2. Joseph Stalin
Born Ioseb Dzhugashvili on December 18, 1878, in Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, Joseph Stalin was the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman. He attended a local seminary but was expelled in 1899 for revolutionary activities. Stalin joined an underground revolutionary group and sided with the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party in 1903. He served in minor party posts and was appointed to the first Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin overcame his rivals and took control of Soviet politics. He initiated the Five-Year Plans that radically altered Soviet economic and social structures, resulting in the deaths of many millions. In the 1930s, he purged the party and the general populace, exiling dissidents to Siberia or summarily executing them after staged show trials. Stalin’s policies transformed the Soviet Union into a major world power but at a terrible cost to its own people (britannica.com).
