HIS 242
Stalinism in the 1930s
Remarks by Professor Evans

Kalinin Collective Farm

An innocent image of the peaceful Russian countryside,
the fields of the former Kalinin Collective Farm

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Here I am getting ready to write a bit about Stalin while listening to Mel Carter; what an absurd contraposition.

Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили, იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი, 6/18 December 1879-5 March 1953, aka "Koba" or "Uncle Joe") stands alone with Adolf Hitler as one of the greatest killers in world history, "one of the most powerful and murderous dictators in human history." He certainly left his mark on Russian history. Might we conservatively estimate 75 million dead as a result of his actions?

Consider the revolution that he imposed on Russia in the 1930s

Then there is the fact of Stalin's non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939 that allowed the start of World War II and eventually the German invasion of the USSR, leading to some 50 million dead Soviet citizens. Stalin had had plenty of warnings about the intended German invasion, including information from: Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy in Japan; Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, who contacted Stalin in April 1941; and, finally, a German deserter who warned on 21 June 1941 that the invasion would begin the next day. Stalin choose to ignore everything, and so when the Germans attacked on 22 June 1941, they caught the Soviet army completely by surprise.

It is pretty clear that Stalin was a man of limited moral scruples. This was exactly what Lenin was looking for when he recruited Stalin for the Bolshevik party. Most of the Bolshevik leaders were intellectuals, but Stalin was a man hardened by his upbringing. He had grown up in poverty in the Caucasus (in a mixed atmosphere of being Georgian but living in the Russian Empire--Thus, he was considered to be the nationalities expert in the Bolshevik party), and he attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary, fulfilling his mother's wish that he become a priest. Can you even begin to imagine? But it was at the seminary that Stalin was first exposed to Marxist thought, and he was expelled in 1899. After serving some time in prison and then Siberia--Interestingly, Stalin was always able to escape pretty quickly from his imprisonments in the tsarist regime, leading some to speculate later that he had been a police operative. Any evidence for that went up in flames soon after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 when the Okhrana archives mysteriously burned--OK, back to the story. Stalin joined the Social-Democrat party in 1901 and then sided with Lenin and the Bolshevik faction when the party split. He was soon deeply involved in the party, carrying out all kinds of illegal activities, especially the nasty stuff like bank robberies to help fund party activities, maybe even some murders but that has never been clearly proven.

As a side note, some of the physical problems that Stalin had to overcome in his life--who knows the psychological impact of these.

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