Joseph Stalin Essay -- Joseph Stalin bio Biography Essays

The man who turned the Soviet Union from a backward country into a world superpower at unimaginable human cost (Joseph Stalin). Stalin was born into a dysfunctional family in a poor village in atomic number 31 (Joseph Stalin). Permanently scarred from a childhood bout with smallpox and having a mildly deformed arm, Stalin always felt unfairly treated by life, and indeed developed a strong, romanticized desire for greatness and respect, combined with a shrewd streak of calculating cold-heartedness towards those who had maligned him. He always felt a sense of unfavorable position before educated minds, and particularly distrusted them (Joseph Stalin). Sent by his mother to the seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, to study to become a priest, the young Stalin never stainless his education, and was instead soon completely drawn into the citys active revolutionary circles. Never a fiery intellectual polemicist or orator like Lenin or Trotsky, Stalin specialized in the humdrum nuts and bolts of revolutionary activity. Risking arrest every day by helping organize workers, distributing illegal literature, and robbing trains to support the cause, while Lenin and his studious friends lived safely abroad and wrote clever articles about the plight of the Russian working class (Lenin & Stalin). Although Lenin found Stalins boorishness offensive at times, he valued his loyalty, and decreed him later the Revolution to various low-priority leadership positions in the new Soviet government(Lenin & Stalin). In 1922, Stalin was appointed to another such post, as General Secretary of the communistic Partys Central Committee. Stalin understood that cadres are everything if you control the personnel, you control the organization. He shrewdly used his new position to consolidate power in exactly this way--by domineering all appointments, setting agendas, and moving around Party staff in such a way that eventually everyone who counted for anything owed th eir position to him(Stalin Biography). By the time the Partys intellectual core realized what had happened, it was too late--Stalin had his people in place. While Lenin, the only person with the moral authority to challenge him, was on his deathbed and incapable of speech after a series of strokes, and besides, Stalin even controlled who had access to the leader. The General Secretary of the ... .... This ambitious plan brought hardship and met resistance as he putd the kulaks (wealthy peasant farmers) (Stalin The Man and His Era). This was followed in 1932 by the second, equally ambitious Five-Year Plan. In 1936, Stalin developed a new Soviet constitution, which was seen as a democratic document. However, the following elections were marred by purge trials from 1934 to 1938 in which Stalin systematically eliminated his opposition(Stalin The Man and His Era). Stalin further hurt his international image when he signed a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939. The Nazi leader soon broke this agreement and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. In Allied negotiations after the war, Stalin succeeded in obtaining control of half of Europe, and the following year the Iron mantelpiece descended over the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe as Stalin consolidated his gains (Joseph Stalin). This began the cold war, which continued throughout Stalins rule. He died in Moscow in 1953 and was entombed in Red Square alongside Lenin. However, his character was later attacked by Nikita Khrushchev and his body removed from the Lenin mausoleum (Stalin Biography).