Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin succeeded Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union through the 1920s and ruled until his death on 5 March 1953. His government forced the collectivization of agriculture beginning in 1929, whose resulting famines killed millions, most severely the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933; the Great Terror of 1936-1938 saw hundreds of thousands executed; and the Gulag system of forced-labor camps held an estimated eighteen million people over the course of his rule. Historians' estimates of the total dead from the famines, the purges, and the camps together run from roughly six million to twenty million people.