Joseph Stalin

Origin and religion

Born in Gori, Georgia, to a Georgian family. Ethnic Kartvelian, not Russian. He trained briefly in an Orthodox seminary in Tbilisi, wrote poetry in Georgian as a youth, and ruled a state whose official language and core bureaucracy were Russian. Georgian nationality did not soften policy in Georgia or anywhere else.

Georgian Orthodox family. Expelled from the Tiflis seminary. Atheist in power.

Responsibilities

• General secretary of the Communist Party (from 1922)
• Dictator of the USSR after the 1920s
• Director of collectivization, the famine, and the Great Terror

As general secretary he controlled appointments. After defeating Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, he forced collectivization of agriculture from 1929, set grain quotas that produced the 1932–33 famines, and in 1937–38 signed off on regional execution quotas. He edited death lists personally. He also ran the war against Nazi Germany from 1941 and the deportation of entire nations.

The record

On 27 December 1929 he told a conference of Marxist agrarians that policy had moved “from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.” The Stalin–Kaganovich correspondence and Politburo decisions of 1932–33 show a leadership that knew villages were starving, closed borders so peasants could not flee, and kept exporting grain. NKVD Order 00447 (30 July 1937) set numeric quotas for shooting. A cipher of 10 January 1939, in his name, told party officials that “physical methods” of interrogation had been authorized by the Central Committee since 1937. He died of a brain hemorrhage on 5 March 1953.