On this day in 1953 Joseph Stalin, the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, died.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvil) was born on 18 December 1879 in Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian empire.
He studied at a theological seminary where he began to read Marxist literature. He never graduated, instead devoting his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy, the Bolsheviks. He spent the next 15 years as an activist and on a number of occasions was arrested and exiled to Siberia.
Stalin, 1943
Stalin was not one of the decisive players in the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, but he soon rose through the ranks of the party. In 1922, he was made general secretary of the Communist Party, a post which gave him control over appointments and thus allowed him to build up a base of support.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin promoted himself as his political heir and by the late 1920s, Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union.
Stalin was fond of American cowboy movies. The movies, being in foreign languages, were given a running translation by the people’s commissar of cinema (Ivan Bolshakov). The translations were hilarious for the audience as Ivan spoke very basic English. His favourite films were westerns and Charlie Chaplin episodes.
In 1928, Stalin replaced the New Economic Policy of the 1920s with a highly centralised command economy and Five-Year Plans that launched a period of rapid industrialization and economic collectivisation in the countryside. As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian society into a great industrial power.
His programme of rapid industrialisation achieved huge increases in Soviet productivity and economic growth but at great cost. The population suffered deeply during the Great Terror of the 1930s, during which Stalin purged the party of ‘enemies of the people’, resulting in the execution of thousands and the exile of millions to slave labour camps.
In 1939, Stalin’s USSR entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. This pact allowed the Soviet Union to regain some of the former territories of the Russian Empire in 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. Despite heavy human and territorial losses in the initial period of war, the Soviet Union stopped the Nazi Axis advance. The Red Army drove through Eastern Europe in 1944–45 and captured Berlin in May 1945. Having played the decisive role in the Allied victory, the USSR emerged as a recognized superpower after the war. After World War Two, the Soviet Union entered the nuclear age and ruled an empire, which included most of Eastern Europe.
In his seventies, Stalin’s health began to deteriorate. His main problem was high blood pressure. By the end of February 1953, he fell into a coma. After four days, Stalin briefly gained consciousness, but died of a stroke on 5 March 1953.
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