Childhood and early years
Stalin was born in the town of Gori, Georgia, to a cobbler named Vissarion (Beso) Dzhugashvili. His mother, Ekaterina, was born a serf. Ekaterina used to work doing laundry and housecleaning in rich peoples' houses, often taking Soso (as Stalin was then called) with her. The boy was bright, and a David Pismamedov, a Gori Jew, used to give him books and money. (Years later, he reportedly came to the Kremlin to see what had happened to little Soso, and Stalin talked with him in public.) Soso, was often severely beaten by his father, which was not an unusual way of "teaching lessons" to children during these times. Eventually, Beso left for Tiflis, leaving the family without support. When Soso was 11, his mother enrolled him in the Gori seminary. He studied Russian Orthodox Christianity until he was nearly twenty.

Stalin's involvement with the socialist movement began at seminary school, from which he was expelled in 1899 after failing to appear at scheduled examinations. He worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus, facing repeated arrest and exile to Siberia between 1902 and 1917. He adhered to Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of "professional revolutionaries". His practical experience made him useful in Lenin's Bolshevik party, gaining him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912. Some historians have argued that, during this period, Stalin was actually a Tsarist spy, who was working to infiltrate the Bolshevik party. In 1913 he adopted the name Stalin, which means "man of steel" in Russian.

Rise to power
Initially opposed to the overthrow of Aleksandr Kerensky's Provisional Government in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was won over to Lenin's position following the latter's return from exile in April, but only played a minor role in the Bolsheviks' seizure of power on November 7. He was political commissar of the Soviet Army (Western front) during the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet war. Stalin's first government position was as People's Commissar of Nationalities Affairs. He held a number of senior administrative posts within the Soviet government and party apparatus, becoming in April 1922 general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, a post which he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country. This concentration of personal power increasingly alarmed the dying Lenin, and in Lenin's Testament he famously called for the removal of the "rude" Stalin. However, this document was later suppressed by members of the Central Committee, many of whom were also criticised by the Bolshevik leader.

After Lenin's death in January 1924, a triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev governed the party, placing themselves ideologically between Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin (on the right).

During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favour of a policy of building Socialism in One Country, in contrast to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. Stalin would quickly switch sides and join with Bukharin. Together, they fought a new opposition of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year, Trotsky was exiled. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivisation and industrialisation, Stalin can be said to have exercised control over the party and the country. However, as the popularity of other leaders such as Sergei Kirov and the so-called Ryutin plot were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute power until the Great Purge of 1936-1938.

Stalin and changes in Soviet society

Industrialization
Main article: Industrialization of the USSR
Stalin replaced Lenin's market socialist New Economic Policy with a system of centrally-ordained Five-Year Plans, which called for a highly ambitious program of state guided crash industrialization, and collectivization of agriculture. In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialisation from a very low economic base. Russia, generally ranked as the poorest nation in Europe before 1914, now industrialized at a phenomenal rate, far surpassing Germany's pace of industrialization in the 19th century and Japan's earlier in the 20th.

With no seed capital, little foreign trade, and barely any modern industry to start with, Stalin's government financed industrialisation by both restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the peasantry.

Stalin had a vast cult of personality.
Collectivization
Main article: Collectivisation in the USSR
Stalin's regime moved to force collectivisation of agriculture. The theory behind collectivisation was that it would replace the small-scale un-mechanised and inefficient farms, that were then commonplace in the Soviet Union, with large-scale mechanised farms that would produce food far more efficiently.

Theoretically, landless peasants were to be the biggest beneficiaries from collectivisation, because it promised them an opportunity to take an equal share in the labour and its rewards. For those with property, however, collectivisation meant giving it up to the collective farms and selling most of the food that they produced to the state at low prices set by the state itself, leaving the farmers with a bare minimum.

Collectivisation meant the destruction of a centuries-old way of life, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivisation also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced widespread and often violent resistance among the peasantry.

In an attempt to overcome this resistance shock brigades were used to coerce reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms between 1929 and 1933. In response to this many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major drop in food production.

Stalin blamed this drop in food production on kulaks (Russian: fist; rich peasants), who he believed were capitalistic parasites who were organising resistance to collectivisation. All kulaks who resisted collectivisation were to be shot, transported to Gulag labor camps or deported to remote areas of the country. In reality however, the term "kulak" was a loose term to describe anyone who opposed collectivisation, which included many peasants who were anything but rich.

Most historians agree that the disruption caused by forced collectivization was largely responsible for major famines which caused up to 5 million deaths in 1932-33, particularly in Ukraine and the lower Volga region, at a time when the Soviet Union continued to export millions of tonnes of grain on world markets.

Social services
Stalin's government placed heavy emphasis on the provision of basic medical services. Campaigns were carried out against typhus, cholera, and malaria; the number of doctors was increased as rapidly as facilities and training would permit; and death and infant mortality rates steadily decreased. Education was also dramatically expanded, with many more Russians learning to read and write, and higher education expanded. The generation that grew up under Stalin also saw a major expansion in job opportunities, especially for women.

Purges and deportations

Purges of dissidents
Main article: Great Purge.
Stalin consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with the Great Purge against his suspected political and ideological opponents, culminating in the extermination of the majority of the original Bolshevik Central Committee, and over half of the largely pliant delegates of the 17th Party Congress in January 1934. Measures used against these victims ranged from imprisonment in labor camps of Gulag to execution after show trials or assassination (such as that of Trotsky and, some allege, Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov). Thousands of people merely suspected of opposing Stalin's regime were killed or imprisoned (often using Article 58 in which people could be imprisoned for "anti-Soviet activities"). Initially, Politburo, including Stalin, routinely signed death warrants for huge lists of enemies of the people. Over the time the persecution procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. The Russian word troika gained a new, horrible meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three.

Several show trials known as the Moscow Trials were held to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewere in the country. There were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938.

Trotsky's August 1940 assassination in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since 1936, eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. Only two members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) now remained - Stalin himself and his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. The fact so many of the original Bolshevik leaders were killed led Stalin's arch-critic Leon Trotsky to claim a "river of blood" separated his regime from that of Lenin.

Deportations

See also: Population transfer: Soviet Union.
Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. Over 1.5 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the main official reasons for the deportations, although an ambition to ethnically cleanse regions in a process known as "Russification" may have also been a factor.

The deportations started with Poles from Belorussia, Ukraine and European Russia (see Polish minority in Soviet Union) 1932-1936. Volga Germans and seven nationalities of the Crimea and the northern Caucasus were deported: the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and Meskhetian Turks. Other minorities evicted from the Black Sea coastal region included Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians. From the newly conquered Eastern Poland 400,000 people were deported. The same followed in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (over 200,000 people were deported). The death toll from these deportations was huge: 60% of the Baltic deportees were estimated to have perished, and nearly half of the entire Crimean Tatar population died of hunger in the first eighteen months after being banished from their homeland. Overall, 40% of those deported are estimated to have perished.

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles, asserting that the Ukrainians avoided such a fate "only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them." His government reversed most of Stalin's deportations, although it was not until as late as 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhs and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union and they are still a major political issue - the memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic republics, Tatarstan and Chechnya.

Death toll
About one million people were shot during the periods 1935-38, 1942 and 1945-50 and millions of people were transported to Gulag labor camps. In Georgia about 80,000 people were shot during the periods 1921, 1923-24, 1935-38, 1942 and 1945-50 and more than 100,000 people were transported to Gulag camps.

On March 5, 1940, Stalin himself and other Soviet leaders signed the order to execute 25,700 Polish intelligentsia including 14,700 Polish POW. It became known as Katyn massacre. Some other famous massacres: massacre of prisoners 30,000-40,000 people.

It is believed by most historians that, including famines, prison and labor camp mortality, and state terrorism (deportations and political purges), Stalin and his colleagues were directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions. How many millons died under Stalin is greatly disputed. Although no official figures have been released by the Soviet or Russian governments, most estimates put the figure at between eight and twenty million. Comparison of the 1926-39 census results suggests 5-10 million deaths in excess of what would be normal in the period, mostly through famine in 1931-34. The highest estimates put the figure as high as 50 million from the 1920s to the 1950s.

World War II
In August 1939 Stalin on his August 19 speech agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany which divided Central Europe into the two powers' respective spheres of influence. In June 1941, however, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Stalin had not expected this and the Soviet Union was largely unprepared for this invasion. Until the last moment, Stalin had sought to avoid any obvious defensive preparation which might provoke German attack, in the hope of buying time to modernize and strengthen his military forces. Even after the attack commenced Stalin appeared unwilling to accept the fact and, according to some historians, was too stunned to react appropriately for a number of days. A controversial new theory put forward by Victor Suvorov asserts that Stalin had been preparing an invasion of Germany and that the lack of preparations for defensive warfare left Soviet forces vulnerable despite their heavy concentration near the border.

The Nazis initially made huge advances, capturing or killing hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops. The earlier execution of many of the Red Army's experienced generals had a severely negative effect on Russia's ability to organise defences. In response on November 6, 1941, Stalin addressed the Soviet Union for only the second time during his three-decade rule (the first time was earlier that year on July 2). He claimed that even though 350,000 troops were killed in German attacks so far, that the Germans have lost 4.5 million soldiers (a gross over-estimation) and that Soviet victory was near. The Soviet Red Army did in fact put up fierce resistance, but during the war's early stages was largely ineffective against the better-equipped and trained Nazi forces until the invaders were halted and then driven back before Moscow (December 1941).

Stalin's Order No. 227 of July 27, 1942 illustrates the ruthlessness with which he sought to stiffen army resolve: all those who retreated or otherwise left their positions without orders to do so were to be summarily shot. In the war's opening stages, the retreating Red Army also sought to deny resources to the enemy through a scorched earth policy of destroying the infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize them. Unfortunately, this, along with abuse by German troops, caused starvation and suffering among the civilian population that was left behind.

The Soviets bore the brunt of civilian and military losses in World War II. Between 21 and 28 million Soviets, most of them civilians, died in the "Great Patriotic War", as the Soviets called the German-Soviet conflict. Civilians were rounded up and burned or shot in many cities occupied by the Nazis. The Nazis considered Slavs to be "sub-human", ranking the killings in the eyes of many as ethnically targeted mass murder, or genocide. The conflict left a huge deficit of men of the wartime fighting-age generation in Russia. As a result, to this day, World War II is remembered very vividly in Russia, and May 9, Victory Day, is one of its biggest national holidays.

Many elderly Russians are nostalgic for the Stalin era.
Post-war era
Following World War II, Stalin's regime installed friendly Communist-led satellite governments in the countries that the Soviet army had occupied, including Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, the later "Communist Bloc" allied from 1955 in the Warsaw Pact. Stalin saw this as a necessary step to protect the Soviet Union, and ensure that it was surrounded by countries with friendly governments, to act as a buffer against any future invaders, a reversal of inter-war western hopes for a sympathetic Eastern European cordon sanitaire against Communism.

But this action convinced many in the west that the Soviet Union intended to spread communism across the world. The relations between the Soviet Union and its former World War II western allies soon broke down, and gave way to a prolonged period of tension and distrust between east and west known as the Cold War.

At home Stalin presented himself as a great wartime leader who had led the USSR to victory against the Germans. Internally his repressive policies continued, but never reached the extremes of the 1930s. Stalin had, according to some, prepared a new wave of arrests and executions aimed at "rootless cosmopolitans," a phrase that was understood to refer to Jews, in 1953, but if these plans did indeed exist, he died before he could implement them. (See doctors' plot.)

On March 1, 1953, after an all-night dinner with interior minister Lavrenty Beria and future premiers Georgi Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin collapsed. He died four days later, on March 5, 1953, at the age of 73. Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage. His body was left in state in Lenin's Mausoleum until October 31, 1961, when de-Stalinization was taking place in the Soviet Union. Stalin's body was then buried by the Kremlin walls. The political memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claimed Beria had boasted to Molotov that he poisoned Stalin.

Unless an autopsy is performed (his corpse is embalmed), the facts about his death will probably never be known with certainty. But in 2003, a joint group of Russian and American historians announced their view that Stalin ingested warfarin, a powerful rat poison that thins the blood and causes strokes and hemorrhages. Since it is flavorless, warfarin is a plausible murder weapon.

Policies and accomplishments
Under Stalin the Soviet Union was industrialized to the point that by the time of World War II the Soviet industrial-military complex was able to help resist the German invasion, though at a great cost in human lives.

While the social and economic transformations over which he presided laid the foundations for the USSR's emergence as a global superpower, much of Stalin's conduct of Soviet affairs was subsequently repudiated by his successors in the Communist Party leadership, notably in his denunciation by Khrushchev in February 1956. His immediate successors, though, continued to follow the basic principles on which Stalin based his rule -- the political monopoly of the Communist Party presiding over a command economy.