(1879–1953), Communist leader of the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century, including World War II and the formative years of the Cold War
Stalin, the pseudonym adopted by a young underground revolutionary and former Orthodox seminary student in Czarist Russia, means “man of steel.” This quality indeed marked the career of Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, who was born in obscurity in Russian Georgia in December 1879 and died a feared autocrat and world leader in March 1953.
Stalin rose within Lenin's Bolshevik faction of the Rus sian Communist Party from 1898 through the Russian Revolution in 1917 and beyond. Following Lenin's death, he outmaneuvered Trotsky and other rivals and by 1929 became the sole leader of the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A shrewd and ruthless political infighter, he built a tyrannical but powerful totalitarian state. Millions were “liquidated” in massive “purges.” In inter national affairs, although Stalin's outlook was shaped by belief in a historically destined global victory for communism, he was also a realist and pragmatist.
When World War II came to the USSR in 1941, despite Stalin's political machinations to avoid German invasion (including the Nazi‐Soviet Pact of August 1939), the Soviet Union was ill‐prepared. Stalin, who had become prime minister as well as chief of the ruling party, also became commander in chief of the armed forces. For many Russians, he symbolized successful determination to win the war. The Soviet Union entered a grand alliance with Great Britain and the United States against the Axis powers (although against Japan only in the final weeks of the war). Stalin concentrated on winning the war, but not at the expense of constant calculation of how to enhance the international role and power of the Soviet Union in the postwar world. He dealt shrewdly with Western leaders, including Winston S. Churchill of Great Britain and Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference and Harry S. Truman at Potsdam. Despite victory and the founding of the United Nations, the very success of the wartime coalition ended the common interest that had brought the USSR and the Western democracies together. The end of World War II thus quickly led to the emergence of a new so‐called Cold War, dividing the former Allies.
Stalin's ideological predispositions, reinforced by personal suspiciousness, if not paranoia, led him to pursue an aggressive postwar course in foreign relations that constituted a central element in the unleashing of the Cold War. His reliance on a personal dictatorship within his own Communist Party, and a totalitarian state structure within the Soviet Union, required severe limitations on contact with the outside world. It also contributed to a conduct of relations with other states that soon resulted in the sharp drawing of lines between the bloc he controlled and the outside world.
Stalin sought to expand Communist rule, Soviet influence, and his own control in those places and under circumstances where it was possible. Unlike Adolf Hitler, however, he was not driven to advance where it was inexpedient, much less to court or initiate war. This was true of even the most apparent exception—the Korean War. Archival documents released in the 1990s showed that the principal impetus for a North Korean military attack on South Korea came from Kim Il Sung, although Stalin (and Chinese leader Mao Zedong) were led to approve and provide support for the attack and thus bear responsibility. Initially, however, Stalin refused to approve Kim's plans, and did so only when he mistakenly concluded that the United States would not intervene. The Korean attack was neither Stalin's test of Western resolve nor precursor to a possible Soviet attack in Western Europe, as was widely feared at the time.
In his last years, Stalin's paranoia grew, and he was about to launch a new purge of his henchmen when he suffered a stroke and died. Ironically, he had imagined or invented a plot by Kremlin doctors against Soviet leaders and removed long‐trusted doctors, aides, and guards; some of his threatened surviving entourage may then have hastened his death by denying medical assistance. In any event, succeeding leaders soon stopped virtually any mention of his name, a striking contrast to the ubiquitous glorification of Stalin that had emerged after the war. By 1956, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, not only condemned “the cult of the individual” that had been built up by Stalin, but in a secret speech denounced his crimes against the people and the party. The lot of the people, while still subordinated to the interests of the state, improved. Stalin's successors also moved to reduce frictions with the rest of the world.
Thus, after Stalin's death, a general lessening of tension ensued. The Cold War, however, continued with varying intensity for another thirty‐six years, until a Soviet leader—Mikhail Gorbachev—came to power prepared to discard the “Stalinist” world view and so end the division of Europe and the world.
[See also Cold War: External Course; Cold War: Changing Interpretations.]
Bibliography
- Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era, 1973.
- Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power, 1990.
- Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 1991
