Josef Stalin :: essays research papers

Josef Stalin was born with the name Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on December 21st, 1897 in. As a young boy he was nicknamed "Soso". He had a sickly childhood, with disease and poverty taking a toll on his life. He was the only child of his parents that lived past infancy. He had dark hair, yellow eyes, and a ruddy complexion and stood just 5 feet 4 inches. Stalin then went on to serve in the military, but his rise to power came after he ousted Leon Trotsky. Then Stalin began great purges where he would sweep through the people beneath him and kill anyone he suspected was not 100% loyal to him. Very few people beneath Stalin stayed there for long. Stalin then started several five-year plans. Soon the USSR was a superpower, and it was because Stalin brought them there. When the German armies attacked the USSR in June 1941, Stalin, after suffering a brief nervous collapse, personally took command of the Soviet armed forces. With the help of a small defense committee (war cabinet), he made all major military, political, and diplomatic decisions throughout the war. He pursued victory with increasing skill, determination, and courage, by staying on in the Kremlin when Hitler's armies stood at the gates of Moscow, ordering a fantastic shifting of industrial plants from European Russia to the east, arranging for lend-lease from the Western powers, selecting more and more first-rate military commanders, and developing increasingly effective military strategy, including the remarkable counteroffensives at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. He under girded the strength and morale of his people by fostering their traditional religious and patriotic sentiments, and conducting adroitly the complicated diplomacy from the Teheran conference to Potsdam. Of course, vi ctory could not have been achieved without the patriotism and fortitude of the Russian people, the quality and skill of the Soviet military professionals, the efforts of the USSR's allies, and the enormous political and military miscalculations of Hitler. In 1945, at the end of the war, there was a general expectation that in the USSR, which had shown itself to be one of the world's truly great powers, the despotic system of rule and institutional rigidities would disappear or at the least be tempered. Instead, Stalin and his men restored almost completely the pre-war system, molded the occupied countries of eastern Europe in the Stalinist image and placed them under Moscow's control, and entirely isolated the whole bloc of Communist nations from the West.