Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili - Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) was born on Dec. 21, 1879 in Gori, in the Russian province of Georgia. His father was a shoemaker, his mother, Yekaterina (a seamstress), made the more profound impact on his life. She directed his education and hoped, he would train to become a priest. Instead, Stalin became a loyal supporter of the Marxist revolution. In 1899, Iosif joined the Social Democrats, and became a revolutionary. He organized many worker protests, which led to his arrest in 1902. He was exiled to Siberia but escaped. From 1902 to 1913 he would be arrested and exiled six times, he escaped almost every time.
The Social Democrats split into two groups, the Bolsheviks, under Lenin, and the Mensheviks. Stalin joined the radical
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From March to November of 1917, Russia was mandated by a Provisional Government, which made plans to democratically elect another assembly. The elected government, led by Lenin, made peace with the Germans and had a three-year civil war. Stalin commanded many parts of the civil war.
The Bolsheviks named themselves the Communists after the war. Stalin was selected as General Secretary of the Party in 1922. Lenin began to grow wary of Stalin, and wrote an attestant warning other members of his party. Lenin's advisers, ignored the testament and allowed Stalin to remain in power. Stalin began his rise to dominance by destroying his rival Trotsky, exiling him from the Soviet Union in 1929. By 1930, he stood alone atop the Party and the Soviet Union.
In 1927 Stalin had begun a drive to industrialize and modernize the Soviet Union, with a Five-Year Plan. Stalin wanted to take all the peasants’ land and redistribute it. The peasants opposed heavily, the government killed/exiled the farmers, famine spread in the country, and close to ten million people died. Seeing this, Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda committed suicide in