Joseph Stalin and His Legacy

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 Stalin's   Childhood                                                                                  Stalin grew up poor and an only child. His father was a shoemaker and alcoholic who beat his son. When Stalin was a boy he got small pox. when he was 14, he got  a scholarship to attend a school in Tbilisi and study to be a priest in the Georgian Orthodox Church. While there he read the work of Karl Marx, this is when he was against the Russian monarchy. In 1899, Stalin was expelled from school for missing exams, although he claimed it was for supporting Karl Marx .

 

                            Stalin's Rise To Power

in 1912, Lenin appointed Joseph Stalin to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Three years later, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922, with Lenin as its first leader. During these years, Stalin had continued to move up the party ladder, and in 1922 he became secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a role that enabled him to appoint his allies to government jobs and grow a base of political support.

After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin eventually outmaneuvered his rivals and won the power struggle for control of the Communist Party. By the late 1920s, he had become dictator of the Soviet Union.