The Collapse of Communism and the Breakup of the Soviet Union by Small Cathleen;

Author:Small, Cathleen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing LLC

Joseph Stalin proved to be a ruthless leader.

By this time, Stalin had discovered the work of Russian Communist Vladimir Lenin, and shortly after Stalin’s expulsion from the seminary, he went underground as a revolutionary for the Marxist Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, the precursor to the Bolsheviks.

Eventually, Lenin officially formed the Bolsheviks, and the bright, capable, charming Stalin joined him. Stalin, a gifted writer, assisted in the creation and dissemination of propaganda and helped organize strikes. However, the funding for these activities often came from illegal—and sometimes deadly—means, so Stalin was arrested and exiled multiple times. Stalin was as gifted at escaping exile as he was at writing, so his exiles rarely lasted long.

Stalin’s Rise to Power

Stalin’s mentor, Lenin, eventually became the head of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and later the Soviet Union, and it was Lenin who appointed Stalin as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922—the same post that Gorbachev would hold decades later. Although Stalin and Lenin began as allies, as Stalin grew in power, Lenin began to disagree with him, and their relationship began to falter, with Lenin eventually declaring that Stalin should be removed as general secretary. By then, though, Lenin was in poor health, and the situation was out of his control.

When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin was one of a number of powerful men in the Politburo. In the following years, Stalin systematically removed all of his internal enemies and opponents—some were fired, some were imprisoned, and some were executed. As head of the Soviet Union, Stalin was well known for using the secret police and intelligence agencies to carry out his own agenda (such as assassinating Leon Trotsky, fellow member of the Politburo with whom Stalin had numerous political disagreements) and to maintain a strong Communist Party and tight control over the media and over Soviet citizens.

Stalin was also known for his extremely healthy ego. He elevated himself to almost godlike status, even going so far as to essentially rewrite history to reflect a strongly pro-Stalin Soviet history. He was militant about censoring the media so that Soviet citizens only had access to pro–Soviet Union and pro-Stalin news and information. Anyone who dared speak against Stalin, Communism, or the Soviet Union would be exiled, sentenced to a gulag, or executed.

Part of Stalin’s rewriting of Soviet history was designed to cover up some of his most heinous acts, such as the ethnic purges he conducted. In the late 1930s, hundreds of thousands of non-native people in the Soviet Union were arrested, with many of them executed. These ethnicities included Polish, German, Korean, and American people in the Soviet Union, among other ethnicities. Most of these people were ordinary citizens—they were not officials in the Soviet government who would have been a political threat to Stalin. They simply didn’t fit Stalin’s view of the populace of the Soviet Union. Of the people, Stalin reportedly said, “Who’s going to remember all this riff- raff in ten or twenty years’ time? No one.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.