Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on December 21, 1879, in Gori, Georgia . Both his parents were peasants. His father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, was a cobbler, hopping that one day his son will be apprenticed in the same trade; his mother, Yekaterina Geladze Dzhugashvili, worked as a house servant for various upper-class Georgian families. Stalin was rather sickly as a child; he was badly scarred by smallpox, and another illness crippled his left arm (later in his life, in 1916, this disability will prevent him from joining the Russian army). Nevertheless, he is described as having been in excellent physical shape as a teenager; throughout much of his life he was muscular and well built.

Sosso (Stalin’s schoolboy nickname) was an excellent student. He graduated from the Gori Church School in 1894 with very high marks and managed to earn a full scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological S

Stalin died on March 5, 1953, alone and isolated in a room inside Kremlin. Although Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, when he died, the whole nation wept tears of grief and of fear for the future. The iron will of Stalin wouldn’t be there anymore to guide and protect them. Yet, his death was the most pleasant news to the untold millions who were repressed during his reign.

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, surprising Stalin, who had refused to believe that an attack was imminent. Italy and Romania declared war on the USSR the same day. Finland, Hungary, Albania, and other Axis satellites, soon followed. Britain and the United States tried to help, by sending material aid to the USSR. The US program, known as Lend-Lease, ultimately provided the USSR with some $12 billion worth of equipment and food. After the United States entered the war in December 1941, the three powers became military allies. In January 1942, four months after it had pledged allegiance to the principles of the Atlantic Charter, the Soviet government and 25 other Allied governments signed a declaration formally subscribing to the program and purposes of the Atlantic Charter and pledging their cooperation in the war against the Axis powers.

The First Five-Year Plan also called for transforming Soviet agriculture from predominantly individual farms into a system of large state collective farms. The Communist regime believed that collectivization would improve agricultural productivity and would produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Collectivization was further expected to free many peasants for industrial work in the cities and to enable the party to extend its political dominance over the remaining peasantry.

After a Bolshevik-sponsored insurrection in July, Lenin went into hiding and Trotsky was arrested, leaving Stalin and Yakob Sverdlov (another prominent Bolshevik) temporarily in charge of the Bolsheviks. After Lenin's return several months later, Stalin's influence rapidly declined (due to his failure to completely agree with all of Lenin's positions, including his advocacy of an “armed revolution” to overthrow the Provisional Government). This decline only proved temporary, however.

Stalin's purge of the military continued from June 1937 to October 1939 with the arrest of Marshal V.K. Bliukher (Commander of the Far East). During the first week Stalin arrested 980 officers. The purge resulted in the execution of 3000 naval commanders and 38,700 army officers.Of the top 101 generals 80 were shot; of 186 division commanders 140 were shot. This series of arrests, show trials, executions and deportation, didn’t stop until 1939 (Goff, page 238). These purges proved disastrous when, in the second world war, the huge Red Army had no leaders to follow..

In 1928, the Central Committee established the right of the party to exercise guidance over literature; and in 1932 literary and artistic organizations were restructured to promote a specified style called “socialist realism”. Works that did not contribute to the building of socialism were banned. Lenin had seen the need for increasing revolutionary consciousness in workers. Stalin now asserted that art should not merely serve society, but do so in a way determined by the party and its megalomaniac plans for transforming society. As a result, artists and intellectuals as well as political figures became victims of the Great Terror of the 1930s.

By the end of the war, the Soviet Union was recognized as one of the great powers of the world. Stalin participated with the heads of government of the United States and Great Britain at the Tehran Conference in 1943 and at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 to decide the overall military and political strategy of the war and a common postwar European policy. The U.S.S.R als

Some topics in this essay:
Soviet Union, Five-Year Plan, Red Army, Hitler Stalin, Soviet Communists, Dmitrii Shostakovich, Central Committee, Theological Seminary, Stalin Stalinism, Appendix III, soviet union, red army, civil war, goff page, central committee, stalin lenin, nazi germany, collective farms, secret police, millions people, red army units, estonia latvia lithuania, eastern zone assigned, april 1920 stalin, zone assigned ussr,