Joseph Stalin, who took over the administration of the Soviet Union with the death of Lenin in January 1924, is one of the leaders about whom the most books have been written, a revolutionary according to some, and a ruthless dictator according to others.
Yosif Visaryonovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Josef Stalin, was born on December 18, 1878, in Gori, Georgia. His father, Vissaryon, was a Georgian shoemaker. His mother, Ekaterina, who had a strong personality, was Ossetian. Of their four children, they looked upon their only surviving son.
His father entered the factory as a laborer shortly before Josef was born. In his childhood, he was called Soso, the son of the shoemaker Sheso. At the age of seven, he contracted smallpox and carried its scars throughout his life. Although his father wanted him to be a shoemaker, his mother chose the seminary and enrolled in the Gori Church School. All lessons were given here in Russian; therefore, Stalin learned his native Georgian language from his mother.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Ideologically adhering to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, he formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are called Stalinism.
The first years of his childhood are spent in an environment where the cruelty surrounding him and the passionate love of his mother are intertwined. His school years, from the age of eight to eighteen, when he connects with the wider world, are a powerful factor in shaping his personality. At the end of his six-year school life, he won a scholarship that opened the doors of the Tbilisi Theological School. At school, Josef is recruited into the choir for his impressive voice. During these years, he also wrote poems, which were published in various magazines.
Darwin's Origin of Species, which he read in school by putting it among religious books, would deeply shake his religious thoughts. Meanwhile, he draws attention with his fiery speeches. He starts renting revolutionary books from a bookstore with his friends. At that time he was interested in literature, history, sociology, and other branches of science. Years later, schoolmates tell how they recited the poems of Georgian poet Chavchavadze and other national poets together on Sundays at the foot of Goriçvari Mountain.
Even though he has not been to school for a year, he contacts an illegal group established by Russian Marxists in Tbilisi and learns about Plekhanov, Marx, and all Russian socialist writers from them for the first time. In the face of this situation, on May 27, 1899, the School Council expelled Josef from the school on the grounds that he was not politically reliable.
Stalin later recalls: “My father worked in a shoe factory, my mother was a worker, and I can say that I am a Marxist, thanks to the rebellious turmoil of my environment, on the same social level as my parents, and the Jesuit persecution and severe intolerance at the Orthodox Church Theological School. My environment was filled with a great hatred for the tsarist tyranny, and I was thrown into revolutionary work with all my heart.”
While Stalin was at the Tbilisi Theological School in 1898, an article by Lenin in a newspaper published by the St Petersburg Union caught his attention. From the moment he reads this article, he begins to look forward to every word of this new author. And before long, this unknown person becomes the hero of heroes in Stalin's eyes. These two met by correspondence five years after this date. He comes face-to-face with the hero of Stalin for the first time in 1905, at a party conference in Tampere, Finland.
He describes that moment as follows: “I was hoping to see our party's mountain eagle (he uses this expression often) as a great man, a great man not only politically but also physically. Because I envisioned Lenin as an imposing and flamboyant giant. I was disappointed to meet a man who was extremely ordinary-looking, below average height, and who was in no way, literally, indistinguishable from ordinary mortals…”
Stalin grasped the basic principles of scientific socialism during his years working with the secretly organized Marxist group called Mesame Dasi (Social Democrats). Then he is allowed to take over a group of workers working in the Tbilisi railway workshops. It is not difficult for him to talk to these people, after all, his parents were from the same social stratum. Stalin would describe his place in the revolutionary movement in his youthful days as "I was the floor sweeper of the revolution" in later years.
In September 1901, Stalin and his group established such a printing house in Baku and published the first Georgian social democratic newspaper called Brdzola (The Struggle). It is involved in various events and actions. He was arrested on April 5, 1902, and was convicted of being the chief leader and teacher of the revolutionary movement in Batumi. He is first taken to Batumi prison and then to a prison in Kutay. A year later, he was exiled to the village of Novaya Uda, in the Balajants region of Siberia, which has a very harsh climate. He escapes from prison on January 4, 1904; The Baku strike of the same year marks the beginning of the revolutionary upsurge. The strike's executive committee is made up of Bolsheviks, and Stalin works with them.
The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party is divided into two groups: Bolsheviks (Majority) and Mensheviks (Minorities, more moderate). In this conflict, Stalin sided with Lenin (Bolsheviks) and for months traveled around the cities and towns of the Caucasus, defending Lenin's views with all his might. But in order not to be caught on these journeys, he uses the nicknames he changed.
The strike of railway workers, which started on the Moscow-Kazan railway in October 1905, spread to telegraph offices, factories, workshops, and mines in a few days. When students, lawyers, and engineers join this, a strike takes place all over Russia. Everything stops in the country and with the publication of the Tsar's manifesto, the strike weakens, and a few days later the strike is lifted. However, on November 13, when news of an uprising among the Kronstadt sailors and martial law was declared in Poland, the strike resumed. Although the Bolsheviks start an armed uprising, after 9 days the government can suppress the uprising. However, Stalin was not in the capital at this time, he was in the Caucasus.
Alexander Svanidze, an old school friend of Stalin's, introduces him to his sister, Ekaterina Svanidze. Stalin married Ekaterina, whom he called Kato, in Tbilisi in 1906. Little is known about Ekaterina Svanidze, and Stalin is not very talkative about family life. However, their happiness was short-lived, as they were both members of an illegal party and both lived a life that makes every house they stay in extremely temporary. A year later, a son is born. The boy is called Jacob but is known as Yasha. When his 22-year-old wife died of typhus shortly after the birth of their child, Stalin would say, "With his death, my last feeling died."
Raised by his grandparents, Yasha rarely saw his father as a child, since Stalin rarely came home, as he spent most of his time in prison and exile. Years later, Yasha was captured by the Nazis during the war in 1941 and was shot in the head while trying to escape from a concentration camp near Berlin in 1943. Since he was a suicidal person since his youth, there is much speculation about his death.
On March 25, 1908, the police again interrupted Stalin's work. After spending eight months in Baku prison, he is deported to Vologda in northern Russia. A year later he escaped from exile and returned to Baku to complete his work on the Bolshevik organization, but this did not last long. He was arrested again in 1910, and after six months in Baku prison, he escaped again in the summer of 1911 and, at the request of the party leadership, went to St Petersburg to strengthen the Bolshevik organization there. However, he was caught by the police in 1912 and taken to Vologda, before he could do any proper work.
For months he has been agitating for the convening of the new party conference, the publication of a legal newspaper, and the establishment of an illegal center to carry out practical work in Russia. Stalin becomes second-in-command of the Bolshevik Party. After receiving this news, he manages to escape again in Vologda and comes to St Petersburg. He provided the first legal newspaper of the Bolsheviks, Pravda, to appear on April 22, 1912. On the same day, Stalin is arrested once again. He is sent once again to Siberia, this time to Narin, but escapes exile in September. During this period, he received the nickname Stalin, which means man of steel.
Elected to the Central Committee by Lenin at the Prague Conference in 1912, he prepares to take on the larger central management tasks the party has given him. But it is under stricter surveillance than ever before. On February 23, 1913, at a concert held for Pravda in St. Petersburg, Stalin was arrested again. This time, Stalin was sent to the far corner of Turuhansk for four years, but in early 1914 he was sent further north to the village of Kareika, which is in Siberia's Arctic Tropic. The tsar's men are determined not to let him escape this time.
As soon as the news of the dethronement of the tsar with the 1917 Russian Revolution, also known as the October Revolution, symbolized by Lenin's slogan of bread, peace, and freedom, reaches Siberia, Stalin, like thousands of political exiles in prison, sets out to return. It reaches St Petersburg on March 25, 1917.
Alliluyev, whom Stalin knew from the Caucasus, has two daughters named Hura and Nadezhda. Stalin is a friend of the family and often stays with them. And of course, he is the hero of little Nadezhda. Perhaps the love story of Stalin's life begins here because many years later Nadezhda will become Stalin's second wife. In 1919, when Nadezhda was 18 and Stalin was 40, they got married and had a son. Nadezhda starts university, she hides from everyone that she is Stalin's wife. Their second child is also born. The Kremlin openly expresses its displeasure that its principles are being violated when hosting lavish parties. Her relationship with her husband is getting worse and she gives herself to religion. On November 9, 1932, Nadezhda also attends the drinking party, to which actress Galia Egorovna was invited, but when her husband woos Galia, she returns to her room and ends her life with a gun.
Stalin is the head of the newspaper Pravda. Later, Lenin gave the post of People's Commissar. The task of the People's Commissariat was to suppress the nationalist ideas and movements of communities belonging to various nations. As a result of this bloody work, he was also given the Workers' and Peasants' Commissariat in 1919. As a political commissar in the civil war, he fights with cavalry units against opposing army forces. During these wars, the Russian army was completely disbanded and left its place to the Red Army.
When Stalin was elected general secretary at the party congress after Lenin's death in 1924, he gained the opportunity to rule the entire Communist Party.
With the slogan of Socialism in One Country, Stalin places a brand new cadre in the executive cadres. Stalin was the first to grasp the importance of Lenin's doctrine of the establishment of socialism in one country Russia. But it does not fully develop this doctrine in relation to the foreign policy of the communists of other countries. While it is accepted that the internal problems of the communist parties of other countries are very different, their policies on international problems are based on an oversimplified understanding that the world is divided into the socialist USSR and the capitalist world united in hostility to the Soviets.
In addition to being indifferent to the Western way of life and Western thought, Stalin was brought up in an educational tradition that consciously rejected it. The people closest to Stalin, such as Molotov, Kirov, Kaganovich, and Kuibishev, also lacked Western culture, an international perspective.
By Stalin's decisions, in 1930, 25 million peasants were forcibly taken from their homes and moved to large industrial factories. Farming, and agriculture, is tied to collective principles. In 1944, he dissolves the Comintern (the world party of the Socialist Revolution, founded by Lenin with the aim of uniting the international working class in the struggle to overthrow capitalism) as an obligation and guarantee against the USA and England. The International is replaced by a national anthem, the words of which commemorate the glory of Stalin. In 1946 he named the Council of People's Commissars the Council of Ministers, which Lenin hated. In 1947, the Worker-Peasant Red Army was renamed the Armed Forces of the USSR. He puts an end to his Bolshevik title that had characterized the party until that day.
When the Second World War is won, Stalin's power increased. In the agreements made with Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran and Yalta, the Soviets were accepted as the second-largest state in the world. In 1947, he established the Cominform to spread international communism against the Marshall Plan, which he defined as an instrument of American imperialism. Taking advantage of the fact that most of the Balkan and Eastern European states were poor and impoverished, they started to dominate one by one by making revolutions, after which the iron curtain was established by opening the distance between the East and the West.
It is now accepted that he carried out systematic state terrorism during the rule of Stalin. The most important of these practices is the activities of the Gulag labor camps, which were tried to be kept very secret during the Soviet period. After the 90s, the ice begins to melt and secret files are revealed. The labor camps, known as the Gulag, mainly fulfilled two functions: to punish the opponents of the regime and to contribute to the development of the industry by systematically using the free labor of the criminals. Another feature of the Gulag camps was that compared to other prisons, a significant portion of the prisoners were political prisoners.
However, not all researchers agree on the extent of what happened in the Gulag camps. Solzhenitsyn's writings put the number of political victims in the Stalin era (including those executed, exiled, and sent to prison) at 15 million. Official records in the archives of the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the state unit that handles various affairs of the Soviet Union) are very different, they are shown as 4 million.
Simon Sebag Montefiore covers his private life in his book The Palace of the Red Tsar, Stalin. According to what is written in the book, Stalin actually doesn't care much for women, but he still gets along with a lot of women. While married, he had affairs with many women, including the wives of high-ranking officials. One of them is Bronka Metlikova, whose husband is a member of the Politburo. An illegitimate daughter is born from this relationship. He also has an illegitimate son with Maria Kuzakova. According to the book, Stalin, who has difficulty in establishing emotional relationships, is uncomfortable with the fact that women flock to him like bees and says their only concern is to get him to bed. However, Stalin likes to dance with women. He says, "I can't grasp women by the waist when I dance" because of his left arm, which became short after an accident in his youth.
In 1920, Russian biologist Ilya Ivanov told Stalin that a supersoldier could be created from a mixture of animals and humans. Stalin also supports these studies. For this, a secret research center called Askania Nova is established on the Black Sea coast in Crimea. For this new genre to be created, Stalin said, “Let them be strong but stupid. Let them eat less, work hard”.
As a result of a cerebral hemorrhage, he suffered on March 2, 1953, Stalin's right leg and right arm were paralyzed, and he became unconscious. He died on March 5, 1953. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, declares Stalin as the enemy. Even the names of cities that begin with the name Stalin are changed. Stalin's picture and busts are removed from money, stamps, and official offices. Even his tomb is opened and carried outside the Kremlin wall.