page_title: Joseph Stalin
section_title: Cold War policy: 1947–1950
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Stalin / Post-war era / Cold War policy: 1947–1950
caption_attribution_description: English: Mao at Stalin's side on a ceremony arranged for Stalin's 71th birthday in Moscow in December 1949. Behind between them is Marshal of the Soviet Union Nikolai Bulganin. on the right hand of Stalin is Walter Ulbricht of East Germany and at the edge Mongolia's Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal. Suomi: Tuimailmeinen Mao suojelijansa ja kilpailijansa Stalinin vieressä Stalinin 71-vuotispäivän kunniaksi järjestetyssä seremoniassa Moskovassa joulukuussa 1949. Keskellä takana Neuvostoliiton marsalkka Bulganin. Stalinin oikealla puolella Itä-Saksan Walter Ulbricht ja laidassa Mongolian Tsedenbal. 中文: 毛泽东与斯大林在1949年12月莫斯科举办的斯大林71岁寿辰庆典上。毛泽东与斯大林之间是布尔加宁，斯大林右方是东德领导人乌布利希，乌布利希右方边缘是蒙古人民共和国领导人泽登巴尔。
context_page_description: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet politician who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. He served as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and premier of the Soviet Union. Despite initially governing the Soviet Union as part of a collective leadership, he eventually consolidated power to become the country's de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are known as Stalinism.
  Born to a poor family in Gori in the Russian Empire, Stalin joined the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a youth. He edited the party's newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction via robberies, kidnappings, and protection rackets. Repeatedly arrested, he underwent several internal exiles. After the Bolsheviks seized power during the 1917 October Revolution and created a one-party state under Lenin's newly renamed Communist Party, Stalin joined its governing Politburo.
context_section_description: In the aftermath of the Second World War, the British Empire declined, leaving the U.S. and USSR as the dominant world powers. Tensions among these former Allies grew, resulting in the Cold War. Although Stalin publicly described the British and U.S. governments as aggressive, he thought it unlikely that a war with them would be imminent, believing that several decades of peace was likely. He nevertheless secretly intensified Soviet research into nuclear weaponry, intent on creating an atom bomb. Still, Stalin foresaw the undesirability of a nuclear conflict, saying in 1949 that "atomic weapons can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world." He personally took a keen interest in the development of the weapon. In August 1949, the bomb was successfully tested in the deserts outside Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. Stalin also initiated a new military build-up; the Soviet army was expanded from 2.9 million soldiers, as it stood in 1949, to 5.8 million by 1953.
  The US began pushing its interests on every continent, acquiring air force bases in Africa and Asia and ensuring pro-U.S. regimes took power across Latin America. It launched the Marshall Plan in June 1947, with which it sought to undermine Soviet hegemony in eastern Europe. The US also offered financial assistance as part of the Marshall Plan on the condition that they opened their markets to trade, aware that the Soviets would never agree.
  The Allies demanded that Stalin withdraw the Red Army from northern Iran. He initially refused, leading to an international crisis in 1946, but one year later Stalin finally relented and moved the Soviet troops out.
  Stalin also tried to maximise Soviet influence on the world stage, unsuccessfully pushing for Libya—recently liberated from Italian occupation—to become a Soviet protectorate. He sent Molotov as his representative to San Francisco to take part in negotiations to form the United Nations, insisting that the Soviets have a place on the Security Council. In April 1949, the Western powers established the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), an international military alliance of capitalist countries. Within Western countries, Stalin was increasingly portrayed as the "most evil dictator alive" and compared to Hitler.
  In 1948, Stalin edited and rewrote sections of Falsifiers of History, published as a series of Pravda articles in February 1948 and then in book form. Written in response to public revelations of the 1939 Soviet alliance with Germany, it focused on blaming Western powers for the war. He erroneously claimed that the initial German advance in the early part of the war was not a result of Soviet military weakness, but rather a deliberate Soviet strategic retreat. In 1949, celebrations took place to mark Stalin's seventieth birthday (albeit not the correct year) at which Stalin attended an event in the Bolshoi Theatre alongside Marxist–Leninist leaders from across Europe and Asia.
caption: Stalin at his seventieth birthday celebration with (left to right) Mao Zedong, Nikolai Bulganin, Walter Ulbricht and Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal
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