(b. Dec. 21 [Dec. 9, Old Style], 1879, Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire—d. March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.)
J
oseph Stalin was the secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-53) and premier of the Soviet state (1941-53), who for a quarter of a century dictatorially ruled the Soviet Union and trans-formed it into a major world power.The Young Revolutionary and Rise to Power
Born in Georgia as Ioseb Dzhugashvili, Stalin was the son of a cobbler. He studied at a seminary but was expelled for revolutionary activity in 1899. He joined an underground Georgian revolutionary organization in 1900 and the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1903. A disciple of Vladimir Lenin, he served in minor party posts and was appointed to the first Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912. In the following year he published, at Lenin’s behest, an important article on Marxism and the national question. By now he had adopted the name Stalin, deriving from Russian stal (“steel”), and he also briefly edited the newly founded Bolshevik newspaper Pravda before undergoing a long period of exile in Siberia from July 1913 to March 1917.
Until the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the Bolsheviks to power, Stalin was a relatively minor figure in the party. Active as a politico-military leader on various fronts during the Civil War of 1918–20, Stalin held two ministerial posts in the new Bolshevik government, being commissar for nationalities (1917–23) and for state control (1919–23). But it was his position as secretary general of
Joseph Stalin. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no.
LC-7 Joseph Stalin 7
the party’s Central Committee, from 1922 until his death, that provided the power base for his dictatorship. Besides heading the secretariat, he was also member of the power-ful Politburo. Because Stalin was unintellectual, his rivals thought him unintelligent—a gross error, and one literally fatal in their case.
Lenin’s Successor
From 1921 onward Stalin flouted the ailing Lenin’s wishes, until, a year before his death, Lenin wrote a political “tes-tament” calling for Stalin’s removal from the secretary generalship. Coming from Lenin, this document was potentially ruinous to Stalin’s career, but Stalin’s usual luck and skill enabled him to have it discounted during his life-time. After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin overcame his rivals, including Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Bukharin, and Aleksey Rykov, and took control of Soviet politics. Stalin expelled Trotsky, his main rival, from the Soviet Union in 1929 and had him assassinated in Mexico in 1940.
In 1928 Stalin inaugurated the five-year plans that radically altered Soviet economic and social structures—
including intensive industrialization that forced collectivization of agriculture and resulted in the deaths of many millions. Among those who vainly sought to mod-erate Stalin’s policies was his young second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, whom he had married in 1919. She committed suicide in 1932.
In late 1934—just when the worst excesses of Stalinism seemed to have spent themselves—Stalin launched a new campaign of political terror against the very Communist Party members who had brought him to power. Widespread secret executions and persecution of not only party
mem-number of people in the arts, academic, and legal worlds, and foreign communists on Soviet soil.
Role in World War II
In August 1939, Stalin concluded a pact with Adolf Hitler, which encouraged the German dictator to attack Poland and begin World War II. Stalin annexed eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania; he also attacked Finland and extorted territorial concessions. In May 1941 Stalin recognized the growing danger of a German attack on the Soviet Union by appointing himself chair-man of the Council of People’s Commissars or head of the government, his first governmental office since 1923.
Stalin’s prewar measures were exposed as incompetent by the German blitzkrieg that surged deep into Soviet ter-ritory after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union of June 22, 1941. Stalin allied with the United States and the United Kingdom and took control of military operations, direct-ing the Soviet armies as they repulsed the German invaders and occupied the eastern European lands. When the Germans threatened Moscow in the winter of 1941, he remained in the capital, helping to organize a great counter-offensive. The Battle of Stalingrad, in the following winter, and the Battle of Kursk, in the summer of 1943, were also won by the Soviet army under Stalin’s direction, turning the tide of invasion against the Germans, who capitulated in May 1945.
Stalin participated in high-level Allied meetings, including those of the Big Three with British prime min-ister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D.
Roosevelt at Tehrān (1943) and Yalta (1945). A formidable negotiator, he outwitted these statesmen, extracting great concessions for the Soviet Union. After the war, Stalin
7 Joseph Stalin 7
based on native communist regimes, nominally indepen-dent but in fact subservient to himself. In 1948 the defection of Yugoslavia, led by Josip Broz Tito, from the Soviet camp, struck a severe blow to world Communism as a Stalin-dominated monolith. To prevent others from following Tito’s example, Stalin instigated local show tri-als, in which satellite Communist leaders confessed to Titoism, and many were executed.
Last Years
Far from continuing his wartime alliance, Stalin now regarded as enemies the United Kingdom and, especially,
(Left to right) Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, U.S. president Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and British prime minister Winston Churchill at the Tehrān
the United States, against whom he embarked on the Cold War. At home, the primacy of Marxist ideology was harshly reasserted, and Stalin’s chief ideological hatchet man, Andrey Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee, began a reign of terror in the Soviet artistic and intellec-tual world. Hopes for domestic relaxation, widely aroused in the Soviet Union during the war, were thus sadly disappointed.
Increasingly suspi-cious and paranoid in his later years, Stalin ordered the arrest, announced in January 1953, of certain—mostly Jewish—Kremlin doc-tors on charges of medically murdering various Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov. The dictator was evidently preparing to make this Doctors’ Plot the pretext for yet another great terror menacing all his senior associates, but he died suddenly on March 5.
Noted for bringing the Soviet Union into world prom-inence, at terrible cost to his own people, Stalin left a legacy of repression and fear as well as industrial and mili-tary power. In 1956 Stalin and his personality cult were denounced by Nikita Khrushchev.
Joseph Stalin, 1950. Sovfoto
7 Ibn Sa‘ūd 7
iBn sa‘u¯d
(b. c. 1880, Riyadh, Arabia—d. Nov. 9, 1953, Al-T· ā’if, Saudi Arabia)
I
bn Sa‘ūd was the tribal and Muslim religious leader who formed the modern state of Saudi Arabia and initiated the exploitation of its oil.The Sa‘ūds ruled much of Arabia from 1780 to 1880;
but, while Ibn Sa‘ūd was still an infant, his family was driven out by their rivals, the Rashīds, and became penni-less exiles in Kuwait. In 1901 Ibn Sa‘ūd, then 21, set out from Kuwait with 40 camelmen in a bold attempt to regain his family’s lands. A daring raid into Riyadh in January 1902 succeeded in rousing the former supporters of his dynasty, and within two years Ibn Sa‘ūd had won over much of central Arabia. Turkish forces summoned by the Rashīds opposed him until 1912 with little success and then withdrew for lack of supplies.
Ibn Sa‘ūd decided, in the years before World War I, to revive his dynasty’s support for Wahhābism, an extremist Muslim puritan revival. Ibn Sa‘ūd was in fact a devoted puritan Muslim, yet he was also aware that religious fanat-icism could serve his ambition, and he deliberately fostered it, founding a militantly religious tribal organization known as the Ikhwān (brethren). This fanatical brother-hood encouraged his followers to fight and to massacre their Arab rivals, and it helped him to bring many nomadic tribesmen under more immediate control.
During World War I, Ibn Sa‘ūd entered into a treaty with the British (December 1915), accepting protectorate status and agreeing to make war against Ibn Rashīd, who was being supported by the Turks. But despite British arms and a subsidy of £5,000 a month from the British government (which continued until 1924), he was inactive until 1920, arguing that his subsidy was insufficient. During
1920–22, however, he marched against Ibn Rashīd and extinguished Rashīdī rule, doubling his own territory.
Ibn Sa‘ūd now ruled central Arabia except for the Hejaz region along the Red Sea. This was the territory of Sharīf H·usayn of Mecca. In 1924 the Ikhwān took Mecca, and the Hejaz was added to Ibn Sa‘ūd’s dominions. In the late 1920s, the Ikhwān turned against him when he for-bade further raiding on their part. He defeated them at the Battle of Sibilla in March 1929.
This battle opened a new era; thereafter Ibn Sa‘ūd’s task was government, not conquest. In 1932 he formally unified his domains into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. An absolute monarch, he had no regular civil service or pro-fessional administrators. All decisions were made by him or by those he personally delegated for a particular task.
There was little money, and he himself was not interested in finance. In May 1933 Ibn Sa‘ūd signed his first agree-ment with an American oil company. Not until March 1938 did the company strike oil, and work virtually ceased dur-ing World War II, so that Ibn Sa‘ūd was again nearly penniless.
Saudi Arabia took no part in the war, but toward its end the exploitation of oil was resumed. By 1950 Ibn Sa‘ūd had received a total of about $200,000. Three years later, he was getting some $2,500,000 a week. The effect was disastrous on the country and on Ibn Sa‘ūd. He had no idea of what to do with all the money, and he watched helplessly the triumph of everything he hated. His austere religious views were offended. The secluded, penurious, hard, but idealistic life of Arabia was vanishing. Such vast sums of money drew half the swindlers in the Middle East to this puritan religious sanctum. Ibn Sa‘ūd was unable to cope with financial adventurers. His last years were marked by severe physical and emotional deterioration.
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