Stalin (1878–1953). Joseph Vassarianovich Jugashvili was a Georgian revolutionary and Bolshevik who became the General Secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Stalin, or “man of steel” was the most enduring of the underground pseudonyms which he took, in order to carry out his revolutionary work under the Tsarist autocracy and evade their hated political police, the Okhrana. Stalin was imprisoned and exiled no fewer than five times. In every case he was not broken, but carried on his work, and escaped to resume contact with the underground revolutionary network. His father was a shoemaker and factory worker. His mother a simple peasant woman. As a brilliant young student, despite humble origins, he was educated in the only public schooling available in those times - the religious seminary in Tiflis, Georgia. Coming into contact with many philosophical and historical works, he read widely and thought deeply. He came into contact too with illegal Marxist literature, saw its power and truth and set out upon the journey of becoming a Marxist, a social scientist and great intellectual thinker. Realising that “philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it”, he went among the workers to educate and grow the revolutionary movement. He took part in workers reading circles, organised unions and demonstrations, made contact with and became a disciple of the great Lenin. He was a theoretician and practical revolutionary, taking part in the 1905 and February 1917 revolutions in Russia, that overthrew Tsarism. He was a key leader and organiser of the October 1917 Revolution which overthrew Capitalism, brought Russia out of WW1, and so ended the mechanised slaughter of the inter imperialist world war, bringing into being the world’s first Socialist State. Under his stewardship the U.S.S.R. went from a group of poor agrarian countries, decimated and pillaged by the imperialists, to an electrified world superpower. It was the Soviet Union who made the greatest contribution to the defeat of fascism, in World War 2, under the leadership of Generalissimo Stalin. The Soviet people made enormous sacrifices to vanquish German imperialism, intent on imposing its regime of slavery, exploitation and racial superiority on the Russian and Slavic peoples. The USSR suffered the most losses of the Allies in the Great Patriotic War (10 million soldiers, and a brutal 17 million civilian deaths due to the the barbaric German occupiers brutality toward the Soviet Socialist motherland). It was the Red Army that pushed the Nazi hordes back until they were able to fly the red flag of proletarian revolution from atop the Reichstag in Berlin. Josef Vassarianovich Stalin’s memory has been sullied by lies and slanders, academic “propaganda with footnotes” created by imperialist shills, IRD, MI6 and CIA agents such as Robert Conquest, and open fascist proxies of imperialism such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The power of these “works” has not been their great truth - quite the reverse, they are built upon a mountain of lies and falsifications - but the financial power of the backers, publishers, media and government connections of the hired cold-war warriors whom penned them. It is the capitalist class and the power and wealth that comes from the wage slavery of the mass of the workers that enables them to spread these lies. They quite rightly see that if the truth of the communist movement spreads among the working class, their privilege will crumble. His name is resurfacing in conversations within the Russian Federation. Statues are being re-erected. The garbage that he predicted would amass on his grave is slowly being blown away. History has a habit of doing that. As the crises of capitalism deepen, more workers are once again looking back to the Soviet experience — and its key architects who built and defended it. Joseph Stalin. Bolshevik. Revolutionary. Student of Lenin. youtu.be/poOZFKoEx9c?si=6Ujk…