I. Introduction

Stalin, Joseph (1879- 1953), 1922 to 1953 served as the general secretary of communist party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This autocratic ruler was better than anyone else in shaping the characteristics of the Soviet regime, and in1.

Stalin was born in Gori, Georgia, and was part of the huge Russian empire at birth. He is the third and only surviving child of the shoemaker and cleaner. 1888, Stalin began to study in Gori Church School, where he studied Russian with excellent results and won a scholarship from the Theological Seminary in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

Young revolutionaries II

Stalin was a devout believer in orthodox Christianity when he started studying in a seminary. However, he soon came into contact with the radical ideas of his classmates and began to read illegal literary works based on the works of German political philosopher Karl Marx. 1899, when he was about to graduate, he gave up religious education and devoted his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. While working as an accountant in Tbilisi, Stalin promoted Marxism to railway workers on behalf of local social democratic organizations. After moving to the port of Bat'umi, he organized a large-scale demonstration of workers there (1902), and Stalin was chased and arrested by the imperial police. A year later, he was sentenced to exile in Siberia, Russia. However, he quickly managed to escape and returned to Georgia in early 1904.

When the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903, Stalin was attracted by the more militant Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. In Georgia, where Menshevism was dominant, Stalin soon gained the reputation of a staunch follower of militant Lenin. He first met Lenin at a meeting in Finland in 1905.

In 1905, Stalin married a Georgian woman, yekaterina Swanedya, and she died two years later. Stalin was arrested and exiled by imperial police in 1908 for illegal underground activities. He escaped the next year, followed by further arrest, exile and secret travel abroad, until the Russian Revolution in 19 17. Lenin promoted Stalin to the Central Committee, the leading body of the Bolshevik Party, in 19 12. At this time, Stalin had adopted the Russian pen name, meaning "the body of steel". At Lenin's behest, Stalin wrote his main theoretical work, Marxism and Ethnic Issues. Stalin was arrested and sent to Siberia before the short article 19 13 was published.

Stalin was released from exile after February of the Russian revolution (or March in the new calendar) overthrew the Russian monarchy. He went to Petrograd (later Leningrad; Now St. Petersburg), where he became a member of the presidium of the CPC Central Committee. He then claimed editorial control over the party newspaper Pravda.

Although Stalin did not play an important role in the process of Bolsheviks taking over the government in 10, he became a member of the Soviet People's Committee of the new government and led the Ethnic Affairs Committee. When the Bolsheviks tried to control the territory of the former Russian empire in their own hands, considering the importance of nationality, Stalin's position was crucial to the Bolsheviks' victory in the subsequent Russian civil war. On 19 19, he was elected as a member of the Political Bureau and the Organization Bureau of the Central Committee, the highest decision-making body in communist party. At the height of the civil war, as a political commissar of the Red Army, Stalin supervised the military action on the western front against the counter-revolutionary White Army led by General Peter Vrangel. From 1920 to 192 1, his decision as a political commissar ended in disaster, which led to a long-term conflict with Leon Trotsky, the political commissar of the war. At the same time, Stalin's first wife died in 1907. He married Nadezhda Alliluyeva in 19 18 and moved to Moscow with the government.

Soviet dictator III

After the Bolsheviks won the civil war, Stalin devoted himself to organizational work and administrative tasks. He served as the political commissar of the State Control Committee from 19 19 until 1923. In 1922, he was elected as the general secretary of communist party. This position enabled him to control personnel appointments and laid the foundation for his political power. Stalin's rude and aggressive behavior brought him into conflict with sick Lenin, who wrote his political "will" shortly before his death in 1924, which expressed his doubts about Stalin. In his will, Lenin doubted whether the general secretary of the Party would use his power cautiously enough, and he demanded that Stalin be dismissed. However, skilled political skills enabled Stalin to belittle and suppress Lenin's will, and Lenin's death enabled Stalin to establish a ruling alliance with Lev Kamenev and grigori Zinoviev, and excluded Stalin's rival Trotsky from the struggle for inheritance. Stalin changed his line in 1925, and formed a new alliance with Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei R. YKOV to oppose his former partner. The latter formed an inner-party group against Stalin with Trotsky in 1926, which was called "left-wing opposition". Once Stalin succeeded in repelling these opponents, he began to oppose his former allies Bukharin and Rykov. By the end of 1929, Stalin had succeeded in political strategy, eliminated his political opponents and established his position as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union.

IV. Domestic policies

In the late1920s, Stalin decided that the New Economic Policy (NEP) no longer worked, and Lenin promoted the postwar economic recovery by encouraging limited private enterprises in1921920s. The economic growth rate is declining, and the grain produced by farmers is not enough to meet the demand. Stalin did not give pea ants an economic incentive to increase their production, but chose a policy of forcing them to enter state-owned collective farms. At the same time, he promoted a plan of rapid industrialization, which began with the ambitious first five-year plan of 1928. Stalin believed that the Soviet Union must rapidly industrialize in order to strengthen the communist regime and enable the country to resist foreign enemies. The plan obtained funds by developing rural resources, which led to the near collapse of Soviet agriculture and millions of farmers died of famine. Industrialization has been realized, but at a great cost.

Although his absolute power was not challenged at the beginning of 1930, Stalin was worried about the potential plot against him, especially after his second wife committed suicide at the end of 1932. Stalin launched a large-scale inner-party purge after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, chairman of Lenin Grad Party, on1February 1934. Many people speculated that this was planned by Stalin because he thought Kirov was a threat. Although the purge began gradually, the Soviet secret police arrested and executed thousands of party member at 1934 and 1935, and at 1936. The trial of important party figures, including Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin, was held in Moscow, and they were quickly executed on trumped-up charges. In 1937 and 1938, terror spread to the whole Soviet society, including the military high command. It is estimated that the number of people arrested and executed in the purge ranged from 1936 to 1938, ranging from 65438+500,000 to 7 million. Countless others were imprisoned in forced labor camps. With the end of 1938, the purge left Stalin with a new generation of loyal officials. However, during World War II, the large reduction of troops made the country more vulnerable to the threat of Adolf Hitler's Germany.

V. Foreign policy

Although Stalin's policy in the mid-1930s was to support the Comintern (Comintern) to form a people's front against the rise of fascism in Europe, he gave up the idea of collective security with the West and decided to form an alliance with Nazi Germany in August 1939. The "secret agreement" of the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty divided Eastern Europe into the spheres of influence of Germany and the Soviet Union; The Soviet Union allowed Germany to invade Poland in exchange for Hitler's promise not to invade Soviet territory. Despite warnings, in June, the Nazis launched Operation Stalin against the Soviet Union, which was a three-pronged attack. Although the Soviet Union was ill-prepared for the invasion and suffered huge losses at the beginning, it supported Stalin as one, and he assumed the direct leadership of the war effort. After the defeat of Stalingrad in 1943 1 month, the Nazis lost the initiative and were finally forced to retreat in 1945, which enabled Soviet troops to enter Eastern Europe. After the allied governments recognized the Soviet Union's sphere of influence in these newly liberated countries, Stalin established a puppet communist regime and pulled the so-called iron curtain between Eastern Europe and Western Europe.

1947, the Soviet Union established the Communist Intelligence Bureau (Cominform), an international organization composed of communist leaders, to ensure consistency with the Soviet Union's line. Yugoslavia was expelled from the Union in 1948 after Stalin accused Yugoslav traitor leader josip broz tito of refusing to obey Soviet orders. In the same year, Moscow announced the blockade of Berlin, which intensified the cold war with the West. Stalin is determined to catch up with the United States in developing atomic bombs; He ordered to spare no effort to achieve this goal, which was achieved on August 1953 shortly after his death.

The last few years

By 1950, Stalin's mental and physical health had begun to deteriorate, and he was not in the Kremlin, the government headquarters in Moscow for a long time. His subordinates are afraid of becoming victims of Stalin's growing paranoia, which is manifested in another purge plan. 1 month, Stalin ordered the arrest of a group of Kremlin doctors who were accused of planning the medical murder of senior Soviet officials. Just as the resurgence of large-scale terrorism was imminent, Stalin died of stroke complications in March. Although the whole country was plunged into grief, Stalin's political successors expressed a sigh of relief and quickly took action to reverse some of the most cruel features of his regime. Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin as the general secretary of the Soviet communist party (CPSU) (known as the first secretary before 1966), denounced Stalin's ruling method and political theory, the so-called Stalinism, in his "secret speech" at the 20th Party Congress held in 1956.

B evaluation

Stalin's historical legacy is overwhelmingly negative. Although his policies transformed the Soviet Union from an agriculture-based society into an industrialized country with a strong military arsenal, this transformation was at the cost of millions of lives. Stalin's military distrust of the West and his claim to the Soviet Union's dominance in Eastern Europe led to the Cold War. He cleansed the society through police violence and terror, leaving a permanent scar in the collective memory of the people under his rule. Although admired by some Russians, most people will agree with the western evaluation that Stalin is one of the most cruel dictators in history.