Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin was born on December 18, 1878, in Gory, Georgia, in the Russian Empire to a poor family. At age 7, he called smallpox, leaving him with a pockmarked face.
Joseph's mother was a devout Russian Orthodox Christian and wanted him to become a priest. In 1895, she sent him to study in Tiflis, the Georgian capital. However, he started reading the writings of Karl Marx. and Vladimir Lenin after joining a secret organization which wanted Georgian independence from Russia.
In 1901, he joined the Social Democratic Labor Party and organized protests and strikes for the revolutionary movement against czarism. A year later, he was arrested for coordinating a strike and sent to prison. Stalin would join the Bolshevik party and use guerrilla warfare during the Russian Revolution of 1905. He impressed the party's leader Vladimir Lenin in his ability to organize meetings and strikes, as well as his ruthless techniques to raise money for the party by kidnapping and robbery.
In 1907, he sold 250,000 rubles in a bank robbery in Tiflis to fund the cause. Around this time, he adopted the name Stalin, which means steel in Russian, or man of steel. During the Russian Revolution in 1917, Stalin ran the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda.
By October, the revolution was over, and the Bolsheviks were in control. A civil war then followed with a Bolshevik victory. In 1922, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party, and he manipulated his role so that he was in a powerful position.
Lenin died in 1924, and it was assumed that Leon Trotsky would be the next leader, but Stalin would make sure this wouldn't happen. He had Trotsky and other threats to his future leadership removed from the Central Committee and exiled. Eventually, Stalin was effectively dictator of the Soviet Union. In the late 1920s, Stalin would aim to turn the Soviet Union into a modernized, industrialized country, and he wanted it done rapidly.
He developed three five-year plans between 1928 and 1938. Coal, oil, steel. and electricity production massively increased, but workers who failed to achieve their ambitious targets for production were executed or sent to the gulags. He also introduced collectivization to increase food production, seizing land originally given to the peasants and reorganizing it into collective farms.
Mass famine was caused as a result and millions died, but Stalin saw this as a necessary evil to achieve the ambitions of his five-year plans and transform the Soviet Union. As Stalin created a cult of personality through culture, he became more paranoid. Everyone had to praise him, and his portrait was everywhere from schools to factories.
In 1934, Stalin had party member Sergei Kirov killed because of the threat to his power. Throughout the 30s, Stalin purged Communist party members, and 81 of the 103 generals and admirals were executed in the Red Army. 20 million citizens in the Soviet Union were sent to the gulags or executed. In 1939, Stalin made a deal with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Red Army was not prepared and suffered massive losses and had not helped that Stalin had purged many talented officers during the 30s. Stalin refused to leave Moscow as the German forces moved further east. In 1942, the Red Army at Stalingrad were told not to give the city to German forces and to defend it at all costs as the city bore Stalin's name. This was the turning point in pushing the Nazis back, and soon the Red Army was liberating Eastern Europe all the way to Berlin.
The Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 between the Soviet Union, USA, and Britain was tense. With the use of the atom bomb, the Allies did not need the help of the Soviet Union in defeating Japan. Stalin felt betrayed, and with the rival...
between the ideologies of capitalism and communism reignited, he grew more suspicious and paranoid of the West. The Cold War had begun. East Berlin and Eastern Europe, which were occupied territories by the Soviet forces, were transformed into satellite states, forming a bulwark between the Soviet Union and Stalin's former allies. As his health deteriorated in the early 1950s and after an attempted assassination, Stalin's paranoia increased even to the doctors looking after him, which he had tortured to confessions of poisoning. He also ordered the head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, to investigate a new purge of the Communist Party, panicking members of the Politburo into wondering if they would be executed.
Before this could happen, Stalin died of a stroke on March 5th, 1953. At his funeral, huge crowds gathered to pay their respects, and 500 people were crushed as a result of people surging forward. After a power struggle over who would be the next leader of the Soviet Union from the inner circle, Nikita Khrushchev succeeded Stalin. While he was a Stalinist, he would denounce the dictator and reform Stalin's policies of terror and fear during a de-Stalinization process. Subscribe for more history videos.
Get simple history. The Cold War, out today. Thank you guys for all your support on the Simple History YouTube channel. If you enjoy it, please consider visiting our Patreon page. There, you can show us your support for the channel by donating and make a huge difference in what we're able to create for you.
Plus, you can get early access on upcoming videos. So let's keep it growing, and thank you for being part of this amazing community.