Josef Stalin was a Soviet communist revolutionary and politician of Georgian origin. He ruled the Soviet Union (USSR) from the mid-1920s until his death, serving as Secretary General of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952, and as Prime Minister of his country from 1941 to 1953. Initially he presided over a one-party state that ruled for a system of collective leadership, becoming in fact the dictator of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Ideologically linked to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, it helped to formalize these ideas as Marxism-Leninism, while its own policies became known as Stalinism.
Born into a poor family in Gori, the Russian Empire, he started his revolutionary career after joining the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (POSDR) as a young man. There, he edited the party's newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through robberies, kidnappings and safety nets. Repeatedly imprisoned, he suffered several internal exiles.