Stalin's correct surname. Joseph Stalin - biography

Name: Joseph Stalin

Age: 73 years old

Place of Birth: Gori, Tiflis province; A place of death: Kuntsevo, USSR

Activity: revolutionary, head of the USSR government

Family status: widower

Joseph Stalin - biography

Historical figure, person. Without his strong-willed decisions, the Great Victory over fascism might not have taken place. There are ambivalent attitudes towards Stalin. There are also people who were offended by him for life, there are those who idolized this man. But you can try to figure out what he was like in childhood, what his biography was like as a whole.

Childhood, family of Joseph Stalin

The family of Joseph Vissarionovich was not rich; they lived in the city of Gori, which is located in Georgia. Externally, the boy had fused toes on his left foot. From the age of seven, as a result of an accident, my left arm lost the ability to straighten. My father worked as a shoemaker, and like a real shoemaker, he swore and beat his household. Joseph also got hit right on the head once.

The mother also did not have a soft character. Since childhood, Joseph has become accustomed to her sternness and authoritative voice. In the end, the parents did not live together. The boy remained to live with his mother. She had to work hard so that her son would not need anything. She predicted the priesthood for him. Due to drunkenness, my father died in a fight, and my mother died before the war.

Years of study of Joseph Stalin

Studies began at theological school, then at the seminary. All subjects were very easy for Joseph. He easily composed poems that were correct in rhyme and good in meaning. But getting into the theological school was not easy. This institution taught exclusively in Russian. The Georgian boy did not know, but the mother loved her son so much that she could not allow Soso to be upset. The mother asked the Russian children to practice the language with her son. Joseph so quickly mastered all the knowledge and skills of reading and writing in Russian that he successfully entered the first grade of Gori religious school.

The school found the child’s mother in a difficult situation, awarded Soso a scholarship, and the boy studied well. Stubbornness of character and the desire to always be the best were met with physical weakness and short stature. Moreover, he was from a poor family and knew “his” place. Therefore, he grew up secretive and vindictive. Joseph's hobby was reading, he educated himself. Unfortunately, the works that the boy chose did not always teach only good things. Many heroes of the books brought up selfishness and pride in Soso. But my reading circle was very wide.

Stalin was a self-taught genius; he was drawn to everything new, which is why revolutionary Marxist sentiments became especially close to him. Students read those books that were on the list of prohibited books. They placed sheets of such literature between the pages of church books. So no one saw anything illegal in the opened Bible, and at that time everyone was reading Marx and Lenin. He actively collaborates with V.I. Lenin, expresses the interests of the Bolshevik Party, for which he was repeatedly imprisoned and exiled.

During the civil war, Stalin's figure was noticeable; he headed leadership positions. He actively advocates collectivization and industrialization in the country. Collective farms appeared, and heavy industry began to revive. But this Stalinist policy had a huge disadvantage: as a result of dispossession and mass terror Almost twenty million people were affected. The times of the Great Patriotic War demonstrated Stalin's talent as a military leader.

Joseph Stalin - biography of personal life

Stalin was married twice. Ekaterina Svanidze And Nadezhda Alliluyeva- his wife. Two sons and a daughter. Yakov was born from his first marriage; his wife died of tuberculosis when the boy was still very young. Nadezhda was a harsh woman and very touchy; after 14 years of marriage, her character traits worsened, and the wife committed suicide out of resentment towards her husband. She shot herself. All information about the life of the leader Soviet state with women they are stingy and secretive. For the first time Joseph Dzhugashvili (this real name Stalin) got married at the age of 26.

The romantic Georgian beauty believed that he loved her a real hero, fiery knight of the revolution. The hero Koba was popular at that time. Local Robin Hood helping poor people. Catherine was only 16 years old, the young people were married. Stalin was often not at home, his wife whiled away the days and evenings alone. A son was born, Catherine’s body was weak, there was no money for treatment, every penny went into the party treasury. The wife dies, and the son lives with his maternal grandparents.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin(real name Dzhugashvili) - Russian revolutionary, Soviet political, party, statesman, military leader. Joseph Stalin was awarded the title of Generalissimo Soviet Union(1945). Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet state from the late 1920s until his death on March 5, 1953.

The childhood and education of Joseph Stalin

According to the official version, Joseph Stalin was born on December 9 (21), 1879 in the city of Gori, Tiflis province. According to unofficial data, Joseph Vissarionovich was born on December 6 (18), 1878.

Stalin's father Vissarion Dzhugashvili- was a shoemaker. He didn't earn much. He drank often.

Stalin's mother - Ekaterina Georgievna(nee - Geladze) loved her son very much. She dreamed that Joseph Stalin would become a priest. In 1888, Joseph was immediately accepted into the second preparatory class at the Gori Orthodox Theological School, and in September 1889, Joseph Dzhugashvili entered the first class of the school, where he received his education. Joseph Vissarionovich studied very well. He graduated from college in 1894 and his college graduation certificate had almost all excellent marks.

Joseph Stalin then continued his education; in September 1894, Dzhugashvili entered the Orthodox Tiflis Theological Seminary. But it was during this period that young Joseph Dzhugashvili made Marxist friends. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin began to attend meetings of underground groups of revolutionaries expelled by the tsarist government to Transcaucasia.

According to Wikipedia, English historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore wrote: “Stalin was an extremely gifted student who received high marks in all subjects: mathematics, theology, Greek, Russian. Stalin liked poetry, and in his youth he himself wrote poems in Georgian, which attracted the attention of connoisseurs.” In his opinion, Stalin had outstanding intellectual abilities: for example, he could read Plato in original. When Stalin came to power, the historian continues, he always wrote his own speeches and articles in a clear and often sophisticated style. The English historian argued that the myth of Stalin the ignoramus was spread Leon Trotsky and his supporters.

In 1931, a German writer Emil Ludwig in an interview he asked Stalin: “What prompted you to become an oppositionist? Possibly mistreatment from parents? Stalin replied: “No. My parents treated me quite well. Another thing is the theological seminary where I studied then. Out of protest against the mocking regime and the Jesuit methods that existed in the seminary, I was ready to become and actually became a revolutionary, a supporter of Marxism...” At the same time, Joseph Vissarionovich did not talk about his drunkard father, who beat him, and his wife.

Communicating with new friends, Joseph Stalin systematically engaged in self-education, and then revolutionary affairs. In 1898, young Dzhugashvili joined the first Georgian Social Democratic organization. Joseph Vissarionovich immediately proved himself to be a convincing speaker. Therefore, he was assigned to conduct propaganda in workers' circles.

Revolutionary career

In 1899, Joseph Dzhugashvili left the seminary, and in 1901 the young man actually became a professional revolutionary and went underground. He worked under the party nicknames “Koba”, “David”, “Stalin”. Joseph Vissarionovich took part in the so-called “exes”, that is, in attacks on banks to replenish the party treasury. Joseph Stalin became a member of the Tiflis and Batumi committees of the RSDLP. He was eventually arrested.

From 1902 and over the next eleven years, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was arrested 8 times. The young revolutionary was in exile seven times, but each time he managed to escape (except for exile in 1913). In exile, as Stalin’s associates noted, in particular, Mikhail Sverdlov, he behaved aloofly, even arrogantly.

In the intervals between arrests, Joseph Vissarionovich was engaged in great revolutionary work. Stalin organized the Baku strike in 1904, after which a collective agreement was concluded between the strikers and industrialists. In 1905 at 1st conference Joseph Stalin personally met the RSDLP in Tammerfors (Finland) for the first time V. I. Lenina. Further, Stalin took part as a delegate from Tiflis in the IV and V congresses (1907) in Stockholm and London.

In 1912, at the plenum of the Baku RSDLP, Stalin was introduced in absentia to the Central Committee and to the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP.

Having noticed Joseph Vissarionovich literary abilities, he was entrusted with organizing the publication of the newspapers Pravda and Zvezda. In 1913, Stalin’s article “Marxism and the National Question” was published in Vienna. From that moment on, Joseph Dzhugashvili began to be considered an expert on the national question in revolutionary circles. In the same year in February, Joseph Vissarionovich was arrested and exiled to the Turukhansk region. He was freed only after February revolution. Stalin returned to Petrograd and entered the Bureau of the Central Committee, and then, together with Lev Kamenev headed the editorial office of the newspaper Pravda.

Since Vladimir Lenin was abroad, Stalin, along with other revolutionaries of Petrograd, received Active participation in preparation and conduct October revolution.

Wikipedia reports that due to Lenin’s forced departure into hiding, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, as his follower and like-minded person, spoke at the VI Congress of the RSDLP (b) (July-August 1917) with a report to the Central Committee. At a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) on August 5, Joseph Stalin was elected a member of the narrow composition of the Central Committee. In August-September, Joseph Dzhugashvili mainly carried out organizational and journalistic work, publishing his articles in the newspapers “Pravda” and “Soldatskaya Pravda”.

On the night of October 16, at an extended meeting of the Central Committee, he spoke out against the position of L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinovieva who voted against the decision to revolt. Joseph Stalin was elected a member of the Military Revolutionary Center, which joined the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee (VRK).

During this period, Joseph Stalin often spoke in debates at city conferences, where they reported on the current situation, and participated in anti-war propaganda. Joseph Stalin was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Bureau from the Bolshevik faction. He increasingly supported Lenin's views. On October 10, 1917, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), Joseph Vissarionovich voted for a resolution on an armed uprising.

After the October Revolution, Joseph Stalin was directly involved in the development of a plan for the defeat of the troops advancing on Petrograd A.F. Kerensky And P.N. Krasnova. And then, together with Vladimir Lenin, he signed the decision of the Council of People's Commissars to ban the publication of “all newspapers closed by the Military Revolutionary Committee.”

Civil War

When the civil war began, Stalin was appointed chairman of the Military Council of the North Caucasus Military District (June-September 1918). Later, Joseph Stalin was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, then a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and a representative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense (from late 1918 to May 1919, and also from May 1920 to April 1922).

As the doctor of military and historical sciences wrote Mahmut Gareev, during Civil War Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin gained extensive experience in the military-political leadership of large masses of troops on many fronts (defense of Tsaritsyn, Petrograd, on the fronts against Denikin, Wrangel, and the White Poles).

Stalin - the path to power

English writer Charles Snow also characterized Stalin’s educational level quite highly: “One of the many curious circumstances related to Stalin: he was much more educated in a literary sense than any of his contemporaries statesmen. Compared to him Lloyd George And Churchill- surprisingly poorly read people. As, indeed, Roosevelt».

Apparently thanks to his abilities, Joseph Stalin was elected to the Politburo and Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), as well as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). Initially, this position meant only the leadership of the party apparatus, and the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, Lenin, continued to be perceived by everyone as the leader of the party and government.

After Lenin's death, by the end of the 20s, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin defeated the opposition and became the head Soviet Russia. From that moment on, Stalin took up state affairs. He decisively began to speed up industrialization and complete collectivization Agriculture.

Hunger and progress

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin declared 1929 the year of the “great turning point.” Joseph Vissarionovich was going to transform agricultural Russia into a developed industrial state. He named industrialization, collectivization and cultural revolution as the strategic objectives of the state. The “great turning point” course was carried out using violent methods that cost millions human lives. But thanks to the enthusiasm of the population, the country has achieved a lot. Hydroelectric power stations and factories were built, and the first metro lines appeared in Moscow. At the same time, people died of hunger.

In 1932, a number of regions of the USSR (Ukraine, Volga region, Kuban, Belarus, Southern Urals, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan) were struck by famine. According to a number of historians, the famine of 1932-1933 was artificial; the state had the ability to reduce its scale and consequences.

Stalin's general line destroyed the rural worker. Along with the fists, innocent people also suffered. The rural population was forced to go to the city in search of work. The situation was critical. And then Joseph Stalin made a statement about “excesses on the ground,” and already before the war the situation in the village improved.

During these same years, Joseph Stalin decisively dealt with the opposition. As is known, the so-called “Congress of Winners”, the XVII Congress of the CPSU (b) (1934), for the first time stated that the resolution of the Tenth Congress had been implemented, and there was no longer any opposition in the party.

Joseph Stalin and the Great Patriotic War

Just before World War II, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, focusing on the situation that arose in Europe, decided to get closer to Germany. Thus, the leader of Soviet Russia, realizing that war with Hitler was inevitable, wanted to postpone the military conflict for some time in order to complete the rearmament of the army and completely switch to new types of military equipment.

Based on the pact Molotov-Ribbentrop, the USSR reached agreements on the delimitation of spheres of influence, and after the outbreak of World War II annexed the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.

But World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler attacked Poland. Since September 1939, Poland, France, Great Britain and its dominions were at war with Germany (Anglo-Polish Military Alliance of 1939 and Franco-Polish Alliance of 1921).

In June 1941, Hitler's treacherous attack on the USSR took place. In this difficult war, the country led by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (as Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces) suffered serious material and bitter human losses.

During 1941, the USSR, USA and China joined the anti-Hitler coalition. As of January 1942, the coalition consisted of 26 states: the Big Four (USA, UK, USSR, China), British dominions (Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa), countries of Central and Latin America, the Caribbean, as well as governments in expulsion of occupied European countries. The number of coalition participants increased during the war.

The Soviet Union, under the leadership of Stalin, made a decisive contribution to the victory over Nazism, which contributed to the expansion of the influence of the USSR in Eastern Europe and East Asia, as well as the formation of the world socialist system.

IN post-war years Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin contributed to the creation of a powerful military-industrial complex in the country and the transformation of the USSR into one of the two world superpowers, possessing nuclear weapons and becoming a co-founder of the UN, a permanent member of the UN Security Council with the right of veto.

Deportations and repressions in the USSR

In the USSR, many peoples were subjected to total deportation, among them: Koreans, Germans, Ingrian Finns, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks. Of these, seven - Germans, Karachais, Kalmyks, Ingush, Chechens, Balkars and Crimean Tatars - also lost their national autonomies.

Historians agree that Stalin's repressions in the Red Army caused serious damage to the country's defense capability and, among other factors, led to significant losses Soviet troops in the initial period of the Great Patriotic War.

Those repressed during these years included three of the five marshals of the Soviet Union, 20 army commanders of the 1st and 2nd rank, 5 fleet flagships of the 1st and 2nd rank, 6 flagships of the 1st rank, 69 corps commanders, 153 division commanders, 247 brigade commanders.

During the war, the aggressive anti-religious campaign and mass closures of churches were stopped. Stalin became a supporter of the comprehensive expansion of the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church.

After the victory in 1945, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin proposed a toast “To the Russian people!”, which he called “the most outstanding nation of all the nations that make up the Soviet Union.”

July 24, 1945 in Potsdam Truman told Joseph Stalin that the United States “now has weapons of extraordinary destructive power.” According to Churchill's recollections, Stalin smiled, but did not become interested in the details. From this, Churchill concluded that Stalin did not understand anything and was not aware of events. But he was wrong.

That same evening, Stalin ordered Molotov to talk with Kurchatov on accelerating work on the nuclear project. On August 20, 1945, to manage the atomic project, the State Defense Committee created a Special Committee with emergency powers, headed by L.P. Beria. The Special Committee was created executive agency— The first main directorate under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (PGU). Stalin's directive obliged the PGU to ensure the creation of atomic bombs, uranium and plutonium, in 1948.

Personal life of Joseph Stalin

On the night of July 16, 1906, in the Tiflis Church of St. David, Joseph Dzhugashvili married Ekaterina Svanidze. From this marriage, Stalin’s first son, Yakov, was born in 1907. At the end of the same year, Stalin's wife died of typhus.

In the spring of 1918, Stalin married for the second time. His wife was the daughter of a Russian revolutionary S. Ya. Alliluyeva — Nadezhda Alliluyeva.

On March 24, 1921, a son, Vasily, was born to Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva in Moscow. Stalin also adopted Artem Sergeeva after the death of his close friend, a revolutionary Fedor Andreevich Sergeev.

In February 1926, daughter Svetlana was born.

Grandson of Stalin Evgeny Dzhugashvili born in 1936. Worked as a senior lecturer in the history of wars and military art at the Military Academy for 25 years. General Staff USSR Armed Forces named after. K.E. Voroshilova. Performed the role of I.V. Stalin in a film by a Soviet Georgian director D.K. Abashidze"Yakov, son of Stalin" (1990). Citizen of Russia and Georgia, lived in Moscow and Tbilisi. Died in 2016.

Hobbies of Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin loved to read. As Simon Sebag-Montefiore wrote: “...Stalin's library consisted of 20,000 volumes, and he spent many hours every day reading books, making notes in their margins and cataloging them. At the same time, Stalin’s tastes in reading were eclectic: Maupassant, Wilde, Gogol, Goethe, Zola. Stalin was an erudite man - he quoted the Bible, works Bismarck, works Chekhov, admired Dostoevsky, considering him a subtle psychologist.”

Death of Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin died at his official residence - the Near Dacha, where he permanently lived in post-war period. On March 1, 1953, one of the guards found Joseph Stalin lying on the floor of a small dining room. On the morning of March 2, doctors arrived at Nizhnyaya Dacha and diagnosed paralysis on the right side of the body. On March 5 at 21:50, Stalin died. According to the medical report, death was caused by a cerebral hemorrhage.

In the Necropolis near the Kremlin wall, memorial cemetery on Red Square, and in the wall itself there are urns with the ashes of state, party and military leaders of the USSR, participants in the October Revolution of 1917. To the right of the Mausoleum, especially prominent party and government figures are buried without cremation, in a coffin and in a grave, including in 1961 The body of Joseph Stalin was transferred there from the Mausoleum.

Assessment of the activities of Joseph Stalin

The activities of Joseph Stalin will be debated for a long time. Stalin's supporters believe that he left behind a strong party, a country with advanced social and political system. Made the USSR a power of global importance.

Opponents of Joseph Vissarionovich believe that Stalin’s reign was characterized by the presence of an autocratic regime of personal power, the dominance of authoritarian-bureaucratic methods of management, an excessive strengthening of the repressive functions of the state, the merging of party and government agencies, strict state control over all aspects of society, violation of the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens, deportations of peoples, mass deaths as a result of the famine of 1931-1933 and rampant repression.

In the obituary for the death of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, The Manchester Guardian of March 6, 1953 wrote: “The essence of Stalin’s historical achievement is that he took Russia with a plow and left it with nuclear reactors. He raised Russia to the level of the second industrial power in the world. This was not the result of purely material progress and organization. Such achievements would not have been possible without a comprehensive cultural revolution, during which the entire population attended school and studied very hard."

After Stalin's death public opinion information about him was largely formed in accordance with the position of officials of the USSR and Russia. After the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Soviet historians assessed Stalin taking into account the position of the ideological bodies of the USSR.

However, they are named after Stalin geographical features in many countries of the world.

In the Foundation's report Carnegie(2013) notes that if in 1989 Stalin’s “rating” in the list of the greatest historical figures was minimal - 12% (Vladimir Lenin - 72%, Peter I - 38%, Alexander Pushkin - 25%), then in 2012 Stalin turned out to be in first place with 49%. According to a public opinion poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation on February 18-19, 2006, 47% of Russian residents considered Stalin’s role in history to be generally positive, 29% - negative. During a survey of television viewers (May 7 - December 28, 2008), organized by the Rossiya TV channel in order to select the most valued, noticeable and symbolic personality Russian history, Stalin occupied the leading position by a large margin. As a result, Stalin took third place, losing about 1% of the votes to the first two historical figures.

When Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress he debunked Stalin’s personality cult, after which at one meeting in the Kremlin he declared:

— The Chief of the General Staff is present here Sokolovsky, he will confirm that Stalin did not understand military issues. Am I right? “No way, Nikita Sergeevich,” the marshal answered clearly. He was relieved of his post.

Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov also confirmed: “We are not worth Stalin’s little finger!”

Joseph Stalin in the news these days

The figure of Joseph Stalin continues to play huge role In the political life of the country, films are made about Stalin, which are associated with scandals, Joseph Vissarionovich is discussed by politicians and ordinary people.

Every now and then scandals arise with banners or memorial signs to Stalin. The online publication “Free Press-South” states that a banner with a portrait of Joseph Stalin in the uniform of a generalissimo and the inscription: “We remember, we are proud!”, which was hung on April 29, 2015 in the center of Stavropol, caused a scandal. In May 2015, the monument to Joseph Stalin, erected in Lipetsk on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Victory by local communists, was doused with pink paint. That same year, a banner depicting Stalin was hung in the center of Moscow.

In the Chelyabinsk region, coins with Stalin and Zhukov were issued. An initiative group of residents of the closed city of Ozersk in the Chelyabinsk region appealed to the administration of the locality with a request to erect a monument to Joseph Stalin for the 70th anniversary of the Victory.

In 2015, a monument dedicated to the participants was unveiled in Yalta Yalta Conference 1945. The composition repeats famous photograph, taken at the end of a conference where Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt are sitting side by side. In the fall of the same year, in the village of Shelanger in the Mari El Republic, a monument to Joseph Stalin was unveiled at the entrance of the Zvenigovsky meat processing plant.

"Free Press" reported that, in the opinion of the President of Ukraine Petra Poroshenko, Joseph Stalin was one of those who started World War II in September 1939.

In 2016 Vladimir Zhirinovsky got into the news with a proposal to move all burials from Red Square in the capital to Mytishchi near Moscow. The LDPR leader mentioned that a few days ago people brought flowers to the grave of the “bloody dictator” Stalin in honor of the anniversary of his death. Although the country, according to him, still cannot recover from his rule.

Joseph Stalin is often mentioned in the campaign of Russian presidential candidates in the 2018 Elections. So the candidate Ksenia Sobchak in the fall of 2017, she called Stalin “an executioner and a criminal,” accusing him of “full-scale genocide of the Russian people.”

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation responded to this that it is connected with the name of Stalin scientific progress, hundreds of new research institutes, hundreds of new educational institutions, eradication of illiteracy, cultural breakthrough, industrialization.

Stalin was the most outstanding personality in the history of mankind.

Scandal with the film “The Death of Stalin”

On January 23, Free Press reported that the Ministry of Culture had revoked the distribution certificate of the satirical comedy “The Death of Stalin” by the British director Armando Iannucci. The film was also sent for additional legal examination, the news reported.

According to the head of the department Vladimir Medinsky, many people of the older generation, and not only others, will perceive it as an offensive mockery of the entire Soviet past, of the country that defeated fascism, of the Soviet army and of ordinary people. Medinsky assures that the revocation of the rental certificate is not related to issues of censorship, but to issues of morality.

The film, which was due to be released on January 25, tells the story of the struggle for power after the death of the Soviet leader. The main roles in the film were played by Jason Isaacs, Olga Kurilenko, Steve Buscemi And Rupert Friend.

The director of the feature film “The Death of Stalin” Armando Iannucci told reporters that he still hopes that his work will be released in Russia.

Press Secretary of the President of Russia Dmitry Peskov refused to consider the situation with the withdrawal of the distribution certificate from the film “The Death of Stalin” a few days before the start of its showing in cinemas as a manifestation of censorship.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (real name - Dzhugashvili, Georgian იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი, December 6 (18), 1878 or December 9 (21), 1879, Gori, Georgia - March 5, 1953 ., Moscow, USSR) - Soviet statesman, political and military figure , General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) since 1922. Head of the Soviet Government (Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars since 1941, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR since 1946), Generalissimo of the Soviet Union (1945).

Stalin's period in power was marked by mass repressions from 1937 to 1939. and 1943, sometimes directed against entire social strata and ethnic groups, destruction prominent figures science and art, persecution of the Church and religion in general, the forced industrialization of the country, which turned the USSR into a country with one of the most powerful economies in the world, collectivization, which led to the death of the country’s agriculture, the mass exodus of peasants from the countryside and the famine of 1932-1933, victory in the Great Patriotic War, the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the transformation of the USSR into a superpower with enormous military-industrial potential, the beginning of the Cold War. Russian public opinion regarding Stalin's personal merit or responsibility for the listed phenomena has not yet been fully formed.

Name and nicknames

Stalin's real name is Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (his name and his father's name in Georgian sound like Ioseb and Besarion), his diminutive name is Soso. Very early, a version appeared according to which the surname Dzhugashvili is not Georgian, but Ossetian (Dzugati/Dzugaev), which was only given a Georgian form (the sound “dz” was replaced by “j”, the ending of Ossetian surnames “you” was replaced by the Georgian “shvili”) . Before the revolution, Dzhugashvili used a large number of pseudonyms, in particular, Besoshvili (Beso is a diminutive of Vissarion), Nizheradze, Chizhikov, Ivanovich. Of these, besides Stalin, the most known pseudonym became “Koba” - as is usually believed (based on the opinion of Stalin’s childhood friend Iremashvili), after the name of the hero of Kazbegi’s novel “The Patricide,” a noble robber who, according to Iremashvili, was the idol of young Soso. According to V. Pokhlebkin, the pseudonym came from the Persian king Kavad (in another spelling Kobades), who conquered Georgia and made Tbilisi the capital of the country, whose name in Georgian sounds Koba. Kavad was known as a supporter of Mazdakism, a movement that promoted early communist views. Traces of interest in Persia and Kavad are found in Stalin’s speeches of 1904-07. The origin of the pseudonym “Stalin” is usually associated with the Russian translation of the ancient Georgian word “dzhuga” - “steel”. Thus, the pseudonym “Stalin” is a literal translation into Russian of his real last name.

During the Great Patriotic War, he was usually addressed not by his first name, patronymic or military rank (“Comrade Marshal (Generalissimo) of the Soviet Union”), but simply “Comrade Stalin.”

Childhood and youth

Born on December 6 (18), 1878 (according to the entry in the metric book of the Gori Assumption Cathedral Church) in Georgia in the city of Gori, although starting from 1929 [source?], his birthday was officially considered December 9 (21), 1879. He was the third son in family, the first two died in infancy. His native language was Georgian; Stalin learned Russian later, but always spoke with a noticeable Georgian accent. According to his daughter Svetlana, Stalin, however, sang in Russian with virtually no accent.

He grew up in poverty, in the family of a shoemaker and the daughter of a serf. Father Vissarion (Beso) drank and beat his son and wife; Stalin later recalled how as a child, in self-defense, he threw a knife at his father and almost killed him. Subsequently, Beso left home and became a wanderer. The exact date of his death is unknown; Stalin's peer Iremashvili claims that he was stabbed to death in a drunken brawl when Soso was 11 years old (possibly confused with his brother Georgiy); according to other sources, he died a natural death much later. Stalin himself considered him alive back in 1909. Mother Ketevan (Keke) Geladze was known as a strict woman, but she loved her son dearly and strived to give him a career, which she associated with the position of a priest. According to some reports (which are mainly adhered to by Stalin's opponents), his relationship with his mother was cool. Stalin did not come to her funeral in 1937, but only sent a wreath with the inscription in Russian and Georgian: “To my dear and beloved mother from her son Joseph Dzhugashvili (from Stalin).” Perhaps his absence was due to the trial of Tukhachevsky that unfolded in those days.

In 1888, Joseph entered the Gori Theological School. In July 1894, upon graduating from college, Joseph was noted as the best student. His certificate contains A's in many subjects. Here is a fragment of his certificate:

A student of the Gori Theological School, Dzhugashvili Joseph... entered the first grade of the school in September 1889 and, with excellent behavior (5), showed success:

By Sacred history Old Testament - (5)

According to the Sacred History of the New Testament - (5)

According to the Orthodox Catechism - (5)

Explanation of worship with the church charter - (5)

Russian with Church Slavonic - (5)

Greek - (4) very good

Georgian - (5) excellent

Arithmetic - (4) very good

Geographies - (5)

Calligraphy - (5)

Church singing:

Russian - (5)

and Georgian - (5)

In September of the same 1894, Joseph, having brilliantly passed the entrance exams, was enrolled in the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi). Without completing the full course of study, he was expelled from the seminary in 1899 (according to the official Soviet version, for promoting Marxism; according to seminary documents, for failure to appear for an exam). In his youth, Soso always strived to be a leader and studied well, scrupulously completing his homework.

Memoirs of Joseph Iremashvili

Joseph Iremashvili, a friend and classmate of the young Stalin at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, was expelled from the USSR in 1922, after being released from prison. In 1932, a book of his memoirs in German, “Stalin and the Tragedy of Georgia” (German: “Stalin und die Tragoedie Georgiens”), was published in Berlin, covering the youth of the then leader of the CPSU (b) in a negative light. According to Iremashvili, young Stalin was characterized by rancor, vindictiveness, deceit, ambition and lust for power. According to him, the humiliations suffered in childhood made Stalin “cruel and heartless, like his father. He was convinced that the person to whom other people should obey must be like his father, and therefore he soon developed a deep dislike for everyone who was above him in position. From childhood, the goal of his life was revenge, and he subordinated everything to this goal.” Iremashvili ends his description with the words: “It was a triumph for him to achieve victory and inspire fear.”

From the reading circle, according to Iremashvili, the aforementioned novel by the Georgian nationalist Kazbegi “The Patricide” made a special impression on young Soso, with whose hero - the abrek Koba - he identified himself. According to Iremashvili, “Koba became a god for Coco, the meaning of his life. He would like to become the second Koba, a fighter and hero, famous like this last one."

Before the revolution

1915 active member of the RSDLP(b)

In 1901-1902, member of the Tiflis and Batumi committees of the RSDLP. After the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP (1903) - Bolshevik. He was repeatedly arrested, exiled, and escaped exile. Participant in the revolution of 1905-1907. In December 1905, delegate to the 1st conference of the RSDLP (Tammerfors). Delegate to the IV and V congresses of the RSDLP 1906-1907. In 1907-1908, member of the Baku Committee of the RSDLP. At the plenum of the Central Committee after the 6th (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (1912), he was co-opted in absentia into the Central Committee and the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) (he was not elected at the conference itself). Trotsky, in his biography of Stalin, believed that this was facilitated by Stalin’s personal letter to V.I. Lenin, where he said that he agreed to any responsible work. In those years when the influence of Bolshevism was clearly declining, this made a great impression on Lenin.

In 1906-1907 led the so-called expropriation in Transcaucasia. In particular, on June 25, 1907, in order to raise funds for the needs of the Bolsheviks, he organized the robbery of a cash-in-transit carriage in Tiflis.[source?]

In 1912-1913, while working in St. Petersburg, he was one of the main employees in the first mass Bolshevik newspaper Pravda.

At this time, Stalin, at the direction of V.I. Lenin, wrote the work “Marxism and the National Question,” in which he expressed Bolshevik views on ways to resolve the national question and criticized the program of “cultural-national autonomy” of the Austro-Hungarian socialists. This caused Lenin to have an extremely positive attitude towards him, who called him a “wonderful Georgian.”

In 1913 he was exiled to the village of Kureika, Turukhansk Territory, and was in exile until 1917.

After the February Revolution he returned to Petrograd. Before Lenin's arrival from exile, he led the activities of the Central Committee and the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolshevik Party. In 1917, he was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Pravda, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and the Military Revolutionary Center. In relation to the Provisional Government and its policies, I proceeded from the fact that the democratic revolution was not yet completed, and overthrowing the government was not a practical task. Due to Lenin’s forced departure into hiding, Stalin spoke at the VI Congress of the RSDLP(b) with a report to the Central Committee. Participated in Oktyabrsky armed uprising as a member of the party center under its leadership. After the victory of the October Revolution of 1917, he joined the Council of People's Commissars as People's Commissar for Nationalities.

Civil War

After the outbreak of the civil war, Stalin was sent to the south of Russia as an extraordinary representative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for the procurement and export of grain from the North Caucasus to industrial centers. Arriving in Tsaritsyn on June 6, 1918, Stalin took power in the city into his own hands, established a regime of terror there and began defending Tsaritsyn from the troops of Ataman Krasnov. However, the very first military measures taken by Stalin together with Voroshilov resulted in defeats for the Red Army. Blaming “military experts” for these defeats, Stalin carried out mass arrests and executions. After Krasnov came close to the city and semi-blocked it, Stalin was recalled from Tsaritsyn at the decisive insistence of Trotsky. Soon after Stalin left, the city fell. Lenin condemned Stalin for the executions. Stalin, being absorbed in military affairs, did not forget about the development of domestic production. So, he then wrote to Lenin about sending meat to Moscow: “There are more cattle here than necessary... It would be good to organize at least one canning factory, set up a slaughterhouse, etc..”

In January 1919, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky travel to Vyatka to investigate the reasons for the defeat of the Red Army near Perm and the surrender of the city to the forces of Admiral Kolchak. The Stalin-Dzerzhinsky Commission contributed to the reorganization and restoration of combat effectiveness of the broken 3rd Army; however, in general, the situation on the Perm front was corrected by the fact that Ufa was taken by the Red Army, and Kolchak already on January 6 gave the order to concentrate forces in the Ufa direction and move to defense near Perm. Stalin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his work on the Petrograd Front. Firmness of decisions, unprecedented efficiency and a smart combination of military-organizational and political activity allowed us to gain many supporters.

In the summer of 1920, Stalin, sent to the Polish front, encouraged Budyonny to disobey command orders to transfer the 1st cavalry army from near Lvov to the Warsaw direction, which, according to some historians, had fatal consequences for the Red Army campaign.

1920s

RSDLP - RSDLP(b) - RCP(b) - VKP(b) - CPSU

In April 1922, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) elected Stalin as General Secretary of the Central Committee. L. D. Trotsky considered G. E. Zinoviev to be the initiator of this appointment, but perhaps it was V. I. Lenin himself, who sharply changed his attitude towards Trotsky after the so-called. “discussions about trade unions” (this version was set out in the famous “Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” and was considered mandatory during Stalin’s lifetime). Initially, this position meant only the leadership of the party apparatus, while the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Lenin, formally remained the leader of the party and government. In addition, leadership in the party was considered inextricably linked to the merits of the theorist; therefore, following Lenin, Trotsky, L.B. Kamenev, Zinoviev and N.I. Bukharin were considered the most prominent “leaders,” while Stalin was seen to have neither theoretical merits nor special merits in the revolution.

Lenin highly valued Stalin's organizational skills; Stalin was considered an expert on the national question, although in recent years Lenin noted his “Great Russian chauvinism.” On this basis (the “Georgian incident”) Lenin clashed with Stalin; Stalin's despotic behavior and his rudeness towards Krupskaya made Lenin repent of his appointment, and in his "Letter to the Congress" Lenin stated that Stalin was too rude and should be removed from his post Secretary General.

But due to illness, Lenin withdrew from political activity. The highest power in the party (and in fact in the country) belonged to the Politburo. In the absence of Lenin, it consisted of 6 people - Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin and M.P. Tomsky, where all issues were decided by a majority vote. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev organized a “troika” based on opposition to Trotsky, whom they had a negative attitude towards since the Civil War (frictions between Trotsky and Stalin began over the defense of Tsaritsyn and between Trotsky and Zinoviev over the defense of Petrograd, Kamenev supported almost everything Zinoviev). Tomsky, being a leader of trade unions, had a negative attitude towards Trotsky since the time of the so-called. "discussions about trade unions". Bukharin could become Trotsky's only supporter, but his triumvirs began to gradually win him over to their side.

Trotsky began to resist. He sent a letter to the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (Central Control Commission) demanding strengthening of democracy in the party. Soon other oppositionists, not only Trotskyists, sent a similar so-called message to the Politburo. "Statement of the 46." The Troika then showed its power, mainly using the resources of the apparatus led by Stalin. At the XIII Conference of the RCP(b) all oppositionists were convicted. Stalin's influence increased greatly.

On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. The Troika united with Bukharin, A.I. Rykov, Tomsky and V.V. Kuibyshev, forming the so-called Politburo (which included Rykov as a member and Kuibyshev as a candidate member). "seven". Later, at the August plenum of 1924, this “seven” even became an official body, albeit secret and extra-statutory.

The XIII Congress of the RSDLP (b) turned out to be difficult for Stalin. Before the start of the congress, Lenin's widow N.K. Krupskaya handed over a “Letter to the Congress.” It was announced at a meeting of the Council of Elders (a non-statutory body consisting of members of the Central Committee and leaders of local party organizations). Stalin announced his resignation for the first time at this meeting. Kamenev proposed to resolve the issue by voting. The majority was in favor of leaving Stalin as General Secretary; only Trotsky's supporters voted against. Then a proposal was voted on that the document should be read out at closed meetings of individual delegations, while no one had the right to take notes and the “Testament” could not be referred to at the meetings of the congress. Thus, the “Letter to the Congress” was not even mentioned in the materials of the congress. It was first announced by N. S. Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956. Later, this fact was used by the opposition to criticize Stalin and the party (it was argued that the Central Committee “hidden” Lenin’s “testament”). Stalin himself (in connection with this letter, who several times raised the question of his resignation before the plenum of the Central Committee) rejected these accusations. Just two weeks after the congress, where Stalin's future victims Zinoviev and Kamenev used all their influence to keep him in office, Stalin opened fire on his own allies. First, he took advantage of a typo (“NEPman” instead of “NEP” in Kamenev’s quotation from Lenin:

I read in the newspaper the report of one of the comrades at the XIII Congress (Kamenev, I think), where it was written in black and white that the next slogan of our party is supposedly the transformation of “Nepman Russia” into socialist Russia. Moreover, what’s even worse, this strange slogan is attributed to none other than Lenin himself

In the same report, Stalin accused Zinoviev, without naming him, of the principle of “dictatorship of the party”, put forward at the XII Congress, and this thesis was recorded in the resolution of the congress and Stalin himself voted for it. Stalin’s main allies in the “seven” were Bukharin and Rykov.

A new split emerged in the Politburo in October 1925, when Zinoviev, Kamenev, G. Ya. Sokolnikov and Krupskaya presented a document that criticized the party line from a “left” point of view. (Zinoviev led the Leningrad communists, Kamenev led the Moscow ones, and among the working class of large cities, which lived worse than before the First World War, there was strong dissatisfaction with low wages and rising prices for agricultural products, which led to the demand for pressure on the peasantry and especially on the kulaks ). The Seven broke up. At that moment, Stalin began to unite with the “right” Bukharin-Rykov-Tomsky, who expressed the interests primarily of the peasantry. In the internal party struggle that began between the “right” and “left,” he provided them with the forces of the party apparatus, and they (namely Bukharin) acted as theorists. The “new opposition” of Zinoviev and Kamenev was condemned at the XIV Congress

By that time, the theory of the victory of socialism in one country had emerged. This view was developed by Stalin in the brochure “On Questions of Leninism” (1926) and Bukharin. They divided the question of the victory of socialism into two parts - the question of the complete victory of socialism, i.e. about the possibility of building socialism and the complete impossibility of restoring capitalism internal forces, and the question of final victory, that is, the impossibility of restoration due to the intervention of Western powers, which would be excluded only by establishing a revolution in the West.

Trotsky, who did not believe in socialism in one country, joined Zinoviev and Kamenev. The so-called "United Opposition". It was finally defeated after a demonstration organized by Trotsky’s supporters on November 7, 1927 in Leningrad. At this time, including the Bukharinites, the creation of a “personality cult” of Stalin began, who was still considered a party bureaucrat, and not a theoretic leader who could lay claim to Lenin’s legacy. Having established himself as a leader, Stalin in 1929 dealt an unexpected blow to his allies, accusing them of a “right deviation” and beginning to actually implement (in extreme forms) the program of the “left” to curtail the NEP and accelerated industrialization through the exploitation of the countryside, until hitherto the subject of condemnation. At the same time, Stalin’s 50th birthday is celebrated on a grand scale (whose date of birth was then changed, according to Stalin’s critics, in order to somewhat smooth out the “excesses” of collectivization with the celebration).

1930s

Immediately after the murder of Kirov on December 1, 1934, a rumor arose that the murder was organized by Stalin. There are different versions of the murder, from Stalin’s involvement to domestic ones.

After the 20th Congress, on the orders of Khrushchev, a Special Commission of the CPSU Central Committee was created to investigate the issue, headed by N. M. Shvernik with the participation of the old Bolshevik Olga Shatunovskaya. The commission interrogated over 3 thousand people and, according to letters from O. Shatunovskaya addressed to N. Khrushchev, A. Mikoyan and A. Yakovlev, it found reliable evidence that allowed it to be asserted that Stalin and the NKVD organized the murder of Kirov. N.S. Khrushchev also speaks about this in his memoirs). Subsequently, Shatunovskaya expressed suspicion that documents incriminating Stalin had been confiscated.

In 1990, during a repeated investigation conducted by the USSR Prosecutor's Office, the following conclusion was given: “... In these cases, there is no information about the preparation in 1928-1934. The attempt on Kirov’s life, as well as the involvement of the NKVD and Stalin in this crime, is not contained.”

A number of modern historians support the version of the murder of Kirov on the orders of Stalin, others insist on the version of a lone killer.

Mass repressions of the second half of the 1930s

Politburo decision signed by Stalin obliging the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR to sentence 457 “members of counter-revolutionary organizations” to execution and imprisonment in a camp (1940)

As historian M. Geller notes, the murder of Kirov served as a signal for the beginning of “ Great Terror" On December 1, 1934, on Stalin’s initiative, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution “On amendments to the existing criminal procedural codes of the Union republics” with the following content:

Make the following changes to the current criminal procedural codes of the union republics for the investigation and consideration of cases of terrorist organizations and terrorist acts against employees of the Soviet government:

1. The investigation in these cases should be completed within no more than ten days;

2. The indictment must be served on the accused one day before the hearing of the case in court;

3. Hear cases without the participation of the parties;

4. Cassation appeals against sentences, as well as filing petitions for pardon, should not be allowed;

5. Sentence to to the highest degree punishments shall be carried out immediately upon sentencing.

Following this, the former party opposition to Stalin (Kamenev and Zinoviev, allegedly acting on Trotsky’s instructions) was accused of organizing the murder. Subsequently, according to Shatunovskaya, in Stalin’s archive, lists of the “Moscow” and “Leningrad” opposition centers that allegedly organized the murder were discovered in Stalin’s own handwriting. Orders were issued to expose “enemies of the people” and a series of trials began.

Mass terror during the “Yezhovshchina” period was carried out by the then authorities of the country throughout the entire territory of the USSR (and, at the same time, in the territories of Mongolia, Tuva and Republican Spain controlled at that time by the Soviet regime), as a rule, on the basis of previously “released into place” by the party authorities figures of “planned tasks” to identify people (the so-called “enemies of the people”), as well as lists of pre-planned victims of terror compiled by the KGB authorities (based on these figures), the reprisal against whom was centrally planned by the authorities. [source?] During the period of the Yezhovshchina, the regime ruling in the USSR completely discarded even that socialist legality, which, for some reason, it sometimes considered necessary to observe in the period preceding the Yezhovshchina. During the Yezhovshchina, torture was widely used against those arrested; sentences that were not subject to appeal (often to death) were passed without any trial - and were carried out immediately (often even before the verdict was passed); all property of the absolute majority of arrested people was immediately confiscated; the relatives of the repressed themselves were subjected to the same repressions - for the mere fact of their relationship with them; Children of repressed persons left without parents (regardless of their age) were also placed, as a rule, in prisons, camps, colonies, or in special “orphanages for children of enemies of the people.”[source?]

In 1937-1938, the NKVD arrested about 1.5 million people, of whom about 700 thousand were executed, that is, on average, 1,000 executions per day.

Historian V.N. Zemskov names a smaller number of those executed - 642,980 people (and at least 500,000 who died in the camps).

As a result of collectivization, famine and purges between 1926 and 1939. The country lost, according to various estimates, from 7 to 13 million and even up to 20 million people.

The Second World War

German propaganda reporting Stalin's supposed escape from Moscow and propaganda coverage of the capture of his son Yakov. Autumn 1941

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference.

During the Great Patriotic War, Stalin actively participated in hostilities as Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Already on June 30, by order of Stalin, the State Defense Committee was organized. During the war, Stalin lost his son.

After the war

Portrait of Stalin on the freight diesel locomotive TE2-414, 1954Central Museum of the October Railway, St. Petersburg

Portrait of Stalin on the diesel freight locomotive TE2-414, 1954

Central Museum of the October Railway, St. Petersburg

After the war, the country set itself on a course of accelerated revival of an economy destroyed by military action and scorched earth tactics carried out by both sides. Stalin used harsh measures to suppress the nationalist movement, which was actively manifested in the territories newly annexed to the USSR (the Baltic states, Western Ukraine).

In the liberated states of Eastern Europe, pro-Soviet communist regimes were established, which later formed a counterweight to the militaristic NATO bloc to the west of the USSR. Post-war contradictions between the USSR and the USA in the Far East led to the Korean War.

The loss of life did not end with the war. The Holodomor of 1946-1947 alone claimed the lives of about a million people. In total, for the period 1939-1959. According to various estimates, population losses ranged from 25 to 30 million people.

At the end of the 1940s, the great power component of Soviet ideology (the fight against cosmopolitanism) intensified. In the early 1950s, several high-profile anti-Semitic trials were carried out in the countries of Eastern Europe, and then in the USSR (see Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, The Doctors' Case). All Jewish educational institutions, theaters, publishing houses and mass media were closed (except for the newspaper of the Jewish Autonomous Region “Birobidzhaner Shtern” (“Birobidzhan Star”)). Mass arrests and dismissals of Jews began. In the winter of 1953, persistent rumors circulated about the impending deportation of Jews; Whether these rumors were true is debatable.

In 1952, according to the recollections of participants in the October plenum of the Central Committee, Stalin tried to resign from his party duties, refusing the post of secretary of the Central Committee, but under pressure from the plenum delegates he accepted this position. It should be noted that the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was formally abolished after the 17th Party Congress, and Stalin was nominally considered one of the equal secretaries of the Central Committee. However, in the book “Joseph Vissarion Stalin,” published in 1947. Brief biography" said:

On April 3, 1922, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party... elected Stalin as General Secretary of the Central Committee. Since then, Stalin has been working in this post continuously.

Stalin and the metro

Under Stalin, the first metro in the USSR was built. Stalin was interested in everything in the country, including construction. His former bodyguard Rybin recalls:

I. Stalin personally inspected the necessary streets, going into the courtyards, where mostly rickety huts were breathing their last and huddled with many mossy sheds on chicken legs. The first time he did this was during the day. A crowd immediately gathered, did not allow us to move at all, and then ran after the car. We had to reschedule the examinations for the night. But even then, passers-by recognized the leader and escorted him with his long tail.

As a result of lengthy preparation, the master plan for the reconstruction of Moscow was approved. This is how Gorky Street, Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya, Kutuzovsky Prospekt and other beautiful thoroughfares appeared. During another trip along Mokhovaya, Stalin said to the driver Mitryukhin:

We need to build new university named after Lomonosov, so that students study in one place, and not wander all over the city.

During the construction process, by personal order of Stalin, the Sovetskaya metro station was adapted for the underground control center of the Moscow Civil Defense Headquarters. In addition to the civilian metro, complex secret complexes were built, including the so-called Metro-2, which Stalin himself used. In November 1941, a solemn meeting on the occasion of the anniversary of the October Revolution was held in the metro at the Mayakovskaya station. Stalin arrived by train along with his guards, and from the Headquarters building Supreme High Command He didn’t come out on Myasnitskaya, but went down from the basement into a special tunnel that led to the metro.

Stalin and higher education in the USSR

Stalin paid great attention to the development of Soviet science. Thus, according to Zhdanov’s memoirs, Stalin believed that higher education in Russia went through three stages: “In the first period... they were the main forge of personnel. Along with them, workers' faculties developed only to a very weak extent. Then, with the development of economy and trade, a large number of practitioners and businessmen were required. Now... we should not plant new ones, but improve existing ones. The question cannot be put this way: universities train either teachers or researchers. You can't teach without leading and knowing scientific work... now we often say: give us a sample from abroad, we’ll take it apart, and then build it ourselves.”

Stalin paid personal attention to the construction of Moscow State University. The Moscow City Committee and the Moscow City Council proposed building a four-story town in the Vnukovo area, where there were wide fields, based on economic considerations. The President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Academician S. I. Vavilov and the Rector of Moscow State University A. N. Nesmeyanov proposed building a modern ten-story building. However, at a meeting of the Politburo, which Stalin personally chaired, he said: “this complex is for Moscow University, and not 10-12, but 20 floors. We will entrust the construction to Komarovsky. To speed up the pace of construction, it will need to be carried out in parallel with the design... It is necessary to create living conditions by building dormitories for teachers and students. How long will students live? Six thousand? This means there must be six thousand rooms in the hostel. Special care should be taken for students with families.”

The decision to build Moscow State University was supplemented by a set of measures to improve all universities, primarily in cities affected by the war. Large buildings in Minsk, Voronezh, and Kharkov were transferred to universities. Universities in a number of union republics began to actively create and develop.

In 1949, the issue of naming the Moscow State University complex on the Lenin Hills after Stalin was discussed. However, Stalin categorically opposed this proposal.

Education and science

At the direction of Stalin, a profound restructuring of the entire system of humanities was undertaken. In 1934, history teaching was resumed in secondary and high schools. According to historian Yuri Felshtinsky, “Under the influence of the instructions of Stalin, Kirov and Zhdanov and the decrees of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the teaching of history (1934-1936), dogmatism and scolding began to take root in historical science, the substitution of research with quotations, and the adjustment of material to preconceived conclusions " The same processes occurred in other areas of humanities. In philology, the advanced “formal” school (Tynyanov, Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, etc.) was destroyed; philosophy began to be based on a primitive presentation of the foundations of Marxism in Chapter IV of the “Short Course”. Pluralism within Marxist philosophy itself, which existed until the end of the 30s, became impossible after that; “philosophy” was reduced to commenting on Stalin; All attempts to go beyond the official dogma, manifested by the Lifshitz-Lukacs school, were harshly suppressed. The situation has especially worsened in post-war period, when massive campaigns began against the departure from the “principle of party membership”, against the “abstract academic spirit”, “objectivism”, as well as against “anti-patriotism”, “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “derogation of Russian science and Russian philosophy”, Encyclopedias of those years report , for example, the following about Socrates: “ancient Greek. idealist philosopher, ideologist of the slave-owning aristocracy, enemy of ancient materialism.”

To encourage outstanding figures in science, technology, culture and organizers of production, the Stalin Prizes, awarded annually since 1941, were established in 1940 (instead of the Lenin Prize, established in 1925, but not awarded since 1935). The development of Soviet science and technology under Stalin can be described as taking off. The created network of fundamental and applied research institutes, design bureaus and university laboratories, as well as prison-camp design bureaus (the so-called “sharags”) covered the entire front of research. Scientists have become the country's true elite. Names such as physicists Kurchatov, Landau, Tamm, mathematician Keldysh, creator of space technology Korolev, aircraft designer Tupolev are known all over the world. In the post-war period, based on obvious military needs, the greatest attention was paid to nuclear physics. Thus, in 1946 alone, Stalin personally signed about sixty important documents that determined the development of atomic science and technology. The result of these decisions was the creation of the atomic bomb, as well as the construction of the world's first nuclear power plant in Obninsk (1954) and the subsequent development of nuclear energy.

At the same time, centralized management scientific activities, not always competent, led to the restriction of directions that were considered to contradict dialectical materialism and therefore have no practical use. Entire fields of research, such as genetics and cybernetics, were declared “bourgeois pseudosciences.” The consequence of this was arrests and sometimes even executions, as well as the removal of prominent Soviet scientists from teaching. According to one of the common points of view, the defeat of cybernetics ensured that the USSR was fatally lagging behind the United States in the creation of electronic computer technology - work on the creation of a domestic computer began only in 1952, although immediately after the war the USSR had all the scientific and technical personnel necessary for its creation. The Russian genetics school, considered one of the best in the world, was completely destroyed. Under Stalin, truly pseudoscientific trends enjoyed state support, such as Lysenkoism in biology and (until 1950) the new doctrine of language in linguistics, which, however, was debunked by Stalin himself at the end of his life. Science was also affected by the fight against cosmopolitanism and the so-called “adulation of the West”, which had a strong anti-Semitic connotation, which had been waged since 1948.

Stalin's personality cult

Soviet propaganda created a semi-divine aura around Stalin as an infallible “great leader and teacher.” Cities, factories, collective farms, and military equipment were named after Stalin and his closest associates. The city of Donetsk (Stalino) bore the name of Stalin for a long time. His name was mentioned in the same breath as Marx, Engels and Lenin. On January 1, 1936, the first two poems glorifying I.V. Stalin, written by Boris Pasternak, appeared in Izvestia. According to the testimony of Korney Chukovsky and Nadezhda Mandelstam, he “simply raved about Stalin.”

Poster depicting Stalin

Poster depicting Stalin

“And in those same days, at a distance behind the ancient stone wall

It is not a person who lives, but an act: an act the size of the globe.

Fate gave him the destiny of the previous gap.

He is what the bravest people dreamed of, but no one dared before him.

Behind this fabulous affair, the order of things remained intact.

He didn't get up celestial body, has not become distorted, has not decayed...

In the collection of fairy tales and relics of the Kremlin floating above Moscow

Centuries have become as accustomed to it as to the battle of a sentry tower.

But he remained a man, and if, against the hare

If he shoots at the cutting areas in winter, the forest will respond to him, like everyone else.”

Stalin’s name is also mentioned in the anthem of the USSR, composed by S. Mikhalkov in 1944:

Through the storms the sun of freedom shone for us,

And the great Lenin illuminated the path for us,

Stalin raised us to be loyal to the people,

Inspired us to work and to deeds!

Phenomena similar in nature, but smaller in scale, were observed in relation to other government leaders(Kalinin, Molotov, Zhdanov, Beria, etc.), as well as Lenin.

A panel depicting J.V. Stalin at the Narvskaya station of the St. Petersburg metro existed until 1961, then it was covered with a false wall

Khrushchev, in his famous report at the 20th Party Congress, argued that Stalin encouraged his cult in every possible way. Thus, Khrushchev stated that he reliably knew that, when editing his own biography prepared for publication, Stalin wrote entire pages where he called himself the leader of nations, a great commander, the highest theoretician of Marxism, a brilliant scientist, etc. . In particular, Khrushchev claims that the following passage was written by Stalin himself: “Masterfully fulfilling the tasks of the leader of the party and the people, having the full support of everyone Soviet people“Stalin, however, did not allow even a shadow of conceit, arrogance, or narcissism in his activities.” It is known that Stalin suppressed some acts of his praise. Thus, according to the recollections of the author of the Orders of Victory and Glory, the first sketches were made with the profile of Stalin. Stalin asked to replace his profile with the Spasskaya Tower. In response to Lion Feuchtwanger's remark "about the tasteless, exaggerated adulation of his personality", Stalin "shrugged his shoulders" and "excused his peasants and workers by saying that they were too busy with other things and could not develop good taste."

After the “exposure of the cult of personality,” a phrase usually attributed to M. A. Sholokhov (but also to other historical characters) became famous: “Yes, there was a cult... But there was also a personality!”

In modern Russian culture There are also many cultural sources praising Stalin. So, for example, you can point to the songs of Alexander Kharchikov: “Stalin’s March”, “Stalin is our father, our Motherland is our mother”, “Stalin, get up!”

Stalin and anti-Semitism

Some Jewish authors, based on the fact that under Stalin, Jews were also subject to criminal liability, on some cases of manifestations of everyday anti-Semitism in Soviet society, and also on the fact that in some of his theoretical works Stalin mentions Zionism in the same breath with other types of nationalism and chauvinism (including anti-Semitism), they conclude about Stalin’s anti-Semitism. Stalin himself repeatedly made statements severely condemning anti-Semitism. Among Stalin's closest associates there were many Jews.

Stalin's role in the creation of the state of Israel

Stalin deserves great credit for the creation of the state of Israel. The first official contact between the Soviet Union and the Zionists took place on February 3, 1941, when Chaim Weizmann, a world-famous chemist and head of the World Zionist Organization, came to the Ambassador in London I.M. Maisky. Weizmann made a trade offer for oranges in exchange for furs. The business failed, but the contacts remained. Relations between the Zionist movement and Moscow leaders changed after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June. The need to defeat Hitler was more important than ideological differences - before this, the attitude of the Soviet government towards Zionism was negative.

Already on September 2, 1941, Weizmann reappeared with the Soviet ambassador. The head of the World Zionist Organization said that the appeal of Soviet Jews to world Jewry with a call to join forces in the fight against Hitler made a huge impression on him. Using Soviet Jews to psychologically influence world public opinion, especially Americans, was a Stalinist idea. At the end of 1941, a decision was made in Moscow to form the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee - along with the All-Slavic, Women's, Youth and Committee of Soviet Scientists. All these organizations were focused on educational work abroad. The Jews, at the call of the Zionists, collected and transferred $45,000,000 to the Soviet Union. However, the main role they played was in explanatory work among the Americans, because isolationist sentiments were strong at that time.

After the war, the dialogue continued. British intelligence services spied on the Zionists because their leaders were sympathetic to the USSR. The British and American governments imposed an embargo on Jewish settlements in Palestine. Britain sold weapons to the Arabs. The Arabs, in addition, hired Bosnian Muslims, former soldiers of the SS volunteer division, Anders' soldiers, and Arab units in the Wehrmacht. By Stalin’s decision, Israel began to receive artillery and mortars and German Messerschmitt fighters through Czechoslovakia. It was mostly German captured weapons. The CIA proposed shooting down the planes, but politicians wisely refused this step. In general, few weapons were supplied, but they helped maintain the high morale of the Israelis. There was also great political support. According to P. Sudoplatov, before the UN vote on the division of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in November 1947, Stalin told his subordinates: “Let's agree with the formation of Israel. This will be a pain in the ass for the Arab states, and then they will seek an alliance with us."

Already in 1948, a cooling began in Soviet-Israeli relations, which led to the severance of diplomatic relations with Israel on February 12, 1953 - the basis for such a step was a bomb explosion near the doors of the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv (diplomatic relations were restored shortly after Stalin’s death, but then they worsened again due to military conflicts).

Stalin and the church

Stalin's policy towards the Russian Orthodox Church was not uniform, but it was distinguished by its consistency in pursuing the pragmatic goals of the survival of the communist regime and its global expansion. To some researchers, Stalin's attitude towards religion did not seem entirely consistent. On the one hand, not a single atheistic or anti-church work of Stalin remains. On the contrary, Roy Medvedev cites Stalin’s statement about atheistic literature as waste paper. On the other hand, on May 15, 1932, a campaign was announced in the USSR, the official goal of which was the complete eradication of religion in the country by May 1, 1937 - the so-called “godless five-year plan.” By 1939, the number of churches opened in the USSR numbered in the hundreds, and diocesan structures were completely destroyed.

Some weakening of anti-church terror took place after L.P. Beria came to the post of chairman of the NKVD, which was associated both with a general weakening of repressions and with the fact that in the fall of 1939 the USSR annexed significant territories on its western borders, where there were numerous and full-blooded church churches. structures.

On June 22, 1941, Metropolitan Sergius sent out an appeal to the dioceses “to the Pastors and Flock of Christ’s Orthodox Church,” which did not go unnoticed by Stalin.

There are many mythical tales about Stalin’s alleged resort to the prayerful help of the Church during the war, but there are no serious documents that would confirm this. According to the oral testimony of Anatoly Vasilyevich Vedernikov, secretary of Patriarch Alexy I, in September 1941, Stalin allegedly ordered to lock Sergius of Stragorodsky together with his cell attendant in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin, so that he would pray there in front of the icon of the Mother of God of Vladimir (the icon was moved there at that time). Sergius stayed in the Assumption Cathedral for three days.

In October 1941, the Patriarchate and other religious centers were ordered to leave Moscow. Orenburg was proposed, but Sergius objected and Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk) was chosen. Metropolitan Sergius and his staff stayed in Ulyanovsk until August 1943.

According to the memoirs of NKGB officer Georgy Karpov, on September 4, 1943, Stalin, at a meeting at which, in addition to Karpov, was attended by Molotov and Beria, ordered the formation of a body for the interaction of the Russian Orthodox Church with the government - the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Council of People's Commissars. A few hours after the meeting, late at night, Metropolitans Sergius, Alexy (Simansky), Nikolai (Yarushevich) were brought to Stalin. During the conversation, a decision was made to elect a Patriarch, open churches, seminaries and a theological academy. The building of the former German embassy was provided to the Patriarch as a residence. The state actually stopped supporting renovationist structures, which were completely liquidated by 1946.

The apparent change in policy regarding the Russian Orthodox Church causes much controversy among researchers. Versions have been expressed ranging from Stalin’s deliberate use of church circles to subjugate the people to the opinion that Stalin remained a secretly religious person. The latter opinion is also confirmed by the stories of Artyom Sergeev, who was brought up in Stalin’s house. And also, according to the recollections of Stalin’s bodyguard Yuri Solovyov, Stalin prayed in the church in the Kremlin, which was located on the way to the cinema. Yuri Solovyov himself remained outside the church, but could see Stalin through the window.

The real reason for the temporary change in the repressive policy towards the Church lay in considerations of primarily foreign policy expediency. (See article History of the Russian Church)

Since the autumn of 1948, after the Conference of Heads and Representatives of the Orthodox Churches was held in Moscow, the results of which were disappointing from the point of view of promoting the Kremlin’s foreign policy interests, the previous repressive policy was largely resumed.

Sociocultural scales of Stalin's personality

Assessments of Stalin's personality are contradictory. The party intelligentsia of the Lenin era rated him extremely low; Trotsky, reflecting her opinion, called Stalin “the most outstanding mediocrity of our era.” On the other hand, many people who subsequently communicated with him spoke of him as a widely and diversified educated and extremely intelligent person. According to the English historian Simon Montefiore, who studied Stalin’s personal library and reading circle, he spent a lot of time reading books, in the margins of which his notes remained: “His tastes were eclectic: Maupassant, Wilde, Gogol, Goethe, as well as Zola, whom he adored. He liked poetry. (...) Stalin was an erudite man. He quoted long passages from the Bible, the works of Bismarck, and the works of Chekhov. He admired Dostoevsky."

On the contrary, the Soviet historian Leonid Batkin, while recognizing Stalin’s love of reading, believes, however, that he was an “aesthetically dense” reader, and at the same time remained a “practical politician.” Batkin believes that Stalin had no idea “about the existence of such a ‘subject’ as art,” about a “special artistic world,” about the structure of this world, and so on. Using the example of Stalin’s statements on literary and cultural topics given in the memoirs of Konstantin Simonov, Batkin concludes that “everything that Stalin says, everything that he thinks about literature, cinema, etc., is completely ignorant,” and that the hero of the memoirs is “quite “still a primitive and vulgar type.” To compare with Stalin’s words, Batkin cites quotes from marginalized people - the heroes of Mikhail Zoshchenko; in his opinion, they are almost no different from Stalin’s statements. In general, according to Batkin’s conclusion, Stalin brought “a certain energy” of the semi-educated and average layer of people to a “pure, strong-willed, outstanding form.”

It should be noted that Batkin fundamentally refuses to consider Stalin as a diplomat, military leader, and economist, as he says at the beginning of the article.

Roy Medvedev, speaking out against “often extremely exaggerated assessments of the level of his education and intelligence,” at the same time warns against downplaying it. He notes that Stalin read a lot, and widely, from fiction to popular science. In the article, the historian quotes Stalin’s words about reading: “This is my daily norm - 500 pages”; Thus, Stalin read several books a day and about a thousand books a year. In the pre-war period, Stalin devoted his main attention to historical and military-technical books; after the war, he moved on to reading political works, such as “History of Diplomacy” and the biography of Talleyrand. At the same time, Stalin actively studied the works of Marxists, including the works of his comrades-in-arms, and then opponents - Trotsky, Kamenev and others. Medvedev notes that Stalin, being the culprit for the death of a large number of writers and the destruction of their books, at the same time patronized M. Sholokhov, A. Tolstoy and others, returns from exile E.V. Tarle, whose biography of Napoleon he took with great interest and personally supervised its publication, stopping tendentious attacks on the book. Medvedev emphasizes knowledge of national Georgian culture; in 1940, Stalin himself made corrections to the new translation of “The Knight in the Skin of the Tiger.” .

Stalin as speaker and writer

According to L. Batkin, Stalin's oratorical style is extremely primitive. It is distinguished by “a catechismal form, endless repetitions and inversions of the same thing, the same phrase in the form of a question and in the form of a statement, and again the same phrase through a negative particle; curses and cliches of party bureaucratic dialect; an invariably meaningful, important face designed to hide that the author has little to say; poverty of syntax and vocabulary.” A. P. Romanenko and A. K. Mikhalskaya also draw attention to the lexical paucity of Stalin’s speeches and the abundance of repetitions. Israeli scholar Mikhail Weiskopf also argues that Stalin’s argument “is built on more or less hidden tautologies, on the effect of a stupefying drumming.”

The formal logic of Stalin’s speeches, according to Batkin, is characterized by “chains of simple identities: A = A and B = B, this cannot be, because it can never happen” - that is, there is no logic in the strict sense of the word in Stalin’s speeches at all. Weiskopf speaks of Stalin’s “logic” as a collection of logical errors: “the main features of this pseudologic are the use of an unproven proposition as a premise, etc. petitio principii, that is, the hidden identity between the basis of the proof and the thesis supposedly following from it. The tautology of Stalin's arguments (idem per idem) constantly forms a classic “circle in the proof.” There is often a rearrangement of the so-called. strong and weak judgments, substitution of terms, errors - or rather, falsifications - associated with the relationship between the volume and content of concepts, with deductive and inductive conclusions, etc.” Weiskopf generally considers tautology as the basis of the logic of Stalin’s speeches (more precisely, “the basis of the foundation,” as the author puts it, paraphrasing the real words of the leader). In particular, Weiskopf cites the following examples of Stalinist “logic”:

She can ruin the common cause if she is downtrodden and dark, of course, not by her own evil will, but by her own darkness

Weiskopf finds a petitio principii error in this phrase, arguing that one of the references to “darkness” is a premise, and the other is a conclusion following from it, thus the premise and conclusion are identical.

“The words and deeds of the opposition bloc invariably come into conflict with each other. Hence the discord between deed and word.”

“The misfortune of Bukharin’s group lies precisely in the fact that they do not see characteristic features of this period Hence their blindness"

“Why is it the capitalists who take the fruits of the proletarians’ labor, and not the proletarians themselves? Why do capitalists exploit proletarians, and not proletarians exploit capitalists? Because the capitalists buy the labor power of the proletarians, and that is why the capitalists take the fruits of the labor of the proletarians, that is why the capitalists exploit the proletarians, and not the proletarians of the capitalists. But why exactly do capitalists buy the labor power of proletarians? Why are proletarians hired by capitalists, and not capitalists hired by proletarians? Because the main basis of the capitalist system is private ownership of the instruments and means of production...”

However, according to Batkin, it is unlawful to make claims against Stalin’s speeches in tautologies, sophisms, gross lies and idle talk, since they were not intended to convince anyone, but were of a ritual nature: in them the conclusion does not follow from the reasoning, but precedes it, “that is not a “conclusion,” of course, but “intention and decision. Therefore, the text is a way to make it clear, to guess about the decision, and to the same extent a way to prevent guessing.”

Georgy Khazagerov elevates Stalin's rhetoric to the traditions of solemn, homiletical (preaching) eloquence and considers it didactic-symbolic. According to the author’s definition, “the task of didactics is, based on symbolism as an axiom, to organize the picture of the world and to convey this ordered picture intelligibly. Stalinist didactics, however, also took on the functions of symbolism. This was manifested in the fact that the zone of axioms grew to entire curricula, and evidence, on the contrary, was replaced by a reference to authority.” V.V. Smolenenkova notes strong impact, which, with all these qualities, Stalin’s speeches had on the audience. Thus, Ilya Starinov conveys the impression made on him by Stalin’s speech: “We listened to Stalin’s speech with bated breath. (...) Stalin spoke about what worried everyone: about people, about personnel. And how convincingly he spoke! Here I first heard: “Personnel decides everything.” The words about how important it is to take care of people and take care of them are etched in my memory for the rest of my life...” Cf. also an entry in the diary of Vladimir Vernadsky: “Only yesterday the text of Stalin’s speech reached us, which made a huge impression. We used to listen on the radio from five to ten. The speech is undoubtedly from a very smart person."

V.V. Smolenenkova explains the effect of Stalin’s speeches by the fact that they were quite adequate to the mood and expectations of the audience. L. Batkin also emphasizes the moment of “fascination” that arose in the atmosphere of terror and the fear and respect it generated for Stalin as the personification of a higher power that controlled destinies. On the other hand, in the story “Atonement” by Julius Daniel (1964), student conversations about Stalin’s logic, conducted during his lifetime, are described in the spirit of future articles by Batkin and Weiskopf: “well, you remember - “this cannot be, because this it can never happen,” and so on, in the same spirit.”

Stalin and the culture of his contemporaries

Stalin was a very reading person and was interested in culture. After his death, his personal library remained, consisting of thousands of books, many with personal notes in the margins. He himself told some visitors, pointing to a stack of books on his desk: “This is my daily norm - 500 pages.” In this way, up to a thousand books were produced per year. There is also evidence that back in the 20s, Stalin attended the play “Days of the Turbins” eighteen times by the then little-known writer Bulgakov. At the same time, despite the difficult situation, he walked without personal security and transport. Later, Stalin took part in the popularization of this writer. Stalin also maintained personal contacts with other cultural figures: musicians, film actors, directors. Stalin also personally entered into controversy with the composer Shostakovich. According to Stalin, his post-war musical compositions were written for political reasons - with the aim of discrediting the Soviet Union.

Personal life and death of Stalin

In 1904, Stalin married Ekaterina Svanidze, but three years later his wife died of tuberculosis. Their only son Yakov was captured by the Germans during World War II. According to the widespread version, reflected, in particular, in Ivan Stadnyuk’s novel “War” and the Soviet film “Liberation” (the reliability of this story is unclear), the German side offered to exchange him for Field Marshal Paulus, to which Stalin replied: “I don’t exchange a soldier for a field marshal " In 1943, Yakov was shot and killed in the German concentration camp Sachsenhausen while trying to escape. Yakov was married three times and had a son, Evgeniy, who participated in the 1990s. in Russian politics (Stalin’s grandson was on the electoral lists of Anpilov’s bloc); this direct male line of the Dzhugashvili family still exists.

In 1919, Stalin married a second time. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, a member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, committed suicide in her Kremlin apartment in 1932 (the sudden death was officially announced) [source?]. From his second marriage, Stalin had two children: Svetlana and Vasily. His son Vasily, a Soviet officer air force, participated in command positions in the Great Patriotic War, after its end he led the air defense of the Moscow region (lieutenant general), after Stalin’s death he was arrested, died shortly after liberation in 1960. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva asked for political asylum at the embassy on March 6, 1967 United States in Delhi and moved to the USA in the same year. Artyom Sergeev (the son of the deceased revolutionary Fyodor Sergeev - “Comrade Artyom”) was raised in Stalin’s family until the age of 11.

In addition, it is believed that in Turukhansk exile, Stalin had an illegitimate son, Konstantin Kuzakov. Stalin did not maintain relations with him.

Stalin with children from his second marriage: Vasily (left) and Svetlana (center)

According to evidence, Stalin beat his sons, so that, for example, Yakov (whom Stalin usually called “my fool” or “little wolf”) more than once had to spend the night on the landing or in the apartments of neighbors (including Trotsky); N.S. Khrushchev recalled that Stalin once beat Vasily with his boots for poor performance. Trotsky believed that these scenes of domestic violence reproduced the atmosphere in which Stalin was raised in Gori; Modern psychologists also agree with this opinion. With his attitude, Stalin drove Yakov to attempt suicide, to the news of which he reacted mockingly: “Ha, I didn’t make it!” . On the other hand, Stalin’s adopted son A. Sergeev retained favorable memories of the atmosphere in Stalin’s house. Stalin, according to the memoirs of Artyom Fedorovich, treated him strictly, but with love and was a very cheerful person.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953. The exact cause is still unknown. It is officially believed that death was caused by a cerebral hemorrhage. There is a version according to which Lavrenty Beria or N.S. Khrushchev contributed to his death without providing assistance. There is, however, another version of his death, and a very probable one [source?] - Stalin was poisoned by his closest associate Beria.

At Stalin's funeral on March 9, 1953, due to the huge number of people wanting to say goodbye to Stalin, a stampede arose. Exact amount casualties are still unknown, although they are estimated to be significant. In particular, it is known that one of the unidentified victims of the stampede received the number 1422; numbering was carried out only for those dead who could not be identified without the help of relatives or friends.

Stalin's embalmed body was placed on public display in the Lenin Mausoleum, which in 1953-1961 was called the “Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin.” On October 30, 1961, the XXII Congress of the CPSU decided that “Stalin’s serious violations of Lenin’s covenants ... make it impossible to leave the coffin with his body in the Mausoleum.” On the night of October 31 to November 1, 1961, Stalin’s body was taken out of the Mausoleum and buried in a grave near Kremlin wall. Subsequently, a monument was unveiled at the grave (bust by N.V. Tomsky). Stalin became the only Soviet leader for whom a memorial service was performed by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Myths about Stalin

There are many myths about Stalin. They were often spread by opponents of Stalin (mainly such as L. D. Trotsky, B. G. Bazhanov, N. S. Khrushchev, etc.). Sometimes they appeared on their own. This is how rape myths exist; that he was an agent of the secret police; that he only pretended to be a Marxist-Leninist/communist, but in fact was a hidden counter-revolutionary; that he was an anti-Semite and a Great Russian chauvinist/ethnonationalist; that he was an alcoholic; that he suffered from paranoia and even about Stalin’s statements.

Alleged poems by Stalin

On December 21, 1939, on the day of the solemn celebration of Stalin’s 60th birthday, an article by N. Nikolaishvili “Poems of Young Stalin” appeared in the newspaper “Zarya Vostoka,” in which it was reported that Stalin allegedly wrote six poems. Five of them were published from June to December 1895 in the newspaper “Iberia”, edited by Ilya Chavchavadze signed “I. Dzh-shvili”, the sixth - in July 1896 in the Social Democratic newspaper “Keali” (“Furrow”) signed “Soselo”. Of these, I. Dzh-shvili’s poem “To Prince R. Eristavi” was included in 1907, among selected masterpieces of Georgian poetry, in the collection “Georgian Reader”.

Until then, there was no news that young Stalin wrote poetry. Joseph Iremashvili does not write about this either. Stalin himself neither confirmed nor denied the version that the poems belonged to him. For Stalin's 70th birthday, in 1949, a book of his supposed poems was being prepared, translated into Russian (major masters were involved in working on the translations - in particular, Boris Pasternak and Arseny Tarkovsky), but on Stalin's orders the publication was stopped.

Modern researchers note that the signatures of I. Dzh-shvili and especially Soselo (diminutive of “Joseph”) cannot be the basis for attributing poems specifically to Stalin, especially since one of I. Dzh-shvili’s poems is addressed to Prince R. Eristavi, with whom the seminarian Stalin clearly could not be familiar. It has been suggested that the author of the first five poems was philologist, historian and archaeologist, expert on Georgian culture Ivan Javakhishvili.

Awards

Stalin had:

* title of Hero of Socialist Labor (1939)

* title of Hero of the Soviet Union (1945).

Was a cavalier:

* three Orders of Lenin (1939, 1945, 1949)

* two Orders of Victory (1943, 1945)

* Order of Suvorov, 1st degree (1943)

* three Orders of the Red Banner (1919, 1939, 1944).

In 1953, immediately after the death of I.V. Stalin, four copies of the Order of Generalissimo Stalin were urgently produced (without the use of precious metals) for approval by the main members of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee.

Modern opinions about Stalin

The events of the Stalin era were so grandiose that they naturally gave rise to a huge flow of various literature. Despite all the diversity, several main directions can be distinguished.

* Liberal Democratic. Authors based on liberal and humanistic values ​​consider Stalin to be the strangler of all freedom and initiative, the creator of a totalitarian type of society, as well as the culprit of crimes against humanity, comparable to Hitler. This assessment prevails in the West; during the era of perestroika and the early 1990s. it also prevailed in Russia. During the life of Stalin himself, a different attitude towards him was developed in leftist circles in the West (ranging from benevolent to enthusiastic), as the creator of an interesting social experiment; This attitude was expressed, in particular, by Bernard Shaw, Leon Feuchtwanger, Henri Barbusse. After the revelations of the 20th Congress, Stalinism disappeared as a phenomenon in the West. [source?]

* Communist-anti-Stalinist. His followers accuse Stalin of destroying the party and of abandoning the ideals of Lenin and Marx. This approach originated among the “Leninist guard” (F. Raskolnikov, L. D. Trotsky, N. I. Bukharin’s suicide letter, M. Ryutin “Stalin and the crisis of the proletarian dictatorship”) and became dominant after the 20th Congress, and under Brezhnev was the banner of socialist dissidents (Alexander Tarasov, Roy Medvedev, Andrei Sakharov). Among the Western left - from moderate social democrats to anarchists and Trotskyists - Stalin is usually seen as a spokesman for the interests of the bureaucracy and a traitor to the revolution (according to Trotsky's view in What is the USSR and Where is It Going, also known as The Revolution Betrayed). on Stalin's Soviet Union as a deformed workers' state). The categorical rejection of Stalin’s authoritarianism, which distorted the principles of Marxist theory, is characteristic of the dialectical-humanistic tradition in Western Marxism, represented, in particular, by the Frankfurt School, as well as the “new left”. One of the first studies of the USSR as a totalitarian state belongs to Hannah Arendt (“The Origins of Totalitarianism”), who also considered herself (with some reservations) a leftist. In our time, Stalin is condemned from communist positions by Trotskyists and heterodox Marxists.

* Communist-Stalinist. Its representatives completely justify Stalin and consider him a faithful successor of Lenin. In general, they are within the framework of the official theses of Soviet propaganda of the 1930s. As an example, we can cite M. S. Dokuchaev’s book “History Remembers.”

* Nationalist-Stalinist. Its representatives, while criticizing both Lenin and the democrats, at the same time highly value Stalin for his contribution to strengthening Russian imperial statehood. They consider him the undertaker of the “Russophobes” Bolsheviks, the restorer of Russian statehood. In this direction, an interesting opinion belongs to the followers of L.N. Gumilyov (although the elements vary). In their opinion, under Stalin, the anti-system of the Bolsheviks died during the repressions. Also, excessive passionarity was knocked out of the ethnic system, which allowed it to gain the opportunity to enter the inertial phase, the ideal of which was Stalin himself. The initial period of Stalin’s reign, during which many actions of an “anti-system” nature were taken, are considered by them only as preparation before the main action, which does not determine the main direction of Stalin’s activities. One can cite as an example the articles by I. S. Shishkin “The Internal Enemy”, and V. A. Michurin “The Twentieth Century in Russia through the prism of the theory of ethnogenesis by L. N. Gumilyov” and the works of V. V. K

We stand for peace and champion the cause of peace.
/AND. Stalin/

Stalin (real name - Dzhugashvili) Joseph Vissarionovich, one of the leading figures of the Communist Party, the Soviet state, the international communist and labor movement, a prominent theorist and propagandist of Marxism-Leninism. Born into the family of a handicraft shoemaker. In 1894 he graduated from the Gori Theological School and entered the Tbilisi Orthodox Seminary. Under the influence of Russian Marxists living in Transcaucasia, he became involved in revolutionary movement; in an illegal circle he studied the works of K. Marx, F. Engels, V. I. Lenin, G. V. Plekhanov. Since 1898 member of the CPSU. Being in a social democratic group "Mesame-dashi", carried out propaganda of Marxist ideas among the workers of the Tbilisi railway workshops. In 1899 he was expelled from the seminary for revolutionary activities, went underground, and became a professional revolutionary. He was a member of the Tbilisi, Caucasian Union and Baku Committees of the RSDLP, participated in the publication of newspapers “Brdzola” (“Struggle”), “Proletariatis Brdzola” (“Struggle of the Proletariat”), “Baku Proletarian”, “Buzzer”, “Baku Worker”, was an active participant in the Revolution of 1905-07. in Transcaucasia. Since the creation of the RSDLP, he supported Lenin’s ideas of strengthening the revolutionary Marxist party, defended the Bolshevik strategy and tactics of the class struggle of the proletariat, was a staunch supporter of Bolshevism, and exposed the opportunist line of the Mensheviks and anarchists in the revolution. Delegate to the 1st conference of the RSDLP in Tammerfors (1905), 4th (1906) and 5th (1907) congresses of the RSDLP.

During the period of underground revolutionary activity, he was repeatedly arrested and exiled. In January 1912, at a meeting of the Central Committee, elected by the 6th (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP, he was co-opted in absentia into the Central Committee and introduced into Russian Bureau of the Central Committee. In 1912-13, working in St. Petersburg, he actively collaborated in newspapers "Star" And "Is it true". Participant Krakow (1912) meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP with party workers. At this time Stalin wrote a work "Marxism and the National Question", in which he highlighted Lenin’s principles for solving the national question, and criticized the opportunist program of “cultural-national autonomy.” Got the job positive assessment V.I. Lenin (see Complete collection of works, 5th ed., vol. 24, p. 223). In February 1913, Stalin was again arrested and exiled to the Turukhansk region.

After the overthrow of the autocracy, Stalin returned to Petrograd on March 12 (25), 1917, was included in the Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) and in the editorial office of Pravda, and took an active part in developing the work of the party in new conditions. Stalin supported Lenin's course of developing the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one. On 7th (April) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (b) elected member of the Central Committee(from that time on he was elected as a member of the party’s Central Committee at all congresses up to and including the 19th). At the 6th Congress of the RSDLP (b), on behalf of the Central Committee, he delivered a political report to the Central Committee and a report on the political situation.

As a member of the Central Committee, Stalin actively participated in the preparation and conduct of the Great October Socialist Revolution: he was a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee, the Military Revolutionary Center - the party body for leading the armed uprising, and in the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. At the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets on October 26 (November 8), 1917, he was elected to the first Soviet government as People's Commissar for National Affairs(1917-22); at the same time in 1919-22 he headed People's Commissariat of State Control, reorganized in 1920 into the People's Commissariat Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate(RCT).

During the Civil War and foreign military intervention of 1918-20, Stalin carried out a number of important assignments of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) and the Soviet government: he was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, one of the organizers defense of Petrograd, member of the RVS South, West, Southwestern Fronts, representative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense. Stalin proved himself to be a major military-political worker of the party. By resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of November 27, 1919, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

After the end of the Civil War, Stalin actively participated in the party's struggle for restoration National economy, for the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP), for strengthening the alliance of the working class with the peasantry. During the discussion about trade unions imposed on the party Trotsky, defended Lenin's platform on the role of trade unions in socialist construction. On 10th Congress of the RCP (b)(1921) gave a presentation “The party’s immediate tasks in the national question”. In April 1922, at the Plenum of the Central Committee, Stalin was elected General Secretary of the Central Committee Party and held this post for over 30 years, but since 1934 he was formally Secretary of the Central Committee.

As one of the leading figures in the field of nation-state building, Stalin took part in the creation of the USSR. However, initially in solving this new and complex problem, he made a mistake by putting forward "autonomization" project(entry of all republics into the RSFSR with autonomy rights). Lenin criticized this project and justified the plan to create a single union state in the form of a voluntary union of equal republics. Taking into account the criticism, Stalin fully supported Lenin’s idea and, on behalf of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), spoke at 1st All-Union Congress of Soviets(December 1922) with a report on education USSR.

On 12th Party Congress(1923) Stalin made an organizational report on the work of the Central Committee and a report “National moments in party and state building”.

V.I. Lenin, who knew the party cadres excellently, had a huge influence on their education, sought the placement of cadres in the interests of the overall party cause, taking into account their individual qualities. IN "Letter to the Congress" Lenin gave characterizations to a number of members of the Central Committee, including Stalin. Considering Stalin one of the outstanding figures of the party, Lenin at the same time wrote on December 25, 1922: “Comrade. Stalin, having become Secretary General, concentrated immense power in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use this power carefully enough” (ibid., vol. 45, p. 345). In addition to his letter, Lenin wrote on January 4, 1923:

“Stalin is too rude, and this shortcoming, quite tolerable in the environment and in communications between us communists, becomes intolerable in the position of Secretary General. Therefore, I suggest that the comrades consider a way to move Stalin from this place and appoint another person to this place, who in all other respects differs from Comrade. Stalin has only one advantage, namely, more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to his comrades, less capriciousness, etc.” (ibid., p. 346).

By decision of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), all delegations were familiarized with Lenin’s letter 13th Congress of the RCP (b), held in May 1924. Considering the difficult situation in the country and the severity of the struggle against Trotskyism, it was considered advisable to leave Stalin as General Secretary of the Central Committee so that he would take into account criticism from Lenin and draw the necessary conclusions from it.

After Lenin's death, Stalin actively participated in the development and implementation of the policies of the CPSU, plans for economic and cultural construction, measures to strengthen the country's defense capability and the foreign policy of the party and the Soviet state. Together with other leading figures of the party, Stalin waged an irreconcilable struggle against the opponents of Leninism, played an outstanding role in the ideological and political defeat of Trotskyism and right-wing opportunism, in defending Lenin’s teaching on the possibility of the victory of socialism in the USSR, and in strengthening the unity of the party. The works of Stalin were important in the propaganda of Lenin’s ideological heritage "On the Foundations of Leninism" (1924), "Trotskyism or Leninism?" (1924), "On questions of Leninism" (1926), “Once again about the social-democratic deviation in our party” (1926), “On the right deviation in the CPSU (b)” (1929), “On issues of agricultural policy in the USSR”(1929), etc.

Under the leadership of the Communist Party, the Soviet people implemented Lenin’s plan for building socialism and carried out revolutionary transformations of gigantic complexity and world-historical significance. Stalin, together with other leading figures of the party and the Soviet state, made a personal contribution to the solution of these problems. The key task in building socialism was the socialist industrialization, which ensured the economic independence of the country, the technical reconstruction of all sectors of the national economy, and the defense capability of the Soviet state. The most difficult and difficult task revolutionary changes there was a reorganization of agriculture on a socialist basis. When conducting collectivization of agriculture mistakes and excesses were made. Stalin also bears responsibility for these mistakes. However, thanks to decisive measures taken by the party with the participation of Stalin, the mistakes were corrected. Of great importance for the victory of socialism in the USSR was the implementation cultural revolution.

In the conditions of impending military danger and in the years Great Patriotic War 1941-45 Stalin took a leading part in the multilateral activities of the party to strengthen the defense of the USSR and organize the defeat of fascist Germany and militaristic Japan. At the same time, on the eve of the war, Stalin made a certain miscalculation in assessing the timing of a possible attack by Nazi Germany on the USSR. On May 6, 1941 he was appointed Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR(from 1946 - Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR), June 30, 1941 - Chairman of the State Defense Committee ( GKO), July 19 - People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR, August 8 - Supreme Commander Armed Forces of the USSR.

As head of the Soviet state, he took part in Tehran (1943), Crimean(1945) and Potsdam (1945) conferences leaders of three powers - the USSR, the USA and Great Britain. In the post-war period, Stalin continued to work as General Secretary of the Party Central Committee and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. During these years, the party and the Soviet government carried out a tremendous amount of work to mobilize the Soviet people to fight for recovery and further development National economy, carried out a foreign policy course aimed at strengthening the international position of the USSR, the world socialist system, at uniting and developing the international labor and communist movement, at supporting liberation struggle peoples of colonial and dependent countries, to ensure peace and security of peoples throughout the world.

In Stalin's activities, along with positive aspects, there were theoretical and political errors, and some traits of his character had a negative impact. If in the first years of work without Lenin he took into account critical remarks addressed to him, then started later to deviate from the Leninist principles of collective leadership and the norms of party life, to overestimate their own merits in the successes of the party and the people. Gradually formed Stalin's personality cult, which entailed gross violations socialist legality, caused serious harm to the activities of the party and the cause of communist construction.

20th Congress of the CPSU(1956) condemned the cult of personality as a phenomenon alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, the nature of socialist social order. In the resolution of the CPSU Central Committee of June 30, 1956 “On overcoming the cult of personality and its consequences” the party gave an objective, comprehensive assessment of Stalin’s activities and a detailed criticism of the cult of personality. The cult of personality did not and could not change the socialist essence of the Soviet system, the Marxist-Leninist character of the CPSU and its Leninist course, and did not stop the natural course of development Soviet society. The party developed and implemented a system of measures that ensured the restoration and further development of Leninist norms of party life and the principles of party leadership.

Stalin was a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919-52, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1952-53, a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1925-43, a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from 1917, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR from 1922, a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the 1st-3rd convocations . He was awarded the titles of Hero of Socialist Labor (1939), Hero of the Soviet Union (1945), Marshal of the Soviet Union (1943), highest military rank- Generalissimo of the Soviet Union (1945). He was awarded 3 Orders of Lenin, 2 Orders of Victory, 3 Orders of the Red Banner, Order of Suvorov 1st degree, as well as medals. After his death in March 1953, he was buried in the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. In 1961, by decision of the XXII Congress of the CPSU, he was reburied on Red Square.

Soch.: Soch., vol. 1-13, M., 1949-51; Questions of Leninism, and ed., M., 1952: On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 5th ed., M., 1950; Marxism and questions of linguistics, [M.], 1950; Economic problems of socialism in the USSR, M., 1952. Lit.: XX Congress of the CPSU. Verbatim report, vol. 1-2, M., 1956; Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee “On overcoming the cult of personality and its consequences.” June 30, 1956, in the book: CPSU in resolutions and decisions of congresses. Conferences and plenums of the Central Committee, 8th ed., vol. 7, M., 1971; History of the CPSU, vol. 1-5, M., 1964-70: History of the CPSU, 4th ed., M., 1975.

Events during Stalin's reign:

• 1925 - adoption of a course towards industrialization at the XIV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
• 1928 - the first five-year plan.
• 1930 - the beginning of collectivization
• 1936 - adoption of the new constitution of the USSR.
• 1939 –1940 - Soviet-Finnish War
• 1941 –1945 - The Great Patriotic War
• 1949 - creation of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA).
• 1949 - successful test of the first Soviet atomic bomb, which was created by I.V. Kurchatov under the leadership of L.P. Beria.
• 1952 - renaming the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) into the CPSU

Comrade, what year are you?

On March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin died. And if no one has any doubts about the date of death, the date of birth of the Secretary General still (!) causes controversy. Both old Soviet encyclopedias and modern ones, including Wikipedia, indicate two options: December 6 (or the 18th according to the new style) 1878 and December 9 (the 21st according to the new style) 1879. The difference is a whole year and three days.

Kremlin historians have finally decided to put an end to the almost century-old dispute. "MK" tried to figure out this mystery together with the director's advisor Federal service Security, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Sergei Devyatov.

“Stalin (Dzhugashvili) Joseph Vissarionovich, b. in 1879 in the city. Burns of Tiflis province. Georgian by nationality, son of a shoemaker, shoe factory worker...” This is how the first official biography of Stalin begins. It was compiled by his assistant in the mid-1920s and published in additional volume encyclopedic dictionary "Pomegranate". From that moment on, a completely inexplicable change in Stalin’s real age occurred from the point of view of normal logic. Moreover, in the future, the true date and year of birth is completely replaced, including in official documents!

Just three questions - when was Stalin really born, did he himself decide to “confuse” the dates, and why was this done at all?

Before us is the metric book of the Gori Assumption Cathedral Church for recording births and deaths. It was here that it was noted that, we quote: “in 1878, on December 6, a son, Joseph, was born to the Orthodox peasants Vissarion Ivanovich and his legal wife Ekaterina Gavrilovna Dzhugashvili.” How should you feel about this document?

There is no doubt about its reliability, says Sergei Devyatov. - The church registry book in those days was perhaps the main document. In addition to it, there is this certificate issued to Joseph Dzhugashvili in June 1894 about his completion of the full course at the Gori Theological School. Do you see what is written here?

In small letters it reads: “on the sixth day of the month of December, one thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight.” This is exactly in the line about birth. And here are Stalin’s answers to the questions in the Swedish newspaper’s questionnaire. The date stamped by the hand of the Secretary General is 1878.

It turned out that there were also materials from the police department. They are now in the archives of the CPSU Central Committee, so it was not difficult to find them. The Tsarist gendarmerie did not always agree on the dates of Stalin's birth

Please note that in the documents of the Baku Gendarmerie Department, the time of birth is marked as 1880,” continues Devyatov. - In others - 1879 and 1881. The most accurate was the St. Petersburg Provincial Gendarmerie Directorate; it was not mistaken in the date: December 6, 1878.

Question two: did the substitution take place with Stalin’s consent? The answer is clear - yes. There is documentary evidence that that first biography article was agreed upon by him personally. Here, for example, is this note: “The attached biographical information is personally from Comrade. They were reviewed by Stalin and corrected by him.” It was found in the collections of the Central Party Archive of the IML under the CPSU Central Committee.

Then the last and most important question is - why?

In the early 90s, a version was launched about a new birthday for Stalin, says Devyatov. “It said that the Secretary General could not pompously celebrate his 50th anniversary in 1928 due to the fight against the opposition, but was able to do this in 1929 in the context of the fight against the “right deviation.” This point of view does not stand up to elementary criticism: the new date of birth of the Secretary General appeared in his official biography many years before the supposed celebration of the anniversary. Even the “great leader of all times and peoples” was unable to predict the prospects for the fight against the opposition and its chronological framework.

We read Lenin's letter to Stalin, written in May 1922. It contains a note: “P.S. Secret. In Zubalovo, where they built dachas for you, Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky, and next to mine they will build them by the fall, we need to ensure that the railway line is repaired by the fall and that the railcars move completely regularly. Then fast, secret and cheap communication is possible all year round.” Apparently, even in their fifth year in power, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party did not feel entirely confident. And yet, replacing the date and year of birth, that is, a fundamental change in the so-called “installation data” that was reflected in the archival and operational files of the police department, is undoubtedly a personal invention of Stalin.

What if the reason is mystical?

It is known that Stalin turned to the services of esotericists, so most likely this is the case, says psychologist Natalya Komissarova. - Knowing a person’s date of birth, astrologers can make a forecast, from which it will be clear on which days a person is vulnerable in terms of illnesses, accidents, etc. With such a forecast, enemies could choose the right moment to make an impact. I think this is exactly what Stalin was afraid of.

However, such an exotic version is not supported by historians.