Joseph Stalin: A Life from Beginning to End (World War 2 Biographies)

by Hourly History

“Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.” —Karl Marx

He was the son of a cobbler and a housemaid who barely made enough money to survive.

at around 21 years of age that he found work at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory.

He was given a small room to sleep in when he wasn’t working, right underneath the observatory. It was the first solid room and board Stalin had since his expulsion from seminary school.

“Everybody has a right to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege.” —Joseph Stalin

This split of opinion is what would lead to a schism between the Bolsheviks (Russian for “the Majority”) led by Lenin and Stalin, and the so-called Mensheviks, (Russian for “the Minority”) led by the rest, who disapproved of such strong-arm tactics.

“with her died my last warm feeling for humanity.”

“It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” —Joseph Stalin

Massive civil unrest in the form of strikes and protests soon spread throughout the Russian Empire, reaching a fever pitch until the Tsarist regime, under the vice grip of international and internal turmoil, finally collapsed altogether in February 1917. As soon as Vladimir Lenin heard the news he returned from his own self-imposed exile in Germany to finally implement his vision of a communist revolution.

“The death of one man is tragic, but the death of thousands is a statistic.” —Joseph Stalin

During a scant five years, the entire industrial output of the Soviet Union would be increased by 50 percent. Russian national income rose from 24.4 to 96.3 Russian Rubles during this time as well. However, no matter what the short-term payout was, the cost of this great leap forward would be absolutely staggering when it came to human life, with hundreds of thousands of workers meeting their deaths from starvation, exhaustion, and abuse by their vicious state-sanctioned overseers.

At Stalin’s behest, the German’s had promised to give the Soviets a free hand in Eastern Poland, Finland, Estonia, Romania, and Latvia, as long as the Russians did not interfere with their “other” military ambitions. With the ink barely dry on the agreement, the Germans then stormed into western Poland, leading Britain and France to both declare war on the Nazis.

Just two weeks later, Stalin would send his own Red Army into Eastern Poland to take his share of the Polish nation that the “non-aggression” pact had allotted him, essentially making it a joint Nazi/Soviet offensive that crushed the Poles from both sides. Interestingly enough, even though the British and French didn’t hesitate to declare war on Nazi Germany, they never declared war on the Russians, even though their initial invasion and occupation of Eastern Poland were just as brutal as the Nazi invasions of Western Poland.

“In war I would deal with the Devil and his grandmother.” —Joseph Stalin

By most accounts, Stalin was genuinely surprised on June 22nd, 1941 when his “non-aggression” pact partner Adolf Hitler launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. When Russia entered into its backroom deals with Germany, it was simply a means to an end. Stalin felt that war in Europe would be inevitable, but he was working a long game in which he hoped that Germany, England, and France would fight each other to a standstill in a protracted struggle, completely exhausting their resources. Meanwhile, he would work to build up tremendous resources for the Soviets, allowing them to emerge at the end of the conflict with a fresh and vastly more powerful army that could easily subdue the weakened belligerents.

According to Khrushchev, Stalin, in one of his particularly disgusted moods, had “cursed the French for letting themselves by beaten” and claimed that the British were “fleeing as fast as their legs could carry them.”

Meanwhile, the Red Army was in a state of complete discord, as so many valuable Generals and intelligence officers had been executed in Stalin’s purge of just a few years before that the command structure of the military was nearly non-existent.

In the final months of 1941, Moscow appeared to be in an increasingly precarious position. Called “Operation Typhoon,” the German dash to Moscow began on November 15th, 1941, and in just five days the Germans were only 20 miles away from downtown Moscow. This was actually close enough for long range Nazi guns to take potshots at the Kremlin.

the Germans want a war of extermination, they shall have one.”