How did Stalin rise to power?

Strangely, there is some disagreement about when Joseph Stalin was born. Official Soviet accounts traditionally listed his birth date as December 21, 1879.

However, more recent evidence, suggests that Stalin was actually born on December 18, 1878 (December 6 according to the Old-Style Julian calendar).

Regardless of the exact date, Joseph Stalin was born in the country of Georgia, which, at the time, was a colony of the Russian Empire.

His original birth name was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, which is the Georgian version of his name. It was later Russified to Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

His father was a cobbler, and his mother made some money by washing people's clothes. Despite both of his parents working, the family was relatively poor.

While still a young child, Stalin contracted smallpox. He survived the illness, but it left pockmarked scars across his face for the rest of his life.

Then, at the age of ten, Stalin was sent to a local church school for his education, which he completed in 1894. 

His mother wanted Stalin to become a priest, so sent him to Tiflis Theological Seminary in around 1895.

While there, young Stalin discovered the writings of Karl Marx, which inspired him to follow a political life, rather than a religious one.

Later Stalin propaganda states that he was expelled from the seminary in 1899, but it's unclear if it was due to his growing Marxist or communist beliefs.

Official Soviet history claimed that it was, but it is debated, with some sources suggesting reasons such as poor attendance or other misconduct.

In 1900 Stalin became involved in underground political activities, organising worker demonstrations and strikes in the Caucasus region.

Then, in 1903, he officially joined one of the two main Russian Marxist parties within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) named the Bolsheviks.

There, he met its main leader, Vladimir Lenin, who became Stalin's primary political influence.

For the next 13 years, Stalin would be arrested seven times for participation in revolutionary activities against the Tsarist regime in Russia.

He was convinced that a communist revolution was not far away, and Stalin wanted to help when it occurred.

In fact, Stalin adopted the name 'Stalin,' meaning 'Man of Steel,' around 1912 during his early revolutionary activities to reflect his tough, unyielding persona.

The communist overthrow of the Russian Tsar finally happened in 1917, and occurred in two separate stages.

The Tsar himself was overthrown in February of 1917, then the Bolshevik revolution occurred in October.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was one of most pivotal turning point in Soviet history.

The Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government who had taken over following the fall of the monarchy and, in its place, established a communist state, which ruled Russia with a socialist system of government.

Socialism believed that a country's industry should be owned by the common people in order to support greater equality.

This ideology was opposed to capitalist systems, which believed that individuals should be allowed to create their own wealth and spend it as they please.

Under the soviet system, rather than a king making decisions for the country, councils of workers, called 'soviets', were intended to make these decisions.

However, in reality, the party leaders of the Bolsheviks usually made the decisions on behalf of the common people anyway.

Following the overthrow of the government by the Bolsheviks, large sections of the country rose up in armed revolt against them.

This sparked a civil war that lasted from 1917-22, split between the communist 'Reds' army and the opposing 'Whites' army.

Ultimately, the Bolsheviks won, but only after there was a massive loss of life across the country.

Once more secure in their power, the country underwent significant changes, and Stalin gained a powerful new position.

He became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on April 3, 1922.

Initially this position was created to manage the expanding party organization, but the role gained significant influence under Stalin.

He used it to build a power base within the Communist Party where controlled party appointments and, in the eyes of many, made him the de facto leader of the Soviet Union.

As part of this role, on December 30, 1922, Stalin negotiated the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, which formally established the Soviet Union as a federation of Soviet republics, uniting Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Transcaucasian republics under a central government.

In 1924, after several months of illness, Lenin died of a stroke, which was a major blow to the Soviet Union, as he was a highly respected leader.

Many in the party leadership turned to Joseph Stalin as his successor.

However, before his death, Lenin had warned his followers to specifically not allow Stalin to take power and even recommended removing him as General Secretary.

Despite these warnings, Stalin was able to outmaneuver his rivals, including Trotsky, and seize control of the party.

Stalin was a very different leader from Lenin, and he pursued a more aggressive policy towards the modernisation of the country.

For example, the New Economic Policy (NEP), which had been introduced by Lenin in 1921 to stabilize the Soviet economy after the civil war that had allowed for a temporary reintroduction of limited market economics, was abolished by Stalin.

During the 1920s and 1930s, under Stalin's direction, the Soviet Union underwent a rapid process industrialisation.

This was meant to transform the country from a largely rural society into a modern industrialised nation. 

At the start of the 20th century, Russia had failed to keep up with the industrial revolution that had transformed Britain, America, and much of Europe.

As a result, much of Russia still operated in a manner that was common during the Medieval era.

Stalin knew that for Russia to compete with the other great nations, it had to quickly change its industry to one that was focused on new factories which incorporated new technology.

To achieve this in a short time, Stalin developed two 'five-year plans' to rapidly advance the country's technological capabilities.

The first five-year plan, which was implemented in 1928 and lasted until 1932, aimed to increase Soviet industrial output by 250%, particularly in heavy industries such as coal, iron, and steel.

The plan was largely successful, and it helped to make the Soviet Union one of the leading industrialised nations in the world at the time.

However, to achieve his aims, Stalin had to content with people within his own party that challenged both his authority and ideas.

One of the most critical voices was from Leon Trotsky, one of the most important leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution back in 1917.

While, he had been sidelined from power by Stalin much earlier, starting in 1924, Trotsky remained a loud critic of Stalin's policies.

By this time, he was seen as a growing threat to Stalin's power. So, in 1929, Stalin expelled Leon Trotsky from the Soviet Union, he eventually ended up in Mexico.

In the same year, a major global event traumatised most of the western world. It was called the Great Depression and it was a global economic downturn that began in America in 1929 and lasted until 1939. 

Compared to the rest of the world, the Soviet Union was not severely affected by the Great Depression because it was largely isolated from the global economy due to its planned economic policies.

However, during this same period, famine and economic struggles were present in Russia, but these were more due to internal policies like collectivisation rather than the Great Depression. 

What made the situation worse during the Great Depression years, was the fact that the Soviet government continued to collect taxes and implement strict controls on the economy despite the challenges its people faced.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was able to weather this storm and emerge relatively unscathed.

Then, Stalin instituted the second 'five-year plan', which began in 1933 and lasted until 1938.

It was even more ambitious than the first. While it continued to focus on the further development of heavy industry, it also included a program of collectivisation.

Collectivisation was a policy that aimed to merge individual peasant farms into large, government-controlled farms known as kolkhozes and sovkhozes.

The main aim was to dramatically increase agricultural productivity and extract resources to fund Stalin's rapid industrialization.

At its core, this policy involved the elimination of private property in agriculture and targeted the kulak class of wealthier peasants, often using coercion and violence against those who resisted.

To destroy the power that the wealthier peasants had, Stalin enforced a program known as 'dekulakisation', which forced millions of the most powerful kulaks from the countryside and into the cities.

For many more, they were deported to labor camps or other remote areas, and thousands were even simply executed.

The collectivisation process was controversial, even among the party leadership, as it led to mass starvation in some areas of the country: most notably the Holodomor in Ukraine that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3 to 7 million Ukrainians.

Unfortunately, despite Stalin's best efforts, agricultural output of the new large government farms did not produce the same level of produce as the pre-collectivization smaller farms.

Nevertheless, the movement of people into forced labour camps did help to accelerate the industrialisation process and turn the Soviet Union into a major world power.

By the late 1930s, the criticisms of Stalin's leadership had not stopped and he started to fear an overthrow for those in his own party.

As a result, Stalin launched a series of 'purges' in the Soviet Union. A purge was a campaign of repression, in which people who were deemed to be a threat to the state were arrested, imprisoned, or executed.

The assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, a prominent Soviet leader, is often considered to be the starting point of Stalin's Great Purge.

It was quickly followed by a series of mass arrests and killings of anyone that Stalin deemed as a threat, no matter how little evidence there was of disloyalty.

It is estimated that between 600,000 and 1.2 million people were executed as part of this process. 

Those who weren't killed immediately were often transported and imprisoned in camps known as 'gulags'.

The Gulag was a system of forced labour camps in the Soviet Union that was established in the 1920s, and it grew rapidly during the 1930s.

It is estimated that there were millions of people imprisoned in the Gulag at its peak.

The conditions in these camps were extremely harsh, and many people died as a result of the brutal treatment they received.

Simply put, Stalin considered anyone who opposed him or his ideas to be a dangerous threat to his regime.

This included not only political opponents, but also military leaders, government officials and even ordinary citizens.

The head of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) from 1936 to 1938, Nikolai Yezhov, was in charge of many of the killing during in the Great Purge, which earned him the period the nickname Yezhovshchina before he himself was executed by Stalin in 1940.

Also, in 1940, Leon Trotsky was finally assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, who was acting on orders from the NKVD.

By the time of the Great Purge ended, it had helped to consolidate Stalin’s power, but it also left the country traumatised.

However, Stalin also tried to convince the Russian people that he was only acting in their best interests.

He did this by fostering a 'cult of personality', where his image was glorified through official government propaganda, which portrayed him as the loving 'Father of Nations'.

Money was spent on the creation of statues, portraits, and slogans that praised his leadership across the Soviet Union.

By 1940, there was a growing threat to Stalin from outside of the Soviet Union. In Germany, the Nazi's had risen to power, and they were vocally opposed to communism in any form.

As a result, Soviet Russia was ideologically opposed to Nazi Germany because of their different political systems.

On a simple level, communism believed that all people were equal, while Nazism believed in the superiority of the Aryan race.

As a result of these ideological differences other countries believed that Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany would be permanent enemies of one another.

However, to the shock of many observers, the two countries from formed a positive diplomatic relationship.

In fact, the two countries had a number of common interests, and they were able to work together in some areas.

For example, both nations had an interest in the dissolution of Poland, since this region was seen as a valuable resource for both countries.

To formalise their new-found understanding, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact on August 23, 1939, which was also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

This pact allowed the two countries to avoid war with each other and included a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.

Then, on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and on September 17, Stalin also invaded Poland.

But the friendship between Stalin and Hitler would not survive World War II.