In Stalin, Robert Service portrays the Russian leader Joseph Stalin as on of the notorious figures in history. In his years of power and pomp, from the late 1920ÃÂs until his death in 1953, he personified the soviet communist order. Stalin and rose from extreme poverty to become the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century. Joseph Stalin was a ruthless man with a heart of steel. He overcame some of the worst conditions possible only to end up stronger than before. Stalin accomplished the feat of industrialization in a country that was far the other leading industrialized nations with his Five Year Plan and Collective Farming. He was a man of great power who ruled with an iron fist but, the fear he struck into others would ultimately lead to his demise.
Joseph StalinÃÂs real name was Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili and he was born in Georgia.
Chinese Stamp, 1950. Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong ...
Beria's letter to Politburo
English: From left to right: Joseph Stalin, Frankl...He had a tough child hood that made him the leader that he would be someday. His mother was a serf and his father, Vissarion, was a bankrupt cobbler. StalinÃÂs mother was a prostitute and Joseph would always get made fun of for it. Vissarion was an alcoholic and a violent man. He would often beat his wife and young Stalin for no reason at all. One of Stalin's friends from childhood wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry. As another of his childhood friends, Ioseb Iremashvili recalled, the "undeserved beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father himself," and in his contention, Vissarion taught him to hate people. In 1913, Stalin was falsely accused of Anti-Semitism. Stalin was a Bolshevik and a strong supporter of...