Joseph Stalin was a member of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution, and became a member of the Politburo, or governing council, when the Soviet Union was established. He was also the editor of Pravda ("Truth"), the Communist Party's official newspaper.
When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, Stalin assumed control of the Soviet Union through his appointment as General Secretary of the Communist Party. Immediately, Stalin launched a program of rapid industrialization, known as the "Five-Year Plan." By forcing the shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy very quickly, the Five-Year Plan caused huge disruptions in the country's food supply, leading to a severe famine in 1932 that killed approximately 7 million people.
Stalin began a program called the "Great Purge," labelling his opponents both inside and outside of the Communist Party "enemies of the working class," executing about 690,000 people and imprisoning over a million in prison camps called gulags.
By the time of his death in 1953, Stalin had executed nearly 800,000 people, and a further 1.7 million prisoners had died in the gulags. An additional 800,000 people had perished during forced resettlements. The Soviet Union had been hit by another famine after World War II. All said and done, estimates of the death toll from Stalin's policies and direct actions over his 30 years in power vary between 6 and 9 million lives.
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