There is now, or evar been man as ruthless as Joseph Stalin. Stalin In Russia is seen as hero even after everything he has done to his people. Often people have a perception that the Adolf Hitler was biggest mass killer in the second world war. Nothing could be further from the truth...
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Early Life
Stalin was born as Iosif Dzhugashvili on December 6th 1878 to a poor family in Gori, a small town in Georgia, one of the most recently acquired provinces in the Russian empire. His father was Besarion Jughashvili (debatable) and mother Ekaterina Geladze . He went to a church school in 1808, graduating with top marks in 1894(debatable), when he went to a seminary school to train as a priest, as per his mother’s wishes. There he showed an aptitude for the work but was exposed to the revolutionary ideas sweeping Russia. He read Marx, became an atheist and joined secret revolutionary groups. In 1899 he left the school, possibly expelled for revolutionary activity, possibly for illness.
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Stalin 1894 |
Ekaterina Geladze |
Stlin As Party Member
Now aged 21, Stalin became a professional revolutionary working for the Russian Social Democratic Party. His simple, effective style derived from seminary school proved effective in teaching illiterate workers Marxist-Leninist ideas. In 1902 he was arrested for the first time and later exiled, beginning a cycle of arrest, exile, escape, revolutionary activity and arrest again which would continue to the revolution in 1917. Stalin also proved adept at raising funds through robbery, as well as smuggling guns and explosives through the Russian border. When the RSDP split, Stalin sided with Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
By now Stalin had developed a reputation for dynamic ability and fierce loyalty which was recognised higher in the party. When Lenin decided to reshape the Bolsheviks in 1912 he made sure Stalin, who was in exile, was elected to the ruling Central Committee. Lenin asked Stalin to escape again to help, which Stalin did. In 1913 he adopted the name ‘Stalin’, ‘man of steel’, and became editor of party newspaper Pravda, further underlining his reputation with his first ventures into written party theory, which supported Lenin. He was later arrested and exiled to the Artic Circle.
Stalin The swashbuckling years |
The Revolutions of 1917
Stalin was in exile for the first revolution of 1917, but he was among the first of the exiled Bolsheviks to reach the nation's capital in the aftermath, taking back control of Pravda. While later accounts claiming that Stalin was second only to Lenin during the October Revolution are untrue, Stalin wasn’t unimportant either, he just wasn’t high profile. Stalin rejoined the Central Committee and had a place on the four strong Bureau which controlled the Central Committee, also publishing over sixty articles in Pravda between March and October supporting Bolshevik claims. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks seized control.
Stalin’s Rise
A shortage of qualified Bolsheviks to hold positions of power meant it became common for people to hold several. Stalin, adept at bureaucracy, acquired numerous positions as the years passed, eventually being appointed as the new General Secretary, who was to co-ordinate the central government, in 1922. The interlinking set of jobs and committees he was in charge of provided Stalin with massive power in the Soviet administration at a time when his rivals were more afraid of military men seizing control. Stalin was able to manipulate events by appointing those loyal to him and bringing the party into line behind him.
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Lenin in January 1924 |
Stalin at Lenins funeral 1924 |
Lenin’s death in 1924 left a power vacuum, not helped by a document Lenin left criticising all the possible candidates (it even called for Stalin to be removed from power). Despite this, Stalin positioned himself as Lenin’s heir during a funeral oration and from 1924 – 1928 slowly manoeuvred himself into a position of dominant control. First isolating the left and then the right of party government, portraying them as threatening party unity and having them voted out of power; Trotsky, arguably his greatest rival, was exiled from Russia. By the late 1920s Stalin was leader of the USSR.
World War 2 and The Aftermaths
As war clouds were gathering on the horizon in 1939, Stalin felt that he had scored a coup by striking a non-aggression pact with Hitler, in which they agreed to divide up Poland and then leave each other alone. Stalin so strongly believed that he and Hitler had an understanding that he refused to listen to his military advisors' warnings in 1941 that the Wehrmacht was massing for an attack, and purged any one who dared utter such blasphemy. As a result, when the attack came, the Soviet army was completely unprepared and suffered horrible defeats, while Stalin spent the first several days after the attack holed up in his office in shock. Because the military had been purged of its best minds in the mid-1930s, it took some time, and many lives, before the Soviets were able to regroup and make a credible defense. By then, all of the Ukraine and Belarus were in German hands, Leningrad had been surrounded and besieged, and Nazi artillery was entrenched only a few miles from the Kremlin. After heroic efforts on the part of the whole country, the tide eventually turned at Stalingrad in 1943, and soon the victorious Red Army was liberating the countries of Eastern Europe--before the Americans had even begun to pose a serious challenge to Hitler from the west with the D-Day invasion.
During the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences, Stalin proved a worthy negotiator with the likes of Roosevelt and Churchill, and managed to arrange for the countries of Eastern Europe, which had been liberated by the Red Army to remain in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as securing three seats for his country in the newly formed UN. The Soviet Union was now a recognized world superpower, with its own permanent seat on the Security Council, and the respect that Stalin had craved all his life. Still, he was not finished. Returning soldiers and refugees were arrested and either shot or sent to the labor camps as traitors, entire nationalities that had been deported during the War, also as traitors, were not allowed to return to their homes.
Stalin Death
On March 5 1953, about to start a new purge of the nation, he died.Cause is a mystery.
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