20 million Soviet citizens died at his hand. For a quarter of a century, he ruled his huge empire with a ruthless iron fist. Terror was his modus Operandi. While he was alive, no one, not even his closest family members were safe. Yet, at his passing, he was mourned as the savior of his people. In this podcast, we will discuss the terrible truth of Joseph Stalin.
 
“ A single day is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
 
Joseph Stalin was a leader in the Russian Revolution, becoming a Communist Party Leader and Soviet State ruler known as the Union of the SSR (USSR). He maintained an uncomfortable alliance with the United States and Britain to fight Nazi Germany throughout World War II, but after the war, he discarded any friendship illusions.

Early Life

The man who made the Soviet Union a world powerhouse at unthinkable human cost from a country behind it.  Stalin was born into a dysfunctional family in a poor village in Georgia. Stalin, scarred with a little pox and a little distorted arm, always felt treated by life, and so developed a strong, idealized yearning for grandeur and honor, mixed with a sharp streak of calculating coldness in relation to those who had mistreated him.

Education

When Stalin was 12 years old, the debate came to fruition. Beso, who traveled to Tbilisi (Georgia's capital) to find employment, returned back and brought Stalin to the factory where he worked to make Stalin a cobbler. It was the final time Beso affirmed his picture of the future of Stalin. Keke got Stalin back with help from friends and professors and took him back to the seminary again. Beso refused to support either Keke or his kid and ended the marriage following this occurrence.
Though later she obtained work at a women's cress store, Keke supported Stalin in his profession as a laundry.

Keke saw Stalin's understanding, which his instructors realized. Stalin was a high-school student and in 1894 was awarded an award at the Tbilisi Theological Seminary. There were hints though that the priesthood was not for Stalin. Stalin was not a chorus but also an unscathed conductor of a street gang before joining the seminary.

 
As A Young Revolutionary Stalin
 
Stalin discovered Karl Marx's writings while at the seminary. He joined the local communist party and soon he became more interested than any desire that he would have needed to be a priest in overturning Zar Nicholas II. Only a few months after his graduation, Stalin left school, and in 1900 he gave his first public address.
 
Stalin, after joining the revolutionary subway, went to hide using the identity "Koba." But, Stalin was arrested by police in 1902 and banished for the first time to Siberia in 1903. Free from jail, Stalin was still supporting the revolution and helped organize peasants against Zar Nikolaus II in the Russian Revolution of 1905. Stalin was imprisoned seven times and deported, and between 1902 and 1913 escaped six times.
 
Stalin married Ekaterine Svanidze, a sister of a colleague from a school, in 1904 after being jailed. Before Ekaterine died of typhoid in 1907, they had one son, Yacov.
 

1917 Revolution of Russia

 
The activities that led to the Russian revolution in 1917 were lacking in Stalin since was exiled in Siberia between 1913 and 1917.
 
Stalin resumed his job as a Bolshevik leader when he was released in March 1917. By the time he met up, he had already abdicated Czar Nicholas II during the Russian February Revolution and he had also returned to Russia several weeks after Stalin. The temporary government was in charge with the czar overthrown.
 
But Lenin and Stalin wanted the interim government to be overthrown and a communist government controlled by the Bolsheviks installed. The Bolsheviks and Lenin felt that they were about to start a revolution, and on 25 October 1917, Lenin started a bloody coup. Within two days the Bolsheviks took control and so became the country's leaders, Petrograd, the capital of Russia.
 
But, not everybody was satisfied with the country's bolsheviks. As the Bolshevik troops fought against the White Army, Russia was plunged into a civilian conflict (made up of various anti-Bolshevik factions). The Civil War of Russia continued until 1921.
 
In 1921 the White Army was derailed and the leading leaders in the new bolshevik administration were Lenin, Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. While Stalin and Trotsky competed, Lenin recognized and fostered their different capabilities.
 
In 1922, Stalin was assigned the less prominent role of Secretary-General of the Communist Party. Trotsky was more popular than Stalin. Trotsky, a convincing orator, held a prominent presence in external affairs and many saw him as a seeming heir.
 
But neither Lenin nor Trotsky foresees Stalin's position as an integral component in his ultimate takeover, which allowed him to develop allegiance inside the Communist Party.

Communist Party Leader

When the health of Lenin started in 1922 with the first of strokes, tensions between Stalin and Trotsky grew, creating the difficult question of who would succeed Lenin. Lenin had supported shared authority since his sickbed and kept that vision till his death on 21 January 1924.

 
Trotsky finally didn't match Stalin, because Stalin had spent his years developing devotion and support in the party. By 1927, Stalin completely eliminated all his competitors in politics (including the exiled Trotsky) to emerge as a leader of the Soviet Communist Party.

Hunger Five Year Plans

Stalin had been aware of the propensity of the Soviet Union (as it became called from 1922) to use brutality to meet political objectives, yet it was unable to prepare for the severe violence and tyranny Stalin unleashed in 1928. It was the first year of the Stalin 5 Year Plan, a bold try towards the industrialization of the Soviet Union.
 
In Communism's name, Stalin confiscated and restructured the economy, including farms and fabrics. But this led to lower production efficiency, guaranteeing widespread hunger raced over the countryside.
 
Stalin retained export levels, sending food out of the nation to hide the catastrophic effects of the scheme, although rural people were killed by hundreds of thousands. Any protests against his actions immediately killed or sent to a gulag (a prison camp in the remote regions of the nation).
 
A year early on was proclaimed finished the First Five year Plan (1928–32), and dismal outcomes were launched in the second Five years Plan (1933–37). In 1938 began a third five-year period, but in 1941 World War II was interrupted.
 
Although the attempts were unstable, Stalin's policy of prohibiting advertising led to the full implications of these upheavals being concealed for decades. The five-year plans seemed to illustrate Stalin's proactive leadership to those who were not immediately affected. 

Personality culture

Stalin is also known to develop personality cultivation without precedent. Stalin's image and deeds could not have been more distinct if he presented himself as a paternal figure watching over his people. Stalin also marketed itself via his history with stories about his upbringing and the part he played in Revolution, while Stalin's artworks and sculptures maintained him in public view.
 
But millions of people could only go so far about die, monuments, and heroic legends. Stalin, thus, transformed it into a policy that was punished by exile or execution that showed anything short of total dedication. Furthermore, Stalin wiped out any kind of opposition or competition.

The Great Terror

In spite of Stalin's efforts to remove any disagreement, there was opposition, among officials of the party who realized that Stalin's policies were destructive. Stalin was, besides, re-elected in 1934. This election made Stalin conscious of his criticism, and it started eliminating everyone, including his most important competitor Sergi Kirov who he believed to be an opposition.

 
The murderer Kirov was murdered in 1934, Stalin was used by the dead to commend the risks of the anti-communist movement and he thought that he was the most culpable one.
 
Few commanders have so ruled their ranks like Stalin during the 1930s' Great Terror. He targeted cabinet and government officials, troops, ministers, intellectuals, or anybody else whom he thought suspicious.
 
His secret police would torture, jail or kill those who were confiscated (or a combination of these experiences). Stalin was indiscriminate in his goals and high-ranking government officials and military officers had not been immune. Actually, the Great Terror removed many of the government's major officials.
 
During the Great Terror, the whole public was urged to engage in widespread paranoia. Those who were caught pointing their fingers at neighbors and colleagues to save their own lives. Farcical show trials verified the accused's guilt and assured social ostracism for family members of the guilty if they managed to escape detention.
 
Particularly since Stalin saw a military takeover as the biggest threat the military was killed with the Great Terror. This purge of military leadership would afterward be a serious disadvantage to the military efficiency of the Soviet Union with World War II on the horizon.
 
While death toll estimates vary, Stalin is credited with 20 million people being killed alone during the Great Terror. Besides to being one of the biggest instances of State-sponsored assassination in history, the Grand Terror showed Stalin's compulsive paranoia and his readiness to put it before national interests.

Begins the Cold War

The burden of reconstructing Europe remained when World War II ended. Whereas the U.S. and the UK desired stability, Stalin was unwilling to give up the area he had gained during the war. Stalin, thus, claimed to have freed the land of the Soviet Empire from Germany.

Under Stalin, the Communist Parties seized control of each government in the nation, closed off all connections with the West, and became the Soviet Satellite State's official.
 
Although the Allies refused to launch an extensive war against Stalin, U.S. President Harry Truman acknowledged that Stalin could not go unchallenged. In 1947, Truman established the Truman Doctrine in reaction to Stalin's rule of Eastern Europe, in which the United States committed to aiding communists in their risk of being overrun. Stalin in Greece and Turkey, autonomous during the cold war, was thwarted.


The Berlin Airlines Blockade

Again in 1948, Stalin confronted the Allies, trying to grab control of Berlin, a town divided among World War 2 winners. As part of his victory after the war, Stalin had already taken East Germany and broken it off from the West. In an attempt at forcing the other Allies to leave Berlin in a bid to secure the whole capital which was situated within East Germany. Stalin blocked the city.
 
But resolved not to allow Stalin to do so, the US arranged an airlift that flew large volumes in West Berlin for over a year. The blockade was ineffectual and on 12 May 1949, Stalin finally finished. It remained split between Berlin (and the rest of Germany). This was expressed in 1961 during the height of the Cold War when the Berlin Wall was established.
 
While Stalin's strategy and attitude towards the west remained a Soviet policy long after Stalin died, the Berlin blocage was the largest military conflict between Stalin and the west. During the Cold War, this contest between the Soviet Union and the USA developed into a near nuclear war. The Cold War only ended with the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. 

Death

Stalin sought in his dying years to transform his image into a man of peace. He focused his attention on the reconstruction of the Soviet Union and invested in many house projects, such as bridges and canals, although most of them were not finished.

 
In his efforts to create his legacy as a creative leader, evidence shows that Stalin was present at the next purge, an attempt to eradicate the Jewish people in the Soviet. This never happened as on 1 March 1953 Stalin died, 4 days later, in a stroke.
 
Even after his death, Stalin kept his personality cult. Stalin's body, like Lenin, was embalmed and shown in public. Through death and devastation, Stalin's death destroyed the nation, in spite of those he governed. He retained a cult allegiance, but in time it would diminish.

Legacy

In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev took over the Communist Party. It took a few years for Stalin to replace it. Khrushchev shattered the secret of Stalin's atrocities and led the Soviet Union in a "de-Stalinization" phase, in which the cataclysmic deaths under Stalin and the deficiencies in his programs were recognized.
 
The Soviet people did not have an easy task of breaking through Stalin's personality cult to understand the true facts of their rule. The number of deaths estimated is astonishing. Millions of the Soviet people have wondered the precise fate of their loved ones because of their concealment about the "purged."
 
It was time to end the reverence of the guy who had killed millions with these new-found realities about Stalin. Stalin's photos and sculptures have been removed, and Stalingrad City was renamed Volgograd in 1961.
 
In October 1961 Stalin's remains were taken from the mausoleum, which lay alongside Lenin's, for over 8 years. The body of Stalin is close buried, so it can not be moved. It is encircled by concrete.