Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Born Ioseb dze Jughashvili to a poor family in Georgia in 1878, Stalin was an excellent student who wrote poetry and enrolled in an Orthodox seminary. He became radicalized after reading revolutionary and Marxist literature and joined the precursor to the Bolshevik Party in 1898. Lenin recruited him to the party’s Central Committee in 1912, when he adopted the nom de guerre “Stalin” (from the Russian word for steel). He was arrested several times and spent years in prison and Siberian exile. He joined the Communist Party’s governing Politburo after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and became General Secretary after Lenin’s death in 1924.

In the ensuing years, Stalin transformed the Party’s collective leadership into a one-man dictatorship. He launched his “dekulakization” policy in 1928, whereby allegedly prosperous peasants had their grain confiscated and were arrested, killed, and exiled in large numbers. Mass collectivization of agricultural land was initiated in 1929, and by 1936, 90% of farm households had joined a collective farm (kolkhoz). The first five-year plan was released in 1928, with a focus on developing heavy industry. Stalin became increasingly fearful of assassination and counterrevolution after the murder of a prominent Party member in 1934 and began eliminating his rivals in the Party leadership during the Great Purge of 1936-38, also known as the Great Terror. Stalin himself decided all important matters during the Terror and personally directed many operations. Nevertheless, he was idolized by much of the population after the Soviet victory in World War II, which was made possible by the rapid industrialization his policies had achieved along with the sacrifice of millions of soldiers’ lives. Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953.

After his death, the collective Party leadership quietly initiated a policy of “de-Stalinization” whereby many political prisoners were amnestied, large-scale forced labor was eliminated, and prominent figures targeted in the Purge were rehabilitated. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the new Party leader, gave a secret speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and state terrorism. Hundreds of Stalin monuments were dismantled, countless places were renamed, and his body was removed from Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square. Many Russians continued to regard him as a great statesman and nation-builder, however, and still do today. Current president Vladimir Putin, who reverted Russia’s fledgling democracy to authoritarian dictatorship post-Soviet Union, has not explicitly rehabilitated Stalin but has revived the triumphalist discourse around the Great Patriotic War.