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Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin; ; }} (born Dzhugashvili;), represented in Russian as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (; pre-1918: ). He adopted the alias "Stalin" during his revolutionary career, and made it his legal name after the October Revolution.}} 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952 and as the fourth premier from 1941 until his death. He initially governed as part of a collective leadership, but consolidated power to become an absolute dictator by the 1930s. Stalin codified the party's official interpretation of Marxism as Marxism–Leninism, while the totalitarian political system he created is known as Stalinism.

Born into a poor Georgian family in Gori, Russian Empire, Stalin attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary before joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through bank robberies and other crimes, and edited the party's newspaper, ''Pravda''. He was repeatedly arrested and underwent several exiles to Siberia. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin served as a member of the Politburo, and from 1922 used his position as General Secretary to gain control over the party bureaucracy. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin won the leadership struggle over rivals including Leon Trotsky. Stalin's doctrine of socialism in one country became central to the party's ideology, and his five-year plans from 1928 led to forced agricultural collectivisation, rapid industrialisation, and a centralised command economy. His policies, natural disasters, and increased demand for food caused by urbanization contributed to a famine in 1932–1933 which killed millions, including in the Holodomor in Ukraine. Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin executed hundreds of thousands of his real and perceived political opponents in the Great Purge. Under his regime, an estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag system of forced labour camps, and more than six million people, including kulaks and entire ethnic groups, were deported to remote areas of the country.

Stalin promoted Marxism–Leninism abroad through the Communist International and supported European anti-fascist movements. In 1939, his government signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, enabling the Soviet invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. Germany broke the pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, leading Stalin to join the Allies. The Red Army, with Stalin as its commander-in-chief, repelled the German invasion and captured Berlin in 1945, ending the war in Europe. The Soviet Union established Soviet-aligned states in Eastern Europe, and with the United States emerged as a global superpower, with the two countries entering a period of rivalry known as the Cold War. Stalin presided over post-war reconstruction and the first Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. During these years, the country experienced another famine and a state-sponsored antisemitic campaign culminating in the "doctors' plot". In 1953, Stalin died after a stroke. He was succeeded as leader by Georgy Malenkov and later Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin's rule and began a campaign of "de-Stalinisation".

One of the 20th century's most significant figures, Stalin has a deeply contested legacy. During his rule, he was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international Marxist–Leninist movement, which revered him as a champion of socialism and the working class. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Stalin has retained a degree of popularity in post-Soviet states as an economic moderniser and victorious wartime leader who cemented the Soviet Union as a major world power. Conversely, his critics accuse his regime has been condemned for overseeing mass repression, ethnic cleansing and famine. For most Westerners and anti-communists, he is viewed overwhelmingly negatively, while for significant numbers of Russians and Georgians, he is regarded as a national hero and state-builder.

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