Stalin

Born Josef Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia in 1879, the young Stalin studied to become a priest whilst secretly reading the works of Karl Marx. Politics was to become his religion and between 1902 and 1913 he was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia eight times, escaping on seven occasions. Following the Revolution he employed a cocktail of charm and ruthless cunning to slither up the treacherous Communist Party hierarchy, often by taking posts that nobody wanted which enabled him to build up a power base virtually unnoticed, until, with perfect timing, he was in a position to take over the Party leadership from Lenin when he died in 1924. Surrounding himself with terrified yes-men and trusting absolutely nobody, he was dictator of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953.