Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was born in Gori, Georgia, in 1878, the son of a violent cobbler. Trained for the Russian Orthodox priesthood and expelled, he became a Bolshevik organiser and bank robber for Lenin's revolutionary funds. After Lenin's death in 1924 he outmanoeuvred Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev to take control of the Soviet Communist Party. The collectivisation of Soviet agriculture (1928–33) killed perhaps six million people, mostly Ukrainian peasants, in the Holodomor. The Great Purge (1936–38) executed or imprisoned hundreds of thousands of his own party, military, and citizens. The Hitler-Stalin Pact (1939) opened the partition of Poland; the German invasion of 1941 turned him into a wartime ally of Britain and the United States; victory in 1945 made him the master of half of Europe. He died on March 5, 1953, of a stroke at his dacha outside Moscow; estimates of the total death toll of his regime range from 9 to 20 million.
All Figures
General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party · Dictator 1924–1953
Joseph Stalin
1,878 CE – 1,953 CE
The Georgian seminary student turned bank robber who built the Soviet Union into an industrial superpower — at a cost of perhaps twenty million lives.
Lifetime
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