In 1912, Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland, appointed Joseph Stalin to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Three years later, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union was created in 1922, with Lenin as its first leader. During these many years, Stalin had continued to progress up the party ladder, and in 1922 he became general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a job that enabled him to appoint his allies to federal work and develop a political base. support.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin inevitably surpassed his rivals and received the power struggle for command of the Communist Party. In the late 1920s, he became a dictator of the Soviet Union.
Beginning in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin released a series of five-year designs aimed at changing the Soviet Union that originated from a modern peasant society into an industrial superpower. His development plan was based on federal control of the economic system and also integrated the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, where the federal government had taken command of the farms. Millions of farmers refused to cooperate with Stalin’s orders and were shot or perhaps exiled as punishment. The forced collectivization even resulted in a prevalent famine throughout the Soviet Union that killed millions.
Stalin ruled by terror along with totalitarian control so that he could eliminate anyone who was likely to oppose him. The powers of the secret police were expanded by him, citizens who are encouraged to spy on each other and also have large numbers of people killed or perhaps sent to the Gulag process of forced labor camps. During the second half of the 1930s, Stalin instituted the Great Purge, a series of strategies to rid the Communist Party, the other areas and military areas of Soviet society of all those he considered a threat.
Furthermore, Stalin made a cult of character around him within the Soviet Union. The cities have been renamed in honor of him. Soviet history books have been rewritten to give him a much more visible role in the revolution and to mythologize different elements of his life. It was the subject of flattering works of art, music, and literature, and its title became part of the Soviet national anthem. His government even ran the Soviet press.
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the German dictator Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact. Stalin then proceeded to annex areas of Romania and Poland, in addition to the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. It also launched an intrusion from Finland. Then, in June 1941, Germany broke the Soviet Nazi pact and invaded the USSR, producing important initial breakthroughs. (Stalin had ignored alerts from the British and Americans, as well as their intelligence agents, of a possible invasion, so the Soviets were unprepared for war.) As German soldiers approached the Soviet capital of Moscow, Stalin stayed there and aimed at a protective scorched earth policy, ruining some infrastructure or supplies that could benefit the enemy. The tide turned for the Soviets along with the Battle of Stalingrad, from August 1942 to February 1943, during which the Red Army defeated the Germans and eventually drove them out of the Russian federation.
As the battle progressed, Stalin participated in the main Allied conferences, together in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945). The iron of his will, as well as his deft political skills, allowed him to play the devoted friend without almost ever abandoning his vision of an expanded postwar Soviet kingdom.
THE LATER YEARS OF JOSEPH STALIN
Joseph Stalin did not soften with age: he prosecuted a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to labor camps and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing anything and dissent that smelled of foreign, especially Western influence. He developed communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, and also in 1949 led the Soviets into the nuclear age by exploding an atomic bomb. In 1950, he granted North Korean communist leader Kim Il Sung the authorization to invade South Korea and supported by the United States, an event that triggered the Korean War.
Stalin, who became increasingly paranoid in recent years, died on March 5, 1953, at the age of seventy-four, after suffering a stroke. His body was embalmed and kept in Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square until 1961, when it was removed and placed near the Kremlin walls in conjunction with the de-Stalinization process established by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev (1894 1971). .
By some estimates, he was to blame for the deaths of twenty million people during his brutal rule.