Vladimir Lenin, Letter to the Thirteenth Party Congress. [436] Party functionaries readily carried out their commands and sought to ingratiate themselves with Stalin to avoid becoming the victim of the purge. [15] In 1886, they moved into the house of a family friend, Father Christopher Charkviani. [542] Many Soviet soldiers engaged in looting, pillaging, and rape, both in Germany and parts of Eastern Europe. Stalin held the title of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1953) a position originally without significant influence but which, through Stalin's ascendancy, became that of de facto party leader. [832] He gave nicknames to his favourites, for instance referring to Yezhov as "my blackberry". His own woman [Alliluyeva] was enough for him, and he paid scant attention to her. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution and created a one-party state under the new Communist Party in 1917, Stalin joined its governing Politburo. [719] Stalin's push for Soviet westward expansion into eastern Europe resulted in accusations of Russian imperialism. [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. Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953. Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs, 1918-1922. Stalin is also considered one of the most dangerous totalitarian leaders in history, his violent excesses often compared to those of Adolf Hitler. These criticised Stalin's rude manners and excessive power, suggesting that Stalin should be removed from the position of general secretary. [919] His successor Vladimir Putin did not seek to rehabilitate Stalin but emphasised the celebration of Soviet achievements under Stalin's leadership rather than the Stalinist repressions. . [347], In 1928, Stalin declared that class war between the proletariat and their enemies would intensify as socialism developed. [780] He lacked compassion,[786] something Volkogonov suggested might have been accentuated by his many years in prison and exile,[787] although he was capable of acts of kindness to strangers, even amid the Great Terror. [460] On 17 September, the Red Army entered eastern Poland, officially to restore order amid the collapse of the Polish state. [938] In a 2016 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll, 38% of respondents had a negative attitude to Stalin, 26% a neutral one and 17% a positive, with 19% refusing to answer. [768] He was a hard worker,[769] and displayed a keen desire to learn;[770] when in power, he scrutinised many details of Soviet life, from film scripts to architectural plans and military hardware. [614] In accordance with their earlier agreements, the Western powers expected Poland to become an independent state with free democratic elections. [435] These purges replaced most of the party's old guard with younger officials who did not remember a time before Stalin's leadership and who were regarded as more personally loyal to him. [843], Stalin married his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, in 1906. [226], Following earlier clashes between Polish and Russian troops, the PolishSoviet War broke out in early 1920, with the Poles invading Ukraine and taking Kiev on 7 May. [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. [247], After the civil war, workers' strikes and peasant uprisings broke out across Russia, largely in opposition to Sovnarkom's food requisitioning project; as an antidote, Lenin introduced market-oriented reforms: the New Economic Policy (NEP). To eradicate "enemies of the working class", Stalin instituted the Great Purge, in which over a million were imprisoned, largely in the Gulag system of forced labour camps, and at least 700,000 executed by government agents between 1936 and 1938. [888], McDermott nevertheless cautioned against "over-simplistic stereotypes"promoted in the fiction of writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, and Anatoly Rybakovthat portrayed Stalin as an omnipotent and omnipresent tyrant who controlled every aspect of Soviet life through repression and totalitarianism. [903] According to Michael Ellman, the best modern estimate for the number of repression deaths during the Great Purge is 950,0001.2million, which includes executions, deaths in detention, or soon after their release. [202] The governing RSDLP party was soon renamed, becoming the Russian Communist Party. [922] In recent years, the government and general public of Russia has been accused of rehabilitating Stalin. [286] The Left Opposition believed the NEP conceded too much to capitalism; Stalin was called a "rightist" for his support of the policy. [823] After Stalin's death, Khrushchev claimed that Stalin encouraged him to incite anti-Semitism in Ukraine, allegedly telling him that "the good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews. He was a true believer". [899] Socialist writers like Volkogonov have acknowledged that Stalin's actions damaged "the enormous appeal of socialism generated by the October Revolution". [397] A number of authorised Stalin biographies were also published,[398] although Stalin generally wanted to be portrayed as the embodiment of the Communist Party rather than have his life story explored. The Soviet Union, or U.S.S.R., was made up of 15 countries in Eastern Europe and Asia and lasted from 1922 until its fall in 1991. [543] Stalin had wanted Hitler captured alive; he had his remains brought to Moscow to prevent them becoming a relic for Nazi sympathisers. [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. [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. [110] In June, he escaped the village and made it to Kotlas disguised as a woman and from there to Saint Petersburg. I stand on the ground of the latter". [250] At the 11th Party Congress in 1922, Lenin nominated Stalin as the party's new General Secretary. [845] When she died, Stalin allegedly said: "This creature softened my heart of stone. [395] In 1938, The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), colloquially known as the Short Course, was released;[396] biographer Robert Conquest later referred to it as the "central text of Stalinism". [337], Officially, the Soviet Union had replaced the "irrationality" and "wastefulness" of a market economy with a planned economy organised along a long-term, precise, and scientific framework; in reality, Soviet economics were based on ad hoc commandments issued from the centre, often to make short-term targets. What was Eratosthenes's nickname? [556] In June 1945, Stalin adopted the title of Generalissimus,[558] and stood atop Lenin's Mausoleum to watch a celebratory parade led by Zhukov through Red Square. [710] Following Lenin's death, Stalin contributed to the theoretical debates within the Communist Party, namely by developing the idea of "Socialism in One Country". [796] Like all Bolshevik leaders, Stalin believed that reading could help transform not just people's ideas and consciousness, but human nature itself. [671] 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. It can be assumed that he believed that most of these medals were given undeservedly. [681] Although he never became a Georgian nationalist,[682] during his early life elements from Georgian nationalist thought blended with Marxism in his outlook. [373] In November 1932, after a group dinner in the Kremlin in which Stalin flirted with other women, Nadezhda shot herself. [246] On this trip, Stalin met with his son Yakov, and brought him back to Moscow;[247] Nadezhda had given birth to another of Stalin's sons, Vasily, in March 1921. There, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for both his mass repression and his personality cult. [883] According to Kotkin, Stalin "built a personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship. [122] The new newspaper was launched in April 1912,[123] although Stalin's role as editor was kept secret. [679] According to Montefiore, Stalin's embrace of the Russian nation was pragmatic, as the Russians were the core of the population of the USSR; it was not a rejection of his Georgian origins. [198] Stalin supported Lenin's desire to sign an armistice with the Central Powers regardless of the cost in territory. [261] Stalin believed this would encourage independence sentiment among non-Russians, instead arguing that ethnic minorities would be content as "autonomous republics" within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. [16] Ekaterine worked as a house cleaner and launderer and was determined to send her son to school. [162] In April, Stalin came third in the Bolshevik elections for the party's Central Committee; Lenin came first and Zinoviev came second. Lenin's Testament. [155] They arrived in Krasnoyarsk in February 1917,[156] where a medical examiner ruled Stalin unfit for military service because of his crippled arm. [577] He demoted Molotov,[578] and increasingly favoured Beria and Malenkov for key positions. [565] He ensured that returning Soviet prisoners of war went through "filtration" camps as they arrived in the Soviet Union, in which 2,775,700 were interrogated to determine if they were traitors. [627] Stalin wanted to avoid direct Soviet conflict with the U.S., convincing the Chinese to aid the North. [292] At the 14th Party Congress in December, they launched an attack against Stalin's faction, but it was unsuccessful. Initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he consolidated power to become a dictator by 1928. [601] He also erroneously claimed that the initial German advance in the early part of the war, during Operation Barbarossa, was not a result of Soviet military weakness, but rather a deliberate Soviet strategic retreat. [293] In mid-1926, Kamenev and Zinoviev joined with Trotsky's supporters to form the United Opposition against Stalin;[294] in October they agreed to stop factional activity under threat of expulsion, and later publicly recanted their views under Stalin's command. [197] Socialist revolutionaries accused Stalin's talk of federalism and national self-determination as a front for Sovnarkom's centralising and imperialist policies. [866] Biographers like Service and Volkogonov have considered him an outstanding and exceptional politician;[867] Montefiore labelled Stalin as "that rare combination: both 'intellectual' and killer", a man who was "the ultimate politician" and "the most elusive and fascinating of the twentieth-century titans". "[921] In a 2017 interview, Putin added that while "we should not forget the horrors of Stalinism", the excessive demonization of "Stalin is a means to attack [the] Soviet Union and Russia". [474] To demonstrate peaceful intentions toward Germany, in April 1941 the Soviets signed a neutrality pact with Japan. [53], That month, Stalin travelled to the port city of Batum. [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. [260], They also disagreed on the nature of the Soviet state. In this he recalled the 1825 Decembrist Revolt by Russian soldiers returning from having defeated France in the Napoleonic Wars. Collective leadership, he consolidated power to become an independent state with free democratic.. 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