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Joseph Stalin
When was Joseph Stalin born?
Joseph Stalin was born on December 18, 1878. His birth date was traditionally believed to be December 21, 1879, but the 1878 date was confirmed by records in theCommunist Party central archives.
When did Joseph Stalin die?
Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, in Moscow. His death triggered a leadership scramble within the Soviet Communist Party, andNikita Khrushchev ultimately emerged as Stalin’s successor.
What was Joseph Stalin’s childhood like?
Joseph Stalin was raised in poverty in provincialGeorgia. A bout of childhood smallpox scarred his face, and his left arm was mangled, most likely in a carriage accident. Although his mother doted on him, Stalin’s father was a drunk who routinely beat him.
Where was Joseph Stalin educated?
Joseph Stalin learned Russian at the church school in his hometown of Gori, Georgia. He entered Tiflis Theological Seminary to train as a priest, but he left school in 1899. He never earned a degree.
How did Joseph Stalin change the world?
From 1928 until his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin ruled theSoviet Union as a dictator, transforming the country from an agrarian peasant society into a globalsuperpower. The cost was tremendous, however: Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens.
Joseph Stalin (born December 18 [December 6, Old Style], 1878, Gori,Georgia,Russian Empire [seeResearcher’s Note] —died March 5, 1953,Moscow,Russia, U.S.S.R.) was thesecretary-general of theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–53) andpremier of theSoviet state (1941–53), who for a quarter of a century dictatorially ruled theSoviet Union and transformed it into a major world power.
During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Sovietdictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin industrialized theUnion of Soviet Socialist Republics, forciblycollectivized its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeatGermany in 1941–45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Chief architect of Soviettotalitarianism and a skilled but phenomenally ruthless organizer, he destroyed the remnants of individual freedom and failed to promote individual prosperity, yet he created a mightymilitary-industrial complex and led the Soviet Union into thenuclear age.
Stalin’s biography was long obscured by amendacious Soviet-propagated “legend” exaggerating his prowess as a heroicBolshevik boy-conspirator and faithful follower ofLenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. In his prime, Stalin was hailed as a universal genius, as a “shining sun,” or “the staff of life,” and also as a “great teacher and friend” (especially of thosecommunities he most savagely persecuted); once he was even publiclyinvoked as “Our Father” by a metropolitan of theRussian Orthodox Church. Achieving wide visual promotion through busts, statues, and icons of himself, the dictator became the object of afanatical cult that, in private, he probably regarded withcynicism.
Early years
Stalin was ofGeorgian—not Russian—origin, and persistent rumors claim that he was Ossetian on the paternal side. He was the son of a poor cobbler in the provincial Georgian town ofGori in theCaucasus, then an imperial Russian colony. The drunken father savagely beat his son. Speaking only Georgian at home, Joseph learned Russian—which he always spoke with a guttural Georgian accent—while attending thechurch school at Gori (1888–94). He then moved to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he secretly readKarl Marx, the chief theoretician of internationalCommunism, and other forbidden texts, being expelled in 1899 for revolutionary activity, according to the “legend”—or leaving because of ill health, according to his doting mother. The mother, a devout washerwoman, had dreamed of her son becoming a priest, but Joseph Dzhugashvili was more ruffianly than clerical in appearance and outlook. He was short, stocky, black-haired, fierce-eyed, with one arm longer than the other, his swarthy face scarred bysmallpox contracted in infancy. Physically strong and endowed with prodigious willpower, he early learned to disguise his true feelings and to bide his time; in accordance with the Caucasian blood-feud tradition, he wasimplacable in plotting long-term revenge against those who offended him.
In December 1899, Dzhugashvili became, briefly, a clerk in the Tiflis Observatory, the only paid employment that he is recorded as having taken outside politics; there is no record of his ever having done manual labor. In 1900 he joined the political underground, fomenting labor demonstrations and strikes in the main industrial centers of the Caucasus, but his excessive zeal in pushing duped workers into bloody clashes with the police antagonized his fellow conspirators. After the Social Democrats (Marxist revolutionaries) of the Russian Empire had split into their two competing wings—Menshevik andBolshevik—in 1903, Dzhugashvili joined the second, more militant, of these factions and became adisciple of its leader,Lenin. Between April 1902 and March 1913, Dzhugashvili was seven times arrested for revolutionary activity, undergoing repeated imprisonment and exile. The mildness of the sentences and the ease with which the young conspirator effected his frequent escapes lend color to the unproved speculation that Dzhugashvili was for a time anagent provocateur in the pay of the imperial political police.
Stalin’s rise to power
Dzhugashvili made slow progress in the partyhierarchy. He attended three policy-making conclaves of the Russian Social Democrats—in Tammerfors (nowTampere, Finland; 1905),Stockholm (1906), andLondon (1907)—without making much impression. But he was active behind the scenes, helping to plot a spectacular holdup in Tiflis (nowTbilisi) on June 25 (June 12, Old Style), 1907, in order to “expropriate” funds for the party. His first big political promotion came in February (January, Old Style) 1912, when Lenin—now in emigration—co-opted him to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which had finally broken with the other Social Democrats. In the following year, Dzhugashvili published, at Lenin’s behest, an important article onMarxism and the national question. By now he had adopted the name Stalin, deriving from Russianstal (“steel”); he also briefly edited the newly founded Bolshevik newspaperPravda before undergoing his longest period of exile: in Siberia from July 1913 to March 1917.
In about 1904 Stalin had married a pious Georgian girl, Ekaterina Svanidze. She died some three years later and left a son, Jacob, whom his father treated withcontempt, calling him a weakling after an unsuccessful suicide attempt in the late 1920s; when Jacob was taken prisoner by the Germans duringWorld War II, Stalin refused a German offer to exchange his son.
ReachingPetrograd fromSiberia on March 25 (March 12, Old Style), 1917, Stalin resumed editorship ofPravda. He briefly advocated Bolshevik cooperation with the provisional government of middle-class liberals that had succeeded to uneasy power on the lasttsar’s abdication during theFebruary Revolution. But under Lenin’s influence, Stalin soon switched to the more-militant policy of armed seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. When theircoup d’état occurred in November (October, Old Style) 1917, he played an important role, but one less prominent than that of his chief rival,Leon Trotsky.
(Read Leon Trotsky’s 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)
Active as a politico-military leader on various fronts during theCivil War of 1918–20, Stalin also held two ministerial posts in the new Bolshevik government, being commissar for nationalities (1917–23) and for state control (or workers’ and peasants’ inspection; 1919–23). But it was his position as secretary general of the party’sCentral Committee, from 1922 until his death, that provided the power base for his dictatorship. Besides heading the secretariat, he was also member of the powerfulPolitburo and of many other interlocking and overlapping committees—an arch-bureaucrat engaged in quietly outmaneuvering brilliant rivals, including Trotsky andGrigory Zinovyev, who despised suchmundane organizational work. Because the pockmarked Georgian was so obviously unintellectual, they thought him unintelligent—a gross error, and one literally fatal in their case.
- Russian in full:
- Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin
- Original name (Georgian):
- Ioseb Dzhugashvili
- Title / Office:
- prime minister (1941-1953),Soviet Union
- Political Affiliation:
- Bolshevik
- Communist Party of the Soviet Union
- Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party
- Notable Family Members:
- daughterSvetlana Alliluyeva
- On the Web:
- Jewish Virtual Library - Joseph Stalin (Feb. 11, 2026)
From 1921 onward Stalin flouted the ailing Lenin’s wishes, until, a year before his death, Lenin wrote a political “testament,” since widely publicized, calling for Stalin’s removal from the secretary generalship; coming from Lenin, this document was potentially ruinous to Stalin’s career, but his usual luck and skill enabled him to have it discounted during his lifetime.