Stalin was not one of the decisive players in the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, but he soon rose through the ranks of the party. In 1922 he was made general secretary of the Communist Party, a post not considered particularly significant at the time but which gave him control over appointments and thus allowed him to build up a base of support. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin promoted himself as his political heir and gradually outmanoeuvred his rivals. By the late 1920s, Stalin was effectively the dictator of the Soviet Union.
His forced collectivisation of agriculture cost millions of lives, while his programme of rapid industrialisation achieved huge increases in Soviet productivity and economic growth but at great cost. Moreover, the population suffered immensely during the Great Terror of the 1930s, during which Stalin purged the party of 'enemies of the people', resulting in the execution of thousands and the exile of millions to the gulag system of slave labour camps.
These purges severely depleted the Red Army, and despite repeated warnings, Stalin was ill prepared for Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. His political future, and that of the Soviet Union, hung in the balance, but Stalin recovered to lead his country to victory. The human cost was enormous but that mattered little to him.
After World War Two, the Soviet Union entered the nuclear age and ruled over an empire which included most of eastern Europe. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin died of a stroke on 5 March 1953.
Throughout his six years in office, Gorbachev always seemed to be moving too fast for the party establishment, which saw its privileges threatened, and too slow for more radical reformers, who hoped to do away with the one-party state and the command economy. Desperately trying to stay in control of the reform process, he seemed to have underestimated the depth of the economic crisis. He also seemed to have had a blind spot for the power of the nationality issue: Glasnost created ever-louder calls for independence from the Baltics and other Soviet republics. He was successful in foreign policy, but primarily from an international perspective. While his arms control agreements with the United States could be seen as in the Soviet interest too, the peaceful breakaway of the countries of Eastern Europe, followed by German unification and NATO membership for the new Germany, appeared to old-line Communists more a sell-out.
In August 1991 hard-liners had had enough. With Gorbachev on vacation in the Crimea, they staged a coup. However, they failed because of incompetence, lack of support from the military and massive street protests in Moscow. After the coup, Gorbachev lost the political initiative. This now belonged to the leaders of the various Soviet republics, in particular the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. At the end of the year, Gorbachev was forced to resign as president of a Soviet Union no longer in existence. Since that time, he has been blamed by many Russians for their current political and economic predicament. In the West, he remains the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped end the Cold War.
