Stalin, Josef

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin was born on December 18, 1878, in Georgia, then part of the Russian empire. As a Bolshevik revolutionary, he played an active role in the Russian Revolution of 1917 that toppled the czarist regime. In 1922, he was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee. In 1924, Stalin successfully navigated the power vacuum created by Vladimir Lenin's death, effectively becoming the leader of the Soviet Union. He continued to serve as such until his death on March 5, 1953. In an effort to soften his harsh image, Stalin deliberately cultivated an avuncular public persona. He was informally referred to as Uncle Joe, affectionately by his friends and admirers and ironically by adversaries as well those uncomfortably allied with him.

Stalin was a master of Machiavellian machination. He seized leadership of the Soviet Union, and kept it, by ruthlessly purging the Communist Party—and the nation as a whole—of any potential opponents. Those who posed actual or perceived threats to Stalin were eliminated in a variety of ways. Some were falsely charged as “enemies of the state” and then executed, exiled, or imprisoned in the labor camps of the infamous Gulag. Others were covertly assassinated, with their deaths faked to look accidental.

Such was the case with Solomon Mikhoels, artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Despite Mikhoels's additional service as chair of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II, an increasingly anti-Semitic Stalin ordered him killed. The murder was made to look like the result of a car accident by having a truck run over Mikhoels's already dead body, which was then deposited in a snowbank beside a street in Minsk. To keep up appearances, Mikhoels was given a state funeral.

Stalin's opponents disappeared in others ways as well. Official photographs were doctored to eliminate images of those who had fallen out of favor with him. Not even high-ranking Soviet officials or close friends of Stalin were immune from such treatment, as the cases of Nikolai Yezhov and Leon Trotsky illustrate.

As People's Commissar for State Security, Yezhov was head of the NKVD (the Soviet Union's secret police). From 1936 to 1938 he was the point man for Stalin's Great Purge, which targeted a wide swath of Soviet citizens, ranging from humble peasants to the powerful and privileged, millions of whom were killed. As an unintended consequence, the Great Purge diminished the nation's agricultural, industrial, and military capacity, leaving the Soviet Union ill-prepared to face the threat posed by Nazi Germany. Yezhov's efforts earned him the same treatment, with Stalin's approval, that he had inflicted upon others. In 1940, he was arrested, tortured, and forced to confess to crimes against the state, for which he was executed.

Trotsky suffered a similar fall from favor. Despite his credentials as a leading Communist theorist and his service as the Red Army's founder and first leader, he was assassinated in Mexico on orders from Stalin. After their deaths, Yezhov and Trotsky were conspicuously absent from official photographs in which they had previously appeared, often in close proximity to Stalin. Such positioning was an unambiguous sign of the status they once enjoyed as members of his inner circle.

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