Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Ио́сиф Виссарио́нович Ста́лин), original name Ioseb Jughashvili (Georgian: იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი tentative, Russian: Ио́сиф Джугашви́ли) (December 21 [December 9, Old Style], 1879 - March 5, 1953), was a Bolshevikrevolutionary and the second leader of the Soviet Union. Under Stalin, who replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with five year plans (introduced in 1928) and collective farming, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society to a major world industrial power; meanwhile Stalin consolidated his personal power and eliminated effective political opposition during the 1930s through ruthless purges and repression (SeeGulag). Victory in World War II (1945) laid the groundwork for the formation of the Warsaw Pact and established the USSR as one of the two major world powers, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following Stalin's death in 1953.
His first name is also transliterated as Josif. His surname is sometimes transliterated as Dzhugashvili and occasionally rendered as Djugashvili. Shvili is a Georgian suffix meaning "son of." Neither the word nor the name Jugha (or Dzhuga) are known in Georgian.
He was also known as Koba (a revolutionary nickname, after a Georgian folk hero, a Robin Hood-like brigand. The name Stalin (derived from combining Russian stal, "steel" with the possessive suffix "-in") originally was a conspiratorialnickname; however, it stuck with him and he continued to call himself Stalin after the Russian Revolution. Stalin is also reported to have used at least a dozen other names for the purpose of secretcommunications, but for obvious reasons most of them remain unknown. His other nicknames were Ivanovich, Soso, David, Nijeradze, and Chizhikov.
Stalin was born in the town of Gori, Georgia, to a cobbler named Vissarion (Beso) Dzhugashvili. His mother, Ekaterina, was born a serf. Ekaterina used to work doing laundry and housecleaning in rich peoples' houses, often taking Soso (as Stalin was then called) with her. The boy was bright, and David Pismamedov, a GoriJew, used to give him books and money. (Years later, he reportedly came to the Kremlin to see what had happened to little Soso, and Stalin talked with him in public.) Soso was often severely beaten by his father, which was not an unusual way of "teaching lessons" to children during these times. Eventually, Beso left for Tiflis, leaving the family without support. When Soso was 11, his mother enrolled him in the Gori seminary. He studied Russian Orthodox Christianity until he was nearly twenty.
Stalin's involvement with the socialist movement began at seminary school, from which he was expelled in 1899 after failing to appear at scheduled examinations. He worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus, facing repeated arrest and exile to Siberia between 1902 and 1917. He adhered to Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of "professional revolutionaries". His practical experience made him useful in Lenin's Bolshevik party, gaining him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912. Some historians have argued that, during this period, Stalin was actually a Tsaristspy, who was working to infiltrate the Bolshevik party. In 1913 he adopted the name Stalin, which means "man of steel" in Russian.
His only significant contribution to the development of Marxist theory at this time was a treatise written while briefly exiled in Vienna, Marxism and the national question. It presents an orthodox Marxist position on this important debate; see Lenin's article On the right of nations to self-determination for comparison. This treatise may have contributed to his appointment as People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution.
Initially opposed to the overthrow of Alexander Kerensky's Provisional Government in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was won over to Lenin's position following the latter's return from exile in April, but only played a minor role in the Bolsheviks' seizure of power on November 7. He was political commissar of the Soviet Army (Western front) during the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet war. Stalin's first government position was as People's Commissar of Nationalities Affairs. He held a number of senior administrative posts within the Soviet government and party apparatus, becoming in April 1922 general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, a post which he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country. This concentration of personal power increasingly alarmed the dying Lenin, and in Lenin's Testament he famously called for the removal of the "rude" Stalin. However, this document was later suppressed by members of the Central Committee, many of whom were also criticised by the Bolshevik leader.
During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building Socialism in One Country, in contrast to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. Stalin would quickly switch sides and join with Bukharin. Together, they fought a new opposition of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year, Trotsky was exiled. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivisation and industrialisation, Stalin can be said to have exercised control over the party and the country. However, as the popularity of other leaders such as Sergei Kirov and the so-called Ryutin plot were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute power until the Great Purge of 1936-1938.
World War I and the Russian Civil War had a devastating effect on the country's economy; industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. Under Stalin's direction, the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism, was replaced by a system of centrally-ordained Five-Year Plans in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture. In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialisation from a very low economic base. Russia, generally ranked as the poorest nation in Europe in 1922, now industrialized at a phenomenal rate, far surpassing Germany's pace of industrialisation in the 19th century and Japan's earlier in the 20th.
With no seed capital, little foreign trade, and barely any modern industry to start with, Stalin's government financed industrialisation by both restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the peasantry, both processes effectively amounting to the primitive accumulation of capital described by Karl Marx in Das Kapital. Collectivisation was instrumental in depriving peasants of the fruits of their labor.
In specific but common cases, the industrial labor was knowingly underpaid. First, there was the usage of the almost free labor of prisoners in forced labor camps. Second, there was frequent "mobilization" of communists and Komsomol members for various construction projects.
Stalin's regime moved to force collectivisation of agriculture. The theory behind collectivisation was that it would replace the small-scale un-mechanised and inefficient farms with large-scale mechanised farms that would produce food far more efficiently.
Collectivisation meant the destruction of a the way of life introduced after abolition of serfdom in 1861, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivisation also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced widespread and often violent resistance among the peasantry, and actually the productivity of agriculture dropped.
Stalin blamed this drop in food production on kulaks (Russian: fist; rich peasants), who he believed were capitalistic parasites who were organising resistance to collectivisation. Those who resisted collectivisation were to be shot, transported to Gulaglabour camps or deported to remote areas of the country. In reality however, the term "kulak" was a loose term to describe anyone who opposed collectivisation, which included many peasants who were anything but rich.
Many historians agree that the disruption caused by forced collectivisation was largely responsible for major famines which caused up to 5 million deaths in 1932-33, particularly in Ukraine and the lower Volga region.
Under Stalin's rule, sciences suffered from heavy ideological pressure. In the middle of the 1930s, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko started a campaign against genetics and was supported by Stalin. Between 1934 and 1940, many geneticists were executed (including Agol, Levit, Nadson) or sent to labor camps (including the most well-known Soviet geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, who died in prison in 1943). Genetics was stigmatized as a "fascist science". Some geneticists, however, survived and continued to work in genetics, dangerous as it was. In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience"; all geneticists were fired from work (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. The taboo on genetics continued even after Stalin's death. Only in the middle of 1960s was it completely waived. (See Lysenkoism.)
Cybernetics was also outlawed. It was officially declared that "a machine cannot think", and any research in computer-related fields was prohibited. As with genetics, the taboo continued for several years after Stalin's death.
In the late 1940s, there were also attempts to outlaw special and general relativity, as well as quantum mechanics. However, top Soviet physicists made it clear that without using these theories, they would be unable to create a nuclear bomb.
In fact, scientific research in nearly all areas was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to labor camps (including Lev Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938-1939), or executed (like Lev Shubnikov, who was shot in 1937). They were persecuted for their (real or imaginary) dissident views, and seldom for "politically incorrect" research.
Stalin's government placed heavy emphasis on the provision of basic medical services. Campaigns were carried out against typhus, cholera, and malaria; the number of doctors was increased as rapidly as facilities and training would permit; and death and infant mortality rates steadily decreased. Education was also dramatically expanded, with many more Russians learning to read and write, and higher education expanded. The generation that grew up under Stalin also saw a major expansion in job opportunities, especially for women.
Stalin consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with the Great Purge against his suspected political and ideological opponents, culminating in the extermination of the majority of the original BolshevikCentral Committee, and over half of the largely pliant delegates of the 17th Party Congress in January1934. Measures used against these victims ranged from imprisonment in labour camps of the Gulag to execution after a show trial or assassinations (such as that of Trotsky and, some allege, Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov). Thousands of people merely suspected of opposing Stalin's regime were killed or imprisoned (often using Article 58 in which people could be imprisoned for "anti-Soviet activities"). Initially, Politburo, including Stalin, routinely signed death warrants for huge lists of enemies of the people. Over the time the persecution procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. The Russian word troika gained a new, horrible meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three.
Several show trials known as the Moscow Trials were held to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewhere in the country. There were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Source | Copyright
Stalin's involvement with the 
