Today is the anniversary of Stalin's death

[Larry1]

On March 5, 1953 Joseph Stalin, absolute master of the Soviet Union, died.

He was born Iosef Vissarionovich Djugashvili in the small town of Gori, in Georgia, which was part of the Russian Empire. His father was a drunk and sadistic shoemaker who often beat him,  once so severely that people weren't sure he would survive. His mother was religious and instrumental in getting Iosef into a seminary school, with the aim of becoming a priest.  Eventually though, Iosef was kicked out of the school and began a career as a Bolshevik revolutionary. His main activities in the early years consisted of robbing banks to raise money for the Bolsheviks. After a time he renamed himself Josef Stalin.

Stalin didn't play a significant part in the October Revolution, although he later re-wrote history to give himself greater prominence. Early in Bolshevik rule he was Commissar for Nationalities and General Secretary of the Communist Party (at the time merely an administrative post). In the latter position he was able to put his supporters into positions of some power.

Lenin had strokes in the early 1920s and was consequently less able to run the Soviet Union. Reportedly, he wrote a last testament advising that Stalin be removed from office. There is some question as to whether Lenin actually wrote this testament, but in any case Stalin was able to hush it up.

When Lenin died in 1924 Stalin began machinations with the ultimate aim of gaining rule in Russia. He had to overcome Old Bolsheviks who had far more prestige and respect than he had in the Party. He cleverly made alliances with certain Bolshevik leaders against other leaders, and eventually forced them all out and took sole power himself. In the late 1920s he forced Leon Trotsky, the man after Lenin who was most responsible for the Bolsheviks gaining power, out of the country.

In 1934 he presided over the 17th Party Congress, sometimes called the Congress of Victors. Stalin was incredibly paranoid and feared that someone might try to supplant him. At the Congress the charismatic young Politburo member Sergei Kirov was revealed to be very popular. Before the end of the year Kirov was murdered, in very suspicious circumstances.  The historian Robert Conquest wrote a book on the murder and concluded that, although it couldn't be proved, Stalin almost certainly had Kirov murdered. Kirov's murder served as the pretext for Stalin's Great Purge, in which millions of Soviet citizens were put in labor camps or killed.

The Purge was conducted by the NKVD, successor to the Cheka, which would later become reorganized into the KGB. It was begun under Genrikh Yagoda, who was replaced several years later by Nicolai Yezhov, a short, malignant fellow (5 feet tall; 151cm). The bulk of the mass murder was done on Yezhov's watch, which caused the Great Purge to be called the Yezhovshchina. The Purge was not only of ordinary citizens. Many Party members were arrested and killed.  Of 1,996 party members present at the 17th Party Congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested, and about two thirds of those executed within three years.

Yagoda was subject to a show trial and executed.  Yezhov too would be executed.  In addition to these men, several of the prominent Old Bolsheviks were subjected to show trials and executed. Yezhov was replaced by an, if possible, even more malignant character, a Georgian named Lavrenti Beria.

I will skip over the war years and go straight to Stalin's death, since this post is on the anniversary of his death. In early March of 1953 Stalin was at his dacha outside Moscow and had dinner with his usual coterie of Politburo members. They all feared that Stalin would have them executed as he had previously executed high officials. One of them might well have decided to do something about this.  The head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, substituted a new man for one of Stalin's usual bodyguards. After Stalin went to bed in the wee hours of the morning this man told the other guards that Stalin had given orders not to wake him up in the morning but to wait for him to leave his bedroom.

The next morning the guards nervously awaited Stalin to emerge from his room. He didn't for hours. Finally someone decided to open his door and found Stalin lying on the floor, unable to talk. The guards called other officials and a gathering of Politburo members was held in Stalin's room.  Years later some of the sons of these officials were interviewed and some of the dialogue was reconstructed. Beria intimated that he had murdered Stalin.

In recent years the medical records were studied by a panel of doctors which concluded that Stalin was poisoned, probably by Warfarin, a colorless, odorless rat poison that was likely put in his wine that night.

Several years after Stalin's death one of his Politburo members, Nikita Khruschev, gave a speech at the Party Congress in 1956, in which he revealed some of Stalin's great crimes and condemned Stalin's cult of personality. After Kruschev took power a de-Stalinization was done, including changing the name of Stalingrad to Volgograd.

Today Stalin has become more popular with Russians than he was for many years.

[jone]

Is there a better way to get get rid of a rat than to use Rat Poison?

[jone]

I grew up in Wisconsin, not far from where Stalin's daughter lived.  She lived a very quiet life, attempting to stay out of the limelight.  I can't imagine that he was much of a father figure to her.

[Boethius]

She defended him, although he killed her mother.   From what I have read, she was a very difficult person.
 

[jone]

Yeah, but it is surmised that Stalin broke up his daughter's relationship with her one great love.  And while she defended him, she never forgave him for that.

What is it with these Russian leaders where instead of working things out, they just 'off' the opposition or spouses.  At least Putin had the decency to divorce is ex-wife. 

[Boethius]

In Soviet times, to have a divorce, or to even be fairly open about a mistress, were big no no's.  At lower levels of the nomenklatura, either would kill your career.  The Bolsheviks were huge hypocrites in that way.

[lordtiberius]

Brezhnev had mistress after mistress

[Boethius]

Yes, but it was not advertised to the general public during his lifetime.  Plus, he was at a level where such behaviour was excused.

[lordtiberius]

And yet divorce rates during Soviet times topped anywhere else.

Nice summary Larry.  That was the best anyone could say about the bastard.

[Boethius]

No, divorce rates varied across the USSR.  My husband remembers when divorces were printed in newspapers, they were so rare in Ukraine.  They started to become more common in the late 1970's, and were almost all related to alcoholism.

[Larry1]

Nice summary Larry.  That was the best anyone could say about the bastard.

Thank you. Since there has been some interest in this topic I'm planning to write at least one more post on Stalin. I just need to break out the books so that I can add some details to my account.

[lordtiberius]

What I didn't know was that Yezhov was rapacious homosexual.

[AC]

While Putin does not rule from the Kremlin in Moscow, he does have a small office there.  It is the former office of Stalin, which he clearly relishes.

[Larry1]

In the original post in this thread I mentioned that I skipped over the war years. This thread will discuss Stalin and his relationship with the Red Army.

Stalin's Purge of the Army

By 1936 Stalin's Purge of the Communist Party was in full swing.  Many ordinary people were also sent to the camps (gulag). Stalin didn't start the building of camps. That was done in the early years of the Bolshevik regime.  But Stalin vastly expanded the system of camps.

Stalin had the Party entirely under his control. The only institution capable of overthrowing him was the Red Army. Stalin was paranoid therefore he extended his Purge to the Army. He arrested about 30,000 officers, including most of the senior leadership of the Army.

As a result of this Purge of the Army leadership the Army found the going very difficult in the Winter War with Finland in 1939-1940, even though the Red Army vastly outnumbered the Finnish forces. One reason that Hitler decided that he could defeat the Soviet Union was its poor performance in the Winter War.

Conduct of the War

In 1939 Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed a non-aggression pact.  This agreement is usually referred to as the Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact, after the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Germany who signed it.

In 1940 and 1941 a Soviet intelligence officer based in Tokyo warned his superiors that the Germans were planning an attack on the Soviet Union. Richard Sorge was an intelligence officer for the GRU, the Soviet Army's intelligence branch. Sorge had penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo under the guise of being a journalist for a pro-Nazi newspaper and was able to look at the German plans with the German embassy's military attache.

Stalin rejected this and other spies' warnings as disinformation.  He also rejected the warnings of Marshal Timoshenko, in command of the Red Army units close to German lines, and refused to allow preparations for a German attack.

On June 22, 1941 the German Army did attack the Soviets. Stalin kept himself in his dacha outside Moscow for the first week or so after that. Several Politburo members drove out to see him. There are reports that Stalin might have thought they were there to arrest him.  They were not.  They set up a Defense Commission to run the war, with Stalin as its chairman.

After months of war and capture of hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops, the Soviets stiffened resistance. Georgi Zhukov organized the defense of Moscow. Forward units of the German Army reached as far as 20 miles from Moscow but made it no farther.

In this too Richard Sorge played a crucial part. The Japanese had a large force occupying China's Manchuria region, near Soviet territory. In 1939 and 1940 Japanese units had crossed over the disputed border, to be routed by Soviet forces commanded by Zhukov. Stalin was concerned that the Japanese would attack in force, thus putting the Soviets into a two-front war, which would be enormously dangerous. Sorge, whose agent had penetrated the highest levels of Japanese government, produced information indicating that the Japanese had decided to move South, against the British and American forces, instead of against the Soviets. This time Stalin believed Sorge and in October moved 18 Red Army divisions and tens of thousands of planes and tanks West.  These troops, some of the best in the Red Army, were vital to the December Soviet counter-attack against the Germans.

For all Stalin's negligence during the leadup to the German attack, he did perform better once the war began.  He appointed capable generals and generally took their advice.  Hitler, in contrast, usually appointed capable generals and did not take their advice. His blunders and idiotic micromanagement of the war caused Germany to lose the war sooner than it otherwise would have.

During the war the Soviets produced a vast amount of war materiel and weapons, including over 50,000 of the excellent T-34 tanks. This production, along with larger Soviet manpower, and the British and Americans fighting the Germans in the West, made it impossible for Germany to avoid defeat.

[lordtiberius]

Bravo Larry. 

Andrey Vladov got his promotion through this mass slaughter.  Look what good it did him.

[Larry1]

Bravo Larry. 

Andrey Vladov got his promotion through this mass slaughter.  Look what good it did him.

Thank you.

Did you mean Andrey Vlasov?

LT knows about Vlasov but for the benefit of readers who do not, he was a Russian general who was captured by the Germans and while in captivity came out as anti-Bolshevik and was allowed to raise an army to fight the Soviets. At the end of the war he was captured by the Americans and returned to the Soviets. He was tried for treason and executed.

[lordtiberius]

Larry, what is Stalin's legacy?  Also, Isn't  Stalin a less successful version of Peter the Great?

[Larry1]

Larry, what is Stalin's legacy?  Also, Isn't  Stalin a less successful version of Peter the Great?

Mendy would be the best person to answer this, but I'll take a stab at it. I think Stalin's legacy is the cult of personality and an Asiatic type despotism where the leader exercises absolute control over his cowed subjects.

It's difficult for me to compare the success of Stalin to that of Peter the Great. But for all the dams and hydroelectric plants built during his reign it wasn't possible for him to be really successful because he presided over a communist government.  Communism is a horrible way to run an economy.

There is some evidence that Stalin thought of himself as a 20th century Ivan the Terrible.

On a related note, it looks like the Putin regime is continuing its pattern of hushing up Stalin's crimes:

A prison museum dedicated to victims of Soviet-era political repression may reopen as a memorial to the gulag system, but all references to crimes committed by dictator Josef Stalin will be removed, rights activists have said.

Perm-36 museum director Viktor Shmyrov said the "memorial won't disappear, but the museum has been taken over by other people appointed by the new authorities, who have totally changed the content," BBC Russian Service reported Wednesday.

"Now it's a museum about the camp system, but not about political prisoners. They don't talk about the repressions or about Stalin," he was quoted as saying.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/gulag-museum-to-reopen-but-proof-of-stalin-crimes-removed-director-says/517046.html

[lordtiberius]

The bastard's legacy was the Gulag.  He was a lifelong thief and what better way to steal than enslaving millions of his own people in such a haphazard and ineffectual way than the gulag and its projects - most of which despite their intentions have no commercial value.

[mendeleyev]

LT, I don't know if a comparison between Peter and Stalin is warranted.

Peter was a visionary, and one who had the fortitude to leave his country and seek out knowledge and experience from folks like the Dutch and the English.

His capital city, named for the Apostle Peter as it's patron saint, was built on stolen land (conquered from Sweden), and on the backs (and deaths), of slave labour from his own population. Yet, he was no Stalin.

Peter's legacy is a great city, a nation formed into a European power, and the establishment of the Romanov dynasty for longevity.

Stalin was actually a coward, truly mentally ill, and his main vision was for enslaving his own people and a lust for power. Were it not for smarter and braver generals around him, whom he stole their credit, he would have lost the war with Germany.

Stalin's legacy includes millions who died in famines, millions who were sacrificed on the battlefield, the Gulags, and the terror of his security organs. He was a worthless piece of crap, and with no disrespect meant to his mother, a bastard who deserves to burn in hell. (Those are the neutral things one can say about him. We won't even go into his faults.)

[Boethius]

Peter forced his noblemen to sew the pockets on their clothing shut before they left Russia, so they wouldn't embarrass him when abroad.

[Anotherkiwi]

Peter forced his noblemen to sew the pockets on their clothing shut before they left Russia, so they wouldn't embarrass him when abroad.

Huh?  How so?  The mind boggles as to what they could possibly have been up to! 

[Boethius]

Stealing.

[Anotherkiwi]

Stealing.

What?  Noblemen?  Is there where Putin got all his big ideas? 

[Larry1]

First the regime eliminates references to Stalin's crimes in the gulag museum (see above) and now a museum glorifying Stalin is being opened. Stalin, one of the great mass murderers in history, is being rehabilitated:

A museum showcasing Soviet leader Josef Stalin's political and military bravado, while disregarding the mass political repression he orchestrated, will open in the Tver region in May, the Meduza news site reported Tuesday...

A survey published in January by the Levada Center, an independent pollster based in Moscow, found that 52 percent of Russians view Stalin in a positive light.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/517314.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+themoscowtimes%2Fnews+%28The+Moscow+Times+News%29