59 Terrifying Facts about Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was the dictator of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1929-1953. He murdered tens of millions
of people as he forced an underdeveloped Soviet Union to become an atomic
superpower.
Farmers under Stalin’s rule harvested enough grain to feed
the Russian people during widespread famine that killed millions, but Stalin
insisted on exporting it to pay for his new factories.
Stalin was not actually a native Russian. He was from
Georgia, a region that had been claimed by Russia in 1801. He may also be
Ossetian (an Iranian ethnic group) on his paternal side.
Historians still debate how far the Allied cause was
compromised by using one dictator (Stalin) to stop another (Hitler) during WW
II and then handing over tens of millions of Europeans to Soviet servitude
after the war.
Between 1936-1938, Stalin instigated “The Great Purge” or
“The Great Terror” to purge the Communist Party and to consolidate his own
power. Millions of people were sent to forced labor, kidnapped or executed. He
purged more than ¾ of his own generals, field commanders, and naval admirals in
the Red Army.
While approving lists of people to be assassinated, Stalin
reportedly muttered, “Who’s going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or
twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names of the boyars Ivan the
Terrible got rid of? No one.”
Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Tse Tung are
statistically the most effective mass murderers of the 20th century. Numbers
vary, but it is estimated that Stalin killed 40 million people, Mao Tse Tung
killed 60 million, and Hitler killed 30 million.
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) shockingly
excused the purges of both Stalin and later Mao. On the horrors of the gulags,
Sartre thought silence was the best approach: “It was not our duty to write
about the Soviet labor camps.”
Stalin (allegedly) appointed chief scientist Ilya Ivanov
(1870-1932) to create hybrid ape-man of “immense strength, but with an
underdeveloped brain.” When Ivanov was unable to deliver, he was arrested and
exiled to Kazakhstan.
Stalin was hit by a horse-drawn carriage twice as a child,
which led to permanent damage of his left arm. This injury exempted him from
fighting in WW I where he would have likely died.
Stalin loved movies, especially westerns. He considered
himself a movie producer/director, screenwriter, and a supreme censor. When
Lenin said, “Cinema is the most important of the arts,” Stalin agreed. He also
inherited Goebbels’s movie library after the war.
Stalin’s main rival in the communist party, Leon Trotsky
(1879-1940), nicknamed Stalin “Comrade Index Card.” However, Stalin would have
the last laugh as Stalin later became the head of the country, and Trotsky
would later be killed with an ice pick while on the run in Mexico by one of
Stalin’s henchmen.
Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djhugashvili on
December 18, 1878 (or December 6, 1878 according to the Old Style Julian
calendar) in the town of Gori in Georgia. Stalin would later purposely change
his birthdate to December 21, 1879, most likely to throw off the tsar’s secret
police.
Gulag survivor Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) described
Stalin’s prison camps his book The Gulag Archipelago (1973). He said that a
prisoner at any time might be thrown into a “bedbug infested box” where hoards
of hungry parasites would swarm a victim. At first, a prisoner would resist the
parasites, but after a few hours, he would weaken, and let the parasites “drink
his blood without a murmur.”
In 1910, Josef Djhugashvili changed his name to Stalin, which
means “man of steel.”
It is estimated that the death toll directly attributed to
Stalin’s rule is over 20 million lives—on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet
troops and civilians who died during WW II—for a total of 40 million lives.
Some scholars put the number as high as 60 million.
Stalin had an utter disregard for human life, as reflected in
this quote: “Death is the solution to all problems. No man—no problem.”
During WW II, Stalin ordered Red Army officers to execute
deserters and troops who ran from battle. Between 1941 and 1942 alone, more
than 150,000 soldiers were shot.
In 1952, Stalin created an imaginary conspiracy called the
Doctor’s Plot in which he arrested hundreds of doctors and medical workers,
mostly Jews. Ironically, all the best doctors were in jail when Stalin suffered
a stroke and subsequently died.
Some historians believe that Stalin was actually poisoned
with wayfarin (a colorless blood thinner used as rat killer) during a final
dinner with members of his Politburo. Scholars suggest he was assassinated to
prevent a looming war with the United States.
Stalin had two older siblings who died young. He was the only
child in his family to survive to adulthood.
As a teenager, Joseph Stalin was a bully, notorious for acts
of violence and vandalism.
Stalin thought the actor John Wayne (1907-1979) was a threat
to Communism and should be assassinated. Assassins were supposedly sent to LA,
but they failed to kill Wayne before Stalin’s death. When Stalin’s successor
Khrushchev met “the Duke” later, he told Wayne that he had rescinded the order.
Stalin’s father, Besarion (Beso), was an alcoholic who often
beat his wife and young son. After his business failed, Beso left his wife and
Stalin, visiting them only occasionally to continue the beatings and drinking.
Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina (Keke) has been characterized in
vastly different ways. By some accounts, she was an illiterate but devout
housemaid who wanted Stalin to become a priest. Other reports claim she was
promiscuous and even a prostitute who slept with several prominent men in the
community, including the local police chief and the local tavern owner.
Stalin had several physical deformities, including a face
scarred by small pox, a webbed foot, and a withered arm. He would remain
incredibly self-conscious of his appearance throughout his life.
In the course of his secret life, Stalin was known by several
names, including Soso, “Soselo” or “Koba.” The latter was the name of the
romantic hero in Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 novel The Patricide.
Stalin was only 5’4.” President Truman’s nickname for Stalin
was “the little squirt.”
Stalin often put to death even his closest allies and
compatriots. He once said “I trust no one, not even myself.”
Before Stalin became dictator and killed an upwards of 20
million people, he entered the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary—the highest rung of
the educational ladder in the Caucasus--to become a priest. While he later said
he was forced out for stating Marxist ideals, he actually left on his own
accord.
Before becoming a ruthless dictator and supreme ruler of the
U.S.S.R., Stalin’s one and only legitimate job was that of a weatherman for an
observatory. He had to leave suddenly to escape the Tsar’s secret police.
Stalin’s forced industrialization of Russia created the worst
man-made famine in history between 1932 and 1933. Today, Ukrainians, remember
the famine as the Holodomor, or “murder by starvation.” An estimated 6-8
million people died, of whom 4-5 million were Ukrainians.
Before committing mass murders and forced displacements of
millions, Stalin was an aspiring poet. Under the name Soselo, he authored and
published several poems, including odes to violets
Stalin was exiled to Siberia not once, not twice—but seven
times. He managed to escape most of those times, showing a penchant for
dramatic getaways and adopting a wide range of alias and disguises.
After Stalin’s son Yakov (1907-1943) was taken prisoner by
the Nazis, Stalin refused to pay ransom for his return, even though his son
faced the potential of terrible torture. Yakov died in a Nazi concentration
camp.
So feared was Stalin among his own troops, that when he
arrived on the front during Russia’s civil war (1917-1923), an entire regiment
defected to the White Army. He punished the rebellion by publicly executing
anyone he could catch.
Before he was dictator, Joseph Stalin and his gang, known as
“The Outfits” robbed banks, trains, and mail ships to fund the Bolshevik
struggle. In one murderous robbery in 1907, Stalin’s gangsters killed 40
people, robbed two horse drawn carriages, and stole a quarter of million
dollars. He never answered for his crimes.
Under Stalin, religion was violently suppressed with mass
arrests and the closure of churches.
During WW II, Stalin initially tried to ally with Hitler.
However, when Hitler declared war on the Soviet Union, Stalin then sided with
the Allies.
Stalin often turned on the very people he relied on to carry
out his executions. For example, in 1939, he had the commissar of the NKVD
Nikolai Yezhov (a.k.a “the blood thirsty dwarf”) executed. Yezhov was stripped,
beaten, dragged sobbing from his cell, and shot. Officials even retouched
photos to erase him.
Despite killing millions of people, Stalin was nominated for
the Nobel Peace Prize twice, once in 1945 and again in 1948, for his
involvement in bringing WW II to an end. He was also named Time magazine Man of
the Year twice, in 1939 and 1942.
Stalin’s first wife died of typhus 7 months after the birth
of their first son. Stalin said all tenderness died with her. His second wife,
with whom he had two children, committed suicide. Stalin also fathered several
children out of wedlock.
Stalin died in March 5, 1953 after he suffered a stroke. He
was embalmed and preserved in Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square until
1961 when it was removed and buried near the Kremlin as part of the
de-Stalinization process.
In the 1950s, Stalin gave North Korea’s communist leader Kim
II Sung (1912-1994) permission to invade United States supported South Korea,
an event that triggered the Korean War.
Stalin was a prodigious reader and was noted for his
intelligence. He gave one of his many mistresses, who was nicknamed
“Glamourpuss,” a copy of A Study of Western Literature.
A recent Carnegie endowment for International Peace survey
revealed that while 65% of Russians agreed that Stalin was responsible for
millions of deaths, 45% of Russians held a generally positive view of him.[
In 2003, about 750,000 Russians voted for a party that said
it was continuing Stalin’s attempt to battle the ancient Egyptian priesthood of
Ra, which supposedly runs the world from its base in Switzerland.[
During his rule, Stalin sent millions of people to labor
camps or “gulags.” At least one million people died there.
Before Lenin died, he wrote what is known as “Lenin’s
Testament,” which stated that Stalin should be replaced with someone less
brutal. Despite Lenin’s denouncement, Stalin managed to kill or exile all of
his rivals and gain ultimate power.
Stalin created a state-run media propaganda system that
portrayed Stalin as a wise and caring leader. Newspapers claimed he was
responsible for the Soviet Union’s “beautiful present and future.”
During the Great Terror (1936-1938), children of Stalin’s
victims were given new names so they couldn’t track down their parents.
Stalin’s personal doctors suggested that major
atherosclerosis in the brain could have contributed to his paranoia and
ruthlessness of his rule over the Soviet Union.
Stalin most likely exercised greater political power than any
other figure in history. Specifically--through sheer force--he industrialized
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, collectivized agriculture, created a
system of police terror, helped defeat Germany in WW II, and extended Soviet
control to include a belt of Eastern European states.
In 1942, one of Stalin’s advisors told Stalin that the best
way to get concessions from Churchill was to get him drunk. Stalin later
laughed that the tactic worked and that “It’s good when you know the weakness
of your enemy in advance.”
Later in life, Stalin became a hypochondriac and was obsessed
about being poisoned. He insisted on having his food lab-tested on a retinue of
rats and mice that went everywhere with him.
Stalin created one of the most comprehensive and fearsome
apparatus of state terror in all of history, the NKVD (an ancestor KGB). It was
a system of terror that conducted mass executions, kidnappings, created the
horrific Gulag camps, and was responsible for mass deportations of entire
nationalities.
On the night of August 12, 1952, Stalin ordered the execution
of 13 Yiddish poets, writers, and cultural and political figures in the USSR as
part of his paranoid anti-Semitic campaign following WW II.
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, later known as Lana Peters was
the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin. In 1967, she defected
from Soviet Union and sought asylum in the United States.
Among the many mass executions during Stalin’s “Great Terror”
was the Vinnytsia massacre, during which Soviet secret police murdered at least
9,432 people. A monument was erected to the “Victims of Stalinist Terror.”
Later the Soviets rededicated it as the “Victims of Nazi Terror.”
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