Joseph Stalin 

By Ricky

Stalin was born on December 21, 1879, in Gori, a town near Tbilisi.  His real name was Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili.  But, in 1913, he changed it to Stalin, which meant “man of steel” in Russian.  Not much is known about Stalin’s childhood.  His father was an unsuccessful village shoemaker.  He is said to have been a drunkard who was mean to Stalin.  Stalin grew up as an only child.  Stalin caught smallpox around the age of 7, and the sickness marked his face for life.  In 1888, Stalin’s mother sent him to a little church school in Gori.  He spent 5 years there, and was a very smart kid.  Then he got a scholarship at the religious seminary in Tbilisi.  He entered in 1894 to study for the priesthood in the Georgian Orthodox Church.

          After Stalin left the seminary, he got a job as a clerk at the Tbilisi Geophysical Observatory.  In a year, he began his career as an active revolutionist.  In 1900, Stalin helped organize a small May Day protest near Tbilisi.  This protested working conditions.  In 1902, Stalin was arrested and put into jail for his revolutionary activities.  In 1903, he was transferred from jail and put into exile in Siberia.  However, he escaped from Siberia in January, 1904.    He returned to Tbilisi and joined the Bolsheviks.  Stalin and Vladimir Lenin met in Finland in 1905.  Most of the time between 1906 and 1917, he was either in jail or in exile.  And in 1917, the Bolsheviks took over Russia, which was called the October Revolution.

          Lenin became head of the new government after the revolution and named Stalin commissar of nationalities.  Within a few months, opposition of this new government grew in parts of the country.  Soon this turned into a civil war.

          The Bolsheviks won the war in 1920.  They began to re-build to country because of the war.  But while this was happening, Stalin was creating a plan that not even Lenin knew about.  But by the end of 1922, Lenin was getting pretty uneasy by Stalin’s rise to power.  Before Lenin was attacked by a series of strokes, he wrote a note saying that Stalin must be removed from office.  But, because of his illness, Lenin couldn’t remove Stalin.  Lenin died in 1924.  The leading Bolsheviks finally discovered Lenin’s note, but they simply ignored it.  And Stalin continued destroying his opponents.  In December, 1929, Stalin became the dictator of Russia.

          In 1929, Stalin began to seize control of agriculture.  He ended private farming and transferred the control of farms, farm equipment, and livestock to the government.  But the farmers protested his order and destroyed about half of the U.S.S.R’s livestock and much of its produce.

          By the late 1930’s, Hitler was ready to conquer Europe.  And in 1939, the U.S.S.R and Germany signed a treaty agreeing not to go to war to each other.  Stalin and Hitler also planned to divide Poland between themselves.  Germany quickly conquered western Poland, and the Soviet Union siezed the eastern side.  Germany and the Soviets signed another treaty setting the borders for the division of Poland.

          In March, 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Stalin agreed that the U.S., the U.K. and the U.S.S.R. would work together nonstop until Germany was defeated.

          Early in 1953, Stalin prepared to replace the top men in the Soviet government.  Apparently he was planning a great purge.  Then on March 4, 1953, the Central Committee of the Communist Party announced that Stalin had suffered a brain hemorrhage on March 1.  Stalin died on March 5, 1953.

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