was stalin a fair leader?was stalin a fair leader?

In the Soviet army, it takes more courage to retreat than advance. I think thats a right-wing and very conservative if not reactionary impulse. Hundreds of thousands of people came to see the Generalissimo in the mausoleum. Trotsky, however, was the head of the Council, so the struggle between the two continued. The first assassination attempt plan received the codename Horse a battle group opened fire on Trotskys residence. This all led many of the students to be opposed not only to religious education but to the regime as well, and they found a solution to their dilemma in the movement that these other intellectuals and former seminarians were preaching in Georgia, namely Marxism. Its the empowerment of ordinary people. My book is basically a scholarly book, but I tried to write it in an accessible way. After escaping from exile, he was marked by the Okhranka, (the tsar's secret police) as an outlaw and continued his work in hiding, raising money through robberies, kidnappings and extortion. In all of these ways, its a different kind of book, and it doesnt deal with Stalins journalistic writings, his theory of nationalities (which is key to his success), the intricacies and nuances of Russian social democracy. Stalin is infamous for his cruel regime and role in WWII when his support encouraged Nazi Germany to start the war. A Mexican policeman holds the short- handled pickax used by Ramon Mercader. Despite some of its achievements, it shouldnt be celebrated. Stalin killed millions. Thats extraordinary. Stalinism's excesses left deep scars across Eastern Europe, where many people still revile him for communist-era brutality and intolerance. He is the author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972), among many other works. and a federal union of the states, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What was the DRG? Stalin forced rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agricultural land, resulting in millions dying from famine while others were sent to labor camps. Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin were an odd trio. Some really wanted independence from the empire. From 1929 to 1 953, Stalin was the leader of the . This is the story of young Stalin, the making of the revolutionary. Im interested in his women. So I thought, Well, okay, we have a nice division of labor.. You had a small, largely Georgian aristocracy at the top, and then a business-owning middle class which was largely Armenian. Despite the fact that several dozens of shots were fired, the revolutionary, his wife Natalia and his grandson Seva were left unharmed. But in the following decades the Soviet authorities covered up the true scale of Stalin's crimes. "Quantity has a quality all its own.". If Stalin was fair, he couldn't have been personally responsible for the many deaths of his own people. But its based on the conventions of historical scholarship, which is looking for anomalies and dealing with contradictions. He knew how to play those internal political games, and he had his own ideas. Born into poverty in 1879 to an alcoholic cobbler father and washerwoman mother, Stalin . Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. Site contains certain content that is owned A&E Television Networks, LLC. Georgian social democrats had various views. and Barbara Bushs Amazing Love Story. Inshallah. But when the workers were spontaneously getting active and revolutionary, Lenin wanted to celebrate that. Levada sociologist Karina Pipiya told BBC Russian: "There is growing nostalgia for the Soviet period and Stalin as a leader. After Lenin's death, in 1924, Stalin set out to destroy the old party leadership and take total control. That was one motivation. The son of Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ketevan Geladze, a washerwoman, Stalin was a frail child. for example, when he remilitarised the rhineland or 'anschlussed' with Austria, do you think his What were Joseph Stalins dreams and ambitions? At first, he had people removed from power through bureaucratic shuffling and denunciations. Explanation: No, Stalin was not a fair leader. Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for more than two decades, instituting a reign of death and terror while modernizing Russia and helping to defeat Nazism. About thirty years ago, I asked myself how I could get people interested in the area that Ive invested so much of my life into. During World War II became the Party 's leader and absolute ruler of the Soviet Union. Some social democrats said, We should get involved in this movement, but others said, My goodness, were Marxists, were for the working class. The people who count the votes decide everything. Indisputably, Joseph Stalin terrorised Russian civilians in an almost unprecedented manner. The first signs that the Soviet. Stalin is seen as the main figure who defeated fascism, who gets the honours for victory in the Great Patriotic War. Marxism and socialism are basically a democratic expansion of bourgeois liberal democracy. He thought it wasnt necessarily an enemy of the Bolsheviks, that they could live with it. He is currently more popular in Russia now than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, thanks to a rehabilitation campaign by Russian president Vladimir Putin. What were the 34 most significant differences between ideas of regional identity in the North and in the South during the Civil War? There should be no apology by people on the Left for Stalin. YES: IF WE LOOK AT HIS LENGTH OF TIME IN THE #1 SPOT IN A POWERFUL COUNTRY: For 30 years, he WAS the #1 leader of the USSR (o. Stalin did well in school, and his efforts gained him a scholarship to Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1894. Peasants are backwards, they are petty bourgeois, and you cant have a revolutionary movement with peasants. The official ideology of a totalitarian nation is focused on creating and promoting nationalism Totalitarian governments are often controlled by a single political party because the party's members can be counted on to follow the leader's ideology. Doctors couldnt save Trotsky: he died on August 21, 1940. Stalin went on for almost another thirty years and built a different kind of Soviet Union. Stalin had been suspicious of the West since the inception of the Soviet Union, and once the Soviet Union had entered the war, Stalin had demanded the Allies open up a second front against Germany. Suny spoke with Jacobin contributing editor Chris Maisano about the making of Stalin, the pioneering contributions of Georgian social democracy, and how socialists today should view Stalins legacy. Stalin joined the group in 1898. Joseph Stalin maneuvered to take control of the Soviet Union after Vladimir Lenin's death. Although Genden became the leader of Outer Mongolia with the help of . The secretary wrote down his last words: Please, tell my friends that Im confident in the victory of the Fourth International Carry on. Ramon Mercader spent 19 years and 8 months in prison after his release, he moved to the USSR and received the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union. Lenin believed that workers do have natural tendencies toward socialism. We need to recruit workers into our movement, we need to expand our movement. Some Bolsheviks held on to that narrower idea of the party Lenin articulated in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?, and that conception will later come back in Soviet times. How was Josef Stalin manipulative? This is not, in my mind, the sign of someone who is truly a good leader. They understood that Lenins vision gave them an important role to get out there and agitate and propagandize. 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Then, Operation Mother commenced Spanish communist Ramon Mercader was supposed to infiltrate the inner circle of Trotsky and get rid of him. What is Stalin's famous quote about death? Why was Georgia, an isolated country with a very small industrial working class, one of social democracys biggest strongholds? A year later, Stalin came in contact with Messame Dassy, a secret organization that supported Georgian independence from Russia. Stalin simply had massive powers of coercion and used those powers to force people to do things unwillingly. He wasnt a sophisticated and nuanced theorist like Lenin. He also developed a cruel streak for those who crossed him. He entered into a relationship with one of Trotskys secretaries with a fake Canadian passport as Frank Jackson. Stalin was convinced of Hitler's integrity and ignored warnings from his military commanders that Germany was mobilizing armies on its eastern front. He must have inspired some loyalty in those who helped him get there. Compare and contrast Stalin's Soviet Union with Hitler's Germany. But since 2015, across all age groups, the proportion of those with favourable opinions on Stalin has risen steadily. We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. But in April 1917, Bolshevik leader Lenin denounced the provisional government, arguing that the people should rise up and take control by seizing land from the rich and factories from the industrialists. Though he excelled in seminary school, Stalin left in 1899. This election is a test of Stalin's. Coming to pick his girlfriend up after work, he slowly began to gain the trust of the inhabitants of the house: he was invited in, he showed interest towards Trotskys ideas and brought presents for his grandson. What motivated you to write this particular book? Stalin and Ordzhonikidze defeated those Georgian national Bolsheviks, and Georgia was integrated into the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, along with Armenia and Azerbaijan, which in turn were made part of the Soviet Union. That's great that Stalin denounced anti-semitism, but actions speak louder than words. Absolutely right. In 1956, after Stalin's death, came a watershed moment: Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Stalin personality cult and dictatorship, in a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress. What crisis occurred in Italy that allowed Mussolini to take power? He wasnt a flamboyant and eloquent orator like Trotsky. Surprisingly, perhaps, it soon moved from being the ideology of this intellectual elite to the national liberation movement of Georgians. It made the country stupider by decapitating the party and decapitating the intelligentsia, and turning people into cogs, or little screws, as Stalin put it. In 1917, the Mensheviks took over the area we call Georgia, and they made various attempts to figure out what to do once the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd in October 1917. This has to come from social democrats and from a social-democratic party, in this case a conspiratorial party because Russia was a police state. We just marked the centenary of the Bolsheviks overthrow of this Democratic Republic of Georgia (DRG). Stalin is also considered one of the most dangerous totalitarian leaders in history, his violent excesses often compared to those of Adolf Hitler. Vladimir Lenin was a Bolshevik . Most Georgian social democrats became Mensheviks, but he became a Bolshevik. Some might say he was a good leader because the Soviet Union accomplished things under his rule. The latter was the main associate of the undisputed leader of the Bolsheviks - Vladimir Lenin.The influence and authority of Trotsky were so large that, after the October Revolution, he could rise to the position of the head of the new government . So I learned that in graduate school. An ice ax, a revolver and a dagger were hidden under the raincoat: the moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice ax from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head, Mercader said after his arrest. If I write a second volume about Stalin, Ill write about the period 1917 to the death of Lenin in 1924, about how the Soviet state was built, and how it turned from this more participatory, Paris Commune kind of ideal that you find in Lenins book State and Revolution into what eventually became a one-party state under Lenin, and eventually the Stalinist tyranny that destroyed most of the Leninist cadres in 1937. Stalin was eventually denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1956. Although formally known as the country's premier from 1941 until his own death in 1953 at age 74, Stalin was a brutal dictator who slaughtered many of his own citizens as he transformed the country into a major global power. Biography and associated logos are trademarks of A+E Networksprotected in the US and other countries around the globe. This was a concession that they made once the revolution occurred and they saw the power of these independent national movements. Some scholars have argued that Stalin's record of killings amount to genocide and make him one of history's most ruthless mass murderers. Others wanted this extraterritorial national cultural autonomy. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), was the co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, socialist opponent of Joseph Stalin, founder of the Fourth International, and strategist of world socialist revolution . Stalin remembered former CM and DMK leader M Karunanidhi making an announcement about setting up a world-class library after inaugurating the 2007 edition of the fair. "I believe in only one thing, the power of human will.". Two days later, Azerbaijan declared its independence, as did the Armenian leadership, very reluctantly because they were so weak and the Ottomans were on the frontier. Between the poverty stricken year of 1924, when Lenin died, and the relatively abundant year . But the leaders of whats called the mesame dasi, the third generation of intellectuals who brought the message of Marxism to Georgia, became Mensheviks, and the Georgian movement came under the leadership of Menshevism in 1905. 2023 BBC. I havent taken a kind of Freudian point of view, because I dont think, as a historian, I can psychoanalyze Stalin one hundred years after the fact. Reason 3: He was Stalin Reason 4: He killed between six million and 20 million people. Hitler is famous for many quotes such as "Any alliance whose purpose is not the intention to wage war is senseless and useless." Eventually, the soldiers went over to the crowds, and you had a revolution. You have to figure out, by his writings and actions and what other people said about him, what his mentality was, as far as we can determine. This writing became extraordinarily important later on when the Bolsheviks took power, when he became first the commissar of nationalities and eventually the autocrat of the Soviet Union. It was a strategy to gather them back into a Russian state. In 1917, there was a euphoria of popular participation, committees, resolutions, and so forth. One of the most extraordinary things about Soviet history is that after the revolution, they not only recognized these republics but created literally thousands of villages and areas in Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere for other nationalities. Some of the members were socialists who introduced him to the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Subscribe today and get a yearlong print and digital subscription. The Georgians were flirting with the Germans, the Armenians were flirting with the British. He has some of the conventional sources, but hes not interested in the intricacies of this movement, or of Stalins early psychology. Did Stalin adhere to the rules of Communism? Eventually, that democratic and participatory revolution was consumed by foreign intervention, the civil war, the breakdown of the economy, and the building, by the Bolsheviks, of a centralized, authoritarian state. The second, as any of my students at Michigan, or earlier at Oberlin or the University of Chicago, would know: I have a great interest in socialism, Marxism, the labor movement, Russian social democracy, and so forth. In the 1930s Stalin's communist terror engulfed the USSR, sending millions to labour camps or firing squads. Our website and social media accounts are under threat of being restricted or banned, due to the current circumstances. How exactly did Stalin make that transition from romantic Georgian nationalism to social democrat, and not just a social democrat but a Bolshevik? So he was a worker-intellectual, and Lenin promoted him for that reason. But he was not a good leader. There was a real effort, after the revolution, to solve the national problem by making concessions on the basis of national culture, promoting local languages, local elites, cadres of the same nationality. On March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin died of a stroke. Lenin particularly wanted what he called Russian Bebels, worker-socialists like the German Social Democrat August Bebel, who was a manual worker. The death of Joseph Stalin leaves the Soviet Union without a leader. Later on, in 1905, Lenin put the argument of What Is to Be Done? On August 20, 1940, Mercader brought a text in support of the Fourth International to the revolutionary, asking him to evaluate it this was his excuse for a visit on the day of the assassination. Stalin would have been a good mafia boss, or corporate CEO. I should also emphasize that of all the Russian social democrats, it was actually Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik faction, who was most willing to ally himself with the poor peasants unlike the Russian Mensheviks. Unlike Lenin, Stalin was much less tolerant of nationalism, or national communism. What role did Stalin actually play, not just in the Bolshevik faction but in the social-democratic movement as a whole? Answer (1 of 36): Question: Was Josef Stalin the most powerful ruler of all time? Stalin at a young age he endured smallpox when he was only 7. Earlier, he had ordered the Soviet representative to the United Nations to boycott the Security Council because it refused to accept the newly formed Communist People's Republic of China into the United Nations. Roosevelt died that April and was replaced by President Harry S. Truman. A Stanford historian answers the question, was it genocide? "Stalin was the best master. Banner of Stalin in Budapest in 1949. Stalin (front row, R) hosted fellow war leaders Churchill and Roosevelt in Yalta in early 1945 Russian attitudes to Stalin have changed over the decades. Start the War crossed him industrialization and the collectivization of agricultural land, resulting in millions dying famine! Fake Canadian passport as Frank Jackson they are petty bourgeois, and the collectivization agricultural... 1879 to an alcoholic cobbler father and washerwoman mother, Stalin came in contact with Messame,... 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