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Stalin in his youth, approx. 1894, at the age of 16, and in 1902 at the age of 24.
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Stalin was born in the city of Gori , Georgia , in the family of the shoemaker Vissarion Ivanovich Djugashvili . His mother, Ekaterina Geladze , came from a family of serfs. Stalin's three brothers died young. Joseph, affectionately called "Soso", was practically alone with his parents. Vissarion Ivanovich Djugashvili was a former serf who, when released, became a shoemaker. He opened his own workshop, but soon went bankrupt, which forced him to work in a shoe factory in Tbilisi (Tbilisi). Rarely visiting his family and being intoxicated, Vissarion often beat his wife and son for no reason. A childhood friend of Stalin's wrote that "... these undeserved and horrifying beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend wrote that he had never seen Stalin cry. Another childhood friend, Iremashvili, he believed that his father's beatings inoculated Stalin with hatred of the authorities. He also said that anyone who showed power over others reminded him of his father and his cruelty. Stalin means "man of steel" in Russian.
One of the people Ekaterina was washing and cleaning was a Jew from Gori , David Papismedov. Papismedov gave Joseph, who helped his mother, money and books to read and encouraged him. A few decades later, Papismedov came to the Kremlin to see what little Soso had become. Stalin surprised his colleagues not only by the fact that he received the old Jew, but also by the fact that he talked to him in public, full of joy.
Finally, Stalin's father, Beso, left for Tbilisi in 1888 , leaving his family without material support. There were rumors that he died in a fight between drunks in a bar, although others say that he saw him in Georgia in 1931.
His aunt, Nina Djuradze, was also active in the communist movement. [21]
At the age of eight, Soso began teaching at the church school in Gori. When he entered school, Stalin was in a very heterogeneous group of students. Stalin and his classmates were mostly Georgians and spoke one of the seventy Caucasian languages, but at school they were forced to use Russian. Even when speaking Russian, Russian teachers made fun of Stalin and his colleagues because of their Georgian accent. Stalin was also ridiculed by those who were the sons of priests or merchants. They mocked his ragged school uniform and his face with traces of wind. Young Joseph learned to defeat his opponents by intimidating them. He exploited the weaknesses of his colleagues, brutally mocking them. To avoid physical confrontation, he mocked them, accusing them of using violence as a "brain substitute."
Stalin imposed his authority on those from wealthy families. Although Stalin later sought to hide these Georgian origins, during his childhood he was fascinated by local folklore. The stories he read spoke of Georgian Wallachians who had fought valiantly for the country's independence. The favorite hero of Stalin's stories was a legendary mountain robber named Koba. He asked his classmates to call him Koba, and this name became his first pseudonym as a revolutionary. In a short time he became the strongest athlete and the best at school. He excelled in school and was a prize-winner, and when he turned 14 he was rewarded with a scholarship to the Theological Seminary in Tbilisi, an institution of the Russian Orthodox Church., where he began to study in 1894. He was paid to sing in the choir, money that was added to his small scholarship. Although his mother wanted him to become a priest (even after he became the leader of the Soviet Union), Stalin entered the seminary not because of any religious vocation, but because it was one of the few educational options available, as long as the tsarist government did not. he wanted to allow a university in Georgia.
Stalin's involvement in the socialist movement (to be more precise, in that branch which would later turn into the communist movement ), began in the seminary, from where he was expelled in 1899 , after failing to take the scheduled exams. He worked for a decade as an illegal activist in the Caucasus , being arrested several times and eventually exiled to Siberia between 1902 and 1917 . He adhered to the doctrineto VI Lenin, the doctrine of a strongly centralized party of "professional revolutionaries." His practical experience made him useful to the Bolshevik party , being elected to the Central Committee in January 1912 . Some historians have stated that at this time Stalin was, in fact, a tsarist spy infiltrating the Bolshevik party, but there are no reliable documents to prove this. In 1913 he adopted the name Stalin , which means "steel" in Russian.
His only significant contribution to the development of Marxist theory at the time was a short treatise written in exile in Vienna, "Marxism and the National Problem." It presents a Marxist-Orthodox position on this important issue. (For comparison, see Lenin's article "On the Right to Self-Determination of Nations.") This treaty seems to have contributed to his appointment as People's Commissar for National Affairs after the Revolution.
Stalin's first wife was Ekaterina Svanidze , with whom he was married for only three years, until her death in 1907. At the funeral, Stalin said that any warm feeling for people died with her, because only she could to soften his heart. With her was a son, Jacob , with whom he did not get along well in the years that followed. Jacob was an officer in the Red Army and was taken prisoner by the Nazis. They offered to exchange him for a higher-ranking officer, but Stalin refused the offer. Jacob is said to have died by throwing himself into an electrified fence in the Sachsenhausen camp , where he was being held captive. [22]According to another version, he was killed for refusing to obey orders. [2. 3]
Stalin had two children with his second wife, Nadezhda Allilueva . She committed suicide in 1932, shooting herself after an argument with her husband, leaving a farewell letter, which, according to their daughter's testimony, was "partly personal, partly political." [24] She officially died of the disease. With Nadezhda, Stalin had a son, Vasily , and a daughter, Svetlana . Vasily advanced into the Soviet Air Force's military hierarchy, but died of alcoholism in 1962. Stalin was affectionate with his daughter when she was a child, but she eventually fled the Soviet Union in 1967.
In March 2001, the Russian independent television station NTV discovered a hitherto unknown nephew living in Novokuznetsk. Yuri Davidov told NTV that his father told him about his ancestry, but because of the campaign against the cult of Stalin's personality, which was in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet. [25] Several historians, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn , mentioned a son he had with a concubine, Lida, in 1914, during his exile in Siberia. He had two sons named Virsefika Stalin and Permauk Stalin.
According to Montefiore's research, [26] Stalin was a kind of bandit who copied Koba and extorted money. Montefiore goes on to say that Stalin was a gangster, a brigand and a common law murderer, with multiple arrests in his native Georgia, a bank robber and a skilled swindler. He began by extorting money from Caucasian employers as a "protection fee." The sums thus obtained were provided to the Bolsheviks who accepted him into their ranks.
In 1912, Stalin was co-opted into the Central Committee at the Prague Party Conference. In 1917, Stalin was the editor of the newspaper Pravda while Lenin and most of the Bolshevik leaders were in exile. After the February Revolution , Stalin and the editorial staff took a stand in support of Kerensky 's provisional government , and it is said that he went so far as to refuse to publish an article on Lenin calling for the overthrow of this provisional government. When Lenin returned from exile, he wrote his April Theses , which highlighted his position.
In April 1917, Stalin won the election for the Central Committee with the third largest number of votes in the party and was later elected to the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (May 1917); he held this position until his death.
According to numerous testimonies, Stalin played a minor role in the revolution of November 7 and has graced role in the party's history once it came to power. Other writers, such as Adam Ulam, stated that each person on the Central Committee had been assigned a specific task.
During the Civil War and the Polish-Russian War , Stalin was a political commissar in the Red Army on various fronts. Stalin's first government office was as People's Commissar for National Affairs (1917-1923). He was also the People's Commissar for the Inspection of Workers and Peasants (1919-1922), a former member of the Revolutionary Military Soviet (1920-1923) and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Congress (since 1917).
In April 1922 , Stalin became Secretary General of the all-powerful Communist Party , a position he transformed over time into the most powerful position in the country. This position was an undesirable one within the party (Stalin was sometimes called by the party comrades Comrade Cartotecă ), but he saw the potential of the position that could ensure the basis of his power, as he was able to bring many personal allies into the party. This concentration of personal power alarmed the dying Lenin more and more, and in his political will he demanded the removal of the "brutal" Stalin. In the end, this document was not taken into account by the members of the Central Committee, many of whom were also criticized by the Bolshevik leader.
After Lenin 's death in January 1924 , Stalin, Kamenev , and Zinoviev led the party together, placing themselves ideologically between Trotsky (an exponent of the party's left wing) and Bukharin (an exponent of the right).
Meanwhile, Stalin abandoned the emphasis on the world revolution in favor of the policy of building " socialism in one country ," in contrast to Trotsky's theory, " The Permanent Revolution ." Stalin soon changed camps and joined Bukharin. Together they fought against the opposition of Trotsky, Kamenev , and Zinoviev . After 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plan ), Stalin had won first place among the leaders, and the following year Trotsky was exiled. Skillfully maneuvering the right-wing oppositionof Bukharin, now appearing collectivization and industrialization, it can be said that Stalin gained control of the party and the country. How great was the popularity of other leaders, such as that of Sergei Kirov and the so-called plot Riutin , Stalin gained 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 production in 1922 was only 13% of that of 1914. Under Stalin's leadership, the New Economic Policy , which allowed limited market freedom in the context of the socialist economy, was replaced by a five-year plan decided from the center, at the end of of the third decade. It involved an extremely ambitious program of forced, state-led industrialization and collectivization of agriculture . Despite the initial setbacks and mistakes, the first two five-year plans led to rapid industrialization, starting from a very low economic base. Soviet Union, Generally categorized as the poorest nation in Europe in 1922, is now industrialized at a phenomenal rate, far exceeding the speed industrialization of Germany in the nineteenth century and Japan in the twentieth century .
With no investment capital, insignificant foreign trade, and no modern industry to support, Stalin's government financed industrialization both by restricting the consumption of some Soviet citizens (to ensure capital reinvested in industry) and by ruthless plundering. the wealth of the peasantry. Not infrequently, industrial work was knowingly paid for below its true value. It was, first of all, the case of the almost free labor of the prisoners in the labor camps . And secondly, there were the frequent "mobilizations" of communists and Komsomol members for various construction projects.
Stalin's regime collectivized agriculture. The theory that justified collectivization was that small, non-mechanized and inefficient farms would be replaced by heavily mechanized farms, which would produce crops with much more efficiency.
Collectivization has meant dramatic social change, of unprecedented magnitude since the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the alienation of the peasantry from control over land and agricultural production. Collectivization also meant a dramatic drop in the standard of living of many peasants (but not of all, the poorest peasants felt an increase in living standards). Collectivization had to face a general and often violent resistance of the peasantry.
In the first years of collectivization, agricultural production actually fell. Stalin blamed this unexpected drop on kulaks , wealthy , who opposed collectivization. Therefore, those classified as "culaci", "aid of the kulaks" and later "former culaci", were some shot, others sent to the Gulag - labor camps or were deported to remote areas of the country, without a rule in in this regard.
The two-stage development of collectivization, interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial "Dizzy of Success" (Pravda, March 30, 1930), is a perfect example of his ability to apply tactical retreats .
Many historians agree that the devastation caused by forced collectivization was responsible for the terrible famine that killed up to 5 million people between 1932-33, especially in Ukraine and the lower Volga River .
Science in the Soviet Union was under the strict ideological control of the party, along with art, literature and everything else. On the positive side, there has been significant progress in "ideologically secure" areas, thanks to the system of free education and training and state-funded scientific research. However, in a few cases, the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic, with the best-known examples being those of the " pseudo-bourgeois sciences ": genetics and cybernetics .
At the end of the fifth decade, there were also attempts to suppress theories of special and general relativity , as well as quantum mechanics , considered idealistic . Eventually, leading Soviet physicists resolutely stated that without the use of these theories, they would not be able to make the nuclear bomb .
Linguistics was the only field of Soviet science to which Stalin contributed directly and personally. At the beginning of the Stalinist rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nicolai Iakovlevici Marr , who stated that language is a class construction and that the structure of language is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written on language policy , given his position as People's Commissar for Nationalities , felt that he had mastered the basic issues enough to consistently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance of Soviet linguistics. . Stalin's major work in linguistics was a short essay calledMarxism and the problems of linguistics . Although he did not make a great theoretical or practical contribution, there are no apparent errors in the way Stalin understood linguistics and his influence certainly freed this science from ideologically oriented theories that dominated genetics, for example.
Scientific research in almost every field has been hampered by the fact that many scientists have been sent to labor camps, including Lev Landau , a later Nobel Prize winner who spent a year in prison in 1938-1939. ), or were executed (such as Lev Shubnikov , who was shot in 1937 ). They were persecuted for dissent (real or imaginary) or, more often, for "politically incorrect" research.
However, progress was made in certain areas of science and technology during Stalin's time, such as the development of the BESM -1 computer in 1953 , and the launch, 4 years after his death, of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 . In fact, many politicians in the United States had begun to fear after the " Sputnik Crisis " that their country had been overshadowed by the Soviet Union in science and public education.
Stalin's government placed great emphasis on providing free medical services . Campaigns against typhus , cholera and malaria were launched . The number of doctors has grown as fast as the capacity of medical education and medical facilities has allowed. Mortality and infant mortality rates have been steadily declining. Educationof all grades it was free and developed spectacularly, with more and more Soviet citizens learning to read and write, many becoming graduates of a higher form of education. Generations that grew up in Stalin's time, especially women, had even greater chances of getting a job.
During the Stalinist regime, the style of socialist realism was officially established for a long time as mandatory for painting , sculpture , music , theater . Previously fashionable "revolutionary" trends: expressionism , abstract art , and avant-garde experimentalism have been discouraged or denounced as formalism .
Careers have been forged and collapsed, some several times. Famous names were repressed, both "revolutionaries" (among them: Isaac Babel , Vsevolod Meierhold ) and "nonconformists" (for example: Osip Mandelstam ). Others, representing both the "Soviet man" ( Arkadi Gaidar ) and the remnants of pre-revolutionary Russia ( Constantin Stanislavski ), prospered. Some emigrants returned to the Soviet Union, such as Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy in 1925, Alexander Kuprin in 1936, and Alexander Vertinsky in 1943. The case of Anna Ahmatova should be mentioned, who endured several cycles of repression-rehabilitation, but who was never arrested, although her first husband, the poet Nicolai Gumiliov , had already been shot in 1922, and her son, the historian Lev Gumiliov , spent two decades in Gulag .
How involved Stalin was in both general and specific issues was appreciated differently. However, his name was constantly used during his time at the helm of the state in discussions about culture, as, in fact, in everything else, and in some famous cases, his opinion was the final one.
Stalin's occasional kindness was felt in strange ways. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov had reached poverty and despair, and yet, after a call to Stalin himself, he was allowed to work. His play, "The Days of Whirlwinds," which sympathetically presented the situation of an anti-Bolshevik family caught in the civil war, was finally performed, it seems, in Stalin's personal intervention and began his career uninterrupted by several. decades on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater.
In architecture , a Stalinist imperial style (practically a modernized, large-scale neoclassicism , exemplified by a few skyscrapers in Moscow) replaced the constructivism of the third decade. A funny anecdote said that the Moskva Hotel was built with two wings that did not fit together, because Stalin had mistakenly signed both projects for approval, and the architects were too afraid to clarify the problem.
Stalin's role in the fate of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. The continuous persecution of the 1930s and 1940s led to its almost complete disappearance. By 1939, several hundred active parishes could be counted (compared to almost 57,000 in 1917). Many churches were demolished and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns died or were imprisoned. During World War II, the church was allowed a partial revival, as a patriotic organization: thousands of parishes were reactivated until a new round of repression during Khrushchev's time. Recognition by the Synod of the Russian Church of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism within the Russian Orthodox Church in the diaspora, a rupture that did not heal until late (in May 2007, when reconciliation took place).
Stalin had a detrimental effect on the cultures of the small indigenous peoples of the Soviet Union. Politics known as Korenization , but also that of national cultures in form, but essentially socialistthey were beneficial to indigenous peoples, allowing them to integrate more easily into Russian society. However, the uniformity of cultures, more evident in the second half of the period, when the Soviet dictator was in power, had very detrimental effects. Political repression and purges had more devastating repercussions on indigenous cultures than on urban culture, since the intellectuals of the small peoples of the union were not so numerous. The traditional way of life of the many peoples of Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus was destroyed and large groups, sometimes entire peoples, were deployed and scattered throughout the union to prevent nationalist uprisings. Many religions specific to certain ethnic groups or nationalities - Catholic , Jewish, Baptist , Islamic , Buddhist - suffered the same persecution as the Russian Orthodox Church (or even worse): thousands of monks were tortured and executed, hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments and monasteries were demolished or desecrated by transformation into warehouses, production spaces, etc.
| The picture in which Nicolai Ejov appeared next to Stalin was retouched by Soviet censors. [27] Such changes to official photographs were common during the Stalinist regime. |
Stalin, as head of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , consolidated his near-absolute power in the fourth decade through the Great Purge against (suspects) political and ideological opponents, culminating in the extermination of most members of the Bolshevik Central Committee and of more than half of the very docile delegations from the 17th Party Congress in January 1934 . Measures ranged from imprisonment in labor camps of the Gulag , the executions were show trials or rapid processes troika NKVD. It is argued that some of the motivations would have been the need for the party to be unified in the face of the anticipated conflict with Nazi Germany . Others believe that all this was motivated by Stalin's desire to consolidate his own power.
Several trials known as the Moscow Trials took place , but the procedures were multiplied across the country. There were four key trials during this period: The Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936 ); The 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 Bukharin ) - in March 1938 .
The August 1940 assassination of Trotsky in Mexico , where he had lived in exile since 1936, eliminated Stalin's last opponent from the party's former leaders. Only three members of the " old Bolsheviks " (the Politburo of Lenin's time) remained: Stalin, the "Starost of the entire Union" (всесоюзный староста) Mikhail Kalinin , and the President of the Sovnarkom , Vyacheslav Molotov . The repression to which so many former revolutionaries and high-ranking party members were subjected led Lev Trotsky to say that "a river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from Lenin's.
No segment of society was left untouched by the purge process. Article 58 of the Criminal Code, which punished "anti-Soviet activities", was applied in the broadest way. At first, the lists for the execution of the people's enemies were confirmed by the Politburo . Over time, the procedure has been simplified to the maximum and delegated to those in the lower command steps. The Russian word troika (group of three elements) has acquired a new meaning: a fast and simplified process held by the committee of three subordinates of the NKVD . Towards the end of the purges, the Politburo dismissed the head of the NKDV, Nicolai Ejov, for abuse. He was eventually executed. Some historians such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest claim that Stalin removed Ejov and his predecessor, Yagoda, to shed their own guilt on their shoulders.
Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II , Stalin personally led a series of deportations on an unprecedented scale, which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. More than 1.5 million people have been deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance against the Soviet regime, and collaboration with the German occupier were the most frequently cited reasons for mass deportations.
The following ethnic groups were totally or partially deported: Poles , Romanians , Moldovans , Koreans , Volga Germans , Tatars in Crimea, calmîcii , Chechens , Ingushes , balkarii , karaciaii , Turks Meskhetian , Bulgarians , Greeks , Armenians , Lithuanians , Latvians , Estonians . A large number of culaci ( chiaburi) regardless of nationality were deported to Siberia or Central Asia .
Also, Romanians and Bessarabians were deported by the thousands to the camps in Siberia and many others were assassinated at the White Fountain and near Odessa. He ordered the liquidation of 20,000 Romanian prisoners in the Balti camp, one of the largest crimes since the war. [28] [29]
In February 1956 , Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles and allowed most of the deportees to return to their homes. However, even by the end of 1991 , the Tartars, Turks, and Germans on the Volga had not been allowed to return en masse to their ancestral lands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations played a major role in the separatist movements in the Baltic republics, Tatarstan , Crimea, Transnistria, Abkhazia, Georgia and Chechnya .
About one million people were killed between 1935-1938, 1942 and 1945-1950 and millions of people were imprisoned in the Gulag = labor camps . In Georgia, about 80,000 people were shot during the years 1921, 1923-1924, 1935-1938, 1942 and 1945-1950, and more than 100,000 people were transported to the Gulag.
On March 5, 1940, Stalin and other Soviet leaders signed an order to execute 25,700 intellectuals, including 14,700 Polish prisoners of war . This became known as the Katyn Massacre . There were other vile massacres of prisoners of war, totaling about 30,000 to 40,000 people.
Historians generally agree that hunger, mortality in labor camps and prisons, as well as state terrorism (deportations and political purges) have claimed millions of lives for which Stalin and his comrades are directly or indirectly responsible. How many millions died in Stalin's time is a long-disputed issue. Although no official figure has been recognized by the Soviet or Russian governments, most estimates are between 8 and 20 million victims. Comparisons of census results from 1926-1937 suggest the deaths of 5-10 million people in addition to what would have been normal at that time, most starving between 1931-1934. The 1926 census shows that the population of the Soviet Union was 147 million, and in 1937 the census gave a total of 162-163 million. These figures are 14 million less than the estimated value of the population and were not disclosed, everything being considered "sabotage" and those who took care of organizing the census were severely punished. Another census was taken in 1939, however the figure of 170 million is directly attributed to Stalin's decision (see also Population of the Soviet Union). It should be noted that the figure of 14 million does not automatically mean an additional 14 million deaths, as long as 3 million may be births that did not take place as a result of reduced fertility or birth control. 50 million is the highest figure that was estimated for the period 1920 - 1953, but it is probably exaggerated.
A quote attributed to Stalin is "The death of a man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic" (answer given to Churchill during the 1945 Yalta Conference ).
