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 (né Dzhugashvili; 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held office as general secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952 and as premier from 1941 until his death. Despite initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he eventually consolidated power to become a dictator by the 1930s. Stalin codified the Communist Party's official interpretation of Marxism as Marxism–Leninism, and his version of it is referred to as Stalinism.
Born into a poor Georgian family in Gori, Russian Empire, Stalin attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary before joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through bank robberies and other crimes, and edited the party's newspaper, Pravda. He was repeatedly arrested and underwent several exiles to Siberia. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin served as a member of the Politburo, and from 1922 used his position as General Secretary to gain control over the party bureaucracy.
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