Stalin And The Soviet Union
Stalin, Joseph (1879-1953), general secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1953, the despotic ruler who more than any other individual molded the features that characterized the Soviet regime and shaped the direction of Europe after World War II ended in 1945.
Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in the town of Gori, Georgia, which at the time was part of the vast Russian Empire. He was the third and only surviving child of a cobbler and a housecleaner. In 1888 Stalin began attending the Gori Church School, where he learned Russian and excelled at his studies, winning a scholarship to the T’bilisi Theological Seminary in ...
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in T’bilisi, Stalin spread Marxist propaganda among railway workers on behalf of the local Social Democratic organization. After moving to the seaport of Bat’umi, where he organized a large workers’ demonstration in 1902, Stalin was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police. A year later he was sentenced to exile in the Russian region of Siberia. He soon managed to escape, however, and was back in Georgia by early 1904.
When the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in 1903, Stalin was drawn to the more militant Bolsheviks, who were led by Vladimir Lenin. In Georgia, where Menshevism predominated, Stalin soon gained a reputation as a belligerent and staunch follower of Lenin, whom he had first met in 1905 at a conference in Finland.
In 1905 Stalin married Yekaterina Svanidze, a Georgian woman who died two years later. Stalin was arrested and exiled by imperial police in 1908 because of his illegal underground activities. ...
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power, Stalin’s post was crucial to the Bolshevik victory in the ensuing Russian Civil War (1918-1921). He was elected a member of the Communist Party’s highest decision-making body, the Politburo, and the Central Committee’s Orgburo (Organizational Bureau) in 1919. As a political commissar in the Red Army during the height of the civil war, Stalin supervised military activities against the counterrevolutionary White forces along the western front that were led by General Pyotr Wrangel. During the war between Russia and Poland from 1920 to 1921, his decisions as a political commissar ended in disaster and led to a long-standing conflict with Commissar of War Leon Trotsky. Meanwhile, ...
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"Stalin And The Soviet Union." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 21 Sep. 2005. Web. 24 Apr. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Stalin-And-The-Soviet-Union/33639>
"Stalin And The Soviet Union." Essayworld.com. September 21, 2005. Accessed April 24, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Stalin-And-The-Soviet-Union/33639.
"Stalin And The Soviet Union." Essayworld.com. September 21, 2005. Accessed April 24, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Stalin-And-The-Soviet-Union/33639.
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