Person1878 – 1953
Joseph Stalin
General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party who ruled the USSR from the late 1920s until his death, led the war against Germany and drew Eastern Europe into the Soviet bloc
Where they went
12 related events
- 1
Four Soviet republics — Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia — joined to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s first socialist federal state.
- 2
Having taken power after Lenin’s death, Stalin ended the New Economic Policy, built up heavy industry under state plans and forced the peasants into collective farms.
- 3
Collectivization and ruthless grain requisitioning brought famine to Ukraine and other Soviet grain lands in 1932–1933, and millions starved to death.
- 4
Claiming to root out “enemies of the people”, Stalin had Party officials, army commanders, intellectuals and ordinary citizens arrested en masse and shot or sent to the camps.
- 5
Claiming they might spy for Japan, Stalin’s regime forcibly moved more than 170,000 Koreans from the Russian Far East, including the Maritime Province, to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
- 6
Ideological enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union promised not to attack each other and divided Eastern Europe in a secret protocol. Nine days later Germany invaded Poland.
- 7
Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war on Germany, beginning the Second World War. The Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east.
- 8
Breaking the non-aggression pact, Germany launched a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. It drove to the gates of Moscow but was halted by winter and a Soviet counter-attack.
- 9
German and Soviet forces fought for more than five months in the streets of Stalingrad on the Volga. The Soviets encircled and forced the surrender of the German Sixth Army, turning the tide of the war in the east.
- 10
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta in Crimea and agreed on the occupation of Germany, the founding of the UN and Soviet entry into the war against Japan, laying the foundations of the post-war order and the Cold War.
- 11
Truman, Stalin and Churchill (later Attlee) settled the treatment of defeated Germany at Potsdam. During the conference the US, Britain and China issued the Potsdam Declaration demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender.
- 12
When the Soviet Union cut road, rail and water routes to West Berlin, the US and Britain supplied the city by air for eleven months (the Berlin Airlift). The next year Germany split into East and West.
People who appear alongside
- Adolf Hitler1889 – 1945
Nazi leader and Führer of Germany (1934–1945) who started the Second World War and perpetrated the Holocaust; he killed himself as Berlin fell
- Vyacheslav Molotov1890 – 1986
Stalin’s close associate, Soviet premier (1930–1941) and foreign commissar, who signed the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939
- Georgy Zhukov1896 – 1974
Marshal of the Soviet Union who directed the defence of Moscow, the Stalingrad counter-offensive and Kursk, and took Berlin
- Winston Churchill1874 – 1965
British prime minister (1940–1945, 1951–1955) who led Britain’s resistance through the Battle of Britain and named the “Iron Curtain” in 1946
- Harry S. Truman1884 – 1972
33rd US president (1945–1953) who ordered the atomic bombings, set the policy of containment with the Truman Doctrine and sent US forces to the Korean War
- Vladimir Lenin1870 – 1924
Leader of the Bolsheviks who set up the Soviet government in the October Revolution of 1917, chaired it, and founded the USSR in 1922
- Leon Trotsky1879 – 1940
Bolshevik leader who directed the armed rising of the October Revolution, negotiated with Germany as foreign commissar, and built the Red Army that won the Civil War
- Hong Beom-do1868 – 1943
Commander of the Korean Independence Army who won at Bongo-dong and fought at Cheongsan-ri; died in Kazakhstan
Themes this person appears in
- World War I and the Russian Revolution1908 – 1923
From the Balkan crises to a war of trenches and total mobilization that toppled four empires; the Russian Revolution it unleashed, which created the first socialist state; and the Versailles settlement of national self-determination and the League of Nations
- The Great Depression and Totalitarianism1919 – 1939
From the Washington Conference to the invasion of Poland — two decades in which the age of international cooperation collapsed in the Depression, fascism, Nazism and Stalinism rose, and the world slid into war again
- World War II1939 – 1945
From the invasion of Poland to the surrender of Japan — the largest war in human history, across Europe, Asia and the Pacific
- The Cold War1945 – 1991
From Yalta to the dissolution of the Soviet Union — half a century in which two blocs led by the US and the USSR divided the world