Joseph Stalin

 

It was 1 March 1953 and the previous night had been a long one. Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov, Nicolai Bulganin and Nikita Khruschev had dined with Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union since 1924. That morning, however, there was no sign of Stalin; uncharacteristically, he had not emerged from his room. No one was bold enough to knock on his door or enter his room until ten o’clock that night, by which time ‘Uncle Joe’ as the western press liked to call him, had been lying on the floor of his room for some considerable time, having suffered a stroke that had paralysed the right side of his body. Three days later, the ‘Coryphaeus of Science’, the ‘Father of Nations’, the ‘Brilliant Genius of Humanity’ and ‘Great Architect of Communism’ – who was also behind the deaths of anywhere between three and sixty million people – died, aged seventy-four.

His life had been extraordinary. He had been a trainee priest, a poet, a weatherman, a newspaper editor, a bank robber and, of course, an ardent revolutionary who had played a large part in introducing Communism to Russia. Then, as leader, he had eliminated all of his opponents to make his position at the head of his government unassailable, helped to defeat the Nazis – albeit, at huge cost to the Russian nation – and, after the war, had turned Russia into one of the world’s two superpowers. Just four years after his death, the Soviet Union had put the very first artificial satellite into orbit around the Earth.

Despite the iron grip with which he held the country, the terrible gulags where more than 3 million opponents were incarcerated, the secret police, the denunciations and purges, a recent survey found that more than thirty-five per cent of Russians would vote for him if he were alive today and, in a national poll to find the most popular person in Russian history and culture, Stalin topped the list.

He was born in Gori, Georgia in 1878 to an Ossetian cobbler and his wife whose business and marriage fell apart when the father became an alcoholic. The young Stalin spoke Georgian for the first eight or nine years of his life, only learning Russian at the church school he attended and where he did well. Around this time, he was knocked down by a horse-drawn carriage, receiving permanent damage to his left arm, an injury that later exempted him from fighting in World War I.

In 1894, at the age of sixteen, he was awarded a scholarship to the Georgian Orthodox Deminary at Tiflis where the teachers tried to impose Russian language and culture on students. Stalin was drawn to Georgian nationalism at this period. He also became a well-known poet, his work appearing in local newspapers.

His rebellious nature began to show at the seminary where he was punished several times for reading banned material – both foreign novels and Marxist literature. It became elementary, however, when the seminary suddenly raised school fees to a level that Stalin and his mother could not afford. He left the seminary in 1899, shortly before the exams. A short while later, he discovered the writings of Vladimir Lenin and his life’s path was chosen – he would be a revolutionary.

He found a job at the Tiflis meteorological Observatory that, although it paid badly, allowed him time to indulge in revolutionary activities, organising strikes, leading demonstrations, writing articles and delivering speeches. It was a dangerous time to be a revolutionary; the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, were always on the lookout for the ring-leaders and many were arrested. When they looked as if they were about to pick him up, he decided to go into hiding and from then on lived off donations from friends and associates in the movement.

He moved to Batumi and found employment at an oil refinery and is believed to have been involved in arson at the refinery in 1902. The bonus the workers should have received for putting out the fire, was not forthcoming, as the management were certain the fire had been started deliberately. Stalin led the workers in a series of strikes that escalated into street fighting with Cossack soldiers. In one action, thirteen striking workers were killed and Stalin portrayed them in pamphlets and speeches as martyrs. Eventually, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia for three years.

He arrived in December 1903 but just five weeks later, he escaped and travelled back to Tiflis. He was anxious to throw himself back into politics. The Social Democrats had now split into two factions – the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks who were led by Lenin and behind whom Stalin put his support.

He founded a Georgian Social Democratic party and travelled the region holding meetings and giving speeches. He began to come to the attention of the Bolshevik leadership in Russia.

A revolution broke out in the Russian Empire in January 1905 following the slaughter of 200 workers taking part in a demonstration in Baku. Stalin led a group of armed Bolsheviks during this upheaval, running protection rackets to raise funds for the party and stealing whatever they could get, including printing equipment. When the revolution finally died out with the Tsar still in power, Stalin continued his activity, fighting against the Mensheviks from platforms and stages across Georgia. He organised armed militias that continued to extort money from the rich and waged guerrilla warfare on the Cossacks.

He was chosen to be one of the three Caucasus representatives at the Bolshevik Conference in Finland in January 1906 and it was there that he first met Lenin on whom he made a very good impression. Returning to Georgia, he resumed his work and helped to organise the assassination of a Cossack general as well as continue his fund-raising through robbing banks and extortion. He was at the Fourth Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party in April 1906 where he was disappointed to hear the conference ban bank robbery as a means of raising party funds. In July 1906, he found time to get married, to Ekaterina Svanidze and she would give birth to their son, Yakov, the following March.

In 1907, he travelled with Lenin to attend the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which was important because it confirmed the Bolshevik supremacy in the party and discussed communist revolution in Russia. Stalin also encountered his great rival, Leon Trotsky, at this conference. It was a defining time for Stalin who began to shift his attention away from the more parochial atmosphere of Georgia towards Russia and, tellingly, he began to write in Russian. His ambitions lay elsewhere. He also staged a huge robbery - 250,000 roubles, worth around £1.5 million in today’s terms. He and his gang ambushed a convoy carrying the money and the ensuing gunfire and explosion of home-made bombs killed around forty people. As for the party ruling that there should be no more bank robberies, Stalin had temporarily resigned from the party to carry out the heist.

Ekaterina, his wife, fell ill around this time, and died, leaving him so devastated that his friends, fearing he might kill himself, took away his pistol.

He continued to organise strikes and ordered the murder of many right-wing supporters of the Tsar. To the annoyance of the Bolshevik intellectuals, money still came from kidnappings and extortion, but by now he was too powerful and influential to be opposed. It came to an end, however, in April 1908 when the Okhrana eventually tracked him down. He spent seven months in prison and had a further sentence of two years in Siberia to serve, but after just seven months, he disguised himself with women’s clothes and escaped to St. Petersburg, travelling back to Georgia a few months later.

In 1910, he was again apprehended and this time he was banned from the Caucasus for five years and sent into exile again to complete his previous sentence. He was released in July 1911.

In 1912, the Bolsheviks left the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and became a separate political grouping. Stalin was co-opted onto the party’s central committee after a number of other members were arrested. He edited the Bolshevik newspaper, Zvezda, renaming it Pravda, but before long had been arrested and exiled yet again. He escaped after just thirty-eight days and returned to St. Petersburg.

He worked to bring the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks together, writing editorials and articles in Pravda supporting the idea, but Lenin was displeased and moved him from the editorship to leading the Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik Party. Around this time, he wrote an essay entitled Marxism and the National Question and for the first time published it under the alias Stalin. Until that time he had used the name ‘Koba’. It was the name of a Robin Hood-type hero in a novel by Alexander Kazbegi.

A spy within the Bolshevik ranks betrayed almost the entire central committee of the party to the Okhrana and they were all arrested and exiled, Stalin to the isolated Siberian province of Turukhansk where he spent six months. The authorities learned, however, that he was about to escape and sent him to a hamlet on the edge of the Arctic Circle where he had to live by fishing and hunting. He also enjoyed an affair during his two years there with a thirteen-year-old girl with whom he fathered two children.

Following the February Revolution in 1917, Stalin was released from exile and, back in St. Petersburg, while the majority of the party leadership remained in exile, seized control of Pravda. To begin with he supported the government of Alexander Kerensky in its pages, but Lenin’s return brought a change in party thinking and the paper began to call for the downfall of Kerensky’s regime. In the meantime, he was elected to the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee.

Fighting broke out between Bolshevik militias and Kerensky’s men and the offices of Pravda were surrounded. He ordered his men to surrender and then smuggled Lenin to Finland. With Lenin absent, Stalin assumed the leadership of the party, being re-elected to the Central Committee and being given the job of editor-in-chief of the party press.

Kerensky faced a threat from inside his own party in September 1917 and looked to the Bolsheviks for help, arming them and allowing them to recruit a small army. When the threat dissipated, however, Kerensky found himself with the problem of an armed and militant Bolshevik army commanded by Stalin. Lenin decided the time was ripe for a coup and by 8 November, Kerensky’s cabinet was under arrest.

The Bolsheviks formed the Council of People’s Commissars and Stalin was given the job of People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs, with the objective of winning over the myriad non-Russian ethnic groupings of the Russian Empire.

But soon, civil war had broken out, Lenin’s Red Army facing the White Army, mostly made up of anti-Bolsheviks. Stalin was given control of Red Army operations in the Caucasus. His ruthlessness showed through. He was distrustful of many of the former Tsarist officers in the Red Army and had many counter-revolutionaries executed. Entire villages were burned to force the peasants into submission. He had dissenters and deserters from the Red Army publicly executed.

In the meantime, he had married again, to Nadezhda Alliluyeva.

Lenin died in January 1924 and Stalin, Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev took over the leadership of the party that had won the civil war and now governed Russia. Stalin was well aware that whoever took over the party would have to show loyalty to the heritage of Lenin and he organised his funeral and made speeches displaying undying loyalty to the ideas of the late leader.

His first move was to eliminate Trotsky from the leadership and then forced out Zinoviev and Kamenev, allying himself with other senior members of the party against them.

But by 1927, the people of Russia were tired of war and factionalism. Stalin’s concept of building ‘Socialism in One Country’ appealed strongly to them and so did he, a straight-talking man of the people. A one-party state was effectively created as no one could voice opposition to the leader of the party and therefore, no one could create an opposition. By 1928, Trotsky had been exiled – he would be assassinated in Mexico in 1940 on Stalin’s orders – and Stalin stood unchallenged as leader of the Soviet Union.

One of the ways in which he retained power was through his extensive intelligence network, both at home and abroad. He had spies in every major country in the world and the Soviet Union was a dangerous place to voice opposition because his spies were everywhere there, too.

He introduced a series of Five Year Plans, aimed at changing the country from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Agriculture was collectivised, producing a marked drop in living standards for millions of Russian peasants and foreign experts were brought in to teach the Soviet people and to improve manufacturing processes. The first two plans achieved their goals and the previously backward Soviet economy was radically modernised. However, it has been estimated that around five million Ukrainian peasants may have died as a result of famine caused by failed harvests and the ruthlessly enforced excessive demands of the state. Stalin refused to release grain reserves.

In the 1930s, Stalin achieved absolute power in Russia by simply purging – assassinating or sending to labour camps, gulags – all of his opponents. It began when Sergei Kirov, leader of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was assassinated. Some suggest that the carnage that followed may have originated from Stalin’s fear that, although he had nothing to do with the murder, he might be next and so he removed all who might have considered killing him. Of course, he may just have seen the popular Kirov as a rival and wanted him out of the way. Stalin claimed at the time that Kirov was part of a larger conspiracy led by the hated Trotsky. Other supposed conspirators, Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen other senior members of the party were assassinated in 1936. Show trials were held and many politicians and military leaders were convicted of treason, the military leaders being especially missed when World War II broke out. No section of society was left untouched by the great purge and people would inform on others to deflect blame from themselves and it took very little to be named an ‘enemy of the people’. Around 700,000 people were executed during this period – the majority peasants and workers – and by the end of it, only three of the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ remained – Stalin, Mikhail Kalinin and Vyacheslav Molotov.

At the same time, history was re-written to remove the purged Communists from textbooks and photographs.

The world was surprised when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939 but he had been offered eastern Poland by the Nazis to stay out of the war that began with Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. On that day, Soviet troops crossed Russia’s eastern frontier with Poland. In November, Stalin invaded Finland, anticipating an easy victory, but finding the Fins determined and resolute and ceding only a small part of their territory in exchange for almost 400,000 Soviet casualties. In March 1940, in an incident known as the Katyn Massacre, Stalin approved the order for the execution of 25,700 Polish nationalists and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in the sections of the Ukraine and Belarus that had been annexed from Poland.

In June 1941, Hitler invaded Russia, launching what Russians call ‘The Great Patriotic War’. The Soviet Union was not expecting the attack and the Germans made huge initial gains, capturing and killing millions of Red Army troops. Just in case the political prisoners held in the gulags helped the Germans, Stalin at this point ordered their deaths and around 100,000 were bayonetted to death or horrifically blown up by grenades in their crowded cells. Stalin’s troops forced the Germans back at Moscow in December 1941 and for the first time he began to appear on the world stage, being seen in newsreels at the Moscow, Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences with Churchill and Roosevelt.

Meanwhile, any Soviet soldier who retreated or surrendered was declared a traitor and many were sent to the gulags on their release from prisoner of war camps. But 3.5 million Russian troops never made it back to Russia from the camps.

The war won, Stalin’s early collaboration with Hitler was swiftly forgotten and Russian propaganda created a surge of nationalism. In the fallout from the war, Stalin surrounded the Soviet Union with ‘satellite states’ and entered into a long period of tension and distrust – the cold war – when the USSR and the USA, the world’s two great powers would often come into conflict, but never armed conflict. In 1948, Stalin tested the patience of the Americans when he blockaded Berlin, the former German capital, now split into four occupied zones governed by each of France, Britain, the United States and Russia. Only the Berlin Airlift of goods and products kept the city going in the year before Stalin lifted the blockade. He then tested the Americans in North Korea, helping the North Koreans to fight the Korean War.

It may be that elements within the Soviet Union had finally had enough of Uncle Joe by that dinner in 1953 because there have been strong suggestions that he was assassinated. In 2003, a group of Russian and American scientists announced that he had swallowed warfarin, a flavourless, powerful rat poison. The truth will never be known and his body lies buried by the Kremlin wall, having been moved from its original resting place in Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square. De-Stalinisation had begun.