Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century, through purges, famine and the defeat of Nazi Germany. Estimates of the dead under his rule run into many millions. Nothing in a birth chart accounts for that, and this reading does not try to: a chart describes a temperament, which is a far smaller thing than a history.

He was born on 18 December 1878 at Gori, in Georgia, then a province of the Russian empire, with four of his ten planets in earth and the Sun in Sagittarius. Sagittarius is the sign of the larger idea and the longer horizon, and its honest failing is over-promising. Set in a chart this heavy with earth, the idea does not stay an idea; it acquires machinery. That combination belongs to somebody who talks in decades and builds in concrete, which is a fair account of the five year plans whichever way you judge them.

The tightest aspect in the chart is the Sun square Saturn, six minutes of arc from exact, which is among the closest that pair comes in any chart on this site. Identity meeting a rule that will not move. It usually arrives early, as a father, an institution or a poverty that cannot be argued with, and it produces either somebody who submits to authority permanently or somebody who decides to become it. A man from a provincial town at the empire's margins who ended as the authority is the second outcome.

Mars is the other loud planet. It faces Pluto across the chart within a degree, which is force meeting force: a person who cannot leave a contest alone and does not distinguish between opposition and threat. Mars also makes an easy angle to Saturn and a creative one to Jupiter, so the aggression had organisation and scale available to it rather than merely temper. His Moon, oddly, is in Libra, the sign that needs the room level and is destabilised by open conflict. In a chart like this that reads less like gentleness than like a preference for having disagreement removed rather than argued with. A politics of unanimity, arrived at by removing the people who disagreed, is that preference handed a state to run.

He died in Moscow on 5 March 1953, at seventy four, on a disseminating Moon 82% lit, the phase that hands on what it worked out and needs the handing on to land. Saturn, the planet that had squared his Sun from the day he was born, made its easiest angle to that Sun on the day it ended.