Joseph Stalin

Legendary card · No. 651

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, holding the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952 and serving as the nation's premier from 1941 to 1953. Initially part of a collective leadership within a one-party system, he ultimately consolidated personal power to become the country's de facto dictator by the 1930s. Ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin helped to formalise these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies became known as Stalinism. Born into a poor Georgian family in Gori, Russian Empire, Stalin began his revolutionary career as a youth by joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Active in the Caucasus, he raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through robberies and other crimes, and...

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