Ioseb Jughashvili (1879-1953) was expelled from seminary school in 1899 and turned to the Georgian Communist Party, where he got the nickname "Stalin." His rise to power is a classic example of political cunning. He was a mere bureaucrat when Lenin died in 1924, but he used party appointments, infighting, and secret police so well that by 1936, he was unquestionably the leading man in the USSR. His personal brand of Communism emphasized heavy industry and high body counts: historians believe he was responsible for eight to twenty million deaths, not counting the additional twenty million killed in World War II. The full extent of his terror was not known for years after his death, and many prominent Western intellectuals were fooled by Stalin's brilliant propaganda machine. Like Stalin, you believe in "out of sight, out of mind." If somebody is bothering you, you'll be a lot happier if you get them away from you, so why not have them exiled, killed, or better yet, erase their very existence? It's only a small step from cropping your exes out of prom photos to removing them entirely from the history books.