JOSEF STALIN

BACKGROUND

• Born on December 21, 1879
• Middle class family
• Father left in 1888
• Excelled well in school
• In 1899, he devoted himself to Marxism after listening to a seminar

CLIMB TO POWER

• May 1917, elected to the Politburo of the Central Committee
• Ascended quickly in the communist party; gained ranks fast
• Lenin died in January of 1924
• Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and Stalin left to control of the party
• After a race to the top, Stalin becomes supreme leader of USSR in 1929

EARLY YEARS IN POWER

• Coming into power, Russia was the poorest nation in Europe
• Kulaks- peasant class. Stalin felt like they needed to be eliminated
• Many citizens stripped of their civil rights
• Ridded of entrepreneurs in order to fulfill communism

TERROR

• Famine led to forced repopulation of civilians.
• Government established a network of “work colonies” for minors.
• Law of 1 December- suspected lawbreakers had to be questioned within 10 days
• “complete liquidation” of the clergy
• Forced labor camps for kulaks, ex-kulaks, criminals, and anyone who opposed his views

TERROR

• He eliminated 98 of the 139 members of the Central Committee
• Secret executions of thousands of people
• Main objective was to brain was the young children into loving Stalin

"FIVE-YEAR PLANS"

• Goal of quickly industrializing the economy and collectivizing agriculture.
• Ordered increases in coal, iron, and electrical power.
• Required the collectivized farms of the USSR to meet ever-increasing production quotas.
• As the collectivization progressed, agricultural production declined.
• The peasant farmers were utterly demoralized by Stalin’s decree for collectivization.

GULAGS

• Forced slave labor camps
• Sent to camps for illogical and ridiculous reasons
• From 1934-1941, some 7 million people entered the Gulag camps
• 300,000 are known to have died in the camps from 1934-40
• Deteriorated after the start of WW2

WW2
On August 23, 1939, Stalin and Hitler signed (on Hitler’s initiative) a nonaggression pact stating that each country pledged not only to refrain from attacking the other for a period of at least ten years, but also that neither would come to the aid of any nation that the other might invade. In exchange for signing this agreement, Germany gave the USSR the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), and divided Poland into German and Soviet spheres of influence.

WW2

• Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939
• Soviets did nothing
• Britain declared war on Germany two days later
• September 17, 1939, soviet tanks were sent into Poland
• Then in late September, sent troops into their Baltic states

WW2

• April 1941, Stalin approved the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact
• June 1941, Hitler invades USSR
• Insisted to have a "scorched earth policy"
• Germans invade Moscow; 900-day battle
• 1.5 million deaths of soldiers and civilians

WW2

• Battle of Stalingrad-1943
• Yalta Conference-1945
• "Yalta Decleration"- put an end to German militarism and Nazism

“There will be no pity. They have sown the wind and now they are harvesting the whirlwind.”
-slogan Soviets used as they marched into Germany, where they raped at least 2 million German women
- Germans surrendered May 7, 1945

After the war’s end, Stalin announced that all Soviet citizens – including military personnel – who had been detained in foreign prisons or work camps during the war should now be classified as traitors, and he ordered that they should all be executed or deported to the Gulags.

Leningrad Affair -Stalin forced all city leaders to confess that they had committed treason, and then had them summarily executed.

POST-WAR

• Encouraged Kim il Sung to invade South Korea
• February 1953- prison camps were ordered to be constructed for Soviet Jews
• Died March 4, 1953

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