omoted the Bolshevik line, and finally caught the attention of Lenin in 1912. Therefore, Stalin was immediately promoted editor of the Party newspaper, Pravda, and was brought into the Party Central Committee by Lenin. A while later, Joseph, whose first wife had died in 1907, married Nadezhda Alliluyeva in 1918 and moved with the government from Petrograd to Moscow. Stalin’s role in the revolution of 1917 was important but not heroic. For instance, he did not go out into the streets and rally workers, peasants, and soldiers. He was not a very popular or charismatic leader who stirred crowds with words of encouragement and bravery, as Leon Trotsky did. Stalin preferred to work within Part committees and soon became Lenin’s special assistant. In October of 1917, when the Bolsheviks, led by Trotsky, seized power in the name of the soviets, Stalin played a small role. He did however, receive a job in the new government as commissar of Nationality Affairs. Shortly after Lenin’s death, a struggle for succession began. Stalin had emerged five years later as the new leader of the Communist Party. He had triumphed over his four rivals, including Leon Trotsky, by “skillfully outmaneuvering them with his political instincts and ambition” (Lewis and Whithead p. 47) to be the new Lenin. Stalin built the Soviet into an “industrialized nation” and a “dominant world power” (Lewis and Whithead p. 48). Unlike Lenin, the “triumph of {Stalin} turned into the tragedy of an entire nation” (Dmitri Volkogonov). Finally in 1953, the regime of terror ended in the Soviet Union with the death of Joseph Stalin. It is difficult to compare the lives of Stalin (illustration 1) and Trotsky (illustration 2), for Stalin achieved sole power while Trotsky was exiled. Joseph Stalin was one of the most ruthless dictators in modern history, who built the Soviet Union into an “industrialized ...
