7 Joseph Stalin 7Joseph Stalin
(b. Dec. 21 [Dec. 9, Old Style], 1879, Gori, Georgia, Russian
Empire—d. March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.)
J
oseph Stalin was the secretary-general of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-53) and
premier of the Soviet state (1941-53), who for a quarter of
a century dictatorially ruled the Soviet Union and trans-
formed it into a major world power.
The Young Revolutionary and
Rise to Power
Born in Georgia as Ioseb Dzhugashvili, Stalin was the son
of a cobbler. He studied at a seminary but was expelled for
revolutionary activity in 1899. He joined an underground
Georgian revolutionary organization in 1900 and the
Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic
Workers’ Party in 1903. A disciple of Vladimir Lenin, he
served in minor party posts and was appointed to the first
Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912. In the following
year he published, at Lenin’s behest, an important article
on Marxism and the national question. By now he had
adopted the name Stalin, deriving from Russian stal
(“steel”), and he also briefly edited the newly founded
Bolshevik newspaper Pravda before undergoing a long
period of exile in Siberia from July 1913 to March 1917.
Until the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the
Bolsheviks to power, Stalin was a relatively minor figure in
the party. Active as a politico-military leader on various
fronts during the Civil War of 1918–20, Stalin held two
ministerial posts in the new Bolshevik government, being
commissar for nationalities (1917–23) and for state control
(1919 –23). But it was his position as secretary general of