Joseph Stalin

December 18, 1878 — March 5, 1953

Short in stature with a pockmarked face and one arm shorter than the other from a childhood accident, Joseph Stalin was an unlikely dictator. The man whose adopted name meant “Man of Steel” was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili to a poor family Georgia, and as a boy he wanted to be a priest. He joined the seminary and excelled in his classes, but soon he began to turn away from his original calling, eventually declaring himself an atheist and a Marxist. He soon joined the Bolshevik party and became one of its most prominent Georgian members, going so far as to orchestrate the robbery of a major Imperial bank. Stalin became the editor of the Bolshevik broadside Pravda and one of Lenin’s closest associates for nearly a decade, though the two men had a falling out towards the end of Lenin’s life. After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin began to position himself as the next leader of the Soviet Union, exiling Leon Trotsky, once thought to be the heir-apparent. By 1929, Stalin had consolidated power, and as the dictator of the Soviet Union, he began a program of collectivization and industrialization that lead to famine and the deaths of millions. In 1939, Stalin agreed to a non-aggression pact with Hitler, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed by the Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers, in which the two nations agreed to carve up Poland. But when the Nazis broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, Stalin allied his nation with Britain, and later the United States. Stalin also had a troubled relationship with his children, his son Yakov from his first marriage to Ekaterine Svanidze (who died), and Vasily and Svetlana from his second marriage to Nadezhda Alliluyeva (who committed suicide). He also had at least two illegitimate children. Though Stalin is thought of as the embodiment of Soviet Russia, he remained proud of his Georgian heritage throughout his life and spoke Russian with a heavy accent, which a translator once compared to that of English spoken by a Scot.

Photograph: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, public domain