Question by Jordan: General summary on Joseph Stalin ?
Can someone give me some bullet points to sum up Joseph Stalin and his reign?
Photo Credit: The National Archives UK/Flickr
Answers and Views:
Answer by Oscar C
Joseph Stalin
AKA ‘Uncle Joe’. Stalin translates to ‘Man of Steel’.
Country: Former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR – Soviet Union). Here are excerpts from Yahoo!:
Kill tally: Approximately 20 million, including up to 14.5 million needlessly starved to death. At least one million executed for political “offences”. At least 9.5 million more deported, exiled or imprisoned in work camps, with many of the estimated five million sent to the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ never returning alive. Other estimates place the number of deported at 28 million, including 18 million sent to the ‘Gulag’.
Background: The vast Russian Empire is thrown into turmoil in March 1917 after Tsar Nicholas II abdicates and the Imperial Government is replaced by a Provisional Government led by moderate socialist Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky.
The Bolsheviks, a network of communists headed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and inspired by the writings of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, are opposed to the Provisional Government’s plan to establish a bourgeois democracy in Russia. They seize government in a coup d’état staged on 6 November, the so-called ‘Bolshevik Revolution’. (By the old Julian calendar the coup took place on 24 October and is therefore also known as the ‘October Revolution’.)
The ‘Battle for Moscow’ will be the biggest of the Second World War, involving seven million participants and an area of operations the size of France. The Germans’ failure to capture the city will be their first military defeat of the war.
To the north, the Germans reach Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in August. The city is surrounded on 8 September, beginning a 900-day siege during which almost 1.5 million civilians and soldiers will die.
In order to encourage military aid from the Western Allies, Stalin agrees to release about 115,000 of the Poles imprisoned after the 1939 annexation.
Meanwhile, the United States enters the war when the Japanese airforce bombs the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii on 7 December. Germany and Italy declare war on the US on 11 December.
1942 – In ‘The Declaration of the United Nations’ of 1 January the Allies agree not to make a separate peace with the enemy and pledge themselves to the formation of a peacekeeping organisation (now the United Nations – UN) on victory.
An accord between the British and the Soviets is accepted in May. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s plan for a “grand alliance” between his country, the USSR and the US is now a reality.
Stalin is again named ‘Time’ magazine’s person of the year, this time for stopping Hitler and opening the possibility of an Allied victory in Europe.
In August Stalin appoints Marshal Georgy Zhukov as his deputy commander-in-chief of defence. Zhukov will direct much of the Red Army’s counteroffensive against the Germans.
The military turning point of the war in Europe comes with the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43. On 28 July Stalin orders the Soviet troops to take “not one step backwards”. Front line forces are flanked by second lines under orders to shoot down any soldier who tries to flee. When the German forces laying siege to the city are encircled and trapped by a Soviet counteroffensive, Hitler refuses to allow them to attempt an escape. They surrender on 2 February 1943.
Almost 500,000 Red Army troops have died during the Stalingrad campaign. A further 600,000 have been wounded. The German Sixth Army has been effectively destroyed in what is at the time the most catastrophic military defeat in German history. Over 500,000 of the German-led troops are dead.
In the wake of the victory, Stalin promotes himself to the rank of marshal. He will personally direct the counteroffensive that drives the German Army out of the Soviet Union, across eastern Europe, and to the heart of Berlin.
Meanwhile, conditions in the work camps of the Gulag Archipelago steadily deteriorate over the course of the war, with well over two million people dying. Camps go for weeks on end without receiving any supplies. In the winter of 1942-1943 alone about a quarter of the Gulag prisoners die from starvation.
The Second World War officially ends on 2 September when Japan formally signs documents of unconditional surrender.
Over 46 million Europeans have died as a result of the war. Worldwide, over 60 million have died.
Close to 60% of the European war dead are from the Soviet Union. Of the more than 26 million Soviets killed, nearly 18 million are civilians. About nine million servicemen and women from the Red Army have died. One of Stalin’s two sons, Yakov, is among the dead.
With the pressure of the war-effort now lifted, Stalin acts to secure the gains. Soviet citizens repatriated from wartime detention in foreign prisons and work camps are deemed to be traitors and are executed or deported to Soviet prison camps. Over 1.5 million Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans are se
Answer by Joseph
This is a long but greAT summary, I suggest you take out the “bullet points”
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSstalin.htm
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/kbank/profiles/stalin/
Answer by draciron
Oscar did a great job of it. Not sure why somebody gave it a thumbs down. It was a good answer and it is accurate. Stalin probably has twice or three times the blood on his hands that Hitler did.
Bullet points is a rather ironic use of the word LOL. Lots of Russians ended up with bullet points all over them because of Stalin’s reign of terror.
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