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18
JOSEPH STALIN, THE RULER
OF.RUSSIA,
WHO ORDERED THE PACT WITH GERMANY
I
N his room in the
Kremlin,
Stalin sits beneath
a pictw:e of Karl
Marx.
From
this
room, .he
went to attend the signing of the Russo–
German
pact by Molotov and von Ribbentrop.
It
is
more than
40
years since Stalin read
Marx
for the first
time.
The son of a Georgian cobbler,
he
waS
studying to
be
a priest in the Tiflis
theological seminary. But when his teachers found
him
reading the philosophy of the class
war,
and
organising Marxist classes among his fellow-pupils,
they expelled
him.
This was the start of his
revolutionary career.
For
20
years, Stalin took part in revolutionary
work. He was in the 1905 Revolution, was
imprisoned or exiled to Siberia seven times, aIid
escaped on each occasion. After the Bolsheviks
seized power, he
began
to occupy important posts
W
in the Communist
Party.
But he was regarded as
a good administrator rather
than
a leader and
maker of policies. Lenin thought
him
too ooarse
for supreme responsibility. · But when Lenin died,
it was Stalin and not Trotsky, Lenin's closest
associate for many years, who succeeded to the
leadership of the
Party.
Since then, Stalin
has
strengthened his pOsition
until .pow he
is
the ·unchallenged dictator ·of the
Soviet Union. Abandoning the policy of working
first
for a world revolution,
his
plan
has
been
to
~
Rfisilt'
skintP
iIltetrudl~
CKXJlloallollly
and
.. .
To .
~
.
ugh
~~q/if1·
d.......
~
..
II..
~,.. 1t6IP'~tlt*,$,llll£)llaJbjles
e
was
c1iil'islieneil
"l~,"
...
....,.,tn~lI'<Is
,
r
called
him
8oso. Fifty-seven years old, he
has
been
married
twice,
has
two sons and a daughter.