Joseph Stalin

leader of the Soviet Union (d. 1953)

Future Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is exiled to Siberia for three years.

The Tampere conference, where Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin meet for the first time, is held in Tampere, Finland.

Joseph Stalin enters the provisional government of Bolshevik Russia.

The People's Commissars give authority to Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin.

Joseph Stalin becomes the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had its roots in the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks, the majority faction of the Social Democratic Labour Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, then led a second revolution which overthrew the provisional government and established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (renamed Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1936), beginning a civil war between pro-revolution Reds and counter-revolution Whites. The Red Army entered several territories of the former Russian Empire, and helped local Communists take power through soviets that nominally acted on behalf of workers and peasants. In 1922, the Communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian republics. Following Lenin's death in 1924, a troika collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed political opposition to him, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism (which he created) and initiated a centrally planned economy. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation which laid the basis for its later war effort and dominance after World War II. However, Stalin established political paranoia, and introduced arbitrary arrests on a massive scale after which the authorities transferred many people (military leaders, Communist Party members, ordinary citizens alike) to correctional labour camps or sentenced them to execution.

The Russian city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad to honor the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Soviet Communist Party General Secretary, who had guided the defense of Tsaritsyn during the Russian Civil War in 1920.

Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union.

Boris Bazhanov defects through Iran. He is the only assistant of Joseph Stalin's secretariat to have defected from the Eastern Bloc.

Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin orders the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class".

Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin orders the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class", ostensibly as an effort to spread socialism to the countryside.