I Hate Hitler

[Guest]

So I keep seeing Lounge Daddys avator and it almost made me puke the other night. I really do hate hitler and everytime I see this avator it reminds me of how much I really do hate him. So I thought hey what the heck I will start a thread about it. Lounge Daddy is a dope dude so i'm sure his reasoning to having satan as his avator is good. But none the less it makes me sick. Ok Godbless !

Edited April 24, 2009 by Guest

[goldenchild17]

Try to love him. That's what we're called to do, no matter how hard it is. peace

[Guest]

[quote name='goldenchild17' post='1845757' date='Apr 24 2009, 05:23 AM']Try to love him. That's what we're called to do, no matter how hard it is. peace[/quote]

Peace bro.
I cant. I have zero zilch notta love for Hitler.
And that will never change.

[Era Might]

[quote]While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man -- though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.

--Romans 5:6-8[/quote]

[goldenchild17]

[quote name='Delivery Boy' post='1845760' date='Apr 24 2009, 05:35 AM']Peace bro.
I cant. I have zero zilch notta love for Hitler.
And that will never change.[/quote]

peace

Mt. 5:43-48

"43 You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy. 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: 45 That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust.

46 For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this? 47 And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this? 48 Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect."

[Guest]

[quote name='goldenchild17' post='1845762' date='Apr 24 2009, 05:54 AM']peace

Mt. 5:43-48

"43 You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy. 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: 45 That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust.

46 For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this? 47 And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this? 48 Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect."[/quote]


Godbless you both and I can't argue with these scriptures. But for some reason I dont think Christ died for Hitler. That is just me though. And as for loving him I guess Jesus did say to do this. But I dunno I still hate him. I just want to know why lounge daddy has a pic of him as his avator ? I'm sure its a obama hitler connection. I'm anxious to find out. Thanks for the scripture fellas as that does pretty much sum it up.

[Era Might]

[quote name='Delivery Boy' post='1845767' date='Apr 24 2009, 06:22 AM']I just want to know why lounge daddy has a pic of him as his avator ?[/quote]
I don't think that's Hitler in Lounge Daddy's avatar. I'm not sure who it is, but it's not Hitler.

[Guest]

[quote name='Era Might' post='1845769' date='Apr 24 2009, 07:29 AM']I don't think that's Hitler in Lounge Daddy's avatar. I'm not sure who it is, but it's not Hitler.[/quote]

lol 4 real ? I'd bet a stack that it's hitler. It's that mustash. (sp)

I'm going to have to look again but i'm about sure.

Edited April 24, 2009 by Guest

[Archaeology cat]

[quote name='Era Might' post='1845769' date='Apr 24 2009, 12:29 PM']I don't think that's Hitler in Lounge Daddy's avatar. I'm not sure who it is, but it's not Hitler.[/quote]


[quote name='Delivery Boy' post='1845771' date='Apr 24 2009, 12:32 PM']lol 4 real ? I'd bet a stack that it's hitler. It's that mustash. (sp) lol

I'm going to have to look again but i'm about sure.[/quote]
It's Stalin, not Hitler.

[Guest]

[quote name='Archaeology cat' post='1845772' date='Apr 24 2009, 07:35 AM']It's Stalin, not Hitler.[/quote]

opps.

[Guest]

Joseph Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili – 18 December 1878[1] – 5 March 1953) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. In the years following Lenin's death in 1924, he rose to become the leader of the Soviet Union.

Stalin launched a command economy, replacing the New Economic Policy of the 1920s with Five-Year Plans and launching a period of rapid industrialization and economic collectivization. The upheaval in the agricultural sector disrupted food production, resulting in widespread famine, such as the Soviet famine of 1932-1933, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor.[2]

During the late 1930s, Stalin launched the Great Purge (also known as the "Great Terror"), a campaign to purge the Communist Party of people accused of corruption or treachery; he extended it to the military and other sectors of Soviet society. Targets were often executed, imprisoned in Gulag labor camps or exiled. In the years following, millions of ethnic minorities were also deported.[3][4]

In 1939, the Soviet Union under Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, followed by a Soviet invasion of Poland, Finland, the Baltics, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. After Germany violated the pact in 1941, the Soviet Union joined the Allies to play a vital role in the Axis defeat, at the cost of the largest death toll for any country in the war. Thereafter, contradicting statements at allied conferences, Stalin installed communist governments in most of Eastern Europe, forming the Eastern bloc, behind what was referred to as an "Iron Curtain" of Soviet rule. This launched the long period of antagonism known as the Cold War.

Stalin's careful control of the media helped him to foster a cult of personality. However, after his death his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced his legacy, initiating the period known as de-Stalinization.

Contents [hide]
1 Stalin before the Revolution
1.1 Childhood and early adult crime
1.2 Marriage, bank robberies and Pravda
1.3 Essay and four years exile
2 Revolution and early wars
2.1 Role during the Russian Revolution of 1917
2.2 Role in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1919
2.3 Role in the Polish-Soviet War, 1919-1920
2.4 Rise to power
2.5 Bolstering Soviet secret service and intelligence
2.6 Cult of personality
3 Changes to Soviet society, 1927–1939
3.1 Purges and deportations
3.1.1 Purges
3.1.2 Deportations
3.2 Collectivization
3.3 Famines
3.3.1 Ukrainian famine
3.4 Industrialization
3.5 Science
3.6 Social services
3.7 Culture
3.8 Religion
3.9 Theorist
4 Calculating the number of victims
5 World War II, 1939–1945
5.1 Pact with Hitler
5.2 Implementing the division of Eastern Europe and other invasions
5.3 Hitler breaks the pact
5.4 Soviets stop the Germans
5.5 Soviet push to Germany
5.6 Final Victory
5.7 Questionable tactics
5.8 Allied conferences on post-war Europe
6 Post-war era, 1945–1953
6.1 The Iron Curtain and the Eastern Bloc
6.2 Sino-Soviet Relations
6.3 North Korea
6.4 Israel
6.5 Falsifiers of History
6.6 Domestic Support
6.7 The "Doctors' plot"
7 Death and reactions
7.1 Later analyses of death
7.2 Reaction by successors
7.3 Recent support by some in Russia
8 Personal life
8.1 Origin of name, nicknames and pseudonyms
8.2 Appearance
8.3 Marriages and family
8.4 Religious beliefs and policies
9 Hypotheses, rumors and misconceptions about Stalin
10 See also
11 Notes
12 References
13 Further reading
14 External links



Stalin before the Revolution

Childhood and early adult crime
Main article: Stalin before the Revolution

Young Stalin, circa 1894, age 16Stalin was born on 18 December 1878 in Gori, Georgia to a family of limited financial means in a town plagued by gang warfare and street brawls. At seven, he contracted smallpox, which permanently scarred his face. At twelve, two horse-drawn carriage accidents left his left arm permanently damaged. At ten, he began attending a church school that required the Georgian children to speak Russian. At sixteen, he received a scholarship to a Georgian Orthodox seminary, where he wrote poetry and rebelled against being forced to speak Russian. Though he performed well, his was expelled shortly before his final exams because he was unable to pay his tuition fees.

Shortly after leaving the Seminary, he discovered the writings of Vladimir Lenin and decided to become a Marxist revolutionary. He began organizing strikes in 1902 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1903. Stalin at first worked against the Mensheviks and, during the Russian Revolution of 1905, he organized and armed Bolshevik militias across Georgia, running protection rackets waging guerrilla warfare on Cossacks, policemen and the Okhrana. After meeting Lenin at a Bolshevik conference, Stalin returned to Georgia, and plotted the assassination of a Cossack general with the Mensheviks, while raising money for the Bolsheviks through extortion, bank robberies and hold-ups.


Marriage, bank robberies and Pravda
Main article: Stalin before the Revolution

The information card on "I. V. Stalina", from the files of the Tsarist secret police in Saint Petersburg, 1911[5]In the summer of 1906, Stalin married Ekaterina Svanidze, who later gave birth to Stalin's first child, Yakov. Stalin temporarily resigned from the party over its ban on bank robberies, conducted a large raid on a bank shipment resulting in the death of 40 people and then fled to Baku, where Ekaterina died of typhus. In Baku, Stalin organized Muslim Azeris and Persians in partisan activities, including the murders of many "Black Hundreds" right-wing supporters of the Tsar, and conducted protection rackets, ransom kidnappings, counterfeiting operations and robberies. After his arrest in 1908, he spent seven months in prison and escaped Siberian exile.

After his return, Stalin unsuccessfully attempted to root out Tsarist spies in the Bolshevik party and was again arrested. In 1911 he was again exiled, during which he had an affair with his landlady Maria Kuzakova resulting in the birth of son Constantine.[6] After his release, in April 1912 in Saint Petersburg, Stalin created the newspaper Pravda from an existing party newspaper, but was caught by the authorities and again exiled to Siberia, where he escaped again after thirty eight days. Thereafter, Stalin published editorials in Pravda calling for a reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, which angered Lenin, resulting in Stalin's removal as Pravda's editor.


Essay and four years exile
Main article: Stalin before the Revolution
Stalin then spent time in Vienna with Nikolai Bukharin and completed an essay titled "Marxism and the National Question", which was published in March 1913 under the pseudonym "K. Stalin." He returned to Saint Petersburg and was arrested along with many other Bolsheviks and condemned to four years imprisonment in Siberia. Living near the Arctic Circle, Stalin had an affair leading to the birth of two more children, one who died in infancy. In late 1916, Stalin was conscripted into the army but was found unfit for service in 1917 due to his damaged left arm. Thereafter, Stalin served his last four months of exile.


Revolution and early wars

Role during the Russian Revolution of 1917
Main articles: Stalin in the Revolution and early wars and Russian Revolution (1917)
After returning from exile to Saint Petersburg, Stalin ousted Vyacheslav Molotov and Alexander Shlyapnikov as editors of Pravda, and took a position in favor of supporting Alexander Kerensky's provisional government. However, after Lenin prevailed at the April 1917 Party conference, Stalin and Pravda supported overthrowing the provisional government. At this conference, Stalin was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee. After Lenin participated in an attempted revolution, Stalin helped Lenin evade capture and, to avoid a bloodbath, ordered the besieged Bolsheviks to surrender.[5] He smuggled Lenin to Finland and assumed leadership of the Bolsheviks.[5] After the jailed Bolsheviks were freed to help defend Saint Petersburg, in October 1917, the Bolshevik Central Committee voted in favor of an insurrection.[5] On 7 November, from the Smolny Institute, Stalin, Lenin and the rest of the Central Committee coordinated the coup against the Kerensky government - the so-called October Revolution. Kerensky left the capital to rally the Imperial troops at the German front. By 8 November, the Winter Palace had been stormed and Kerensky's Cabinet had been arrested.


Role in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1919
Main articles: Stalin in the Revolution and early wars and Russian Civil War

Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin meeting in 1919. All three of them were "Old Bolsheviks" — members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917.Upon seizing Petrograd, Stalin was appointed People's Commissar for Nationalities' Affairs.[7] Thereafter, civil war broke out in Russia, pitting Lenin's Red Army against the White Army, a loose alliance of anti-Bolshevik forces. Lenin formed a five-member Politburo which included Stalin and Trotsky. In May 1918, Lenin dispatched Stalin to the city of Tsaritsyn. Through his new allies, Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, Stalin imposed his influence on the military.[7] Stalin challenged many of the decisions of Trotsky, ordered the killings of many former Tsarist officers in the Red Army and counter-revolutionaries[7][8] and burned villages in order to intimidate the peasantry into submission and discourage food bandit raids.[7] In May 1919, in order to stem mass desertions on the Western front, Stalin had deserters and renegades publicly executed as traitors.[7]


Role in the Polish-Soviet War, 1919-1920
Main articles: Stalin in the Revolution and early wars and Polish–Soviet War
After their Civil War victory, the Bolsheviks moved to expand the revolution into Europe, starting with Poland, which was fighting the Red Army in Ukraine. As joint commander of an army in the Ukraine,[7] Stalin moved against the then-Polish city of Lwów, which conflicted with the general strategy set by Lenin and Trotsky, and refused the movement of troops from his army to a battle for Warsaw.[7] Later, the battles for both Lwów and Warsaw were lost. Stalin returned to Moscow in August 1920, where he defended himself and resigned his military commission.[7] At the Ninth Party Conference on 22 September, Trotsky openly criticized Stalin's war record.[7]


Rise to power
Main article: Stalin's rise to power
Stalin played a decisive role in engineering the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia following which he adopted particularly hardline, centralist policies towards Soviet Georgia, which included the Georgian Affair of 1922 and other repressions.[9][10] Lenin and Lev Kamenev helped to have Stalin appointed as General Secretary in 1922 to help build a base against Trotsky, who moved to formally impose the Party dictatorship over the industrial sectors.[7]

Lenin, who disliked Stalin's policy towards Georgia,[7] suffered a stroke in 1922, forcing him into semi-retirement in Gorki. Stalin visited him often, acting as his intermediary with the outside world.[7] The pair quarreled and their relationship deteriorated.[7] Lenin dictated increasingly disparaging notes on Stalin in what would become his testament. He criticized Stalin's rude manners, excessive power, ambition and politics, and suggested that Stalin should be removed from the position of General Secretary.[7] During Lenin's semi-retirement, Stalin forged an alliance with Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev against Trotsky. These allies prevented Lenin's Testament from being revealed to the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923.[7]

Lenin died of a heart attack on 21 January 1924. Thereafter, Stalin's disputes with Kamenev and Zinoviev intensified. Stalin allied himself now with Nikolai Bukharin. Stalin began advocating that the Bolsheviks should focus building communism in the countries they already controlled rather than spreading the revolution, as Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev advocated. Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were ejected from the Central Committee and then expelled from the Party.[7] Kamenev and Zinoviev were readmitted, but Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union.

Stalin pushed for more rapid industrialization and central control of the economy, contravening Lenin's New Economic Policy. At the end of 1927, a critical shortfall in grain supplies prompted Stalin to push for collectivisation of agriculture.[7][8] After Bukharin criticized Stalin's plans for rapid industrialization as being financed by kulak wealth, he was ejected from the Politburo in November 1929. Stalin took great advantage of the ban on factionalism. By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin was supreme among the leadership. and the following year Trotsky was exiled because of his opposition.


Bolstering Soviet secret service and intelligence
Main article: Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies
Stalin vastly increased the scope and power of the state's secret police and intelligence agencies. Under his guiding hand, Soviet intelligence forces began to set up intelligence networks in most of the major nations of the world, including Germany (the famous Rote Kappelle spy ring), Great Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Stalin saw no difference between espionage, communist political propaganda actions, and state-sanctioned violence, and he began to integrate all of these activities within the NKVD. Stalin made considerable use of the Communist International movement in order to infiltrate agents and to ensure that foreign Communist parties remained pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin.

One of the best examples of Stalin's ability to integrate secret police and foreign espionage came in 1940, when he gave approval to the secret police to have Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico.[11]


Cult of personality
Further information: Cult of personality

Roses for Stalin (1949), painting by Boris Vladimirski.Stalin created a cult of personality in the Soviet Union around both himself and Lenin. Many personality cults in history have been frequently measured and compared to his. Numerous towns, villages and cities were renamed after the Soviet leader (see List of places named after Stalin) and the Stalin Prize and Stalin Peace Prize were named in his honor. He accepted grandiloquent titles (e.g. "Coryphaeus of Science," "Father of Nations," "Brilliant Genius of Humanity," "Great Architect of Communism," "Gardener of Human Happiness," and others), and helped rewrite Soviet history to provide himself a more significant role in the revolution. At the same time, according to Khrushchev, he insisted that he be remembered for "the extraordinary modesty characteristic of truly great people." Statutes of Stalin depict him at a height and build approximating Alexander III, while photographic evidence suggests he was between 5 ft 5 in and 5 ft 6 in (165–168 cm).[12]

Trotsky criticized the cult of personality built around Stalin. It reached new levels during the Great Patriotic War, with Stalin's name included in the new Soviet national anthem. Stalin became the focus of literature, poetry, music, paintings and film, exhibiting fawning devotion, crediting Stalin with almost god-like qualities, and suggesting he single-handedly won the Second World War. It is debatable as to how much Stalin relished the cult surrounding him. The Finnish communist Tuominen records a sarcastic toast proposed by Stalin at a New Year Party in 1935 in which he said "Comrades! I want to propose a toast to our patriarch, life and sun, liberator of nations, architect of socialism [he rattled off all the appellations applied to him in those days] – Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, and I hope this is the first and last speech made to that genius this evening."[13]


Changes to Soviet society, 1927–1939

Purges and deportations

Purges
Main articles: Great Purge, Sergey Kirov, Moscow Trials, and Stalinist purges in Mongolia

Left: Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities"
Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (support).
Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin
Stalin, as head of the Politburo consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party, justified as an attempt to expel 'opportunists' and 'counter-revolutionary infiltrators'.[14][15] Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps, to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.[14][16][17]

In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 1,108 negative votes.[18] After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zioviev.[19] The investigations and trials expanded.[20] Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts", which were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys or appeals, followed by a sentence to be executed "quickly."[21]

Thereafter, several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited anti-Soviet activities as counterrevolutionary crime was applied in the broadest manner.[22] The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "enemy of the people," starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD with sentencing carried out within 24 hours.[23]



Nikolai Yezhov, the young man walking with Stalin in the top photo from the 1930s, was shot in 1940. Following his death, Yezhov was edited out by Soviet censors.[24] Such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin's rule.
Many military leaders were convicted of treason, and a large scale purging of Red Army officers followed.[25] The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin.[26] In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937 , which eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership.[27] The only three "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) that remained were Stalin, Mikhail Kalinin, and Chairman of Sovnarkom Vyacheslav Molotov.

Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities), such as Poles, Ethnic Germans, Koreans, etc. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed.[8] Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed to a story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.

In light of revelations from the Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 and 328,612 for 1937 and 1938 alone respectively, according to official data) were executed in the course of the terror,[28] with the great mass of victims being "ordinary" Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, beggars.[29][30] Some experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete or unreliable.[31][32][33][34] For example, Robert Conquest suggests that the probable figure for executions during the years of the Great Purge is not 681,692, but some two and a half times as high. He believes that the KGB was covering its tracks by falsifying the dates and causes of death of rehabilitated victims.[35]

At the time, while reviewing a list of people to be shot, Stalin reportedly muttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riffraff in ten or twenty years time? No one."[36] In addition, Stalin dispatched a contingent of NKVD operatives to Mongolia, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika and unleashed a bloody purge in which tens of thousands were executed as 'Japanese Spies.' Mongolian ruler Khorloogiin Choibalsan closely followed Stalin's lead.[37]


Deportations
Main article: Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Meeting in a prison cellShortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million[38] were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.[39]

Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations, rightly or wrongly. Individual circumstances of those spending time in German-occupied territories were not examined[40] After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus, the entire population of five of the small highland peoples and the Crimean Tatars – more than a million people in total – were deported without notice or any opportunity to take their possessions.[41]

During Stalin's rule the following ethnic groups were deported completely or partially: Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Finns, Bulgarians, Greeks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Jews. Large numbers of Kulaks, regardless of their nationality, were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. Deportations took place in appalling conditions, often by cattle truck, and hundreds of thousands of deportees died en route.[42] Those who survived were forced to work without pay in the labour camps. Many of the deportees died of hunger or other conditions.

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninism, and reversed most of them, although it was not until 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhetians and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic States, Tatarstan and Chechnya, even today.


Collectivization
Main article: Collectivization in the Soviet Union
Stalin's regime moved to force collectivization of agriculture. This was intended to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, and to make tax collection more efficient. Collectivization meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced violent reaction among the peasantry.

In the first years of collectivization it was estimated that industrial production would rise by 200% and agricultural production by 50%,[43] but these estimates were not met. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks proper made up only 4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the slightly better-off peasants who took the brunt of violence from the OGPU and the Komsomol. These peasants were about 60% of the population). Those officially defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge. Archival data indicates that 20,201 people were executed during 1930, the year of Dekulakization.[37]

The two-stage progress of collectivization — interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorials, "Dizzy with success"[44] and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades"[45] — is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.


Famines
Further information: Droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR
Famine affected other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people.[citation needed] The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, had caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.[46] Most modern scholars agree that the famine was caused by the policies of the government of the Soviet Union under Stalin, rather than by natural reasons.[47]


Entering Gulag (a leaf from Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya's notebook)According to Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop was no worse than that of 1931 ... it was not a crop failure but the excessive demands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have alleviated the famine, while continuing to export grain; he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away, and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response.[48][49] Other historians hold it was largely the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine, with the successful harvest of 1933 ending the famine.[50] Soviet and other historians have argued that the rapid collectivization of agriculture was necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians; Alec Nove claims that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than because of, its collectivized agriculture.

The USSR also experienced a major famine in 1946–48 due to Soviet economic policy and the Soviet entitlement system that cost an estimated 1 to 1.5 million lives as well as secondary population losses due to reduced fertility.[51]


Ukrainian famine
Main article: Holodomor
The Holodomor famine is sometimes referred to as the Ukrainian Genocide, implying it was engineered by the Soviet government, specifically targeting the Ukrainian people to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a political factor and social entity.[52] While historians continue to disagree whether the policies that led to Holodomor fall under the legal definition of genocide, twenty six countries have officially recognized the Holodomor as such. On 28 November 2006 the Ukrainian Parliament approved a bill, according to which the Soviet-era forced famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.[53] Professor Michael Ellman concludes that Ukrainians were victims of genocide in 1932-33, according to a more relaxed definition, which is favored by some specialists in the field of genocide studies. He also asserts that, while this is not the only Soviet genocide (e.g. The Polish operation of the NKVD), it is the worst in terms of mass casualties.[54]

Current estimates on the total number of casualties within Soviet Ukraine range mostly from 2.2 million[55][56] to 4 to 5 million.[57][58][59]


Industrialization
See also: Industrialisation of the Soviet Union

The Russian Civil War and wartime communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism. Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

With seed capital unavailable because of international reaction to Communist policies, little international trade, and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization both by restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the kulaks.

In 1933 workers' real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. Common and political prisoners in labor camps were forced to do unpaid labor, and communists and Komsomol members were frequently "mobilized" for various construction projects. The Soviet Union used foreign experts, e.g. British engineer Stephen Adams, to instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.

In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While it is generally agreed that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate of growth is disputed. It is not disputed, however, that these gains were accomplished at the cost of millions of lives. Official Soviet estimates stated the annual rate of growth at 13.9%; Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that Soviet growth became temporarily much higher after Stalin's death.[60]

According to Robert Lewis the Five-Year Plan substantially helped to modernize the previously backward Soviet economy. New products were developed, and the scale and efficiency of existing production greatly increased. Some innovations were based on indigenous technical developments, others on imported foreign technology.[61]


Science
Main articles: Science and technology in the Soviet Union, Suppressed research in the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism
Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control by Stalin and his government, along with art and literature. There was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic — the most notable examples being the "bourgeois pseudosciences" genetics and cybernetics. Some areas of physics were criticized,[62][63] However, although initially planned,[64] while Stalin personally and directly contributed to study in Linguistics, the principle work of which is a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions."[65] Scientific research was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to labor camps (including Lev Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939) or executed (e.g. Lev Shubnikov, shot in 1937).


Social services
Main article: Soviet democracy
Under the Soviet government people benefited from some social liberalization. Girls were given an adequate, equal education and women had equal rights in employment,[8] improving lives for women and families. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which significantly increased the lifespan and quality of life of the typical Soviet citizen.[8] Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people universal access to healthcare and education, effectively creating the first generation free from the fear of typhus, cholera, and malaria.[66] The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record low numbers, increasing life spans by decades.[66]

Soviet women under Stalin were the first generation of women able to give birth in the safety of a hospital, with access to prenatal care.[66] Education was also an example of an increase in standard of living after economic development. The generation born during Stalin's rule was the first near-universally literate generation. Millions benefitted from mass literacy campaigns in the 1930s, and from workers training schemes.[67] Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract.[66] Transport links were improved and many new railways built. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovites, received many incentives for their work;[67] they could afford to buy the goods that were mass-produced by the rapidly expanding Soviet economy.

The increase in demand due to industrialization and the decrease in the workforce due to World War II and repressions generated a major expansion in job opportunities for the survivors, especially for women.[67]


Culture
Main article: Socialist Realism

Stalin propaganda poster, reading: "Beloved Stalin — a fortune of the nation!"Although born in Georgia, Stalin became a Russian nationalist and significantly promoted Russian history, language, and Russian national heroes, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s. He held the Russians up as the elder brothers of the non-Russian minorities.[68]

During Stalin's reign the official and long-lived style of Socialist Realism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama and literature. Previously fashionable "revolutionary" expressionism, abstract art, and avant-garde experimentation were discouraged or denounced as "formalism".

Famous figures were repressed, and many persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them Isaac Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Lev Gumilev) and "non-conformists" (for example, Osip Mandelstam). Small amounts of remnant of pre-revolutionary Russia survived. The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general, and in specific instances, has been the subject of discussion. Stalin's favorite novelPharaoh, shared similarities with Sergei Eisenstein's film, Ivan the Terrible, produced under Stalin's tutelage.

In architecture, a Stalinist Empire Style (basically, updated neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by the Seven Sisters of Moscow) replaced the constructivism of the 1920s. Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect on indigenous cultures within the Soviet Union, though the politics of Korenizatsiya and forced development were possibly beneficial to the integration of later generations of indigenous cultures.


Caricature of "Stalin a great friend of religion", when churches were allowed to be opened during World War II.
Religion
Main article: Religion in the Soviet Union
Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937–1938.[69] During World War II, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, after the NKVD had recruited the new metropolitan, the first after the revolution, as a secret agent. Thousands of parishes were reactivated until a further round of suppression in Khrushchev's time. The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.

Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects were outlawed and persecuted. Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.


Theorist
Main article: Stalinism
Stalin and his supporters have highlighted the notion that socialism can be built and consolidated by a country as underdeveloped as Russia during the 1920s. Indeed this might be the only means in which it could be built in a hostile environment.[70] In 1933, Stalin put forward the theory of aggravation of the class struggle along with the development of socialism, arguing that the further the country would move forward, the more acute forms of struggle will be used by the doomed remnants of exploiter classes in their last desperate efforts – and that, therefore, political repression was necessary.

In 1936, Stalin announced that the society of the Soviet Union consisted of two non-antagonistic classes: workers and kolkhoz peasantry. These corresponded to the two different forms of property over the means of production that existed in the Soviet Union: state property (for the workers) and collective property (for the peasantry). In addition to these, Stalin distinguished the stratum of intelligentsia. The concept of "non-antagonistic classes" was entirely new to Leninist theory. Among Stalin's contributions to Communist theoretical literature were "Marxism and the National Question", "Trotskyism or Leninism", and "Stalin's Collected Works".


Calculating the number of victims
Researchers before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union attempting to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million.[71] After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives also became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement – for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[72]

The official Soviet archival records do not contain comprehensive figures for some categories of victims, such as the those of ethnic deportations or of German population transfers in the aftermath of WWII.[73] Other notable exclusions from NKVD data on repression deaths include the Katyn massacre, other killings in the newly occupied areas, and the mass shootings of Red Army personnel (deserters and so-called deserters) in 1941. Also, the official statistics on Gulag mortality exclude deaths of prisoners taking place shortly after their release but which resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps.[74] Some historians also believe the official archival figures of the categories that were recorded by Soviet authorities to be unreliable and incomplete.[75][76] In addition to failures regarding comprehensive recordings, as one additional example, Robert Gellately and Simon Sebag-Montefiore argue the many suspects beaten and tortured to death while in "investigative custody" were likely not to have been counted amongst the executed.[8][77]

Historians working after the Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines.[78] Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million – a total of about 9 million victims of repression.[79]

Some have also included deaths of 6 to 8 million people in the 1932–1933 famine as victims of Stalin's repression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others, or simply an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization.[49][80][81]

Accordingly, if famine victims are included, a minimum of around 10 million deaths — 6 million minimum from famine and 4 million minimum from other causes — are attributable to the regime,[82] with a number of recent historians suggesting a likely total of around 20 million, citing much higher victim totals from executions, gulags, deportations and other causes.[83] Adding 6–8 million famine victims to Erlikman's estimates above, for example, would yield a total of between 15 and 17 million victims. Researcher Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million.[84] Others maintain that their earlier higher victim total estimates are correct.[85][86]


World War II, 1939–1945

Ribbentrop and Stalin at the signing of the Pact
Pact with Hitler
Main articles: Stalin in World War II, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and Soviet–German relations before 1941
After a failed attempt to sign an anti-German political alliance with France and Britain[87][88][89] and talks with Germany regarding a potential political deal[87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94],[95
][96] on 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, negotiated by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.[97] Officially a non-aggression treaty only, an appended secret protocol, also reached on 23 August 1939, divided the whole of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.[98][99] The eastern part of Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and part of Romania were recognized as parts of the Soviet sphere of influence,[99] with Lithuania added in a second secret protocol in September 1939.[100] Stalin and Ribbentrop traded toasts on the night of the signing discussing past hostilities between the countries.[101]


Implementing the division of Eastern Europe and other invasions

German and Soviet soldiers in victory parade in Brest in front of picture of StalinMain articles: Stalin in World War II, Soviet invasion of Poland, Occupation of the Baltic states, Winter War, and German–Soviet Axis talks
On 1 September 1939, the German invasion of its agreed upon portion of Poland started World War II.[97] On 17 September the Red Army invaded eastern Poland and occupied the Polish territory assigned to it by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland.[102][103] Eleven days later, the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was modified, allotting Germany a larger part of Poland, while ceding most of Lithuania to the Soviet Union.[104]


Planned and actual territorial changes in Eastern and Central Europe 1939–1940 (click to enlarge)After Stalin declared that he was going to "solve the Baltic problem", by June 1940, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were and merged into the Soviet Union, after repressions and actions therein brought about the deaths of over 160,000 citizens of these states.[104][105][106][107] After facing stiff resistance in an invasion of Finland,[108] an interim peace was entered, granting the Soviet Union the eastern region of Karelia (10% of Finnish territory).[108] After this campaign, Stalin took actions to bolster the Soviet military, modify training and improve propaganda efforts in the Soviet military.[109] In June 1940, Stalin directed the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, proclaiming this formerly Romanian territory part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.[110] But in annexing northern Bukovina, Stalin had gone beyond the agreed limits of the secret protocol.[110]


Stalin and Molotov on the signing of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with the Empire of Japan, 1941After the Tripartite Pact was signed by Axis Powers Germany, Japan and Italy, in October 1940, Stalin traded letters with Ribbentrop, with Stalin writing about entering an agreement regarding a "permanent basis" for their "mutual interests."[111] After a conference in Berlin between Hitler, Molotov and Ribbentrop, Germany presented the Molotov with a proposed written agreement for Axis entry.[110][112] On 25 November, Stalin responded with a proposed written agreement for Axis entry which was never answered by Germany.[113] Shortly thereafter, Hitler issued a secret directive on the eventual attempts to invade the Soviet Union.[113] In an effort to demonstrate peaceful intentions toward Germany, on 13 April 1941, Stalin oversaw the signing of a neutrality pact with Axis power Japan.[114]


Hitler breaks the pact
Further information: Stalin in World War II and Operation Barbarossa
During the early morning of 22 June 1941, Hitler broke the pact by implementing Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Soviet held territories and the Soviet Union that began the war on the Eastern Front.[115] Although Stalin had received warnings from spies and his generals,[116][117][118][119][120] he felt that Germany would not attack the Soviet Union until Germany had defeated Britain.[116] In the initial hours after the German attack commenced, Stalin hesitated, wanting to ensure that the German attack was sanctioned by Hitler, rather than the unauthorized action of a rogue general.[8] Accounts by Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan claim that, after the invasion, Stalin retreated to his dacha in despair for several days and did not participate in leadership decisions.[121] However, some documentary evidence of orders given by Stalin contradicts these accounts, leading some historians to speculate that Kruschev's account is inaccurate.[122] By the end of 1941, the Soviet military had suffered 4.3 million casualties[123] and German forces had advanced 1,050 miles (1,690 kilometers).[124]


Soviets stop the Germans
Further information: Stalin in World War II, Eastern Front (World War II), Battle of Moscow, and Battle of Stalingrad
While the Germans pressed forward, Stalin was confident of an eventual Allied victory over Germany. In September 1941, Stalin told British diplomats that he wanted two agreements: (1) a mutual assistance/aid pact and (2) a recognition that, after the war, the Soviet Union would gain the territories in countries that it had taken pursuant to its division of Eastern Europe with Hitler in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.[125] The British agreed to assistance but refused to agree upon the territorial gains, which Stalin accepted months later as the military situation deteriorated somewhat in mid-1942.[125] By December, Hitler's troops had advanced to within 20 miles of the Kremlin in Moscow.[126] On 5 December, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive, pushing German troops back 40–50 miles from Moscow, the Wermacht's first significant defeat of the war.[126]

In 1942, Hitler shifted his primary goal from an immediate victory in the East, to the more long-term goal of securing the southern Soviet Union to protect oil fields vital to a long-term German war effort.[127] While Red Army generals saw evidence that Hitler would shift efforts south, Stalin considered this to be a flanking campaign in efforts to take Moscow.[128]


Soviet push to Germany
Further information: Stalin in World War II, Eastern Front (World War II), Battle of Kursk, Operation Bagration, Battle of Warsaw (1944), and Vistula-Oder Offensive
The Soviets repulsed the important German strategic southern campaign and, although 2.5 million Soviet casualties were suffered in that effort, it permitted to Soviets to take the offensive for most of the rest of the war on the Eastern Front.[129]


The Big Three: Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November 1943.Germany attempted an encirclement attack at Kursk, which was successfully repulsed by the Soviets.[130] Kursk marked the beginning of a period where Stalin became more willing to listen to the advice of his generals.[131] By the end of 1943, the Soviets occupied half of the territory taken by the Germans from 1941-1942.[131] Soviet military industrial output also had increased substantially from late 1941 to early 1943 after Stalin had moved factories well to the East of the front, safe from German invasion and air attack.[132] In November 1943, Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt in Tehran.[133] The parties later agreed that Britain and America would launch a cross-channel invasion of France in May 1944, along with a separate invasion of southern France.[134] Stalin insisted that, after the war, the Soviet Union should incorporate the portions of Poland it occupied pursuant to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, which Churchill tabled.[135]

In 1944, the Soviet Union made significant advances across Eastern Europe toward Germany,[136] including Operation Bagration, a massive offensive in Belorussia against the German Army Group Centre.[137]


Final Victory
Further information: Stalin in World War II, Battle of Berlin, Battle in Berlin, East Prussian Offensive, and Battle of the Oder-Neisse

Soviet soldiers raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag after its captureBy April 1945, Germany faced its last days with 1.9 million German soldiers in the East fighting 6.4 million Red Army soldiers while 1 million German soldiers in the West battled 4 million Western Allied soldiers.[138] While initial talk existed of a race to Berlin by the Allies, after Stalin successfully lobbied for Eastern Germany to fall within the Soviet "sphere of influence" at Yalta, no plans were made by the Western Allies to seize the city by a ground operation.[139][140]

On 30 April, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, after which Soviet forces found their remains, which had been burned at Hitler's directive.[141] German forces surrendered a few days later. Despite the Soviets' possession of Hitler's remains, Stalin did not believe that his old nemesis was actually dead, a belief that remained for years after the war.[142][143]

Fending off the German invasion and pressing to victory in the East required a tremendous sacrifice by the Soviet Union. Soviet military casualties totaled approximately 35 million (official figures 28.2 million) with approximately 14.7 million killed, missing or captured (official figures 11.285 million).[144] Although figures vary, the Soviet civilian death toll probably reached 20 million.[144]


Questionable tactics
Further information: Stalin in World War II and Soviet war crimes

Part of the 5 March 1940 memo from Lavrentiy Beria to Stalin proposing execution of Polish officersAfter taking around 300,000 Polish prisoners in 1939 and early 1940,[145][146][146][147][148] 25,700 Polish POWs were executed on 5 March 1940, pursuant to a note from to Stalin from Lavrenty Beria, the members of the Soviet Politburo,[149][150] in what became known as the Katyn massacre.[151][149][152] While Stalin personally told a Polish general they'd "lost track" of the officers in Manchuria,[153][154][155][156] Polish railroad workers found the mass grave after the 1941 Nazi invasion.[157] The massacre became a source of political controversy,[158][159] with the Soviets eventually claiming that Germany committed the executions when the Soviet Union retook Poland in 1944.[149][160] The Soviets did not admit responsibility until 1990.[161]

Stalin introduced controversial military orders, such as Order No. 270, requiring superiors to shoot deserters on the spot[162] while their family members were subject to arrest.[163] Thereafter, Stalin also conducted a purge of several military commanders that were shot for "cowardice" without a trial.[163] Stalin issued Order No. 227, directing that commanders permitting retreat without permission to be subject to a military tribunal,[164] and soldiers guilty of disciplinary procedures to be forced into "penal battalions", which were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front lines.[164] From 1942 to 1945, 427,910 soldiers were assigned to penal battalions.[165] The order also directed "blocking detachments" to shoot fleeing panicked troops at the rear.[164] In June 1941, weeks after the German invasion began, Stalin also directed employing a scorched earth policy of destroying the infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize them, and that partisans were to be set up in evacuated areas.[122] He also ordered the NKVD to murder around one hundred thousand political prisoners in areas where the Wermacht approached,[166] while others were deported east.[167][168]

After the capture of Berlin, Soviet troops reportedly raped from tens of thousands to two million women,[169] and 50,000 during and after the occupation of Budapest.[170][171] In former Axis countries, such as Germany, Romania and Hungary, Red Army officers generally viewed cities, villages and farms as being open to pillaging and looting.[172]

According to recent figures, of an estimated four million POWs taken by the Russians, including Germans, Japanese, Hungarians, Romanians and others, some 580,000 never returned, presumably victims of privation or the Gulags.[173] Soviet POWs and forced laborers who survived German captivity were sent to special "transit" or "filtration" camps meant determine which were potential traitors.[174] Of the approximately 4 million to be repatriated 2,660,013 were civilians and 1,539,475 were former POWs.[174] Of the total, 2,427,906 were sent home and 801,152 were reconscripted into the armed forces.[174] 608,095 were enrolled in the work battalions of the defense ministry.[174] 272,867 were transferred to the authority of the NKVD for punishment, which meant a transfer to the Gulag system.[174][175][176] 89,468 remained in the transit camps as reception personnel until the repatriation process was finally wound up in the early 1950s.[174]


Allied conferences on post-war Europe
Further information: List of World War II conferences, Yalta Conference, and Potsdam Conference

The Big Three: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, February 1945.Stalin met in several conferences with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (and later Clement Atlee) and/or American President Franklin D. Roosevelt (and later Harry Truman) to plan military strategy and, later, to discuss Europe's postwar reorganization. Very early conferences, such as that with British diplomats in Moscow in 1941 and with Churchill and American diplomats in in Moscow in 1942, focused mostly upon war planning and supply, though some preliminary postwar reorganization discussion also occurred. In 1943, Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt in the Tehran Conference. In 1944, Stalin met with Churchill in the Moscow Conference. Beginning in late 1944, the Red Army occupied much of Eastern Europe during these conferences and the discussions shifted to a more intense focus on the reorganization of postwar Europe.

In February 1945, at the conference at Yalta, Stalin demanded a Soviet sphere of political influence in Eastern Europe.[177] Stalin eventually was convinced by Churchill and Roosevelt not to dismember Germany.[177] Stalin also stated that the Polish government-in-exile demands for self-rule were not negotiable, such that the Soviet Union would keep the territory of eastern Poland they had already taken by invasion with German consent in 1939, and wanted the pro-Soviet Polish government installed.[177] After resistance by Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin promised a re-organization of the current Communist puppet government on a broader democratic basis in Poland.[177] He stated the new government's primary task would be to prepare elections.[178]

The parties at Yalta further agreed that the countries of liberated Europe and former Axis satellites would be allowed to "create democratic institutions of their own choice", pursuant to the "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live."[179] The parties also agreed to help those countries form interim governments "pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections" and "facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections."[179] After the re-organization of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland, the parties agreed that the new party shall "be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot."[179] One month after Yalta, the Soviet NKVD arrested 16 Polish leaders wishing to participate in provisional government negotiations, for alleged "crimes" and "diversions", which drew protest from the West.[178] The fraudulent Polish elections, held in January 1947 resulted in Poland's official transformation to undemocratic communist state by 1949.

At the Potsdam Conference from July to August 1945, though Germany had surrendered months earlier, instead of withdrawing Soviet forces from Eastern European countries, Stalin had not moved those forces. At the beginning of the conference, Stalin repeated previous promises to Churchill that he would refrain from a "Sovietization" of Eastern Europe.[180] Stalin pushed for reparations from Germany without regard to the base minimum supply for German citizens' survival, which worried Truman and Churchill who thought that Germany would become a financial burden for Western powers.[181] In addition to reparations, Stalin pushed for "war booty", which would permit the Soviet Union to directly seize property from conquered nations without quantitative or qualitative limitation, and a clause was added permitting this to occur with some limitations.[181] By July 1945, Stalin's troops effectively controlled the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, and refugees were fleeing out of these countries fearing a Communist take-over. The western allies, and especially Churchill, were suspicious of the motives of Stalin, who had already installed communist governments in the central European countries under his influence.

In these conferences, his first appearances on the world stage, Stalin proved to be a formidable negotiator. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary noted: "Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all. Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated."[182]


Post-war era, 1945–1953

The Iron Curtain and the Eastern Bloc
Further information: Eastern bloc, Iron Curtain, History of the German Democratic Republic, History of Poland (1945–1989), People's Republic of Hungary, and History of Czechoslovakia (1948–1989)
After Soviet forces remained in Eastern and Central European countries, with the beginnings of communist puppet regimes in those countries, Churchill referred to the region as being behind an "Iron Curtain" of control from Moscow.[183][184] The countries under Soviet control in Eastern and Central Europe were called the "Eastern bloc."


The Eastern Bloc 1948-1989.In Soviet-controlled East Germany, the major task of the ruling communist party in Germany was to channel Soviet orders down to both the administrative apparatus and the other bloc parties pretending that these were initiatives of its own,[185] with deviations potentially leading to reprimands, imprisonment, torture and even death.[185] Property and industry were nationalized under their government.[185] The German Democratic Republic was declared on 7 October 1949, with a new constitution which enshrined socialism and gave the Soviet-controlled Socialist Unity Party ("SED") control. In Berlin, after citizens strongly rejected communist candidates in an election, in June 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin, the portion of Berlin not under Soviet control, cutting off all supply of food and other items. The blockade failed due to the unexpected massive aerial resupply campaign carried out by the Western powers known as the Berlin Airlift. In 1949, Stalin conceded defeat and ended the blockade.

While Stalin had promised at the Yalta Conference that free elections would be held in Poland,[179] after an election failure in "3 times YES" elections,[186] vote rigging was employed to win a majority in the carefully controlled poll.[187][188][189] Following the forged referendum, the Polish economy started to become nationalized.[190]


Stalin and Politburo colleagues in the Kremlin, 1946.In Hungary, when the Soviets installed a communist government, Mátyás Rákosi, who described himself as "Stalin's best Hungarian disciple"[191] and "Stalin's best pupil",[192] took power. Rákosi employed "salami tactics", slicing up these enemies like pieces of salami,[193] to battle the initial postwar political majority ready to establish a democracy.[194] Rákosi, employed Stalinist political and economic programs, and was dubbed the “bald murderer” for establishing one of the harshest dictatorships in Europe.[194][195] Approximately 350,000 Hungarian officials and intellectuals were purged from 1948 to 1956.[194]

During World War II, in Bulgaria, the Red Army crossed the border and created the conditions for a communist coup detat on the following night.[196] The Soviet military commander in Sofia assumed supreme authority, and the communists whom he instructed, including Kimon Georgiev, took full control of domestic politics.[196]

In 1949, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania founded the Comecon in accordance with Stalin's desire to enforce Soviet domination of the lesser states of Central Europe and to mollify some states that had expressed interest in the Marshall Plan,[197] and which were now, increasingly, cut off from their traditional markets and suppliers in Western Europe.[198] Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland had remained interested in Marshall aid des

[Lil Red]

+J.M.J.+
why the long document dump?

[Guest]

it just felt right plus the voices in my head told me i really should.

Edited April 24, 2009 by Guest

[Adrestia]

Hitler chose to reject God is a major way.

There have been times in my life when I have chosen to reject God. Am I more deserving of God's mercy because I haven't strayed as far as Hitler? I can't really hate Hitler (or anyone) because I don't believe that I am better than anyone... and I don't want to hate myself.

just my 2¢

[Guest]

[quote name='tgoldson' post='1845795' date='Apr 24 2009, 08:22 AM']Hitler chose to reject God is a major way.

There have been times in my life when I have chosen to reject God. Am I more deserving of God's mercy because I haven't strayed as far as Hitler? I can't really hate Hitler (or anyone) because I don't believe that I am better than anyone... and I don't want to hate myself.

just my 2¢[/quote]

Yes you're a trillion times more deserving of Gods mercy then Hitler. If Hitler wound up in Heaven somehow It would blow my mind. I dont know how he possibly could ? Although it is a possibilty yet I cant wrap my mind around it.(at least i've heard it's a possiblity) I guess hating Hitler does make one come across as if they think their better. Never looked at that way although what is wrong with thinking you're better then Hitler ?