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Stalin And The Ussr Essay Research Paper

Stalin And The Ussr Essay, Research Paper


Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich


1879-1953, Russian revolutionary, head of the USSR


(1924-53). A Georgian cobbler’s son named


Dzhugashvili, he joined the Social-Democratic party


while a seminarian and soon became a professional


revolutionary. In the 1903 party split (see BOLSHEVISM


AND MENSHEVISM) he sided with LENIN. Stalin


attended party congresses abroad and worked in the


Georgian party press. In 1912 he went to St. Petersburg,


where he was elected to the party’s central committee.


About this time he took the name Stalin (man of steel).


His sixth arrest (1913) led to four years of Siberian exile.


After the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION of March 1917, he


joined the editorial board of the party paper Pravda.


When the Bolsheviks took power (Nov. 1917) he became


people’s commissar of nationalities. He also played an


important administrative role in the civil war (1918-20). In


1922 Stalin was made general secretary of the party.


Lenin, before he died in 1924, wrote a testament urging


Stalin’s removal from the post because of his arbitrary


conduct; but in the struggle to succeed Lenin, Stalin


was victorious. By 1927 he had discarded his erstwhile


allies BUKHARIN, KAMENEV, and ZINOVIEV; in 1929


TROTSKY, his major rival for the succession, was exiled


from the USSR. Forcible agricultural collectivization and


breakneck industrialization beg

an in 1928. The state,


instead of withering away, as Marx had foreseen, was


glorified. Nationalism was revived as socialism in one


country. The military was reorganized along czarist lines.


Conservatism permeated official policy on art,


education, and the family. Political repression and terror


reached a height in the 1930s. In a public trial Bukharin,


Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others were charged with


conspiring to overthrow the regime; they confessed and


were executed. Enormous numbers of ordinary citizens


also fell victim. Stalin’s foreign policy in the 1930s


focused on efforts to form alliances with Britain and


France against NAZI Germany; the 1939 Russo-German


nonaggression pact marked the failure of these efforts.


In 1941 Stalin took over the premiership from


MOLOTOV. The German invasion (June 22) found him


unprepared; at war’s end (1945) 20 million Russians were


dead (see UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS).


At the TEHERAN CONFERENCE and the YALTA


CONFERENCE Stalin gained Western recognition of a


Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The


paranoia of his last years led to a period of terror


reminiscent of the 1930s. On his death (1953) his body


was placed next to Lenin’s. In 1956, at the 20th Party


Congress, KHRUSHCHEV denounced Stalin’s tyranny,


but destalinization has never been thoroughgoing


Bibliography


Wolfson


Lowe

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