[105] They also kidnapped the children of several wealthy figures to extract ransom money. [464], The Soviets further demanded parts of eastern Finland, but the Finnish government refused. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin terrorised his own people, but for the first time a survey suggests . [466] Embarrassed by their inability to defeat the Finns, the Soviets signed an interim peace treaty, in which they received territorial concessions from Finland. Stalin had called for the Chinese Communists to ally themselves with Kuomintang (KMT) nationalists, viewing a Communist-Kuomintang alliance as the best bulwark against Japanese imperial expansionism. Comrade Stalin constantly warns us that not conceit but modesty distinguishes the Bolshevik, that any leader, in whatever post he may be, is the servant of the people. [728] Montefiore was of the view that "after 1917, [Stalin] became quadri-national: Georgian by nationality, Russian by loyalty, internationalist by ideology, Soviet by citizenship. [106] In early 1908, he travelled to the Swiss city of Geneva to meet with Lenin and the prominent Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, although the latter exasperated him. [610] The 1947 Hungarian elections were also rigged, with the Hungarian Working People's Party taking control. Stalin made a decision to use his power over the country to raise production. [413] In May 1933, he released from prison many convicted of minor offences, ordering the security services not to enact further mass arrests and deportations. [706] In the personality cult constructed around him, he was known as the vozhd, an equivalent to the Italian duce and German fhrer. He was good at coercing people. [667], Stalin left neither a designated successor nor a framework within which a peaceful transfer of power could take place. [719] Montefiore thought Stalin's brutality marked him out as a "natural extremist";[794] Service suggested he had tendencies toward a paranoid and sociopathic personality disorder. Lenin was selected as the leader of the country and the party. [747], As leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin typically awoke around 11am,[748] with lunch being served between 3 and 5pm and dinner no earlier than 9pm;[749] he then worked late into the evening. [174] A Bolshevik-controlled ship, the Aurora, opened fire on the Winter Palace; the Provisional Government's assembled delegates surrendered and were arrested by the Bolsheviks. [437] Such functionaries often carried out a greater number of arrests and executions than their quotas set by Stalin's central government. [312] Many Communists, including in Komsomol, OGPU, and the Red Army, were eager to be rid of the NEP and its market-oriented approach;[313] they had concerns about those who profited from the policy: affluent peasants known as "kulaks" and small business owners or "Nepmen". [418] By the latter part of 1937, the purges had moved beyond the party and were affecting the wider population. He and Hitler were about the same height, approximately five feet, eight. [83], In November 1905, the Georgian Bolsheviks elected Stalin as one of their delegates to a Bolshevik conference in Saint Petersburg. [187] He co-signed Lenin's decrees shutting down hostile newspapers,[188] and along with Sverdlov, he chaired the sessions of the committee drafting a constitution for the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. [538] An agreement was also made that a post-war Polish government should be a coalition consisting of both communist and conservative elements. [231], In mid-August 1920, the Poles repulsed the Russian advance, and Stalin returned to Moscow to attend the Politburo meeting. Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the U.S.S.R. from the mid 1920s till his death in 1953. Iosif Stalin, Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow. [103] In Baku he had reassembled his gang, the Outfit,[104] which continued to attack Black Hundreds and raised finances by running protection rackets, counterfeiting currency, and carrying out robberies. [872] Under his rule, the average Soviet life expectancy grew due to improved living conditions, nutrition and medical care[873] as mortality rates also declined. [642] That same month, a much publicised trial of accused Jewish industrial wreckers took place in Ukraine. [205] Eager to prove himself as a commander,[206] once there he took control of regional military operations. [616] Monarchy was abolished in Bulgaria and Romania. [458] In August 1939, the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Germany, a non-aggression pact negotiated by Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. [408] Stalin took a strong personal involvement in the Spanish situation. During these years, the country experienced another major famine and an antisemitic campaign that culminated in the doctors' plot. [401] Stalin initiated confidential communications with Hitler in October 1933, shortly after the latter came to power in Germany. Smallpox as a child left him with lasting scars and a deformity. [254], In May 1922, a massive stroke left Lenin partially paralysed. [934], Some positive sentiment can also be found elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. [196] That month, he travelled to Helsinki to talk with the Finnish Social-Democrats, granting Finland's request for independence in December. [777] He acknowledged that he could be rude and insulting,[778] but he rarely raised his voice in anger;[779] as his health deteriorated in later life he became increasingly unpredictable and bad-tempered. [95] After returning to Tiflis, Stalin organised the robbing of a large delivery of money to the Imperial Bank in June 1907. [69] Stalin detested many of the Mensheviks in Georgia and aligned himself with the Bolsheviks. [162] In April, Stalin came third in the Bolshevik elections for the party's Central Committee; Lenin came first and Zinoviev came second. [595] [219], The Bolsheviks won the Russian civil war by the end of 1919. [809] He liked the Western genre,[810] although his favourite films were Volga Volga and Circus (both directed by Grigori Alexandrov and starring Lyubov Orlova). The real motivation for the terror, according to Harris, was an excessive fear of counterrevolution. [159] In a celebratory mood, Stalin travelled by train to Petrograd in March. [739] 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,[740] which was probably the result of being hit, at the age of 12, by a horse-drawn carriage. Why would we let them have guns?" Joseph Stalin 18 likes Like [369] At its 6th Congress in July 1928, Stalin informed delegates that the main threat to socialism came not from the right but from non-Marxist socialists and social democrats, whom he called "social fascists";[370] Stalin recognised that in many countries, the social democrats were the Marxist-Leninists' main rivals for working-class support. [192] He took Nadezhda Alliluyeva as his secretary[193] and at some point married her, although the wedding date is unknown. [327] By 1932, about 62% of households involved in agriculture were part of collectives, and by 1936 this had risen to 90%. Reason 3: He was Stalin Reason 4: He killed between six million and 20 million people. [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. [17] In September 1888, Stalin enrolled at the Orthodox Gori Church School,[18] a place secured by Charkviani. [796], Keenly interested in the arts,[797] Stalin admired artistic talent. [256] Lenin twice asked Stalin to procure poison so that he could commit suicide, but Stalin never did so. [716] Stalin argued that the Jews possessed a "national character" but were not a "nation" and were thus unassimilable. [645] The amount of written material that he produced also declined. [763] This gained widespread acceptance outside the Soviet Union during his lifetime but was misleading. [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. [292] At the 14th Party Congress in December, they launched an attack against Stalin's faction, but it was unsuccessful. [402] Stalin admired Hitler, particularly his manoeuvres to remove rivals within the Nazi Party in the Night of the Long Knives. [276] Stalin had much contact with young party functionaries,[277] and the desire for promotion led many provincial figures to seek to impress Stalin and gain his favour. [711] Although retaining the Marxist belief that the state would wither away as socialism transformed into pure communism, he believed that the Soviet state would remain until the final defeat of international capitalism. A California professor was widely hounded on Twitter for praising the legacy of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, calling him "one of the great leaders" of the 20th century. [808] Lenin was his favourite author but he also read, and sometimes appreciated, a great deal of writing by Leon Trotsky and other arch-enemies. [3] "Charismatic rule has long been neglected and ridiculed, but apparently it has deep roots and becomes a powerful stimulus once the proper psychological and social doubt that millions believe in it" (Neumann, 1942: p. 75). [200] Lenin eventually convinced the other senior Bolsheviks of his viewpoint, resulting in signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. [561] In 1947, it brought out a second edition of his official biography, which eulogised him to a greater extent than its predecessor. [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). [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. [242] In taking this view, some Marxists accused him of bending too much to bourgeois nationalism, while others accused him of remaining too Russocentric by seeking to retain these nations within the Russian state. [171], On 24 October, police raided the Bolshevik newspaper offices, smashing machinery and presses; Stalin salvaged some of this equipment to continue his activities. [834] While head of the Soviet Union he remained in contact with many of his old friends in Georgia, sending them letters and gifts of money. "Deeply saddened," he said. Despite all that it is fair to say that Lenin was a successful leader without whom November revolution . [34], Stalin joined a forbidden book club at the school;[35] he was particularly influenced by Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is To Be Done? Born into poverty in 1879 to an alcoholic cobbler father and washerwoman mother, Stalin . [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. No, I do not think that Stalin was a good leader. [842], Stalin married his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, in 1906. [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. [568] It was established that 1,710 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages had been destroyed. In his governance, Stalin was inspired by the ideologies of both Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and merged to two to form the Stalinism ideology, a form of socialism that . [85] At the conference Stalin met Lenin for the first time. [314] At this point, Stalin turned against the NEP, which put him on a course to the "left" even of Trotsky or Zinoviev. [124] In July, he arrived at the Siberian village of Narym,[125] where he shared a room with a fellow Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov. [175] Although he had been tasked with briefing the Bolshevik delegates of the Second Congress of Soviets about the developing situation, Stalin's role in the coup had not been publicly visible. [572] Academia and the arts were also allowed greater freedom than they had prior to 1941. Firstly, the divisions within the party, made his task of eliminating people less complicated, he only had individuals, not groups of people against him. Stalin, however, did this strategically, executing the murder of Vladimir Lenin in a guiltless manner. [523] Stalin scarcely left Moscow throughout the war,[524] with Roosevelt and Churchill frustrated with his reluctance to travel to meet them. "[838] Montefiore described Stalin's favoured types as "young, malleable teenagers or buxom peasant women,"[839] who would be supportive and unchallenging toward him. By highlighting the ways in which Stalin manufactured charisma, this article will show how the 'cult of personality' can be viewed as a legitimation technique using manufactured charisma as a tool. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), was the co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, socialist opponent of Joseph Stalin, founder of the Fourth International, and strategist of world socialist revolution . [438], Stalin initiated all key decisions during the Terror, personally directing many of its operations and taking an interest in their implementation. 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