December 18, 1878 - Joseph Stalin

His consolidation of power over the Soviet party apparatus during the 1920s laid the groundwork for decades of political terror, forced collectivization, and mass deportations that reshaped — and ended — millions of lives. The mechanisms he built, from the gulag system to the purges of the late 1930s, were distinguished by their bureaucratic thoroughness as much as their scale. Estimates of deaths attributable to his governance range into the tens of millions, placing him among the most consequential wielders of state violence in the twentieth century.

From Wikipedia

Joseph Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953, holding the titles of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952 and the nation's Premier from 1941 to 1953. Initially presiding over an oligarchic one-party system that governed by plurality, he became the de facto dictator of the Soviet Union by the 1930s. Ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin helped to formalise these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies became known as Stalinism.

Born into a poor Georgian family in Gori, Russian Empire, Stalin began his revolutionary career by joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a youth. There, he edited the party's newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction via robberies, kidnappings, and protection rackets. Repeatedly arrested, he underwent several internal exiles. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia during the 1917 October Revolution, Stalin joined the party's governing Politburo, where he was instrumental in overseeing the Soviet Union's establishment in 1922. After Lenin fell ill and then died in 1924, Stalin assumed leadership over the country.

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