Iosif Vissarionovici Stalin

Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin 1

Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin

Joseph Stalin (Russian)

(Georgian)

Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943.

General secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

In office3 April 1922 16 October 1952

Preceded by Vyacheslav Molotov(as Responsible Secretary)

Succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev(office reestablished)

Chairman of the Council of Ministers

In office6 May 1941 5 March 1953

FirstDeputies Nikolai VoznesenskyVyacheslav Molotov

Preceded by Vyacheslav Molotov

Succeeded by Georgy Malenkov

People's Commissar for Defense of the Soviet Union

In office19 July 1941 25 February 1946

Premier Himself

Preceded by Semyon Timoshenko

Succeeded by Nikolai Bulganinafter vacancy

Member of the Secretariat


In office3 April 1922 5 March 1953

Full member of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th Presidium

In office8 March 1919 5 March 1953

Member of the Orgburo

In office16 January 1919 5 March 1953

Personal details

Born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jugashvili18 December 1878Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire

Died 5 March 1953 (aged74)Kuntsevo Dacha, Kuntsevo, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union

Resting place Lenin's Mausoleum, Moscow (9 March 1953 31 October 1961)Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow (from 31 October 1961)

Nationality Georgian

Political party Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Spouse(s) Ekaterina Svanidze (19061907)Nadezhda Alliluyeva (19191932)

Children Yakov Dzhugashvili, Vasily Dzhugashvili, Svetlana Alliluyeva

Religion None (atheist), formerly Georgian Orthodox

Signature

Military service

Allegiance Soviet Union

Service/branch Soviet Armed Forces

Years of service 19431953

Rank Marshal of the Soviet Union (19431945)Generalissimus of the Soviet Union (19451953)

Commands All (supreme commander)

Battles/wars World War II

Awards

Joseph Stalin or Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: , pronounced[josfvsronvt staln]; born Ioseb Besarionis Dze Jugashvili, Georgian: ,pronounced[isb bsarinis dze duavili]; 18 December 1878 5 March 1953), was the leader of the Soviet Unionfrom the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was appointed general secretary of the party's Central Committee in 1922. He subsequently managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin through suppressing Lenin's criticisms (in the postscript of his testament) and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. By the late 1920s, he was the


unchallenged leader of the Soviet Union. He remained general secretary until the post was abolished in 1952,concurrently serving as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 onward.Under Stalin's rule, the concept of "socialism in one country" became a central tenet of Soviet society. He replacedthe New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin in the early 1920s with a highly centralised command economy,launching a period of industrialization and collectivization that resulted in the rapid transformation of the USSRfrom an agrarian society into an industrial power. However, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonmentof millions of people in correctional labour camps and the deportation of many others to remote areas. The initialupheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 19321933,known as the Holodomor in Ukraine. Later, in a period that lasted from 1936 to 1939, Stalin instituted a campaignagainst alleged enemies within his regime, called the Great Purge, in which hundreds of thousands were executed.Major figures in the Communist Party, such as the old Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky, and several Red Army leaders,were killed after being convicted of plotting to overthrow the government and Stalin.[1]

In August 1939, Stalin entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that divided their influence andterritory within Eastern Europe, resulting in their invasion of Poland in September of that year, but Germany laterviolated the agreement and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human andterritorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow andStalingrad. After defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945,effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies.[2] The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of tworecognized world superpowers, the other being the United States. The Yalta and Potsdam conferences establishedcommunist governments loyal to the Soviet Union in the Eastern Bloc countries as buffer states, which Stalindeemed necessary in case of another invasion. He also fostered close relations with Mao Zedong in China and KimIl-sung in North Korea.Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with theWestern world that would later be known as the Cold War. During this period, the USSR became the second countryin the world to successfully develop a nuclear weapon, as well as launching the Great Plan for the Transformation ofNature in response to another widespread famine and the Great Construction Projects of Communism. In the yearsfollowing his death, Stalin and his regime have been condemned on numerous occasions, most notably in 1956 whenhis successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced his legacy and initiated a process of de-Stalinization. He remains acontroversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant[3] similar to his wartime enemy Adolf Hitler;however, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed.[4][5][6]

Early life


Ioseb aged 15 (left) and 23 (right)Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (Georgian: ) on 18 December1878 in the town of Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Georgia). His mother was KetevanGeladze. His father Besarion Jughashvili worked as a cobbler.As a child, Ioseb was plagued with numerous health issues. He was born with two adjoined toes on his left foot. Hisface was permanently scarred by smallpox at the age of 7. At age 12, he injured his left arm in an accident involvinga horse-drawn carriage, rendering it shorter and stiffer than its counterpart.Ioseb's father slid into alcoholism, which made him abusive to his family and caused his business to fail. WhenIoseb's mother enrolled him into an Orthodox priesthood school against her husband's wishes, his enraged fatherwent on a drunken rampage. He was banished from Gori for assaulting its police chief. He subsequently moved toTiflis (Tbilisi), leaving his family behind.When Stalin was sixteen, he received a scholarship to attend the Georgian Orthodox Tiflis Spiritual Seminary inTbilisi. Although his performance had been good, he was expelled in 1899 after missing his final exams. Theseminary's records also suggest that he was unable to pay his tuition fees.[7] Around this time, Stalin discovered thewritings of Vladimir Lenin and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, a Marxist group.Out of school, Stalin briefly worked as a part-time clerk in a meteorological office, but after a state crackdown onrevolutionaries, he went underground and became a full-time revolutionary, living off donations.When Lenin formed the Bolsheviks, Stalin eagerly joined up with him. Stalin proved to be a very effective organizerof men as well as a capable intellectual. Among other activities, he distributed propaganda, provoked strikes, stagedbank robberies, and ordered assassinations. In 1907 Stalin made use of his reputation as a poet to stage the 1907Tiflis bank robbery. He used a former school friend who was also a fan of his poetry as the inside man for a bankrobbery that left 40 dead and stole millions of roubles for Lenin. This demonstrated to Lenin his need for Stalin.Stalin was arrested and exiled to Siberia numerous times, but often escaped. His skill and charm won him the respectof Lenin, and he rose rapidly through the ranks of the Bolsheviks. [citation needed]

Stalin married his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, in 1906, who bore him a son. She died the following year of typhus.In 1911, he met his future second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, during one of his many exiles in Siberia.

Revolution, Civil War, and Polish-Soviet War

Role during the Russian Revolution of 1917

Prior to the revolution of 1917, Stalin played anactive role in fighting the Russian government.Here he is shown on a 1911 information cardfrom the files of the Russian police in Saint

Petersburg.[8]

After returning to Petrograd from his final exile, Stalin oustedVyacheslav Molotov and Alexander Shlyapnikov as editors of Pravda.He then took a position in favor of supporting Alexander Kerensky'sprovisional government. However, after Lenin prevailed at the April1917 Communist Party conference, Stalin and Pravda shifted toopposing the provisional government. At this conference, Stalin waselected to the Bolshevik Central Committee. In October 1917, theBolshevik Central Committee voted in favor of an insurrection. On 7November, from the Smolny Institute, Trotsky, Lenin and the rest ofthe Central Committee coordinated the insurrection against Kerenskyin the 1917 October Revolution. By 8 November, the Bolsheviks hadstormed the Winter Palace and Kerensky's Cabinet had been arrested.


Role in the Russian Civil War, 19171919

A group of participants in the 8th Congress of theRussian Communist Party, 1919. In the middle

are Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin.

Upon seizing Petrograd, Stalin was appointed People's Commissar forNationalities' Affairs. Thereafter, civil war broke out in Russia, pittingLenin's Red Army against the White Army, a loose alliance ofanti-Bolshevik forces. Lenin formed a five-member Politburo, whichincluded Stalin and Trotsky. In May 1918, Lenin dispatched Stalin tothe city of Tsaritsyn. Through his new allies, Kliment Voroshilov andSemyon Budyonny, Stalin imposed his influence on the military.[citationneeded]

Stalin challenged many of the decisions of Trotsky, ordered the killingsof many counter-revolutionaries and former Tsarist officers in the RedArmy[citation needed] and burned villages in order to intimidate thepeasantry into submission and discourage bandit raids on foodshipments.[citation needed] In May 1919, in order to stem mass desertions on the Western front, Stalin had desertersand renegades publicly executed as traitors.[9]

Role in the Polish-Soviet War, 19191921After the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, the Soviet Russia started the push towards a world revolution.It was part of the communist ideology to transform the whole world into socialist states. (Tukhachevsky: "There canbe no doubt that if we had been victorious on the Vistula (i.e. in Poland), the revolutionary fires would have reachedthe entire continent."[10]). As a natural direction was toward Western Europe, the bolsheviks had to conquer a newlyreborn independent state of Poland. That was the beginning of what became known as the PolishSoviet War. Afterinitial successes of Polish Army, the Bolsheviks pushed them back into central Poland. As the people's commisair tohigh command of the southern front, Stalin was determined to take the then Polish city of Lww (now Lviv inUkraine). This conflicted with the general strategy set by Lenin and Trotsky, which focused on the capture ofWarsaw further north.Tukhachevsky's forces engaged those of Polish commanders Jzef Pisudski and Wadysaw Sikorski at the pivotalBattle of Warsaw, but Stalin refused to redirect his troops from Lww to help. Consequently, the four invadingarmies of Soviet Russia fighting for the Polish capital were totally routed by Poles, and the battles for both Lwwand Warsaw were lost, and Stalin was blamed. In August 1920, Stalin returned to Moscow, where he defendedhimself and resigned his military command. At the Ninth Party Conference on 22 September, Trotsky openlycriticized Stalin's behavior.

Rise to powerStalin played a decisive role in engineering the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia, following which he adoptedparticularly hardline, centralist policies towards Soviet Georgia. This led to the Georgian Affair of 1922 and otherrepressions. Stalin's actions in Georgia created a rift with Lenin, who believed that all the Soviet states should standequal.Lenin nonetheless considered Stalin to be a loyal ally, and when he got mired in squabbles with Trotsky and otherpoliticians, he decided to give Stalin more power. With the help of Lev Kamenev, Lenin had Stalin appointedGeneral Secretary in 1922.[11] This post enabled Stalin to appoint many of his allies to government positions.Lenin suffered a stroke in 1922, forcing him into semi-retirement in Gorki. Stalin visited him often, acting as his intermediary with the outside world, but the pair quarreled and their relationship deteriorated. Lenin dictated increasingly disparaging notes on Stalin in what would become his testament. He criticized Stalin's political views, rude manners, and excessive power and ambition, and suggested that Stalin should be removed from the position of


general secretary. During Lenin's semi-retirement, Stalin forged an alliance with Kamenev and Grigory Zinovievagainst Trotsky. These allies prevented Lenin's Testament from being revealed to the Twelfth Party Congress inApril 1923 (after Lenin's death the testament was read to selected groups of deputies to the Thirteenth PartyCongress in May 1924 but it was forbidden to be mentioned at the plenary assemblies or any documents of theCongress ).Lenin died of a heart attack on 21 January 1924. Following Lenin's death, a power struggle began, which involvedthe following seven Politburo members:[12] Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Joseph Stalin, MikhailTomsky, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev.Again, Kamenev and Zinoviev helped to keep Lenin's Testament from going public. Thereafter, Stalin's disputeswith Kamenev and Zinoviev intensified. Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev grew increasingly isolated, and wereeventually ejected from the Central Committee and then from the Party itself. Kamenev and Zinoviev were laterreadmitted, but Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union.The Northern Expedition in China became a point of contention over foreign policy by Stalin and Trotsky. Stalinwanted the Communist Party of China to ally itself with the Nationalist Kuomintang, rather than attempt toimplement a communist revolution. Trotsky urged the party to oppose the Kuomintang and launch a full-scalerevolution. Stalin funded the KMT during the expedition. Stalin countered Trotsky's criticisms by making a secretspeech in which he said that the Kuomintang were the only ones capable of defeating the imperialists, that ChiangKai-shek had funding from the rich merchants, and that his forces were to be utilized until squeezed for allusefulness like a lemon before being discarded. However, Chiang quickly reversed the tables in the Shanghaimassacre of 1927 by massacring the membership of the Communist party in Shanghai midway through the NorthernExpedition.Stalin pushed for more rapid industrialization and central control of the economy, contravening Lenin's NewEconomic Policy (NEP). At the end of 1927, a critical shortfall in grain supplies prompted Stalin to push for thecollectivisation of agriculture and order the seizure of grain hoards from kulak farmers. Nikolai Bukharin andPremier Alexey Rykov opposed these policies and advocated a return to the NEP, but the rest of the Politburo sidedwith Stalin and removed Bukharin from the Politburo in November 1929. Rykov was fired the following year andwas replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov on Stalin's recommendation.In December 1934, the popular Communist Party boss in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov, was murdered. Stalin blamedKirov's murder on a vast conspiracy of saboteurs and Trotskyites. He launched a massive purge against these internalenemies, putting them on rigged show trials and then having them executed or imprisoned in Siberian Gulags.Among these victims were old enemies, including Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Stalin made the loyalNikolai Yezhov head of the secret police, the NKVD, and had him purge the NKVD of veteran Bolsheviks. With noserious opponents left in power, Stalin ended the purges in 1938. Yezhov was held to blame for the excesses of theGreat Terror. He was dismissed from office and later executed.

Changes to Soviet society, 19271939

Bolstering Soviet secret service and intelligence


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Stalin vastly increased the scope and power of the state's secret police and intelligence agencies. Under his guidinghand, Soviet intelligence forces began to set up intelligence networks in most of the major nations of the world,including Germany (the famous Rote Kappelle spy ring), Great Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Stalinmade considerable use of the Communist International movement in order to infiltrate agents and to ensure thatforeign Communist parties remained pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin.One of the best examples of Stalin's ability to integrate secret police and foreign espionage came in 1940, when hegave approval to the secret police to have Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico.[15]

Cult of personalityStalin created a cult of personality in the Soviet Union around both himself and Lenin. Many personality cults in history have been frequently measured and compared to his. Numerous towns, villages and cities were renamed after the Soviet leader (see List of places named after Stalin) and the Stalin Prize and Stalin Peace Prize were named in his honor. He accepted grandiloquent titles (e.g., "Coryphaeus of Science," "Father of Nations," "Brilliant Genius of Humanity," "Great Architect of Communism," "Gardener of Human Happiness," and others), and helped rewrite


Soviet history to provide himself a more significant role in the revolution of 1917. At the same time, according toNikita Khrushchev, he insisted that he be remembered for "the extraordinary modesty characteristic of truly greatpeople."[16] Statues of Stalin depict him at a height and build approximating the very tall Tsar Alexander III, whilephotographic evidence suggests he was between 5ft 5in and 5ft 6in (165168cm).[17]

Trotsky criticized the cult of personality built around Stalin. It reached new levels during World War II, with Stalin'sname included in the new Soviet national anthem. Stalin became the focus of literature, poetry, music, paintings andfilm that exhibited fawning devotion. He was sometimes credited with almost god-like qualities, including thesuggestion that he single-handedly won the Second World War. The degree to which Stalin himself relished the cultsurrounding him is debatable. The Finnish communist Arvo Tuominen records a sarcastic toast proposed by Stalin ata New Year Party in 1935 in which he said "Comrades! I want to propose a toast to our Patriarch, life and sun,liberator of nations, architect of socialism [he rattled off all the appellations applied to him in those days] JosefVissarionovich Stalin, and I hope this is the first and last speech made to that genius this evening."In a 1956 speech, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of personality with these words: "It is impermissibleand foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessingsupernatural characteristics akin to those of a god."[citation needed]

Purges and deportations

Purges and executions

Left: Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Sovietauthorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities"Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "" (support).Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Stalin


Stalin, as head of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, consolidatednear-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that was justified as an attempt to expel"opportunists" and "counter-revolutionary infiltrators".[18][19] Those targeted by the purge were often expelled fromthe party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps to execution after trialsheld by NKVD troikas.[20][21]

In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad partyboss Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirovreceived only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received at least over a hundred negativevotes.[22][23] After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailedscheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev.[24] Theinvestigations and trials expanded.[25] Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts" that wereto be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys or appeals, followed by asentence to be executed "quickly."[26]

Thereafter, several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout thecountry. Article 58 of the legal code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as counterrevolutionary crime,was applied in the broadest manner.[27] The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "enemy of thepeople", starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation,if not death. The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of threesubordinated to NKVD -NKVD troika- with sentencing carried out within 24 hours.[26] Stalin's hand-pickedexecutioner, Vasili Blokhin, was entrusted with carrying out some of the high profile executions in this period.[28]

Nikolai Yezhov, walking with Stalin in the top photo from the 1930s, was killed in 1940. Following his execution,Yezhov was edited out of the photo by Soviet censors. Such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin'srule.Many military leaders were convicted of treason and a large-scale purge of Red Army officers followed.[29] Therepression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a"river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin.[30] In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated inMexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937; this eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among theformer Party leadership.[31]

With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Joseph Stalin himself, all of the membersof Lenin's original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities) such as Poles, ethnic Germans, Koreans, etc. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed. Many Americans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union during the worst of the Great Depression were


executed; others were sent to prison camps or gulags.[32][33] Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewritethe history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removedfrom the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed toa story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.In light of revelations from Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and328,612 in 1938) were executed in the course of the terror, with the great mass of victims merely "ordinary" Sovietcitizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, beggars.[34]

Many of the executed were interred in mass graves, with some of the major killing and burial sites being Bykivnia,Kurapaty and Butovo.[35]

Some Western experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete orunreliable.[36][37][38]

Stalin personally signed 357 proscription lists in 1937 and 1938 that condemned to execution some 40,000 people,and about 90% of these are confirmed to have been shot. At the time, while reviewing one such list, Stalin reportedlymuttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one.Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one."[39] In addition, Stalin dispatcheda contingent of NKVD operatives to Mongolia, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika, and unleasheda bloody purge in which tens of thousands were executed as "Japanese Spies." Mongolian ruler KhorloogiinChoibalsan closely followed Stalin's lead.[40]

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet leadership sent NKVD squads into other countries to murder defectors andother opponents of the Soviet regime. Victims of such plots included Yevhen Konovalets, Ignace Poretsky, RudolfKlement, Alexander Kutepov, Evgeny Miller, Leon Trotsky and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM)leadership in Catalonia (e.g., Andreu Nin).

Deportations

1941 June deportation in Latvia

Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalinconducted a series of deportations on a huge scale that profoundlyaffected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is estimated thatbetween 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3million[41][42] were deported toSiberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates up to 43%of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.

Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with theinvading Germans were cited as the official reasons for thedeportations, rightly or wrongly. Individual circumstances of thosespending time in German-occupied territories were not examined.After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus, the entire population of five of the small highland peoples and theCrimean Tatars more than a million people in total were deported without notice or any opportunity to take theirpossessions.[43]

As a result of Stalin's lack of trust in the loyalty of particular ethnicities, ethnic groups such as the Soviet Koreans,the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, and many Poles were forcibly moved out of strategic areasand relocated to places in the central Soviet Union, especially Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia. By some estimates,hundreds of thousands of deportees may have died en route.[41]

According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953,with a further 7 to 8million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including the entirenationalities in several cases).


In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninism, and reversed most ofthem, although it was not until 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhetians and Volga Germans were allowed to return enmasse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memoryof the deportations has played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic States, Tatarstan and Chechnya,even today.

Collectivization

Children are digging up frozen potatoes in thefield of a collective farm, 1933

Stalin's regime moved to force collectivization of agriculture. This wasintended to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanizedfarms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, and tomake tax collection more efficient. Collectivization brought socialchange on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861 andalienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivizationalso meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and itfaced violent reaction among the peasantry.

In the first years of collectivization it was estimated that industrialproduction would rise by 200% and agricultural production by 50%,but these expectations were not realized. Stalin blamed thisunanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. However, kulaks proper made up only4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the slightly better-off peasants who took thebrunt of violence from the OGPU and the Komsomol. These peasants were about 60% of the population. Thoseofficially defined as "kulaks", "kulak helpers", and, later, "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag laborcamps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge. Archival data indicates that 20,201people were executed during 1930, the year of Dekulakization.

The two-stage progress of collectivizationinterrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorials, "Dizzy withSuccess"[44] and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades"[45]is a prime example of his capacity for tactical politicalwithdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.


Famines

Famine in USSR, 1933. Areas of most disastrousfamine marked with black.

Passers-by no longer pay attention to the corpsesof starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933.

Famine affected Ukraine, southern Russia and other parts of the USSR.The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimatedat between 5 and 10 million people.[46] The worst crop failure of latetsarist Russia, in 1892, had caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths. Mostmodern scholars agree that the famine was caused by the policies ofthe government of the Soviet Union under Stalin, rather than by naturalreasons. According to Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop wasno worse than that of 1931... it was not a crop failure but the excessivedemands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as manyas five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release largegrain reserves that could have alleviated the famine, while continuingto export grain; he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants hadhidden grain away and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farmtheft laws in response.[47] Other historians hold it was largely theinsufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of naturaldisasters that resulted in famine, with the successful harvest of 1933ending the famine. Soviet and other historians have argued that therapid collectivization of agriculture was necessary in order to achievean equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimatelywin World War II. Alec Nove claims that the Soviet Unionindustrialized in spite of, rather than because of, its collectivizedagriculture.[citation needed]

The USSR also experienced a major famine in 1947 as a result of wardamage and severe droughts, but economist Michael Ellman arguesthat it could have been prevented if the government had notmismanaged its grain reserves. The famine cost an estimated 1 to1.5million lives as well as secondary population losses due to reducedfertility.[48]

Ukrainian famine

The Holodomor famine is sometimes referred to as the Ukrainian Genocide, implying it was engineered by theSoviet government, specifically targeting the Ukrainian people to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a political factorand social entity. While historians continue to disagree whether the policies that led to Holodomor fall under thelegal definition of genocide, twenty-six countries have officially recognized the Holodomor as such. On 28November 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament approved a bill declaring the Soviet-era forced famine an act of genocideagainst the Ukrainian people. Professor Michael Ellman concludes that Ukrainians were victims of genocide in193233 according to a more relaxed definition that is favored by some specialists in the field of genocide studies.He asserts that Soviet policies greatly exacerbated the famine's death toll. Although 1.8million tonnes of grain wereexported during the height of the starvationenough to feed 5 million people for one year-the use of torture andexecution to extract grain under the Law of Spikelets, the use of force to prevent starving peasants from fleeing theworst-affected areas, and the refusal to import grain or secure international humanitarian aid to alleviate conditionsled to incalculable human suffering in the Ukraine. It would appear that Stalin intended to use the starvation as acheap and efficient means (as opposed to deportations and shootings) to kill off those deemed to be


"counterrevolutionaries," "idlers," and "thieves," but not to annihilate the Ukrainian peasantry as a whole. Ellmanalso claims that, while this was not the only Soviet genocide (e.g., the Polish operation of the NKVD), it was theworst in terms of mass casualties.Current estimates on the total number of casualties within Soviet Ukraine range mostly from 2.2million[49][50] to 4to 5 million.[51][52]

A Ukrainian court found Josef Stalin, Lazar Kaganovich, Stanislav Kosior and other leaders of the former SovietUnion guilty of genocide by "organizing mass famine in Ukraine in 19321933" in January 2010. However, thecourt "dropped criminal proceedings over the suspects' deaths".[53][54]

IndustrializationThe Russian Civil War and wartime communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial outputin 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree ofmarket flexibility within the context of socialism. Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrallyordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crashindustrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

Stalin on building of Moscow-Volga canal. It wasconstructed from 1932 to 1937 by Gulag

prisoners.

With seed capital unavailable because of international reaction toCommunist policies, little international trade, and virtually no moderninfrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization both byrestraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens toensure that capital went for re-investment into industry and by ruthlessextraction of wealth from the kulaks.

In 1933 workers' real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926level.[citation needed] Common and political prisoners in labor campswere forced to perform unpaid labor, and communists and Komsomolmembers were frequently "mobilized" for various constructionprojects. The Soviet Union used numerous foreign experts to designnew factories, supervise construction, instruct workers, and improve manufacturing processes. The most notableforeign contractor was Albert Kahn's firm that designed and built 521 factories between 1930 and 1932. As a rule,factories were supplied with imported equipment.

In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a verylow economic base. While it is generally agreed that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economicgrowth under Stalin, the precise rate of growth is disputed. It is not disputed, however, that these gains wereaccomplished at the cost of millions of lives. Official Soviet estimates stated the annual rate of growth at 13.9%;Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that Sovietgrowth became temporarily much higher after Stalin's death.According to Robert Lewis, the Five-Year Plan substantially helped to modernize the previously backward Sovieteconomy. New products were developed, and the scale and efficiency of existing production greatly increased. Someinnovations were based on indigenous technical developments, others on imported foreign technology. Despite itscosts, the industrialization effort allowed the Soviet Union to fight, and ultimately win, World War II.


ScienceScience in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control by Stalin and his government, along with art andliterature. There was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education systemand state-financed research. However, the most notable legacy during Stalin's time was his public endorsement of theagronomist Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian genetics as "bourgeois pseudoscience" and instead advocatedLamarckian inheritance and hybridization theories (which had been discredited by most Western countries by the1920s in favor of Darwinian Evolution), that caused widespread agricultural destruction and major setbacks in Sovietknowledge in biology. Many scientists came out publicly against his views, but the majority of them, includingNikolai Vavilov (who was later hailed as a pioneer in modern Genetics), were imprisoned or executed. Some areasof physics were criticized.[55][56]

Social servicesUnder the Soviet government people benefited from some social liberalization. Girls were given an adequate, equaleducation and women had equal rights in employment, improving lives for women and families. Stalinistdevelopment also contributed to advances in health care, which significantly increased the lifespan and quality of lifeof the typical Soviet citizen. Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people universal access to healthcare and education,effectively creating the first generation free from the fear of typhus, cholera, and malaria. The occurrences of thesediseases dropped to record low numbers, increasing life spans by decades.Soviet women under Stalin were the first generation of women able to give birth in the safety of a hospital withaccess to prenatal care. Education was also an example of an increase in the standard of living after economicdevelopment. The generation born during Stalin's rule was the first near-universally literate generation. Millionsbenefited from mass literacy campaigns in the 1930s, and from workers training schemes.[57] Engineers were sentabroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract.Transport links were improved and many new railways built. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovites,received many incentives for their work; they could afford to buy the goods that were mass-produced by the rapidlyexpanding Soviet economy.The increase in demand due to industrialization and the decrease in the workforce due to World War II andrepressions generated a major expansion in job opportunities for the survivors, especially for women.

Culture

Propaganda portrait of "Marshal Stalin", WorldWar II

Although he was Georgian by birth, some western historians claim thatStalin became a Russian nationalist and significantly promoted Russianhistory, language, and Russian national heroes, particularly during the1930s and 1940s.[citation needed] There are also claims that he held theRussian people up as the elder brothers of the non-Russian minorities.

During Stalin's reign the official and long-lived style of SocialistRealism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama andliterature. Previously fashionable "revolutionary" expressionism,abstract art, and avant-garde experimentation were discouraged ordenounced as "formalism".

The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general, and in specificinstances, has been the subject of discussion.[citation needed] Stalin'sfavorite novel Pharaoh, shared similarities[citation needed] with Sergei Eisenstein's film, Ivan the Terrible, producedunder Stalin's tutelage.


In architecture, a Stalinist Empire Style (basically, updated neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by theSeven Sisters of Moscow) replaced the constructivism of the 1920s. Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect onindigenous cultures within the Soviet Union, though the politics of Korenizatsiya and forced development werepossibly beneficial to the integration of later generations of indigenous cultures.

Religion

Photograph taken of the 1931 demolition of theCathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.

Raised in the Georgian Orthodox faith, Stalin became an atheist. Hefollowed the position that religion was an opiate that needed to beremoved in order to construct the ideal communist society. Hisgovernment promoted atheism through special atheistic education inschools, anti-religious propaganda, the antireligious work of publicinstitutions (Society of the Godless), discriminatory laws, and a terrorcampaign against religious believers. By the late 1930s it had becomedangerous to be publicly associated with religion.[58]

Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church iscomplex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in itsnear-extinction as a public institution: by 1939, active parishesnumbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousandsof priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 19371938.During World War II, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, and thousands of parishes werereactivated until a further round of suppression during Khrushchev's rule. The Russian Orthodox Church Synod'srecognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox ChurchOutside Russia.

Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects were outlawed and persecuted. Many religions popular inethnic regions of the Soviet Union, including the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Catholic Churches, Baptists,Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism underwent ordeals similar to that which the Orthodox churches in other parts of thecountry suffered: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples,sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed. Stalin had a different policy outside theSoviet Union; he supported the Communist Uyghur Muslim separatists under Ehmetjan Qasim in the Ili Rebellionagainst the Anti Communist Republic of China regime. He supplied weapons to the Uyghur Ili army and Red Armysupport against Chinese forces, and helped them establish the Second East Turkestan Republic of which Islam wasthe official state religion.

TheoristStalin and his supporters have highlighted the notion that socialism can be built and consolidated by a country("Socialism in One Country") as underdeveloped as Russia during the 1920s. Indeed this might be the only means inwhich it could be built in a hostile environment.[59] In 1933, Stalin put forward the theory of aggravation of the classstruggle along with the development of socialism, arguing that the further the country would move forward, the moreacute forms of struggle will be used by the doomed remnants of exploiter classes in their last desperate efforts andthat, therefore, political repression was necessary.In 1936, Stalin announced that the society of the Soviet Union consisted of two non-antagonistic classes: workersand kolkhoz peasantry. These corresponded to the two different forms of property over the means of production thatexisted in the Soviet Union: state property (for the workers) and collective property (for the peasantry). In addition tothese, Stalin distinguished the stratum of intelligentsia. The concept of "non-antagonistic classes" was entirely newto Leninist theory. Among Stalin's contributions to Communist theoretical literature were "Dialectical and HistoricalMaterialism," "Marxism and the National Question", "Trotskyism or Leninism", and "The Principles of Leninism."


Calculating the number of victimsBefore the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, researchers who attempted to count the number of people killedunder Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million.[60] After the Soviet Union dissolved,evidence from the Soviet archives also became available, containing official records of 799,455 executions192153,[61] around 1.7million deaths in the Gulag and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement with a total of about 2.9 million officially recorded victims in these categories.

Photo from 1943 exhumation of mass grave ofPolish officers killed by NKVD in Katy Forest

in 1940.

The official Soviet archival records do not contain comprehensivefigures for some categories of victims, such as those of ethnicdeportations or of German population transfers in the aftermath ofWorld War II.[62] Eric D. Weitz wrote, "By 1948, according to NicolasWerth, the mortality rate of the 600,000 people deported from theCaucasus between 1943 and 1944 had reached 25%."[63][64] Othernotable exclusions from NKVD data on repression deaths include theKatyn massacre, other killings in the newly occupied areas, and themass shootings of Red Army personnel (deserters and so-calleddeserters) in 1941. The Soviets executed 158,000 soldiers for desertionduring the war,[65] and the "blocking detachments" of the NKVD shotthousands more.[66] Also, the official statistics on Gulag mortalityexclude deaths of prisoners taking place shortly after their release butwhich resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps. Some historians also believe that the official archival figuresof the categories that were recorded by Soviet authorities are unreliable and incomplete.[67][68] In addition to failuresregarding comprehensive recordings, as one additional example, Robert Gellately and Simon Sebag Montefioreargue that the many suspects beaten and tortured to death while in "investigative custody" were likely not to havebeen counted amongst the executed.[69]

Historians working after the Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4million to nearly 10million, not including those who died in famines. Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example,makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7million out of 7.5milliondeported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million a total of about 9million victims of repression.Some have also included the deaths of 6 to 8 million people in the 19321933 famine among the victims of Stalin'srepression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was adeliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others,[70][71][72] or simply an unintendedconsequence of the struggle over forced collectivization.[73][74]

Accordingly, if famine victims are included, a minimum of around 10 million deaths6million from famine and4million from other causesare attributable to the regime, with a number of recent historians suggesting a likelytotal of around 20 million, citing much higher victim totals from executions, Gulag camps, deportations and othercauses.[75][76][77][78][79] Adding 68million famine victims to Erlikman's estimates above, for example, would yielda total of between 15 and 17 million victims. Researcher Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his originalestimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20million.[80] In his most recent edition of The Great Terror (2007),Conquest states that while exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, the various terror campaignslaunched by the Soviet government claimed no fewer than 15 million lives.[81] RJ Rummel maintains that the earlierhigher victim total estimates are correct, although he includes those killed by the Soviet government in other EasternEuropean countries as well.[82][83]


World War II, 19391945

Ribbentrop and Stalin at the signing of the Pact

Pact with Hitler

After a failed attempt to sign an anti-German military alliance withFrance and Britain[84][85][86] and talks with Germany regarding apotential political deal,[87][88][89][90] on 23 August 1939, the SovietUnion entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany,negotiated by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov andGerman foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.[91] Officially anon-aggression treaty only, an appended secret protocol, also reachedon 23 August 1939, divided the whole of eastern Europe into Germanand Soviet spheres of influence.[92][93]

The eastern part of Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and part ofRomania were recognized as parts of the Soviet sphere of influence,with Lithuania added in a second secret protocol in September1939.[94] Stalin and Ribbentrop traded toasts on the night of thesigning discussing past hostilities between the countries.[95]

Implementing the division of Eastern Europe and otherinvasions

On 1 September 1939, the German invasion of its agreed upon portion of Poland started World War II.[91] On 17September the Red Army invaded eastern Poland and occupied the Polish territory assigned to it by theMolotov-Ribbentrop Pact, followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland.[96] Eleven days later, the secretprotocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was modified, allotting Germany a larger part of Poland, while ceding mostof Lithuania to the Soviet Union.[97]

Planned and actual territorial changes in Easternand Central Europe 19391940 (click to enlarge)

After Stalin declared that he was going to "solve the Baltic problem",by June 1940, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were merged into theSoviet Union, after repressions and actions therein brought about thedeaths of over 160,000 citizens of these states.[98][99][100] After facingstiff resistance in an invasion of Finland,[101] an interim peace wasentered, granting the Soviet Union the eastern region of Karelia (10%of Finnish territory).

After this campaign, Stalin took actions to bolster the Soviet military,modify training and improve propaganda efforts in the Sovietmilitary.[102] In June 1940, Stalin directed the Soviet annexation ofBessarabia and northern Bukovina, proclaiming this formerly

Romanian territory part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. But in annexing northern Bukovina, Stalin hadgone beyond the agreed limits of the secret protocol.[103]


Stalin and Molotov on the signing of theSovietJapanese Neutrality Pact with the Empire

of Japan, 1941

After the Tripartite Pact was signed by Axis Powers Germany, Japanand Italy, in October 1940, Stalin traded letters with Ribbentrop, withStalin writing about entering an agreement regarding a "permanentbasis" for their "mutual interests."[104] After a conference in Berlinbetween Hitler, Molotov and Ribbentrop, Germany presented Molotovwith a proposed written agreement for Axis entry.[105] On 25November, Stalin responded with a proposed written agreement forAxis entry which was never answered by Germany. Shortly thereafter,Hitler issued a secret directive on the eventual attempts to invade theSoviet Union.[106] In an effort to demonstrate peaceful intentionstoward Germany, on 13 April 1941, Stalin oversaw the signing of aneutrality pact with Axis power Japan.[107]

On 6 May, Stalin replaced Molotov as Premier of the Soviet Union. Although Stalin had been the de facto head ofgovernment for a decade and a half, he had concluded relations with Nazi Germany had deteriorated to such anextent that he needed to deal with the problem as de jure head of government as well.[108]

Hitler breaks the pactDuring the early morning of 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler broke the pact by implementing Operation Barbarossa, theGerman invasion of Soviet held territories and the Soviet Union that began the war on the Eastern Front.[109] Alreadyin autumn 1940 Stalin received a warning of the Dutch Communist Party, via the network of the Red Orchestra, thatHitler was preparing for a winter war by letting construct thousands of snow landing gears for the Junkers Ju 52transport planes.[110] Although Stalin had received warnings from spies and his generals,[111][112][113] he felt thatGermany would not attack the Soviet Union until Germany had defeated Britain.[111] In the initial hours after theGerman attack commenced, Stalin hesitated, wanting to ensure that the German attack was sanctioned by Hitler,rather than the unauthorized action of a rogue general.Accounts by Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan claim that, after the invasion, Stalin retreated to his dacha indespair for several days and did not participate in leadership decisions.[114] However, some documentary evidence oforders given by Stalin contradicts these accounts, leading some historians to speculate that Khrushchev's account isinaccurate.[115] By the end of 1941, the Soviet military had suffered 4.3million casualties[116] and German forceshad advanced 1,050 miles (1,690 kilometers).[117]

Soviets stop the Germans

With all the men at the Front, Moscow womendig anti-tank trenches around Moscow in 1941.

While the Germans pressed forward, Stalin was confident of aneventual Allied victory over Germany. In September 1941, Stalin toldBritish diplomats that he wanted two agreements: (1) a mutualassistance/aid pact and (2) a recognition that, after the war, the SovietUnion would gain the territories in countries that it had taken pursuantto its division of Eastern Europe with Hitler in theMolotovRibbentrop Pact. The British agreed to assistance but refusedto agree upon the territorial gains, which Stalin accepted months lateras the military situation deteriorated somewhat in mid-1942.[118] ByDecember 1941, Hitler's troops had advanced to within 20 miles of theKremlin in Moscow. On 5 December, the Soviets launched acounteroffensive, pushing German troops back 4050 miles from Moscow, the Wehrmacht's first significant defeatof the war.[119]


In 1942, Hitler shifted his primary goal from an immediate victory in the East, to the more long-term goal ofsecuring the southern Soviet Union to conquer oil fields vital to a long-term German war effort.[120] In July 1942,Hitler praised the efficiency of the Soviet military industry and Stalin:

Stalin, too, must command our unconditional respect. In his own way he is a hell of a fellow! (German:ein genialer Kerl) He knows his models, Genghiz Khan and the others, very well, and the scope of hisindustrial planning is exceeded only by our own Four Year Plan.[121]

While Red Army generals saw evidence that Hitler would shift efforts south, Stalin considered this to be a flankingcampaign in efforts to take Moscow.[122] During the war, Time magazine named Stalin Time Person of the Yeartwice[123] and he was also one of the nominees for Time Person of the Century title.[citation needed]

Soviet push to Germany

The center of Stalingrad after liberation, 2February 1943.

The Soviets repulsed the important German strategic southerncampaign and, although 2.5million Soviet casualties were suffered inthat effort, it permitted the Soviets to take the offensive for most of therest of the war on the Eastern Front.[124]

The Big Three: Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D.Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister WinstonChurchill at the Tehran Conference, November

1943.

Germany attempted an encirclement attack at Kursk, which wassuccessfully repulsed by the Soviets.[125] Kursk marked the beginningof a period where Stalin became more willing to listen to the advice ofhis generals. By the end of 1943, the Soviets occupied half of theterritory taken by the Germans from 1941 to 1942.[126] Soviet militaryindustrial output also had increased substantially from late 1941 toearly 1943 after Stalin had moved factories well to the East of thefront, safe from German invasion and air attack.[127]

In November 1943, Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt inTehran.[128] The parties later agreed that Britain and America wouldlaunch a cross-channel invasion of France in May 1944, along with aseparate invasion of southern France.[129] Stalin insisted that, after thewar, the Soviet Union should incorporate the portions of Poland it

occupied pursuant to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, which Churchill opposed.[130]

In 1944, the Soviet Union made significant advances across Eastern Europe toward Germany,[131] includingOperation Bagration, a massive offensive in Belorussia against the German Army Group Centre.[132]


Final victory

Victorious Soviet soldiers in Berlin, 1945.

By April 1945, Nazi Germany faced its last days with 1.9millionGerman soldiers in the East fighting 6.4million Red Army soldierswhile 1 million German soldiers in the West battled 4million WesternAllied soldiers.[133] While initial talk existed of a race to Berlin by theAllies, after Stalin successfully lobbied for Eastern Germany to fallwithin the Soviet "sphere of influence" at Yalta, no plans were madeby the Western Allies to seize the city by a ground operation.[134][135]

On 30 April, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, after whichSoviet forces found their remains, which had been burned at Hitler'sdirective.[136] German forces surrendered a few days later. Despite the Soviets' possession of Hitler's remains, Stalindid not believe that his old nemesis was actually dead, a belief that remained for years after the war.[137][138]

Fending off the German invasion and pressing to victory in the East required a tremendous sacrifice by the SovietUnion.[139] Soviet military casualties totaled approximately 35 million (official figures 28.2million) withapproximately 14.7million killed, missing or captured (official figures 11.285million).[140] Although figures vary,the Soviet civilian death toll probably reached 20million. One in four Soviets was killed or wounded.[141] Some1,710 towns and 70,000 villages were destroyed.[142][143] Thereafter, Stalin was at times referred to as one of themost influential men in human history.[144]

Nobel Peace Prize nominationsIn 1945, he was mentioned by Halvdan Koht among seven candidates that were qualified for the Nobel Peace Prize.However, he did not explicitly nominate any of them. The person actually nominated was Cordell Hull.In 1948, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Wladislav Rieger.

Human rights abuses

Part of 5 March 1940 memo from Lavrentiy Beriato Stalin proposing execution of Polish officers

After taking around 300,000 Polish prisoners in 1939 and early1940,[145][146][147][148] 25,700 Polish POWs were executed on 5 March1940, pursuant to a note to Stalin from Lavrenty Beria,[149][150] in whatbecame known as the Katyn massacre.[151] While Stalin personally tolda Polish general they'd "lost track" of the officers inManchuria,[152][153][154] Polish railroad workers found the mass graveafter the 1941 Nazi invasion. The massacre became a source ofpolitical controversy,[155][156] with the Soviets eventually claiming thatGermany committed the executions when the Soviet Union retookPoland in 1944.[157] The Soviets did not admit responsibility until1990.[158]

Stalin introduced controversial military orders, such as Order No. 270in August 1941, requiring superiors to shoot deserters on the spot[159]

while their family members were subject to arrest. Thereafter, Stalinalso conducted a purge of several military commanders that were shotfor "cowardice" without a trial.[66] Stalin issued Order No. 227 in July1942, directing that commanders permitting retreat without permissionto be subject to a military tribunal, and soldiers guilty of disciplinary


procedures to be forced into "penal battalions", which were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front lines.[160]

From 1942 to 1945, 427,910 soldiers were assigned to penal battalions.[161] The order also directed "blockingdetachments" to shoot fleeing panicked troops at the rear.[160]

In June 1941, weeks after the German invasion began, Stalin also directed employing a scorched earth policy ofdestroying the infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize them, and that partisans wereto be set up in evacuated areas.[115] He also ordered the NKVD to murder around one hundred thousand politicalprisoners in areas where the Wehrmacht approached,[162] while others were deported east.[67][163]

After the capture of Berlin, Soviet troops reportedly raped from tens of thousands to two million women,[164] and50,000 during and after the occupation of Budapest.[165][166] Many of these women died or committed suicide as aresult of rape. In former Axis countries, such as Germany, Romania and Hungary, Red Army officers generallyviewed cities, villages and farms as being open to pillaging and looting.[167]

In the Soviet Occupation Zone of post-war Germany, the Soviets set up ten NKVD-run "special camps" subordinateto the gulag. These "special camps" were former Stalags, prisons, or Nazi concentration camps such asSachsenhausen (special camp number 7) and Buchenwald (special camp number 2).[168] According to Germangovernment estimates, "65,000 people died in those Soviet-run camps or in transportation to them."[169]

According to recent figures, of an estimated four million POWs taken by the Soviets, including Germans, Japanese,Hungarians, Romanians and others, some 580,000 never returned, presumably victims of privation or theGulags.[170] German estimates put the actual death toll of German POWs in the USSR at about 1.0 million, theymaintain that among those reported as missing were men who actually died as POW.[171] Soviet POWs and forcedlaborers who survived German captivity were sent to special "transit" or "filtration" camps to determine which werepotential traitors.[172]

Of the approximately 4 million to be repatriated 2,660,013 were civilians and 1,539,475 were former POWs. Of thetotal, 2,427,906 were sent home and 801,152 were reconscripted into the armed forces. 608,095 were enrolled in thework battalions of the defense ministry. 272,867 were transferred to the authority of the NKVD for punishment,which meant a transfer to the Gulag system.[172][173][174] 89,468 remained in the transit camps as reception personneluntil the repatriation process was finally wound up in the early 1950s.[172]

Allied conferences on post-war Europe

The Big Three: British Prime Minister WinstonChurchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt

and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, February1945.

Stalin met in several conferences with British Prime Minister WinstonChurchill (and later Clement Attlee) and/or U.S. President Franklin D.Roosevelt (and later Harry Truman) to plan military strategy and, later,to discuss Europe's postwar reorganization. Very early conferences,such as that with British diplomats in Moscow in 1941 and withChurchill and American diplomats in Moscow in 1942, focused mostlyupon war planning and supply, though some preliminary postwarreorganization discussion also occurred. In 1943, Stalin met withChurchill and Roosevelt in the Tehran Conference. In 1944, Stalin metwith Churchill in the Moscow Conference. Beginning in late 1944, theRed Army occupied much of Eastern Europe during these conferencesand the discussions shifted to a more intense focus on thereorganization of postwar Europe.

In February 1945, at the conference at Yalta, Stalin demanded a Soviet sphere of political influence in EasternEurope. Stalin eventually was convinced by Churchill and Roosevelt not to dismember Germany. Stalin also stated

that the Polish government-in-exile demands for self-rule were not negotiable, such that the Soviet Union would keep the territory of eastern Poland they had already taken by invasion with German consent in 1939, and wanted the


pro-Soviet Polish government installed. After resistance by Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin promised are-organization of the current Communist puppet government on a broader democratic basis in Poland.[175] He statedthe new government's primary task would be to prepare elections.[176]

The parties at Yalta further agreed that the countries of liberated Europe and former Axis satellites would be allowedto "create democratic institutions of their own choice", pursuant to "the right of all peoples to choose the form ofgovernment under which they will live."[177] The parties also agreed to help those countries form interimgovernments "pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections" and "facilitate where necessarythe holding of such elections." After the re-organization of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland,the parties agreed that the new party shall "be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon aspossible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot." One month after Yalta, the Soviet NKVD arrested 16Polish leaders wishing to participate in provisional government negotiations, for alleged "crimes" and "diversions",which drew protest from the West.[176] The fraudulent Polish elections, held in January 1947 resulted in Poland'sofficial transformation to undemocratic communist state by 1949.

British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, U.S.President Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at

the Potsdam Conference, July 1945.

At the Potsdam Conference from July to August 1945, thoughGermany had surrendered months earlier, instead of withdrawingSoviet forces from Eastern European countries, Stalin had not movedthose forces. At the beginning of the conference, Stalin repeatedprevious promises to Churchill that he would refrain from a"Sovietization" of Eastern Europe.[178] Stalin pushed for reparationsfrom Germany without regard to the base minimum supply for Germancitizens' survival, which worried Truman and Churchill who thoughtthat Germany would become a financial burden for Westernpowers.[179]

In addition to reparations, Stalin pushed for "war booty", which wouldpermit the Soviet Union to directly seize property from conquered

nations without quantitative or qualitative limitation, and a clause was added permitting this to occur with somelimitations.[179] By July 1945, Stalin's troops effectively controlled the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia,Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, and refugees were fleeing out of these countries fearing a Communist take-over.The western allies, and especially Churchill, were suspicious of the motives of Stalin, who had already installedcommunist governments in the central European countries under his influence.

In these conferences, his first appearances on the world stage, Stalin proved to be a formidable negotiator. AnthonyEden, the British Foreign Secretary noted: "Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all.Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had topick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and ofcourse he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated."


Post-war era, 19451953

The Iron Curtain and the Eastern BlocAfter Soviet forces remained in Eastern and Central European countries, with the beginnings of communist puppetregimes in those countries, Churchill referred to the region as being behind an "Iron Curtain" of control fromMoscow.[180][181] The countries under Soviet control in Eastern and Central Europe were sometimes called the"Eastern bloc" or "Soviet Bloc".

The Eastern Bloc until 1989

In Soviet-controlled East Germany, the major task of the rulingcommunist party in Germany was to channel Soviet orders down toboth the administrative apparatus and the other bloc parties pretendingthat these were initiatives of its own, with deviations potentiallyleading to reprimands, imprisonment, torture and even death. Propertyand industry were nationalized.[182]

The German Democratic Republic was declared on 7 October 1949,with a new constitution which enshrined socialism and gave theSoviet-controlled Socialist Unity Party (SED) control. In Berlin, aftercitizens strongly rejected communist candidates in an election, in June1948, the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin, the portion of Berlinnot under Soviet control, cutting off all supply of food and other items.The blockade failed due to the unexpected massive aerial resupplycampaign carried out by the Western powers known as the BerlinAirlift. In 1949, Stalin conceded defeat and ended the blockade.

While Stalin had promised at the Yalta Conference that free electionswould be held in Poland, after an election failure in "3 times YES"elections,[183] vote rigging was employed to win a majority in thecarefully controlled poll.[184][185][186] Following the forged referendum, the Polish economy started to becomenationalized.[187]

In Hungary, when the Soviets installed a communist government, Mtys Rkosi, who described himself as "Stalin'sbest Hungarian disciple"[188] and "Stalin's best pupil",[189] took power. Rkosi employed "salami tactics", slicing upthese enemies like pieces of salami,[190] to battle the initial postwar political majority ready to establish ademocracy.[191] Rkosi, employed Stalinist political and economic programs, and was dubbed the "bald murderer"for establishing one of the harshest dictatorships in Europe.[192] Approximately 350,000 Hungarian officials andintellectuals were purged from 1948 to 1956.

During World War II, in Bulgaria, the Red Army crossed the border and created the conditions for a communist coupd'tat on the following night. The Soviet military commander in Sofia assumed supreme authority, and thecommunists whom he instructed, including Kimon Georgiev, took full control of domestic politics.[193]

In 1949, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania founded the Comecon inaccordance with Stalin's desire to enforce Soviet domination of the lesser states of Central Europe and to mollifysome states that had expressed interest in the Marshall Plan,[194] and which were now, increasingly, cut off fromtheir traditional markets and suppliers in Western Europe.[195] Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland had remainedinterested in Marshall aid despite the requirements for a convertible currency and market economies. In July 1947,Stalin ordered these communist-dominated governments to pull out of the Paris Conference on the EuropeanRecovery Programme. This has been described as "the moment of truth" in the postWorld War II division ofEurope.[195]


In Greece, Britain and the United States supported the anti-communists in the Greek Civil War and suspected theSoviets of supporting the Greek communists, although Stalin refrained from getting involved in Greece, dismissingthe movement as premature. Albania remained an ally of the Soviet Union, but Yugoslavia broke with the USSR in1948.In Stalin's last year of life, one of his last major foreign policy initiatives was the 1952 Stalin Note for Germanreunification and Superpower disengagement from Central Europe, but Britain, France, and the United States viewedthis with suspicion and rejected the offer.

Sino-Soviet relations

Stalin and Mao Zedong on a Chinese postagestamp. The apparent use of a Mercator projectiongrossly exaggerates the size of the Soviet Union.

In Asia, the Red Army had overrun Manchuria in the last month of thewar and then also occupied Korea above the 38th parallel north. MaoZedong's Communist Party of China, though receptive to minimalSoviet support, defeated the pro-Western and heavilyAmerican-assisted Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) inthe Chinese Civil War.

There was friction between Stalin and Mao from the beginning. DuringWorld War II Stalin had supported the dictator of China, ChiangKai-Shek, as a bulwark against Japan and had turned a blind eye toChiang's mass killings of communists. He generally put his alliancewith Chiang against Japan ahead of helping his ideological allies in China in his priorities. Even after the war Stalinconcluded a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Chiang's KMT regime in China and instructed Mao and theChinese communists to cooperate with Chiang and the KMT after the war. Mao did not follow Stalin's instructionsthough and started a communist revolution against Chiang. Stalin did not believe Mao would be successful so he wasless than enthusiastic in helping Mao. The USSR continued to maintain diplomatic relations with Chiang's KMTregime until 1949 when it became clear Mao would win.

Stalin supported the Turkic Muslims known today as Uyghur in seeking their own state, Second East TurkestanRepublic during the Ili Rebellion against the Republic of China. He backed the Uyghur Communist Muslim leaderEhmetjan Qasim against the anti Communist Chinese Kuomintang forces.Stalin did conclude a new friendship and alliance treaty with Mao after he defeated Chiang. But there was still a lotof tension between the two leaders and resentment by Mao for Stalin's less than enthusiastic help during the civil warin China.The Communists controlled mainland China while the Nationalists held a rump state on the island of Taiwan. TheSoviet Union soon after recognized Mao's People's Republic of China, which it regarded as a new ally. The People'sRepublic claimed Taiwan, though it had never held authority there.

Mao at Stalin's 70th birthday celebration inMoscow, December 1949

Diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and China reached ahigh point with the signing of the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty ofFriendship and Alliance. Both countries provided military support to anew friendly state in North Korea. After various Korean borderconflicts, war broke out with U.S.-allied South Korea in 1950, startingthe Korean War.

However, not surprisingly, the relations with the Kuomintangdeteriorated. In 1951, in Taiwan, the Chinese Muslim KuomintangGeneral Bai Chongxi made a speech broadcast on radio to the entire


Muslim world calling for a war against Russia, claiming that the "imperialist ogre" leader Stalin was engineeringWorld War III, and Bai also called upon Muslims to avoid the Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, accusing him of beingblind to Soviet imperialism.

North Korea and the Korean WarContrary to America's policy which restrained armament (limited equipment was provided for infantry and policeforces) to South Korea, Stalin extensively armed Kim Il Sung's North Korean army and air forces with militaryequipment and "advisors" far in excess of those required for defensive purposes in order to facilitate Kim's (a formerSoviet Officer) aim of conquering the rest of the Korean peninsula.The North Korean Army struck in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, 25 June 1950, crossing the 38th parallel behind afirestorm of artillery, beginning their invasion of South Korea. During the Korean War, Soviet pilots flew Sovietaircraft from Chinese bases against United Nations aircraft defending South Korea. PostCold War research inSoviet Archives has revealed that the Korean War was begun by Kim Il-sung with the express permission ofStalin.[196][197][198][199]

IsraelStalin originally supported the creation of Israel in 1948. The USSR was one of the first nations to recognize the newcountry. Golda Meir came to Moscow as the first Israeli Ambassador to the USSR that year. However, afterproviding war materiel for Israel through Czechoslovakia from 1947 to 1949, Stalin later changed his mind and cameout against Israel.

Falsifiers of History

In 1948, Stalin personally edited and rewrote by hand sections of the cold war book Falsifiers of History.[200]

Falsifiers was published in response to the documents made public in Nazi-Soviet Relations, 19391941: Documentsfrom the Archives of The German Foreign Office,[201][202] which included the secret protocols of theMolotov-Ribbentrop Pact and other secret German-Soviet relations documents.[201][203] Falsifiers originallyappeared as a series of articles in Pravda in February 1948,[202] and was subsequently published in numerouslanguages and distributed worldwide.[204]

The book did not attempt to directly counter or deal with the documents published in Nazi-Soviet Relations[205] andrather, focused upon Western culpability for the outbreak of war in 1939.[204] It argues that "Western powers" aidedNazi rearmament and aggression, including that American bankers and industrialists provided capital for the growthof German war industries, while deliberately encouraging Hitler to expand eastward.[201] It depicted the SovietUnion as striving to negotiate a collective security against Hitler, while being thwarted by double-dealingAnglo-French appeasers who, despite appearances, had no intention of a Soviet alliance and were secretlynegotiating with Berlin.[204] It casts the Munich agreement, not just as Anglo-French short-sightedness or cowardice,but as a "secret" agreement that was a "a highly important phase in their policy aimed at goading the Hitleriteaggressors against the Soviet Union."[206] The book also included the claim that, during the Pact's operation, Stalinrejected Hitler's offer to share in a division of the world, without mentioning the Soviet offers to join the Axis.Historical studies, official accounts, memoirs and textbooks published in the Soviet Union used that depiction ofevents until the Soviet Union's dissolution.[207]


Domestic supportDomestically, Stalin was seen as a great wartime leader who had led the Soviets to victory against the Nazis.An increasingly nationalistic emphasis on Russian history and achievements became a salient feature of Sovietculture in the 1940s. At the end of May 1945, Stalin proposed a victory toast to the Soviet people, and to the virtuesof the Russian majority in particular:

I should like to propose a toast to the health of our Soviet people, and in the first place, the Russian people.(Loud and prolonged applause and shouts of 'Hurrah.')I drink in the first place to the health of the Russian people because it is the most outstanding nation of all thenations forming the Soviet Union.I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people because it has won in this war universal recognition as theleading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country.I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people not only because it is the leading people, but also becauseit possesses a clear mind, a staunch character, and patience.[208]

Stalin's military-territorial actions during World War II were supported by Russian nationalists inside and outside theSoviet Union (Russian exile Pavel Milyukov during Winter War: "I feel pity for the Finns, but I am for the Vyborgguberniya") for the recovering of the lands lost during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and most of the lands lost bythe former Russian Empire in World War I through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by Trotsky and the CentralPowers in 1918. Also, by 19451948 for the first time since the Middle Ages the Eastern Slavic lands and peopleswere reunited in a single country, and all Slavic nations were outside German (with the definitive termination of theDrang nach Osten), Turkish or other Western European influence and under the orbit of Moscow an old dreamcherished by Russian nationalists and Pan-Slavists alike.[citation needed]

Various foreign scientific discoveries and inventions (such as the Wright Brothers' airplane) were attributed toRussians in post-war Soviet propaganda. Examples include the boiler, reclaimed by father and son Cherepanovs; theelectric light, by Yablochkov and Lodygin; the radio, by Popov; and the airplane, by Mozhaysky. Stalin's internalrepressive policies continued (including in newly acquired territories), but never reached the extremes of the1930s.[citation needed]

"Doctors' plot"The "Doctors' plot" was a plot outlined by Stalin and Soviet officials in 1952 and 1953 whereby several doctors(over half of whom were Jewish) allegedly attempted to kill Soviet officials.[209] The prevailing opinion of manyscholars outside the Soviet Union is that Stalin intended to use the resulting doctors' trial to launch a massive partypurge.[210] The plot is also viewed by many historians as an antisemitic provocation. It followed on the heels of the1952 show trials of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee[211] and the secret execution of thirteen members on Stalin'sorders in the Night of the Murdered Poets.[212]

Thereafter, in a December Politburo session, Stalin announced that "Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of theAmerican intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the United States (there youcan become rich, bourgeois, etc.). They think they're indebted to the Americans. Among doctors, there are manyJewish nationalists."[213] To mobilize the Soviet people for his campaign, Stalin ordered TASS and Pravda to issuestories along with Stalin's alleged uncovering of a "Doctors Plot" to assassinate top Soviet leaders,[214][215] includingStalin, in order to set the stage for show trials.[216]

The next month, Pravda published stories with text regarding the purported "Jewish bourgeois-nationalist" plotters. Nikita Khrushchev wrote that Stalin hinted him to incite anti-Semitism in the Ukraine, telling him that "the good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews."[217][218] Stalin also ordered falsely accused physicians to be tortured "to death".[219] Regarding the origins of the plot, people who knew Stalin, such as Khrushchev, suggest that Stalin had long harbored negative sentiments toward Jews,[220][221] and


anti-Semitic trends in the Kremlin's policies were further fueled by the exile of Leon Trotsky.[222] In 1946, Stalinallegedly said privately that "every Jew is a potential spy."[223] At the end of January 1953, Stalin's personalphysician Miron Vovsi (cousin of Solomon Mikhoels, who was assassinated in 1948 at the orders of Stalin) wasarrested within the frame of the plot. Vovsi was released by Beria after Stalin's death in 1953, as was his son-in-law,the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg.Some historians have argued that Stalin was also planning to send millions of Jews to four large newly built laborcamps in Western Russia[224] using a "Deportation Commission"[225][226][227] that would purportedly act to saveSoviet Jews from an enraged Soviet population after the Doctors Plot trials.[225][228][229] Others argue that anycharge of an alleged mass deportation lacks specific documentary evidence. Regardless of whether a plot to deportJews was planned, in his "Secret Speech" in 1956, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stated that the Doctors Plotwas "fabricated... set up by Stalin", that Stalin told the judge to beat confessions from the defendants[230] and hadtold Politburo members "You are blind like young kittens. What will happen without me? The country will perishbecause you do not know how to recognize enemies."

Death and legacyStalin's health deteriorated towards the end of World War II. He suffered from atherosclerosis from his heavysmoking. He suffered a mild stroke around the time of the Victory Parade, and a severe heart attack in October1945.[231]

On the early morning hours of 1 March 1953, after an all-night dinner and a movie Stalin arrived at his Kuntsevoresidence some 15km west of Moscow centre with interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers GeorgyMalenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev where he retired to his bedroom to sleep. At dawn, Stalin didnot emerge from his room.

Stalin's grave in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis

Although his guards thought that it was odd for him not to rise at hisusual time, they were under strict orders not to disturb him and left himalone the entire day. At around 10p.m. he was discovered by PeterLozgachev, the Deputy Commandant of Kuntsevo, who entered hisbedroom to check up on him and recalled the scene of Stalin lying onhis back on the floor of his room beside his bed wearing pyjamabottoms and an undershirt with his clothes soaked in stale urine. Afrightened Lozgachev asked Stalin what happened to him, but all hecould get out of him was unintelligible responses that sounded like"Dzhhhhh." Lozgachev used the bedroom telephone where hefrantically called a few party officials telling them that Stalin may have

had a stroke and asked them to send good doctors to the Kuntsevo residence immediately.[232] Lavrentiy Beria wasinformed and arrived a few hours afterwards. The doctors only arrived in the early morning of 2 March when theychanged Stalin's bedclothes and tended to him. They diagnosed him with a cerebral hemorrhage (stroke) caused byhypertension (high blood pressure), with stomach hemorrhage facilitating.[233] He was treated in his dacha withleeches, as was customary at the time. On March 3 his double Felix Dadaev was called back from vacation toMoscow "to be ready to stand in for Stalin if needed", but he never needed to. On March 4 Stalin's illness wasbroadcast in the media with surprising detail such as pulse, blood pressure and urinalysis; for convenience the timeof his stroke was said to be March 2 and his location as Moscow. The bedridden Stalin died on 5 March 1953, at theage of 74.


Suggestions of assassinationThe political memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claimed that Beria had boasted to Molotov that hepoisoned Stalin: "I took him out." [234]

Stomach hemorrhage is usually not caused by high blood pressure, but is, along with stroke, consistent withoverdose of warfarin, a colorless, tasteless anticoagulant drug. In the treating physicians' final report submitted to theCentral Committee in July 1953, any mention of the stomach hemorrhage was "deleted or vastly subordinated toother information." In 2004, American historian Jonathan Brent and Russia's Presidential Commission for theRehabilitation of Repressed Persons executive secretary Vladimir Naumov published a book proposing that Beria,with the complicity of Khrushchev, slipped warfarin into Stalin's wine on the night of his death.[233]

Stalin's autopsy, conducted by the Soviet Ministry of Health in March, 1953 but not released until 2011, confirmedthe cause of death as stroke resulting from high blood pressure, and that hypertension had caused cardiachemorrhage (not usually caused by high blood pressure) and gastrointestinal hemorrhageas well. In 2011 Miguel A.Faria, President of Mercer University School of Medicine, retired clinical professor of neurosurgery and adjunctprofessor of medical history, interpreted the autopsy's composition as the examiners' desire to demonstrate forposterity, that they had fulfilled their professional duties as best they could by mentioning the non-cerebralhemorrhages. At the same time they would have provided themselves political cover by purposely attributing thehemorrhages to hypertension instead of poisoning by warfarin. Faria noted that when the autopsy was performed,"Stalin was worshipped as a demigod, and his assassination would have been unacceptable to the Russian populace."He also notes that Stalin experienced renal hemorrhages during his death, which is unlikely to be caused by highblood pressure.

A former prisoner Nikolai Getman who spent the years1945-1953 in Gulag, recorded his testimony in pictures

rather than words.

It has also been suggested by Joe Pirjevec that Stalin wasassassinated by the order of Josip Broz Tito in retaliation forassassination attempts on Tito. A letter was found in Stalin's officefrom Tito that read: "Stop sending people to kill me. We'vealready captured five of them, one of them with a bomb andanother with a rifle... If you don't stop sending killers, I'll sendone to Moscow, and I won't have to send a secon