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BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH STALIN
PART - 1
By
SIDDHANT AGNIHOTRI
B.Sc (Silver Medalist)
M.Sc (Applied Physics)
Facebook: sid_educationconnect
WHAT WE WILL STUDY?
• CHILDHOOD
• THE RISING
• IN POLITICS
• GENOCIDE
CHILDHOOD
• On December 18, 1879, in the Russian peasant village of Gori, Georgia,
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (later known as Joseph Stalin) was born.
The son of Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ketevan Geladze, a
washerwoman, Joseph was a frail child.
• Childhood was not easy and he faced emotional as well as physical abuse
by his father.Once he was beaten so much that his elbow was damaged
and could not be repaired throughout his life.
• He also developed a cruel streak for those who crossed him. Joseph's
mother, a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, wanted him to become a
priest. They were ethnically Georgian and Stalin grew up speaking the
Georgian language
• 1888, she managed to enroll him in church school in Gori. Joseph did well
in school, and his efforts gained him a scholarship to Tiflis Theological
Seminary in 1894
• As he grew older, Stalin lost interest in his
studies. his grades dropped and he was
repeatedly confined to a cell for his rebellious
behaviour.
• Teachers complained that he declared himself
an atheist. For a time, he found work as a tutor
and later as a clerk at the Tiflis Observatory.
• In 1901, he joined the Social Democratic Labor
Party and worked full-time for the revolutionary
movement.
• Meanwhile between 1901-05 he was
continously involved in revolautionary activity
and protests.
YOUNG STALIN
• In November 1905, the Georgian Bolsheviks elected Stalin as one of their
delegates to a Bolshevik conference in Saint Petersburg. On arrival, he
met Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, who informed him that the venue
had been moved to Finland. At the conference Stalin met Lenin for the first
time.
• Though never a strong orator like Vladimir Lenin or an intellectual like
Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin excelled in the mundane operations of the
revolution, calling meetings, publishing leaflets and organizing strikes and
demonstrations.
GAINING MOMENTUM
• In March 1908, Stalin was arrested and interred in Bailov Prison, where he
led the imprisoned Bolsheviks, organised discussion groups, and ordered
the killing of suspected informants.
• In February 1912, Stalin escaped to Saint Petersburg, tasked with
converting the Bolshevik weekly newspaper, Zvezda ("Star") into a
daily, Pravda ("Truth"). The new newspaper was launched in April 1912,
although Stalin's role as editor was kept secret.
GAINING MOMENTUM
RISE OF STALIN
• In February 1917, the Russian Revolution began.
By March, the tsar had abdicated the throne and
Lenin formed his government.
• Stalin executed suspected counter-
revolutionaries, sometimes without trial. His use
of state violence and terror was at a greater
scale.
• In 1922, Stalin was appointed to the newly
created office of general secretary of the
Communist Party. Though not a significant post at
the time, it gave Stalin control over all party
member appointments, which allowed him to build
his base.
• After Lenin's death, in 1924, Stalin set out to
destroy the old party leadership and take total
control and the reign of terror began.
POLITICAL CONTROL
• At first, he had people removed from power through bureaucratic shuffling
and denunciations.Further paranoia set in and Stalin soon conducted a
vast reign of terror, having people arrested in the night and put before
spectacular show trials.
• Potential rivals were accused of aligning with capitalist nations, convicted
of being "enemies of the people" and summarily executed. Stalin saw
Trotsky as the main obstacle to his rise to dominance within the
Communist Party.
• By the latter half of the 1920s, the Soviet Union was still lagging behind
the industrial development of Western countries. There had also been a
shortfall of grain supplies; 1927 produced only 70% of grain produced in
1926.
DICTATORSHIP
• In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin reversed the Bolshevik agrarian policy by
seizing land given earlier to the peasants and organizing collective farms.
• Stalin believed that collectivism would accelerate food production, but the peasants
resented losing their land and working for the state. Millions were killed in forced
labor or starved during the ensuing famine.
• Stalin also set in motion rapid industrialization that initially achieved huge
successes, but over time cost millions of lives and vast damage to the environment.
Any resistance was met with swift and lethal response; millions of people were
exiled to the labor camps of the Gulag or were executed.
• Stalin faced problems in his family life. In 1929, his son Yakov unsuccessfully
attempted suicide. His relationship with Nadya was also strained amid their
arguments and her mental health problems. In November 1932, after a group dinner
in the Kremlin in which Stalin flirted with other women, Nadya shot herself.
Death is the solution to all
problems. No man - no
problem
TO BE CONTD…
BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH STALIN
PART - 2
By
SIDDHANT AGNIHOTRI
B.Sc (Silver Medalist)
M.Sc (Applied Physics)
Facebook: sid_educationconnect
GENOCIDE
• Within the Soviet Union, there was widespread civic disgruntlement
against Stalin's government Social unrest, previously restricted largely to
the countryside, was increasingly evident in urban areas, prompting Stalin
to ease on some of his economic policies in 1932.
• As a result, an estimated 7,000,000 persons perished in this farming area,
known as the breadbasket of Europe, with the people deprived of the food
they had grown with their own hands.
• By mid 1932, nearly 75 percent of the farms in the Ukraine had been
forcibly collectivized. On Stalin's orders, mandatory quotas of foodstuffs to
be shipped out to the Soviet Union were drastically increased in August,
October and again in January 1933, until there was simply no food
remaining to feed the people of the Ukraine.
• By the end of 1933, nearly 25 percent of the population of the Ukraine,
including three million children, had perished. The Kulaks as a class were
destroyed and an entire nation of village farmers had been laid low
GENOCIDE
• Among those farmers, were a class of people called Kulaks by the
Communists. They were formerly wealthy farmers that had owned 24 or
more acres, or had employed farm workers.
• Declared "enemies of the people," the Kulaks were left homeless and
without a single possession as everything was taken from them, even their
pots and pans. It was also forbidden by law for anyone to aid
dispossessed Kulak families.
• Some researchers estimate that ten million persons were thrown out of
their homes, put on railroad box cars and deported to "special settlements"
in the wilderness of Siberia during this era, with up to a third of them
perishing amid the frigid living conditions.
• Men and older boys, along with childless women and unmarried girls, also
became slave-workers in Soviet-run mines and big industrial projects.
REIGN OF TERROR
• Regarding state repressions, Stalin often provided conflicting signals. In
May 1933, he ordered the release of many criminals convicted of minor
offenses from the overcrowded prisons and ordered the security services
not to enact further mass arrests and deportations.
• In 1935, the NKVD was ordered to expel suspected counter-
revolutionaries, particularly those who had been aristocrats, landlords, or
businesspeople before the October Revolution.
• Stalin orchestrated the arrest of many former opponents in the Communist
Party: denounced as Western-backed mercenaries, many were
imprisoned or exiled internally.The first Moscow Trial took place in August
1936; Kamenev and Zinoviev were among those accused of plotting
assassinations, found guilty in a show trial, and executed.
• There were mass expulsions from the party in August 1940, Trotsky was
assassinated in Mexico, eliminating the last of Stalin's opponents among
the former Party leadership.
IN WORLD WAR 2
• As war clouds rose over Europe in 1939, Stalin
made a seemingly brilliant move, signing a
nonaggression pact with Adolph Hitler and Nazi
Germany.
• Stalin was convinced of Hitler's integrity and
ignored warnings from his military commanders that
Germany was mobilizing armies on its eastern
front.
• After heroic efforts on the part of the Soviet Army
and the Russian people, the Germans were turned
back at Stalingrad in 1943. the recent victory in
Stalingrad put Stalin in a solid bargaining position.
• In April 1945, the Red Army seized Berlin, Hitler
committed suicide, and Germany surrendered
unconditionally.Stalin was annoyed that Hitler was
dead, having wanted to capture him alive.
1945-1950
• Within the Soviet Union he was widely regarded as the embodiment of
victory and patriotismThe NKVD were ordered to catalogue the scale of
destruction during the war.
• It was established that 1,710 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages had been
destroyed. They recorded that between 26 and 27 million Soviet citizens
had been killed, with millions more being wounded, malnourished, or
orphaned.
• Stalin's health was deteriorating, and heart problems forced a two-month
vacation in the latter part of 1945. In August 1949, the bomb was
successfully tested in the deserts outside Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan and
cold war started between USSR AND USA.Stalin also initiated a new
military build-up; the Soviet army was expanded from 2.9 million soldiers,
as it stood in 1949, to 5.8 million by 1953.
LATER YEARS
• In April 1949, the Western powers established the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), an international
military alliance of capitalist countries. Within Western
countries, Stalin was increasingly portrayed as the "most
evil dictator alive" and compared to Hitler.
• In his later years, Stalin was in poor health. He took
increasingly long holidays. Stalin nevertheless mistrusted
his doctors.
• There, he emphasised what he regarded as leadership
qualities necessary in the future and highlighted the
weaknesses of various potential successors.
• In 1952, he also eliminated the Politburo and replaced it
with a larger version which he called the Presidium
DEATH
• On 1 March 1953, Stalin's staff found him semi-conscious on the bedroom
floor of his Volynskoe dacha, having urinated on himself. He had suffered a
cerebral hemorrhage.
• Stalin's death was announced on 6 March. The body was embalmed for
long-term preservation,and then placed on display in Moscow's House of
Unions for three days. Crowds were such that a crush killed around 100
people.
• The subsequent funeral involved the body being laid to rest in Lenin's
Mausoleum in Red Square on 9 March. Hundreds of thousands attended.
• Stalin was eventually denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in
1956. However, he has found a rekindled popularity among many of
Russia's young people.
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