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 Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, holding the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952 and serving as the nation's premier from 1941 to 1953. Initially part of a collective leadership within a one-party system, he ultimately consolidated personal power to become the country's de facto dictator 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 as a youth by joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Active in the Caucasus, he raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through robberies and other crimes, and was repeatedly arrested and exiled to Siberia. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin joined the party's Politburo and served as the People's Commissar for Nationalities. He began his rise to power after Lenin's death in 1924, using his role as general secretary to outmaneuver his rivals. Under Stalin's policy of "Socialism in One Country" and his five-year plans from 1928, the country underwent rapid agricultural collectivisation and industrialization, replacing the New Economic Policy with a centralised command economy.
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