Although Lenin found Stalin's boorishness offensive at times, he valued his loyalty, and appointed him after the Revolution to various low-priority leadership positions in the new Soviet government. Stalin understood that "cadres are everything": if you control the personnel, you control the organization. He shrewdly used his new position to consolidate power in exactly this way--by controlling all appointments, setting agendas, and moving around Party staff in such a way that eventually everyone who counted for anything owed their position to him.
By the time the Party's intellectual core realized what had happened, it was too late--Stalin had his mostly mediocre people in place, while Lenin, the only person with the moral authority to challenge him, was on his deathbed and incapable of speech after a series of strokes, and besides, Stalin even controlled who had access to the leader. The General Secretary of the Party became the de facto leader of the country right on up until Mikhail Gorbachev.
After Lenin's death in , Stalin methodically went about destroying all the old leaders of the Party, taking advantage of their weakness for standing on arcane intellectual principle to simply divide and conquer them. At first, these people were removed from their posts and exiled abroad. Later, when he realized that their sharp tongues and pens were still capable of inveighing against him even from far away, Stalin switched tactics, culminating in a vast reign of terror and spectacular show trials in the s during which the founding fathers of the Soviet Union were one by one unmasked as "enemies of the people" who had supposedly always been in the employ of Capitalist intelligence services and summarily shot.
By the s he had dictatorial control over the new Soviet Union. At the same time, Stalin dedicated himself to creating a cult of personality. This including attaching his name to many cities, buildings, and monuments.
Stalin was keenly focused on the expansion of Soviet ideals around the world. He envisioned a Soviet Union that had the military capability to expand far beyond Russia. As such, he was eager to pursue any possible military development that could give the USSR an edge over other world powers.
Through these channels, Stalin became aware of the beginnings of a bomb program in Britain by , with knowledge of the upcoming American program soon to follow.
By the time Stalin regained his resolve, German armies occupied all of the Ukraine and Belarus, and its artillery surrounded Leningrad. To make matters worse, the purges of the s had depleted the Soviet Army and government leadership to the point where both were nearly dysfunctional. After heroic efforts on the part of the Soviet Army and the Russian people, the Germans were turned back at the Battle of Stalingrad in By the next year, the Soviet Army was liberating countries in Eastern Europe, even before the Allies had mounted a serious challenge against Hitler at D-Day.
Stalin had been suspicious of the West since the inception of the Soviet Union , and once the Soviet Union had entered the war, Stalin had demanded the Allies open up a second front against Germany. President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that such an action would result in heavy casualties. This only deepened Stalin's suspicion of the West, as millions of Russians died. As the tide of war slowly turned in the Allies' favor, Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin to discuss postwar arrangements.
At the first of these meetings, in Tehran, Iran, in late , the recent victory in Stalingrad put Stalin in a solid bargaining position. He demanded the Allies open a second front against Germany, which they agreed to in the spring of In February , the three leaders met again at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea.
With Soviet troops liberating countries in Eastern Europe, Stalin was again in a strong position and negotiated virtually a free hand in reorganizing their governments.
He also agreed to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated. The situation changed at the Potsdam Conference in July Roosevelt died that April and was replaced by President Harry S. British parliamentary elections had replaced Prime Minister Churchill with Clement Attlee as Britain's chief negotiator. By now, the British and Americans were suspicious of Stalin's intentions and wanted to avoid Soviet involvement in a postwar Japan. The dropping of two atomic bombs in August forced Japan's surrender before the Soviets could mobilize.
Convinced of the Allies' hostility toward the Soviet Union, Stalin became obsessed with the threat of an invasion from the West. Between and , he established Communist regimes in many Eastern European countries, creating a vast buffer zone between Western Europe and "Mother Russia. In , Stalin ordered an economic blockade on the German city of Berlin, in hopes of gaining full control of the city.
The Allies responded with the massive Berlin Airlift , supplying the city and eventually forcing Stalin to back down. Earlier, he had ordered the Soviet representative to the United Nations to boycott the Security Council because it refused to accept the newly formed Communist People's Republic of China into the United Nations.
When the resolution to support South Korea came to a vote in the Security Council, the Soviet Union was unable to use its veto. It's estimated that Stalin killed as many as 20 million people, directly or indirectly, through famine, forced labor camps, collectivization and executions. Some scholars have argued that Stalin's record of killings amount to genocide and make him one of history's most ruthless mass murderers.
Start your free trial today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. In , the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he named Joseph Goebbels , his trusted friend and colleague, to the key post of minister for public enlightenment and propaganda.
In this capacity, Goebbels was charged with presenting Hitler to At the height of the Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat. In the village of Stavyshche, a young peasant boy watched as the wanderers dug into empty gardens with their bare hands. Many were During the late s and early s, the prospect of communist subversion at home and abroad seemed frighteningly real to many people in the United States.
For many Americans, the most enduring Since its start a century ago, Communism, a political and economic ideology that calls for a classless, government-controlled society in which everything is shared equally, has seen a series of surges—and declines. What started in Russia, became a global revolution, taking The question of where Russia begins and ends—and who constitutes the Russian people—has preoccupied Russian thinkers for centuries.
Joseph Hooker was a career U. Hooker entered the Civil War in as a brigadier general and gained a reputation as a reliable combat Perhaps unsurprisingly, his only daughter, Svetlana, found it extraordinarily difficult growing up in the Kremlin under his care. Though Stalin Live TV. This Day In History.
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