Joseph Stalin was born 18th December 1878 and died on 5th March 1953, was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was born in Gori in the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire, to Besarion Jughashvili, a Georgian cobbler who owned his own workshop, and Ketevan Geladze, a Georgian who was born a serf. He was the youngest of their three boys; their two previous sons died in infancy.
Stalin's chief aim was to expand industrial production. For this, he developed three Five-year Plans between 1928 and 1938. Gosplan, the state planning agency, drew up targets for production for each factory. The first two plans concentrated on improving heavy industry - coal, oil, steel and electricity. Some keen young Communists, called Pioneers, went into barren areas and set up new towns and industries from nothing. There were champion workers called Stakhanovites, named after a coal miner who broke the record for the amount of coal dug up in a single shift. Education schemes were introduced to train skilled, literate workers. The Soviet Union also gave opportunities to women - crèches were set up so they could also work. Women became doctors and scientists, as well as canal diggers and steel workers. At the same time, many of the workers were slave workers and kulaks from the gulag. Strikers were shot, and wreckers (slow workers) could be executed or imprisoned. Thousands died from accidents, starvation or cold. Housing and wages were terrible, and no consumer goods were produced for people. Improvements in production between 1928 and 1937 were phenomenal, Coal increased from 36 million tonnes to 130 million tonnes, Iron also increased form 3 million tonnes to 15 million tonnes, so