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(December 21, 1879 – March 5, 1953)
Back The 54mm soldier. Top quality painting. Price is $472.
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Iosif
(Joseph) Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин), original
name Ioseb Jughashvili (Georgian: იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი; see Other names section)
(December 21, 18791 – March 5, 1953) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a
political leader in the Soviet Union. Stalin became general secretary of the
Soviet Communist Party in 1922; following the death of Vladimir Lenin, he
prevailed over Leon Trotsky in a power struggle during the 1920s and fully
consolidated his authority with the Great Purge, a period of severe repression
which reached its peak in 1937, remaining in power through World War II and
until his death. Stalin molded the features that characterized the new Soviet
regime; his policies, based on Marxist-Leninist ideology, are often considered
to represent a political and economic system called Stalinism.
Under Stalin, who replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with five year plans (introduced in 1928) and collective farming, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society to a major world industrial power by the end of the 1930s. However, Soviet agriculture, which had been exploited to finance the industrialization drive, continued to show poor returns throughout the decade. Collectivization had met widespread resistance from the kulaks, resulting in a bitter struggle of many peasants against the authorities, famine, and possibly millions of casualties, particularly in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Stalin argued that the ruling Communist Party's factionalism might weaken the Soviet Union in the face of foreign enemies. During the 1930s, he eliminated effective political opposition through a harsh system of internal exile (see Gulag) and executions, and through providing certain segments of the population benefits so as to win their support or co-opt them into the regime.
A hard-won victory in World War II (the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945), made possible in part through the capacity for production that was the outcome of industrialization, laid the groundwork for the formation of the Warsaw Pact and established the USSR as one of the two major world powers, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following Stalin's death in 1953. Nevertheless, future generations of Soviet leadership repudiated Stalinism; Stalin's successor as First Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced his use of mass repression and his "personality cult" in 1956.2