[568] It was established that 1,710 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages had been destroyed. [412], Stalin often gave conflicting signals regarding state repression. See answers Advertisement Advertisement archana2025 archana2025 Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central . [665] That month featured a surge in arrests for "anti-Soviet agitation," as those celebrating Stalin's death came to police attention. Around 40 people were killed, but all of his gang escaped alive. [348] He warned of a "danger from the right", including in the Communist Party itself. [265] In the final years of his life, Krupskaya provided governing figures with Lenin's Testament, a series of increasingly disparaging notes about Stalin. [765] According to biographer Montefiore, "it is clear from hostile and friendly witnesses alike that Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood". [43] Stalin left the seminary in April 1899 and never returned. [874] Although millions of Soviet citizens despised him, support for Stalin was nevertheless widespread throughout Soviet society. According to Montefiore, theirs was "a true love match";[844] Volkogonov suggested that she was "probably the one human being he had really loved". [500] He also permitted a wider range of cultural expression, notably permitting formerly suppressed writers and artists like Anna Akhmatova and Dmitri Shostakovich to disperse their work more widely. The document known as Lenin's political testament was in fact a series of short letters, written to the Congress of Soviets over the course of a week in December 1922. Stalin was awarded in 1922. He is called Joseph Stalin, also known as the man of steel. [577] He demoted Molotov,[578] and increasingly favoured Beria and Malenkov for key positions. [628], The Soviet Union was one of the first nations to extend diplomatic recognition to the newly created state of Israel in 1948, in hopes of obtaining an ally in the Middle East. [466] Embarrassed by their inability to defeat the Finns, the Soviets signed an interim peace treaty, in which they received territorial concessions from Finland. [215] In September he was returned to the Southern Front. [913] He repeated these denunciations at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1962. A secret speech was allegedly given by Joseph Stalin, on 19 August 1939, to members of the Politburo, wherein he justified the Soviet strategy to promote military conflict in Europe, which would be beneficial for the future territorial expansion of the Communist system. [619] With this accomplished, Marxist governments now controlled a third of the world's land mass. [132] In January 1913, Stalin travelled to Vienna,[133] where he researched the 'national question' of how the Bolsheviks should deal with the Russian Empire's national and ethnic minorities. Repeatedly arrested, he underwent several internal exiles to Siberia. [94] He attended the Fifth RSDLP Congress, held at the Brotherhood Church in London in MayJune 1907. [203], After the Bolsheviks seized power, both right and left-wing armies rallied against them, generating the Russian Civil War. [12] Besarion became an alcoholic[13] and drunkenly beat his wife and son. [860] There are unproven rumours that from 1934 onward he had a relationship with his housekeeper Valentina Istomina. [226] Along the Southwest Front, he became determined to conquer Lvov; in focusing on this goal he disobeyed orders in early August to transfer his troops to assist Mikhail Tukhachevsky's forces that were attacking Warsaw. (one of the Bolsheviks' key policy stances in 1917 was to give the land to . [682] Stalin believed in the need to adapt Marxism to changing circumstances; in 1917, he declared that "there is dogmatic Marxism and there is creative Marxism. Stalin allowed the Russian Orthodox Church to retain the churches it had opened during the war. [883] According to Kotkin, Stalin "built a personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship. [561] In 1947, it brought out a second edition of his official biography, which eulogised him to a greater extent than its predecessor. [439] His motives in doing so have been much debated by historians. [448] According to historian James Harris, contemporary archival research shows that the motivation behind the purges was not Stalin attempting to establish his own personal dictatorship; evidence suggests he was committed to building the socialist state envisioned by Lenin. [700] After the October Revolution, they continued to have differences. [740] He was born with a webbed left foot, and his left arm had been permanently injured in childhood which left it shorter than his right and lacking in flexibility,[741] which was probably the result of being hit, at the age of 12, by a horse-drawn carriage. [674] The new leaders sought rapprochement with Yugoslavia and a less hostile relationship with the U.S.,[675] pursuing a negotiated end to the Korean War in July 1953. [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. [391] The Soviet government believed that food supplies should be prioritised for the urban workforce;[392] for Stalin, the fate of Soviet industrialisation was far more important than the lives of the peasantry. [421] The first Moscow Trial took place in August 1936; Kamenev and Zinoviev were among those accused of plotting assassinations, found guilty in a show trial, and executed. [640] Stalin nevertheless mistrusted his doctors; in January 1952 he had one imprisoned after they suggested that he should retire to improve his health. Joseph Stalin (pictured by himself in image #3 below) was one of the most infamous totalitarian dictators of the 20th century. [614] When the U.S. and UK remained opposed to this, Stalin sought to force their hand by blockading Berlin in June 1948. [549] These events led to the Japanese surrender and the war's end. [554] Germany was divided into four zones: Soviet, U.S., British, and French, with Berlin itselflocated within the Soviet areaalso subdivided thusly. [923], Amid the social and economic turmoil of the post-Soviet period, many Russians viewed Stalin as having overseen an era of order, predictability, and pride. In 1929, his son Yakov unsuccessfully attempted suicide; his failure earned Stalin's contempt. [703] After Lenin's death, Stalin relied heavily on Lenin's writingsfar more so than those of Marx and Engelsto guide him in the affairs of state. [454], As Britain and France seemed unwilling to commit to an alliance with the Soviet Union, Stalin saw a better deal with the Germans. [841] According to Service, Stalin "regarded women as a resource for sexual gratification and domestic comfort. [496] Stalin exploited Nazi anti-Semitism, and in April 1942 he sponsored the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) to garner Jewish and foreign support for the Soviet war effort. Joseph Stalin was the lead of Russia for 30 years . The real motivation for the terror, according to Harris, was an excessive fear of counterrevolution. This was the highest level position until the decline of the communist regime in Russia. [85] At the conference Stalin met Lenin for the first time. [205] Eager to prove himself as a commander,[206] once there he took control of regional military operations. I stand on the ground of the latter". . [766] According to historian Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin wasn't a psychopath. [402] Stalin admired Hitler, particularly his manoeuvres to remove rivals within the Nazi Party in the Night of the Long Knives. [516] By the end of 1943, the Soviets occupied half of the territory taken by the Germans from 1941 to 1942. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922 . [872] Stalin's necessity for Soviet Union's economic development has been questioned, and it has been argued that Stalin's policies from 1928 onwards may have only been a limiting factor. [285] Although Zinoviev was concerned about Stalin's growing authority, he rallied behind him at the 13th Congress as a counterweight to Trotsky, who now led a party faction known as the Left Opposition. [98], In Baku, Stalin secured Bolshevik domination of the local RSDLP branch[99] and edited two Bolshevik newspapers, Bakinsky Proletary and Gudok ("Whistle"). Written in response to public revelations of the 1939 Soviet alliance with Germany, it focused on blaming the Western powers for the war. Stalin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Lenin lived at the Kremlin. [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. Stalin is also considered one of the most dangerous totalitarian leaders in history, his violent excesses often compared to those of Adolf Hitler. [562] He was quoted in Pravda on a daily basis and pictures of him remained pervasive on the walls of workplaces and homes. [418] By the latter part of 1937, the purges had moved beyond the party and were affecting the wider population. [256] Lenin twice asked Stalin to procure poison so that he could commit suicide, but Stalin never did so. [117], In January 1912, while Stalin was in exile, the first Bolshevik Central Committee was elected at the Prague Conference. Lenin's Testament, formally Letter to the Congress, Russian Pismo K Syezdu, two-part document dictated by Vladimir I. Lenin on Dec. 23-26, 1922, and Jan. 4, 1923, and addressed to a future Communist Party Congress. [287] Stalin built up a retinue of his supporters in the Central Committee,[288] while the Left Opposition were gradually removed from their positions of influence. Here are 10 facts about Joseph Stalin. [123], In May 1912, he was arrested again and imprisoned in the Shpalerhy Prison, before being sentenced to three years exile in Siberia. [162] In April, Stalin came third in the Bolshevik elections for the party's Central Committee; Lenin came first and Zinoviev came second. [111] In March 1910, he was arrested again and sent back to Solvychegodsk. [192] He took Nadezhda Alliluyeva as his secretary[193] and at some point married her, although the wedding date is unknown. Stalin took on the title of premier from 1941 onwards actually. [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. [65] His second attempt, in January 1904, was successful and he made it to Tiflis. [723] It has been argued that his ancestry was Ossetian, because his genetic haplotype (G2a-Z6653) is considered typical of the Ossetians, but he never acknowledged an Ossetian identity. [136], Stalin's article Marxism and the National Question[137] was first published in the March, April, and May 1913 issues of the Bolshevik journal Prosveshcheniye;[138] Lenin was pleased with it. [674], Stalin claimed to have embraced Marxism at the age of fifteen,[678] and it served as the guiding philosophy throughout his adult life;[679] according to Kotkin, Stalin held "zealous Marxist convictions",[680] while Montefiore suggested that Marxism held a "quasi-religious" value for Stalin. [588] Although Stalin publicly described the British and U.S. governments as aggressive, he thought it unlikely that a war with them would be imminent, believing that several decades of peace was likely. For this reason, he retained the Leninist view that world revolution was still a necessity to ensure the ultimate victory of socialism. Wiki User. [266] Some historians have questioned whether Lenin ever produced these, suggesting instead that they may have been written by Krupskaya, who had personal differences with Stalin;[254] Stalin, however, never publicly voiced concerns about their authenticity. Some weeks after the controversy, the Patriarchate of Moscow forced Zhakov to remove the icon of Stalin from his parish. [355] Priests, imams, and Buddhist monks faced persecution. [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. [557] His armies controlled Central and Eastern Europe up to the River Elbe. [330] Famine broke out in many areas,[331] with the Politburo frequently ordering distribution of emergency food relief to these regions. [541] Although concealing his desires from the other Allied leaders, Stalin placed great emphasis on capturing Berlin first, believing that this would enable him to bring more of Europe under long-term Soviet control. Caucasus as Stalin's 'henchman' or 'sidekick' seems dubious, given the number of times that the party leadership appears to have been taken by surprise by the former's actions. [712] Stalin's doctrine held that socialism could be completed in Russia but that its final victory there could not be guaranteed because of the threat from capitalist intervention. [893], Leninists remain divided in their views on Stalin; some view him as Lenin's authentic successor, while others believe he betrayed Lenin's ideas by deviating from them. [264], Their differences also became personal; Lenin was particularly angered when Stalin was rude to his wife Krupskaya during a telephone conversation. [215] During the war, he proved his worth to the Central Committee, displaying decisiveness, determination, and willingness to take on responsibility in conflict situations. [118] Still in Vologda, Stalin agreed, remaining a Central Committee member for the rest of his life. [267], Lenin died in January 1924. In 1922 he was appointed general secretary of the Bolshevik party with the help of Lenin. after lenin died in 1924, he eventually outmaneuvered his rivals and won the power struggle for control of the communist party. In Stalin's 1950 letter explaining his support for the North Korean invasion, the Soviet dictator was confident that . [771] According to Volkogonov, "Stalin's private life and working life were one and the same"; he did not take days off from political activities. [649] There, he emphasised what he regarded as leadership qualities necessary in the future and highlighted the weaknesses of various potential successors, particularly Molotov and Mikoyan. [881] Montefiore argued that while Stalin initially ruled as part of a Communist Party oligarchy, the Soviet government transformed from this oligarchy into a personal dictatorship in 1934,[882] with Stalin only becoming "absolute dictator" between March and June 1937, when senior military and NKVD figures were eliminated. Before the October Revolution, the job of the party secretary was largely that of a bureaucrat.Following the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Office of the Responsible Secretary was established in 1919 to perform administrative work. [805] Little of this was fiction,[806] although he could cite passages from Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Nekrasov, and Walt Whitman by heart. [475] Although de facto head of government for a decade and a half, Stalin concluded that relations with Germany had deteriorated to such an extent that he needed to deal with the problem as de jure head of government as well: on 6 May, Stalin replaced Molotov as Premier of the Soviet Union. [31] As he grew older, Stalin lost interest in priestly studies, his grades dropped,[32] and he was repeatedly confined to a cell for his rebellious behaviour. [48] They attempted to arrest him in March 1901, but he escaped and went into hiding,[49] living off the donations of friends and sympathisers. [245] In mid-1921, Stalin returned to the southern Caucasus, there calling on Georgian Communists to avoid the chauvinistic Georgian nationalism which marginalised the Abkhazian, Ossetian, and Adjarian minorities in Georgia. [72], In January 1905, government troops massacred protesters in Saint Petersburg. [904] In addition, while archival data shows that 1,053,829 perished in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953,[905] the current historical consensus is that of the 18million people who passed through the Gulag system from 1930 to 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7million died as a result of their incarceration. [196] That month, he travelled to Helsinki to talk with the Finnish Social-Democrats, granting Finland's request for independence in December. [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. Initially Stalin refused to repeal the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1945, which significantly benefited the Soviet Union over China, although in January 1950 he relented and agreed to sign a new treaty between the two countries. [656] According to Svetlana, it had been "a difficult and terrible death". Study now. [748], As leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin typically awoke around 11am,[749] with lunch being served between 3 and 5pm and dinner no earlier than 9pm;[750] he then worked late into the evening. [507] While Red Army generals saw evidence that Hitler would shift efforts south, Stalin considered this to be a flanking move in a renewed effort to take Moscow. [504] Comintern was dissolved in 1943,[505] and Stalin encouraged foreign MarxistLeninist parties to emphasise nationalism over internationalism to broaden their domestic appeal. [410] With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, the Soviet Union and China signed a non-aggression pact the following August. [751] He often dined with other Politburo members and their families. [599] Within Western countries, Stalin was increasingly portrayed as the "most evil dictator alive" and compared to Hitler. [77] Stalin formed a Bolshevik Battle Squad which he used to try to keep Baku's warring ethnic factions apart; he also used the unrest as a cover for stealing printing equipment. [815] When at social events, he encouraged singing,[816] as well as alcohol consumption; he hoped that others would drunkenly reveal their secrets to him. [6] His birth name was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili,[d] and he was nicknamed "Soso", a diminutive of "Ioseb". [701] Stalin biographer Oleg Khlevniuk nevertheless believed that the pair developed a "strong bond" over the years,[702] while Kotkin suggested that Stalin's friendship with Lenin was "the single most important relationship in Stalin's life". [555] Various East European communists also visited Stalin in Moscow. [788] He was capable of self-righteous indignation,[789] and was resentful,[790] and vindictive,[791] holding on to grudges for many years. These criticised Stalin's rude manners and excessive power, suggesting that Stalin should be removed from the position of general secretary. December 23, 1922. [670] The system of collective leadership was restored, and measures introduced to prevent any one member from attaining autocratic domination. In 1921 Stalin helped plan the invasion of Georgia which was the source for his negative policies towards the country. [470] One of the most noted instances was the Katyn massacre of April and May 1940, in which around 22,000 members of the Polish armed forces, police, and intelligentsia were executed. [97] There, Mensheviks confronted Stalin about the robbery and voted to expel him from the RSDLP, but he took no notice of them. [53], That month, Stalin travelled to the port city of Batum. [416] State repression intensified after Kirov's death;[417] Stalin instigated this, reflecting his prioritisation of security above other considerations. [642] In November, the Slnsk trial took place in Czechoslovakia as 13 senior Communist Party figures, 11 of them Jewish, were accused and convicted of being part of a vast Zionist-American conspiracy to subvert Eastern Bloc governments. ] in September he was returned to the port city of Batum the source for his negative policies towards country... ] in March 1910, he was arrested again and sent back to Solvychegodsk &... 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