1878-1953
Soviet politician

1. Introduction
2. Stories
3. Biographical summary
4. See also
5. Further reading
6. References

1. Introduction

Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century from the late 1920s until his death, with dictatorial powers from the early 1930s. He was born Ioseb Djugashvili (‘YOH-seb Joo-gash-VEE-lee’) in Georgia, adopting the name Stalin, from the Russian for ‘steel’. He promoted the collectivisation of farming and rapid industrialisation, triggering millions of deaths from starvation. His military opposition to Nazi Germany was vital to the Allies’ victory in World War II, after which he secured the Soviet Union’s control over most of eastern Europe, triggering the ‘Cold War’ with the West. He died in 1953 of a brain haemorrhage, aged 74.

2. Stories

• Stalin became politically active while at a theological seminary, abandoning thoughts of becoming a priest.
• Stalin aligned himself with Lenin and the Bolsheviks but would later have some differences with Lenin.
• Stalin’s relationships resulted in three children with his two wives and perhaps three other children.
• Churchill’s view of Russia and the Soviet Union evolved considerably over time, mainly because of the threat of Hitler and then the Cold War.
• The first meetings between Stalin and Churchill were in Moscow in 1942, helping to form the working relationship between the Big Three (the USA, the Soviet Union and the UK).
• Stalin enjoyed reading, long meals and classical music.
• Stalin died at his country home outside Moscow and joined Lenin in his mausoleum for a few years.

Stalin became politically active while at a theological seminary, abandoning thoughts of becoming a priest.

Stalin was the sole surviving child of a shoemaker and a seamstress in Georgia, part of the Russian Empire. His alcoholic father was violent and his mother decided to separate, moving frequently with her son while trying to make ends meet. Stalin grew up speaking Georgian and retained a heavy accent after learning Russian. He had smallpox aged six, leaving him with facial scarring, and an accident aged 12 which left him with a shortened left arm, sparing him military service and possible death in World War I. He was sensitive about his appearance, including his short height (5’5″-5’6” or 1.65-1.68 m), and ensured that photographs and portraits were to his satisfaction.

Stalin’s mother hoped that his church school and theological seminary attendance would take him into the priesthood but he became focussed on Marxism and political activities, leaving the seminary before completing his studies, either under compulsion or through ill health. He became a clerk at a meteorological observatory in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) but was soon devoting himself to giving Marxism classes and organising strike action. He came to the attention of the Okhrana, the Russian Empire’s secret police, and moved frequently, using aliases.

Relocating to Batumi on the Black Sea, he organised more strikes, the storming of a prison and a mass demonstration. During the First Russian Revolution in 1905, he formed militia squads to attack imperial police and troops. Over the next few years, he helped to organise robberies, extortion rackets, kidnappings and currency counterfeiting in various locations to raise money for political causes. His ordering of the deaths of some informants was an early indication of his ruthlessness. He was arrested and sentenced to exile in Siberia and Vologda on five occasions, escaping three times.

In 1912, he started using the name Stalin, from stal, Russian for ‘steel’. The suffix -in may have imitated the name of his mentor Lenin, also a pseudonym (his real name was Vladimir Ulyanov) which was possibly adopted when using the passport of a friend or while incarcerated by the River Lena in Siberia.

Stalin aligned himself with Lenin’s Bolsheviks but would later have some differences with Lenin.

At a London congress in 1903, a radical faction led by Lenin split from a more moderate group led by Julius Martov. After a walkout by some participants, Lenin had a voting majority and called his group ‘Bolshevik’, from the Russian for ‘majority’. Martov accepted the term ‘Menshevik’, from ‘minority’. Stalin soon associated himself with the Bolshevik faction and attended a Bolshevik conference in Finland in 1905, where he met Lenin for the first time.

Lenin saw that he could make use of Stalin’s zeal and his Georgian background to appeal to other non-Russians. Stalin gained increasingly influential roles in Lenin’s organisation, editing its publication Pravda (‘Truth’) and being appointed to the Bolshevik Central Committee.

Stalin wished to mend fences with the Mensheviks, which Lenin forbade. Later they would also disagree on topics such as whether western Europe was ready for a revolution, the level of state control over international trade, and the relationship between Soviet republics and central powers. Inevitably Stalin would have to give way.

Lenin was living in Switzerland and Stalin was in exile in Siberia during the Russian February Revolution in 1917 which toppled Tsar Nicholas II. They both soon made their way to Petrograd (later Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg). In July 1917, the Bolsheviks staged the ‘July Days’ uprising against the Provisional Government but the uprising was put down and Stalin helped Lenin to go into temporary hiding.

Lenin, supported by Stalin, then instigated the October Revolution of 1917 against the Provisional Government, resulting in an initially unstable Lenin-led government and nearly six years of civil war (see Leon Trotsky). Stalin backed Lenin’s development of the Cheka (secret police) and its violent repression of opposition (the ‘Red Terror’).

Stalin became secretary-general of the Communist Party in 1922. However, Lenin’s ‘Testament’,* supposedly dictated shortly before his death, suggested that Stalin should be replaced by someone ‘more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.’¹ However, its distribution was highly controlled, allowing Stalin to retain his position, soon taking over Lenin’s powers and then extending them.

* Separate from his ‘Political Testament’; some suspect that it was written by his wife; it was accepted as authentic at the time.

Stalin’s relationships resulted in three children with his two wives and perhaps three other children.

Having rarely been without a girlfriend, in 1906 Stalin married Ekaterina Svanidze (‘Kato’), a Georgian seamstress, whom he had met through her politically active brother in Tiflis. Kato wanted a religious wedding but they had difficulty finding a priest to marry them because of Stalin’s false papers to evade authorities. Eventually one of Lenin’s former seminary classmates agreed to conduct the ceremony at two o’clock in the morning. Stalin told his mother about the wedding after the event. He and Kato had a son, Yakov, conceived shortly before the marriage, but Kato died when her infant was eight months old, probably from typhus. Stalin was grief-stricken but left his son to be brought up by Kato’s family.

Stalin’s second wife was Nadezhda Alliluyeva (‘Nadya’), 22 years younger than him. Her father Sergei was a Bolshevik who had hidden Stalin while on the run in the early 1900s. Stalin is said to have saved Nadya from drowning as a toddler. Many years later Sergei hid Lenin, and Stalin again, leading to Stalin’s relationship with Nadya and marriage, this time without a religious ceremony. She worked as a secretary for both him and Lenin but enrolled for engineering studies to develop an independent life. They had two children, Vasily and Svetlana, and adopted Artyom Sergeyev whose father, a close friend of Lenin, died in a train crash four months after Artyom’s birth.

Stalin opposed Nadya’s wish for independence and they frequently had rows, sometimes about Nadya’s suspicions about Stalin having affairs, exacerbating her mental health issues. After a scene between them at a dinner party, Nadya returned to her residence in the Kremlin and shot herself in the heart. For many years her death was attributed to complications from appendicitis.

While Stalin was in exile in 1911, his landlady Maria Kuzakova became pregnant. Her son Konstantin later claimed that he was Stalin’s son but the interior ministry made him sign a secrecy agreement. During another period of exile, he had a relationship with 13-year old Lidiya Pereprygina who soon became pregnant, losing her first child but then producing a son Alexander who was adopted by her future husband.

Churchill’s view of Russia and the Soviet Union evolved considerably over time, mainly because of the threat of Hitler and then the Cold War.

Churchill hated Bolshevism with a passion, calling it ‘foul baboonery’² and describing communists on various occasions as ‘crocodiles’.³ ‘Bolshevism is not a policy; it is a disease’,⁴ he said in 1919. His initial loathing was triggered by what he saw as betrayal of the Allied Powers by the revolutionaries, who withdrew from fighting against Germany in World War I (see Leon Trotsky).

His opposition then turned towards what he saw as the calamitous economic and social effects of their policies. In 1920, he said that the theories of Lenin and Trotsky ‘have driven man from the civilization of the 20th century into a condition of barbarism worse than the Stone Age, and left him the most awful and pitiable spectacle in human experience, devoured by vermin, racked by pestilence, and deprived of hope’.⁵ Later in life, he regretted the ‘failure to strangle Bolshevism at birth’.⁶

His concern was initially not about Russia as a whole but about the Bolshevik revolutionaries in particular, but once their ideology had been adopted by the state, he made less of a distinction. Throughout the 1920s he was implacably opposed to the Soviet regime and to communism. In the 1930s, however, he softened as he began to see Russia as a potential ally against Hitler’s fascism.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 caused great concern for Churchill, who was unsure about how the USSR would proceed: ‘I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’⁷ However the pact was undone by Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and Stalin became a British ally, despite Churchill’s suspicions about his intentions.

After the end of World War II, Churchill became opposed to the Soviet regime again, issuing dire warnings about the ‘iron curtain’ that had descended across Europe (see Harry Truman). He was criticised by some for lack of loyalty towards a wartime ally and was criticised again in his final phase when he sought reconciliation with the Soviet Union to prevent a potential nuclear war.

The first meetings between Stalin and Churchill were in Moscow in 1942, helping to form the working relationship between the Big Three (the USA, the Soviet Union and the UK).

In mid-1942, Stalin was anxious that the Allies should open a front against Hitler in western Europe in addition to the Soviet/German front in the east. Churchill and the Americans had agreed not to do this until ready the following year and in August 1942 Churchill flew to Moscow for a conference (codename Bracelet) to break the news to Stalin face-to-face. Representing the USA was Averell Harriman, later husband of Churchill’s then daughter-in-law Pamela Digby who was married to his son Randolph.

On hearing the bad news, Stalin asked why Britain was afraid of Germany. Churchill disclosed British and American plans for Allied landings in north Africa (Operation Torch). He drew a crocodile (perhaps prompted by association with his communist setting) and described attacking its soft belly from underneath while also attacking its hard snout. Stalin was somewhat placated.

After the meeting, Churchill commented to his advisers that Stalin was a peasant whom he knew how to handle. His accommodation was no doubt bugged and Stalin was confrontational on day two, although the atmosphere became more friendly on day three. On the fourth and final day, Churchill had a good conversation with Stalin in the evening, promising support to the extent available to relieve pressure on the eastern front, including intensification of the bombing of Germany (see Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris).

He was about to leave when Stalin proposed that they continue the conversation in Stalin’s private residence. There they talked and drank (mainly red wine) until 2.45 a.m., when Churchill left with a headache, an unusual occurrence for him. Churchill held discussions with staff, had a bath and was collected at 4.30 a.m. to be taken to the airport, tired but satisfied with how things had gone.

Churchill and Stalin remained forever cagey about each other but had established an amicable bond which facilitated subsequent Big Three meetings. Churchill and Stalin met on four other occasions: in Tehran (1943 with Roosevelt), Moscow (1944), Yalta (1945 with Roosevelt) and Potsdam (1945 with Truman).

Stalin enjoyed reading, long meals and classical music.

One of Stalin’s passions was reading, which he did voraciously: around 500 pages a day, he claimed. He built up a large library of over 20,000 volumes which included many works that were banned for others. He would make extensive annotations using pencils, pens and coloured crayons. His interests were broad, including history, linguistics, political economy and philosophy. Nearly all of his library consisted of books in Russian, with only a few being in his native Georgian. He enjoyed writing poetry, some of which was published.

He was a sociable person who retained many longstanding friendships. Meals were an important feature of his socialising and they were also useful for his political information gathering. They often lasted for hours during which he would impose heavy drinking on his guests to loosen their tongues while limiting his own consumption. His favourite drink was a Georgian semi-sweet red wine which he would usually dilute with water.

One of his personal chefs was Spiridon Putin, grandfather of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Spiridon had previously cooked for Lenin. Stalin enjoyed traditional Georgian fare which includes stews, dumplings and bean soup, with flavourings including walnuts, garlic, pomegranates and honey. Dishes were tasted by staff to avoid Stalin being poisoned.

Stalin enjoyed classical music, but within traditional bounds, as the Russian composer Shostakovich discovered when criticised by Pravda’s influential reviews. One evening in 1944 Stalin heard pianist Maria Yudina playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 23 on the radio and immediately demanded a copy of the recording. The broadcast had not been recorded so Yudina was woken up later that night and was obliged to perform the concerto with an impromptu orchestra by dawn. The recording was delivered to Stalin, after which Yudina received a cash gift on Stalin’s instructions.

Her response was remarkably brave. ‘I thank you, Joseph Vissarionovich, for your aid’, she wrote. ‘I will pray for you day and night and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people and the country.’⁸ She was not punished for her criticism and outlived Stalin by 17 years, with her recording reportedly being played in the background as Stalin was on his deathbed.

Stalin died at his country home outside Moscow and joined Lenin in his mausoleum for a few years.

Stalin spent much of his private time in his final years at his dacha (country house) near the town of Kuntsevo, now part of western Moscow, where he would also conduct many of his high-level business meetings and dinners. Churchill stayed there during his 1942 Moscow visit. Stalin had other dachas, but Kuntsevo was the nearest to his Kremlin residence and was where he died.

He enjoyed being in his garden of roses, apple trees, lemon trees and watermelons. It also had an area for outdoor skittles. The interior was spacious and plain. He spent most of his time in his study, usually sleeping on the study sofa rather than in his bedroom. The study contents included a radio, a gift from Churchill.

Stalin had a strong fear of dying in an aircraft crash. He made a rare exception to his avoidance of air travel when he attended the Big Three conference in Tehran. Another fear was dying in his sleep, so he would work late into the night and fall asleep only when exhausted.

On 1 March 1953, Stalin was found unconscious on the floor of his Kuntsevo dacha by his housekeeper. This was initially ascribed to alcohol consumption by Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of secret police, but the next day doctors were summoned and they diagnosed a cerebral haemorrhage and atherosclerosis (clogging of the arteries). Stalin had been a lifelong cigarette and pipe smoker. Three days later he died on his dining room sofa, aged 74. There has been some speculation about foul play, perhaps involving Beria, without substantiation.

His body was embalmed and displayed for three days before lying in Lenin’s mausoleum for eight years, after which it was relocated to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Georgy Malenkov became premier with much-reduced powers, soon followed by Nikita Krushchev, who oversaw a period of ‘de-Stalinisation’, focused on removing his personality cult. Stalin’s legacy remains disputed in Russia, symbolised by decades-long indecision as to what to do with his Kuntsevo dacha, empty since his death and still behind security barriers.

3. Biographical summary

Occupation	Politician
Country	Georgia; Russia; Soviet Union
Career	Clerk at Tbilisi observatory (1899). Political activist (from 1900). Bolshevik follower of Lenin (from 1903). Bolshevik Party Central Committee (1912). Editor, Pravda newspaper (1912-17). Assisted 1917 Russian Revolution. Commissar for Nationalities (1917–23) and for State Control (workers’ and peasants’ inspection) (1919–23). General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1952). Leader of the Soviet Union (1924-53). Minister of Defence (1941-47). Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941-1953). Supreme Commander, Soviet Armed Forces (1941-53).
Born	1878 in Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Caucasus Viceroyalty, Russian Empire (now in Georgia) (four years younger than Churchill)
Father	Besarion ‘Beso’ Djugashvili (1850-1910), shoemaker; died aged 59 of cirrhosis of the liver
Mother	Ekaterina ‘Keke’ Geladze (1858-1937), washerwoman, seamstress
Siblings	Youngest of three sons: 1. Mikheil (1875); died in infancy 2. Giorgi (1876-1877); died in infancy 3. Ioseb Besarionis, later Joseph Vissarionovich (1878-1953)
Education	Tiflis (now Tbilisi) Spiritual Seminary (nearly five years but incomplete)
Spouses	1. Ekaterina ‘Kato’ Svanidze (1885-1907), m. 1906 until her death (probably from typhus); seamstress 2. Nadezhda ‘Nadya’ Alliluyeva (1901-1932), m. 1919 until her death aged 31 (suicide by gunshot); engineer
Relationships	Numerous including allegedly landlady Maria Kuzakova and Lydia Pereprygina
Children	By first wife Kato: 1. Yakov ‘Yasha’ (1907-1943); born 8 months after marriage; engineer; died aged 36 at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Germany; suicide or shot Allegedly by landlady Maria Kuzakova: 2. Konstantin Kuzakov (1911-1996), journalist, politician Allegedly by Lydia Pereprygina: 3. Infant (1914-1914) 4. Alexander (1916-1987); adopted by Lydia’s husband Yakov Davydov By second wife Nadezhda: 5. Vasily (1921-1962); aged 11 when his mother died; pilot, general; married four times; died aged 40 from alcoholism 6. Svetlana (1926-2011); aged 6 when her mother died; lecturer, translator; four marriages; defected to USA Adopted with Nadezhda: Artyom ‘Tolika’ Sergeev (adopted in 1921) (1921-2008); army officer; his father, Stalin’s friend, died in a train crash
Died	1953 at his Kuntsevo dacha, Kuntsevo, Moscow, Russia, USSR, aged 74 (12 years before Churchill); cerebral haemorrhage
Buried	Embalmed; interred at Lenin’s Mausoleum, Moscow (1953-61); moved to Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow (1961)
Nicknames	Soso (as a child; diminutive of Ioseb); Koba (Russian Robin Hood-like character); Father of Nations (press); Stalin (‘man of steel’); Vozhd (‘leader’, ‘guide’); Uncle Joe (F.D. Roosevelt); the Red Tsar
Height	5’5”-5’6″ (1.65-1.68 m)
Time magazine	Man of the Year twice: 1939, 1942. Front cover eight times: 1930, 1936 (with others), 1937, 1940, 1941, 1943, 1945 (twice; once with Roosevelt and Churchill).

4. See also

Soviet leadership

• Trotsky, Leon

Other leaders of the ‘Big Three’

• Roosevelt, Franklin D.
• Truman, Harry

Dictators’ hobbies, habits and tastes

• Hitler, Adolf (Germany)
• Mao, Zedong (China)
• Mussolini, Benito (Italy)
• Nasser, Gamal Abdel (Egypt)

Others who met Stalin

• Beaverbrook, Lord
• Harriman, Averell
• Wells, H.G.

World War II bombing

• Harris, Arthur ‘Bomber’

Churchill controversies

• Bombing (conventional)
• Bombing (nuclear)

5. Further reading

Stalin

• Montefiore, Simon Sebag, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Orion, 2010)
• Montefiore, Simon Sebag, Young Stalin (Orion, 2010)
• Service, Robert, Stalin: A Biography (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005)

Communism

• Holmes, Leslie, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP Oxford, 2009)

Churchill and the Soviet Union

• Carlton, David, Churchill and the Soviet Union (Manchester University Press, 2000)

The ‘Big Three’

• Fenby, Jonathan, Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another (Simon & Schuster UK, 2015)
• Groom, Winston, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II (Simon and Schuster, 2018)
• Kelly, John, Saving Stalin: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Cost of Allied Victory in Europe (Hachette Books, 2020)
• Preston, Diana, Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World (Pan Macmillan, 2019)
• Reynolds, David, and Vladimir Pechatnov, The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt (Yale University Press, 2018)

Miscellaneous

• Katz, Catherine Grace, The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Family, Love, and War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2020)
• Sullivan, Rosemary, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (HarperCollins Publishers, 2015)
• Walker, Jonathan, Churchill’s Third World War: British Plans to Attack the Soviet Empire 1945 (History Press, 2017)

6. References

1 Vladimir Lenin, ‘Letter to the Congress’, Marxists.Org, 1923 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/congress.htm>.

2 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume 4: The Stricken World, 1916–1922 (Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 257. Spoken at an official lunch at Mansion House, London, on 19 February 1919.

3 For example, in a letter to Anthony Eden: Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (Heinemann Educational Books, 1991), p. 773.

4 Winston S. Churchill, ‘War Office Circular’, Hansard, 1919.

5 Winston S Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963: Volume 3: 1914-1922, ed. by Robert Rhodes James (Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), pp. 2919–20.

6 Winston S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963: Volume 7: 1943-1949, ed. by Robert Rhodes James (Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), p. 7805.

7 Winston S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963: Volume 6: 1935-1942, ed. by Robert Rhodes James (Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), p. 6161.

8 Discover Music, ‘One Amazing Pianist Dared to Criticise Joseph Stalin – and Remarkably Lived to Tell the Tale’, Classic FM, 2016.