death of stalin have a nice long nap old man

Because of this, Stalin began a quest for greatness and respect. The other village children treated him cruelly, instilling in him a sense of inferiority.

At age 7, he contracted smallpox, leaving his face scarred.Ī few years later he was injured in a carriage accident which left arm slightly deformed (some accounts state his arm trouble was a result of blood poisoning from the injury). The son of Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ketevan Geladze, a washerwoman, Stalin was a frail child. On December 18, 1879, in the Russian peasant village of Gori, Georgia, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili - later known as Joseph Stalin - was born. His Red Army helped defeat Nazi Germany during World War II. Stalin forced rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agricultural land, resulting in millions dying from famine while others were sent to labor camps. His confrontational foreign policy and his domestic terror regime (the 'Stalinist system') had an impact on Soviet society and politics well beyond the dictator's death of natural causes at age 73 on March 5, 1953.Joseph Stalin rose to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party in Russia, becoming a Soviet dictator after the death of Vladimir Lenin. Denied access to the western German occupation zones, he agreed to the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in October 1949.Įncouraged by Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the People's Republic of China in October 1949, Stalin gave the green light to North Korean leader Kim Il Sung to attack South Korea in June 1950. Stalin also sought to gain influence in Germany, though his exact goals remain controversial. Stalin said later to Milovan Djilas, a leading Yugoslav communist, 'Whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system.' He believed that the Americans and British 'imperialism' would clash and eventually socialism would triumph.Īfter initially approving the participation by Eastern European countries in the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan (1947), Stalin forbade it. occupied most of the countries in Eastern Europe and eventually ensured the installation of Stalinist regimes. In the wake of the German defeat, the U.S.S.R. More important, Stalin wanted to secure a territorial buffer zone that had ideologically friendly regimes along the U.S.S.R.'s western borders. only joined the war against Japan in August 1945, Stalin insisted on expanding Soviet influence into Asia, namely the Kurile Islands, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, and the northern section of Korea. Truman, in Potsdam (1945), dividing the postwar world into 'spheres of influence.' President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945), and with Churchill and Roosevelt's successor, President Harry S. With the Soviet Union initially carrying the burden of the fighting, Stalin met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. After addressing the nation two weeks later, Stalin took command of his troops. on June 22, 1941, Stalin was not seen or heard from for two weeks.

In an effort to avoid war with Germany, Stalin agreed to a non-aggression pact with German leader Adolf Hitler in August 1939. Stalin also purged the military leadership, executing a large percentage of the officer corps and leaving the U.S.S.R. Soviet nuclear physicist and academician Andrei Sakharov estimated that more than 1.2 million party members - more than half the party - were arrested between 19, of which 600,000 died by torture, execution or perished in the Gulag. In the 1930s, Stalin launched his Great Purge, ridding the Communist Party of all the people who had brought him to power. Collectivization alone killed as many as 14.5 million people, and Soviet agricultural output was reduced by 25 percent, according to some estimates. An estimated 25 million farmers were forced onto state farms. To ensure his position and to push forward 'socialism in one country,' he put the Soviet Union on a course of crash collectivization and industrialization. Using administrative skills and ruthless maneuvering, Stalin rid himself of all potential rivals in the party, first by having many of them condemned as 'deviationists,' and later by ordering them executed. Stalin first rose to power in 1922 as secretary general of the Communist Party. Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on December 21, 1879, he adopted the name Stalin, which means 'Man of Steel,' while still a young revolutionary.

Death of stalin have a nice long nap old man