Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953, holding the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party and later serving as Premier. He consolidated near-absolute personal power through the 1930s, imposing rapid industrialization and forced agricultural collectivization and carrying out the Great Purge, a campaign of mass repression that killed hundreds of thousands of people. As a central Allied leader during the Second World War he directed the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany, and his regime's wartime victory and postwar consolidation of power over Eastern Europe made the Soviet Union one of the world's two superpowers, even as his rule is widely condemned for mass repression, deportations and famines that caused millions of deaths.