Pros And Cons Of Joseph Stalin

As Warren Bennis, a scholar on the subject of leadership, once said, “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” This statement certainly holds true no matter what type of leader you look at. From cruel dictators such as Joseph Stalin, who fought and killed to stay in power, to peaceful leaders like Mohandas Gandhi, who used nonviolent tactics to emancipate India from the United Kingdom, to Jesus Christ, who started a religion and spread his message of love and forgiveness far across the globe, they all had a vision of how they wanted to change the world, for the better, or for the worse.
Widely considered to be one of the most ruthless and cruel dictators of the twentieth century, Joseph Stalin was responsible for an estimated

twenty million deaths during his reign of the Soviet Union (Naimark 11). Rising to power in 1924 after Vladimir Lenin, the previous leader of the USSR, died, Stalin quickly implemented a series of plans to transform the country from a farming society to an industrialized, global force (Service 3). What Stalin wanted was government control of the economy. To do this, he decided to forcefully take the farms in the country. A vast majority of the farmers did not agree with this. Millions of them did not want to give up their only source of revenue and refused to cooperate with the order, so uncooperative farmers were shot or exiled. As a result of this, a famine swept across the Soviet Union and killed millions in the worst man-made famine in history (“Joseph Stalin”).
Stalin tried desperately to dispose of any opponents of his.

He implemented a tremendous amount of forced labor camps, called the GULAG. These camps were where citizens would go to serve time for their crimes. If a peasant was caught stealing anything, arriving late to work three times, or making jokes about high ranking Communist officials, they would be sent off to the concentration camps to serve as punishment (“Gulag”). These camps and strict policies were a large part of the reason that Stalin was considered to be so feared. No one every opposed him or tried to revolt because of his reputation for being so

merciless.
When World War II was rapidly approaching, Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler signed a nonaggression pact in August of 1939.

This meant that neither Germany, nor the Soviet Union, would invade the other country. This pact was made because the USSR wanted to remain at peace with Germany and secure time to build up their military, however, the pact did not last long (“Nonaggression Pact”). On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union without provocation. This lead the Soviet Union to join the Allied side of the fight. They were accompanied by the United States, United Kingdom, France, and many others. Although Stalin had led his country into joining the Allies, there were always underlying tensions between the countries.
The tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were always slightly apparent, but they drastically worsened in 1950 when Stalin gave permission to Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea. The United States had been backing South Korea and the USSR were backing North Korea. This caused the outburst of the Korean War, a war that continues on to this

day.
Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, at the age of 74. He was responsible for transforming the Soviet Union from a farming society into a global superpower. He brought the USSR into the nuclear age, spread communism throughout Eastern Europe, and brought about the deaths of around twenty million Soviet citizens. To this day he is remembered as one of the cruelest and ruthless leaders of the twentieth century. If it were not for him, Russia would not be such a driving force in world events as it is today. While it was not for the better, Joseph Stalin definitely changed the world. He will be remembered for centuries as the driving force behind Russia’s rise to power.
While some of the most infamous leaders of the twentieth century were merciless and ruled with no forgiveness, there were some who spread policies of peace and nonviolence. The greatest example of this comes in the form of Mohandas Gandhi. An Indian religious leader who helped India gain its independence from the United Kingdom, Gandhi’s teachings have gone on to inspire other great leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., who went on to fight for equal treatment of blacks and whites in the United States.