How Did Joseph Stalin Come To Power

Russian revolutionary and politician; successor to Lenin as ruler of the Soviet Union and head of the Communist Party (1929 to 1953)

One of the bloodiest despots in modern history, Joseph Stalin helped transform the Soviet Union into a military and industrial superpower, but at a staggering cost in human lives and suffering. In the words of scholar Stephen Cohen, Stalin's rule was a "holocaust by terror" that "victimized tens of millions of people for twenty-five years."

Stalin was born Iosif Vissioronovich Djugashvili on December 21, 1879, in the Georgian village of Gori. The son of a poor shoemaker, Iosif became a professional revolutionary and at age thirty-four adopted the political name of Stalin, meaning "man of steel." A member…show more content…
The majority of victims during this period were from the Communist Party, the economic ministries, the military, the Communist International, and minority nationalities. No precise figures exist. Official KGB figures for 1937938 claim that just under 700,000 were executed and that at the beginning of the 1940s there were about 3.6 million in labor camps and prisons. Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies have calculated that the total number of excess deaths from 1927 to 1938 may have amounted to some ten million persons, 8.5 million killed between 1927 and 1936 and about 1 to 1.5 million between 1937 and…show more content…
Gulag. A History. New York: Doubleday.

Cohen, Stephen F. (1999). "Bolshevism and Stalinism." In Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Transaction Publishers.

Davies, R. W., Mark Harrison, and Stephen Wheatcroft, eds. (1994). The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Naimark, Norman M. (2001). Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Read, Christopher, ed. (2003). The Stalin Years. A Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Elaine MacKinnon

Source: Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, ©2005 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.

Did this raise a question for