Joseph Stalin Net Worth

Background and career

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, holding the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952 and serving as the nation's premier from 1941 to 1953. Initially part of a collective leadership within a one-party system, he ultimately consolidated personal power to become the country's de facto dictator by the 1930s. Ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin helped to formalise these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies became known as Stalinism.

Born into a poor Georgian family in Gori, Russian Empire, Stalin began his revolutionary career as a youth by joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Active in the Caucasus, he raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through robberies and other crimes, and was repeatedly arrested and exiled to Siberia. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin joined the party's Politburo and served as the People's Commissar for Nationalities. He began his rise to power after Lenin's death in 1924, using his role as general secretary to outmaneuver his rivals. Under Stalin's policy of "Socialism in One Country" and his five-year plans from 1928, the country underwent rapid agricultural collectivisation and industrialization, replacing the New Economic Policy with a centralised command economy. State policy contributed to a major famine in 1930–1933, with Ukraine and Kazakhstan most affected. To eliminate his political rivals and those deemed "enemies of the working class", Stalin oversaw the Great Purge between 1936 and 1939, during which at least 700,000 people were executed and over a million were imprisoned in the Gulag system.

Stalin's government promoted Marxism–Leninism abroad through the Communist International and supported anti-fascist movements in Europe during the 1930s, particularly in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, it signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, resulting in their joint invasion of Poland and the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states. Germany ended the pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941; despite initial setbacks, the Red Army repelled Axis forces and captured Berlin in 1945, ending World War II in Europe. The Soviets helped establish aligned governments in Central and Eastern Europe, China and North Korea, forming the Eastern Bloc and emerging as a world superpower. Stalin led his country through its reconstruction and the start of the Cold War with the United States, overseeing its development of nuclear weapons in 1949. In these years, the country experienced another major famine and a new wave of political purges. Stalin died in 1953 and was ultimately succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced his predecessor and initiated a campaign of de-Stalinisation throughout Soviet society.

Widely considered one of the most significant figures of the 20th century, Stalin was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international Marxist–Leninist movement, for whom he was a champion of socialism and the working class. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, he has retained popularity in Russia as a victorious wartime leader who established the Soviet Union as one of the world's foremost great powers. Conversely, Stalin's totalitarian regime has been widely condemned for overseeing a system marked by mass repression, ethnic cleansing, and the deaths of millions.

Stalin was born on 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 into a Georgian family in Gori, a city in Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire. His birth name was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (Russified as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili). His parents were Besarion Jughashvili and Ekaterine Geladze; Stalin was their third child and the only one to survive past infancy. After Besarion's shoemaking workshop went into decline, the family fell into poverty, and he became an alcoholic who beat Ekaterine and Stalin. The two left the home by 1883, moving through nine different rented rooms. In 1888, Stalin enrolled at the Gori Church School, where he excelled. Stalin faced health problems: an 1884 smallpox infection left him with facial scars, and at age 12, he was seriously injured when he was struck by a phaeton, causing a lifelong disability in his left arm.

In 1894, Stalin enrolled as a trainee Russian Orthodox priest at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, enabled by a scholarship. He initially achieved high grades, but lost interest in his studies. Stalin became influenced by Nikolay Chernyshevsky's pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done?, and Alexander Kazbegi's The Patricide, with Stalin adopting the nickname "Koba" from its bandit protagonist. After reading Das Kapital, he focused on Karl Marx's philosophy of Marxism, which was on the rise as a variety of socialism opposed to the Tsarist authorities. He began attending secret workers' meetings and left the seminary in April 1899.

1899–1905: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

During October 1899, Stalin worked as a meteorologist at the Tiflis observatory. He attracted a group of socialist supporters, and co-organised a secret workers' meeting, where he convinced many to strike on May Day 1900. The empire's secret police, the Okhrana, became aware of Stalin's activities and attempted to arrest him in March 1901, but he went into hiding during which he lived off donations from friends. He helped plan a demonstration in Tiflis on May Day 1901, at which 3,000 marchers clashed with the authorities. Stalin was elected to the Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist party founded in 1898, in November 1901.

That month, he travelled to Batumi. His militant rhetoric proved divisive among the city's Marxists, some of whom suspected that he was an agent provocateur. Stalin began working at the Rothschild refinery storehouse, where he co-organised two workers' strikes. After the strike leaders were arrested, he co-organised a mass demonstration which led to the storming of the prison. Stalin was arrested in April 1902 and sentenced to three years exile in Siberia, arriving in Novaya Uda in November 1903. After one failed attempt, Stalin escaped from his exile in January 1904 and travelled to Tiflis, where he co-edited the Marxist newspaper Proletariatis Brdzola ("Proletarian Struggle") with Filipp Makharadze. During his exile, the RSDLP had become divided between Vladimir Lenin's "Bolshevik" faction and Julius Martov's "Mensheviks". Stalin, who detested many Mensheviks in Georgia, aligned himself with the Bolsheviks.

1905–1912: Revolution of 1905 and aftermath

In January 1905, government troops massacred protesters in Saint Petersburg and unrest spread across the Empire in the Revolution of 1905. Stalin was in Baku in February when ethnic violence broke out between Armenians and Azeris, and he formed Bolshevik "battle squads" which he used to keep the city's warring ethnic factions apart. His armed squads attacked local police and troops, raided arsenals, and raised funds via protection rackets. In November 1905, the Georgian Bolsheviks elected Stalin as one of their delegates to a Bolshevik conference in Tampere, Finland, where he met Lenin. Although Stalin held Lenin in deep respect, he vocally disagreed with his view that the Bolsheviks should field candidates for the 1906 election to the State Duma; Stalin viewed parliamentary process as a waste of time. In April 1906, he attended the RSDLP's Fourth Congress in Stockholm, where the party—then led by a Menshevik majority—agreed that it would not raise funds using armed robbery. Lenin and Stalin disagreed with this, and privately discussed continuing the robberies for the Bolshevik cause.

Stalin married Kato Svanidze in July 1906, and in March 1907 she gave birth to their son Yakov. Stalin, who by now had established himself as "Georgia's leading Bolshevik", organised the June 1907 robbery of a bank stagecoach in Tiflis to fund the Bolsheviks. His operatives ambushed the convoy in Erivansky Square with guns and homemade bombs; around 40 people were killed. Stalin settled in Baku with his wife and son, where Mensheviks confronted him about the robbery and voted to expel him from the RSDLP, but he ignored them. Stalin secured Bolshevik domination of RSDLP branch and edited two Bolshevik newspapers. In November 1907, his wife died of typhus, and he left his son with her family in Tiflis. He then reassembled his gang, which attacked Black Hundreds and raised money through racketeering, counterfeiting, robberies and kidnapping the children of wealthy figures for ransom.

In March 1908, Stalin was arrested and imprisoned. He led the imprisoned Bolsheviks, organised discussion groups, and ordered the killing of suspected informants. He was sentenced to two years of exile in Solvychegodsk in northern Russia, arriving there in February 1909. In June, Stalin escaped to Saint Petersburg, but was arrested again in March 1910 and sent back to Solvychegodsk. In June 1911, Stalin was given permission to move to Vologda, where he stayed for two months. He then escaped to Saint Petersburg, where he was arrested again in September 1911 and sentenced to a further three years of exile in Vologda.

1912–1917: Rise to the Central Committee and Pravda

In January 1912, the first Bolshevik Central Committee was elected at the Prague Conference. Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev decided to co-opt Stalin to the committee, which Stalin (while still in exile in Vologda) agreed to. Lenin believed that Stalin, as a Georgian, would help secure support from the empire's minority ethnicities.

In February 1912, Stalin again escaped to Saint Petersburg, where he was tasked with converting the Bolshevik weekly newspaper, Zvezda ("Star") into a daily, Pravda ("Truth"). The new newspaper was launched in April 1912 and Stalin's role as editor was kept secret. In May 1912, he was again arrested and sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia. In July, he arrived in Narym, where he shared a room with fellow Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov. After two months, they escaped to Saint Petersburg, where Stalin continued work on Pravda.

After the October 1912 Duma elections, Stalin wrote articles calling for reconciliation between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; Lenin criticised him and he relented. In January 1913, Stalin travelled incognito (using a false passport bearing the name "Stavros Papadopoulos") to Vienna, where he researched the "national question" of how the Bolsheviks should deal with the Empire's national and ethnic minorities. His article "Marxism and the National Question" was first published in the March, April, and May 1913 issues of the Bolshevik journal Prosveshcheniye under the pseudonym "K. Stalin". The alias, which he had used since 1912, is derived from the Russian for steel (stal), and has been translated as "Man of Steel". In February 1913, Stalin was again arrested in Saint Petersburg and sentenced to four years of exile in Turukhansk in Siberia, where he arrived in August. Still concerned over a potential escape, the authorities moved him to Kureika in March 1914.

While Stalin was in exile, Russia entered the First World War, and in October 1916 he and other exiled Bolsheviks were conscripted into the Russian Army. They arrived in Krasnoyarsk in February 1917, where a medical examiner ruled Stalin unfit for service due to his crippled arm. Stalin was required to serve four more months of his exile and successfully requested to serve it in Achinsk. Stalin was in the city when the February Revolution took place; the Tsar abdicated and the Empire became a de facto republic. In a celebratory mood, Stalin travelled by train to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg had been renamed) in March. He assumed control of Pravda alongside Lev Kamenev, and was appointed as a Bolshevik delegate to the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, an influential workers' council.