Throughout history, there have been many genocides, but none of them have had the same effect that Stalin’s Purges have had on on the world. While most people assume that Adolf Hitler was the most atrocious mass murderer of the 1900s, Joseph Stalin was actually the dictator to cause the most suffering. During Stalin’s purges, or The Great Purges, an estimated twenty million people died from, (“How many people did Stalin kill”). There were so many different people killed, in fact, that Stalin’s Purges are classified into different genocides. All of these took place in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the 1930s. Genocide is the term used to describe the conscious extermination of a large group of people, especially those of a …show more content…
Stalin was the fascist dictator of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from 1929 to his death in 1953. Joseph Stalin was born in Georgia in 1878, which was a part of the Russian empire at the time. His birth name was Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, but that was before he changed his name to Stalin, which means “Man of Steel”. He was born into a poor family; his father was a shoemaker and his mother was a servant. According to Feather J Crawford, Stalin was abused by his heavy-drinking father when he was young, and it might have affected him permanently. After Stalin left school, he was sent to a seminary where he would study Marxism and become a strong follower of Lenin, the leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party. Stalin quickly became a devoted believer of the Bolshevik movement and started taking action against the Tsarist government. After he was placed under surveillance by the Russian secret police, he went into hiding and became one of the Bolshevik’s main leaders. He eventually became Vladimir Lenin’s closest assistants. Later the Russian Civil War started and towards the end of the war, Stalin was appointed to the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party. After the war, Lenin held the power in the new nation, but in 1922 he had a stroke and would never be the same again. After Lenin attempted to publish a Testament in which Stalin was denounced as self-serving, he died from a suspicious …show more content…
He started believing that anyone who had a form of power should be dealt with. Stalin did not want to risk any loss of power. He was not just using harsh methods to push through changes he thought were essential. He was obsessed with destroying all potential opponents. Before Stalin could start the purges, he needed to make it somewhat legal. At the end of 1934, Sergei Kirov, a prominent leader of the Communist party, was suspiciously murdered. Stalin then used this to ask for support from the Politburo, or the policy-making committee of the Communist Party. The Politburo gave him full support and the purges began. The first people targeted were identified as ‘Trotskyites’, and they were put in prisons where they would be tortured to death by the NKVD, which was the Soviet secret police. Stalin also had the NKVD torture the innocent people they dealt with until they gave signed confessions. According to C N Trueman, Stalin also signed a law that stated families were going to be held accountable for crimes that were committed by the father of their family. This meant that children as young as twelve years of age could be executed; at this point, no one was safe. In an attempt to keep a sense of legality to the purges, large-scale leaders were given public trials which are now known as “Show Trials”. The trials were extensively covered by the
Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from 1929-1953. Stalin rose to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party, becoming a Soviet dictator after
I know you 've heard of a terrible and cruel dictator taking over and killing anything and everything that gets in his way of what he wants, but you might not have heard of this tragic and historic event. The Great Terror, also known as The Blood Purges of 1936 to 1938, was a series of horrific and barbaric assassinations based on the actions of Joseph Stalin. The purges began in October 1936 and ended in November 1938. The Great Terror occurred in the Soviet Union, but mainly in the city of Moscow. The purges were killings that were directly towards government officials, political leaders, leading cultural figures, followers of those figures, and even civilians. The many men and women Joseph Stalin killed or had killed were because they either
Joseph Stalin became leader of the USSR after Lenin’s death in 1924. Lenin had a government of abstemious communist government. When Stalin came into government he moved to a radical communist society. He moved away from the somewhat capitalist/communist economy of Lenin time to “modernize” the USSR. He wanted to industrialize and modernize USSR. He had overworked his workers, his people were dying, and most of them in slave labor camps. In fact by doing this Stalin had hindered the USSR and put them even farther back in time.
Joseph Stalin was a realist dictator of the early 20th century in Russia. Before he rose to power and became the leader of Soviet Union, he joined the Bolsheviks and was part of many illegal activities that got him convicted and he was sent to Siberia (Wood, 5, 10). In the late 1920s, Stalin was determined to take over the Soviet Union (Wiener & Arnold 199). The main aspects of his worldview was “socialism
Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, born on December 18th, 1878, would come to be known as the communist dictator, Josef Stalin. Stalin came from a poor town in Georgia. He first studied for the priesthood where he came across the works of Karl Marx. Stalin later became interested in the revolutionary movement occurring in the USSR during that time and became a part of the Bolshevik group. Stalin gained power of the party after he outmaneuvered his opponents through shifting alliances. After obtaining power, Stalin impacted the world by developing Russia and Eastern Europe, promoting communism and helping to develop the Cold War. (Khlevniuk)
People say that the Stalin’s Great Purges could otherwise be translated as Stalin’s Terror. They grew from his paranoia and his desire to be absolute autocrat, and were enforced the NKVD and public show trials. When someone went against him, he didn’t really take any time in doing something about it. He would “get rid of” the people that went against industrialization and the kulaks. Kulaks were farmers in the later Russian Empire. (“Of Russian Origin: Stalin’s Purges). There were many reasons as to what caused the Great Purges but the main one seems to be Stalin. He believed that the country had to be united under the circumstances that he becomes the leader if it was to be strong. The Soviet Union was industry was weal and in the decline, obviously lacking the capacity to produce enough meal and heavy machinery for the imminent war.
Under the rule of Joseph Stalin, millions of people were killed. They were also tortured in cells called the GULAG and they were brainwashed to kill others. Stalin also killed many high-ranking officials and rivaling army members during his purges. Stalin struck fear in everyone around him and could not be trusted, but was so powerful that everyone respected him. They knew what he could do to them and they did their best to listen to all of his commands. With all the deaths that Stalin caused and how he governed his people actually alerted followers to implement this type of
History Place - Genocide in the 20th Century: Stalin's Forced Famine 1932-33. N.p., 2000. Web. 13 Jan. 2014.
In order to conclude the extent to which the Great Terror strengthened or weakened the USSR the question is essentially whether totalitarianism strengthened or weakened the Soviet Union? Perhaps under the circumstances of the 1930s in the approach to war a dictatorship may have benefited the country in some way through strong leadership, the unifying effect of reintroducing Russian nationalism and increased party obedience.
In this paper, I’ll be focusing on the Holocaust and the genocide in Ukraine, spearheaded by Stalin. The Holocaust is one of the most significant genocides in the history of mankind. (Berger 2007:1). It was significant because it was one of the most organized and systematic genocides ever. The Holocaust also wasn’t limited to only one group of people. It included a whole variety of different races, ethnicities, and cultures. The genocide in Ukraine was led by Stalin, and focused on starving out the Ukrainian people during a time where nationalistic pride was running high. The number of deaths accumulated in the Ukrainian genocide is said to amount from any...
Stalin was “born in Gori, Georgia” as the third and only surviving child of a “cobbler and ex-serf”(Compton’s 403). His true name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. “In 1912 he took the alias of ‘Stalin’, from the Russian word stal, meaning ‘steel”, hence his nickname “Man of Steel”(Compton’s 402). Stalin began his studies at the seminary as a devout believer in Orthodox Christianity, where he was soon exposed to the radical ideas of fellow students. In 1899, just about the time of graduation, he gave up his religious education and to devote his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. In 1902 Stalin was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police for organizing a large worker’s demonstration. A year later he was sentenced to “exile in the Russian region of Siberia, but soon managed to escape and was back in Georgia by early 1904”(Archer 58). When the Russian Social Democratic Party split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions, Stalin sided with the Bolsheviks, who just happened to be led by Vladimir Lenin. Stalin immediately became a staunch follower of Lenin, studying his every move. He did marry in 1905 but his beloved bride died of tuberculosis two years later. Their son, Yasha, died later in a Nazi Prison camp during World War II. After the Bolshevik’s Civil War victory, Stalin became highly organized and was elected secretary of the Communist Party. “After Lenin’s death, Stalin gradually isolated and shunned his political rivals, especially Leon Trotsky, and by the end of 1929 Joseph Stalin had succeeded in eliminating his opponents and became the supreme leader of the USSR” (Compton’s 404).
In the beginning Josef Stalin was a worshiper of his beloved Vladimir Lenin. He followed his every move and did as he said to help establish and lead the Bolshevik party. Much of the early part of his political career was lost due to his exile to Siberia for most of World War I. It wasn’t until 1928, when he assumed complete control of the country were he made most of his success. After Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin promoted his own cult followings along with the cult followings of the deceased leader. He took over the majority of the Socialists now, and immediately began to change agriculture and industry. He believed that the Soviet Union was one hundred years behind the West and had to catch up as quickly as possible. First though he had to seal up complete alliance to himself and his cause.
The Development of Totalitarianism Under Stalin By 1928, Stalin had become the undisputed successor to Lenin, and leader of the CPSU. Stalin’s power of appointment had filled the aisles of the Party Congress and Politburo with Stalinist supporters. Political discussion slowly faded away from the Party, and this led to the development of the totalitarian state of the USSR. Stalin, through.
The intentional murder of an enormous group of people is near unthinkable in today’s society. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, numerous authoritarian regimes committed genocide to undesirables or others considered to be a threat. Two distinct and memorably horrific genocides were the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany and the Holodomor by the Soviet Union. In the Holocaust, The Nazis attempted to eradicate all European Jews after Adolf Hitler blamed them for Germany’s hardship in recent years. During the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union attempted to destroy any sense of Ukrainian nationalism by intentionally starving and murdering Ukrainian people. The two atrocities can be thoroughly compared and contrasted through the eight stages of genocide. The Holocaust and Holodomor shared many minor and distinct similarities under each stage of genocide, but were mainly similar to the methods of organization, preparation, and extermination, and mainly differed
The Effects of Stalin on Russia Much like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin was one of the most ruthless and despised people in the recorded history of the world. Stalin, though, found it fit to abuse his people in any way he saw fit. This man started what history now calls "The Great Purge. " Through the late 1920's when the rest of the world was living it up as the roaring 20's came to an end, Joseph Stalin was setting the stage for gaining absolute power by employing secret police repression against opposing political and social elements within his own Communist Party and throughout society.