[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. [92] In March 1907 she bore a son, Yakov. [286] The Left Opposition believed the NEP conceded too much to capitalism; Stalin was called a "rightist" for his support of the policy. He slowly died over the course of the next few days, apparently in agony, finally expiring on March 5th of a brain hemorrhage. Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union's sole leader from 1924 until his death in 1953. Born to a poor family in Gori in the Russian Empire (now Georgia), Stalin attended the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary before joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. [306], In 1926, Stalin published On Questions of Leninism. [737][738] His mustached face was pock-marked from smallpox during childhood; this was airbrushed from published photographs. [877] Various biographers have described him as a dictator,[878] an autocrat,[879] or accused him of practising Caesarism. Stalin had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, beginning in the 1930s. [849] In later life, he disapproved of Svetlana's various suitors and husbands, putting a strain on his relationship with her. [452] Stalin initiated a military build-up, with the Red Army more than doubling between January 1939 and June 1941, although in its haste to expand many of its officers were poorly trained. Like with the order 227, everyone in the high command called it a stupid order and for Stalin to remove it. [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. [166] After the demonstration was suppressed, the Provisional Government initiated a crackdown on the Bolsheviks, raiding Pravda. [782], Stalin was ruthless,[783] temperamentally cruel,[784] and had a propensity for violence high even among the Bolsheviks. [160] There, Stalin and a fellow Bolshevik Lev Kamenev assumed control of Pravda,[161] and Stalin was appointed the Bolshevik representative to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, an influential council of the city's workers. [550] Soviet forces continued to expand until they occupied all their territorial concessions, but the U.S. rebuffed Stalin's desire for the Red Army to take a role in the Allied occupation of Japan. [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. [913] He repeated these denunciations at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1962. [278] Stalin also developed close relations with the trio at the heart of the secret police (first the Cheka and then its replacement, the State Political Directorate): Felix Dzerzhinsky, Genrikh Yagoda, and Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. [85] At the conference Stalin met Lenin for the first time. [576] He grew increasingly concerned that senior political and military figures might try to oust him; he prevented any of them from becoming powerful enough to rival him and had their apartments bugged with listening devices. [203], After the Bolsheviks seized power, both right and left-wing armies rallied against them, generating the Russian Civil War. [798] He protected several Soviet writers from arrest and prosecution, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, even when their work was labelled harmful to his regime. [759] In 1934, his new Kuntsevo Dacha was built; 9km from the Kremlin, it became his primary residence. [870] In under three decades, Stalin transformed the Soviet Union into a major industrial world power,[871] one which could "claim impressive achievements" in terms of urbanisation, military strength, education and Soviet pride. [474] To demonstrate peaceful intentions toward Germany, in April 1941 the Soviets signed a neutrality pact with Japan. I stand on the ground of the latter". [454], As Britain and France seemed unwilling to commit to an alliance with the Soviet Union, Stalin saw a better deal with the Germans. During these years, the country experienced another major famine and an antisemitic campaign that culminated in the doctors' plot. [549] These events led to the Japanese surrender and the war's end. Whereas Lenin believed that all countries across Europe and Asia would readily unite as a single state following proletariat revolution, Stalin argued that national pride would prevent this, and that different socialist states would have to be formed; in his view, a country like Germany would not readily submit to being part of a Russian-dominated federal state. [891] Khlevniuk noted that at various points, particularly when Stalin was old and frail, there were "periodic manifestations" in which the party oligarchy threatened his autocratic control. [39] Stalin devoted himself to Marx's socio-political theory, Marxism,[40] which was then on the rise in Georgia, one of various forms of socialism opposed to the empire's governing tsarist authorities. One is the political scientist Rudolph Rummel (1932-2014), a non-China specialist who made wildly higher estimates than any other historianthat Mao was responsible for 77 million deaths. [574] Capital punishment was abolished in 1947 but re-instituted in 1950. [691] As a propaganda tool, the shaming of "enemies" explained all inadequate economic and political outcomes, the hardships endured by the populace, and military failures. [504] Comintern was dissolved in 1943,[505] and Stalin encouraged foreign MarxistLeninist parties to emphasise nationalism over internationalism to broaden their domestic appeal. [663] At the funeral on 9 March, Stalins body was laid to rest in Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square; hundreds of thousands attended. Stalin promotes an image of himself as a great benevolent leader and hero of the Soviet Union. [795] Like all Bolshevik leaders, Stalin believed that reading could help transform not just people's ideas and consciousness, but human nature itself. In April 1932, Nikolai Shvernik, the head of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, informed Stalin and Lazar Kaganovich that Soviet workers were rebelling against "starvation" rations implemented on the first of the month. [825] Service cautioned that there was "no irrefutable evidence" of anti-Semitism in Stalin's published work, although his private statements and public actions were "undeniably reminiscent of crude antagonism towards Jews";[826] he added that throughout Stalin's lifetime, the Georgian "would be the friend, associate or leader of countless individual Jews". [200] Lenin eventually convinced the other senior Bolsheviks of his viewpoint, resulting in signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. [336] In November 1929 Stalin removed him from the Politburo. As a result Stalin was left as the ruler of the Ussr. [456] Germany began negotiations with the Soviets, proposing that Eastern Europe be divided between the two powers. [295] The factionalist arguments continued, with Stalin threatening to resign in October and then December 1926 and again in December 1927. [931] In this literature, Stalin's repressions are regarded either as a necessary measure to defeat "enemies of the people" or the result of lower-level officials acting without Stalin's knowledge. [534] As the Red Army reconquered the Caucasus and Crimea, various ethnic groups living in the regionthe Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingushi, Karachai, Balkars, and Crimean Tatarswere accused of having collaborated with the Germans. [51] He continued to evade arrest by using aliases and sleeping in different apartments. Stalin presided over the Soviet post-war reconstruction and its development of an atomic bomb in 1949. [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. [145] He was sentenced to four years exile in Turukhansk, a remote part of Siberia from which escape was particularly difficult. [644], From 1946 until his death, Stalin only gave three public speeches, two of which lasted only a few minutes. [471], The speed of the German victory over and occupation of France in mid-1940 took Stalin by surprise. [795] He was instead an emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual. [9], Besarion was a cobbler who was employed in a workshop owned by another man;[10] it was initially a financial success but later fell into decline,[11] and the family found itself living in poverty. Stalin, for the most part, was a successful leader. [446] As it wound down, Stalin sought to deflect responsibility from himself,[447] blaming its "excesses" and "violations of law" on Yezhov. [526] There, Stalin and Roosevelt got on well, with both desiring the post-war dismantling of the British Empire. Reuters. Stalin contained a lot of bad leadership characteristics but I have cut it down to some of the worst in my opinion. [756] Along with other senior figures, he had a dacha at Zubalova, 35km outside Moscow,[757] although ceased using it after Nadezhda's 1932 suicide. Iosif Stalin, Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow. In 1956, after Stalin's death, came a watershed moment: Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Stalin personality cult and dictatorship, in a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress. [214] He returned to Moscow between January and March 1919,[215] before being assigned to the Western Front at Petrograd. It repels the effects of negativity, prevents abuse of power and of justice, is contagious and promotes self-accountability. [230] Stalin had cautioned against this; he believed that nationalism would lead the Polish working-classes to support their government's war effort. 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