"By the time of his state funeral in March 1953 the man the world knew effectively as "Uncle Joe Stalin" had been dead for four days. The people of the Soviet Union wept openly for their dead leader. To the Russian people Stalin was a saviour. The great leader who had plucked them and the country from the jaws of Hitler's nazis and kept the Americans at bay. As they filed past his corpse few care to recall that Stalin had another darker reputation as the murderer of millions of his own people. Stalin turned Soviet Russia into one of the bloodiest killing rounds the world has ever seen."
—Introduction to a Discovery channel documentary.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili'; December 18, 1878 – March 5, 1953) was the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. He was one of the biggest mass murderers to have ever existed and remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant similar to his wartime enemy Adolf Hitler, others as a capable and necessary leader for the time.
Stalin’s father, Besarion, was an alcoholic, leading to business failures and violence towards Joseph and the boy’s mother. On top of this, Joseph experienced many physical calamities in his youth. He grew up constantly getting into brawls with others his age, and smallpox left his face extremely scarred. Moreover, he was struck by a horse-drawn carriage not once, but twice, leading to permanent damage of his left arm, which in turn exempted him from fighting in World War I, where he would likely have died.
Villainy
While formally the office of the General Secretary was elective and wasn't initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, after Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin managed to consolidate more and more power in his hands, gradually putting down all opposition groups within the party. This included Leon Trotsky, the Red Army organizer, proponent of world revolution, and principal critic of Stalin among the early Soviet leaders, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Instead, Stalin's idea of socialism in one country became the primary line of the Soviet politics. There exists Stalinism, an ideology that Stalin founded and implanted in the Soviet Union.
World War II
In 1939, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler, allowing both to take over Poland. Hitler betrayed this pact in 1941 with the invasion of the USSR, forcing Stalin to turn to the western democracies for support. Stalin, along with Franklin Roosevelt of the United States and Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom were among the "Big Three" in the allied leaders of WW2. Even though the alliance was temporary and Stalin resumed his harsh rule after the war, he was a very effective allied leader and has a grudging respect today for being one of the people who lead the allies to victory. After the war, Stalin spread Communism in eastern Europe and he backed other communist regions in other countries like China, thus becoming a villain to the Western world and sparking the Cold War.
As Leader of the Soviet Union
During his time in power, Stalin had many of his own people killed, particularly during the 'Great Purge' of late 30's. Stalin died in 1953, ending the greatest (or perhaps the worst) era in Soviet history. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, then began the liberalization of Soviet policy that continued into the 1980s and led to its collapse.
Death
Being the murdering tyrant that he was, Joseph Stalin died in his bed after having a major stroke on March 1st, 1953. Initially, he was buried in the Lenin Mausoleum, but soon after, his body was removed, and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin as a criminal, beginning the long process of destalinization.
Legacy
Stalin was one of the biggest mass murderers in history, he killed a minimum of 20 million people during his reign. He conducted genocide in Ukraine and was in charge of an army that raped its way across half of Europe. And yet he remains astonishingly popular; popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed.
Results of a controversial poll taken in 2006 stated that over 35% of Russians would vote for Stalin if he were still alive. Fewer than a third of all Russians regarded Stalin as a "murderous tyrant"; however, a Russian court in 2009, ruling on a suit by Stalin's grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, against the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, ruled that referring to Stalin as a "bloodthirsty cannibal" was not libel. In a July 2007 poll, 54% of the Russian youth agreed that Stalin did more good than bad while 46% (of them) disagreed that Stalin was a "cruel tyrant". Half of the respondents, aged from 16 to 19, agreed Stalin was a wise leader. In 2011, a poll by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that 45 percent of Russians had a “generally positive” view of Stalin. In his home country of Georgia, that number rises to 68 percent. Only a few years beforehand, a TV poll of 50 million Russians named Stalin the “third-greatest Russian of all time.” Western Ukraine still commissions statues of him on a mind-numbingly regular basis.
This isn’t a merely a whitewashing of the past. Similar polls show that most Russians are aware of the depth and depravity of Stalin’s crimes. However, he’s also seen as the leader who took on and defeated Nazi Germany after the horrific Battle of Stalingrad. In other words, he’s a monster but one who defeated an even bigger monster.
Triva
Stalin would regularly air-brush photographs as he was paranoid about the permanent scars on his face, which were a result of small pox as a child. He reportedly had several portrait artists shot for unflattering images of him.
Stalin was apparently a huge fan of American western movies, and would even host screenings for his friends in his private cinema – and he could understand it perfectly as he had his very own in-house translator.
Stalin was awarded the title “Man of Steel.” It fit perfectly with his stern image as leader of the industrial-powerhouse of the USSR. Moreover, it hid his true identity, protecting his family from the many assassination attempts and deceptions that plagued him, as well as the communist party.
His goal of uniting the nation with him as the leader grew to frightening heights. Stalin enacted a series of purges known as “Stalin’s Terror,” whereby millions of people were sent to forced labor, assassinated, or publicly executed, out of fear that they were enemies of the state. With the state police, the NKVD, at the helm of the purges, millions were condemned for having even a single contact with questionable individuals on Stalin’s hit list. Interestingly enough, it was found out after his death that Stalin had been suffering from atherosclerosis (fatty tissue build-up in the arteries) of the brain, possibly explaining his deranged “terror.”
