Born Josef Dzhugashivili in the Russian province of Georgia, Stalin was an able student, admitted in 1893 to the orthodox seminary in Tiflis. In 1899, he as expelled from the seminary for his radical political views. Arrested for revolutionary activity in 1902, he was sent to Siberia, from which he later escaped. By 1907, he had come to the attention of the party leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who secretly endorsed his policy of robbing government banks to support the revolutionary party. At this point, the party leadership viewed him as a thuggish but effective hard-liner with considerable administrative skills. He played only a small role in the 1917 Russian Revolution but by 1922 had risen in the ranks of the leadership to become general secretary of the Communist Party. The position offered him an ideal place from which to rise to succeed Lenin, who shortly before his death had called for Stalin's removal from power. Stalin overcame the opposition of Leon Trotsky and his followers by pursuing a policy that reinforced the centrality of the Communist Party in the new government and the rejection of the goal of world revolution in favor of developing communism within the Soviet Union.

Once in control, he instituted plans to develop the nation into an industrial power and to collectivize all agriculture. Industrialization proceeded with remarkable success in a relatively brief span of time, but collectivization met with strong opposition, to which he responded with characteristic brutality. In 1934, he unleashed the Great Terror, his ruthless purge of the Communist Party, the military, and the professional class, intending to rid the nation of Trotskyism and any evidence of bourgeois influence. By the time of the last "show trial" in 1938, he had absolute control. His nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939 enabled the Soviet Union and Germany to carve up pieces of Poland, but it counted for little else, as Hitler demonstrated in 1941 by attacking the Soviet Union. With the successful conclusion of WW2, Stalin displayed adroit diplomacy at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, leading to Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the onset of the cold war. During the last years of his life, his rule became even more repressive, adding anti-Semitism to his list of offenses.

Despite his record, equal only to Hitler in its murderous, dictatorial impact, he was a hero in the eyes of many when he died in 1953. The tide turned suddenly, however, in 1956 when his successor Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. Five years later, his embalmed corpse was removed from its place of honor in Lenin's tomb and buried elsewhere. By the end of the century, the novelist Joseph Heller's characterization of Joseph Stalin as "the worst man who ever lived" seemed only a slight exaggeration.

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