Joseph Stalin and His Rise to Power Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born on December 18th 1878 in Gori, Georgia, which, at the time, was still part of Russia. His early years consisted of hardship, having been born an only child to an impoverished family with an alcoholic father who abused him and contracting smallpox that left him riddled with facial scars. In his teens he was granted a scholarship in order to study priesthood at the Georgian Orthodox Church, where he secretly began reading the writings of Karl Marx, and would eventually throw away his scholarship and be kicked from the school for missing exams, having claimed it to be for communist propaganda. He soon became a political agitator, fighting for the revolutionary movements against the Russian monarchy by partaking in strikes and demonstrations; however, these peaceful protests soon turned into bank heists, of which the money went to the Bolshevik Party, and would get him “arrested multiple times between 1902 and 1913, and subjected to imprisonment and exile in Siberia”(“Mini-biography on the life of Joseph Stalin” 2009). After his imprisonment, when he was in his thirties, he changed his name to Joseph Stalin, meaning ''man of steel” in Russian. In 1912 Joseph Stalin was appointed by Lenin, who was in exile in Switzerland at the time, …show more content…
Anyone labeled as a threat to the people were taken away in the night by Stalin's secret police, they would be put on “show trials” and the executed. These purges were created around a media base that Stalin molded to make him out to be a hero, this caused the people to adore him, and if they found any fault or threat to his reign, it would be likely that it would be reported. He made the people love and idolize him with falsified textbooks and a romanticized life. Cities were named to honor him, art was made to idolize him, music was created to serenade his