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

Nevertheless, Lenin was reportedly quite impressed by Stalin's display of personal initiative and decisiveness. Before the winter of 1918, Stalin had been recalled to Moscow by Lenin. In January of 1919, Lenin and Trotsky sent Stalin into Siberia to stop a major White advance westward, led by the former Tsarist officer Admiral Kolchak. Stalin was in Siberia until February, when he returned to Moscow after failing to do much to stop the advance (and after heavily criticizing both the local Red Army commander and Trotsky himself for the weaknesses of the Bolshevik forces he was in charge of). In May, Stalin was sent to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in order to stop a White offensive from Estonia (which consisted of some Finnish and British detachments). Stalin performed exceptionally well, winning a decisive victory on June 16 with the capture of two White-controlled fortresses. Shortly thereafter Stalin had 67 officers executed because they had disagreed with him over the handling of the Red Army counterattack.

Stalin gave a whole new meaning on communism. His communist Soviet Union had nothing to do with the community where there would be neither a state nor any social classes, as Lenin, and Marx before him, preached. Although, regarding that there wasn’t any class, no matter what power it possessed to be safe on his reign, we could say that there was a peculiar state of equality between the peasants and the highest state’s officers. Stalin used communism as he used Lenin; to manipulate the masses. Considering that his rule was absolute and there was nothing, not a man nor a state mechanism like a parliament to constrain him, we can undauntedly support that his regime was a totalitarian regime with many similarities to the other totalitarian states of his time (like Hitler’s Germany), and communist only in an extravagant way.

Stalin was appointed by Lenin to the position of General Secretary of the Central Committee in April of 1922. In this position, Stalin was effectively “third-in-command”, second only to Trotsky and Lenin himself. Apparently Lenin had great trust in Stalin's force of character and personal initiative; Stalin was among the very few who never fled Russia and more over many of the old-order Bolsheviks had proved to be somewhat weak-willed and unimaginative during both the Revolution itself and the Civil War which followed.

“The Great Terror”, as Robert Conquest called this period, started with the assassination of Sergei Kirov (see Appendix I), a prominent member of the party, and head of the Petrograd soviet. Stalin, in his way to increase his personal power, and to eliminate any possible future threats, used the assassination of Kirov (which he apparently ordered) as the pretense of a series of arrests.

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, millions people, secret police, nazi germany, labor camps, goff page 238, “the patriotic war”, eastern zone assigned, percent peasant households, red army units,