Stalin's Soviet Union

~1924 – 1953

The purges, the Pact and the terror apparatus — one man's remaking of a revolution into a personal state.

Joseph Stalin did not seize the Soviet state so much as outlast everyone who might have stopped him, running the Bolshevik party's card index while more brilliant men fought over ideas. His foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov gave his name to the pact that shocked the world in August 1939 — a cynical carve-up of Poland and the Baltics with the regime Soviet propaganda had spent a decade calling the enemy of mankind. Behind Stalin stood Lavrentiy Beria, who ran the purges and the camps with an efficiency that outlived his master by only a few years.

3 figures · sorted by birth year

Lavrentiy Beria

infamous

#922 · 7-6-26

ESTP

Stalin's NKVD chief, who ran the Great Terror's machinery and the Katyn massacre.

Vyacheslav Molotov

notable

#921 · 7-6-26

ISTJ

The dour foreign minister whose name attached itself to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Joseph Stalin

infamous

#920 · 7-6-26

ISTJ

The bureaucrat who out-administered every rival to become the Soviet Union's absolute dictator.

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