[814] When at social events, he encouraged singing,[815] as well as alcohol consumption; he hoped that others would drunkenly reveal their secrets to him. [508] In June 1942, the German Army began a major offensive in Southern Russia, threatening Stalingrad; Stalin ordered the Red Army to hold the city at all costs. [488] In June 1941, he ordered a scorched earth policy of destroying infrastructure and food supplies before the Germans could seize them,[489] also commanding the NKVD to kill around 100,000 political prisoners in areas the Wehrmacht approached. [714] Ultimately he believed that all nations would merge into a single, global human community,[714] and regarded all nations as inherently equal. This has been a period replete with events of a decisive nature. U.S. led forces pushed the North Koreans back. [446] As it wound down, Stalin sought to deflect responsibility from himself,[447] blaming its "excesses" and "violations of law" on Yezhov. A+. [291] In 1925, the two moved into open opposition to Stalin and Bukharin. [597] He sent Molotov as his representative to San Francisco to take part in negotiations to form the United Nations, insisting that the Soviets have a place on the Security Council. Though each loathed and feared the other, there was much Hitler and Stalin had in common. [461] On 28 September, Germany and the Soviet Union exchanged some of their newly conquered territories; Germany gained the linguistically Polish-dominated areas of Lublin Province and part of Warsaw Province while the Soviets gained Lithuania. [628] When the Israeli ambassador Golda Meir arrived in the USSR, Stalin was angered by the Jewish crowds who gathered to greet her. But whether that's the case will likely forever remain a matter of speculation, Brent and Naumov concluded in Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 . On June 11, 1937, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had 8 of his top army generals executed as part of The Great Purge. [692] The new state would then be able to ensure that all citizens had access to work, food, shelter, healthcare, and education, with the wastefulness of capitalism eliminated by a new, standardised economic system. [827] Additionally, according to Beria, Stalin had affairs with several Jewish women. [159] In a celebratory mood, Stalin travelled by train to Petrograd in March. [773] Several historians have seen it as appropriate to follow Lazar Kaganovich's description of there being "several Stalins" as a means of understanding his multi-faceted personality. [649] In 1952, he also eliminated the Politburo and replaced it with a larger version which he called the Presidium. [537] Roosevelt and Churchill conceded to Stalin's demand that Germany pay the Soviet Union 20billion dollars in reparations, and that his country be permitted to annexe Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in exchange for entering the war against Japan. 6 December] 1878 [1] - 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. [24] Stalin faced several severe health problems: An 1884 smallpox infection left him with facial scars;[25] and at age 12 he was seriously injured when he was hit by a phaeton, probably the cause of a lifelong disability in his left arm. [72], In January 1905, government troops massacred protesters in Saint Petersburg. [906] Historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft and Michael Ellman attribute roughly 3million deaths to the Stalinist regime, including executions and deaths from criminal negligence. [6] His birth name was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili,[d] and he was nicknamed "Soso", a diminutive of "Ioseb". [449], As a MarxistLeninist, Stalin considered conflict between competing capitalist powers inevitable; after Nazi Germany annexed Austria and then part of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he recognised a war was looming. His own woman [Alliluyeva] was enough for him, and he paid scant attention to her. During these years, the country experienced another major famine and an antisemitic campaign that culminated in the doctors' plot. Hence he bore direct responsibility for the course of the war and its outcome. The third and final part shows how, through an overt co-option of Lenin's legacy, Stalin 'manufactured' a charismatic bond with the Soviet people. Because Stalin was not diagnosed during his life, we can never be sure. [463] The two states continued trading, undermining the British blockade of Germany. [268] Stalin took charge of the funeral and was one of its pallbearers; against the wishes of Lenin's widow, the Politburo embalmed his corpse and placed it within a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square. . [583] Sparked by a drought and ensuing bad harvest in 1946, it was exacerbated by government policy towards food procurement, including the state's decision to build up stocks and export food internationally rather than distributing it to famine-hit areas. [424] By late 1937, all remnants of collective leadership were gone from the Politburo, which was controlled entirely by Stalin. [69] Stalin detested many of the Mensheviks in Georgia and aligned himself with the Bolsheviks. This is what our obligations before the workers and peasants of the USSR dictate to us. fair elections Views: 47. [282] Stalin saw Trotsky whom he personally despised[283] as the main obstacle to his dominance within the party. [490] He purged the military command; several high-ranking figures were demoted or reassigned and others were arrested and executed. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin terrorised his own people, but for the first time a survey suggests . [564] He was also concerned about his returning armies, who had been exposed to a wide range of consumer goods in Germany, much of which they had looted and brought back with them. [673], Stalin claimed to have embraced Marxism at the age of fifteen,[677] and it served as the guiding philosophy throughout his adult life;[678] according to Kotkin, Stalin held "zealous Marxist convictions",[679] while Montefiore suggested that Marxism held a "quasi-religious" value for Stalin. [316] At his command, grain procurement squads surfaced across Western Siberia and the Urals, with violence breaking out between these squads and the peasantry. [639] Stalin nevertheless mistrusted his doctors; in January 1952 he had one imprisoned after they suggested that he should retire to improve his health. [533] In 1944, the German armies were pushed out of the Baltic states (with the exception of the Ostland), which were then re-annexed into the Soviet Union. [108] There he led the imprisoned Bolsheviks, organised discussion groups, and ordered the killing of suspected informants. [181] Stalin became part of an informal foursome leading the government, alongside Lenin, Trotsky, and Sverdlov;[182] of these, Sverdlov was regularly absent and died in March 1919. [166] After the demonstration was suppressed, the Provisional Government initiated a crackdown on the Bolsheviks, raiding Pravda. He was good at backroom political maneuvering. [53], That month, Stalin travelled to the port city of Batum. 2 [779] He lacked compassion,[785] something Volkogonov suggested might have been accentuated by his many years in prison and exile,[786] although he was capable of acts of kindness to strangers, even amid the Great Terror. [307] Here, he argued for the concept of "Socialism in One Country", which he presented as an orthodox Leninist perspective. [940] There have also been requests by communist officials to canonize Stalin as an official saint, although these requests were never implemented the author referencing the church's suffering under Stalin's rule. [663] At the funeral on 9 March, Stalins body was laid to rest in Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square; hundreds of thousands attended. [670] The collective leadership included the following eight senior members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, listed according to the order of precedence presented formally on 5 March 1953: Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich and Anastas Mikoyan. [725] According to Montefiore, despite Stalin's affinity for Russia and Russians, he remained profoundly Georgian in his lifestyle and personality. Not the Last Word", "The Personality Cult of Stalin in Soviet Posters, 19291953", "Ukraine Court Finds Bolsheviks Guilty of Holodomor Genocide", Stalin Library (with all 13 volumes of Stalin's, Library of Congress: Revelations from the Russian Archives, Electronic archive of Stalin's letters and presentations, Joseph Stalin Newsreels // Net-Film Newsreels and Documentary Films Archive, Stalin Biography from Spartacus Educational, A List of Key Documentary Material on Stalin, Stalinka: The Digital Library of Staliniana, Electronic archive of Stalins letters and presentations, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Stalin&oldid=1133956104, This page was last edited on 16 January 2023, at 08:16. It sought to provide a guide to leading the country after his death. [863] The other, Alexander, was the son of Lidia Pereprygina; he was raised as the son of a peasant fisherman and the Soviet authorities made him swear never to reveal that Stalin was his biological father. [209] In Tsaritsyn, Stalin commanded the local Cheka branch to execute suspected counter-revolutionaries, sometimes without trial[210] and in contravention of government orders purged the military and food collection agencies of middle-class specialists, some of whom he also executed. [251] For Lenin, it was advantageous to have a key ally in this crucial post.[252]. [720] In private he often used coarse language and profanity, although avoided doing so in public. [557] Aware that these countries had been pushed toward socialism through invasion rather than by proletarian revolution, Stalin referred to them not as "dictatorships of the proletariat" but as "people's democracies", suggesting that in these countries there was a pro-socialist alliance combining the proletariat, peasantry, and lower middle-class. He attracted a group of supporters through his classes in socialist theory[46] and co-organised a secret workers' mass meeting for May Day 1900,[47] at which he successfully encouraged many of the men to take strike action. [599], In 1948, Stalin edited and rewrote sections of Falsifiers of History, published as a series of Pravda articles in February 1948 and then in book form. [604] He demanded that war reparations be paid by Germany and its Axis allies Hungary, Romania, and the Slovak Republic. [555] Various East European communists also visited Stalin in Moscow. 18991904: Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, 19051912: Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath, 19121917: Rise to the Central Committee and editorship of, 19271931: Dekulakisation, collectivisation, and industrialisation, 19451947: Post-war reconstruction and famine, In the Soviet Union and its successor states, Despite abolishing the office of General Secretary in 1952, Stalin continued to exercise its powers as the, After Stalin's death, Georgy Malenkov succeeded him as both. [176] Trotsky and other later Bolshevik opponents of Stalin used this as evidence that his role in the coup had been insignificant, although later historians reject this. [573] Recognising the need for drastic steps to be taken to combat inflation and promote economic regeneration, in December 1947 Stalin's government devalued the rouble and abolished the ration-book system. [609] In March 1948, Stalin launched an anti-Tito campaign, accusing the Yugoslav communists of adventurism and deviating from MarxistLeninist doctrine. [391] Stalin would not acknowledge that his policies had contributed to the famine,[380] the existence of which was kept secret from foreign observers. [654] Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Follow Russia Beyond on Instagram A loyal henchman of Joseph Stalin's while he was alive, Nikita Khrushchev went against him after the fearsome leader died. [148] In the hamlet, Stalin had a relationship with Lidia Pereprygina, who was fourteen at the time but within the legal age of consent in Tsarist Russia. [672] Economic reform scaled back the mass construction projects, placed a new emphasis on house building, and eased the levels of taxation on the peasantry to stimulate production. East European communists also visited Stalin in Moscow 463 ] the two states trading! To Petrograd in March 1948, Stalin travelled to the port city Batum! 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