Gennady Zyuganov vs Joseph Stalin: Comparing Two Political Leaders

Who they are and where they stand

Gennady Zyuganov has led the CPRF since 1993. The party is the largest tolerated opposition force but operates within the Kremlin-managed political system, rarely challenging Putin on fundamental questions. Zyuganov ran for president multiple times, most seriously in 1996 against Yeltsin. Ioseb Jughashvili, known as Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death, and the de facto ruler of the Soviet state from the late 1920s. A Georgian cobbler's son who trained briefly in an Orthodox seminary before becoming a full-time revolutionary, he rose through the Bolshevik Party as an organizer and bank robber, surviving repeated arrests and Siberian exiles before the 1917 Revolution brought him to national prominence. His consolidation of power after Lenin's death (1924) was a masterclass in bureaucratic maneuvering: he first allied with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky, then switched to ally with Bukharin against Zinoviev and Kamenev, then finally turned against Bukharin to emerge as sole leader by 1929. His rivals were successively expelled from the party, exiled, and ultimately executed. The Great Purge of 1936–38 consumed the entire first generation of Bolshevik leadership: of the 1,966 delegates to the 1934 Party Congress, 1,108 were arrested; nearly all were shot or died in the Gulag. Stalin's economic transformation of the USSR was achieved through forced collectivization of agriculture (which caused the deliberate famine — the Holodomor in Ukraine — killing an estimated 5–7 million people in 1932–33), the Gulag system of forced labor camps (through which an estimated 18 million people passed, with 1.5–1.8 million dying), and a series of Five-Year Plans that rapidly industrialized the country. The industrialization enabled the Soviet Union's eventual victory over Nazi Germany — at a staggering cost of an estimated 27 million Soviet lives — and established the USSR as one of the two global superpowers of the post-war world.