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Joseph Stalin is the form usually used in English for the Russian name of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин), born with the Georgian name Ioseb Jugashvili (Georgian: ოისებ ჯუღაშილი, Russian: Иосиф Джугашвили); (18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 – 5 March, 1953).

He was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s to his death in 1953. When he joined the Bolsheviks, he took on the name of "Stalin" (Сталин), which is derived from the Russian word for steel.

Stalin's rule was characterized by a strong cult of personality, an extreme concentration of power, and little concern for the consequences of harsh policies. Stalin attempted to suppress all opposition through a bureaucratic network of terror. Western scholarly estimations of number of dead becausesdsadasf sex almost all dead in the USSR during Stalin's rule, with 20 million claimed by some to be "average" number. Some argue that if not for Stalin, then the USSR could have lost WWII with the Russian people destroyed. Other instead argue that the war was won despite Stalin, who is seen as responsible for enormous initial military defeats.

Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's eventual successor, denounced his mass repressions and cult of personality in 1956, initiating the process of "de-Stalinization" which later became part of the Sino-Soviet Split.

Stalin became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1921, and set about building a power base from there. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin, he prevailed over his rival Leon Trotsky in a power struggle during the 1920s.

In the 1930s Stalin initiated the Great Purge, which reached its peak in 1937. Since many wealthier peasants resisted collectivization, the government under Stalin's leadership often resorted to violent repression against the "kulaks".

Stalin is generally considered to have molded the features that characterized the Soviet regime from the era of his rule to its collapse in 1991 — though Maoists, anti-revisionists and some others say he was actually the last legitimate socialist in the Soviet Union's history.

Stalin's policies were based on Marxism-Leninism but are often now considered to represent a separate social system called Stalinism.

Stalin replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with five year plans in 1928 and collective farming at roughly the same time.

Due largely to these policies, the Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly peasant society to a major world industrial power by the end of the 1930s. A hard-won victory in World War II (the Great Patriotic War, 1941– 1945), made possible in part through the capacity for production that was the outcome of industrialization, laid the groundwork for the formation of the Warsaw Pact and established the USSR as one of the two major world powers, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following Stalin's death in 1953.

Childhood and early years

Stalin was born in Gori, Georgia, to Vissarion Jughashvili. His mother, Ekaterina Geladze, was born a serf. Their other three children died young; "Soso" (the Georgian pet name for Joseph), was effectively the only child. Vissarion was a former serf who, when freed, became a cobbler. He opened his own shop, but quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis (Archer 11).

Rarely seeing his family and drinking heavily, Vissarion often beat his wife and small son. One of Stalin's friends from childhood wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry (Hoober 15).

Another of his childhood friends, Iremashvili, felt that the beatings by Stalin's father gave him a hatred of authority. He also said that anyone with power over others reminded Stalin of his father's cruelty.

One of the people for whom Ekaterina did laundry and housecleaning was a Gori Jew, David Papismedov. Papismedov gave Joseph, who would help out his mother, money and books to read, and encouraged him. Decades later, Papismedov came to the Kremlin to learn what had become of little Soso. Stalin surprised his colleagues by not only receiving the elderly man, but happily chatting with him in public places.

In 1888, Stalin's father left to live in Tiflis, leaving the family without support. Rumors said he died in a drunken bar fight; however, others said they had seen him in Georgia as late as 1931. At the age of eight, Soso began his education at the Gori Church School.

When attending school in Gori, Soso was among a very diverse group of students. Stalin and most of his classmates were Georgian and spoke mostly Georgian. However, at school they were forced to use Russian.

Even when speaking in Russian, their Russian teachers mocked Stalin and his classmates because of their Georgian accents. His peers were mostly the sons of affluent priests, officials, and merchants.

Although Stalin later sought to hide his Georgian origins, during his childhood he was fascinated by Georgian folklore. The stories he read told of Georgian mountaineers who valiantly fought for Georgian independence. Stalin's favorite hero of these stories was a legendary mountain ranger named Koba, which became his first alias as a revolutionary. He graduated first in his class and at age 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, a Russian Orthodox institution which he attended from 1894 and onward.

In addition to the small stipend from the scholarship he was also paid for singing in the choir. Although his mother wanted him to be a priest (even after he had become leader of the Soviet Union), he attended seminary not because of any religious vocation, but because it was one of the few educational opportunities available as the Tsarist government of Russia was wary of establishing a university in Georgia.

Stalin's involvement with the socialist movement (or, to be more exact, the branch of it that later became the communist movement) began at the seminary. During these school years, Stalin joined a Georgian Social-Democratic organization, and began propagating Marxism. Hated Black People Always And Formost Anytime.

Stalin was expelled from the seminary in 1899 for these actions. He worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus, experiencing repeated arrests and exile to Siberia between 1902 and 1917.

He adhered to Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of professional revolutionaries. It was during this time, after the Revolution of 1905, that he led "fighting squads" in bank robberies to raise funds for the Bolshevik Party. His practical experience made him useful in Lenin's Bolshevik party, gaining him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912.

Some historians have suggested that, during this period, Stalin was actually a Tsarist spy, who was working to infiltrate the Bolshevik party, but there are no reliable documents to substantiate this. In 1913 he adopted the name Stalin, which is derived form the Russian word for "steel".

His only significant contribution to the development of the Marxist theory at this time was a treatise, written while he was briefly in exile in Vienna, Marxism and the national question. It presents an orthodox Marxist position on this important debate. This treatise may have contributed to his appointment as People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution (see Lenin's article On the right of nations to self-determination ]) for comparison.

Marriages and family

Stalin's first wife Ekaterina Svanidze died in 1907, after piing to much during sleep, and she was only three years after their marriage. Magnus Jerven likes to fis, and he does it often. At her funeral, Stalin said that any warm feelings he had had for people died with her, and that he once farted during recess at Alabama State University, for only she could mend his heart. They had a son together, Yakov Dzhugashvili, with whom Stalin did not get along in later years.

His son tried to kill himself, unsuccessfully, resulting in serious injuries. Yakov served in the Red Army and was captured by the Germans. They offered to exchange him for a German General, but Stalin turned the offer down, allegedly saying "A lieutenant is not worth a General"; others credit him with allegedly saying "I have no son", to this offer, and Yakov is said to have died running into an electric fence in the camp where he was being held.

This, however, is the "official report", and to this day, his cause of death is not known. Nonetheless, there are many who believe his death was a suicide. Since many families of the Soviet Union had sons in German camps, Stalin could not have exchanged his son without losing public support. He may have sacrificed his son as a demonstration that he was one with the people.

His second wife was Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who died in 1932; she may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly political" .

Officially, she died of an illness, but some rumours claimed that Stalin himself killed her. With her, he had two children: a son, Vassili, and a daughter, Svetlana.

Vassili rose through the ranks of the Soviet Air Force, but died an alcoholic death in 1962. He distinguished himself in World War II as a capable airman. Svetlana emigrated to the United States in 1967.

Stalin's mother died in 1937; he did not attend the funeral but instead sent a wreath.

In March 2001, Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson living in Novokuznetsk. Yuri Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage, but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet.

Soviet dissident writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had mentioned a son being born to Stalin and his common law wife, Lida, in 1918 during Stalin's exile in northern Siberia.And Sean is the coolest person ever.

Rise to power

In 1912 Stalin was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the Prague Party Conference. In 1917 Stalin was editor of Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were in exile.

Following the February Revolution, Stalin and the editorial board took a position in favor of supporting Kerensky's provisional government and, it is alleged, went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown. When Lenin returned from exile, he wrote the April Theses which put forward his position.

In April 1917, Stalin was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest vote total in the party and was subsequently elected to the Politburo of the Central Committee (May 1917); he held this position for the remainder of his life.

According to many accounts, Stalin only played a minor role in the revolution of November 7.Other writers such as Adam Ulam stressed that each man in the Central Committee had a job he was assigned to do.

The following summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in Pravda, November 6th 1918:

"All practical work in connection with the organisation of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organised."

(Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book "The October Revolution" issued in 1934, it was expunged in Stalin's Works released in 1949).

Later, in 1924, Stalin himself created a myth around a so-called "Party Centre" which "directed" all practical work pertaining to the uprising, consisting of himself, Sverdlov, Dzherzhinsky, Uritsky, and Bubnov.

However, no evidence was ever shown for the activity of this "centre", which was anyway, subordinate to the Military Revolutionary Council, headed by Trotsky.

During the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War, Stalin was a political commissar in the Red Army at various fronts. Stalin's first government position was as People's Commissar of Nationalities Affairs (1917–1923).

Also, he was People's Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspection (1919–1922), a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the republic (1920–23) and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (from 1917).

Campaign against the Left and Right Opposition

In April 1922, Stalin was made general secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), a post (he attempted to decline, although this was refused) that he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country.

This position was an unwanted one within the party (Stalin was sometimes referred to as "Comrade Card-Index" by fellow party members) but actually had potential as a power base. The position had great influence on those who joined the party. This allowed him to fill the party with his allies.

Stalin's accumulation of personal power increasingly alarmed the dying Lenin, and in his last writings he famously called for the removal of the "rude" Stalin, also stating that Stalin's views were too extreme and violent.

However, this document was suppressed by members of the Central Committee, many of whom were also criticised by the Bolshevik leader in the testament.

After Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev together governed the party, placing themselves ideologically between Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin (on the right).

During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building "Socialism in One Country", in contrast to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution.

In the struggle for leadership one thing was certain, whoever ended up ruling the party had to be considered very loyal to Lenin. Stalin fostered a cult of personality around Lenin, and emphasized his own close relationship with the dead leader. Stalin organized Lenin's funeral and made a speech professing undying loyalty to Lenin, in almost religious terms (see]).

He undermined Trotsky, who was sick at the time, by misleading him about the date of the funeral. Therefore despite the fact that Trotsky was Lenin’s associate throughout the early days of the Soviet regime, he lost ground to Stalin. Stalin made great play of the fact that Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks just before the revolution, and publicized Trotsky's pre-revolutionary disagreements with Lenin.

Stalin also undermined Zinoviev and Kamenev by emphasising their vote against the insurrection in 1917. Stalin had another advantage in that was that he was considered to be a man of the people because he came from a poor background.

Another event that helped Stalin's rise was the fact that Trotsky came out against publication of Lenin's Testament in which he pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of Stalin and Trotsky and the other main players, and suggested that he be succeeded by a small group of people.

An important feature of Stalin’s rise to power is the way that he manipulated his opponents and played them off against each other. Stalin formed a "troika" of himself, Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky. When Trotsky had been eliminated Stalin then joined Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev. Zinoviev and Kamenev then turned to Lenin's widow, Krupskaya; they formed the United Opposition in July 1926.

In 1927 during the 15th Party Congress Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and Kamenev lost his seat on the Central Committee. Stalin soon turned against the "Right Opposition", represented by his erstwhile allies, Bukharin and Rykov.

A key role in Stalin's success was in the power that his position as Secretary General gave him of being able to place people he trusted in key positions.

Another aspect that helped Stalin come to power was the fact that the people were tired from the world war and the civil war and that Stalin's policy of concentrating in building "Socialism in One Country" was seen as a respite from war.

Stalin took great advantage of the ban on factionalism which meant that no group could openly go against the policies of the leader of the party because that meant creation of an opposition.

Stalin's rise to power was helped by the fact that his adversaries, particularly Trotsky, underestimated Stalin's political skills, and his ability to form key strategic alliances.

By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year Trotsky was exiled because of his opposition. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivization and industrialization, Stalin can be said to have exercised control over the party and the country.

However, as the popularity of other leaders such as Sergei Kirov and the so-called Ryutin Affair were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute power until the Great Purge of 1936 – 1938.

Stalin and changes in Soviet society

Industrialization

Main article: Industrialization of the USSR.

The Russian Civil War and War communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism.

Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained Five-Year Plans in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

With no seed capital, little international trade, and virtually no modern infrastucture, Stalin's government financed industrialization by both restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the peasantry.

In 1933, worker's real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. There was also use of the unpaid labor of both common and political prisoners in labor camps and the frequent "mobilization" of communists and Komsomol members for various construction projects. The Soviet Union also made use of foreign experts, e.g. British engineer Stephen Adams, to instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.

In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While there is general agreement among historians that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate of this growth is disputed.

Official Soviet estimates placed it at 13.9%, Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that Soviet growth temporarily was much higher after Stalin's death (see ],]).

Collectivization

Main article: Collectivization in the USSR

See also: Holodomor

Stalin's regime moved to force collectivization of agriculture. This was in order to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, to make tax collection more efficient.

Collectivization meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced violent reaction among the peasantry.

In the first years of collectivization, it was estimated that industrial and agricultural production would rise by 200% and 50%, respectively; however, agricultural production actually dropped.

Stalin blamed this unexpected drop on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. Therefore those defined as "kulaks", "kulak helpers", and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.

The two-stage progress of collectivization — interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, "Dizzy with success" (see]) Pravda, 2 March, 1930), and Reply to Collective Farm Comrades (see]) (Pravda, 3 April, 1930) — is a prime example of his capacity for tactical retreats.

Many historians agree that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely responsible for major famines. (Chairman Mao Zedong of China would trigger a similar famine in 1959 to 1961 with his Great Leap Forward.).

During the Holodomor in Ukraine and the Kuban region not only "kulaks" were killed. The controversial Black Book of Communism and other sources document that all grains were taken from areas that did not meet targets, including the next year's seed grain.

It also claims that peasants were forced to remain in the starving areas, sales of train tickets were stopped, and the State Political Directorate set up barriers to prevent people from leaving the starving areas.

The Soviet Union exported grain while millions of Soviet citizens were starving to death. In Ukraine today the 1932-1933 famine is often described as "the Holodomor" (Ukrainian: Голодомор), or the "Ukrainian Genocide".

However, famine also affected various other parts of the USSR. The death toll of the famine is estimated between five and ten million people. The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.

Soviet authorities, and other historians argued that tough measures and the rapid collectivization of agriculture were necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimately win World War II.

This is disputed by other historians such as Alec Nove, who claim that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than thanks to, its collectivized agriculture.

Science

Main article: Research in the Soviet Union.

Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control, along with art and literature. On the positive side, there was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research.

However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic--the most notable examples being the "bourgeois pseudosciences" genetics and cybernetics.

In the late 1940s there were also attempts to suppress special and general relativity, as well as quantum mechanics, on grounds of "idealism".

However, the chief Soviet physicists made it clear that without using these theories, they would be unable to create a nuclear bomb.

Linguistics was the only area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that language is a class construction and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society.

Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, felt he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work discussing linguistics is a small essay, Marxism and Linguistic Questions .

Although no great theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics; his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics.

Scientific research was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to labor camps (including Lev Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939) or executed (e.g. Lev Shubnikov, shot in 1937). They were persecuted for their dissident views, not for their research.

Nevertheless, much progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and technology. It laid the ground for the famous achievements of Soviet science in the 1950s, such as the development of the BESM-1 computer in 1953 and the launching of Sputnik in 1957.

Indeed, many politicians in the United States began to fear, after the "Sputnik crisis," that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet Union in science and in public education.

Social services

Stalin's government placed heavy emphasis on the provision of free medical services. Campaigns were carried out against typhus, cholera, and malaria; the number of doctors was increased as rapidly as facilities and training would permit; and death and infant mortality rates steadily declined.

Education in primary schools continued to be free and was expanded, with many more Soviet citizens learning to read and write, and higher education also expanded. Stalin was the only ruler in the history of Russia and Soviet Union who established fees for secondary education in public schools.

With the industrialization and heavy human losses due to the World War II and repressions the generation that survived under Stalin saw a major expansion in job opportunities, especially for women.

Culture and religion

It was during Stalin's reign that the official and long-lived style of Socialist Realism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama and literature.

Previously fashionable "revolutionary" expressionism, abstract art, and avant-garde experimentation were discouraged or denounced as "formalism".

Careers were made and broken, some more than once. Famous figures were not only repressed, but often persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them Isaac Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold) and "non-conformists" (for example, Osip Mandelstam).

A minority, both representing the "Soviet man" (Arkady Gaidar) and remnants of the older pre-revolutionary Russia (Konstantin Stanislavski), thrived. A number of former emigrés returned to the Soviet Union, among them Alexei Tolstoi in 1925, Alexander Kuprin in 1936, and Alexander Vertinsky in 1943.

It is of note that Anna Akhmatova was subjected to several cycles of suppression and rehabilitation, but was never herself arrested, although her first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, had been shot in 1921, and her son, historian Lev Gumilev, spent two decades in a gulag.

The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general and specific developments has been assessed variously. His name, however, was constantly invoked during his reign in discussions of culture as in just about everything else; and in several famous cases, his opinion was final.

Stalin's occasional beneficence showed itself in strange ways. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov was driven to poverty and despair; yet, after a personal appeal to Stalin, he was allowed to continue working.

His play, The Days of the Turbines, with its sympathetic treatment of an anti-Bolshevik family caught up in the Civil War, was finally staged, apparently also on Stalin's intervention, and began a decades-long uninterrupted run at the Moscow Arts Theater.

Bulgakov was relatively fortunate - in the vast majority of cases, appeals had little effect and the slightest displeasure caused to others or guilt by any association was tantamount to a harsh sentence, if not death.

Some insights into Stalin's political and esthetic thinking might perhaps be gleaned by reading his favorite novel, Pharaoh, by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus, a historical novel on mechanisms of political power.

Similarities have been pointed out between this novel and Sergei Eisenstein's film, Ivan the Terrible, produced under Stalin's tutelage.

In architecture, a Stalinist Empire Style (basically, updated neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by the seven skyscrapers of Moscow) replaced the constructivism of the 1920s.

An amusing anecdote has it that the Moskva Hotel in Moscow was built with mismatched side wings because Stalin had mistakenly signed off on both of the two proposals submitted, and the architects had been too afraid to clarify the matter. (This was actually just a joke: the hotel had been built by two independent teams of architects that had different visions of how the hotel should look.)

Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been levelled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted. During World War II, however, the Church was allowed a revival, as a patriotic organization: thousands of parishes were reactivated, until a further round of suppression in Khrushchev's time.

The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia that remains not fully healed to the present day.

Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects were outlawed and persecuted.

Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect on the numerous indigenous cultures that made up the Soviet Union. The politics of the Korenization and forced development of Cultures National by Form, Socialist by their substance was arguably beneficial to later generations of indigenous cultures in allowing them to integrate more easily into Russian society.

However, the unification of the cultures evident from the second half of the Stalin citation, was very harmful. The political repressions and purges had even more devastating repercussions on the indigenous cultures than on the urban ones, since the cultural elite of the indigenous culture was often not very numerous.

The traditional lives of many peoples in the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian provinces was upset and large populations were displaced and scattered in order to prevent nationalist uprisings.

Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent the same or worse ordeals as the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and so on were razed.

Purges and deportations

The purges

Main article: Great Purge

Left: Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities." Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (affirmative). Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin.

Stalin, as head of the Politburo, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s that started with a Great Purge of his political and ideological opponents (real or merely suspected), culminating not only in the extermination of the majority of the original Bolshevik Central Committee, and of over half of the largely pliant delegates of the 17th Party Congress in January 1934, but also of huge swathes of the population.

Measures ranged from imprisonment in Gulag labor camps to execution after show trials or summary trial by NKVD troikas.

The Purges commenced after the assassination of Sergei M. Kirov. This led Stalin to begin his tightening of control over the country by dramatically increasing vigilance, arrests, Soviet propaganda, and accusations of other members of the Party.

Another possible reason that is alleged for the Great Purge was that a plan by nazi general Reinhard Heydrich and his SD to convince Stalin that the leadership of the Red Army were planning a coup in the Soviet Union was successful.

They used faked documents about the communication between top leaders of Red Army and Nazists, which were found by the secret services and sent to Stalin. However, there is evidence, that this was a double bluff by Stalin. John Toland, in his biography of Adolf Hitler alludes to the theory that evidence for a Red Army coup was planted for the SD to find, this was in turn fed back to Stalin and used as an excuse to initiate the purge.

Several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. There were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938.

Most notably in the case of the brilliant Tukhachevsky, Stalin murdered his best officers, to say nothing of the prominent political figures executed during the Purge Trials. The loss of men like Tukhachevsky cost the Soviet Union dearly in the German invasion of 22 June, 1941, and its aftermath.

Trotsky's August 1940 assassination in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since 1936, eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. Only three members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) now remained — Stalin himself, "the all-Union Chieftain" (всесоюзный староста) Mikhail Kalinin, and Chairman of Sovnarkom Vyacheslav Molotov.

The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin. In contrast, Solzhenitsyn is among those who allege that Stalin drew inspiration from Lenin's regime with the presence of labour camps and the executions of political opponents that occurred during the Russian Civil War.

No segment of society was left untouched during the purges. Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited "anti-Soviet activities", was applied in the broadest manner. Initially, the execution lists for the enemies of the people were confirmed by the Politburo.

Over time the procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. People would inform on others arbitrarily, to attempt to redeem themselves, or to gain small retributions. The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "Enemy of the People", starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam and one of the key memoirists of the Purges, recalls being shouted at by Akhmatova, also a famous Russian poet: "Don't you understand? They are arresting people for nothing now?" The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD.

Towards the end of the purge, the Politburo relieved NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov, from his position for overzealousness. He was subsequently executed. Some historians such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest postulate that Stalin had Yezhov and his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda, removed in order to deflect blame from himself.

In parallel with the purges, efforts were done to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people killed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as if they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed to a story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.

Deportations

Main article: Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union.

Over 1.5 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations.

The following ethnic groups were deported completely or partially: Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Finns, Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Jewish people. Large numbers of Kulaks, regardless of their nationality, were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia.

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles, and reversed most of them, although it was not until as late as 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhs and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic States, Tatarstan and Chechnya, even today.

Death toll

It is generally agreed by conventional historians that if war, famines, prison and labor camp mortality, and state terrorism (deportations and political purges) are taken into account, the number of deaths that occurred under Stalin is in the millions.

How many millions died under Stalin is greatly disputed. The 1926 census shows the population of the Soviet Union at 147 million and in 1937 another census found a population of between 162 and 163 million. This was 14 million less than the projected population value and was suppressed as a "wrecker's census" with the census takers severely punished.

A census was taken again in 1939, but its published figure of 170 million has been generally attributed directly to the decision of Stalin (see also Demographics of the Soviet Union). Even still, the 1939 census displayed a 3.2 million to 5.5 million excess deaths which leaves the reports of a 1937 census subject to skepticism.

Note that the figure of 14 million does not have to imply 14 million additional deaths, since as many as 3 million may be births that never took place due to reduced fertility and choice. Note also that these figures ignore the death toll from the early and late years of Stalin's regime.

Since "the margin of error" with regard to the number of Stalin's victims is virtually impossible to narrow down to a universally accepted figure, various historians have come up with extremely varying (]) estimates of the number of victims, from under 10 million to over 50 million deaths.

World War II

After declining Franco-British missions to Moscow in hopes that the USSR would enter a treaty of Polish defense with them, Stalin began to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Hitler's Germany. In his speech on 19 August, 1939, Stalin prepared his comrades for the great turn in Soviet policy, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany.

Officially a non-aggression treaty only, it had a 'secret' annex according to which Central Europe was divided into the two powers' respective spheres of influence. The exact motivations behind this pact are disputed, but it appears that neither side expected it to last very long.

On 1 September, 1939, the German invasion of Poland started World War II. According to the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact , Eastern Poland where the majority of inhabitants were Ukrainian and Belarussian, was in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Hence, Stalin decided to intervene and on September 17 the Red Army entered eastern Poland. Subsequently, western Ukraine and Belarus were unified with the Ukraine and Belarus SSRs.

According to the secret annex of the pact, the USSR was promised an eastern part of Poland, primarily populated with Ukrainians and Belorussians in case of its desolution, as long as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland were recognized as parts of Soviet sphere of influence.

In November, 1939, Stalin sent troops over the Finnish border provoking war. The Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland proved to be more difficult than Stalin and the Red Army was prepared for, and the Soviets sustained high casualties. The Soviets prevailed in March, 1940, but their underdeveloped army had been revealed to the rest of the world, including Germany.

On March 5, 1940, Stalin signed an order of execution of more than 25,700 Polish "nationalist, educators and counterrevolutionary" activists in the parts of the Ukraine and Belarus republics that had been annexed from Poland. This event has become known as the Katyn Massacre; over 20,000 were Polish officers.

In June 1941, Hitler broke the pa