Some tips on making a Joseph Stalin powerpoint presentation?

Question by Muhammad: Can anyone give me some tips on making a Joseph Stalin powerpoint presentation?
I need to do a powerpoint presentation on Joseph Stalin. Can anyone give me some tips on the sections i should put. I have to have atleast 10 slides on him.

Answers and Views:

Answer by Spellbound
1) I would start with an overview slide – with the dates of his rule (the dates vary depending on how each historian decides when he achieved power, but 1924 is probably the one your teacher expects).

2) I would have one slide showing his early life, from childhood – there is a photo of him in his seminary school uniform. On the same slide I would have him as a young man, revolutionary bank robber, extortionist and escapee from exile. – again there are photos of him during this period.

3) Next I would have him during the revolution. He was editor of the party newspaper when the revolution happened, and was at his desk when the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace. He became Commissar for Nationalities under Lenin.

4) I would then have a slide of him being appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Union, this was in 1922. This post was the stepping stone to power. He used it to promote his supporters and to demote or expel from the party supporters of his rivals.

5) Claiming Lenin’s legacy. Stalin was put in charge of communications with Lenin after Lenin’s stroke. Lenin was convalescing at a house some 10 miles from Moscow and all communications between him and the outside world went through Stalin. He was aware that this closeness to Lenin would be useful when Lenin died, there are several pictures of him and Lenin in the garden.

6) The struggle for power. After Lenin’s death three people ruled the country – Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Firstly Stalin moved against Trotsky, as his popularity among the army made him a serious rival. Stalin called Trotsky and his supporters the Left Opposition. Stalin then used the party machine that he controlled, and his considerable talents of persuasion, to remove these two from power – he called these two, and their supporters, the United Opposition. He then moved against his supporters on the Right of the party – the Right Opposition – composed of Rykov and Bukharin and their supports. By 1928 he had all the reins of power in his hands.

7) Socialism in One Country, Collectivisation and the Five Year Plans. These policies were designed to i) consolidate the gains of the Revolution. ii) the turn the countries backwards, peasant agricultural sector into a modern, efficient system (and to crush any peasant opposition to communist rule) and iii) to turn the USSR into an industrial power through massive investment in factory, mine, dam and infrastructure building.

8) Stalin at War. I would put in some information about how he realised that he was no great general, and allowed his commanders to run the war as they saw fit. You should include something about the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, and Moscow and Leningrad if there is space.

9) Post war, Eastern Europe. Stalin the international politician. I would use either a picture of the Yalta conference, or the Berlin wall to symbolise how the Soviet conquest of Nazi controlled Eastern Europe allowed Stalin to impose communist governments on the liberated countries.

10) Death and legacy. This is much more open to interpretation. I would include a picture of Khrushchev and something about how just three years after Stalin’s death the Soviet Union began to de-Stalinise and liberalise. You could include some information about how Stalin’s legacy is that Soviet style communism is now a reviled ideology, and that no-one seriously advocates it as a model for running a country.

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