Joseph Stalin

Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953), was a political and revolutionary figure in the Soviet Union. From 1924 until his death in 1953, he served as the Soviet Union's president. He formalized these concepts as Marxism-Leninism, subscribing to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism from an ideological standpoint. The Cold War, a period of hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States, began. Stalin oversaw the Soviet Union's post-war recovery and the creation of an atomic bomb in 1949.
Stalin was followed by Nikita Khrushchev, who criticized his reign, after his death in 1953. Stalin's mother Ekaterina, a housecleaner and launderer, was adamant about getting him an education. He sustained terrible injuries when he was struck by a phaeton when he was 12 years old, permanently disabling his left arm. Stalin started attending the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary in 1894. From 1899 to 1901, Stalin studied meteorology at the Georgian observatory in Tiflis.
On May Day 1900, he helped co-organize a covert workers' mass meeting, where he was successful in persuading many of the men to go on strike. He received a three-year banishment in eastern Siberia in 1903. For urging the breakaway Georgian Marxist movement to split from its Russian equivalent, he was dismissed from the party. Yakov was born to Stalin and Kato Svanidze in 1907 after their marriage. He had made a name for himself as "Georgia's top Bolshevik" by then.
On the subject of the Bolsheviks fielding candidates for the State Duma, he clashed with Lenin. In the Vologda Province settlement of Solvychegodsk, Stalin received a two-year exile term. He ran away to Kotlas while pretending to be a lady, then continued on to Saint Petersburg. He was given the job of turning the Bolshevik weekly newspaper Zvezda into a daily publication, Pravda, in 1912. Stalin published papers after the 1912 Duma elections urging amity between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.
He was given a four-year prison term in the isolated Siberian city of Turukhansk. He was sent to the village of Kureika in 1914 out of worry about a probable escape attempt. Stalin was enlisted into the Russian Army in 1916 to participate in World War One. Due to his arm's disability, he was determined to be unfit for military service. He managed Lenin's safety while in exile by smuggling him out of Pravda's Petrograd office.
In October 1917, Stalin supported Lenin's proposal for a Bolshevik takeover. He had the responsibility of informing the Second Congress of Soviets' representatives of the changing circumstances. Historiographers contend that he was crucial to the preparation for and execution of the coup. In November 1917, Stalin was named People's Commissar for Nationalities. a signed edict granting minority the freedom to secede and choose their own government.
married Nadezhda Alliluyeva after hiring her as his secretary. He was accused of supporting federalism as a cover for imperialist actions by socialist revolutionaries. Stalin was dispatched by Sovnarkom to Tsaritsyn to oversee the distribution of food in southern Russia. He gave the local Cheka branch orders to execute suspects in counterrevolution, occasionally without a court hearing. Middle-class specialists were removed from the military and food gathering organizations, some of whom were also put to death.
Most Bolshevik leaders did not support Stalin's extensive use of state terror and brutality. He received criticism from Lenin for using strategies that led to an excessive number of Red Army soldiers dying. 1920 saw the outbreak of the Polish-Soviet War, which saw the Poles invade Ukraine and seize Kiev. Stalin was released from the military on September 1st, 1920. When a peace treaty was signed in Riga on March 18, 1921, the Polish-Soviet War came to an end.
Stalin thought that "independent republics" within Russia should let each national and ethnic minority to exercise their right to self-expression. Stalin disagreed with the notion of independent Georgian, Armenian, and Azeri republics. A Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic was his proposal. Following the civil war, Russia had widespread strikes by workers and peasant movements. Lenin proposed Stalin as the new general secretary of the party in 1922.
Despite their friendship, Lenin thought Stalin was "not clever" and despised his "Asiatic" demeanor. A new federation called the "Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia" was proposed by Lenin. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was chosen as the new name of the union as part of a compromise. Lenin's funeral was overseen by Stalin, who also served as one of the pallbearers. His body was embalmed by the Politburo and interred in a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square.
He delivered nine lectures at Sverdlov University to support his reputation as a fervent Leninist. While the Left Opposition was gradually eliminated, Stalin amassed a retinue of sympathizers within the Central Committee. The United Opposition was founded when Kamenev and Zinoviev joined forces with Trotsky's allies. Stalin defended the idea of "Socialism in One Country" in his 1926 book On Questions of Leninism. There had been a grain shortage and the Soviet Union lagged behind Western nations in terms of industrial growth.
Japan, France, the UK, Poland, and Romania were among the nations that Stalin's regime feared would attack. The Politburo announced the widespread collectivization of agriculture in 1929, creating both sovkhoz state farms and kolkhozy community farms. Approximately 62% of households engaged in agriculture in 1932 belonged to collectives; by 1936, this number had increased to 90%. The loss of their private lands was bitterly felt by many of the collectivised peasants, which caused production to decline. The White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Moscow Metro are two significant building projects that mostly relied on forced labor.
The remaining vestiges of laborers' industrial control were eliminated, and plant managers were given more power. By citing Marx's claim that it was required during the early phases of socialism, Stalin defended pay discrepancy. Stalin stepped up his anti-religious crusade and raised funds for the League of Militant Atheists. Numerous places of worship were destroyed, but Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour stood apart. He had a rocky relationship with Nadezhda because of their disagreements and her mental health issues.
A severe famine struck the Soviet Union, reaching its height in the winter of 1932–1933. Between five and seven million people perished; the North Caucasus and Ukraine were the worst-affected regions. Whether Stalin's administration wanted the famine to happen or not is up for debate among historians. Stalin ordered the creation of a new constitution in 1935–1936 that served as a propaganda tool. According to him, "socialism, the first stage of communism, has essentially been accomplished in our country." The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) published their history in 1938.
The Soviet Union provided the left-wing Republican faction with 407 tanks and 648 aircraft when the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936. Stalin frequently sent contradictory messages about government repression. In August 1936, the first Moscow Trial was held; Kamenev and Zinoviev were among those declared guilty in a mock trial and put to death. 700,000 individuals were shot, 1.6 million were detained, and unknown numbers perished as a result of NKVD torture. Groups of the NKVD killed enemies and defectors overseas in the 1930s and 1940s.
The final of Stalin's opponents, Trotsky, was assassinated in Mexico in August 1940. In the event of a future war with Japan and Germany, Stalin feared a potential fifth column and was concerned about right-wing groups in Spain. Stalin believed that conflict between rival capitalist nations was inevitable because he was a Marxist-Leninist. The Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, which he saw as an opportunity for territorial expansion and short-term peace with Germany during World War II. A week later, Germany invaded Poland, prompting war declarations from the UK and France against Germany.
Finland was invaded by the Soviet Union in November 1939, but despite having a smaller population, the Finns managed to repel the Red Army. Invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked the beginning of the Eastern Front conflict. Stalin was caught off guard despite intelligence services informing him of Germany's intentions. He established a military Supreme Command and a State Defense Committee, both of which he presided over as Supreme Commander (Stavka). During World War Two, Stalin showed greater tolerance toward the Russian Orthodox Church.
While promoting heightened criticism of cosmopolitanism, the authorities increasingly encouraged Pan-Slavic sentiment. Following the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, Marxist-Leninist parties prioritized nationalism over internationalism. During World War Two, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt were referred to as the "Big Three." On the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union repelled significant German assaults in 1941 and 1942. Stalin waited impatiently for the US and UK to launch the Western Front so that it could relieve some of the East's pressure.
The Soviet Union made tremendous progress toward Germany in 1944 by crossing Eastern Europe. Various ethnic groups in the area were charged with working with the Germans while the Red Army retook the Caucasus and Crimea. As a result of the policy, more than one million people were deported. Many Soviet soldiers committed acts of rape, pillage, and looting in Germany and other regions of Eastern Europe. Stalin questioned how a soldier could "respond normally" following the traumas of combat.
He was widely considered as the epitome of triumph and patriotism in the Soviet Union. Stalin took on the name Generalissimus in June 1945. The Russian people, in his words, are "the exceptional nation" and "leading power." Stalin's Collected Works were issued by the government in 1946. On the walls of both houses and workplaces, there were still many pictures of him.
In addition to the 26–27 million people who had died, millions more had been injured, hungry, or left orphaned. Stalin let the Russian Orthodox Church to keep the places of worship it had built during the conflict. In 1950, the death penalty was reinstated after being repealed in 1947.
In Soviet cities throughout the post-war era, there were frequently food shortages. Stalin concentrated on building a number of significant infrastructure projects, such as hydroelectric facilities, canals, and rail links that reached the arctic regions. To build an atom bomb, he surreptitiously increased Soviet research into nuclear weapons. Falsifiers of history was revised and rewritten in part by Stalin before being published as a book in February 1948. He asked that Germany and its Axis allies Hungary, Romania, and the Slovak Republic pay war reparations.
additionally attempted in vain to get Libya placed under Soviet protection. Due to Tito's calls for a Balkan federation and for Soviet support of the communist troops in the ongoing Greek Civil War, relations between Stalin and Tito were strained. In the hopes that it would either become influenced by the Soviet Union or remain neutral, he proposed the establishment of a unified but demilitarized German state. The Hungarian Working People's Party gained power in 1947 as a result of manipulated elections. Romania and Bulgaria both abolished the monarchy.
Mao Zedong, a Chinese Communist, seized control of China in October 1949. Invading the south in June 1950, the North Korean Army started the Korean War. In an effort to gain an ally in the Middle East, the Soviet Union was one of the first countries to provide diplomatic recognition to the newly established state of Israel in 1948. Stalin started an anti-Jewish campaign inside the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc after his disagreement with Israel. Stalin delivered just three public addresses, two of which were brief, from 1946 until his death.
The quantity of writing he produced likewise decreased. He started the Mingrelian scandal, a purge of the Georgian Communist Party, in 1951. Thousands of people watched as Stalin's remains was buried in Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square. The Soviet system underwent changes very away. The goal of the new authorities was to improve relations with the US and Yugoslavia.
Volkogonov contends that Stalin's "dogmatic turn of thinking" influenced his conception of Marxism. Stalin thought that the proletariat and bourgeoisie of the globe would inevitably engage in a "class war." He claimed to be a devoted Leninist, albeit not without reservations. Leninism was developed into Stalinism, which saw Lenin's revolutionary actions as harmful to those Bolsheviks based inside the Russian Empire. Stalin made extensive use of Lenin's works to direct his governmental actions after his death.
He created the concept of "Socialism in One Country," which was closely related to squabbles among the Communist Party's factions. Stalin saw nations as mutable, capitalist-created entities that might meld into other nations. The Jews, he claimed, had a "national character," but they weren't a "nation" and couldn't be assimilated. In the end, he thought, all countries would converge into a single, universal human society. Stalin, who was of Georgian descent, had a strong Georgian accent when speaking Russian.
He was referred to as "Asiatic" by several of his coworkers, and he allegedly once informed a Japanese journalist that he was "not a European man, but an Asian, a Russified Georgian." Given that Russians made up the majority of the USSR's population, Montefiore contended that Stalin's embrace of the Russian people was practical.
Throughout his childhood, Stalin went by many aliases, including "Koba," "Soselo," and "Ivanov," until settling on "Stalin" in 1912. Volkogonov claimed Stalin was a bad public speaker, but his delivery was "simple and clear." He preferred wearing military-inspired attire, especially long black boots, light-colored collarless tunics, and carrying a revolver. Stalin had a sophisticated mind, tremendous self-control, and a superb memory. He might be obnoxious and offensive, but he hardly ever shouted in rage.
According to historians, it is legitimate to refer to "many Stalins," as Lazar Kaganovich put it. Stalin possessed a personal library of more than 20,000 books and was an avid reader. He was self-taught and claimed to read up to 500 pages every day; Montefiore thought highly of him. History was his favorite topic, followed closely by Marxist theory and lastly literature. Stalin loved playing practical jokes and was an avid pool player.
He promoted drinking at social gatherings in the hopes that people would spill their secrets to him when inebriated. Stalin had an early affinity for flowers, and later in life he developed a deep interest in gardening. He maintained contact with several of his former Georgian acquaintances while serving as the leader of the Soviet Union. Stalin's former secretary, Boris Bazhanov, claimed that he had little interest in women. Stalin's favorite types were "malleable teenagers or buxom country women," according to Montefiore.
There are unconfirmed rumors that he began dating his servant Valentina Istomina around 1934. Although he never acknowledged them as being his, Montefiore believed that Stalin had at least two children who were not his. Service and Volkogonov, two biographers, saw him as a brilliant and extraordinary politician. Totalitarianism has been used to describe Stalin's Soviet Union. Numerous biographers have accused him of practicing Caesarism or describing him as an autocrat or dictator.
He started to be characterized as a "Oriental despot" in both the Soviet Union and other places. Many additional biographies have been written since his passing, however up until the 1980s they primarily drew on the same sources of data. Michael Ellman claims that 950,000–1.2 million people died as a result of repression during the Great Purge, which is the greatest estimate available today. 1.5 to 1 in the range. Between 1930 and 1953, the Gulag system resulted in 7 million deaths.
The number of famine deaths is estimated at 5.5–6. Steven Rosefielde cites a figure of 8.7 million, as opposed to 5 million. Stalin was criticized by Khrushchev for both his widespread repression and his personality cult. Joseph Stalin is regarded by many Russians as having presided over an era of stability, predictability, and pride. The Levada Center's polling indicates that Stalin's popularity has increased since 2015.
Vladimir Putin placed a focus on celebrating Soviet accomplishments rather than trying to redeem Joseph Stalin. Stalin has not been declared a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church, but some churches still have icons of him. According to a survey conducted in 2012 for the Carnegie Endowment, 38% of Armenians agreed that their nation "would always need a leader like Stalin."
== Why Stalin is Famous ==
From 1929 until 1953, Joseph Stalin ruled the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Under Stalin, the Soviet Union underwent a massive industrial and military transformation from a peasant nation. But throughout his terrible leadership, millions of his own compatriots perished because he controlled by terror.
From 1929 to 1953, Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union. Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born in Gori, Georgia, on December 18, 1878. He adopted the name Stalin, which is Russian for "man of steel," while he was in his 30s. Joseph Stalin wed seamstress Ekaterina "Kato" Svanidze in 1906. Nadezhda "Nadya" Alliluyeva committed suicide in 1918; the couple had one son, Yakov, who perished while a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II.
Stalin imposed a totalitarian regime and ruled with terror in order to crush any potential opponents. He increased the secret police's authority and incited the public to spy on one another. Millions of people were murdered or deported to the Gulag system of concentration camps for forced labor. Stalin, who became more and more paranoid as he aged, passed away on March 5, 1953, at the age of 74, after a stroke. In Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, his remains was embalmed and kept there until 1961.
From 1929 until 1953, Joseph Stalin ruled the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Under Stalin, the Soviet Union underwent a massive industrial and military transformation from a peasant nation. He nevertheless ruled via terror, and millions of his own people perished under his terrible tyranny. As a young man, Stalin got involved in both criminal and revolutionary movements. Following the passing of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, Stalin outwitted his opponents to win control of the party. During World War II, Stalin sided with the United States and Great Britain, but after the war, he and the West developed a tense alliance known as the Cold War. The Soviets started a de-Stalinization process after he passed away.
According to the Old Style Julian calendar, Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born on December 18, 1878, or December 6, 1878. (although he later invented a new birth date for himself: December 21, 1879). He was raised in Gori, a small town in Georgia that was then a part of the Russian Empire. He adopted the name Stalin in his 30s, which is Russian meaning "man of steel."
Did you realize? Stalingrad was given to the Russian city of Tsaritsyn in 1925. The city, which is situated along Europe's largest river, the Volga, became known as Volgograd in 1961 as part of the de-Stalinization movement. Today, it is a significant industrial hub and one of Russia's major cities.
Stalin was raised in poverty as the only kid. His mother worked as a laundress, while his father, a shoemaker and drinker, abused him. Stalin experienced smallpox as a child, which left him with permanent face scars. He received a scholarship when he was a teenager so that he could attend a seminary in the adjacent city of Tblisi and prepare for the Georgian Orthodox Church's priesthood.
While there, he started reading Karl Marx's writings in private and developed an interest in the revolutionary movement opposing the Russian monarchy. Marx is a German social philosopher and the author of the "Communist Manifesto." Stalin was ejected from the seminary in 1899 for skipping exams, though he later claimed it was because of his support for Marxist propaganda.
After graduating from high school, Stalin joined labor strikes and demonstrations as an undercover political agitator. Following the fictitious Georgian outlaw-hero Koba as his alias, he joined the Bolsheviks, the more violent branch of the Marxist Social Democratic movement headed by Vladimir Lenin.
In addition, Stalin engaged in a number of illegal actions, like as bank robberies, through which the Bolshevik Party received funding. Between 1902 and 1913, he was repeatedly detained, imprisoned, and forced into exile in Siberia.
Stalin was chosen to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in 1912 by Lenin, who was at the time living in exile in Switzerland. During the Russian Revolution, which began in November 1917, the Bolsheviks took control three years later. Lenin served as the Soviet Union's first president when it was established in 1922.
Throughout these years, Stalin kept climbing the party ranks, and in 1922 he was appointed secretary general of the Communist Party's Central Committee. In this capacity, he was able to nominate his allies for government positions and broaden his base of political support.
Stalin eventually outwitted his adversaries and won the power battle for control of the Communist Party after Lenin's passing in 1924. He had assumed the role of Soviet Union ruler by the late 1920s.
Joseph Stalin began implementing a series of five-year plans in the late 1920s with the goal of transforming the Soviet Union from a peasant country into an industrial giant. His economic-control-focused development strategy included the forcible collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which the state assumed ownership of farms.
Millions of farmers, especially the wealthier kulak farmers who owned land and employed paid labor, were executed or banished as punishment for refusing to follow Stalin's commands. Millions of people died in the Soviet Union's massive famine as a result of the forced collectivization.
Stalin imposed a totalitarian regime and ruled with terror in order to crush any potential opponents. He increased the secret police's authority, incited spying among the populace, and ordered the execution of millions of individuals or their deportation to the Gulag system of slave labor camps.
Stalin launched the Great Purge in the latter half of the 1930s, a series of campaigns intended to purge the Communist Party, the military, and other aspects of Soviet society of those he deemed a danger.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin also created a cult of personality around himself. In his honor, towns were given new names. He was given a more significant part in the revolution and other aspects of his life were mythologized in Soviet history books.
Stalin was the subject of admiring literature, music, and art, and his name was included into the Soviet anthem. He removed former associates who were killed during his numerous purges from images in an effort to rewrite history. The Soviet media was likewise governed by his government.
The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was signed by Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler in 1939, just before the start of World War II. Stalin then went on to annexe portions of Poland and Romania in addition to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, three Baltic states. Additionally, he started an invasion of Finland.
Then, in June 1941, Germany invaded the USSR in violation of the Nazi-Soviet treaty, earning major initial gains. The Soviets were not prepared for war, and Stalin had disregarded warnings about a probable invasion from the Americans, the British, and his own intelligence personnel.
Stalin remained in the Soviet capital of Moscow as German troops drew near and implemented a scorched-earth defense strategy, eradicating any supplies or infrastructure that the adversary may use to its advantage. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from August 1942 to February 1943 and saw the Red Army decimate the Germans and ultimately drive them from Russia, marked a turning point for the Soviets.
Stalin took part in the important Allied conferences as the war went on, such as the Tehran Conference (1943) and the Yalta Conference (1945). He was able to play the dependable ally while maintaining his belief in an expanded postwar Soviet empire because to his steel will and astute political acumen.
Joseph Stalin did not mature with age: in the USSR after World War II, he began a reign of terror that included purges, executions, exiles to labor camps, and persecution, repressing all criticism and anything that suggested outside influence, especially from the West.
He installed communist regimes across Eastern Europe and, in 1949, by detonating an atomic bomb, brought the Soviet Union into the nuclear era. He authorized North Korea's communist leader Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea, which the United States supported, in 1950, setting off the Korean War.
Stalin, who became more and more paranoid as he aged, passed away on March 5, 1953, at the age of 74, after a stroke. As part of the de-Stalinization movement started by Nikita Khrushchev, the successor to Joseph Stalin, his body was removed from Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square in 1961 and interred close to the Kremlin walls (1894-1971).
According to some estimates, Joseph Stalin's cruel rule resulted in the deaths of 6 million to 20 million people, either directly as a result of Stalin's policies or indirectly as a result of political murders. As a wave of executions swept the Soviet Union during Stalin's Great Purge, the killings first started in the 1930s.
In certain instances, a quota was set for the number to be put to death or jailed, according to history professor Norman Naimark of Stanford University. Some authorities went overboard to display their exuberance.
Stalin's botched attempts at collectivizing agriculture led to millions more deaths in the devastating famines that ravaged the Kazakh area from 1930 to 1933 and the Ukraine in 1932–1933. Various estimates suggest that 4 million men, women, and children perished from starvation during the Holodomor (a compound of the Ukrainian words meaning "to cause death" and "starvation").
== Great Purge ==
Joseph Stalin's drive to bolster his control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the government was known as The Great Purge. The purges were also intended to eliminate any remaining influence held by major political rivals like Leon Trotsky. From August 1936 through March 1938, it took place. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin experienced a period of purges from 1936 to 1938 known as The Great Purge. The historian Robert Conquest coined the phrase "great cleanse" in 1968.
The reasons behind the purge, such as Stalin's paranoia or his wish to get rid of dissenters, are up for debate among historians. The NKVD head Genrikh Yagoda oversaw the beginning of the Great Purge, which peaked between September 1936 and August 1938. Numerous political offenses have tens of thousands of victims (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups). Stalin's Great Purge was an attempt to exterminate opposition organisations that had previously and potentially posed a threat. The phrase "purge of the Party ranks" was shortened to "purge" in Soviet political slang.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Béla Kun were among the Bolshevik heroes who were killed by the government as the purges got under way. Stalin launched the Great Purge in 1934 using Sergey Kirov's murder as justification. Some historians in the past have come to believe that Stalin orchestrated the murder. The elimination of any potential "fifth column" in the event of war was another motivation for the purge. The Great Purge is divided into three comparable trials according to Soviet historians.
The first trial, which took place in August 1936, had 16 members of the so-called "Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite" Counter-Revolutionary Bloc who were charged with plotting to kill Stalin with fascist and capitalist entities. In one trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev were charged with conspiring with Trotsky, who was alleged to be working with Germany. In the end, 13 of the accused were shot to death; the others were sentenced to work in labor camps. We now know that confessions were only obtained through severe psychological abuse and coercion. According to the Dewey Commission's findings, Trotsky never told any of the defendants or witnesses in the Moscow trials to strike deals with other nations that would be detrimental to the Soviet Union.
According to Karl Radek's testimony, a "third organization independent from the cadres that had passed through school" existed. One of the most well-known Soviet show trials is The Trial of the Twenty-One. There were 21 defendants in it who were allegedly members of the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites," allegedly under Nikolai Bukharin's leadership. They were accused of planning to assassinate Lenin and Stalin and divide the United States. S. R. and give its territories to Britain, Germany, and Japan.
The confession of Nikolai Bukharin sparked intense discussion among Western observers. It served as the basis for Maurice Merleau-philosophical Ponty's article and the acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. Some keen witnesses observed that he would only accept confessions in writing. Stalin instructed the NKVD to assess how many "kulaks" and "criminals" were present in each district. These people were supposed to be detained, either executed, or transported to gulag camps.
Anna Larina, Bukharin's widow, lived to see her husband's posthumous rehabilitation fifty years later. With 669,929 arrests and 376,202 executions, the "Great Terror" in the Soviet Union in 1937–1938 was the country's most extensive single campaign of repression. The so-called "special settlers" (spetzpereselentsy), who were always under police monitoring, were likewise particularly susceptible to repression. During the Great Terror, at least 100,000 of them were detained. The NKVD's largest operation of this kind was in Poland.
Records show that there have been 111,091 executions and 143,810 arrests. There were 12 Poles. 5% of people killed during the Great Terror were women, whereas 0% were men. 4% of the populace in the USSR. In the Great Terror, ethnic Poles made up the largest group of victims, making up fewer than 0.
5 percent of the total population. The NKVD's national operations have been dubbed genocidal by certain academics. There is scant evidence that the purported prejudices of Stalin and Russia played a major causal influence. It was first believed that 25–50% of Red Army officers had been expelled. The actual number is currently estimated to be about 7–7.
7%. A systematic underestimating of the exact number of the Red Army officer corps led to this mismatch. Nearly all of the senior Bolsheviks from Lenin's Soviet government or the 1917 Russian Revolution were put to death. According to documents found by Vladimir Bukovsky in the Central Committee archives in 1992, there were restrictions on both executions and arrests, just as there were for all other planned economy activity.
1,500 people perished in prisons and detention camps and 2,000 writers, thinkers, and artists were imprisoned during the 1920s and 1930s. Osip Mandelstam, a poet, was detained after reading his well-known anti-Stalin poem, Stalin Epigram. In a work camp, geologist Dmitrii Mushketov was put to death. Don't touch this cloud dweller," Stalin is alleged to have shouted as he crossed Boris Pasternak's name off the list for the purges. Isaac Babel was found guilty of spying for Trotsky, the French, and the Austrians at the same time.
The rubber strap was used to beat Vsevolod Meyerhold to death. Titsian Tabidze, a poet from Georgia, was tortured in prison after being arrested on a treason allegation. After being forced to label his friends as enemies of the people, fellow poet Paolo Iashvili committed suicide by shooting himself. Stalin's personal tutor, Jan Sten, later became a member of the Bloc of Soviet Oppositions. In 1933, poet Nikolai Klyuev was detained for defying Soviet doctrine.
A taxonomy of Russian dialects developed by the Russian linguist Nikolai Durnovo served as the foundation for contemporary scientific linguistic nomenclature. Les Kurbas, a director of Ukrainian theater and motion pictures, was shot on November 3, 1937. Stalin built a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika in the 1930s by sending NKVD agents to the Mongolian People's Republic. Tens of thousands of persons who were thought to be involved with "pro-Japanese spy rings" were put to death. 18,000 Buddhist lamas perished in the tragedy, making up the majority of the casualties.
The 1936–1938 Great Purge can be loosely divided into four phases. Yezhov was demoted from his position as the NKVD's director before being tried and put to death. According to Michael Parrish, the Great Panic ended in 1938, but a lesser terror persisted in the 1940s. Simon Tisdall, Edwidge Danticat, Oxford University Press, London, 1979, released Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties - The Untold Story of Soviet Executions and Retaliations. After Stalin's death, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned The Great Purge.
American writer H. In 1941, R. Knickerbocker referred to them as "the great purges". Stalin's purges resulted in the deaths of around 5,000,000 people all at once or over a short period of time. There is a significant amount of freshly presented original archive material in Rehabilitation: The Political Processes of the 1930s and 1950s (Peaилитaи. 30-50-x) (1991). Materials go into great depth to explain how many show trials were faked.
The Moscow Trials defendants, including Nikolai Bukharin, were not pardoned until 1988. In 1937 and 1938, Stalin signed 357 lists approving the deaths of over 40,000 people. This was 7.4% of those legally executed; it is established that 90% of them were shot. Researchers with access to the archives have verified that Stalin had a direct hand in the purge. Stalin definitely ordered the killing of many innocent individuals, but it is more likely that he did so because he believed that many of them had committed crimes against the state and believed that the execution of others would serve as a deterrence to the guilty.
After Stalin's death, two Soviet commissions looked into the show trials. With the exception of Radek and Yagoda, the commission advocated for the rehabilitation of every defendant. Many mass graves containing executed Great Terror victims were found and transformed into memorials. Some, like the Bykivnia killing grounds outside of Kyiv, are estimated to have 200,000 bodies. President Vladimir Putin unveiled the Wall of Sorrow on October 30, 2017, in an official but divisive acknowledgement of the crimes committed by the Soviet Union.
In Odessa, Ukraine, a mass grave containing 5,000–8,000 skeletons was found in August 2021. On the reason for the Soviet Terror in 1937–1938, historians disagree. The purge's goal was to deal with elite resistance to Stalin's leadership rather than suppress the Soviet people as a whole.
== Holodomor ==
In Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, there was a famine known as the Holodomor, often referred to as the Terror-Famine or the Great Famine. It was a part of the larger Soviet famine of 1932–1933, which affected the majority of the Soviet Union's grain-producing regions. The word "Holodomor" was first used as "Haladamor" in publications from the Ukrainian diaspora in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Until historical documents were declassified and published, the Soviet Union disregarded mentions of hunger as anti-Soviet propaganda. After that, it became impossible to continue to deny the calamity. Between 1932 and 1933, the Holodomor famine struck both the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian SSR.
The population of Ukraine rose by only 6.6% between 1926 and 1939, whereas Russia and Belarus saw respective increases of 16.9% and 11.7%. The oblasts of Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa, and Vinnytsia that had the worst famine in 1933. The Ukrainian Weekly, which monitored the situation in 1933, highlighted communication problems. The Soviet government published posters with the slogan "Eating your own children is a barbarous act." There are numerous views as to what led to the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 during the Great Depression.
Others point the finger at deliberate Soviet actions meant to wipe off the Ukrainian population. The compulsory collectivization strategy in Ukraine caused a severe crisis and contributed to famine. Oleh Wolowyna contends that the famine was significantly influenced by peasant rebellion and its suppression. It has been suggested that the Soviet government attacked Ukrainian nationalism by using the artificial famine. The fact that the oblasts of Ukraine with the largest losses were Kyiv and Kharkiv, which produced far less grain than other regions of the nation, calls into question the collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for the famine.
In 1931, several regions in these Oblasts had their purchase quotas doubled, as opposed to the 9% increase in procurement that was the national average. Before, during, and after the Holodomor famine, Ukraine used a number of oppressive measures. Collectivization involved not just taking land from farmers but also closing churches, destroying religious artifacts, and detaining priests. The Orthodox Church in Ukraine was branded by the GPU as a "nationalist, political, counter-political" institution during a show trial that was instigated by the GPU. It is estimated that tens of thousands of people were detained, banished, or even put to death during and after the trial, including 30,000 thinkers, authors, educators, and scientists.
In the 1930s, blacklisting was one of the agitation-propaganda strategies used in the Soviet Union, particularly in Ukraine and the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region. 32 districts in Kazakhstan were banned in 1932 because they failed to meet grain output quotas. The death rate in some Kharkiv neighborhoods on the blacklist may be higher than 40%. Other places, like Vinnytsia, where blacklisting was practiced, mortality was unaffected particularly. The Soviet government attributed the emigration of peasants to anti-Soviet forces.
To make up for unmet grain procurement targets in Ukraine, the Soviet government seized grain stocks. There was a widespread purging of Communist party leaders at all levels in Ukraine. The Soviet administration steadfastly denied there was a famine and refused to request outside assistance. To maintain the collective agricultural system, the aid that was provided was dispersed only in certain areas. According to Soviet archival records, food assistance was given first to the workers who were the most productive.
Famine and oppressive laws were also suffered by Ukrainians in other regions of the Soviet Union. The Kuban Ukrainian people was severely impacted by a devastating famine in 1932–1933 as a result of the policy of forced collectivization. By 1939, there were 150,000 self-described Ukrainians living in Kuban, down from 915,000 in 1926. The Kazakh famine of 1931–1933 had a profound impact on ethnic minorities in Kazakhstan. The extent of the catastrophe was recognized outside of the Soviet Union despite efforts by the government to conceal it.
For a very long time, the Soviet Union denied that the Holodomor even happened. Prior to the opening of the archives, estimates ranged greatly, from 2.5 million to 4.8 million to 5 million. Some extrapolate based on localized deaths, while others utilize historical statistics. Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine, and other Ukrainian officials estimate that seven to ten million people perished during the Holodomor. Some historians from Ukraine and the West employ comparable numbers.
Timothy D. Snyder and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, two historians, have disputed the usage of the 7 to 20 million numbers. The losses were reduced by Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky to between 3 million and 3.5 million, or approximately 3.2 million, taking into account the lack of specific data. The findings of the 1926 Census and the 1937 Census do not tally up, according to the statistics. The life expectancy for those born in 1932 dropped dramatically to 28 years, and for those born in 1933, it even further decreased to an incredibly low 10.8 years for females and 7.3 years for males. 2.4 million additional fatalities were reported, although Snyder says this number is "significantly low."
The Holodomor had the greatest impact on rural Ukraine. The death toll is estimated to be between 2.2 million and 3.5 million. Around 81.3% of the famine victims in the Ukrainian SSR were ethnic Ukrainians, according to Babyonyshev's estimation from 1981. Regarding whether Soviet actions would qualify as genocide under legal standards, there is no international agreement. Several nations, including Canada, have designated the Holodomor as a genocide.
According to certain sources, certain territories will be prevented or delayed from achieving recognition due to Russian influence and a refusal to deteriorate relations with Russia. The denial of the Holodomor is the claim that there was no famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933. According to historians, official policy—not poor harvests—was the main cause of the high death toll. Stanislav Kulchytsky, a historian from Ukraine, alleges that the Soviet government instructed him to fabricate his conclusions. A national tragedy for the Ukrainian people, the Holodomor, or Great Famine of 1932–1933, claimed the lives of between 7 and 10 million innocent people.
Ukraine and the European Parliament both view the incident as a genocide, while Russia's lower house of parliament denounced the Soviet government. 35 legal and genocide experts have referred to Russia's use of famine as a weapon of war in 2022 as a part of a pattern of genocide. Pope Francis linked the "awful Holodomor Genocide" to the Russian invasion in Ukraine, which specifically targets and destroys civilian infrastructure. On the banks of the Dnieper River in Kiev, the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide was built in 2008. 93% of respondents to a poll conducted in Ukraine in 2022 agreed that it was a genocide.
The first public monument in Canada was built to commemorate the famine-50th genocide's anniversary. In October 2018, a memorial statue was unveiled in Toronto. It was deemed to be an act of genocide by the Senate of the Republic of Poland. A monument honoring the Great Famine victims was built in Canada. The Ukrainian Weekly reported on a multiethnic community gathering that took place in Chicago's Ukrainian Village on the North Shore Drive on March 20, 1982.
On November 13, 2009, the U.S. A message from President Barack Obama was made in honor of Ukrainian Holodomor Remembrance Day. There will be a new H. The resolution Res. 1109, which declared the Holodomor to be a genocide and served as a reminder of the oppressive Soviet policies, was approved. Pope Francis organized a ceremony to honor the famine victims on November 23, 2022.