Joseph Stalin Essays - Old Bolsheviks, Marshals Of The Soviet Union

Joseph Stalin Joseph Stalin was a Georgian Marxist revolutionary leader and later dictator of the USSR. He was born in Gori, Georgia. He studied at Tiflis Orthodox where he was expelled from in 1899. After joining a Georgian Social Democratic organization in 1898, he became active in a revolutionary underground, and he was twice sent to Siberia. As a leading Bolshevik he played an active role in the October Revolution. In 1922, he became general secretary of the Party Central Committee, a position that he held until the day of his death. Stalin also occupied other key positions, which enabled him to build up enormous personal power in the government. This is a key point in Stalin's life where he was enormously confident about himself which led him to do things that were no acceptable in today's standard life. After the death of Vladimir I. Lenin in 1924 Stalin became leader of the Soviet Union where he made many changes to agriculture and industry. He believed that the Soviet Union was one hundred years behind the West and that they had to catch up as quickly as possible. This is where the idea of his ?Five Year Plan,? came about. The five-year plan basically got the people involved and motivated them into a modern life. From the 5-year plan, 25 million farms were produced which were only big enough to feed the families that were harvesting them. The more successful peasants were called the Kulaks. Along with the five-year plan, Stalin launched a campaign for the ?collectivization of agriculture,'' where millions of peasants were recognized as part of the civilization. Between 1934 and 1938 he built up a government, and armed forces in which millions of people were imprisoned, exiled, or shot. In 1938 he signed a Non- Aggression Pact with Hitler which bought the Soviet Union two years after the involvement in World War Two. After the German invasion in 1941, the USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance, and Stalin, as was leader, took the name of Generalissimo. He took part in the conferences of Tehran, Yelta, and Potsdam that resulted in Soviet military and political control over the liberated countries of postwar E and C Europe. Much of the blame of the concentration camps and German invasion are blamed on Adolph Hitler, but in the lost shadows is this man, Joseph Stalin. Stalin is responsible for some concentration camps and exiles that went on with the slaves. Joseph Stalin was an evil man. The party of slaves that he started, the Kulaks, (meaning that they had a little bit more than the regular slaves) were being stubborn and they didn't want to give Stalin their crops without him paying a certain fee for them. When the Kulaks started to rebel against Stalin, he was infuriated and he declared war against the slaves. Stalin and his armies overpowered the slave's and they had to surrender to them before anything else occurred. Along with their crops came all the machinery that they had and everything that they possessed. Due to Joseph Stalin's actions, many people who were on this collective farm system starved to death. The exact amount of people whom Stalin caused death to is not known but facts prove tha t there were many of people who died to his actions. In 1945 he conducted foreign policies which contributed to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. By1950 Stalin's mental and physical health had begun to deteriorate and he was absent from the Kremlin, the government headquarters in Moscow, for long periods of time. In January 1953 Stalin ordered the arrest of a group of Kremlin doctors on charges of plotting the medical murder of high-level Soviet officials. A few days later, Stalin died of complications from a stroke in March. After his death, the people were upset while Stalin's political successors expressed relief and moved quickly change some of the most brutal features of his regime. Nikita Khrushchev, who replaced Stalin as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denounced Stalin's methods of rule and political theories, known as Stalinism, in his secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. Stalin's historical legacy is really