Joseph Stalin
Stalin refused to believe the invasion was coming, then ran the Soviet war effort for four years and finished it in Berlin. He had received something over eighty warnings from his own intelligence services, from Churchill and from a spy in Tokyo giving the date, and treated all of them as British provocations designed to start a war he had bought time to avoid. The purges had removed three of five marshals and most of the senior officer corps in 1937 and 1938, and the army that met the invasion on 22 June 1941 was badly led and forward-deployed. He disappeared to his dacha for several days at the end of June, and the politburo went out to find him; his first broadcast on 3 July began with the word brothers and sisters, which he had never used. What followed was administratively formidable. Some 1,500 factories were dismantled and moved east of the Urals, whole industries reassembled in months, and the country outproduced Germany in tanks and aircraft from 1942 on lend-lease trucks and its own machine tools. Order 227 in July 1942 forbade any retreat without permission and established blocking detachments behind the lines. He stayed in Moscow through the panic of October 1941, took the surname of supreme commander, and learned to let Zhukov and Vasilevsky plan. He also deported entire nations — Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans — on collective charges of disloyalty. Some 27 million Soviet citizens died, and he ended the war with half of Europe.
- Lived: 1878 CE – 1953 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: general_secretary, commander_in_chief, dictator
