The document known as Lenin's political testament was in fact a series of short letters, written to the Congress of Soviets over the course of a week in December 1922. [251] For Lenin, it was advantageous to have a key ally in this crucial post.[252]. [418] Stalin issued a decree establishing NKVD troikas which could mete out rulings without involving the courts. [30] According to Stalin's biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore, they became "minor Georgian classics"[31] and were included in various anthologies of Georgian poetry over the coming years. [162] In April, Stalin came third in the Bolshevik elections for the party's Central Committee; Lenin came first and Zinoviev came second. He was the first fascist leader in Europe, and a model for later leaders such as Hitler and Franco. [934], Some positive sentiment can also be found elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. His gang ambushed the armed convoy in Erivan Square with gunfire and home-made bombs. [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. [293] Stalin in turn accused Kamenev and Zinoviev of reintroducing factionalism and thus instability into the party. [448] According to historian James Harris, contemporary archival research shows that the motivation behind the purges was not Stalin attempting to establish his own personal dictatorship; evidence suggests he was committed to building the socialist state envisioned by Lenin. [386] The 1931 and 1932 harvests had been poor ones because of weather conditions[387] and had followed several years in which lower productivity had resulted in a gradual decline in output. [340] The USSR underwent a massive economic transformation. Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was the leader of Italy from 1922 until 1945. [619] With this accomplished, Marxist governments now controlled a third of the world's land mass. MZbee. [406] In turn, the anti-communist governments of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936. Lenin's Testament is a document dictated by Vladimir Lenin in late 1922 and early 1923. [407], When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, the Soviets sent 648 aircraft and 407 tanks to the left-wing Republican faction; these were accompanied by 3,000 Soviet troops and 42,000 members of the International Brigades set up by the Communist International. [375] Stalin's friends noted that he underwent a significant change following her suicide, becoming emotionally harder. [683] The historian Alfred J. Rieber noted that he had been raised in "a society where rebellion was deeply rooted in folklore and popular rituals". [554] Germany was divided into four zones: Soviet, U.S., British, and French, with Berlin itselflocated within the Soviet areaalso subdivided thusly. [863] One of them, Konstantin Kuzakov, later taught philosophy at the Leningrad Military Mechanical Institute, but never met Stalin. [460] On 17 September, the Red Army entered eastern Poland, officially to restore order amid the collapse of the Polish state. [727] Some of Stalin's colleagues described him as "Asiatic", and he supposedly once told a Japanese journalist that "I am not a European man, but an Asian, a Russified Georgian". [919] After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the first President of the new Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, continued Gorbachev's denunciation of Stalin but added to it a denunciation of Lenin. [860] There are unproven rumours that from 1934 onward he had a relationship with his housekeeper Valentina Istomina. [431] During these years, approximately 1.6million people were arrested,[432] 700,000 were shot, and an unknown number died under NKVD torture. Widely considered to be one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Stalin was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international MarxistLeninist movement, which revered him as a champion of the working class and socialism. [230] Stalin lost the argument, after which he accepted Lenin's decision and supported it. [580] In the Leningrad Affair, the city's leadership was purged amid accusations of treachery; executions of many of the accused took place in 1950. . [213], In December 1918, Stalin was sent to Perm to lead an inquiry into how Alexander Kolchak's White forces had been able to decimate Red troops based there. [180] Stalin backed Lenin's decision not to form a coalition with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionary Party, although they did form a coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. [136] The article was published under the pseudonym "K. Stalin",[139] a name he had used since 1912. [260], They also disagreed on the nature of the Soviet state. [881] Montefiore argued that while Stalin initially ruled as part of a Communist Party oligarchy, the Soviet government transformed from this oligarchy into a personal dictatorship in 1934,[882] with Stalin only becoming "absolute dictator" between March and June 1937, when senior military and NKVD figures were eliminated. [91], Stalin married Kato Svanidze in an Orthodox church ceremony at Senaki in July 1906. [712] 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. Stalin was born in Georgia in the town of Gori,[2] then part of the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire and home to a mix of Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Russians, and Jews. [403] Stalin nevertheless recognised the threat posed by fascism and sought to establish better links with the liberal democracies of Western Europe;[404] in May 1935, the Soviets signed a treaty of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia. [205] Eager to prove himself as a commander,[206] once there he took control of regional military operations. General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. [414] In September 1934, he launched a commission to investigate false imprisonments; that same month he called for the execution of workers at the Stalin Metallurgical Factory accused of spying for Japan. [644] In 1951, he initiated the Mingrelian affair, a purge of the Georgian branch of the Communist Party which resulted in over 11,000 deportations. [66] There, he co-edited a Georgian Marxist newspaper, Proletariatis Brdzola ("Proletarian Struggle"), with Philip Makharadze. [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. [320] Large numbers died during the journey. Stalin and a fellow senior Bolshevik Leon Trotsky both endorsed Lenin's plan of action, but it was initially opposed by Kamenev and other party members. [459] A week later, Germany invaded Poland, sparking the UK and France to declare war on Germany. [933] A 2017 Pew Research survey had 57% of Georgians saying he played a positive role in history, compared to 18% of those expressing the same for Mikhail Gorbachev. "[846] They had a son, Yakov, who often frustrated and annoyed Stalin. Serving in the Russian Civil War before overseeing the Soviet Union's establishment in 1922, Stalin assumed leadership over the country following Lenin's death in 1924. [68] During his exile, the RSDLP had split between Vladimir Lenin's "Bolsheviks" and Julius Martov's "Mensheviks". Advertisement. During the Great Terror, Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, rounded up more than 150,000 during its Polish Operation in 1937-38, 110,000 of whom were shot dead. Lenin's Testament, formally Letter to the Congress, Russian Pismo K Syezdu, two-part document dictated by Vladimir I. Lenin on Dec. 23-26, 1922, and Jan. 4, 1923, and addressed to a future Communist Party Congress. [660], Stalin's death was announced on 6 March. [432], During the 1930s and 1940s, NKVD groups assassinated defectors and opponents abroad;[433] in August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, eliminating the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution and created a one-party state under the new Communist Party in 1917, Stalin joined its governing Politburo. [270] To bolster his image as a devoted Leninist, Stalin gave nine lectures at Sverdlov University on the "Foundations of Leninism", later published in book form. [315], In early 1928 Stalin travelled to Novosibirsk, where he alleged that kulaks were hoarding their grain and ordered that the kulaks be arrested and their grain confiscated, with Stalin bringing much of the area's grain back to Moscow with him in February. Increasingly, Stalin appointed his loyalists to the Politburo. [539] Privately, Stalin sought to ensure that Poland would come fully under Soviet influence. [298] Some of those United Opposition members who were repentant were later rehabilitated and returned to government. Early Life of Joseph Stalin. Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs, 1918-1922. [100] In August 1907, he attended the Seventh Congress of the Second International an international socialist organisation in Stuttgart, Germany. Initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he consolidated power to become a dictator by 1928. [783], Stalin was ruthless,[784] temperamentally cruel,[785] and had a propensity for violence high even among the Bolsheviks. [585] While agricultural production stagnated, Stalin focused on a series of major infrastructure projects, including the construction of hydroelectric plants, canals, and railway lines running to the polar north. [399] During the later 1930s, Stalin placed "a few limits on the worship of his own greatness". [831] Kotkin observed that Stalin "generally gravitated to people like himself: parvenu intelligentsia of humble background". The real motivation for the terror, according to Harris, was an excessive fear of counterrevolution. [528] Stalin was impatient for the UK and U.S. to open up a Western Front to take the pressure off of the East; they eventually did so in mid-1944. [378] In May 1932, he introduced a system of kolkhoz markets where peasants could trade their surplus produce. [248] There was also internal turmoil in the Communist Party, as Trotsky led a faction calling for abolition of trade unions; Lenin opposed this, and Stalin helped rally opposition to Trotsky's position. [206] At the same time, he disregarded orders and repeatedly threatened to resign when affronted. [713] This concept synthesised Marxist and Leninist ideas with nationalist ideals,[695] and served to discredit Trotskywho promoted the idea of "permanent revolution"by presenting the latter as a defeatist with little faith in Russian workers' abilities to construct socialism. [418] By the latter part of 1937, the purges had moved beyond the party and were affecting the wider population. [367] Through the Communist International, Stalin's government exerted a strong influence over Marxist parties elsewhere in the world;[368] initially, Stalin left the running of the organisation largely to Bukharin. [233] Stalin felt humiliated and under-appreciated; on 17 August, he demanded demission from the military, which was granted on 1 September. [160] There, Stalin and a fellow Bolshevik Lev Kamenev assumed control of Pravda,[161] and Stalin was appointed the Bolshevik representative to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, an influential council of the city's workers. [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. [140] Derived from the Russian word for steel (stal),[141] this has been translated as "Man of Steel";[142] Stalin may have intended it to imitate Lenin's pseudonym. [771] According to Volkogonov, "Stalin's private life and working life were one and the same"; he did not take days off from political activities. [826] Service cautioned that there was "no irrefutable evidence" of anti-Semitism in Stalin's published work, although his private statements and public actions were "undeniably reminiscent of crude antagonism towards Jews";[827] he added that throughout Stalin's lifetime, the Georgian "would be the friend, associate or leader of countless individual Jews". [3] He was born on 18 December[O.S. [391] Stalin would not acknowledge that his policies had contributed to the famine,[380] the existence of which was kept secret from foreign observers. [848], Stalin's second wife was Nadezhda Alliluyeva; theirs was not an easy relationship, and they often fought. [199] Stalin thought it necessary because unlike Lenin he was unconvinced that Europe was on the verge of proletarian revolution. He was faced with the problem that there were few Marxists left in Eastern Europe, with most having been killed by the Nazis. [207] He befriended two military figures, Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, who would form the nucleus of his military and political support base. [696] In his book, Foundations of Leninism, he stated that "Leninism is the Marxism of the epoch of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution". What was Eratosthenes's nickname? [54] His militant rhetoric proved divisive among the city's Marxists, some of whom suspected that he might be an agent provocateur working for the government. [851] In any event, she suspected that he was unfaithful with other women,[852] and committed suicide in 1932. Many of Lenin's former lieutenants realized that Stalin was making himself a de-facto dictator. In these letters, Lenin expressed concern about a potential split in the Bolshevik Central Committee, chiefly because of the rivalry and animosity between Stalin and Trotsky: [27] He joined 600 trainee priests who boarded there,[28] and he achieved high grades. [608] Stalin did not personally attend the meeting, sending Zhdanov in his place. [355] Conservative social policies were promoted to enhance social discipline and boost population growth; this included a focus on strong family units and motherhood, re-criminalisation of homosexuality, restrictions placed on abortion and divorce, and abolition of the Zhenotdel women's department. [614] When the U.S. and UK remained opposed to this, Stalin sought to force their hand by blockading Berlin in June 1948. [157] Stalin was required to serve four more months of his exile, and he successfully requested that he serve it in nearby Achinsk. [397] A number of authorised Stalin biographies were also published,[398] although Stalin generally wanted to be portrayed as the embodiment of the Communist Party rather than have his life story explored. [805] Little of this was fiction,[806] although he could cite passages from Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Nekrasov, and Walt Whitman by heart. 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