Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November 1943
Soviet soldiers in Polotsk, 4 July 1944
British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, U.S. President Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, July 1945
Banner of Stalin in Budapest in 1949
Stalin at his 71st birthday celebration with (left to right) Mao Zedong, Nikolai Bulganin, Walter Ulbricht and Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal
Stalin's casket on howitzer carriage drawn by horses, caught on camera by US assistant army attaché Major Martin Manhoff from the embassy balcony
Lavrenti Beria with Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, on his lap and Stalin seated in the background smoking a pipe. Photographed at Stalin's dacha near Sochi in the mid-1930s.
Chinese Marxists celebrate Stalin's seventieth birthday in 1949
Stalin carrying his daughter, Svetlana
A poster of Stalin at the 3rd World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, East Germany, 1951
Interior of the Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia
A contingent from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist) carrying a banner of Stalin at a May Day march through London in 2008
Interior of the Gulag Museum in Moscow
Marxist–Leninist activists from the opposition Communist Party of the Russian Federation laying wreaths at Stalin's Moscow grave in 2009