A man of steel

[congbang@usa.net]

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, as he was originally named—he 
adopted the pseudonym Stalin, meaning “a man of steel,” only about 1910—was 
born on December 21, 1879, in Gori, now in the Republic of Georgia. Both 
his parents were Georgian peasants. Neither of them spoke Russian, but 
Stalin was forced to learn it, as the language of instruction, when he 
attended the Gori church school in 1888-94. The best pupil in the school, 
Soso (his schoolboy nickname) earned a full scholarship to the Tbilisi 
Theological Seminary.
While studying for the priesthood, Stalin read forbidden literature, 
including Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and soon converted to a new orthodoxy: 
Russian Marxism. Before graduation he quit the seminary to become a 
full-time revolutionary. Stalin began his career in the Social-Democratic 
party in 1899 as a propagandist among Tbilisi railroad workers. The 
police caught up with him in 1902. Arrested in Batum, he spent more than a 
year in prison before being exiled to Siberia, from which he escaped in 
1904. This became a familiar pattern. Between 1902 and 1913 Stalin was 
arrested eight times; he was exiled seven times and escaped six times. The 
government contained him only once; his last exile in 1913 lasted until 
1917.
On his return from Siberia in 1904 Stalin married. His first wife, 
Yekaterina Svanidze, died in 1910. A second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, whom 
he married in 1919, committed suicide in 1932.
In the last years of czarist Russia (1905-17) Stalin was more of an 
up-and-coming follower than a leader. He always supported the Bolshevik 
faction of the party, but his contribution was practical, not theoretical. 
Thus, in 1907 he helped organize a bank holdup in Tbilisi “to 
expropriate” funds. Lenin raised him into the upper reaches of the party in 1912 
by co-opting him into the Bolsheviks' Central Committee. The next year 
he briefly edited the new party newspaper, Pravda (Truth), and at Lenin's 
urging wrote his first major work, Marxism and the Nationality 
Question. Before this treatise appeared (1914), however, Stalin was sent to 
Siberia.
After the Revolution of March 1917, Stalin returned to Petrograd (now 
Saint Petersburg), where he resumed the editorship of Pravda. Together 
with Lev Kamenev, Stalin dominated party decisions in the capital before 
Lenin arrived in April. The two advocated a policy of moderation and 
cooperation with the provisional government. Although he played a not 
insignificant role in the armed uprising that followed in November, Stalin 
was not remembered as a revolutionary hero. In the words of one memoirist, 
he produced the impression of a “grey blur.”
As the Bolsheviks' expert on nationalism, Stalin was Lenin's choice to 
head the Commissariat for Nationality Affairs. Together with Yakov 
Sverdlov and Leon Trotsky, he helped Lenin decide all emergency issues in 
the difficult first period of the civil war. Stalin participated in that 
war as a commander on several fronts. Within the party Stalin 
strengthened his position by dogged organizational work and devotion to 
administrative tasks. He was commissar for state control in 1919-23, and—more 
important—in 1922 he became secretary-general of the party. As Stalin 
converted this organizational base into a source of political power, he came 
into conflict with Lenin on several minor but ultimately telling issues.
Before his death, Lenin came to regard the flaws in Stalin's 
personality and conduct as political liabilities. In his political “testament” 
Lenin doubted whether the party's general secretary would use his great 
power with sufficient caution. He also attacked Stalin as being “too rude” 
and called for his removal. Luck and adroit maneuvering enabled Stalin 
to suppress Lenin's testament.
After Lenin's death Stalin joined in a troika with Grigory Zinovyev 
and Kamenev to lead the country. With these temporary allies, Stalin acted 
against his archrival Trotsky, the foremost candidate for Lenin's 
mantle. Once the threat of Trotsky was eliminated, however, Stalin reversed 
course, aligning himself with Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov against 
his former partners. Trotsky, Zinovyev, and Kamenev in turn challenged 
Stalin as the “left opposition.” By skillful manipulation and clever 
sloganeering, but especially by interpreting Lenin's precepts to a new 
generation coming of age in the 1920s, Stalin bested all his rivals. By his 
50th birthday (1929), Stalin had cemented his position as Lenin's 
recognized successor and entrenched his power as sole leader of the Soviet 
Union.
Stalin reacted to lagging agricultural production in the late '20s by 
a ruthless, personally supervised expropriation of grain from peasants 
in Siberia. When other crises threatened in late 1929, he expanded what 
had been a moderate collectivization program into a nationwide offensive 
against the peasantry. Millions were displaced, and unknown thousands 
died in the massive collectivization. The industrialization campaigns over 
which Stalin presided in the 1930s were much more successful; these 
raised the backward USSR to the rank of the industrial powers.
In the mid-1930s Stalin launched a major campaign of political terror. 
The purges, arrests, and deportations to labor camps touched virtually 
every family. Former rivals Zinovyev, Kamenev, and Bukharin admitted to 
crimes against the state in show trials and were sentenced to death. 
Untold numbers of party, industry, and military leaders disappeared during 
the “Great Terror,” making way for a rising generation that included 
such leaders as Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Fear instilled by a 
political secret police formed an essential part of the system called 
Stalinism.
In part because the purges stripped the military of its leadership, 
the Soviet Union suffered greatly in World War II. Stalin personally 
directed the war against Nazi Germany. By rallying the people, and by his 
willingness to make great human sacrifices, he turned the tide against the 
Germans, notably at the Battle of Stalingrad.
Stalin participated in the Allies' meetings at Tehran (1943), Yalta 
(1945), and Potsdam (1945), where he obtained recognition of a Soviet 
sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and after the war he extended 
Communist domination over most of the countries liberated by the Soviet armies. 
His single-minded determination to prevent yet another devastating 
assault on the USSR from the West had much to do with the growth of the cold 
war. In his last years, increasingly paranoid and physically weak, 
Stalin apparently was about to start another purge. In January 1953 he 
ordered the arrest of many Moscow doctors, mostly Jews, charging them with 
medical assassinations. The so-called Doctors' Plot seemed to herald a 
return to the 1930s, but Stalin's sudden death on March 5, 1953, in Moscow 
forestalled another bloodbath.