Joseph Stalin

Who was he: History is filled with truths as well as half-truths and at times it can be complete fiction, but history does say that the man who turned the Soviet Union into a world superpower always felt unfairly treated and developed an almost unstoppable desire to be respected – even when Joseph Stalin's streak of cold-heartedness would come to the surface.

No one ever accused Stalin of being a gifted intellectual like Trotsky or Lenin because Stalin intently focused on the basic nuts and bolts of revolutionary activity. He had no problem putting himself at personal risk by distributing illegal material, helping to organize workers for the cause, and robbing trains to support the revolution.

Lenin and his bookwormish friends lived abroad and although they wrote poignant articles about the Russian working class, they never really intermingled with the people the way Stalin did. They found Stalin's daily antics offensive and frustrating at times, but they valued his Party loyalty.

When the revolution ended, they gave Stalin a series of leadership positions in the new Soviet government, but these were all considered low-priority posts. When he was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee in 1922, he followed his plan of controlling the organization by controlling the personnel. There was a calculated method behind Stalin's grassroots approach.

Stalin set all agendas, made all appointments, and moved the Party personnel around so each one of them had some input in the Party, and thus owed their positions to Stalin. By the time the Party intellectuals realized what Stalin was doing it was too late. Stalin placed semi-competent people where he wanted them and the only person that could stop the process and challenge him was Lenin, who was by then on his death bed after a series of strokes left him unable to speak Even if he could, Stalin controlled who had access to the leader. The General Secretary of the Party became the de facto leader of the country thanks to Stalin's brilliant manipulative abilities.

When Lenin died in 1924 Stalin went on a mission of destroying all the old leaders of the Party by identifying their weaknesses. He used the divide and conquer approach to remove them from their positions or to exile them. But Stalin had forgotten they still had pens and tongues and knew how to use them, so he changed tactics. He went on a reign of terror and methodically labeled the founding fathers "enemies of the people." He claimed they all worked for capitalistic intelligence agencies.

Trotsky was exiled to Mexico in 1929 and it took Stalin 11 years to silence him with an ice pick. Stalin's enemy purges touched every local Party cell and all intellectual professionals since he believed that anyone with a higher education was a potential counterrevolutionary. Stalin virtually eliminated Soviet brainpower, which left him as the sole intellectual and expert on every human subject.

He projected his own inferiority on the country while he pursued an economic policy that included rapid industrialization to keep up with the capitalists. He collectivized agriculture, which meant he took back the land from the peasants and made them serfs again. He developed a massive heavy industry building program, which kept the country productive during the Great Depression.

Joseph Stalin was a hero to some, but his violent government agriculture plan, his forced resettlement, the elimination of successful peasants and the use of cheap labor, attained through the arrest of millions of innocent citizens, caused countless deaths and created the worst man-made famine in human history. Stalin died in 1953, before an assassination plot against him was carried out.

In 1956, in his famous "secret" speech to the Party Congress, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his power-grabbing tactics. In spite of such politically expedient statements that have been issued by the Party, Stalin's reign of terror will never be forgotten by the Russian people who continue to live under Communist Party rule.

Background: Joseph Stalin, who was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, felt inferior around intellectuals and never trusted them. The fact that Stalin was born into a dysfunctional family in a poor Georgian village on 18 December 1878 and that he was permanently scarred after a bout with smallpox at age seven contributed to his inferiority complex, as did his mildly deformed arm after being hit by a horse-drawn carriage at age 12.

Joseph Stalin never completed his education even though his mother wanted him to become a priest. She sent him to a seminary in Tiflis, but he was enamored with the city's revolutionary circles and withdrew from the seminary just before graduation when the seminar raised its fees beyond what Stalin could pay.

Stalin became a clerk with the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory as he increased his participation with revolutionary activity. After narrowly avoiding arrest by the Tsar's secret police, however, he went into hiding and became a full-time revolutionary, and met Lenin for the first time in 1906.

There are those these days who claim that most of the Communist Revolution was generated by the great central banking families that have done so much damage for so long throughout the world. And it is certainly a fact that Western elites assisted in funding communism by supporting the Red Army and by importing Lenin from Germany where he'd been harbored.

These same factions also funded Adolf Hitler and then apparently manipulated the Yalta Treaty to set up the next war ... the Cold War. By then, perhaps, Stalin had served his purpose. He died on 5 March 1953, apparently of the lingering impact of a stroke. Later review has suggested he had likely ingested warfarin, a form of rat poison that inhibits blood coagulation thereby potentially causing his stroke.

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