Joseph Stalin

Melissa Allard

July 15, 2016

HIS 112

Research Paper – Joseph Stalin

Under the direction of Jerry Sheppard

At The University of Mount Olive

        Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili in 1879 in a small town of Gori. Born into poverty, Stalin was an only child. His Father was a shoemaker and an alcoholic that frequently beat him, his mother was a laundress. From a young man Stalin was involved in revolutionary politics, as well criminal activity and from 1902 onwards he had been imprisoned no few than six times. He took the name Stalin, from the Russian for “man of steel.” He was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1929 to 1953. Unquestionability Stalin’s twenty-five year dictatorship was indomitable and the Soviet regime under him can be considered to be the example of totalitarianism.

        In 1897 the Russian Empire contained over 125 million people, of which only two-fifths were Russian. The other 60 percent was made up of multinational, multilingual, and multi-religious collection of Slavs, Jews, Balts, Finns, Georgians, Armenians, and Turkic-speaking Muslin people of Central Asia. Stalin, himself a non-Russian and these non-Russians were subject to racial discrimination and religious persecutions. The emancipation from Russian imperialism was a struggle for them. From 1894 to 1917, the Russian empire was ruled by Tsar Nicholas as absolute autocrats. Over 80 percent of Nicholas’s subjects were peasants living in village communes that were closely regulated. As Russia entered the First World War in 1914 the tsarist structure became strained and would soon collapse ending a three hundred year rule of the Romanov tsars.