Joseph Staline,
Joseph (Iosif) Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, commonly known as Joseph Stalin is a Soviet politician of Georgian origin, born in Gori December 18, 1878 - officially December 21, 1879 - and died in Moscow March 5, 1953. Usually called a dictator today (although in political science, the term is always debate when it is opposed to fascist dictators and Nazi), he was general secretary of Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953 and led the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from the late 1920s until his death. First dubbed Sosso (diminutive of Iosif) during his childhood, he was then called Koba (after a Georgian folk hero) in its first years of clandestine activism and his close friends. He then used the pseudonym Stalin trained on the Russian word сталь (stal), which means steel.
In a game of intrigue underground patient and successive alliances with various factions of the Bolshevik party, and relying on the all-powerful political police and the growing bureaucratization of the plan, he imposed a progressive personal power and absolute transformed the USSR into a totalitarian regime whose cult made compulsory to himself was one of the most distinctive features. He fully nationalize the land, industrialization and the Soviet Union forced march through five-year plans, the price of a heavy human and social costs. His long reign was marked by a regime of terror and betrayal paroxysmal and killing or sent to labor camps of the Gulag of millions of people, especially during the collectivization campaign and the Great Purge of 1937. He practiced both massive population displacements, including the deportation of a full fortnight of national minorities, the forced settlement no less disastrous nomads of Central Asia. He also denied the existence of deadly famine of 1932-1933 (Holodomor) of 1946-1947 and after having partly caused by his brutal policies. Secrecy and propaganda systematically interviewed about his actions made the travesty and the rewriting of the past a permanent feature of his absolute power.
His memory is also associated with the military victory of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia which was the main architect after the break in June 1941 of the non-aggression signed in August 1939. The Second World War, after putting the USSR on the Brink, Stalin brought great prestige in the world, and allowed the successor of Lenin to extend its control over an empire stretching from East Berlin to the Pacific Ocean.
Young Stalin
Stalin was born in the city of Gori, while in the Tiflis governorate (Russian empire), December 18, 1878 - officially December 21, 1879.
The father of Stalin Vissarion Dzhugashvili was a shoemaker earning a good living but who lost his entire lower wealth when he became an alcoholic. It was from a village in northern Georgia, Jugha (hence its name), and it is said that he had Ossetian origins. Her mother was in turn a poor seamstress, Ekaterina Gavrilovna Gueladze. However, here again there are mysteries about the true identity of the father of the Soviet leader. Thus, it is said that his mother had had sex with many of his employers. Therefore, it is possible that the real father is the landlord Iosseb and officer of the Russian army Egnatichvili Koba, where many still the prefect of Gori Damien Davrichewy Petrovich.
According to some, the result of oppressive temperament of his father Vissarion Dzhugashvili, created in him a desire for rebellion, still absent at the time of childhood. Her mother, a devout Orthodox pushes toward the priesthood, and tries every means to finance his studies he continued successfully until 1898. After the success of its reviews, Iosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich entered the seminary in Tbilisi (Tiflis) and remains there until twenty years.
At the seminary, where he entered at fourteen, he attended various courses, including readings of sacred texts, religion, canon law, etc.. Iosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich is not yet in contact with Marxism. It was not until 1899 that he began to rebel to show the authority of the seminar. He is driven. But his attitude can still be described as revolutionary. After receiving several adjustments from reading banned books (especially The Sea Workers of Victor Hugo) and despite the favors granted to him by the rector of the seminary, he was expelled in 1899 for failure to examine biblical readings l 'experience in the seminar marked the future Soviet leader until the end of his life, for example, in a 1905 text, published in the Proletariat Brdzola, where he writes:
"This would desecrate what is sacred in the party than give a verbose name of the party member, that is to say an officer of the army of the proletariat. The Party, through the Central Committee led in dignity before this holy army. "
He assiduously read Dostoyevsky, but the ban on the grounds that it was bad for the youth.
Iosif Vissarionovich begins his career as a revolutionary way illegal under the nickname Koba (Bear). He was arrested on numerous occasions. In 1907 he was involved in bank robberies bleeding used to finance the party, as the robbery committed in Tbilisi in June, which reported 250 000 rubles. He was deported to Siberia several times and escaped every time. He escaped in 1904 and including then joined the Bolshevik faction of RSDRP. That's when he meets for the first time Lenin. He made a laudatory story in 1924, a week after his death:
"When I compared it to other leaders of our party, it always seems that the comrades of Lenin - Plekhanov, Martov, Axelrod and others - were smaller than him in a head that Lenin compared to them was not just a leader but a leader type than a mountain eagle, fearless in battle and boldly leading the party forward into the unexplored paths of the Russian revolutionary movement [...] "
Paradoxically, if Stalin was complimentary about Lenin, the converse was far from being valid. In 1911, Lenin spoke of him as "wonderful Georgian," but in 1915, in a letter to Gorky, he forgot his name. During the Civil War he appreciated Stalin as a disciplined and effective executive, who assured him that "[his] hand does not tremble [would] not," but their political and personal relationships deteriorate significantly in 1922-1923. Also, in his political testament, in March 1923, Lenin wrote:
"Stalin is too rude, and this defect perfectly tolerable in our midst and in relations among us Communists, is not in the position of secretary general. I therefore propose to our comrades to consider a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing in his place another person who has in all things about Comrade Stalin only one advantage, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.."
Access to the supreme power (1924-1953)
After the fall of the Tsars (after the abdication of Tsar Nicolas II) during the Revolution of February 1917, Stalin, just back from a long exile in Siberia, took over the party leadership in Petrograd. He then advocated a policy of "critical support" to the bourgeois Provisional Government Reform of Alexander Kerensky. However, on return from exile of Lenin, he drew up very quickly to April Theses. They advanced the idea that the task of the Bolsheviks was to prepare the socialist revolution, the only way, according to Lenin, to empower the people and stop the war.
Running dedicated, Stalin played no role in the Russian Revolution, but he has the ability, as always since he is a member of the Party, to systematically align the positions of Lenin. This will enable much later accused of crimes as his comrades any discrepancy prior to the deceased Lenin.
In the summer of 1917 he was a founding member of the Politburo.
Stalin, of Georgian origin, was appointed Commissioner for Nationalities in the Council of People's Commissars from the revolution.
During the Russian Civil War he was sent to Tsaritsyn Bolshevik (later Stalingrad). He made himself conspicuous by his tendency to attribute to "sabotage" the problems encountered by their visceral distrust of "experts" and other "bourgeois specialists" recycled by the new regime, not the distrust that never leave, and its complete absence of feeling when he takes drastic action and order by number of executions. He already faces there to Leon Trotsky, the supreme head of the Red Army.
It also Tsaritsyn he forges his clan of followers who will march to power: the leaders of the Red Cavalry Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny first, soon joined by compatriots in the Caucasus (Grigory Ordzhonikidze ) and men united by their hatred of Trotsky. It was also during the civil war that Stalin is forging close ties with the political police, the dreaded Cheka, and its founder and paramount chief Felix Dzerzhinsky. This alliance with the police, who will be the key to the future Stalinist regime, will be increasing from year to year, so that Stalin Chekists entrust the management and education of her own family.
In 1920, Stalin's disobedience to the orders of General Tukhachevsky is a major cause of failure of the march on Warsaw and the defeat in the Russo-Polish.
Bureaucrat industrious and discreet, Stalin quietly climbed the ranks to become Secretary General of the Party April 3, 1922, a position he quickly became the most important post in the country.
The same year, with his compatriot Grigory Ordzhonikidze, Stalin planned the invasion of their homeland, Georgia, whose Menshevik government was duly elected and internationally recognized independence including Moscow. The violence that accompanied the forced attachment to the Soviet Union provoked anger impotent Lenin, already ill.
To achieve supreme power, Stalin supported the nascent bureaucracy, the police on his clan loyal and skilful game successive alliances with various factions within the party. Before the death of Lenin (1924), he already wields considerable authority. Character seemingly dull and disinclined to brilliant theoretical discourse is a genius for intrigue underground. He played for years with moderate and let the various groups of care and hurled insults to discredit each other while weaving its web. Many veterans of the party, but more new bureaucrats promoted his plebeian origin numbers are easily recognized in the character of appearance guy, good extension worker, who is silent in most meetings and smokes his pipe between two soothing words. It suits them better than Trotsky lonely and too bright for them, which sharply critical, and has not been able to build networks in a Party that has joined in 1917. However, Lenin is too "brutal" and prefers Trotsky is why, after the death of Lenin, Stalin will remove the "will of Lenin," in which it declared its hostility to Stalin?
In 1924-1925, an ally of Kamenev and Zinoviev, Trotsky, Stalin ousted the government. In 1926, allied to the right of Bukharin, it is excluded from the Politburo and the Comintern, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, reconciled in the meantime. Having defeated the leftist opposition, he returned in 1928-1929 against the opposition of the right of Bukharin and Rykov, driven respectively the head of the Comintern and the government. In 1929, Stalin exiled Trotsky made the USSR and finished installing all his men to key positions. The celebration with great pomp its 50 years, December 21, 1929, also marks the debut of the cult around his personality.
Read also Mao Zedong
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