By the time the Party's intellectual core realized what had happened, it was too late--Stalin had his mostly mediocre 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 Party became the de facto leader of the country right on up until Mikhail Gorbachev. After Lenin's death in , Stalin methodically went about destroying all the old leaders of the Party, taking advantage of their weakness for standing on arcane intellectual principle to simply divide and conquer them.
At first, these people were removed from their posts and exiled abroad. Later, when he realized that their sharp tongues and pens were still capable of inveighing against him even from far away, Stalin switched tactics, culminating in a vast reign of terror and spectacular show trials in the s during which the founding fathers of the Soviet Union were one by one unmasked as "enemies of the people" who had supposedly always been in the employ of Capitalist intelligence services and summarily shot.
The particularly pesky Leon Trotsky, who continued to badger Stalin from Mexico City after his exile in , had to be silenced once and for all with an ice pick in The purges, or "repressions" as they are known in Russia, extended far beyond the Party elite, reaching down into every local Party cell and nearly all of the intellectual professions, since anyone with a higher education was suspected of being a potential counterrevolutionary.
This depleted the Soviet Union of its brainpower, and left Stalin as the sole intellectual force in the country--an expert on virtually every human endeavor. As war clouds gathered over Europe in , Stalin made a seemingly brilliant move, signing a nonaggression pact with Germany's Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.
Stalin was convinced of Hitler's integrity and ignored warnings from his military commanders that Germany was mobilizing armies on its eastern front. When the Nazi blitzkrieg struck in June , the Soviet Army was completely unprepared and immediately suffered massive losses.
Stalin was so distraught at Hitler's treachery that he hid in his office for several days. By the time Stalin regained his resolve, German armies occupied all of the Ukraine and Belarus, and its artillery surrounded Leningrad.
To make matters worse, the purges of the s had depleted the Soviet Army and government leadership to the point where both were nearly dysfunctional. After heroic efforts on the part of the Soviet Army and the Russian people, the Germans were turned back at the Battle of Stalingrad in By the next year, the Soviet Army was liberating countries in Eastern Europe, even before the Allies had mounted a serious challenge against Hitler at D-Day.
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. President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that such an action would result in heavy casualties. This only deepened Stalin's suspicion of the West, as millions of Russians died. As the tide of war slowly turned in the Allies' favor, Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin to discuss postwar arrangements.
At the first of these meetings, in Tehran, Iran, in late , the recent victory in Stalingrad put Stalin in a solid bargaining position. He demanded the Allies open a second front against Germany, which they agreed to in the spring of In February , the three leaders met again at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea. With Soviet troops liberating countries in Eastern Europe, Stalin was again in a strong position and negotiated virtually a free hand in reorganizing their governments.
He also agreed to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated. The situation changed at the Potsdam Conference in July Roosevelt died that April and was replaced by President Harry S. British parliamentary elections had replaced Prime Minister Churchill with Clement Attlee as Britain's chief negotiator. By now, the British and Americans were suspicious of Stalin's intentions and wanted to avoid Soviet involvement in a postwar Japan.
The dropping of two atomic bombs in August forced Japan's surrender before the Soviets could mobilize. Convinced of the Allies' hostility toward the Soviet Union, Stalin became obsessed with the threat of an invasion from the West.
Between and , he established Communist regimes in many Eastern European countries, creating a vast buffer zone between Western Europe and "Mother Russia. In , Stalin ordered an economic blockade on the German city of Berlin, in hopes of gaining full control of the city.
The Allies responded with the massive Berlin Airlift , supplying the city and eventually forcing Stalin to back down. In this capacity, Goebbels was charged with presenting Hitler to At the height of the Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat.
In the village of Stavyshche, a young peasant boy watched as the wanderers dug into empty gardens with their bare hands. Many were During the late s and early s, the prospect of communist subversion at home and abroad seemed frighteningly real to many people in the United States. For many Americans, the most enduring Since its start a century ago, Communism, a political and economic ideology that calls for a classless, government-controlled society in which everything is shared equally, has seen a series of surges—and declines.
What started in Russia, became a global revolution, taking The question of where Russia begins and ends—and who constitutes the Russian people—has preoccupied Russian thinkers for centuries. Joseph Hooker was a career U. Hooker entered the Civil War in as a brigadier general and gained a reputation as a reliable combat Perhaps unsurprisingly, his only daughter, Svetlana, found it extraordinarily difficult growing up in the Kremlin under his care.
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