A Writeup on Joseph Stalin

In Animal Farm, Napoleon is parallel to Joseph Stalin in reality. Who is Joseph Stalin then? In this post, I shall do a writeup on Joseph Stalin.

Birth and Early Life
Joseph Stalin was born in Georgia in 1878. He encountered many unfortunate accidents. A horse carriage accident permanently damaged his left arm while small pox scarred his face. At the age of ten, he attended church school where the Georgian children were forced to speak Russian. He rebelled against the imperialist and religious order at the age of sixteen when he received a scholarship to the Georgian Orthodox seminary. However, he was expelled shortly because of failure in taking his final exams. Soon after, he discovered Lenin's writings and became determined to become a Marxist revolutionary, eventually joining Lenin's Bolsheviks. He became a full-time revolutionary after being marked by the Tsar's secret police. He rose in rank rapidly and became a chief operative in Caucasus, a mountainous region on the border of Asia and Europe. Through many atrocities such as bank robberies and kidnap, he tried to raise funds. In 1906, he married Ekaterina Svanidze who gave birth to his first child. He temporarily resigned from his party due to the banning of bank robberies. However, he masterminded a raid on a bank shipment which caused the deaths of 40 people. He then fled to the capital of Azerbaijan where his wife died of typhus. He claimed that "with her died any human feeling in him" at her funeral. In Azerbaijan, Stalin organised Muslims in partisan activities, including the murder of many of the Tsar's supporters. On many occasions, he was captured and sent to exile but escaped. After one of his escapes, he returned to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) to create the party newspaper Pravda from from which he got his pen name Stalin which means steel in Russian. During his last exile, he was conscripted to join the Russian army to fight in World War I but was deemed unfit due to his damaged left arm.

Revolution and Wars
In 1917, Stalin played a huge role in the Russian Revolution. He started the Revolution after ousting his editors in the Pravda newspaper. He then took a position in supporting the Russian provisional government. However, after Lenin won at the April 1917 Party Conference, Stalin and Pravda supported the overthrowing of the provisional government. At the conference, Stalin was elected to be the Bolshevik Central Commitee. After Lenin took part in an attempted revolution, Stalin helped him to evade capture and eventually ordered the Bolsheviks to surrender to avoid a slaughter. Stalin and Lenin eventually escaped to Finland where they drafted up plans of another revolution. Lenin also became the leader of the Bolsheviks. When the October Revolution happened, Kerensky, the head of the Russian provisional government was at the German front to rally Russian soldiers. By November, the Winter Palace had been stormed and Kerensky's cabinet was arrested.

Stalin also engineered the 1921 Invasion of Georgia and he adopted a set of centralist policies towards them. This created a rift between Lenin and Stalin as Lenin believed that all Soviet states should stand equal. However, Lenin still regarded Stalin as a loyal ally. Stalin suffered a stroke in 1922 and he went into semi-retirement. Stalin visited him often so that he could keep in touch with the outside world. However, they quarrelled and their relationship deteoriated. During Lenin's semi-retirement, Stalin forged an alliance with Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev against Trotsky. This signals the start of a power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. When Lenin died in 1924, the disputes between Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky intensified to the extent that they ejected from the Central Committee and then from the Party itself. Kamenev and Zinoviev were later readmitted while Trotsky was expelled from the country. As Stalin pushed for industrialisation and control of the economy, he contravened Lenin's New Economy Policy. In 1927, a critical fall in grain supplies prompted Stalin to seize farmer's crops.

Changes under Stalin's Rule
Under Stalin's rule, he increased the scope and power of the intelligence and secret police. Soviet intelligence forces began to set up networks in major locations worldwide. The effectiveness of this can be seen from the fact that Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico by the intelligence.
Other than the intelligence, Stalin also tried to purge leaders in the Bolsheviks who won the majority of the crowd. One example of this was Sergei Kirov. He received much less negative votes than Stalin and he was assassinated. Many trials, including the Moscow trials, were held and that started the cycle of public persecution and abuse. Besides the purges, he promoted atheism through education in schools as he thought it was easier to create a perfect communist society without the presence of another idea. By the 1930s, it was considered dangerous to be involved with religion. Many priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Much of Russia's religious buildings were demolished. About 3 to 60 million people were killed before the Soviet Union dissolved.

World War II
Before World War II, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany after failed attempts to sign anti-German military alliance with England and France. This divided the whole of East Europe into spheres of Soviet and German influences. In 1939, German forces and Bolsheviks invaded Poland and this started World War II. The Soviet Union was given part of Poland. The Tripartite Pact was signed by the Axis Powers. In 1941, however, Hitler breaks the pact with the Soviet Union, initiating Operation Barbarossa which saw the German Invasion of Soviet Union territories. By the end of 1941, German forces had advanced deep into the Soviet Union and there were many casualties in the Soviet Army. With the help of Britain and the United States, the Soviet Union succeeded in pushing back the German army, eventually defeating Germany which initiated the suicide of German leader Adolf Hilter.

Death
In 1953, after an all-night dinner, Stalin was found unconcious in his room, probably after suffering a stroke which rendered him unable to move. 4 days later, he died at the age of 74. The cause of his death was listed as cerebral haemorrhage. However, it had been suggested that he had been assassinated. His body was preserved in Lenin's Mausoleum until 1961, when his body was removed and buried next to the Kremlin walls as a process of de-Stalinization.

I hope this post has been enriching and would give you ample knowledge in the reading of Animal Farm. Thank you.