Joseph+Stalin

Ameera Khan English 4-A 10/28/11




 * Josef Stalin was born on December 21, 1879 in Gori, Georgia. His birth name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.
 * While he was growing up, he had to experience poverty. In the class system, he and his family fell into the peasant category.
 * His mother was really protective over him because his other 3 siblings died and he had a bad health problem. However he survived! When he was seven years old, he caught smallpox.
 * Since his mother was very religious he had to go to a religious school. Despite having a bad health problem, he was a very good student and did good in school. He got a free scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary.
 * While he was studying at Tiflis, he became part of a Russian independence group.
 * In May 1899, he got kicked out of the group because he would show disrespect to people who would read forbidden group. This would be a religious matter because he was trying to convert his students to Marxism.
 * He was unemployed for a while after getting expelled from the group until he started to work as private middle school tutor. He also wrote articles for the socialist Georgian Newspaper.
 * In 1922, he got assigned as a new worker for General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee. He abused that power by being tyrannical.
 * After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin destroyed everything by conquering and taking advantage of the old leaders.
 * While in power, Stalin removed people from their positions and had them exiled abroad. Later, when he realized that the exiles were still capable of speaking and writing ill against him from far away, Stalin switched tactics, culminating in a vast reign of terror and spectacular show trials in the 1930s during which the founding fathers of the Soviet Union were one by one unmasked as "enemies of the people" who had supposedly always been in the employ of Capitalist intelligence services and summarily shot.
 * Stalin convinced and economic policy to make every thing advanced by having a demand for rapid industrialization. In the end he forcefully collected agriculture,instituted the Five-Year Plans to coordinate all investment and production in the country, and undertook a massive program of building heavy industry.
 * Because of this, the Soviet Union boosted its economy while the Capitalist world was going through the Great Depression.
 * Measures such as the violent expropriation of the harvest by the government, the forced resettlement and murder of the most successful peasants as counterrevolutionary elements, and the discovery of a source of cheap labor through the arrest of millions of innocent citizens led to countless millions of deaths from the worst man-made famine in human history and in the camps of the Gulag.
 * As war began in 1939, Stalin felt that he had scored a coup by striking a non-aggression pact with Hitler, in which they agreed to divide up Poland and then leave each other alone.
 * As a result, when the attack from the Nazis came, the Soviet army was completely unprepared and suffered horrible defeats, while Stalin spent the first several days after the attack holed up in his office in shock. Because the military had been purged of its best minds in the mid-1930s, it took some time, and many lives, before the Soviets were able to regroup and make a credible defense. By then, all of the Ukraine and Belarus were in German hands, Leningrad had been surrounded and besieged, and Nazi artillery was entrenched only a few miles from the Kremlin. After heroic efforts on the part of the whole country, the tide eventually turned at Stalingrad in 1943, and soon the victorious Red Army was liberating the countries of Eastern Europe--before the Americans had even begun to pose a serious challenge to Hitler from the west with the D-Day invasion.
 * During the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences, Stalin proved a worthy negotiator with the likes of Roosevelt and Churchill, and managed to arrange for the countries of Eastern Europe, which had been liberated by the Red Army to remain in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as securing three seats for his country in the newly formed UN.
 * Returning soldiers and refugees were arrested and either shot or sent to the labor camps as traitors, entire nationalities that had been deported during the War, also as traitors, were not allowed to return to their homes, and in 1953, a plot to kill Stalin was ostensibly uncovered in the Kremlin. Stalin remained a hero to his people until Khrushchev's well-known "secret" speech to a Party Congress in 1956, in which Stalin's excesses, at least as far as power grabbing in the Party itself, were denounced.

★ Stalin led Communist Russia but had Socialist beliefs. Communism and Socialism are slightly different.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSstalin.htm http://www.pbs.org/redfiles/bios/all_bio_joseph_stalin.htm