| “ | There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm. | „ |
| ~ Joseph Stalin |
- "Death is the solution to all problems. No man...no problem"
- —Joseph Stalin
| “ | By the time of his state funeral in March 1953 the man the world knew effectively as "Uncle Jo Stalin" had been dead for four days. The people of the Soviet Union wept openly for their dead leader. To the Russian people Stalin was a saviour. The great leader who had plucked them and the country from the jaws of Hitler's nazis and kept the Americans at bay. As they filed past his corpse few care to recall that Stalin had another darker reputation as the murderer of millions of his own people. Stalin turned Soviet Russia into one of the bloodiest killing rounds the world has ever seen. | „ |
| ~ Introduction to a Discovery channel documentary. |
| “ | The greatest tragedy of all was that this butcher of innocents would never be called to account for his crimes. | „ |
| ~ A classic Karma Houdini |
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili; December 18, 1878 – March 5, 1953) was the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. He was one of the biggest mass murderers to have ever existed and remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant similar to his wartime enemy Adolf Hitler, others as a capable and necessary leader for the time.
Villainy
While formally the office of the General Secretary was elective and wasn't initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, after Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin managed to consolidate more and more power in his hands, gradually putting down all opposition groups within the party. This included Leon Trotsky, the Red Army organizer, proponent of world revolution, and principal critic of Stalin among the early Soviet leaders, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Instead, Stalin's idea of socialism in one country became the primary line of the Soviet politics. There exists Stalinism, an ideology that Stalin founded and implanted in the Soviet Union.
World War II
In 1939, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler, allowing both to take over Poland. Hitler betrayed this pact in 1941 with the invasion of the USSR, forcing Stalin to turn to the western democracies for support. Stalin, along with Franklin Roosevelt of the United States and Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom were among the "Big Three" in the allied leaders of WW2. Even though the alliance was temporary and Stalin resumed his harsh rule after the war, he was a very effective allied leader and has a grudging respect today for being one of the people who lead the allies to victory. After the war, Stalin spread Communism in eastern Europe and he backed other communist regions in other countries like China, thus becoming a villain to the Western world and sparking the Cold War.
As Leader of the Soviet Union
During his time in power, Stalin had many of his own people killed, particularly during the 'Great Purge' of late 30's. Stalin died in 1953, ending the greatest (or perhaps the worst) era in Soviet history. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, then began the liberalization of Soviet policy that continued into the 1980s and led to its collapse.
Death
Being the murdering tyrant that he was, Joseph Stalin died in his bed after having a major stroke on March 1st, 1953. Initially, he was buried in the Lenin Mausoleum, but soon after, his body was removed, and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin as a criminal, beginning the long process of destalinization.
Legacy
Stalin was one of the biggest mass murderers in history, he killed a minimum of 20 million people during his reign, with others putting the number much higher. He conducted genocide in Ukraine and was in charge of an army that raped its way across half of Europe. And yet he remains astonishingly popular; popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed.
Results of a controversial poll taken in 2006 stated that over 35% of Russians would vote for Stalin if he were still alive. Fewer than a third of all Russians regarded Stalin as a "murderous tyrant"; however, a Russian court in 2009, ruling on a suit by Stalin's grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, against the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, ruled that referring to Stalin as a "bloodthirsty cannibal" was not libel. In a July 2007 poll, 54% of the Russian youth agreed that Stalin did more good than bad while 46% (of them) disagreed that Stalin was a "cruel tyrant". Half of the respondents, aged from 16 to 19, agreed Stalin was a wise leader. In 2011, a poll by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that 45 percent of Russians had a “generally positive” view of Stalin. In his home country of Georgia, that number rises to 68 percent. Only a few years beforehand, a TV poll of 50 million Russians named Stalin the “third-greatest Russian of all time.” Western Ukraine still commissions statues of him on a mind-numbingly regular basis.
This isn’t a merely a whitewashing of the past. Similar polls show that most Russians are aware of the depth and depravity of Stalin’s crimes. However, he’s also seen as the leader who took on and defeated Nazi Germany after the horrific Battle of Stalingrad. In other words, he’s a monster but one who defeated an even bigger monster.