Joseph Stalin

Born Ioseb Jughashvili in Gori, a small town in Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire. His father is a cobbler and a drunk who beats him. His mother, a laundress, scrapes together money to send him to seminary. He is the only one of his parents' children to survive infancy.

Organizes the Tiflis bank robbery. His gang ambushes an armored stagecoach with bombs in the middle of a crowded square. Forty people are injured. They steal 241,000 rubles, equivalent to several million dollars today. Lenin is impressed. Stalin is 28.

Appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party. It is considered an administrative post, not a position of real power. Lenin, already ill, soon warns the party: "Stalin has concentrated an unbounded power in his hands, and I am not certain he will always know how to use that power with sufficient caution." The warning goes unheeded.

The collectivization of agriculture, which he ordered in 1928, triggers a famine that kills between 5 and 7 million people. In Ukraine, the Holodomor kills an estimated 3.5 million. Stalin denies the famine exists. Soviet officials who report starvation are punished. Foreign journalists who write about it are expelled.

The Great Purge reaches its peak. He executes eight senior Red Army commanders in a single day. By the time the purges end in 1938, three of five marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, and 50 of 57 corps commanders are dead. When Germany invades four years later, the Red Army is led by officers too frightened to make decisions.

Meets Roosevelt and Churchill at the Tehran Conference. It is the first time the three leaders sit together. They plan the invasion of France, which will come six months later at Normandy. Stalin asks for a second front in Europe. Churchill resists. Roosevelt sides with Stalin. The postwar division of Europe begins at this table.

Orders the deportation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples. In a single operation, half a million people are loaded onto cattle cars and shipped to Central Asia. Thousands die in transit. Entire villages are erased from maps. The Chechen-Ingush ASSR is abolished. He accuses them of collaborating with the Nazis. Most were fighting for the Red Army.

Dies after suffering a stroke at his dacha. His guards, terrified of disturbing him, wait 12 hours before entering his room. They find him on the floor, soaked in urine. Doctors are summoned, but the best doctors in Moscow are in prison, arrested on his orders weeks earlier in the Doctors' Plot. He dies four days later. He is 74. None of his inner circle weep. Several celebrate.

Nikita Khrushchev delivers his "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress, denouncing Stalin's cult of personality, the purges, and his wartime blunders. Delegates sit in stunned silence. Stalin's body is later removed from Lenin's Mausoleum. Stalingrad is renamed Volgograd.