The Rise of Joseph Stalin
Born as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia, Joseph Stalin would go on to become one of Russia’s most notorious dictators and lead his country to victory in World War II. Contrary to his position of enormous power later on, Stalin began his life with very little power at all- he grew up in poverty. But after receiving a good education including attending a seminary school which he was later expelled from, Stalin began to take an interest in the Marxist revolutionary movement. In the next few years, he became highly involved in the Bolshevik party, working his way through positions until he reached the top. Once awarded the job of general secretary of the Central Committee and after Lenin’s predicted death, Stalin was able to success Lenin and become the ruler of the Soviet Union (“Joseph Stalin”).
After achieving the position of power he had been working for all his life, Stalin’s first priorities were to “create the communist state that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had once envisioned” (“Joseph Stalin”). To fulfill that vision, he initiated the concept of collective farms and introduced the first of many five-year plans to industrialize the Soviet Union. Although these actions
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To do this, he created his own secret police system that got rid of anyone standing in his way of ruling. Known as the Great Purge, Stalin’s secret police force eliminated old Bolsheviks who were potential enemies and any political opponents (“Stalin, Joseph”). If that wasn’t enough, he also sent millions of people to the Gulag, or a system of Soviet prison camps located in Northern Russian, where they most likely died. While it was widely known how obsessed with himself and with power he was, “...it is still something of a puzzle why after 1933 Stalin felt the need to institute a regime of terror so sweeping and indiscriminate that it left few families in the Soviet Union untouched”