Joseph Stalin | Intellectual and Killer

God is on your side? Is He a Conservative? The Devil’s on my side. He’s a good communist.

- Joseph Stalin to Winston Churchill during the Tehran Conference in 1943 -

The great revolutionary's body lay in a red coffin as it wound its way through the streets of Moscow toward the House of Trade Unions. Six men carried it, surrounded by a phalanx of guards, through the gathered throng of mourners—some genuine, others paid. Each hoped to succeed Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but only one could, and did. The mustachioed man known to his friends as "Koba" who had spent decades fighting to bring communism to his homeland was now General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and he held in his hands the keys to ultimate power in the world's largest state. His rivals, especially Lenin's closest ally Leon Trotsky, were already plotting against him, but the general secretary controlled the Party's political apparatus and had the support of leaders across the country. When Lenin was laid to rest, three men formed an uneasy alliance, a troika, to rule collectively, but Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was determined to rule alone.

From Student  to Revolutionary

Ioseb Besarionis dze Jugashvili was born in the town of Gori in Georgia, then a region in the southwestern part of the Russian Empire, in December 1878. His parents, Besarion and Ekaterine loved their son dearly, as he was their only child to survive infancy, but as life grew difficult in the depressed and dangerous part of Russia where they lived, Besarion turned to drink. He began to abuse his wife and son, and they escaped his clutches when Ioseb was only five years old. For the next ten years, Ekaterine and her son traveled across Georgia and lived in rented rooms. It was a difficult life for the boy, whose face was scarred by smallpox and thus endured teasing from his peers. His physical state grew worse at the age of twelve when he was hit by a carriage and left with a partially-disabled left arm. His mother also beat him as he matured; in a letter later in life, Ioseb quoted his mother as saying it was the only way she could “govern her unruly treasure.”

Like one of his contemporaries, Adolf Hitler, a career in politics and dictatorship was not Ioseb Jugashvili's first choice. He entered an Orthodox seminary in Tiflis, the Georgian capital, at the age of sixteen. While studying to become a priest, the young man wrote poetry and became a minor celebrity in the city. People loved reading his work on the greatness and beauty of the Motherland. Gradually, though, Ioseb's interest in spirituality dwindled when he joined a book club. He studied Napoleon Bonaparte’s life and career, hoping perhaps to imitate the great French emperor. The club also read books that had been banned by Nicholas II’s government, including the writings of Karl Marx. Another was Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, which turned Ioseb away from God because, in his own words, “He would have created a world far more just that this one.” Ioseb became a passionate communist and an atheist by the time he turned 21. As he watched the government crush one attempt at democratic reform after another, a growing revolutionary zeal filled his heart, and he left seminary in 1899 to join the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party.

The Russian Empire was in a perilous state at the turn of the 20th century. Ruled by the Romanov family for nearly three hundred years, the country languished in a near-feudal state with wealth inequality like nothing seen since the time of the French Revolution. The czar and his fellow aristocrats held the peasants in virtual slavery, and workers in Russia's growing industrial sector had no rights whatsoever, toiling in the most disgusting and dangerous conditions imaginable. An early attempt at reform under the liberal Czar Alexander II had brought about a surge in Russian cultural development and political freedoms, but when the emperor was murdered in 1881 by anarchists, his son Alexander III reverted to brutal oppression and crushed anyone who challenged the status quo. His secret police, the "Okhrana," employed hundreds of thousands of agents across the vast empire who infiltrated workers' collectives and revolutionary sewing circles, and those found guilty of sedition were murdered or sent into exile in the frozen wastes of Siberia. But the dream of reform survived the iron terror of Alexander III and flourished amidst the incompetent indifference of his son, Nicholas II. By the time Ioseb Jugashvili joined the ranks of Russian revolutionaries, the Romanov's time was growing short.

Rise to Power

For five years, Ioseb worked within the Georgian wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party to grow its membership and spread its ideals. His non-Russian heritage and Georgian accent led some revolutionaries to dismiss him as ignorant, but when they read his fiery words, they saw a true leader behind them. In 1904, the RSDLP split into two factions, with the "Mensheviks" hoping to work peacefully toward the dream of world socialism and the "Bolsheviks" preferring to overthrow the Romanovs by force. Jugashvili aligned himself with the Bolsheviks and their leader, Vladimir Lenin, and rose through the ranks to lead the Georgian Bolsheviks and serve as a delegate to the Party's central committee. He then organized both propaganda and street violence across southwestern Russia in an effort to destabilize the czarist regime and appeal to the broad masses of the Russian people. He also married his first wife, Ekaterine Svanidze, and had his first son, Yakov. Jugashvili, who was now using the pen name "Stalin" in his writings, was involved in several violent acts in the last decade before the Russian Revolution, most famously a 1907 bank robbery in Tiflis. The robbery was a success, largely because the Bolsheviks were using homemade bombs and automatic weapons while the local police and Cossack troops had only revolvers and unreliable rifles. However, this success soon turned to failure when the Bolsheviks realized that most of the bills they had stolen were too large a denomination to actually spend. This incident shot Jugashvili to the top of Russia's "most-wanted" list. He was in and out of prison repeatedly over the next decade—during which he changed his legal name to "Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin"—and spent time in Siberian exile along with those other Bolshevik leaders who remained in Russia (Lenin and his deputy Trotsky were in foreign exile in Switzerland).

Revolution came to Russia with the onset of the First World War in 1914. After three years of inept leadership and horrific bloodshed, the Russian people rose up and toppled Nicholas II's government and seized control of the Winter Palace and his family. Nicholas abdicated, and power transferred to Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist, who immediately announced that he would continue the war against the German-led Central Powers. Stalin, having been declared unfit for military service because of his crippled arm, remained in exile. Once the Germans gave Lenin safe passage home to Russia and the Bolsheviks had seized power from Kerensky, Stalin returned to St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, and joined the new communist government. He then took command of Red Army forces driving on the loyalist troops holding Tsaritsyn, the largest city in southwestern Russia north of his homeland, and demonstrated the bloody-mindedness that characterized the rest of his life by burning enemy villages and murdering anyone who refused to swear loyalty to the Bolsheviks and their revolution. Stalin's troops won the Battle of Tsaritsyn, and the city was renamed "Stalingrad" in 1925 in his honor.

Stalin then became involved in domestic affairs within Lenin's administration and quickly fell into conflict with Leon Trotsky, his chief rival for their chief's ear. He also remarried (Ekaterine having died only a year into their marriage), and Nadezhda bore him a son and daughter before their divorce after thirteen years. As the Communist Party's general secretary, Stalin worked behind the scenes to place loyal men, known as "apparatchiki" in key positions within the government and across the Soviet Union to ensure his grip on power remained strong. Though publicly loyal to Lenin, Trotsky and the other members of the ruling "Politburo," Stalin and his henchmen knew that there would be trouble once their leader—who was not well—finally died. After a series of strokes confined him to his bed, Lenin made it clear he hoped that Trotsky would succeed him as leader of the Soviet Union, but his wishes were no match for Stalin's machinations.

For three years after Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin shared power in the governing troika with Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, both "Old Bolsheviks" who had been leaders in the 1917 revolution. Stalin disliked these men intensely and preferred to work with younger, better-educated, and more violent men like Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the brutal "Cheka" secret police who had hunted down Lenin's opponents, and Genrikh Yagoda, who later supervised Stalin's bloody purges before his own execution in 1938. He also formed a close relationship with Vyacheslav Molotov, to whom he entrusted the day-to-day running of the government once he took power. Trotsky, who supported Zinoviev and Kamenev from outside the halls of power, continued to criticize his rival's policies and became a serious threat to his position in the Party. Finally, in 1927, Stalin had had enough. Acting as head of the Communist Party, he dismissed the other two members of the troika and replaced them with Molotov and General Kliment Voroshilov, a hero of the Russian Civil War. Zinoviev and Kamenev were imprisoned and Trotsky exiled, only to die on Stalin's orders eleven years later in Mexico.

The Summits and Valleys of Power

Joseph Stalin's career as supreme ruler of the Soviet Union is, obviously, far too long and complex for a fifteen-minute podcast, so with apologies to history buffs everywhere, I have had to condense it into what I believe are the four key policies or events of his reign. For those wanting more details, I will provide some book and podcast recommendations in next week's discussion, and please, please send us your questions so Joe and I can answer them!

The main disagreement between Stalin and Trotsky was over economic policy within the Soviet Union. Trotsky (and Lenin before him) believed that world socialism would come through factory workers alone and that peasants were too poor and ill-educated to serve the Communist Party's purposes. Stalin disagreed and wanted to bring them into the revolutionary movement, and once in power, he did just that. His policy was known as "collectivization," in which small farms across the twelve time zones of the Soviet Union would be combined into large collective farms. The peasants who lived on them would continue to work the land as their ancestors had done for generations, but their crops would be gathered by local bureaucrats into enormous grain storehouses, and everyone in the region would then be given as much food as the Agriculture Commissariat believed they needed. This was the ultimate expression of Karl Marx's words, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Collectivization was, objectively, a disaster for the Soviet Union. The peasants objected to having their crops taken from them, and they disliked being forced to use modern equipment like tractors to replace traditional pieces like ox-drawn plows. Food output plummeted, and the result was famine across the Soviet Union. When farmers resisted collectivization, Stalin ordered his commissars, all of whom were loyal apparatchiki, to simply starve them into submission. The toughest resistance was in Ukraine, the Soviet Union's "breadbasket" responsible for over half of the country's total food supply. There, peasants called "kulaks" sabotaged equipment and raided granaries. The enforced starvation inflicted by Stalin, known today as the "Holodomor," cost the lives of at least seven million Ukrainians—most of whom were children—between 1930-32. Interestingly, an American journalist named Walter Duranty was in the Soviet Union at the time and witnessed the suffering of Stalin's victims. When he returned home, he denounced reports of the Holodomor in several articles for the New York Times as propaganda. Only in the 1950s, after Stalin had died, did the world learn the true horrors of what had happened twenty years earlier, and the Holodomor continues to be a major source of resentment between Russia and Ukraine today.

Joseph Stalin was a deeply-paranoid man, probably stemming from his experiences with the czarist Okhrana and its infiltrators within the revolutionary movement. It led him to order the deaths of men he had worked with to bring Nicholas II down, some of whom he may have even considered friends. Threats seemed to grasp at him from all sides in the 1930s—resistance from the kulaks, the rising might of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, and the threat that Leon Trotsky might be plotting to return to Russia and overthrow him.

In 1937, Stalin inaugurated what the historian Robert Conquest called "the Great Purge." His secret police, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (abbreviated in Russian as the NKVD) arrested hundreds of thousands of "Old Bolsheviks" and other real, and perceived, enemies of the regime, hauled them before show trials, and murdered them or sent them to Siberian gulags. The NKVD headquarters, the Lubyanka building in Moscow, and Lefortovo Prison outside the capital, became scenes of brutal torture and death. Those taken away in the night were never seen again, and their families often received a bill in their mailboxes a few weeks later for the bullet used to dispatch their loved one. At the show trials, the accused were forced to denounce Trotsky and beg for their lives, but the sentence was always death without recourse or appeal. Like the Holodomor, the "butcher's bill" will probably never be known, but the Great Purge is estimated to have cost at least a million lives. Stalin is often said to have commented during these dark days that "the death of one man is a tragedy, [but] the death of millions is a statistic," and though there is no proof he uttered these words, they surely describe his attitude as he casually signed one death warrant after another while taking breaks from watching American films in his Kremlin apartment or country house outside Moscow. His communist doctrine demanded conformity to state plans, but Stalin believed, as he wrote in a 1912 newspaper article, that “true conformity is possible only in the cemetery.”

Alongside collectivization, Stalin also worked tirelessly to drag the largely-agricultural Soviet economy into the industrial age. Whole factories in small towns were dismantled and relocated to enormous newly-built cities in the Urals and along the Don and Volga rivers, where commissars supervised workers as they churned out farm equipment, Gaz and Zil trucks, and more than thirty million Mosin Nagant rifles for the enormous Red Army. As under the czars, the men and women who worked in these factories endured terrible conditions, but Stalin's industrialization program helped save the Soviet Union's national life when Adolf Hitler invaded the country in the summer of 1941. (Of course, it was British and especially American aid that carried the millions of Red Army soldiers from Stalingrad to Berlin.)

The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was a textbook case of the "cult of personality." Unlike Lenin, who disliked the fact that he had become a public icon of revolution, Stalin embraced those who worshipped him as a secular god and used it to secure the loyalty of the Soviet people. Even before the Second World War transformed him into a colossus standing against fascist aggression, his name was spoken in whispered admiration, and his image appeared on street corners and public buildings across the Soviet police state. He certainly had eyes and ears everywhere, with NKVD informants filling every populated area and even bribing children with sweets and trinkets if they reported on their parents. When war came to Russia in 1941, Stalin became the symbol of anti-Nazi resistance in the communist world, and even many in the West considered this man with blood-stained hands to be merely "Uncle Joe," a gruff but tender-hearted old codger. His control of the Soviet press and censorship of Western reporters was so complete that the public image of life under his rule was one of hard work and sacrifice for the state—the total conformity he wrote about in 1912 and the incalculable numbers of unmarked graves that filled Soviet soil and fertilized its crops went unknown until his death.

The cult of personality extended even into the Kremlin and Stalin's innermost circle. During the war and for the last eight years of his life, "Koba"—a nickname he took from his favorite novel, Alexander Kazbegi's The Patricide—and the men closest to him lived lives of unimaginable stress. Stalin had the weight of the world on him as German soldiers burned their way across his country and slaughtered his people for the crime of being "undesirable." His day started in the early afternoon, where he would receive reports from the front and make the necessary military decisions. His dinner, starting around 11:00 pm lasted for at least two hours and included seven courses and whole barrels of Georgian wine (instead of the traditional vodka). He and his entourage would then repair to the Kremlin's private movie theater and watch foreign films; he enjoyed American westerns, and his favorite actor was reportedly John Wayne. Since he was not fluent in English, his Minister of Cinematography, Ivan Bolshakov, would have to translate live while the film was running—and Stalin often shouted at him for getting words wrong or speaking too loudly. Then it was back to the dining room for a "late-night snack" at four or five in the morning, where he would make jokes and play pranks on the highest-ranking officials in the Soviet government, all of whom were in the room with him. He would finally go to bed at about six in the morning, just as the sun was rising over the Moscow skyline. This insanity continued even after the war, and as the Cold War was heating up and the world trembled as the United States and the Soviet Union tested nuclear bombs and postured over controlling smaller countries, the men surrounding Joseph Stalin were as drunk as their leader! It is, I think, and wonder that humanity survived.

Death and Legacy

Stalin's health suffered from stress and poor living habits in his final years before meeting his Maker. He withdrew from public life after the victory over Nazi Germany and made only three speeches from 1946-53, two of which were only a few minutes long. He also wrote fewer books and articles, preferring to instead pen obscene comments on political cartoons in the Soviet newspapers, TASS and Pravda. On March 1, 1953, he was found in his bedroom floor at his country house outside Moscow, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Stalin died four days later, and an investigation revealed he had already been on borrowed time thanks to advanced atherosclerosis.

Stalin had no designated successor, and a three-year power struggle occurred in the Soviet Union. Gregory Malenkov ruled the country briefly after securing an alliance with Vyacheslav Molotov, the last surviving member of Stalin's inner circle from the days before the Great Purge. But in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev overthrew Malenkov and gave a speech denouncing Stalin's many crimes and revealing them to the Soviet people and the world for the first time. He then amnestied those still in prison for political crimes, abolished the NKVD, and reformed the gulags to prohibit torture. (Of course, none of these reforms lasted—Khrushchev may have been a kinder, gentler communist than Stalin had been, but he was still a Soviet tyrant.)

The cult of personality surrounding Stalin, as well as the tremendous events during his time in power, makes it difficult to assess his popularity among the Russian people even today. Of course, no one taken seriously on any side of the political aisle supports his brutality and repression—though there are revisionists whose work has tried to limit his blame by shifting it to the apparatchiki under him. His leadership during the Second World War and victory over Nazism has earned him tremendous respect, both in Russia and outside, and it is not entirely undeserved. The Levada Center, a Russian polling and research institute, conducted polls in Russia in 2017 and 2019 assessing the relative popularity of famous people in that country. Stalin came in first in both surveys, with a 46% approval rate in 2017 and 51% in 2019. A 2021 study by Levada showed that 39% of his countrymen believed him to be "the most outstanding figure of all times and nations." This is shocking given what the world now knows about Stalin's crimes and probably says more about the central place of Russia's victory has in the national psyche than anything else.

In my humble opinion, Joseph Stalin deserves a place on a historical list, not of its most beloved leaders but of its most bloodthirsty. He certainly ranks in the top three of history's greatest murderers—only Mao Tse Tung and possibly Genghis Khan killed more. The effects of Stalin's rule and the traumas it inflicted on the Russian soul are still felt today, as the country remains suspicious of outsiders (though it was long before Ioseb Jugashvili was even born), and especially of Westerners thanks to his Cold War-era propaganda that portrayed the free world as a moral enemy of Mother Russia. The collectivist ideology he espoused is one of death, not of fairness and equality, and the history of his nation shows anyone with an objective eye that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and not even those with the best of intentions—which Joseph Stalin did not have—can resist its dark appeals.

Image Credit: OpIndia