Josef Stalin :: essays research papers

Josef Stalin was born with the name Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on celestial latitude 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 consequently went on to serve in the soldiers, but his rise to power came aft(prenominal) he ousted Leon Trotsky. Then Stalin began great purges where he would sweep through the masses beneath him and kill anyone he suspected was not 100% sure to him. Very few people beneath Stalin stayed thither for long. Stalin then started several(prenominal) 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, person every last(predicate)y took command of the Sovie t armed forces. With the jock of a small defense committee (war cabinet), he made all major military, political, and diplomatic decisions throughout the war. He pursued victory with increase skill, determination, and courage, by staying on in the Kremlin when Hitlers 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 Hesperian powers, selecting more and more first-rate military commanders, and developing increasingly powerful military strategy, including the remarkable counteroffensives at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. He under girded the strength and team spirit 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, victory could not attain been achieved without the patriotism and fortitude of the Russian people, the quality and skill of the Soviet military professionals, the efforts of the USSRs 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 worlds in truth 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, mold the occupied countries of eastern Europe in the Stalinist image and fit(p) them under Moscows control, and entirely isolated the whole bloc of Communist nations from the West.