Stalin's Boorishness Offensive At Times example essay topic

"The man who turned the Soviet Union from a backward country into a world superpower at unimaginable human cost (Joseph Stalin)."Stalin was born into a dysfunctional family in a poor village in Georgia (Joseph Stalin)". Permanently scarred from a childhood bout with smallpox and having a mildly deformed arm, Stalin always felt unfairly treated by life, and thus developed a strong, romanticized desire for greatness and respect, combined with a shrewd streak of calculating cold-heartedness towards those who had maligned him. "He always felt a sense of inferiority before educated intellectuals, and particularly distrusted them (Joseph Stalin)". Sent by his mother to the seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, to study to become a priest, the young Stalin never completed his education, and was instead soon completely drawn into the city's active revolutionary circles.

"Never a fiery intellectual polemicist or orator like Lenin or Trotsky, Stalin specialized in the humdrum nuts and bolts of revolutionary activity. Risking arrest every day by helping organize workers, distributing illegal literature, and robbing trains to support the cause, while Lenin and his bookish friends lived safely abroad and wrote clever articles about the plight of the Russian working class (Lenin & Stalin)". Although Lenin found Stalin's boorishness offensive at times, he valued his loyalty, and appointed him after the Revolution to various low-priority leadership positions in the new Soviet government (Lenin & Stalin)". In 1922, Stalin was appointed to another such post, as General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee. "Stalin understood that 'cadres are everything': if you control the personnel, you control the organization. He shrewdly used his new position to consolidate power in exactly this way -- by controlling all appointments, setting agendas, and moving around Party staff in such a way that eventually everyone who counted for anything owed their position to him (Stalin Biography)".

By the time the Party's intellectual core realized what had happened, it was too late -- Stalin had his people in place. While Lenin, the only person with the moral authority to challenge him, was on his deathbed and incapable of speech after a series of strokes, and besides, Stalin even controlled who had access to the leader. The General Secretary of the Party became the de facto leader of the country right on up until Mikhail Gorbachev. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin methodically went about destroying all the old leaders of the Party, taking advantage of their weakness for standing on private intellectual principle to simply divide and conquer them.

At first, these people were removed from their posts and exiled abroad. "Later, when he realized that their sharp tongues and pens were still capable of inveighing against him even from far away, Stalin switched tactics, culminating in a vast reign of terror and spectacular show trials. In the 1930's during which the founding fathers of the Soviet Union were one by one unmasked as 'enemies of the people' who had supposedly always been in the employ of Capitalist intelligence services and summarily shot (Stalin Internet Library)". The particularly pesky Leon Trotsky, who continued to badger Stalin from Mexico City after his exile in 1929, had to be silenced once and for all with an ice pick in 1940. "The purges, or 'repressions' as they are known in Russia, extended far beyond the Party elite, reaching down into every local Party cell and nearly all of the intellectual professions, since anyone with a higher education was suspected of being a potential counterrevolutionary (Stalin Internet Library)."This depleted the Soviet Union of its brainpower, and left Stalin as the sole force in the country.

"He was an expert on virtually every human endeavor (Stalin Internet Library)". Driven by his own sense of inferiority, which he projected onto his country as a whole, Stalin pursued an economic policy of mobilizing the entire country to achieve the goal of rapid industrialization, so that it could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Capitalist powers. "To this end, he forcefully collectivized agriculture (one of the Bolsheviks' key policy stances in 1917 was to give the land to the peasants. Collectivization took it back from them and effectively reduced them to the status of serfs again), instituted the Five-Year Plans to coordinate all investment and production in the country, and undertook a massive program of building heavy industry (Stalin: The Man and His Era)". Although the Soviet Union boasted that its economy was booming while the Capitalist world was experiencing the Great Depression. It's industrialization drive succeeded rapidly in creating an industrial infrastructure where there once had been none, the fact is that all this was done at unreasonable cost in human lives.

"Measures such as the violent expropriation of the harvest by the government, the forced resettlement and murder of the most successful peasants as counterrevolutionary elements. The discovery of a source of cheap labor through the arrest of millions of innocent citizens led to countless millions of deaths from the worst man-made famine in human history and in the camps of the Gulag (Stalin: The Man and His Era)."As war clouds were gathering on the horizon in 1939, Stalin felt that he had scored a coup by striking a non-aggression pact with Hitler, in which they agreed to divide up Poland and then leave each other alone (Stalin's Russia) ". Stalin so strongly believed that he and Hitler had an understanding that he refused to listen to his military advisors' warnings in 1941. "That the Wehrmacht was massing for an attack, and purged any one who dared utter such profanity. As a result, when the attack came, the Soviet army was completely unprepared and suffered horrible defeats, while Stalin spent the first several days after the attack holed up in his office in shock (Stalin's Russia) ". Because the military had been purged of its best minds in the mid-1930's, it took some time, and many lives, before the Soviets were able to regroup and make a credible defense.

"By then, all of the Ukraine and Belarus were in German hands, Leningrad had been surrounded and besieged, and Nazi artillery was entrenched only a few miles from the Kremlin (Stalin's Russia)". After heroic efforts on the part of the whole country, the tide eventually turned at Stalingrad in 1943, and soon the victorious Red Army was liberating the countries of Eastern Europe -- before the Americans had even begun to pose a serious challenge to Hitler from the west with the D-Day invasion. During the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences, Stalin proved a worthy negotiator with the likes of Roosevelt and Churchill. "He managed to arrange for the countries of Eastern Europe, which had been liberated by the Red Army to remain in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as securing three seats for his country in the newly formed UN (Stalin's Russia)."The Soviet Union was now a recognized world superpower, with its own permanent seat on the Security Council, and the respect that Stalin had craved all his life Stalin: (The Man and His Era)". Returning soldiers and refugees were arrested and either shot or sent to the labor camps as traitors. Entire nationalities that had been deported during the War, also as traitors, were not allowed to return to their homes, and in 1953, a plot to kill Stalin was seemingly uncovered in the Kremlin itself.

A new purge seemed imminent, and was cut short only by Stalin's death. "He remained a hero to his people until Khrushchev's well-known 'secret's peach to a Party Congress in 1956, in which Stalin's excesses, at least as far as power grabbing in the Party itself, were denounced. Ios ef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Kob a, the 'Man of Steel,' or Stalin, was born in Georgia, was educated at the Tiflis Theological Seminary from which he was expelled for 'propagating Marxism (Joseph Stalin)". He joined the Bolshevik underground and was arrested and transported to Siberia, He escaped in 1904."The ensuing years witnessed his closer identification with revolutionary Marxism, his many escapes from captivity, his growing intimacy with Lenin and Bukharin, his early disparagement of Leon Trotsky, and his co-option, in 1912, to the illicit Bolshevik Central Committee (Joseph Stalin)."With the Revolution of 1917 and the replacement of Kerensky's weak Provisional Government by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Stalin was appointed Commissar for Nationalities and a member of the Politburo. Although his activities throughout the counter-revolution and the war with Poland were confined to organizing a Red 'terror' in Tsaritsin (Stalin's Russia)".

With his appointment as General Secretary to the Central Committee in 1922, Stalin began secretly to build up the power that would guarantee his control of the Soviet Union after Lenin's death. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin took control. By 1928, Trotsky had been degraded and banished. Stalin's reorganization of the Soviet's resources, with its successive Five Year Plans, suffered numerous industrial setbacks and encountered consistently stubborn resistance in agriculture, where the kulaks refused to accept the principles of collectivization. "The measures taken by Stalin to discipline those who opposed his will involved the death by execution or famine of at least 10 million peasants (1932-33) (Stalin Internet Library)".

The bloodbath which eliminated the Old Bolsheviks and the alleged right-wing intelligentsia, and the staged 'engineers' trial,' were followed by a drastic, purge of thousands of the Officer corps, including Marshal Tuchachevsky. Stalin believed they were all guilty of pro-German sympathies (Stalin Internet Library)". . Red Army forces and material went to the support of the Spanish Communist government in 1936, although Stalin was careful not to commit himself too deeply". After the Munich crisis Franco-British negotiations for Russian support in the event of war were protracted until the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which bought Stalin some time he thought he needed to prepare for a German invasion (Stalin's Russia)". In 1941 the prosperity of the nazis' initial thrust into Russia could be accounted for in part by the disposal of the Red Army on the frontiers, ready to invade rather than repel invasion.

Stalin's strategy followed the traditional Muscovite pattern of plugging gaps in the defenses with more and more bodies and trading space for time in which imposing climatic conditions could whittle away the opponents's trength. "Sustained by material furnished by Britain an the United States, the Red Army responded to Stalin's call to defend not the principles of Marx and Engels, but "Mother Russia" (Stalin's Russia)."Quick to exploit the unwarranted Anglo-American fear that Russia might get out of the war, Stalin easily outwitted the allied leaders of the Teheran and Yalta Conferences (Stalin's Russia)". With the Red Army's invasion of German soil, Soviet soldiers were encouraged to penetrate far beyond the point where they had last been employed. "Thus Stalin's dominance of the Potsdam Conference, followed by the premature break up of the Anglo-American forces, left Stalin with a territory enlarged by more 180,0000 square miles which, with satellites, increased the Soviet sphere of influence by more than 760, 00 square miles (Joseph Stalin)."While Stalin consolidated his gains an 'iron curtain' was dropped to cut off Soviet Russia and her satellites from the outside world. At the same time, a Cold War ensued between east and west (Stalin's Russia)."An entirely unscrupulous man, Stalin consistently manipulated Communist imperialism for the greater glory of Soviet Russia and the strengthening of his own person as autocrat (Stalin's Russia)". He died, in somewhat mysterious circumstances, in 1953.

Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He presided over a program of national industrialization during the 1930's and the development of the cold war following World War II. "He was criticized as a ruthless dictator who conducted violent purges within the government to maintain his power (Stalin Internet Library)."Born Ios if Vissarionovitch Dzhugashvili on Dec 21, 1879 in Gori, Russia, Stalin entered the Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1893 and by age 15 had joined a Marxist group there (Stalin Biography)". In 1898, he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party and soon became a paid agitator. Between 1903 and 1917, he was arrested and sent into exile six times by the czarist government, each time escaping and returning. After the split of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, he became a regional leader of the extremist Bolshevik faction.

He became a strong force and an aide to party leader Vladimir Lenin after the failed revolution attempt in 1905. In 1912 he was elected to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee. Stalin was arrested several more times and exiled to the distant Turukhansk region where he was freed after the successful 1917 October Revolution. In the following years of civil war, he served in a variety of posts aiding the military effort.

In 1922, he became general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and in 1924 became Lenin's successor as chairperson of the Politburo. In the following years, the communist government struggled to construct a new economic system. In 1928 Stalin launched the first of his Five-Year Plans of industrialization and collectivization. "This ambitious plan brought hardship and met resistance as he purged the kulaks (wealthy peasant farmers) (Stalin: The Man and His Era)". This was followed in 1932 by the second, equally ambitious Five-Year Plan.

In 1936, Stalin developed a new Soviet constitution, which was seen as a democratic document. "However, the following elections were marred by purge trials from 1934 to 1938 in which Stalin systematically eliminated his opposition (Stalin: The Man and His Era)". Stalin further hurt his international image when he signed a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939. The Nazi leader soon broke this agreement and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. "In Allied negotiations after the war, Stalin succeeded in obtaining control of half of Europe, and the following year the Iron Curtain descended over the Soviet Union and its 'satellites' in Eastern Europe as Stalin consolidated his gains (Joseph Stalin)". This began the cold war, which continued throughout Stalin's rule.

He died in Moscow in 1953 and was entombed in Red Square alongside Lenin. "However, his character was later attacked by Nikita Khrushchev and his body removed from the Lenin mausoleum (Stalin Biography) .".