A master of political infighting, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) cautiously consolidated his power and eliminated his enemies in the mid-1920s. Then in 1928, as the ruling Communist Party’s undisputed leader, he launched the first five-year plan — a “revolution from above,”5 as he so aptly termed it, to transform Soviet society along socialist lines. Stalin and the Communist Party used constant propaganda, enormous sacrifice, and unlimited violence and state control to establish a dynamic, modern totalitarian state in the 1930s.