Joseph Stalin, or Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was born on December 18, 1878. Stalin was very significant to history during World War Ⅱ. He played a large role in World War Ⅱby becoming the dictator of The Soviet Union in 1929. His forced industrialization of The USSR created the largest man made famine ever in history. He also with the help of his enormous red army defeated fascism and imperialism in other countries, and enforced socialism. In fact a third of the world population was living under socialism by the time of his death. Without Stalin the world would be a completely different place.
Joseph Stalin was born in a small Georgian village of Gori, which is southwest to the broad Russian Empire. Stalin was the only child of Vissarion and his wife Yekaterina. Stalin
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was born the youngest of three however his siblings died shortly after being born. His father was an abusive alcoholic that left his family to go work in a factory in Tiflis, Georgia when Stalin was only five years old. Now being raised only by his mother, they turned to a priest named Father Charkviani and lived with him for all of Stalin’s childhood. His mother wanted Stalin to be a priest and enrolled him in religious schooling although he did not want to pursue this career. Growing up, Stalin was an outsider. He only spoke Georgian which was vastly different from Russian until he began to learn Russian when he was nine years old. He was also physically different from the other boys in his community. Due to smallpox Stalin’s face was permanently scarred, his left arm grew shorter than his right due to blood poisoning, and he was significantly shorter than others his age. Although he was very different, Stalin received good grades and loved to read. He also had a love for the outdoors. He would spend days camping and climbing in the wilderness in the countryside in Gori. In July, 1894 Stalin graduated church school as one of the top students in his class although he had a reputation for being aggressive and got into trouble often for getting into fist fights with his peers. He then enrolled in The Tiflis Theological Seminary in September 1894 at the age of 15. His mother worked hard to pay the tuition and recommended this school so he would become a priest. The teachers at this school were determined to teach Russian language and culture on Georgian students. Towards the end of the year, the school raised their fees unexpectedly. Not being able to pay Stalin dropped out. Shortly after dropping out, Stalin became a revolutionary. He gave speeches and organized strikes which ultimately led to arrests and street clashes. On July 28, 1906, Stalin married Ekaterina Svanidze. She was a old school friend as well as a fellow revolutionary. On March 31, 1907 she gave birth to Stalin’s first son named Yakov. That same year on June 26 Stalin organised a bank robbery to fund revolutionary activities. Stalin and a gang of other revolutionaries ambushed a large delivery of money to The Imperial Bank using guns and homemade bombs. Over 40 people were killed during the robbery. Stalin and his gang escaped alive stealing up to 341,000 rubles which is equivalent to 3.4 million dollars. Two days later Stalin and his family fled to Baku trying to avoid any trouble that the robbery might have caused. In Baku Stalin continued his revolutionary movements.
Also his wife fell ill from Baku’s bad pollution and was diagnosed with typhus and later died on December 7, 1907. Stalin was hit hard by this loss and when into mourning for a long time. This death made Stalin harden and have an even more stiff personality. He actually abandoned his son who was raised by Stalin’s wife’s family. While the grief of his dead wife was fading he continued his revolutionary activities in Baku. He then changed his last name from Dzhugashvili to “Stalin” which roughly translates to “man of steel”.
In 1922 Stalin was appointed general secretary of the communist party. With Stalin gaining power in the newly founded Soviet Union, Lenin, the ruler of the Soviet Union knew that Stalin was trying to take his place. Only two years later in 1924, Lenin died and Stalin set out to take total control. To gain more power, Stalin removed anyone who dared stand in his way. He created a vast rain of terror that will never be forgotten. Stalin had potential rivals arrested and executed in public claiming that they were enemies of the people. It is estimated that Stalin killed up to 49 million at that
time. In the 1930’s Stalin took a move to industrialize the soviet union by taking individual landholdings and turning them into collective farms. By doing this Stalin hoped to increase the food supply for urban population and agricultural exports. By 1934 there was a 51% increase in The Soviet Union’s industrial output. Although the production increase and the number of employed population doubled, the quality and efficiency of the production was horrible. In 1933, Stalin sought out to create a manmade famine in Ukraine to destroy the people who wanted independence from his rule. The famine nearly killed a devastating 7,000,000 people. Overall, Joseph Stalin was a rare individual that changed and molded history in such a way so that he will be remembered for centuries.
Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from 1929-1953. Stalin rose to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party, becoming a Soviet dictator after
He would always try to stay one step ahead of other countries and try to begin new projects which seemed to fail. Joseph Stalin had many people suffering and killed when he was
Joseph Stalin became leader of the USSR after Lenin’s death in 1924. Lenin had a government of abstemious communist government. When Stalin came into government he moved to a radical communist society. He moved away from the somewhat capitalist/communist economy of Lenin time to “modernize” the USSR. He wanted to industrialize and modernize USSR. He had overworked his workers, his people were dying, and most of them in slave labor camps. In fact by doing this Stalin had hindered the USSR and put them even farther back in time.
Stalin’s hunger for power and paranoia impacted the Soviet society severely, having devastating effects on the Communist Party, leaving it weak and shattering the framework of the party, the people of Russia, by stunting the growth of technology and progress through the purges of many educated civilians, as well as affecting The Red Army, a powerful military depleted of it’s force. The impact of the purges, ‘show trials’ and the Terror on Soviet society were rigorously negative. By purging all his challengers and opponents, Stalin created a blanket of fear over the whole society, and therefore, was able to stay in power, creating an empire that he could find more dependable.
Originally platformed by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin took control of the communist party in 1924 when Lenin died of a stroke. Communist ideals were heavily in opposition to classical liberal values; Whereas Liberalism stressed the importance of the individual, Communism sought to better the greater good of society by stripping many of the individual rights and freedoms of citizens. Communism revoked the class structure of society and created a universal equality for all. This equality came with a price however. Any who opposed the communist rule were assassinated in order to keep order within society. Joseph Stalin took this matter to the extreme during an event known as the Great Purge. The Great Purge, also known as The Great Terror, began in 1936 and concluded in 1938. During these two years, millions of people were murdered and sent to labour camps in Siberia for opposing the Communist party and the ultimate dictator, Stalin himself. In some cases, even those who did not oppose the regime were killed. Sergey Kirov was a very popular member of the communist party and Stalin saw this as a possible threat to his ultimate power. As a result, Stalin order Kirov to be executed. Stalin furthered his violation of individual rights by introducing the NKVD who worked closely with the russian secret police force. One of the primary goals of the secret police was to search out dissidents who were not entirely faithful to the communist regime. This violation of privacy caused histeria en mass in the Soviet Union and millions were killed as a result. The Soviet union resisted liberalism to such an extreme that it resulted in the deaths of millions of people, leading to some of the darkest days in russian
Joseph Stalin was a realist dictator of the early 20th century in Russia. Before he rose to power and became the leader of Soviet Union, he joined the Bolsheviks and was part of many illegal activities that got him convicted and he was sent to Siberia (Wood, 5, 10). In the late 1920s, Stalin was determined to take over the Soviet Union (Wiener & Arnold 199). The main aspects of his worldview was “socialism
Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet Union can be best described as a period of terror and censorship. In other words, he was very strict, considering the fact that he created the totalitarian government. In order to create this type of government, Stalin used fear and propaganda. He took part in The Great Purge, which was a campaign of terror that was supposed to eliminate anyone who threatened Stalin’s power. He also relied on secret police, who would arrest and execute any traitors. The online blog, “The Reasons For the Failure of The Russian Revolution”, brings up information on how Stalin planned to rule as dictator of Russia. It has been noted, “This ‘reshaping’ had three main aspects: the elimination of all dissent; the liquidation of all forms of democracy and of working class organisation; the slashing of the living standards of the working class and the physical annihilation of millions of peasants” (Text 5). This quote explains how Stalin wanted to industrialize Russia, which includes the deaths of several peasants of Russia. The Russians did not just die from The Great Purge, but also from Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. The Five-Year Plan was an attempt to industrialize the Soviet Union. It was also a plan for increasing the output of steel, coal, oil, and electricity. He had control over economic resources, including farms and
Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born on December 18, 1878, in Gori, Georgia, which then became part of the Russian empire. When he grew up, he named himself Stalin, Russian for “man of steel”. Stalin’s family was poor. His father was an alcoholic shoemaker, who was abusive and violent towards his wife and only son, and his mother was an illiterate peasant who wanted her son to become a priest. Stalin became the dictator of the Soviet Union (USSR) after Lenin died, from 1929 to 1953, when he died.
Originally born as Joseph Vissaiovich Djugashvili, Joseph Stalin was born in a little town of Gori, Georgia, December 18, 1878. Along in his 30s, Joseph took Stalin for the Russian name, “man of steel.” Stalin was very unfortunate as a child. He had an alcoholic, abusive father. His father’s occupation was a shoemaker. His mother, however, was a laundress (“Joseph”).
Stalin was “born in Gori, Georgia” as the third and only surviving child of a “cobbler and ex-serf”(Compton’s 403). His true name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. “In 1912 he took the alias of ‘Stalin’, from the Russian word stal, meaning ‘steel”, hence his nickname “Man of Steel”(Compton’s 402). Stalin began his studies at the seminary as a devout believer in Orthodox Christianity, where he was soon exposed to the radical ideas of fellow students. In 1899, just about the time of graduation, he gave up his religious education and to devote his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. In 1902 Stalin was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police for organizing a large worker’s demonstration. A year later he was sentenced to “exile in the Russian region of Siberia, but soon managed to escape and was back in Georgia by early 1904”(Archer 58). When the Russian Social Democratic Party split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions, Stalin sided with the Bolsheviks, who just happened to be led by Vladimir Lenin. Stalin immediately became a staunch follower of Lenin, studying his every move. He did marry in 1905 but his beloved bride died of tuberculosis two years later. Their son, Yasha, died later in a Nazi Prison camp during World War II. After the Bolshevik’s Civil War victory, Stalin became highly organized and was elected secretary of the Communist Party. “After Lenin’s death, Stalin gradually isolated and shunned his political rivals, especially Leon Trotsky, and by the end of 1929 Joseph Stalin had succeeded in eliminating his opponents and became the supreme leader of the USSR” (Compton’s 404).
In the beginning Josef Stalin was a worshiper of his beloved Vladimir Lenin. He followed his every move and did as he said to help establish and lead the Bolshevik party. Much of the early part of his political career was lost due to his exile to Siberia for most of World War I. It wasn’t until 1928, when he assumed complete control of the country were he made most of his success. After Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin promoted his own cult followings along with the cult followings of the deceased leader. He took over the majority of the Socialists now, and immediately began to change agriculture and industry. He believed that the Soviet Union was one hundred years behind the West and had to catch up as quickly as possible. First though he had to seal up complete alliance to himself and his cause.
Joseph Stalin was born on December 18, 1879. His was born with the name Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (bbc.co.uk). The mom of Stalin was a washerwomen and his dad was a cobbler. He grew up in a world of poverty and illness. At the age of seven he had caught small pox. The small pox left a huge impact on him because he was left with a pockmarked face and his left arm noticeably deformed. He was constantly bullied by his peers and felt he needed to prove himself. Stalin was an only child who had to also endure the beatings of his alcoholic father (History.com). He earned a scholarship to study priesthood in the city of Tblisi. It was in studying priesthood that he started to read the work of Karl Marx, a German social philosopher. He then
Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, arguably the world’s most powerful, but lethal leader, was Russia’s turning point from agriculture and failed westernization to a world superpower and rapid industrialization. The power struggle and chaos in Russia from 1914 to the 1920’s made it easy for him to win power. In World War I, there was a sharp decrease in every aspect of Russia which led to many riots triggering a revolution in 1917. Nicholas II, the czar of Russia later abdicated and was killed. Alexander Kerensky took over Russia and as turmoil escalated, Vladimir Lenin replaced him by promising three simple things: peace, bread and land. Lenin led the path to communism but died in 1924 of typhus. In 1929, Stalin took absolute power of Russia, later becoming the U.S.S.R or the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin had complete totalitarian control of Russia, making it a world superpower by industrializing fast. Joseph Stalin ultimately did more good in Russia/U.S.S.R than harm because of his economic technique of industrializing the country in a short time and his politically stable control of the U.S.S.R although he murdered many for the expansion of the country.
On 18th December in 1879, in the Russian peasant village of Gori, Georgia, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known as Joseph Stalin was born. The son of Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ketevan Geladze, a washerwoman, Joseph was a frail child. At 7, he contracted smallpox, leaving his face scarred. A few years later he was injured in a carriage accident which left his arm slightly deformed (some accounts state his arm trouble was a result of blood poisoning from the injury).
There are many historical figures that made great impacts in the wars that have had even to this day, and still have an impact on people and have changed the course of the war. One of the many historical figures throughout the course of World War Two is the ‘Russian Hero’, Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, right after Lenin. Stalin was the man to change Russia from a powerless country into the military superpower it is today. Stalin had accomplished many great achievements, not only for Russia but for the entire Second World War. "The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages...onward, to victory!”, was once said by Joseph Stalin, trying to motivate the soldiers like a good