Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) was General Secretary of the Communist Party who, after Lenin's death, became the dictator of the Soviet Union, consolidating unchecked power by the late 1920s. He drove rapid industrialization and the forced collectivization of agriculture, and his rule included the Great Purge of the 1930s, in which hundreds of thousands were executed, the vast Gulag system of forced-labor camps, and the Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions. Under his leadership the Soviet Union bore the main weight of the fighting on the Eastern Front and defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War, at the cost of enormous casualties. His final years brought renewed repression, including the antisemitic "Doctors' Plot" campaign of 1952–53, cut short by his death in 1953.