Joseph Stalin

The Soviet statesman Joseph Stalin (1879‐1953) was the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union and the leader of world communism for almost thirty years.

Under Stalin, the Soviet Union greatly enlarged its territory, won a war of unprecedented destructiveness, and transformed itself from a relatively backward country into the second most important industrial nation in the world. For these achievements, the Soviet people and the international Communist movement paid a price that many of Stalin’s critics consider excessive. The price included the loss of millions of lives; massive material and spiritual deprivation; political repression; an untold waste of resources; and the erection of an inflexible authoritarian system of rule thought by some historians to be one of the most offensive...