Titans of History

STALIN

1878–1953

He sought to strike, not at the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull.

Leon Trotsky, 1936

Stalin was the Soviet dictator who defeated Hitlerite Germany in the Second World War, expanded the Russian empire to its greatest extent, industrialized the USSR and made it a nuclear superpower. During a reign of terror lasting thirty years, this mass murderer was responsible for the annihilation of more than 25 million of his own innocent citizens, and confined 18 million to slave-labor camps.

Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born in Gori, a small town in Georgia in the Caucasus, the son of an alcoholic cobbler called Beso and his clever, forceful wife, Keke. Poor, unsure of his real paternity, with a pockmarked face, webbed feet and one shorter arm, young Soso (as he was known) grew up to be a highly intelligent, super-sensitive, emotionally stunted child possessed of both an inferiority complex and an overweening arrogance. His mother managed to win him a place at the seminary in Tiflis, where he studied for the priesthood, learned Russian, studied the classics and published romantic poetry. But after his conversion to Marxism, he became a fanatical and pitiless revolutionary and joined Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. He was a born conspirator who dominated his comrades, undermined and betrayed his rivals, murdered suspected police spies, always pushing toward the extremes. He was repeatedly arrested but repeatedly escaped, returning from exile in Siberia for the 1905 Revolution. He became the leading financier of the Bolsheviks through bank robberies and extortion.

After the crushing of the 1905 Revolution, Stalin created his own outfit of gangsters and hit men who killed police agents and raised cash for Lenin in a series of outrageous, bloody bank robberies, protection rackets, train heists and piratical hold-ups on the Black Sea and the Caspian. Stalin’s career as an outlaw culminated in the Tiflis bank robbery in June 1907, in which his gangsters killed fifty people and got away with 300,000 rubles. Stalin then moved his outfit to oil-rich Baku, always on the run, always spreading violence and fear.

At this time Stalin was married to Kato Svanidze, with whom he had a son, Yakov, but Kato died in 1907. Contemptuous of a settled existence, he enjoyed affairs with many women, became engaged to many of them, fathered illegitimate children—and abandoned all of them heartlessly. He married again in 1918, but failed to make his new wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, any happier than his other women. She committed suicide in 1932, leaving Stalin two legitimate children, Vasily and Svetlana.

He lived under many aliases—but in the end he called himself Stalin—man of steel. His violent escapades having drawn the attention of Lenin, Stalin was elected to the Party’s Central Committee. Lenin realized Stalin combined two vital political talents—he was practical and capable of organizing violence, but he could also edit, write and work on theory. “He’s exactly the type I need,” he said. Stalin was arrested for the last time in 1912 and exiled to the Arctic Circle, where he spent most of the First World War. When the tsar was unexpectedly overthrown in March 1917, Stalin returned to Petrograd, where he was later joined by Lenin. After his seizure of power in the October Revolution, Lenin recognized that the brilliant, showy Leon Trotsky and the morose, ruthless Stalin were his two most competent henchmen, and promoted them to his ruling executive committee, the Politburo. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Lenin maintained power by terror, deploying Stalin as a brutal troubleshooter. But Stalin proved to be unimpressive as a military leader compared with Trotsky, whom Stalin constantly tried to undermine.

In 1922 Lenin, keen to balance Trotsky’s prestige, promoted Stalin to the post of the party’s general secretary. Before long, however, Lenin became outraged by his protégé’s arrogance and tried to sack him—but it was too late. After Lenin suffered a fatal stroke in 1924, Stalin allied himself with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev against Trotsky, who was defeated by 1925, sent into exile in 1929 and assassinated by one of Stalin’s hit men in 1940. After Trotsky’s exile, Stalin swung to the right, allying himself with Nikolai Bukharin to defeat Kamenev and Zinoviev.

In 1929 Stalin was hailed as Lenin’s successor, the Vozhd—the Leader—and thenceforth became the subject of a frenzied cult of personality. Jettisoning Bukharin, Stalin embarked on a ruthless push to industrialize the backward USSR and collectivize the peasantry. When the peasantry resisted, Stalin launched a quasiwar against the better-off peasants, known as kulaks, shooting many, exiling more, and continuing to sell grain abroad even as 10 million were shot or died in a famine he himself had created. It was one of Stalin’s greatest crimes.

In 1934, despite a triumphant party congress, there was a plot to replace Stalin with his young henchman, Sergei Kirov, who was later assassinated in Leningrad. Stalin may or may not have ordered the killing, but he certainly used it to launch the Great Terror to regain control and crush any dissent. With the aid of the NKVD secret police, Stalin subjected those he regarded as his leading political enemies to a series of show trials, extracting false confessions by torture. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin were all found guilty of fabricated crimes and shot, as were two successive leaders of the NKVD, Yagoda and Yezhov. But the show trials were just the tip of the iceberg: in 1937–8 Stalin drew up secret orders to arrest and shoot thousands of “enemies of the people” by city and regional quotas. The politburo and central committee were purged; 40,000 army officers were shot, including three of the five marshals. Even Stalin’s closest friends were not immune: he signed death lists of 40,000 names. Soviet society was terrorized and poisoned. In those years approximately one million were shot, while many millions more were arrested, tortured and exiled to the labor camps of Siberia, where many died. “You can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs,” he said.

In 1939, faced with a resurgent Nazi Germany and distrusting the Western democracies, Stalin put aside his anti-fascism and signed the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler. Poland was partitioned between Germany and the USSR, and 28,000 Polish officers were murdered in the Katyn Forest on Stalin’s orders. Stalin also seized and terrorized the Baltic States, and launched a disastrous war against Finland.

Stalin ignored constant warnings that Hitler was planning to attack the USSR. The invasion came in June 1941, and within days the Soviet armies were retreating. Stalin’s inept interference in military matters led to colossal losses—some 6 million soldiers—in the first year of war. But by late 1942 he had finally learned to take advice, and his generals scored a decisive victory over the Germans at Stalingrad. This was the turning point in the war, and by the time Berlin fell to the Red Army in May 1945, the Soviets controlled all of eastern Europe—and were to maintain a steely grip on it for the next forty-five years. Stalin was indifferent to the cost of victory: some 27 million Soviet citizens—both soldiers and civilians—perished during the war, during the course of which Stalin had ordered the deportation of entire peoples to Siberia, including a million Chechens, of whom half died in the process.

During the war, Stalin built personal relationships with the Allied war leaders, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, charming and manipulating both in a series of summit meetings of the Big Three at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. He proved an adept diplomat.

Just when he was at his apogee in 1945, President Harry Truman (Roosevelt’s successor) revealed that America had the atomic bomb, which they went on to use against Japan. Faced with rising US power, Stalin successfully threw all his resources into a secret project to create a Soviet A-bomb, which was achieved by 1949.

Stalin’s last years were spent in glorious, paranoid isolation. Soon after the end of the war he relaunched his reign of terror. In 1949 two of his own chosen heirs were shot in the Leningrad case, along with many others. In 1952, apparently convinced that all Jews in the USSR were in alliance with America, he planned to execute his veteran comrades, implicating them in the fabricated Doctors’ Plot, alleging that Jewish doctors were conspiring to assassinate the Soviet leadership. Stalin died after a stroke in March 1953.

A master of brutal repression, subtle conspiracy and political manipulation, this cobbler’s son became both the supreme pontiff of international Marxism and the most successful Russian tsar in history. Stalin and the Bolsheviks, along with his great foes Hitler and the Nazis, brought more misery and tragedy to more people than anyone else in history.

Tiny in stature, with inscrutable features, honey-colored eyes that turned yellow in anger, Stalin was gifted but joyless, paranoid to the point of insanity, utterly cynical and ruthless, yet a fanatical Marxist. A terrible husband and father who poisoned every love relationship in his life, he believed that human life was always expendable and physical annihilation was the essential tool of politics. “One death,” he told Churchill with characteristic gallows humor, “is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Stalin had no illusions about his brutality: “The advantage of the Soviet model,” he said, “is that it solves problems quickly—by shedding blood.” Ten to 20 million died at his hands and 18 million passed through his Gulag concentration camps.

One of history’s most pitiless monsters, he nonetheless remains a hero to many: a textbook prefaced by President Vladimir Putin himself in 2008 hailed him as “the most successful Russian leader of the 20th century.”