Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878[2] – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and head of state who served as the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. Stalin assumed the leading role of the state after Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924, and gradually marginalized his competitors until he had become the unchallenged leader.

Stalin launched a command economy, replacing the New Economic Policy of the 1920s with Five-Year Plans and launching a period of rapid industrialization and economic collectivization. The upheaval in the agricultural sector disrupted food production, resulting in widespread famine, including the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–1933 (known in Ukraine as the Holodomor).[3]

During the late 1930s, Stalin launched the Great Purge (also known as the "Great Terror"), a campaign to purge the Communist Party of people accused of sabotage, terrorism, or treachery; he extended it to the military and other sectors of Soviet society. In practice, the purges were indiscriminate. Targets were often executed, imprisoned in Gulag labor camps or exiled. In the years which followed, millions of members of ethnic minorities were also deported.[4][5]

In 1939 Stalin entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, followed by the Soviet invasion of Poland, Finland, the Baltics, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. After Germany violated the pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet Union joined the Allies to play an important role in the Axis defeat, at the cost of the largest death toll for any country in the war (mostly due to the mass deaths of civilians in territories occupied by Germany). After the war, Stalin installed subservient communist governments in most countries in Eastern Europe, forming the Eastern bloc, behind what was referred to as an "Iron Curtain" of Soviet rule during the Cold War.


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