Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union since 1924, dies in Moscow.
Ioseb Dzhugashvili was born in 1889 in Georgia, then part of the old Russian empire. The son of a drunk who beat him mercilessly and a pious washerwoman mother, Stalin learned Russian, which he spoke with a heavy accent all his life, in an Orthodox Church-run school.
While studying to be a priest at Tiflis Theological Seminary, he began secretly reading Karl Marx and other left-wing revolutionary thinkers. In 1900, Stalin became active in revolutionary political activism, taking part in labor demonstrations and strikes. Stalin joined the more militant wing of the Marxist Social Democratic movement, the Bolsheviks, and became a student of its leader, Vladimir Lenin.
Stalin’s first big break came in 1912, when Lenin, in exile in Switzerland, named him to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party—now a separate entity from the Social Democrats. The following year, Stalin (finally dropping Dzugashvili and taking the new name Stalin, from the Russian word for “steel”) published an article on the role of Marxism in the destiny of Russia.
In 1917, escaping from an exile in Siberia, he linked up with Lenin and his coup against the middle-class democratic government that had supplanted the czar’s rule. Stalin continued to move up the party ladder, from commissar for nationalities to secretary general of the Central Committee—a role that would provide the center of his dictatorial takeover and control of the party and the new USSR.
Stalin demanded—and got—absolute state control of the economy, as well as greater swaths of Soviet life, until his totalitarian grip on the new Russian empire was absolute.
Stalin proceeded to annex parts of Poland, Romania, and Finland, and occupy Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In May 1941, he made himself chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars; he was now the official head of the government and no longer merely head of the party.
After Germany’s surrender in April 1945, Stalin oversaw the continued occupation and domination of much of Eastern Europe, despite “promises” of free elections in those countries.
Stalin did not mellow with age; he pursued a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to the Gulag Archipelago (a system of forced-labor camps in the frozen north) and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing all dissent and anything that smacked of foreign, especially Western European, influence.
To the great relief of many, he died of a massive heart attack on March 5, 1953. He is remembered to this day as the man who helped save his nation from Nazi domination—and as the mass murderer of the century, having overseen the deaths of between 8 million and 20 million of his own people.
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A man who is being reborn in America.
Joe Stalin died? I didn’t even know he’d been sick.
I thought he was in rehab.
I was six years old (going on seven!) when Stalin died, and I remember it well, because my father brought home a copy of the New York Daily News, unusual, because it seldom if ever appeared in our home. The front page was a full head shot of Stalin beneath the banner headline. My father commanded me to spit on it! He was anti-commie, to say the least, quite convincing, because he knew his stuff. I’ve always shared his sentiments in that area and do to this day. How so many in the USA have failed to learn the lessons of history is beyond me.
All TBPers are strongly encouraged to watch the brilliant blackest black comedy “The Death Of Stalin” with (Steve Buscemi as Kruschev and Monty Python alum Michael Palin as Molotov.).
The banality of evil exemplified most marvelously. It used to be called “blaxk” humour but Woke folks can’t use that anymore.
See just how some Central Committee members will need to be treated here in the USSA*.
*Spoiler Alert! Security chief Lavrenti Beria gets just desserts.
The movie is largely true (the timing of certain events was concentrated for thematic purposes). The movie is based on a graphic novel with hundreds of footnotes. I have read a biography of Lazar Kaganovich, and it is very consistent with the biography.