Born on Dec. 21, 1879 on Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire, he was a Soviet politician and dictator. He joined an underground revolutionary group and sided with the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party in 1903. He was a disciple of Vladimir Lenin, he served in minor party posts and was appointed to the first Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912. He remained active behind the scenes and in exile which lasted from 1913 to 1917, until the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the Bolsheviks to power. He adopted the name Stalin from Russian stal, “steel”. He served as commissar for state control in the Bolshevik government.
He was a member of the Politburo, and then he became secretary-general of the party's Central Committee. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin overcame his rivals, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Bukharin, and Aleksey Rykov, and took control of Soviet politics. In 1928 he inaugurated the Five-Year Plans that radically altered Soviet economic and social structures and resulted in the deaths of many millions. Later, he fixed to eliminate threats to his power through the purge trials and through widespread secret executions and persecution. In World War II he signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, attacked Finland in the Russo-Finnish War, and annexed parts of Eastern Europe to strengthen his western frontiers. In 1941 when Germany invaded Russia, Stalin allied Russia with Britain and the U.S. After the war he consolidated Soviet power in Eastern Europe and built up the Soviet Union as a world military power. He was preparing to build up another purge after the so-called Doctors' Plot when he died on March 5, 1953 in Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.. Stalin is remembered for having left a legacy of repression and fear as well as industrial and military power.
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