Titans of History

Stalin was the Soviet dictator who defeated Hitlerite Germany in the Second World War, expanded the Russian empire to its greatest extent, industrialized the USSR and made it a nuclear superpower. During a reign of terror lasting thirty years, this mass murderer was responsible for the annihilation of more than 25 million of his own innocent citizens, and confined 18 million to slave-labor camps.

Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born in Gori, a small town in Georgia in the Caucasus, the son of an alcoholic cobbler called Beso and his clever, forceful wife, Keke. Poor, unsure of his real paternity, with a pockmarked face, webbed feet and one shorter arm, young Soso (as he was known) grew up to be a highly intelligent, super-sensitive, emotionally stunted child possessed of both an inferiority complex and an overweening arrogance. His mother managed to win him a place at the seminary in Tiflis, where he studied for the priesthood, learned Russian, studied the classics and published romantic poetry. But after his conversion to Marxism, he became a fanatical and pitiless revolutionary and joined Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. He was a born conspirator who dominated his comrades, undermined and betrayed his rivals, murdered suspected police spies, always pushing toward the extremes. He was repeatedly arrested but repeatedly escaped, returning from exile in Siberia for the 1905 Revolution. He became the leading financier of the Bolsheviks through bank robberies and extortion.

After the crushing of the 1905 Revolution, Stalin created his own outfit of gangsters and hit men who killed police agents and raised cash for Lenin in a series of outrageous, bloody bank robberies, protection rackets, train heists and piratical hold-ups on the Black Sea and the Caspian. Stalin’s career as an outlaw culminated in the Tiflis bank robbery in June 1907, in which his gangsters killed fifty people and got away with 300,000 rubles. Stalin then moved his outfit to oil-rich Baku, always on the run, always spreading violence and fear.

At this time Stalin was married to Kato Svanidze, with whom he had a son, Yakov, but Kato died in 1907. Contemptuous of a settled existence, he enjoyed affairs with many women, became engaged to many of them, fathered illegitimate children—and abandoned all of them heartlessly. He married again in 1918, but failed to make his new wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, any happier than his other women. She committed suicide in 1932, leaving Stalin two legitimate children, Vasily and Svetlana.

He lived under many aliases—but in the end he called himself Stalin—man of steel. His violent escapades having drawn the attention of Lenin, Stalin was elected to the Party’s Central Committee. Lenin realized Stalin combined two vital political talents—he was practical and capable of organizing violence, but he could also edit, write and work on theory. “He’s exactly the type I need,” he said. Stalin was arrested for the last time in 1912 and exiled to the Arctic Circle, where he spent most of the First World War. When the tsar was unexpectedly overthrown in March 1917, Stalin returned to Petrograd, where he was later joined by Lenin. After his seizure of power in the October Revolution, Lenin recognized that the brilliant, showy Leon Trotsky and the morose, ruthless Stalin were his two most competent henchmen, and promoted them to his ruling executive committee, the Politburo. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Lenin maintained power by terror, deploying Stalin as a brutal troubleshooter. But Stalin proved to be unimpressive as a military leader compared with Trotsky, whom Stalin constantly tried to undermine.

In 1922 Lenin, keen to balance Trotsky’s prestige, promoted Stalin to the post of the party’s general secretary. Before long, however, Lenin became outraged by his protégé’s arrogance and tried to sack him—but it was too late. After Lenin suffered a fatal stroke in 1924, Stalin allied himself with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev against Trotsky, who was defeated by 1925, sent into exile in 1929 and assassinated by one of Stalin’s hit men in 1940. After Trotsky’s exile, Stalin swung to the right, allying himself with Nikolai Bukharin to defeat Kamenev and Zinoviev.

In 1929 Stalin was hailed as Lenin’s successor, the Vozhd—the Leader—and thenceforth became the subject of a frenzied cult of personality. Jettisoning Bukharin, Stalin embarked on a ruthless push to industrialize the backward USSR and collectivize the peasantry. When the peasantry resisted, Stalin launched a quasiwar against the better-off peasants, known as kulaks, shooting many, exiling more, and continuing to sell grain abroad even as 10 million were shot or died in a famine he himself had created. It was one of Stalin’s greatest crimes.