Joseph Stalin §

Born Iosif Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia, in 1878 to a Georgian-Ossetian cobbler family; expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1899 and rose through the Caucasian Bolshevik underground in Baku, where he co-organised the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery and absorbed the multinational labour-politics of the oil city. As Lenin's Commissar of Nationalities (1917–23) he authored the Bolshevik nationalities doctrine and chaired the Caucasian Bureau (Kavbiuro) at its meetings of 4–5 July 1921, where he intervened to overturn the previous day's vote and assign Karabakh to Soviet Azerbaijan rather than Soviet Armenia (Saparov 2014, citing Russian state-archive minutes). General Secretary of the CPSU from April 1922 until his death; consolidated personal dictatorship by the late 1920s. Personally responsible for the November 1948 – June 1953 forced resettlement (depending on the year, "voluntary repatriation") of approximately 100,000 Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR to the Kura-Aras lowlands of the Azerbaijani SSR, a precedent for the 1988–94 inversions. Died at Kuntsevo on 5 March 1953.