Joseph Stalin

Born on December 18, 1879, in Gori, Georgia, Joseph Stalin rose to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party, becoming a Soviet dictator upon Vladimir Lenin's death. The son of Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ketevan Geladze, a washerwoman, Joseph was a frail child. At age 7, he contracted smallpox, leaving his face scarred and his left arm slightly deformed.

Joseph's mother, a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, wanted him to become a priest. In 1888 Stalin began attending the Gori Church School, where he learned Russian and excelled at his studies, winning a scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in the Georgian capital in 1894.

A year later, Joseph came in contact with Messame Dassy, a secret organization that supported Georgian independence from Russia. While employed as an accountant in Tbilisi, Stalin spread Marxist propaganda among railway workers on behalf of the local Social Democratic organization.

After moving to the seaport of Bat'umi, where he organized a large workers' demonstration in 1902, Stalin was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police. A year later he was sentenced to exile in the Russian region of Siberia. He soon managed to escape, however, and was back in Georgia by early 1904.

Stalin joined up with the Bolshevik revolutionaries. This was an underground group of people that followed the communist writings of Karl Marx and were led by Vladimir Lenin. After the Bolsheviks seized power during the October Revolution and created a one-party state under Lenin's newly renamed Communist Party in 1917, Stalin joined its governing Politburo.

Joseph Stalin became leader of the Soviet Union after the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, died in 1924.

Joseph Stalin was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1953. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society into an industrial and military superpower. However, he ruled by terror, and millions of his own citizens died during his brutal reign.

Stalin forced rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agricultural land, resulting in millions dying from famine while others were sent to camps. His Red Army helped defeat Nazi Germany during WWII.

In death as in life, Joseph Stalin was both revered and feared. The day after his death, 5 March 1953, 109 people died in the crush to pay their last respects.
Joseph Stalin

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) served s president of the independent country of Russia from 1991 through 1999.

Yeltsin was born in the village of Butka about 250 km east of Sverdlovsk, Russia. He graduated from the Ural Polytechnic University in Sverdlovsk became an engineer as a young man. In the 1960s Yeltsin joined the Communist Party – the political group that controlled the Soviet Union. In 1976 the Party put him in charge of the Sverdlovsk region. 

When Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev assumed power in 1985, Yeltsin assumed the post of first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee.

In 1990 he was elected president of the Russian republic. Yeltsin retried on December 31, 1999. He died in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin played a critical role in both the collapse of the USSR, which was the final marker that definitively ended the Cold War and the founding of the new Russian Federation, which he served as its first president.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin

Andropov, Yuri Vladimirovich (1914-1984)

Andropov was elected a member of the party’s Central Committee in 1961. He was Central Committee secretary from 1962 through 1967, a post that promised entry into the very upper echelons of the party hierarchy.

In 1967 he was made head of the state security force (KGB) from 1967 to 1982 and in 1973 a member of the Politburo, He took over a party leader in November 1982 and became a President of the Soviet Union during 1983 and 1984.

Yuri Andropov played a central role in the 1956 Soviet  invasion of Hungary, the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, thus delaying political reforms in the Soviet satellite nations for over 20 years.

Yuri Andropov was born in Stavropol province in southern Russia on 15 June 1914. His father was a railway worker.

In 1932, he entered the Technical Institute of Water Transportation at Rybinsk in Yaroslavl province, north of Moscow. He graduated in 1936.

At the age of sixteen, he joined the Communist Youth League (Yaraslav Komsomol), the vehicle for his early rise to positions of authority. He became a full Party member in 1939.

Andropov served in a number of Komsomol posts before becoming a top Komsomol secretary in the newly formed Soviet Karelo-Finish Republic in early 1940.

As German troops advanced into the Soviet Union, he took part in organizing guerillas activities with Soviet partisans who were present on the war’s front lines.
Andropov, Yuri Vladimirovich (1914-1984)

Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982)

Leonid Brezhnev served as leader of the Soviet Union for 18 years. He was born on December 19, 1906 in the city of Dneprodzerzhinsk, then part of the Russian Empire.

Brezhnev was a land surveyor in the 1920s before joining the Communist Party in 1931. He later enrolled in a metallurgical institute, graduating in 1935.

He held several important positions as an army officer, engineer and political commissar during the Stalinist administration and rose to the rank of major general in Red Army during World War II.

Leonid Brezhnev became head of state in 1960 at the age of fifty-three and was elevated to Communist Party general secretary in 1964 after the party removed Nikita Khrushchev from power.

Brezhnev shared leadership responsibilities with Alexi Kosygin but quickly became the USSR’s undisputed head of state.

In foreign relation, Brezhnev ordered the military suppression of Czechoslovakia’s experiment in ‘socialism with a human face’ in 1968 via an invasion by Warsaw Pact nations.

In the last years of his tenure Brezhnev ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.
Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982)