Answer: Josef Stalin
When Stalin took control of the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death, he inherited a revolution still on shaky legs. Russia had gone from Tsarist autocracy to civil war to Marxist experiment in under a decade. The country was backward by European standards—industrial output was a joke, infrastructure was crumbling, and large parts of the population were still illiterate peasants. The Bolsheviks had seized power, yes, but holding onto it? That was another matter entirely. Stalin’s answer was brutal clarity: control everything.
He believed that the USSR was surrounded by enemies—both foreign and internal—and that the only way to survive was through totalitarian strength. Every institution had to be under the regime’s grip. Every potential rival, real or imagined, had to be eliminated. It wasn’t just paranoia—though there was plenty of that—it was a worldview forged in violence, revolution, and constant fear of counter-revolution.
That’s why the purges happened. He needed to make sure there were no alternative centers of power—no old Bolsheviks with enough moral capital to challenge him, no military leaders who might get ideas, no intellectuals who might think too freely. You couldn’t just oppose Stalin—you couldn’t even be remembered as someone who might have opposed Stalin. So people were erased. Not just physically, but historically. Airbrushed from photographs, struck from books, made ghosts.
Then came collectivization. Stalin looked at the industrialized West and saw enemies with tanks, planes, and factories. The USSR had peasants with wooden plows. So he forced a rapid transformation of agriculture and industry—at breakneck speed. To do that, he ordered the collectivization of farms, believing that large, state-controlled farms would be more efficient and feed the growing urban workforce. The peasants didn’t agree. Especially in Ukraine, where many farmers resisted handing over their land and grain.
Stalin interpreted that resistance not as economic rebellion—but as political defiance. A direct threat to the revolution. So he crushed it. The result was the Holodomor—a man-made famine that killed millions. Entire villages starved. People ate grass, bark, and worse. And the government kept exporting grain to meet quotas and fund industrialization.
And while all of this was happening, the gulag system exploded. These weren’t just prisons—they were economic engines. Stalin used forced labor to build canals, mines, railroads—massive infrastructure projects constructed on the backs of prisoners. You could be arrested for a comment, a joke, for knowing the wrong person. Once inside, survival wasn’t guaranteed. The camps were brutal, freezing, and often fatal. But the regime got its roads.
The psychology behind all of this? Stalin believed that history was a kind of forge—and that only those willing to endure unimaginable suffering could shape it. He didn’t just want to transform the USSR; he wanted to remake human beings into a new Soviet ideal. But you can’t engineer a new kind of person without breaking millions of the old kind.
So yes, tens of millions died under Stalin. But in his own mind? That was the cost of dragging a feudal empire into the modern world while surrounded by wolves. The tragedy is that so many people believed it—or were too terrified not to.