Joseph Stalin (whose real name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) was the political leader of the USSR from 1929 until his death in 1953. He helped to convert Russia into a communist country from a monarchy. Stalin also helped to improve industry in Russia, making it a great industrial nation. He took a great part in assisting the allies to over throw Hitler’s reign of terror during World War II.

After the war he established Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe; however, he was responsible for the death and deprivation of millions of people.

Joseph Stalin was born on December 21, 1879 in Gori, Georgia to an illiterate peasant girl and an alcoholic. He was the only child of four to survive infancy. His father was an unsuccessful cobbler who died in 1890 from wounds received in a brawl. His mother took care of him, and nursed him through various sicknesses, including smallpox and septicemia, which left his left arm slightly crippled. His mother, Yekaterina, was very religious and was determined that Stalin should become a priest. In 1888 he was enrolled in a local orthodox parochial school in Gori. In 1894 he won a scholarship to the orthodox theological seminary in Tiflis. While he was in school he read forbidden literature, including Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. In his fourth year he joined Mesame Dasi, a secret group espousing Georgian nationalism and Socialism. In May of 1899, just before graduation he was expelled from the seminary because of his involvement with Mesame Dasi and their activities.

During the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution Stalin served as political commissar with Bolshevik armies on several fronts. At that time political commissars were entrusted with military duties, and Stalin showed exceptional ability as a strategist and tactician. In 1918 he directed the successful defense of vital Tsaritsyn against the White Army. The city was renamed Stalingrad in his honor in 1925, though the name was later changed to Volgograd as part of an effort in the 1950s and 1960s to downgrade Stalin's importance. In 1921 Stalin led the invasion that won his homeland, Georgia (in Russia), for the Communists, as the Bolsheviks now called themselves. The next year Stalin became general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party. As Lenin's trusted aide, Stalin methodically assumed increasing power. Some of Stalin's unscrupulous methods worried even Lenin, Who wrote, " Stalin is too rough." Stalin, however, was undisturbed by criticism. Grimly he undermined his rival Leon Trotsky, the Soviet Union's war minister and Lenin's former close associate. In 1925, a year after Lenin's death, Stalin forced Trotsky to resign as war minister and in 1927 expelled him from the party. Determined to eliminate the minority Trotskyite influence, Stalin exiled Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929 and had him assassinated in Mexico in 1940. Having dealt with the opposition Stalin was then the supreme ruler. Stalin ordered the collectivization of farms. When peasants resisted, he ordered the state to seize their land and possessions. Well-to-do farmers, called kulaks, especially resented collectivization. Determined to root out all opposition, Stalin showed no mercy to the rebellious kulaks. In 1932-33 he created a famine in the Ukraine and liquidated some 3 million kulaks through death by
starvation. In 1936 Stalin's ruthless methods again drew world attention. To consolidate his place as supreme dictator, he conducted a series of purges. Claiming that a number of Red Army officers and scores of old Bolshevks were "plotting against the state," Stalin had them executed. Many of them were men who had helped Stalin in his drive to power. In August 1939 Stalin startled the world again when he brought the Soviet Union into a no aggression pact with Nazi Germany. One month later Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. The no aggression pact permitted the Soviets to seize eastern Poland attack Finland, and absorb the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina without Grman opposition. Stalin extended Soviet borders into outlying buffer areas.

After the war's end, Stalin seemed to be determined to make the Soviet Union dominant in Europe and to impose Communism on the world. Through purges and other relentless measures he forced Communist governments on Eastern Europe and sought to gain control of Italy and France. In the United Nations and in Allied councils, his obstructionist policy blocked efforts to establish a lasting peace. His blockade of Berlin in 1948-49 threatened a third global war.

As the leader, he ruled like what his adopted name, Stalin, means: men of steel. Steel does not care what gets in its path, as long as the job gets done. Stalin did not let moral scruples about other’s life and comfort stop him. When he needed grain, he ruthlessly took it from Siberian peasants, without a by your leave. He did not care that they might become poorer or even die from starvation. His emotions were like steel, uncaring. He threw away the lives of his shoulder against Germany’s hate filled and hated legions of soldiers that stormed into Russia with the conquest on their minds. The lives of his solders did save the country, so their deaths preserved Stalin’s seat and life. That is most likely all he thought about the deaths, that they helped him and why should not have he thought different. His acts on the peasants and all other citizens showed how much he thought of life. He thought that they were his to do what he wanted to do with. He did not only limit his terror to the lowborn peasants. In the 1930’s no one was unaffected by his terror. Stains of the deaths of former rivals and of the sweat of people justly and unjustly deported to labor camps marked those years. The people not died or in labor camps stepped lightly and either figuratively or literally lived with fear as their roommate from the secret police who sniffed out the slightest wrong in someone and reported it. He lead with an iron fist and death of others were hardly a speck on his chin, in his point of view, but he got his country through troubled times.

Deception is a word that could have been used instead of steel in Stalin’s name meaning. In a speech delivered in 1924 called “The Party's Tasks in the Countryside” he states: “that we helped them to throw off the landlords and to obtain land, that we ended the war,” referring to the very peasants that he took grain away from. Is not landlord someone you pay to own land for? Who takes your land from you? The peasants gave their money and then have steeled from their callused, dirt covered hands the grain that kept them alive. How much better is starving to death because your leader took your food then wars the workers? How good is land if you can not keep most of what you worked out of it? Ask yourself these questions then ask whether Stalin is deceptive. If you are still not sure, let this convince you. In most of Stalin’s speeches he starts with the same word: comrades. He said this to the people who he regarded as tools for his schemes; for his own purpose. Last I checked comrade means an intimate friend or associate or fellow solder. He called people who may have ended up stains on an executor’s ax comrades. He called people who probably lived with a ubiquitous fear of his secret police that. If you still are not sure let us examine the way he got into his power. He first became allies, Grigory Zinovyev and Kamenev to help him get ride of his arch rival. Once that was taken care of, he switch allies to Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov and went against the two other men. As you in all hope see, Stalin was as deceptive as he needed to be to rule like he did and to take care of himself.