From 1929 until 1953, Joseph Stalin was the ruler of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). He slaughtered tens of millions of people in order to push a developing Soviet Union to become an atomic powerhouse. ¹⁾

Stalin was not actually a native Russian. He was from Georgia, a country that Russia had seized in 1801. ²⁾

Historians continue to dispute how much the Allied cause was jeopardized by utilizing one tyrant (Stalin) to stop another (Hitler) during WWII and then enslaving tens of millions of Europeans after the war. ³⁾

Stalin launched “The Great Purify” or “The Great Terror” between 1936 and 1938 in order to purge the Communist Party and cement his own control. Millions of people were forced to work, abducted, or executed. In the Red Army, he purged more than 34 of his own generals, field commanders, and navy admirals. ⁴⁾

While reviewing assassination lists, Stalin allegedly said, “Who’s going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one.“. ⁵⁾

According to statistics, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Tse Tung were the most successful mass killers of the twentieth century. The numbers vary, but it is thought that Stalin murdered 40 million people, Mao Tse Tung murdered 60 million, and Hitler murdered 30 million. ⁶⁾

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), a French philosopher, unexpectedly justified Stalin's and subsequently Mao's purges. Sartre believed that quiet was the appropriate response to the atrocities of the gulags: “It was not our job to write about the Soviet work camps.”. ⁷⁾

Stalin tasked head scientist Ilya Ivanov with developing a hybrid ape-man with “immense muscle but an undeveloped intellect.” Ivanov was imprisoned and banished to Kazakhstan because he was unable to deliver. ⁸⁾

Stalin was struck twice by a horse-drawn carriage as a toddler, causing lasting injury to his left arm. Because of this injuries, he was unable to fight in WWI, where he would have most certainly died. ⁹⁾

Stalin was a big fan of movies, especially westerns. Stalin agreed with Lenin when he remarked, “Cinema is the most significant of the arts”. ¹⁰⁾

In his book The Gulag Archipelago, Gulag veteran Alexander Solzhenitsyn chronicled Stalin's prison camps. He said that a prisoner might be tossed into a “bedbug infected cage” at any time, when swarms of ravenous parasites would swarm a victim. A prisoner would initially reject the parasites, but after a few hours, he would get weak and allow the parasites to “take his blood without a whimper”. ¹¹⁾

Josef Djhugashvili changed his name to Stalin, which means “man of steel,” in 1910. ¹²⁾

Stalin had a complete contempt for human life, as evidenced by the following quote: “Death is the solution to all problems.” “No man — no problem.” ¹³⁾

During World War II, Stalin directed Red Army leaders to kill deserters and men who fled the battlefield. More than 150,000 men were killed in action between 1941 and 1942. ¹⁴⁾

Stalin invented the Doctor's Plot in 1952, and jailed hundreds of physicians and medical professionals, predominantly Jews, as part of it. Ironically, when Stalin suffered a stroke and died, all of the top physicians were imprisoned. ¹⁵⁾