Joseph Stalin
From Philosopedia
Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (19 December 1878 - 5 March 1953)
The Georgian cobbler’s son (who was named Ioseb Dzhugashvili) moved from being a seminarian to becoming leader of the Communist Party and one of the internationally best-known atheists.
Accepting the view in Karl Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that “Religion . . . is the opium of the people,” Stalin (a pseudonym meaning “man of steel”) ruled as dictator of the state without the need for any sanction from the church.
Early on, Stalin became the darling of much of the international intelligentsia (Joseph McCabe in 1940 wrote that “it is now generally agreed that he is one of the greatest statesmen in Europe and a distinguished strategist”), but his rule was marked by a paranoia that led to periods of terror, and he became a symbol of a ruthless dictator without real feelings for the uplifting of mankind.
A story current in the 1940s had it that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were breakfasting at Teheran. Roosevelt mentioned his odd dream last night, that God had appointed him head of the United Nations. Churchill piped up that, indeed, that was a coincidence, that he, too, had dreamed God had appointed him Premier of the United Nations. Stalin, still a bit groggy from a sleepless night, retorted, “I had a dream last night, too, but I don’t remember appointing anyone to anything.” Scholars are still estimating the enormous numbers of people who were killed because of Stalin’s ruthlessness, illustrating that, although he was an unbeliever, Stalin was by no stretch of the imagination a humanist.
One estimate is that 20,000,000 died at Stalin's hands.
