Joseph Stalin

From Revolutionary to Soviet Leader

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was born on 18 December 1878 in Gori, Georgia. As a young man he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, becoming known in revolutionary circles for organising strikes, participating in bank robberies to raise party funds, and enduring multiple exiles to Siberia. After the October Revolution of 1917, he entered the core of the Soviet government and in 1922 was appointed General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. Following Lenin's death, Stalin used the secretariat as a power base to eliminate his rivals — Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and others — in a series of inner-party struggles, and by the late 1920s had established total dictatorial control over the Soviet party, state, and military.

The Second World War, the Great Terror, and Soviet Expansion

Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin directed the Great Terror — a campaign of secret-police operations, show trials, and mass executions that eliminated potential dissenters across the party, military, and Soviet society, with estimates of those killed or sent to the Gulag exceeding one million. During the Second World War he first concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany before joining the Allied camp after Germany's invasion of the USSR. In the post-war period, Stalin oversaw the establishment of satellite states across Eastern Europe, forming a Soviet-centred socialist bloc, and authorised the outbreak of the Korean War. Stalin died on 5 March 1953, leaving behind a highly centralised totalitarian system and an unthawed Cold War.

Relations with the Chinese Communist Party

Stalin's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party was always complex and contradictory. Throughout the Chinese Civil War he consistently underestimated the CCP's revolutionary potential, and in 1945 signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance with the Republic of China government — securing Soviet strategic rights in Manchuria as a reward for Soviet entry into the war against Japan — rather than prioritising CCP victory. After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Stalin remained wary of Mao Zedong, comparing him to Yugoslavia's Tito and fearing that China might become a Communist great power independent of Soviet control. During the 1950 negotiations, Stalin kept Mao waiting in Moscow for weeks as a demonstration of Soviet dominance. The Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance that was eventually signed promised aid but preserved extensive Soviet privileges regarding Port Arthur, the Chinese Changchun Railway, and Xinjiang — reflecting Stalin's enduring refusal to treat China as a genuinely equal partner.