When Stalin joined the Bolshevik Party, Russia was suffering from a huge problem of elite overproduction, which was a fundamental cause of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.[4] By 1941, when the Soviet Union entered World War II, Stalin had taken care of this problem by ruthlessly exterminating this elite “surplus.” He essentially created a pipeline for ambitious aspirants to enter the elite, progress up the ranks, and then be executed or sent to labor camps.
