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Russian Revolution
(1905) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Bombs found in the Bolshevik explosives lab. 1907

The 1905 Russian Revolution is a historical term describing a wave of political terrorism, strikes, peasant unrests, mutinies, both anti-government and undirected, that swept through vast areas of the Russian Empire, leading to the establishment of the State Duma of the Russian Empire, multi-party system and the Russian Constitution of 1906. Contents [hide]

* 1 Background * 2 Rise of the opposition * 3 Start of the revolution * 4 Height of the revolution * 5 Duma and Stolypin * 6 Rise of terrorism * 7 Finland * 8 Estonia * 9 See also * 10 References * 11 External links

[edit] Background

The liberal Tsar Alexander II, who had emancipated the serfs in 1861 and passed a range of legal, local government and military reforms, was assassinated on March 1, 1881 by Narodnik (populist) terrorists. His conservative successor, Alexander III, governed with an iron fist. Both the state and the church were subordinate to this autocracy, which in 1905 was headed by Alexander III's son, Nicholas II, of the House of Romanov.

[edit] Rise of the opposition

At the start of the 20th century Russian liberals formed Union of Zemstvo constitutionalists (1903) and Union of Liberation (1904) which called for a constitutional monarchy. Russian socialists organised into two major groups: Socialist-Revolutionary Party, following the Russian populist tradition, and Marxist Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

In the fall of 1904 liberals started a series of banquets, celebrating 40th anniversary of the liberal court statutes, and calling for political reforms and establishment of constitution. On November 30, 1904 Moscow City Duma passed a resolution, demanding establishment of elected national legislature, full freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Similar resolutions and appeals from other city dumas and zemstvo councils followed.

Nicholas II made move to fulfill much of the demands, appointing liberal Pyotr Dmitrievich Sviatopolk-Mirskii minister of the interior after the assassination of Vyacheslav von Plehve. On 12 December, 1904, Tsar issued a manifesto promising broadening zemstvo and local municipal councils authority, insurance for the industrial workers, emancipation of inorodtsy and abolition of censorship. Still, crucial point of representative national legislature was missing in the manifesto.

[edit] Start of the revolution

In December 1904, a strike occurred at the Putilov plant in Saint Petersburg. Sympathy strikes in other parts of the city raised the number of strikers above 80,000. Controversial Orthodox priest George Gapon, who headed a police-sponsored workers' association, led a huge workers' procession to the Winter Palace to deliver a petition to the Tsar on Sunday, January 22 [O.S. January 9] 1905). Clashes with the police and army, known as a Bloody Sunday, resulted in more than 100 deaths. The events of Bloody sunday are usually considered the start of active phase of revolution.

Events in Saint-Petersburg provoked public indignation and a series of mass strikes throughout Russia. Growing inter-ethnic confrontation throughout the Caucasus resulted in Armenian-Tatar massacres, heavily damaging the cities and the Baku oilfields. Polish socialists - both the PPS and the SDKPiL - called for a general strike; over 400,000 workers became involved in strikes all over Russian Poland.

The government responded fairly quickly. The Tsar dismissed the Minister of the Interior, Pyotr Sviatopolk-Mirskii, on January 18, 1905 O.S. and appointed a government commission "to enquire without delay into the causes of discontent among the workers in the city of St. Petersburg and its suburbs" in view of the strike movement. Commission was headed by Senator N.V. Shidlovsky, a member of the State Council, and included officials, chiefs of government factories, and factory owners. It was also to have included workers’ delegates elected according to a two-stage system. Elections of the workers delegates were blocked by the socialists, trying to divert the workers from the elections to the armed struggle. On February 20 (March 5), 1905, the Commission was dissolved without having started work.

Following the assassination of his uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, on February 4 O.S. Tsar agreed to give new concessions. On February 18 O.S. he published the Bulygin Rescript, which promised the formation of a 'consultative' assembly, religious tolerance, freedom of speech (in the form of language rights for the Polish minority) and a reduction in the peasants' redemption payments.

On May 24 and 25, about 300 Zemstvo and municipal representatives held three meetings in Moscow, which passed a resolution, asking for a popular representation at the national level. On June 6, 1905 Nicholas II had received a Zemstvo deputation. Responding to speeches by Prince Sergei Trubetskoi and Mr. Fyodrov, the tsar confirmed his promise to convene an assembly of people’s representatives.

In October, 1905 Saint Petersburg Soviet was formed. It called for a general strike, refusal to pay taxes and withdrawal of bank deposits.

[edit] Height of the revolution Ilya Repin, 17 October 1905

On August 6 O.S. Nicholas II agreed to the creation of a consultative State Duma of the Russian Empire. When the slight powers of this and the limits to the electorate were revealed, unrest redoubled and culminated in a general strike in October.

On October 30, the October Manifesto, written by Sergei Witte and Alexis Obolenskii, was presented to the Tsar. It closely followed the demands of the Zemstvo Congress in September, granting basic civil rights, allowing the formation of political parties, extending the franchise towards universal suffrage, and establishing the Duma as the central legislative body. The Tsar waited and argued for three days, but finally signed the manifesto on October 30 [O.S. October 17] 1905), owing to his desire to avoid a massacre, and a realisation that there was insufficient military force available to do otherwise. He regretted signing the document, saying that he felt "sick with shame at this betrayal of the dynasty" - "the betrayal was complete".

When the manifesto was proclaimed there were spontaneous demonstrations of support in all the major cities. The strikes in Saint Petersburg and elsewhere either officially ended or quickly collapsed. A political amnesty was also offered. The concessions came hand-in-hand with renewed, and brutal, action against the unrest. There was also a backlash from the conservative elements of society, with right-wing attacks on strikers, left-wingers and Jews.

While the Rusissian liberals were satisfied by the October Manifesto and took preparations for upcoming Duma elections, radical socialists and revolutionaries denounced the elections and called for an armed uprisings to "finish off the tsarism".

The November uprising of 1905 in Sevastopol, headed by retired naval Lieutenant Pyotr Shmidt, was only suppressed after a fierce battle. Trans-Baikal railroad fell into a hands of strikers committes and demobilised soldiers, returning from Manchuria after the Russo-Japanese war (See Chita Republic). Tsar had to send special detachement of loyal troops along the Trans-Siberian Railway to restore order.

The uprisings ended in December with a final spasm in Moscow. Between December 5 and December 7 O.S. there was a general strike by the Russian worker class. The government sent in troops on December 7, and a bitter street-by-street fight began. A week later the Semenovskii Regiment was deployed, and used artillery to break-up demonstrations and shell workers' districts. On December 18 O.S., with around a thousand people dead and parts of the city in ruins, the Bolsheviks surrendered.

[edit] Duma and Stolypin

Among the political parties formed, or made legal, was the liberal-intelligentsia Constitutional Democratic party (the Kadets), the peasant leaders' Labour Group (Trudoviks), the less liberal Union of October 17 (the Octobrists), and the reactionary Union of Land-Owners.

The electoral laws were promulgated in December 1905—franchise to male citizens over 25 years of age, electing through four electoral colleges. This was a 'weighted' electoral system where the votes of some sections of society were worth more than others. For example, the vote of an landowner was worth more than the vote of a peasant or industrial worker. The first elections to the Duma took place in March 1906 and were boycotted by the socialists, the SRs and the Bolsheviks. In the First Duma there were 170 Kadets, 90 Trudoviks, 100 non-aligned peasant representatives, 63 nationalists of various hues, and 16 Octobrists.

In April 1906 the government issued the Fundamental Law, setting the limits of this new political order. The Tsar was confirmed as absolute leader, with complete control of the executive, foreign policy, church, and the armed forces. The Duma was shifted, becoming a lower chamber below the half-elected, half-appointed by tsar State Council. Legislation had to be approved by the Duma, the Council and the Tsar to become law and in "exceptional conditions" the government could bypass the Duma.

In April, after having negotiated a loan of almost 900 million roubles to repair Russian finances, Sergei Witte resigned. Apparently the Tsar had "lost confidence" in him. Later known as "late Imperial Russia's most outstanding politician", Witte was replaced by seniour Ivan Goremykin. On May 6, 1906 Goremykin was replaced by Pyotr Stolypin.

Demanding further liberalisation and acting as a platform for "agitators", the First Duma was dissolved by the Tsar in July 1906. Despite the hopes of the Kadets and the fears of the government, there was no widespread popular reaction to the Vyborg appeal. However, an assassination attempt on Pyotr Stolypin led to the establishment of field trials for terrorists, and over the next eight months more than a thousand people were hanged.

[edit] Rise of terrorism

Years 1904 and 1907 were time of decline for the mass movements, such as strikes and political demonstrations, but also a time of rising political terrorism. SR Combat Organization, PSP Combat organization and Bolshevik terror groups carried out numerous assassinations, targeting civil servants and police, and robberies.

Notable victims of assassins included:

* Dmitry Sipyagin — Minister of Interior. Killed April 2, 1902 in Saint Petersburg. * Vyacheslav von Plehve — Minister of Interior.Killed 28 July in 1904 in Saint Petersburg. * Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia — Killed February 17, 1905 in Moscow * Victor Sakharov — former war minister, Killed November 22, 1905 * Nikolai Bobrikov - Governor-General of Finland, Killed June 17, 1904 in Helsinki * Admiral Chukhnin — the Black Sea Fleet commander. Killed July 11, 1906. * Aleksey Ignatyev * Eliel Soisalon-Soininen chancellor of justice of Finland. Killed February 6, 1905 in Helsinki

[edit] Finland Demonstrators in Jakobstad

In the Grand Duchy of Finland the Social Democrats organized the general strike of 1905 (October 30 – November 6). First Red Guards were formed, led by captain Johan Kock. During the general strike the Red Declaration, written by Yrjö Mäkelin, was given in Tampere, demanding dissolution of the Senate of Finland and universal suffrage, political freedoms, and abolition of censorship. Leader of the constitutionalists, Leo Mechelin crafted the November Manifesto, that led to the abolition of the Diet of Finland of the four Estates and to the creation of the modern Parliament of Finland. It also resulted in a temporary halt to the russification policy started in 1899.

On July 30, 1906, Russian sailors rose to rebellion in the fortress of Viapori (later called Suomenlinna), Helsinki. The Finnish Red Guards supported rebellion with a general strike, but it was quelled by the Baltic Fleet in sixty days.

[edit] Estonia

In the Governorate of Estonia, Estonians called for freedom of the press and assembly, for universal suffrage, and for national autonomy. On October 16, Russian army opened fire in a meeting on a street market in Tallinn, killing 94 and injuring over 200. The October Manifesto was supported in Estonia and brought the Estonian flag out publicly for the first time. Jaan Tõnisson used the new political freedoms to widen the rights of Estonians by establishing the first Estonian political party - National Progress Party. Another, more radical political organization, the Estonian Social Democratic Workers' Union was founded as well. The moderate supporters of Tõnisson and more radical supporters of Jaan Teemant could not reach a consensus, how to continue with the revolution, only that they both wanted to limit the rights of Baltic Germans and end Russification. The radical views were publicly welcomed and in December 1905, martial law was declared in Tallinn. A total of 160 manors were looted, resulting in ca. 400 workers and peasants killed by the army. Estonian gains from the revolution were minimal, but the tense stability that prevailed between 1905 and 1917 allowed Estonians to advance the aspiration of national statehood.

Russian Revolution (1917) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search

See also: Russian Revolution (1905)

To comply with Wikipedia's lead section guidelines, the introduction of this article may need to be rewritten. Please discuss this issue on the talk page and read the layout guide to make sure the section will be inclusive of all essential details. This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (November 2008)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 refers to a series of popular revolutions in Russia, and the events surrounding them. These revolutions had the effect of completely changing the nature of society within the Russian Empire and transforming the Russian state, which ultimately led to the replacement of the old Tsarist autocracy with the Soviet Union.

The February Revolution (March 1917) was a spontaneous popular revolution focused around St Petersburg. In the chaos, members of the Duma assumed control of the country, forming the Russian Provisional Government. The army leadership felt they did not have the means to suppress the revolution and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the last Tsar of Russia, abdicated, effectively leaving the Provisional Government in power. The Soviets (workers' councils) which were led by more radical socialist factions initially permitted the new government to rule but insisted on a prerogative to influence the government and control various militias. The February Revolution took place in the context of the First World War, with much of the army in a state of mutiny.

A period of dual power eventuated, in which the Provisional Government held state power and the national network of Soviets, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the lower-class citizens and the political left. During this chaotic period there were frequent mutinies and many strikes. The Provisional Government chose to remain in the war, whereas the policy of the Bolsheviks and other socialist factions was to abandon the war effort. The Bolsheviks formed workers militas into the Red Guards (later the Red Army) over which they exerted substantial control.[1] The Mensheviks, another socialist faction, were also fighting for control over the country at this time.

The October Revolution (November of the Gregorian calendar), in which the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the workers' Soviets, overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks appointed themselves as leaders of various government ministries and seized control of the countryside, establishing the Cheka to ruthlessly quash dissent. The Bolshevik leadership signed a peace treaty with Germany in March 1918. A civil war erupted between the Red and White (nationalist) factions, which was to continue for several years, with the Bolsheviks ultimately victorious. In this way the Revolution paved the way for the USSR. While many notable historical events occurred in Moscow and Petrograd, there was also a broadly-based movement in cities throughout the state, among national minorities throughout the empire, and in the rural areas, where peasants seized and redistributed land. Contents [hide]

* 1 Background o 1.1 Political issues o 1.2 Timeline 1914-1916 * 2 February Revolution * 3 Between February and throughout October: "Dual Power" (dvoevlastie) * 4 October Revolution * 5 Civil war * 6 Death of the imperial family * 7 The Russian revolution and the world * 8 Chronologies o 8.1 Chronology of events leading to the Revolution of 1917 o 8.2 Expanded chronology of events during the Revolution of 1917 * 9 Cultural portrayal * 10 See also * 11 Notes * 12 References * 13 Further reading o 13.1 Participants' accounts o 13.2 Primary documents o 13.3 Other books * 14 External links

[edit] Background

Main article: Russian history, 1892-1917

Bolshevik forces marching on Red Square.

At the start of 1917 the country was ripe for revolution — growing rapidly, creating expanded social opportunities but also great uncertainty. Poor villagers more and more often migrated between agrarian and industrial work environments, and many relocated entirely, creating a growing urban labor force. A middle class of white-collar employees, businessmen, and professionals (the latter group comprising doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, engineers, etc.) was on the rise. Even nobles had to find new ways to subsist in this changing economy, and contemporaries spoke of new classes forming (proletarians and capitalists, for example), although these classes were also divided along crisscrossing lines of status.

It was becoming harder to speak of clearly-defined social groups or boundaries. Not only were groups fractured in various ways, their defining boundaries were also increasingly blurred by migrating peasants, worker intellectuals, gentry professionals, and the like. There was a general sense that the texture of people's lives was being transformed by a spreading commercial culture which remade the surfaces of material life (buildings, store fronts, advertisements, fashion, clocks and machines) and nurtured new objects of desire.[2]

By 1917, the growth of political consciousness, the impact of revolutionary ideas, and the weak and inefficient system of government (which had been debilitated further by its participation in World War I), should have convinced the emperor, Nicholas II, to take the necessary steps towards reform. In January 1917, in fact, Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador in Russia, advised the emperor to "break down the barrier that separates you from your people to regain their confidence." In response to his advice, Nicholas effectively disowned Buchanan.

Many of the people of Russia resented the autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II and the corrupt and anachronistic elements in his government. He was seen as being out of touch with the needs and aspirations of the Russian people, the vast majority of whom were victims of the wretched socio-economic conditions which prevailed. Socially, Tsarist Russia stood well behind the rest of Europe in its industry and farming, resulting in few opportunities for fair advancement on the part of peasants and industrial workers. Economically, widespread inflation and food shortages in Russia contributed to the revolution. Militarily, inadequate supplies, logistics, and weaponry led to heavy losses that the Russians suffered during World War I; this further strengthened Russia's view of Nicholas II as weak and unfit to rule. Ultimately, these factors, coupled with the development of revolutionary ideas and movements (particularly during the years following the 1905 Bloody Sunday Massacre), led to the Russian Revolution.

Many workers acquired a sense of self-respect and confidence, heightening expectations and desires. Living in cities, workers encountered material goods such as they had never seen while in the village. Most important, living in cities, they were exposed to new ideas about the social and political order.[3]

The social causes of the Russian Revolution mainly came from centuries of oppression of the lower classes by the Tsarist regime, and Nicholas's failures in World War I. While rural agrarian peasants had been emancipated from serfdom in 1861, they still resented paying redemption payments to the state, and demanded communal tender of the land they worked. The problem was further compounded by the failure of Sergei Witte's land reforms of the early 1900s. Increasing peasant disturbances and sometimes full revolts occurred, with the goal of securing ownership of the land they worked. Russia consisted mainly of poor farming peasants, with 1.5% of the population owning 25% of the land.[citation needed]

The rapid industrialization of Russia also resulted in urban overcrowding and poor conditions for urban industrial workers (as mentioned above). Between 1890 and 1910, the population of the capital, Saint Petersburg, swelled from 1,033,600 to 1,905,600, with Moscow experiencing similar growth. This created a new 'proletariat' which, due to being crowded together in the cities, was much more likely to protest and go on strike than the peasantry had been in previous times. In one 1904 survey, it was found that an average of sixteen people shared each apartment in Saint Petersburg, with six people per room. There was also no running water, and piles of human waste were a threat to the health of the workers. The poor conditions only aggravated the situation, with the number of strikes and incidents of public disorder rapidly increasing in the years shortly before World War I.

World War I only added to the chaos. Conscription swept up the unwilling in all parts of Russia. The vast demand for factory production of war supplies and workers caused many more labor riots and strikes. Conscription stripped skilled workers from the cities, who had to be replaced with unskilled peasants, and then, when famine began to hit due to the poor railway system, workers abandoned the cities in droves to look for food. Finally, the soldiers themselves, who suffered from a lack of equipment and protection from the elements, began to turn against the Tsar. This was mainly because, as the war progressed, many of the officers who were loyal to the Tsar were killed, and were replaced by discontented conscripts from the major cities, who had little loyalty to the Tsar.

[edit] Political issues

Many sections of the crown had reason to be dissatisfied with the existing autocracy. Nicholas II was a deeply conservative ruler and maintained a strict authoritarian system. Individuals and society in general were expected to show self-restraint, devotion to community, deference to the social hierarchy, and a sense of duty to country. Religious faith helped bind all of these tenets together as a source of comfort and reassurance in the face of difficult conditions and as a means of political authority exercised through the clergy. Perhaps more than any other modern monarch, Nicholas II attached his fate and the future of his dynasty to the notion of the ruler as a saintly and infallible father to his people. This idealized vision of the Romanov monarchy blinded him to the actual state of his country. With a firm belief that his power to rule was granted by Divine Right, Nicholas assumed that the Russian people were devoted to him with unquestioning loyalty. This ironclad belief rendered Nicholas unwilling to allow the progressive reforms that might have alleviated the suffering of the Russian people. Even after the 1905 revolution spurred the Tsar to decree limited civil rights and democratic representation, he worked to limit even these liberties in order to preserve the ultimate authority of the crown.[4]

Despite constant oppression, the desire of the people for democratic participation in government was strong. Since the Age of Enlightenment, Russian intellectuals had promoted Enlightenment ideals such as the dignity of the individual and of the rectitude of democratic representation. These ideals were championed most vociferously by Russia’s liberals, although populists, Marxists, and anarchists also claimed to support democratic reforms. A growing opposition movement had begun to challenge the Romanov monarchy openly well before the turmoil of World War I. Dissatisfaction with Russian autocracy culminated in the huge national upheaval that followed the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 1905, in which hundreds of unarmed protesters were shot by the Tsar's troops. Workers responded to the massacre with a crippling general strike, forcing Nicholas to put forth the October Manifesto which established a democraticly elected parliament (the State Duma). The Tsar undermined this promise of reform but a year later with Article 87 of the 1906 Fundamental State Laws, and subsequently dismissed the first two Dumas when they proved uncooperative. Unfulfilled hopes of democracy fueled revolutionary ideas and violent outbursts targeted at the monarchy.

One of the Tsar’s principal rationales for risking war in 1914 was his desire to restore the prestige that Russia had lost amid the debacles of the Russo-Japanese war. Nicholas also sought to foster a greater sense of national unity with a war against a common and ancient enemy. The Russian Empire was an agglomeration of diverse ethnicities that had shown significant signs of disunity in the years before the First World War. Nicholas believed in part that the shared peril and tribulation of a foreign war would mitigate the social unrest over the persistent issues of poverty, inequality, and inhuman working conditions. Instead of restoring Russia's political and military standing, World War I led to the horrifying slaughter of Russian troops and military defeats that undermined both the monarchy and society in general to the point of collapse.

[edit] Timeline 1914-1916

1914

* June - July: General strikes by workers in Saint Petersburg. * 19 July: Germany declares war on Russia, causing a brief sense of patriotic union amongst the Russian nation and a downturn in striking. * 30 July: The All Russian Zemstvo Union for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers is created with Lvov as president. * August - November: Russia suffers heavy defeats and a large shortage of supplies, including food and munitions, but holds onto Austrian Galicia. * 18 August: Saint Petersburg is renamed Petrograd as 'Germanic' names are changed to sound more Russian, and hence more patriotic. * 5 November: Bolshevik members of the Duma are arrested; they are later tried and exiled to Siberia.

1915

* 19 February: Great Britain and France accept Russia's claims to Istanbul and other Turkish lands. * 5 June: Strikers shot at in Kostromá; casualties. * 9 July: The Great Retreat begins, as Russian forces pull back out of Galicia and Russian Poland into Russia proper. * 9 August: The Duma's bourgeois parties form the 'Progressive bloc' to push for better government and reform; includes the Kadets, Octobrist groups and Nationalists. * 10 August: Strikers shot at in Ivánovo-Voznesénsk; casualties. * 17 August-19th: Strikers in Petrograd protest at the deaths in Ivánovo-Voznesénsk. * 23 August: Reacting to war failures and a hostile Duma, the Tsar takes over as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, prorogues the Duma and moves to military headquarters at Mogilev. Central government begins to seize up.

1916

* January - December: Despite successes in the Brusilov offensive, the Russian war effort is still characterised by shortages, poor command, death and desertion. Away from the front, the conflict causes starvation, inflation and a torrent of refugees. Both soldiers and civilians blame the incompetence of the Tsar and his government. * 6 February: Duma reconvened. * 29 February: After a month of strikes at the Putílov Factory, the government conscripts the workers and takes charge of production. Protest strikes follow. * 20 June: Duma prorogued. * October: Troops from 181st Regiment help striking Russkii Renault workers fight against the Police. * 1 November: Miliukov gives his 'Is this stupidity or treason?' speech in reconvened Duma. * 17 December/18th: Rasputin is killed by Prince Yusupov. * 30 December: The Tsar is warned that his army won't support him against a revolution.

[edit] February Revolution

Main article: February Revolution

Nicholas II, March 1917, shortly after the revolution brought about his abdication.

This revolution broke out without definite leadership and formal plans, which may be seen as indicative of the fact that the Russian people had quite enough of the existing system. Petrograd, the capital, became the focus of attention, and, on 23 February (8 March) 1917, people at the food queues started a demonstration. They were soon joined by many thousands of women textile workers, who walked out of their factories—partly in commemoration of International Women's Day but mainly to protest against the severe shortages of bread. Already, large numbers of men and women were on strike, and the women stopped at any still-operating factories to call on their workers to join them. The mobs marched through the streets, with cries of "Bread!" and "Give us bread!" During the next two days, the strike, encouraged by the efforts of hundreds of rank-and-file socialist activists, spread to factories and shops throughout the capital. By 25 February, virtually every industrial enterprise in Petrograd had been shut down, together with many commercial and service enterprises. Students, white-collar workers and teachers joined the workers in the streets and at public meetings, whilst, in the still-active Duma, liberal and socialist deputies came to realise a potentially-massive problem. They presently denounced the current government even more vehemently and demanded a responsible cabinet of ministers. The Duma, consisting primarily of the bourgeoise, pressed the Tsar to abdicate in order to avert a revolution.

On the evening of Saturday the 25th, with police having lost control of the situation, Nicholas II, who refused to believe the warnings about the seriousness of these events, sent a fateful telegram to the chief of the Petrograd military district, General Sergei Khabalov: "I command you tomorrow to stop the disorders in the capital, which are unacceptable in the difficult time of war with Germany and Austria."[5] Most of the soldiers obeyed these orders on the 26th, but mutinies, often led by lower-ranked officers, spread overnight. On the morning of the 27th, workers in the streets, many of them now armed, were joined by soldiers, sent in by the government to quell the riots. Many of these soldiers were insurgents, however, and they joined the crowd and fired on the police, in many cases little red ribbons tied to their bayonets. The outnumbered police then proceeded to join the army and civilians in their rampage. Thus, with this near-total disintegration of military power in the capital, effective civil authority collapsed.

By nighttime on the 27th, the cabinet submitted its resignation to the Tsar and proposed a temporary military dictatorship, but Russia's military leaders rejected this course. Nicholas, meanwhile, had been on the front with the soldiers, where he had seen first-hand Russia's defeat at Tannenberg. He had become very frustuated and was conscious of the fact that the demonstrations were on a massive scale; indeed, he feared for his life. The ill health of his son (suffering from the blood disorder hemophilia) was causing him difficulties, too. Nicholas accepted defeat at last and abdicated on 13 March, hoping, by this last act of service to his nation (as he stated in his manifesto), to end the disorders and bring unity to Russia.[6] In the wake of this collapse of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty—Nicholas's brother, to whom he subsequently offered the crown, refused to become Tsar unless that was the decision of an elected government; he wanted the people to want him as their leader—a minority of the Duma's deputies declared themselves a Provisional Government, chaired by Prince Lvov, a moderate reformist, although leadership moved gradually to Alexander Kerensky of the Social Revolutionary Party.

[edit] Between February and throughout October: "Dual Power" (dvoevlastie)

The effective power of the Provisional Government was challenged by the authority of an institution that claimed to represent the will of workers and soldiers and could, in fact, mobilize and control these groups during the early months of the revolution—the Petrograd Soviet [Council] of Workers' Deputies. The model for the soviet were workers' councils that had been established in scores of Russian cities during the 1905 revolution. In February 1917, striking workers elected deputies to represent them and socialist activists began organizing a citywide council to unite these deputies with representatives of the socialist parties. On 27 February, socialist Duma deputies, mainly Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, took the lead in organizing a citywide council. The Petrograd Soviet met in the Tauride Palace, the same building where the new government was taking shape.

The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet believed that they represented particular classes of the population, not the whole nation. They also believed Russia was not ready for socialism. So they saw their role as limited to pressuring hesitant "bourgeoisie” to rule and to introduce extensive democratic reforms in Russia (the replacement of the monarchy by a republic, guaranteed civil rights, a democratic police and army, abolition of religious and ethnic discrimination, preparation of elections to a constituent assembly, and so on).[7] They met in the same building as the emerging Provisional Government not to compete with the Duma Committee for state power but to best exert pressure on the new government, to act, in other words, as a popular democratic lobby.

The relationship between these two major powers was complex from the beginning and would shape the politics of 1917. The representatives of the Provisional Government agreed to "take into account the opinions of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies," though they were also determined to prevent "interference in the actions of the government," which would create "an unacceptable situation of dual power."[8] In fact, this was precisely what was being created, though this "dual power" (dvoevlastie) was the result less of the actions or attitudes of the leaders of these two institutions than of actions outside their control, especially the ongoing social movement taking place on the streets of Russia’s cities, in factories and shops, in barracks and in the trenches, and in the villages.

A series of political crises—see the chronology below—in the relationship between population and government and between the Provisional government and the soviets (which developed into a nationwide movement with a national leadership, The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK)) undermined the authority of the Provisional Government but also of the moderate socialist leaders of the Soviet. Although the Soviet leadership initially refused to participate in the "bourgeois" Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, a young and popular lawyer and a member of the Social Revolutionary Party (SRP), agreed to join the new cabinet, and he became an increasingly central figure in the government, eventually taking leadership of the Provisional Government. As minister of war and later Prime Minister, Kerensky promoted freedom of speech, released thousands of political prisoners, did his very best to continue the war effort and even organised a new offensive (which, however, was no more successful than its predecessors). Nevertheless, Kerensky still faced several great challenges, highlighted by the soldiers, urban workers and peasants, who claimed that they had gained nothing by the revolution:

* Other political groups were trying to undermine him. * Heavy military losses were being suffered on the front. * The soldiers were dissatisfied, demoralised and had started to defect. (On arrival back in Russia, these soldiers were either imprisoned or sent straight back to the front.) * There was enormous discontent with Russia's involvement in the war, and many were calling for an end to it. * There were great shortages of food and supplies, which was difficult to remedy because of the wartime economic conditions.

The political group which proved most troublesome for Kerensky, and would eventually overthrow him, was the Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin. Lenin had been living in exile in neutral Switzerland and, due to the democratization of politics after the February Revolution which legalized formerly banned political parties, he perceived the opportunity for his Marxist revolution. Although return to Russia had become a possibility, the war made it logistically difficult. Eventually, German officials arranged for Lenin to pass through their territory, hoping that his activities would weaken Russia or even--if the Bolsheviks came to power--lead to Russia's withdrawal from the war. Lenin and his associates, however, had to agree to travel to Russia in a sealed train: Germany would not take the chance that he would foment revolution in Germany. After passing through the front, he arrived in Petrograd in April 1917.

With Lenin's arrival, the popularity of the Bolsheviks increased steadily. Over the course of the spring, public dissatisfaction with the Provisional Government and the war, in particular among workers, soldiers and peasants, pushed these groups to radical parties. Despite growing support for the Bolsheviks, buoyed by maxims that called most famously for "all power to the Soviets," the party held very little real power in the moderate dominated Petrograd Soviet. In fact, historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick have asserted that Lenin's exhortations for the Soviet Council to take power were intended to arouse indignation both with the Provisional Government, whose policies were viewed as conservative, and the Soviet itself, which was viewed as subservient to the conservative government. By most historians' accounts, Lenin and his followers were unprepared for how their groundswell of support, especially among influential worker and soldier groups, would translate into real power in summer, 1917.

On 18 June, the Provisional Government launched an attack against Germany which failed miserably. Soon after, the military ordered the Petrograd to go to the front reneging a previously made promise and the soldiers refused to follow the new orders. The arrival of radical Kronstadt sailors, who had tried and executed many officers, including one admiral, further fueled the growing revolutionary atmosphere. The sailors and soldiers, along with Petrograd workers, took to the streets in violent protest, calling for "all power to the Soviets." The revolt, however, was disowned by Lenin[citation needed] and the Bolshevik leaders and dissipated within a few days. In the aftermath, Lenin fled to Finland under threat of arrest while Trotsky, among other prominent Bolsheviks, was arrested. The July Days confirmed the popularity of the anti-war, radical Bolsheviks, but their unpreparedness at the moment of revolt was an embarrassing gaffe which resulted in loss of support among their main constituent groups--soldiers and workers.

The Bolshevik failure in the July Days proved temporary, though. In August, poor, or misleading, communication led General Lavr Kornilov, the recently appointed Supreme Commander of Russian military forces, to believe that the Petrograd government had been captured by radicals, or was in serious danger thereof. In response, he ordered troops to Petrograd to pacify the city. In order to secure his position, Kerensky had to ask for Bolshevik assistance. He also sought help from the Petrograd Soviet, which called upon armed Red Guards to "defend the revolution." The Kornilov Affair failed largely due to the efforts of the Bolsheviks, whose influence over railroad and telegraph workers proved vital in stopping the movement of troops. With his coup failing, Kornilov surrendered and was relieved of his position. The Bolsheviks' role in stopping the attempted coup immensely strengthened their position.

In early September, the Soviet Council freed the jailed Bolsheviks and Trotsky became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Growing numbers of socialists and lower-class Russians viewed the government less and less as a force in support of their needs and interests. The Bolsheviks benefited as the only major organized opposition party which had refused to compromise with the Provisional Government, and they benefited from growing frustration and even disgust with other parties, such as the Mensheviks and SRs, who stubbornly refused to break with the idea of national unity across all classes.

In Finland, Lenin had worked on his book State and Revolution and continued to lead his party writing newspaper articles and policy decrees. By October, he returned to Petrograd, aware that the increasingly radical city presented him no legal danger and a second opportunity for revolution. The Bolshevik Central Committee drafted a resolution, calling for the dissolution of the Provisional Government in favor of the Petrograd Soviet. The resolution was passed 10-2 (Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev prominently dissenting) and the October Revolution began.

[edit] October Revolution

Main article: October Revolution

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks

The October Revolution was led by Vladimir Lenin and was based upon Lenin's writing on the ideas of Karl Marx, a political ideology often known as Marxism-Leninism. It marked the beginning of the spread of communism in the twentieth century. It was far less sporadic than the revolution of February and came about as the result of deliberate planning and coordinated activity to that end. Though Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik Party, it has been argued that since Lenin wasn't present during the actual takeover of the Winter Palace, it was really Trotsky's organization and direction that led the revolution, spurred by the motivation Lenin instigated within his party.[citation needed] Critics on the Right have long argued that the financial and logistical assistance of German intelligence via their key agent, Alexander Parvus was a key component as well, though historians are divided, for the evidence is sparse.

On 7 November 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir I. Lenin led his leftist revolutionaries in a revolt against the ineffective Provisional Government (Russia was still using the Julian Calendar at the time, so period references show an 25 October date). The October revolution ended the phase of the revolution instigated in February, replacing Russia's short-lived provisional parliamentary government with government by soviets, local councils elected by bodies of workers and peasants. Liberal and monarchist forces, loosely organized into the White Army, immediately went to war against the Bolsheviks' Red Army.

Soviet membership was initially freely elected, but many members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, anarchists, and other leftists opposed the Bolsheviks through the soviets. When it became clear that the Bolsheviks had little support outside of the industrialized areas of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, they barred non-Bolsheviks from membership in the soviets. Other socialists revolted and called for "a third revolution." The most notable instances were the Tambov rebellion, 1919–1921, and the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921. These movements, which made a wide range of demands and lacked effective coordination, were eventually defeated along with the White Army during the Civil War.

[edit] Civil war

Main article: Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War, which broke out in 1918 shortly after the revolution, brought death and suffering to millions of people regardless of their political orientation. The war was fought mainly between the Red Army ("Reds"), consisting of radical communists and revolutionaries, and the "Whites"—the monarchists, conservatives, liberals and moderate socialists who opposed the drastic restructuring championed by the Bolsheviks. The Whites had backing from nations such as Great Britain, France, USA and Japan.

Also during the Civil War, Nestor Makhno led a Ukrainian anarchist movement allied with the Bolsheviks thrice, one of the powers ending the alliance each time. However, a Bolshevik force under Mikhail Frunze destroyed the Makhnovist movement, when the Makhnovists refused to merge into the Red Army. In addition, the so-called "Green Army" (nationalists and anarchists) played a secondary role in the war, mainly in Ukraine.

[edit] Death of the imperial family

In early March, the Provisional Government placed Nicholas and his family under house arrest in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, 15 miles (24 km) south of Petrograd. In August 1917 the Kerensky government evacuated the Romanovs to Tobolsk in the Urals, allegedly to protect them from the rising tide of revolution during the Red Terror. After the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, the conditions of their imprisonment grew stricter and talk of putting Nicholas on trial increased. As the counter revolutionary White movement gathered force, leading to full-scale civil war by the summer, the Romanovs were moved during April and May 1918 to Yekaterinburg, a militant Bolshevik stronghold-. During the early morning of 16 July, at approximately 1:30 am, Nicholas, Alexandra, their children, their physician, and three servants were taken into the basement and executed. According to Edvard Radzinsky and Dmitrii Volkogonov, the order came directly from Vladimir Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov in Moscow. That the order came from the top has long been believed, although there is a lack of hard evidence. It has been argued that the execution was carried out on the initiative of local Bolshevik officials, or that it was an option approved in Moscow should White troops approach Yekaterinburg. Radzinsky noted that Lenin's bodyguard personally delivered the telegram ordering the execution and that he was ordered to destroy the evidence.[9] The royal family was lined up and told to wait and the shooting commenced.

[edit] The Russian revolution and the world

Trotsky said that the goal of socialism in Russia would not be realized without the success of the world revolution. Indeed, a revolutionary wave caused by the Russian Revolution lasted until 1923. Despite initial hopes for success in the German Revolution, in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic and others like it, no other Marxist movement succeeded in keeping power in its hands.

This issue is subject to conflicting views on the communist history by various Marxist groups and parties. Stalin later rejected this idea, stating that socialism was possible in one country.

The confusion regarding Stalin's position on the issue stems from the fact that he, after Lenin's death in 1924, successfully used Lenin's argument—the argument that socialism's success needs the workers of other countries in order to happen—to defeat his competitors within the party by accusing them of betraying Lenin and, therefore, the ideals of the October Revolution.

[edit] Chronologies

[edit] Chronology of events leading to the Revolution of 1917

Dates are correct for the Julian calendar, which was used in Russia until 1918. It was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar during the 19th century and thirteen days behind it during the 20th century. Date(s) 	Event(s) 1855 	Start of reign of Tsar Alexander II. 1861 	Emancipation of the serfs. 1874–81 	Growing anti-government terrorist movement and government reaction. 1881 	Alexander II assassinated by revolutionaries; succeeded by Alexander III. 1883 	First Russian Marxist group formed. 1894 	Start of reign of Nicholas II. 1898 	First Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). 1900 	Foundation of Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR). 1903 	Second Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Beginning of split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. 1904–5 	Russo-Japanese War; Russia loses war. 1905 	Russian Revolution of 1905.

* January: Bloody Sunday in Saint Petersburg. * June: Battleship Potemkin uprising at Odessa on the Black Sea (see movie The Battleship Potemkin). * October: general strike, Saint Petersburg Soviet formed; October Manifesto: Imperial agreement on elections to the State Duma.

1906 	First State Duma. Prime Minister: Petr Stolypin. Agrarian reforms begin. 1907 	Second State Duma, February–June. 1907 	Third State Duma, until 1912. 1911 	Stolypin assassinated. 1912 	Fourth State Duma, until 1917. Bolshevik/Menshevik split final. 1914 	Germany declares war on Russia. 1915 	Serious defeats, Nicholas II declares himself Commander in Chief. 1916 	Food and fuel shortages and high prices. Progressive Bloc formed. 1917 	Strikes, mutinies, street demonstrations lead to the fall of autocracy.

[edit] Expanded chronology of events during the Revolution of 1917 Gregorian Date 	Julian Date 	Event January 	Strikes and unrest in Petrograd February 	February Revolution 8 Marchth 	23 Februaryrd 	International Women's Day: strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd, growing over the next few days. 11 Marchth 	26 Februaryth 	50 demonstrators killed in Znamenskaya Square Tsar Nicholas II prorogues the State Duma and orders commander of Petrograd military district to suppress disorders with force. 12 Marchth 	27 Februaryth 	* Troops refuse to fire on demonstrators, deserters. Prisons, courts, and police bumbs attacked and looted by angry crowds.

* Okhrana buildings set on fire. Garrison joins revolutionaries. * Petrograd Soviet formed. * Formation of Provisional Committee of the Duma by liberals from Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets).

14 Marchth 	1 Marchst 	Order No.1 of the Petrograd Soviet. 15 Marchth 	2 Marchnd 	Nicholas II abdicates. Provisional Government formed under Prime Minister Prince Lvov. 16 Aprilth 	3 Aprilrd 	Return of Lenin to Russia. He publishes his April Theses. 3 Mayrd–4th 	20 Aprilth–21st 	"April Days": mass demonstrations by workers, soldiers, and others in the streets of Petrograd and Moscow triggered by the publication of the Foreign Minister Miliukov's note to the allies, which was interpreted as affirming commitment to the war policies of the old government. First Provisional Government falls. 18 Mayth 	5 Mayth 	First Coalition Government forms when socialists, representatives of the Soviet leadership, agree to enter the cabinet of the Provisional Government. Kerensky, the only socialist already in the government, made minister of war and navy. 16 Juneth 	3 Junerd 	First All-Russian Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies opens in Petrograd. Closed on 24th. Elects Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK), headed by Mensheviks and SRs. 23 Junerd 	10 Juneth 	Planned Bolshevik demonstration in Petrograd banned by the Soviet. 29 Juneth 	16 Juneth 	Kerensky orders offensive against Austro-Hungarian forces. Initial success only. 1 Julyst 	18 Juneth 	Official Soviet demonstration in Petrograd for unity is unexpectedly dominated by Bolshevik slogans: "Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers", "All Power to the Soviets". 15 Julyth 	2 Julynd 	Russian offensive ends. Trotsky joins Bolsheviks. 16 Julyth–17th 	3 Julyrd–4th 	The "July Days"; mass armed demonstrations in Petrograd, encouraged by the Bolsheviks, demanding "All Power to the Soviets". 19 Julyth 	6 Julyth 	German and Austro-Hungarian counter-attack. Russians retreat in panic, sacking the town of Tarnopol. Arrest of Bolshevik leaders ordered. 20 Julyth 	7 Julyth 	Lvov resigns and asks Kerensky to become Prime Minister and form a new government. Established 25 Julyth. 4 Augustth 	22 Julynd 	Trotsky and Lunacharskii arrested. 8 Septemberth 	26 Augustth 	Second coalition government ends. 8 Septemberth–12th 	26 Augustth–30th 	"Kornilov mutiny". Begins when the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, General Lavr Kornilov, demands (or is believed by Kerensky to demand) that the government give him all civil and military authority and moves troops against Petrograd. 13 Septemberth 	31 Augustst 	Majority of deputies of the Petrograd Soviet approve a Bolshevik resolution for an all-socialist government excluding the bourgeoisie. 14 Septemberth 	1 Septemberst 	Russia declared a republic 17 Septemberth 	4 Septemberth 	Trotsky and others freed. 18 Septemberth 	5 Septemberth 	Bolshevik resolution on the government wins majority vote in Moscow Soviet. 2 Octobernd 	19 Septemberth 	Moscow Soviet elects executive committee and new presidium, with Bolshevik majorities, and the Bolshevik Viktor Nogin as chairman. 8 Octoberth 	25 Septemberth 	Third coalition government formed. Bolshevik majority in Petrograd Soviet elects Bolshevik Presidium and Trotsky as chairman. 23 Octoberrd 	10 Octoberth 	Bolshevik Central Committee meeting approves armed uprising. 24 Octoberth 	11 Octoberth 	Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region, until 13 Octoberth. 2 Novembernd 	20 Octoberth 	First meeting of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. 7 Novemberth 	25 Octoberth 	October Revolution is launched as MRC directs armed workers and soldiers to capture key buildings in Petrograd. Winter Palace attacked at 9:40pm and captured at 2am. Kerensky flees Petrograd. Opening of the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets. 8 Novemberth 	26 Octoberth 	Second Congress of Soviets: Mensheviks and right SR delegates walk out in protest against the previous day's events. Congress approves transfer of state authority into its own hands and local power into the hands of local soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies, abolishes capital punishment, issues Decree on Peace and Decree on Land, and approves the formation of an all-Bolshevik government, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), with Lenin as chairman.

Russian Provisional Government From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Provisional Government of Russia, 1917) Jump to: navigation, search Временное правительство Россiи Russian Provisional Government Provisional government ←	1917 	↓ Flag 	Coat of arms Flag 	Coat of arms Anthem "Worker's Marseillaise" Capital 	Petrograd Language(s) 	Russian Political structure 	Provisional government Historical era 	World War I - Established 	February, 1917 - Disestablished 	October 25, 1917 Currency 	Ruble Preceded by 	Succeeded by	Russian Empire Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic Ukrainian People's Republic Belarusian People’s Republic Ober Ost Kingdom of Poland (1916–1918) Moldavian Democratic Republic Kuban People's Republic Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus Kingdom of Finland (1918) Idel-Ural State Alash Autonomy Don Republic

The Russian Provisional Government was formed in Petrograd in 1917 after the February Revolution and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II.[1]

When the authority of the Tsar's government began disintegrating after the February Revolution of 1917, two rival institutions, the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet, competed for power. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on March 2 (Julian calendar) and nominated his brother, Grand Duke Michael as the next tsar. Grand Duke Michael did not want to take the poisoned chalice[2] and deferred acceptance of imperial power the next day. Legal authorization for the transfer of power was given by a proclamation signed by Grand Duke Michael. The Provisional Government was expected to rule until the Constituent Assembly later determined the form of government in Russia.

The Provisional Government was designed to set up elections to the Assembly while maintaining essential government services, but its power was effectively limited by the Petrograd Soviet's growing authority. The weakness of the Provisional Government is perhaps best reflected in the derisive nickname given to Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky, who became known as the "persuader-in-chief." [3] Although at first the Soviet gave support to the Provisional Government, this gradually eroded. Since the Soviet controlled the army, factories, and railways and had the support of the workers, this became a period of dual authority.[4]

The Provisional Government was led first by Prince Georgy L'vov and then by Alexander Kerensky. It postponed the expected elections. Instead of ending Russia's involvement in World War I, it launched a new offensive against the German and Austro-Hungarian army in July 1917, thereby weakening its popularity among Russia's war-weary people. This Kerensky Offensive, as it was called, was a failure which further eroded support for the government. The Provisional Government was unable to make decisive policy decisions due to political factionalism and a breakdown of state structures.[5] This weakness led to a challenge from the right in the form of the Kornilov Affair, and then from the left, which organized the October Revolution, transferring power to the Soviets controlled by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks then replaced the government with their own which, until the Russian Constituent Assembly was disbanded, was also called "provisional". Contents [hide]

* 1 Announcement of its formation o 1.1 Prime Ministers of the Provisional Government * 2 The October Revolution * 3 See also * 4 Additional reading * 5 References

[edit] Announcement of its formation

Below is the public announcement of the formation of the Provisional Government, the text of which was published in Izvestia the day after its formation. [6] “

Public Announcement of the Formation of the First Provisional Government

The Temporary Committee of the members of the State Duma, with the help and the support of the army and the inhabitants of the capital, has now attained such a large measure of success over the dark forces of the old regime that it is possible for the Committee to undertake the organization of a more stable executive power.

With this end in mind, the Temporary Committee of the State Duma has appointed the following persons as ministers of the first cabinet representing the public; their past political and public activities assure them the confidence of the country:

* Minister-President and Minister of the Interior Prince G.E. Lvov (Non-Party) * Minister of Foreign Affairs P.N. Miliukov (Kadet) * Minister of War and Navy A.I. Guchkov (Octobrist) * Minister of Transport N.V. Nekrasov (Kadet) * Minister of Trade and Industry Alexander Konovalov (Kadet) * Minister of Finance M.I. Tereshchenko (Non-Party) * Minister of Education A.A. Manuilov (Kadet) * Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod V.N. Lvov (Centrist) * Minister of Agriculture A.I. Shingarev (Kadet) * Minister of Justice A.F. Kerensky (SR)

The actual work of the cabinet will be guided by the following principles:

1. An immediate and complete amnesty in all cases of a political and religious nature, including terrorist acts, military revolts and agrarian offences, etc. 2. Freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and the right to form unions and to strike and the extension of political freedom to persons serving in the armed forces limited only by the demands of military and technical circumstances. 3. The abolition of all restrictions based on class, religion, and nationality. 4. The immediate arrangements for the calling on the Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal, equal and direct suffrage and secret ballot, which will determine the form of government and the constitution of the country. 5. The substitution of a people's militia for the police, with elective officers responsible to the organs of local self-government. 6. Elections to the organs of local self-government are to be held on the basis of universal, equal and direct suffrage and secret ballot. 7. Those military units which took part in the revolutionary movement shall be neither disarmed nor withdrawn from Petrograd. 8. While preserving strict military discipline on duty and during military service, the soldiers are to be freed from all restrictions in the exercise of those civil rights which all other citizens enjoy.

The Provisional Government wishes to add that it has no intention whatsoever of taking advantage of the military situation to delay in any way the carrying through of the reforms and the measures outlined above. ”

[edit] Prime Ministers of the Provisional Government

* Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich L'vov (March 23–July 8) * Alexander Kerensky (July 8–November 8)

[edit] The October Revolution Milrevcom proclamation about the overthrowing of the Provisional Government

The Provisional Government was deposed as a result of the October Revolution. Kerensky escaped the Bolsheviks in their capture of the Winter Palace and fled to Pskov, where he rallied some loyal troops for an attempt to retake the capital. His troops managed to capture Tsarskoe Selo but were beaten the next day at Pulkovo. Kerensky spent the next few weeks in hiding before fleeing the country. He went into exile in France.

Some historians, such as Pavel Osinsky, argue that the October Revolution was as much a function of the failures of the Provisional Government as it was of the strength of the Bolsheviks. Osinsky described this as “socialism by default” as opposed to “socialism by design.” [7]

Riasanovsky argued that the Provisional Government made perhaps its "worst mistake"[8] by not holding elections to the Constituent Assembly soon enough. They wasted time fine-tuning details of the election law, while Russia slipped further into anarchy and economic chaos. By the time the Assembly finally met, argued Riasanovsky, "the Bolsheviks had already gained control of Russia."[9]

Bolshevik From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the Bolshevik faction in the RSDLP 1903-1912. For other uses, see Bolshevik (disambiguation). Bolshevik Party Meeting. Lenin is seen at right. Boris Kustodiev's 1920 painting "Bolshevik"

The Bolsheviks, originally also[1] Bolshevists[2] (Russian: Большевик, Большевист (singular) Russian pronunciation: [bəlʲʂɨˈvʲik], derived from bolshe, "more") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split apart from the Menshevik faction[3] at the Second Party Congress in 1903 and ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[4] The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia during the October Revolution phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and founded the Soviet Union.

Bolsheviks (or "the Majority") were an organization of professional revolutionaries under a strict internal hierarchy governed by the principle of democratic centralism and quasi-military discipline, who considered themselves as a vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat. Their beliefs and practices were often referred to as Bolshevism.[5] The party was founded by Vladimir Lenin, who also led it in the October Revolution. Contents [hide]

* 1 History of the split o 1.1 Origins of the name o 1.2 Beginning of the 1905 Revolution (1903–1905) o 1.3 ("The minority") (1906–1907) o 1.4 Split between Lenin and Bogdanov (1908–1909) o 1.5 Final attempt at party unity (1910) o 1.6 Forming a separate party (1912) * 2 Political philosophy * 3 From Bolshevism to Communism * 4 Derogatory usage of "Bolshevik" * 5 Non-Russian/Soviet groups having used the name "Bolshevik" * 6 See also * 7 References * 8 External links

[edit] History of the split

Bolshevism - Democracy is a form of government in which the supreme power is held completely by the people under a free electoral system. In the Second Congress of the RSDLP, held in Brussels and London during August 1903, Lenin advocated limiting party membership to a small core of professional revolutionaries, leaving sympathizers outside the party, and instituting a system of centralized control known as the democratic centralist model. Julius Martov, until then a close friend and colleague of Lenin, agreed with him that the core of the party should consist of professional revolutionaries, but argued that party membership should be open to sympathizers, revolutionary workers and other fellow travellers. The two had disagreed on the issue as early as March-May 1903, but it wasn't until the Congress that their differences became irreconcilable and split the party.[6] Although at first the disagreement appeared to be minor and inspired by personal conflicts, e.g. Lenin's insistence on dropping less active editorial board members from Iskra or Martov's support for the Organizing Committee of the Congress which Lenin opposed, the differences quickly grew and the split became irreparable.

[edit] Origins of the name

The two factions were originally known as "hard" (Lenin's supporters) and "soft" (Martov's supporters). Soon, however, the terminology changed to "Bolsheviks" and "Mensheviks", from the Russian "bolshinstvo" (majority) and "menshinstvo" (minority), based on the fact that Lenin's supporters narrowly defeated Martov's supporters on the question of party membership. Neither Lenin nor Martov had a firm majority throughout the Congress as delegates left or switched sides. At the end, the Congress was evenly split between the two factions.

From 1907 on, English language articles sometimes used the term "Maximalist" for "Bolshevik" and "Minimalist" for "Menshevik", which proved confusing since there was also a "Maximalist" faction within the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1904–1906 (which after 1906 formed a separate Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries Maximalists‎) and then again after 1917.[7]

[edit] Beginning of the 1905 Revolution (1903–1905)

The two factions were in a state of flux in 1903–1904 with many members changing sides. The founder of Russian Marxism, Georgy Plekhanov, who was at first allied with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, parted ways with them by 1904. Leon Trotsky at first supported the Mensheviks, but left them in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He remained a self-described "non-factional social democrat" until August 1917 when he joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks as their positions converged and he came to believe that Lenin was right on the issue of the party.

The lines between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks hardened in April 1905 when the Bolsheviks held a Bolsheviks-only meeting in London, which they call the Third Party Congress. The Mensheviks organized a rival conference and the split was thus formalized.

The Bolsheviks played a relatively minor role in the 1905 revolution, and were a minority in the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies led by Trotsky. The less significant Moscow Soviet, however, was dominated by the Bolsheviks. These soviets became the model for the Soviets that were formed in 1917.

[edit] ("The minority") (1906–1907)

As the Russian Revolution of 1905 progressed, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and smaller non-Russian social democratic parties operating within the Russian Empire attempted to reunify at the Fourth (Unification) Congress of the RSDLP held at Folkets hus, Norra Bantorget in Stockholm, April 1906. With the Mensheviks ("The minority") striking an alliance with the Jewish Bund, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a minority. However, all factions retained their respective factional structure and the Bolsheviks formed the Bolshevik Center, the de-facto governing body of the Bolshevik faction within the RSDLP. At the next, Fifth Congress held in London in May 1907, the Bolsheviks were in the majority, but the two factions continued functioning mostly independently of each other.

[edit] Split between Lenin and Bogdanov (1908–1909)

With the defeat of the revolution in mid-1907 and the adoption of a new, highly restrictive election law, the Bolsheviks began debating whether to boycott the new parliament known as the Third Duma. Lenin and his supporters Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev argued for participating in the Duma while Lenin's deputy philosopher Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky and others argued that the social democratic faction in the Duma should be recalled. The latter became known as recallists ("otzovists" in Russian). A smaller group within the Bolshevik faction demanded that the RSDLP central committee should give its sometimes unruly Duma faction an ultimatum, demanding complete subordination to all party decisions. This group became known as "ultimatists" and was generally allied with the recallists.

With a majority of Bolshevik leaders either supporting Bogdanov or undecided by mid-1908 when the differences became irreconcilable, Lenin concentrated on undermining Bogdanov's reputation as a philosopher. In 1909 he published a scathing book of criticism entitled Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909),[8] assaulting Bogdanov's position and accusing him of philosophical idealism.[9] In June 1909, Bogdanov was defeated at a Bolshevik mini-conference in Paris organized by the editorial board of the Bolshevik magazine Proletary and expelled from the Bolshevik faction.[10]

[edit] Final attempt at party unity (1910)

With both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks weakened by splits within their ranks and by Tsarist repression, they were tempted to try to re-unite the party. In January 1910, Leninists, recallists and various Menshevik factions held a meeting of the party's Central Committee in Paris. Kamenev and Zinoviev were dubious about the idea, but were willing to give it a try under pressure from "conciliator" Bolsheviks like Victor Nogin. Lenin was adamantly opposed to any re-unification, but was outvoted within the Bolshevik leadership. The meeting reached a tentative agreement and one of its provisions made Trotsky's Vienna-based Pravda a party-financed 'central organ'. Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts failed in August 1910 when Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations.

[edit] Forming a separate party (1912)

The factions permanently broke off relations in January 1912 after the Bolsheviks organized a Bolsheviks-only Prague Party Conference and formally expelled Mensheviks and recallists from the party. As a result, they ceased to be a faction in the RSDLP and instead declared themselves an independent party, which they called RSDLP (Bolshevik).

Although the Bolshevik leadership decided to form a separate party, convincing pro-Bolshevik workers within Russia to follow suit proved difficult. When the first meeting of the Fourth Duma was convened in late 1912, only one out of six Bolshevik deputies, Matvei Muranov, (another one, Roman Malinovsky, was later exposed as a secret police agent) voted to break away from the Menshevik faction within the Duma on 15 December 1912.[11] The Bolshevik leadership eventually prevailed and the Bolsheviks formed their own Duma faction in September 1913. Bolsheviks with Lenin in the middle.

[edit] Political philosophy

The Bolsheviks believed in organizing the party in a strongly centralized hierarchy that sought to overthrow the Tsar and achieve power. Although the Bolsheviks were not completely monolithic, they were characterized by a rigid adherence to the leadership of the central committee, based on the notion of democratic centralism. The Mensheviks favored open party membership and espoused cooperation with the other socialist and some non-socialist groups in Russia. Bolsheviks generally refused to co-operate with liberal or radical parties (which they labeled "bourgeois") or even eventually other socialist organisations, although Lenin sometimes made tactical alliances. Left to right: Trotsky, Lenin, and Kamenev

[edit] From Bolshevism to Communism

In 1952 at XIX Party Congress Stalin declared: "There are no more Mensheviks. Why should we call ourselves Bolsheviks? We are not the majority, but the whole party." According to his suggestion, the Communist party was renamed as the Communist Party of Soviet Union. Since that time, the term Bolshevik has been regarded as obsolete, and relevant only to the pre-Revolutionary times and the Russian Civil War.

[edit] Derogatory usage of "Bolshevik"

During the days of the Cold War in the United Kingdom, labour union leaders and other leftists were sometimes derisively described as "Bolshie". The usage is roughly equivalent to the term "Commie", "Red" or "pinko" in the United States during the same period. However these days it is often used to describe a difficult or rebellious person e.g.:"Timothy, don't be so bolshie!" An alternative spelling is "bolshy". (Collins Mini Dictionary, 1998)

See also Jewish Bolshevism

[edit] Non-Russian/Soviet groups having used the name "Bolshevik"

* Argentina: Bolshevik Tendency * Bangladesh: Maoist Bolshevik Reorganisation Movement of the Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party * India: Bolshevik Party of India * India/Sri Lanka: Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma * India: Revolutionary Socialist Party (Bolshevik) * Mexico: Bolshevik Communist Party * Senegal: Bolshevik Nuclei * Sri Lanka: Bolshevik Samasamaja Party * United States: International Bolshevik Tendency

Donate Now » [Expand] Support Wikipedia: a non-profit project. Donate Now » [Expand] Support Wikipedia: a non-profit project. — Donate Now Vladimir Lenin From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Semi-protected "Lenin" redirects here. For other uses, see Lenin (disambiguation). Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Владимир Ильич Ленин Vladimir Lenin Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars In office November 8, 1917 – January 21, 1924 Preceded by 	Alexander Kerensky (President of the Provisional Government) Succeeded by 	Alexei Rykov Joseph Stalin as Supreme Leader (General Secretary of the Communist Party) Born 	April 22, 1870(1870-04-22) (OS) Simbirsk, Russian Empire Died 	January 21, 1924 (aged 53) Gorki, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union Nationality 	Russian Political party 	Bolshevik Party Spouse 	Nadezhda Krupskaya Profession 	Politician, revolutionary Religion 	Atheism Signature 	Vladimir Lenin's signature

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ле́нин; April 22 [O.S. April 10] 1870 – January 21, 1924), born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Russian: Влади́мир Ильи́ч Улья́нов) and also known by the pseudonyms V.I. Lenin and N. Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, a communist politician, the principal leader of the October Revolution, the first head of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1999, he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.[1] His contributions to Marxist theory are commonly referred to as Leninism. Contents [hide]

* 1 Early life * 2 Revolutionary activity, travel and exile * 3 Return to Russia * 4 Head of the Soviet state o 4.1 Creation of the secret police o 4.2 Assassination attempts o 4.3 Lenin against Anti-Semitism o 4.4 Lenin and the Red Terror o 4.5 Russian Communist Party and civil war * 5 Later life and death * 6 After death o 6.1 Censorship of Lenin in the Soviet Union * 7 See also * 8 Notes * 9 Further reading * 10 External links o 10.1 Selected works

[edit] Early life Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), aged three. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), c. 1887.

Born in Simbirsk – later renamed Ulyanovsk after its most famous son – beside the Volga River in the Russian Empire, Lenin was the son of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova.[2] His father was a successful Russian official in public education who wanted democracy. The family was of mixed ethnicity, his ancestry being “Russian, Mordovian, Kalmyk, Jewish (see Blank family), Volgan German, and Swedish, and possibly others” according to biographer Dmitri Volkogonov.[3] Lenin was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church In January 1886, Lenin’s father, a schoolmaster, died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and, in May 1887, when Lenin was 17 years old, his eldest brother Alexander was arrested and hanged for participating in a terrorist bomb plot threatening the life of Tsar Alexander III.[4] His sister Anna, who was with Alexander at the time of his arrest, was banished to his family estate in the village of Kokushkino, about 40 km (25 mi.) from Kazan. These events radicalized Lenin, and his official Soviet biographies describe them as being central to the revolutionary track of his life. It is also significant, perhaps, that this emotional upheaval transpired in the same year he enrolled at the Kazan State University. A famous painting by Piotr Belousov, We Will Follow a Different Path, reprinted in millions of Soviet textbooks, depicted young Lenin and his mother grieving the loss of his elder brother. The phrase “We will follow a different path” refers to Lenin's choosing a Marxist approach to popular revolution, instead of anarchist or individualist methods. As Lenin became interested in Marxism, he was involved in student protests and was subsequently arrested. He was then expelled from Kazan University for his political ideas. He continued to study independently, however, and it was during this period of exile that he first familiarized himself with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Lenin was later permitted to continue his studies, this time at the University of Saint Petersburg, and, by 1891, had been admitted to the Bar.[5] In January 1892, Lenin was awarded a first class degree in law by the University.[6] He also distinguished himself in Latin and Greek, and learned German, French and English. His knowledge of the latter two languages was limited: he relied on Inessa Armand to translate an article into French and into English in 1917. In the same year he also wrote to S. N. Ravich in Geneva “I am unable to lecture in French.”[7]

[edit] Revolutionary activity, travel and exile Lenin’s mug shot, December 1895.

Lenin practiced as a lawyer for some years in Samara, a port on the Volga river,[8] before moving to St Petersburg in 1893. Rather than pursuing a legal career, he became increasingly involved in revolutionary propaganda efforts, joining the local Marxist group. On December 7, 1895, Lenin was arrested, detained by authorities for fourteen months, in cell 193 of the St Petersburg Remand Prison, and then released and exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in Siberia, where he mingled with such notable Marxists as Georgy Plekhanov, who had introduced socialism to Russia.[9]

In July 1898, Lenin married socialist activist Nadezhda Krupskaya and he published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia in April 1899.[10] In 1900, his exile came to an end, and he began his travels throughout Russia and the rest of Europe. Lenin lived in Zurich, Geneva (where he lectured and studied at Geneva University), Munich, Prague, Vienna, Manchester and London, and, during this time, he co-founded the newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”) with Julius Martov, who later became a leading opponent. He also wrote several articles and books related to the revolutionary movement, striving to recruit future Social Democrats. He began using various aliases, finally settling upon "Lenin"—"N. Lenin" in full. (The Western press often called him "Nikolai Lenin" - perhaps on the mistaken assumption that N. stood for Nikolai - however, he was virtually never referred to by this name in Russia or the Soviet Union, and Lenin himself never used it as a pseudonym.)

Lenin was active in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP; РСДРП in Russian) and, in 1903, led the Bolshevik faction after a split with the Mensheviks. The names ‘Bolshevik’, or ‘Majority’, and ‘Menshevik’, or ‘Minority’, referred to the narrow outvoting of the Mensheviks in the decision to limit party membership to revolutionary professionals, rather than including sympathizers. The division was inspired partly by Lenin’s pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1901–02), which focused on his revolutionary strategy. It is said to have been one of the most influential pamphlets in pre-revolutionary Russia, with Lenin himself claiming that three out of five workers had either read it or had had it read to them.[11]

In November 1905, Lenin returned from exile to Russia to support the 1905 Russian Revolution.[12] In 1906, Lenin was elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP. At this time he shuttled between Finland and Russia but, in December 1907, with the revolution crushed by the Tsarist authorities, he returned back to European exile.[13] Until the revolutions of 1917, he spent the majority of his time exiled in Europe, where, despite relative poverty, he managed to continue his political writings.[14]

In response to philosophical debates on the proper course of a socialist revolution, Lenin completed Materialism and Empirio-criticism in 1909—a work which became fundamental in the Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Lenin continued to travel in Europe and participated in many socialist meetings and activities, including the Prague Party Conference of 1912. When Inessa Armand left Russia and settled in Paris, she met Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in exile, and it is believed that she was Lenin’s lover during this time. As writer Neil Harding points out however, although much has been made of this relationship, despite the “slender stock of evidence … we still have no evidence that they were sexually intimate”.[15] 2008 photo of Lenin’s rented house in Zurich, Switzerland 1920 photo of the house. Memorial plate

When the First World War began in 1914, and the large Social Democratic parties of Europe (at that time self-described as Marxist, and including luminaries such as Karl Kautsky) supported their various countries’ war efforts, Lenin was absolutely stunned, refusing to believe at first that the German Social Democrats had voted for war credits. This led him to a final split with the Second International, which was composed of these parties. Lenin (against the war in his belief that the peasants and workers were fighting the battle of the bourgeoisie for them) adopted the stance that what he described as an “imperialist war” ought to be turned into a civil war between the classes. As war broke out, Lenin was briefly detained by the Austrian authorities in the town of Poronin, where he was residing at the time. On September 5, 1914 Lenin moved to neutral Switzerland, residing first at Berne and then Zurich.[16] In 1915 he attended the anti-war Zimmerwald Conference, convened in the Swiss town of that name. Lenin was the main leader of the minority Zimmerwald Left, who unsuccessfully urged against the majority pacifists that the conference should adopt Lenin's stance of converting the imperialist war into a class war. Lenin and the Zimmerwald Left urged a similar resolution at the next anti-war conference, also held in Switzerland at Kienthal (24-30 April 1916), but in the end settled for a compromise manifesto.[17]

It was in Zurich in the spring of 1916 that Lenin wrote the important theoretical work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.[18] In this work Lenin argues that the merging of banks and industrial cartels give rise to finance capital. According to Lenin, in the last stage of capitalism, in pursuit of greater profits than the home market can offer, capital is exported. This leads to the division of the world between international monopolist firms and to European states colonizing large parts of the world in support of their businesses. Imperialism is thus an advanced stage of capitalism, one relying on the rise of monopolies and on the export of capital (rather than goods), and of which colonialism is one feature.[19]

[edit] Return to Russia Locomotive of Lenin’s train, on which he arrived at Finland Station, Petrograd in April, 1917.

After the 1917 February Revolution in Russia and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin realized that he must return to Russia as soon as possible, but this was problematic because he was isolated in neutral Switzerland as the First World War raged throughout neighboring states. The Swiss communist Fritz Platten nonetheless managed to negotiate with the German government for Lenin and his company to travel through Germany by rail, on the so-called “sealed train ”. The German government clearly hoped Lenin’s return would create political unrest back in Russia, which would help to end the war on the Eastern front, allowing Germany to concentrate on defeating the Western allies. Once through Germany, Lenin continued by ferry to Sweden; the remainder of the journey through Scandinavia was subsequently arranged by Swedish communists Otto Grimlund and Ture Nerman.

On April 16, 1917, Lenin arrived by train to a tumultuous reception at Finland Station, in Petrograd.[20] He immediately took a leading role within the Bolshevik movement, publishing the April Theses,[21] which called for an uncompromising opposition to the provisional government. Initially, Lenin isolated his party through this lurch to the left. However, this uncompromising stand meant that the Bolsheviks were to become the obvious home for all those who became disillusioned with the provisional government, and with the “luxury of opposition” the Bolsheviks did not have to assume responsibility for any policies implemented by the government.[22] Lenin disguised as “Vilén”, wearing a wig and his goatee shaved off. Finland, August 11, 1917.

Meanwhile, Aleksandr Kerensky, Grigory Aleksinsky and other opponents of the Bolsheviks accused them and Lenin in particular of being paid German agents.[23] In response Leon Trotsky, a prominent new Bolshevik leader, made a defensive speech on July 17, saying: “ 	An intolerable atmosphere has been created, in which you as well as we are choking. They are throwing dirty accusations at Lenin and Zinoviev. Lenin has fought thirty years for the revolution. I have fought twenty years against the oppression of the people. And we cannot but cherish a hatred for German militarism. … I have been sentenced by a German court to eight months’ imprisonment for my struggle against German militarism. This everybody knows. Let nobody in this hall say that we are hirelings of Germany.[24] 	”

After the turmoil of the July Days, when workers and soldiers in the capital clashed with government troops, Lenin had to flee to Finland for safety, to avoid arrest by Kerensky. The Bolsheviks had not arranged the July Uprising. The time was still not ripe for revolution, claimed Lenin: the workers in the city were willing, but the Bolsheviks still needed to wait for the support of the peasants. During his short time in Finland, Lenin finished his book State and Revolution,[25] which called for a new form of government based on workers’ councils, or soviets, elected and revocable at all moments by the workers. After an abortive coup attempt by General Kornilov in late August the masses rallied to the Bolsheviks and their programme of 'peace, bread and land'.[26]Imprisoned Bolshevik leaders were released and Lenin returned to Petrograd in October, inspiring the October Revolution with the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” Lenin directed the overthrow of the Provisional Government from the Smolny Institute between 6 and 8 November 1917. The storming and capitulation of the Winter Palace on the night of the 7th to 8th of November marked the beginning of Soviet rule.

[edit] Head of the Soviet state Lenin and his wife, in 1919.

On November 8, 1917, Lenin was elected as the Chair of the Council of People’s Commissars by the Russian Congress of Soviets.

“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country,”[27] Lenin said, emphasizing the importance of bringing electricity to all corners of Russia and modernizing industry and agriculture: “ 	We must show the peasants that the organisation of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism.[28] 	”

He initiated and supervised the devising and realisation of the GOELRO plan, the first-ever Soviet project for national economic recovery and development. He was very concerned about creating a free universal health care system for all, the rights of women, and teaching the illiterate Russian people to read and write.[29] But first and foremost, the new Bolshevik government needed to take Russia out of the World War.

Faced with the imposing threat of a continuing German advance eastwards, Lenin argued that Russia should immediately sign a peace treaty. Other Bolshevik leaders, such as Bukharin, advocated continuing the war as a means of fomenting revolution in Germany. Trotsky, who led the negotiations, advocated an intermediate position, of “No War, No Peace”, calling for a peace treaty only on the conditions that no territorial gains on either side be consolidated. After the negotiations collapsed, the Germans renewed their advance, resulting in the loss of much of Russia’s western territory. As a result of this turn of events, Lenin’s position consequently gained the support of the majority in the Bolshevik leadership. On March 3, 1918, Lenin removed Russia from World War I by agreeing to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under which Russia lost significant territories in Europe. Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Kalinin, 1919.

The Russian Constituent Assembly was shut down during its first session January 19 and the Bolsheviks in alliance with the left Socialist Revolutionaries then relied on support from the soviets.

The Bolsheviks had formed a coalition government with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. However, their coalition collapsed after the Social Revolutionaries opposed the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and joined other parties in seeking to overthrow the Bolshevik government. Lenin responded to these efforts by a policy of wholesale persecution, which included jailing some of the members of the opposing parties.

From early 1918, Lenin campaigned for a single individual (accountable to the state to which the workers could ask for measures) to be put in charge of each enterprise (workers having to obey him until it was changed by the state), contrary to most conceptions of workers' self-management, but absolutely essential for efficiency and expertise according to Lenin (it was argued by most proponents of self-management that the intention behind this move was to strengthen state control over labour and that the failures of self-management were mostly because of lack of resources —a problem the government itself could not solve as his licensing for a month of all workers of most factories proved). As S.A. Smith wrote: “By the end of the civil war, not much was left of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers’ state.”

Lenin had a certain admiration for the Irish socialist revolutionary James Connolly, and the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize the Irish Republic which fought a war of independence against Britain. He would often meet with the famous revolutionary’s son, Roddy Connolly and developed a close friendship with him.

[edit] Creation of the secret police Lenin in his Kremlin office, 1918.

Main article: Cheka

To protect the newly-established Bolshevik government from counterrevolutionaries and other political opponents, the Bolsheviks created a secret police, the Cheka, in December 1917.[30]

The Bolsheviks had planned to hold a trial for the former Tsar, but in July 1918, when the White Army was advancing on Yekaterinburg where the former royal family was being held, Sverdlov acceded to the request of the local Soviet to execute the Tsar right away, rather than having him freed by the Whites. The Tsar and the rest of his immediate family were executed, though whether this was a decision of the central government or the local Soviet remains the subject of historical dispute. Lenin was informed about the execution only after it had taken place, but did not criticize it.[31] Censorship was quickly imposed, and it was up to the Cheka to confiscate the literature of dissident workers: “[On] November 17 the Central Executive Committee passed a decree giving the Bolsheviks control over all newsprint and wide powers of closing down newspapers critical of the regime…” (Leonard Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Workers were re-forming independent soviets; the Cheka broke them up. Independent newspapers criticized Lenin’s government; the Cheka closed them down, until the Bolshevik-controlled Pravda and Izvestia had a monopoly on the supply of news. Shapiro asserts that “The refusal to come to terms with the socialists and the dispersal of the Constituent assembly led to the logical result that revolutionary terror would now be directed not only against traditional enemies, such as the bourgeoisie or right-wing opponents, but against anyone, be he socialist, worker or peasant, who opposed Bolshevik rule.”

[edit] Assassination attempts Lenin and Fritz Platten in 1919.

On January 14, 1918, an assassination attempt on Lenin was made in his car in Petrograd by unrecognizable gunmen. Lenin and Fritz Platten were in the back of the car together, after having given a public speech. When the shooting started, “Platten grabbed Lenin by the head and pushed him down. … Platten’s hand was covered in blood, having been grazed by a bullet as he was shielding Lenin.”[32]

On August 30, 1918, Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, approached Lenin after he had spoken at a meeting and was on the way to his car. He had his foot on the running board. She called out to Lenin, who turned to answer. She immediately fired three shots hitting Lenin twice: one bullet, relatively harmless, lodged in the arm; the second round, more seriously entering at the juncture of Lenin’s jaw and neck, the third shot striking a woman who was talking with Lenin when the shooting began.[33] Lenin fell to the ground, unconscious. He was taken to his apartment in the Kremlin, refusing to venture to a hospital since he believed that other assassins would be waiting there. Doctors were summoned but decided that it was too dangerous to remove the bullets. While Lenin began his slow recovery, Pravda ridiculed Kaplan as a latter-day Charlotte Corday; assuring its readers that immediately after the shooting: “Lenin, shot through twice, with pierced lungs, spilling blood, refuses help and goes on his own. The next morning, still threatened with death, he reads papers, listens, learns, and observes to see that the engine of the locomotive that carries us towards global revolution has not stopped working…”[34] Although Lenin had no “pierced lungs”, the potentially fatal neck-jaw wound had allowed blood to enter one of his lungs, which is still a very serious condition.[35]

Other than similar exhortation by the press, little was revealed to the Russian public – either about the attempted assassination, the suspect, or Lenin’s condition. Historian Richard Pipes wrote, “The impression one gains … is that the Bolsheviks deliberately underplayed the event to convince the public that whatever happened to Lenin, they were firmly in control.”

Popular reaction to the assassination attempt on Lenin was described at the time by Leonid Krasin, who wrote to his wife on 7 Sept 1918:

“As it happens, the attempt to kill Lenin has made him much more popular than he was. One hears a great many people who are far from having any sympathy with the Bolsheviks, saying that it would be an absolute disaster if Lenin had succumbed to his wounds, as it was first thought he would. And they are quite right, for in the midst of all this chaos and confusion he is the backbone of the new body politic, the main support on which everything rests.”[36]

A personal cult of Lenin, which he himself tried to discourage, began with this incident.[37] Lenin’s health declined from this point. It is believed by some that the incident contributed to his later strokes.

[edit] Lenin against Anti-Semitism

Lenin was intrigued with technology and in 1919 recorded eight of his speeches on gramophone records. Seven were later re-recorded and put on sale in the Khrushchev era. Significantly, the one which was suppressed outlined Lenin’s feelings on anti-Semitism:[38] “ 	The Tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organized pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. … Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. … It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations… Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers… Shame on accursed Tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.[39] 	”

[edit] Lenin and the Red Terror Lenin with Trotsky and soldiers in Petrograd, 1921.

Following the assassination attempt on Lenin and the successful assassination of Petrograd chief of secret police Moisei Uritsky, Stalin, in a telegram argued that a policy of “open and systematic mass terror” be instigated against “those responsible”. The other Bolsheviks agreed, and instructed Felix Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin had appointed to head the Cheka in 1917, to commence a “Red Terror”, which was officially announced to the public on September 1, 1918, by the Bolshevik newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta. According to Christopher Read, at this time, due to the assassination attempt by Kaplan, Lenin was lying severely wounded in the hospital and was too ill to advise retaliatory measures.[40][41] But while recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror."[42] Suspected enemies could expect brutal torture, flogging, maiming or execution. Some were shot, others drowned, buried alive, or hacked to death by swords. Quite often those about to be executed were forced to dig their own graves.[43] Many lurid and often embellished accounts of these atrocities were produced. A British observer claimed that "The evidence of wholesale executions...of the cold-blooded and refined tortures carried out by Chinese experts and of the revolting sadism of young Jewesses is irrefutable".[44] However, it is undoubtable that atrocities indeed occurred.[45][46] Historian Orlando Figes claims the torture practiced by the Chekas was matched only by the Spanish Inquisition.[47] The only published Soviet statistics regarding Cheka executions are the semi-official ones provided by the Chekist Martin Latsis, limited to RSFSR over the period 1918–1920, giving the grand total of 12,733 executed, including 3,082 for taking part in rebellions, 2,024 for membership of counter-revolutionary organisations, 643 for gangsterism, 455 for incitement to revolution, 206 for corruption, 102 for desertion and the same number for espionage.[48] These statistics are considered by some scholars to be understatements, as they do not embrace the war zones of the Ukraine or the Crimea.[49] In the latter at least 50,000 people were shot or hanged after General Wrangel was put down at the end of 1920.[50] Some historians estimate that between 1917 and 1922 up to 280,000 people were killed by the Chekas, of which about half perished through summary executions and the other half through the suppression of rebellions (e.g. Tambov Rebellion).[51] Orlando Figes goes so far as to assert that it is possible more people were killed by the Cheka than died in battle.[52] During the Civil War, atrocities were carried out by both Reds and Whites.[53]

According to the Black Book of Communism, in May 1919 there were 16,000 people in labour camps based on the old Tsarist katorga labour camps, and in September 1921 there were more than 70,000.[54] Lenin's Hanging Order documents that Lenin himself ordered terror on August 11, 1918.[55]

According to Orlando Figes, Lenin had always been an advocate of “mass terror against enemies of the revolution” and was open about his view that the proletarian state was a system of organized violence against the capitalist establishment. Figes also claims that the terror, while encouraged by the Bolsheviks, had its roots in a popular anger against the privileged.[56] When Kamenev and Bukharin tried to curb the “excesses” of the Cheka in late 1918, it was Lenin who defended it.[57]

Lenin remained an advocate of mass terror. In a letter of March 19, 1922, to Molotov and the members of the Politburo, following an uprising by the clergy in the town of Shuia, Lenin outlined a brutal plan of action against the clergy and their followers, who were defying the government decree to remove church valuables: “We must (…) put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. (…) The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing (…) the better.”[58] Estimates of the numbers of the clergy killed vary. According to The Black Book of Communism, 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were killed in 1922.[59] This is contradicted by the historian Christopher Read who estimates from the records that a grand total of 1,023 clergy were killed in the whole period 1917-23.[60] The late Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, cites documents that confirm nearly 3,000 were put to death in 1918 alone.[61]

In September 1918, during the Red Terror, 25 former tsarist ministers and high civil servants, along with 765 so-called White Guards, were shot in Moscow. Lenin personally signed the execution lists.[62] Despite this attempt by Lenin to stop them, the Whites continued active and indulged in a massive anti-Red terror and also pogroms against the Jews. For instance, the Whites killed 115,000 Ukrainian Jews in 1919 alone.[63] According to historian Christopher Read the numbers killed by the White forces were on a comparable scale to the Bolsheviks and can probably be numbered in hundreds of thousands.[64] But, according to The Black Book of Communism, the two types of terror were not on the same level. The Red Terror, which was official policy, was more systematic, better organized, and targeted at whole social classes (i.e. Decossackization). The White Terror was never systematized in such a fashion, and was almost invariably the work of detachments that were taking measures not authorized by the military command.[65] However, according to historian Evan Mawdsley, the White general Anton Denikin "deserves criticism" for not fully condemning anti-Jewish pogroms.[66]

[edit] Russian Communist Party and civil war Lenin giving a speech. Communist Party of the Soviet Union History Organization Congress · Central Committee Politburo · General Secretary Secretariat · Orgburo Control Committee Auditing Commission Leaders Vladimir Lenin Joseph Stalin Nikita Khrushchev Leonid Brezhnev Yuri Andropov Konstantin Chernenko Mikhail Gorbachev Other topics Pravda Komsomol Communism portal v • d • e

Further information: On the Allies invasion of Russia: Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War Polar Bear Expedition, North Russia Campaign, American Expeditionary Force Siberia

In March 1919, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders met with revolutionary socialists from around the world and formed the Communist International. Members of the Communist International, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks themselves, broke off from the broader socialist movement. From that point onwards, they would become known as communists. In Russia, the Bolshevik Party was renamed the “Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks),” which eventually became the CPSU.

Meanwhile, the civil war raged across Russia. A wide variety of political movements and their supporters took up arms to support or overthrow the Soviet government. Although many different factions were involved in the civil war, the two main forces were the Red Army (communists) and the White Army (traditionalists). Foreign powers such as France, Britain, the United States and Japan also intervened in this war (on behalf of the White Army). Eventually, the more organisationally proficient Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, won the civil war, defeating the White Russian forces and their allies in 1920. Smaller battles continued for several more years, however.

The civil war has been described as “unprecedented for its savagery,” with mass executions and other atrocities committed by both sides. Between battles, executions, famine and epidemics, many millions would perish.[67] Trotsky, Lenin and Kamenev at the II Party Congress in 1919.

In late 1919, successes against the White Russian forces convinced Lenin that it was time to spread the revolution to the West, by force if necessary. When the newly independent Second Polish Republic began securing its eastern territories annexed by Russia in the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, it clashed with Bolshevik forces for dominance in these areas, which led to the outbreak of the Polish-Soviet War in 1919. With the revolution in Germany and the Spartacist League on the rise, Lenin viewed this as the perfect time and place to “probe Europe with the bayonets of the Red Army.” Lenin saw Poland as the bridge that the Red Army would have to cross in order to link up the Russian Revolution with the communist supporters in the German Revolution, and to assist other communist movements in Western Europe. However the defeat of Soviet Russia in the Polish-Soviet War invalidated these plans.

Lenin was a harsh critic of imperialism.[68] In 1917, he declared the unconditional right of separation for national minorities and oppressed nations. However, when the Russian Civil War was won he used military force to assimilate the newly independent states of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.[69] He argued that the inclusion of those countries in the newly emerging Soviet government would shelter them from capitalist imperial ambitions.[citation needed]

During the civil war, as an attempt to maintain food supply to the cities and the army in the conditions of economic collapse, the Bolsheviks adopted the policy of war communism. That involved “requisitioning” supplies from the peasantry for little or nothing in exchange. This led the peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. Additionally, according to the official Bolshevik view which is still shared by some Marxists,[70] rich peasants (kulaks) withheld grain in order to increase their profits – statistics indicate that most of the grain and the other food supplies passed through the black market.[71] Then, the Bolshevik requisitions came to affect the food that peasants had grown for their own subsistence and their seed grain. The resulting conflicts began with the Cheka and the army shooting hostages, and, according to The Black Book of Communism, ended with a second full-scale civil war against the peasantry, including the use of poison gas, death camps, and deportations. The same source emphasizes that in 1920, Lenin ordered increased emphasis on the food requisitioning from the peasantry, at the same time as the Cheka gave detailed reports about the large scale famine.[72] The long war and a drought in 1921 also contributed to the famine. Estimates on the deaths from this famine are between 3 and 10 million.[73][74] “Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth”, a Communist poster from 1920.

The long years of war, the Bolshevik policy of war communism, the Russian famine of 1921, and the encirclement of hostile governments took their toll on Russia, however, and much of the country lay in ruins. There were many peasant uprisings, the largest being the Tambov rebellion. After an uprising by the sailors at Kronstadt in March 1921, Lenin replaced the policy of War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), in a successful attempt to rebuild industry and especially agriculture. The new policy was based on recognition of political and economic realities, though it was intended merely as a tactical retreat from the socialist ideal. The whole policy was later reversed by Stalin.

[edit] Later life and death Kamenev and Lenin at Gorki Leninskiye, 1922.

Lenin’s health had already been severely damaged by the strains of revolution and war. The assassination attempt earlier in his life also added to his health problems. The bullet remained lodged in his neck until April 24, 1922, when a German doctor surgically removed it.[75] In May 1922, Lenin had his first stroke. He was left partially paralyzed on his right side, and his role in government declined. After the second stroke in December of the same year, he resigned from active politics. In March 1923, he suffered his third stroke and was left bedridden for the remainder of his life, no longer able to speak. Lenin with Stalin, who Lenin warned was becoming too powerful and called to be removed.

After his first stroke, Lenin dictated to his wife several papers regarding the government. Most famous of these is Lenin's Testament, which was partially inspired by the 1922 Georgian Affair and among other things criticized top-ranking communists, including Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky. Of Stalin, who had been the Communist Party’s general secretary since April 1922, Lenin said that he had “unlimited authority concentrated in his hands”. He suggested that “comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post” because his rudeness would become “intolerable in a Secretary-General”. Upon Lenin’s death, his wife mailed his Testament to the central committee, to be read at the 13th Party Congress in May 1924. However, the committee and especially the ruling “triumvirate” – Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev – had a vested interest in not releasing the will to the wider public. Lenin’s Testament was first officially published in 1925 in the United States by Max Eastman. In the same year, Trotsky wrote an article that downplayed its significance, stating that Lenin’s notes should not be regarded as a “will” and had neither been concealed nor violated.[76] He did invoke it in his polemic against Stalin on later occasions, while in exile.[77][78]

Lenin died at 18:50 Moscow time on January 21, 1924, aged 53, at his estate in Gorki Leninskiye. Over 900,000 people passed through the Hall of Columns during the four days and nights that Lenin lay in state. Large sections of the population in other countries expressed their grief at the death of Lenin. Speaking at a memorial meeting, Chinese premier Sun Yat-sen. said:

Through the ages of world history thousands of leaders and scholars appeared who spoke eloquent words, but these remained words. You, Lenin, were an exception. You not only spoke and taught us, but translated your words into deeds. You created a new country. You showed us the road of joint struggle... You, great man that you are, will live on in the memories of the oppressed people through the centuries.[79]

Winston Churchill, who had supported the British interventionist forces which, in league with the Whites, had tried to suppress the Bolsheviks, later commented that:

He alone could have found the way back to the causeway...The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth...their next worst his death.[80]

The city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor three days after Lenin’s death. This remained the name of the city until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, when it reverted to its original name, St. Petersburg, even though its administrative area kept the name (Leningrad Oblast)

During the early 1920s the Russian movement of cosmism was so popular that Leonid Krasin and Alexander Bogdanov proposed to cryonically preserve Lenin’s body in order to revive him in the future.[81] Necessary equipment was purchased abroad, but for a variety of reasons the plan was not realized.[82] Instead his body was embalmed and placed on permanent exhibition in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow on January 27, 1924.

[edit] After death The Lenin Mausoleum at Red Square, Moscow.

Lenin’s preserved body is on permanent display at the Lenin Mausoleum. Vladimir Lenin, cartoon by Nikolai Bukharin, 1927

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the level of reverence for Lenin in post-Soviet republics has declined considerably, though he is still considered an important figure by generations who grew up during the Soviet period.[83] Most statues of Lenin have been torn down in Eastern Europe, but many still remain in Russia and ex-Soviet Central Asia. In 1991, following a close vote and political battles between communists and liberals the city of Leningrad returned to its original name, St Petersburg, whilst the surrounding Leningrad Oblast retained Lenin’s name.[84] The citizens of Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s birthplace, have so far resisted all attempts to revert its name to Simbirsk. The subject of interring Lenin’s body has been a recurring topic for the past several years in Russia.

Lenin stated that he wanted to be buried next to his mother and did not want any monuments to himself.[citation needed]

[edit] Censorship of Lenin in the Soviet Union

Lenin’s writings were carefully censored under the Soviet regime after his death. In the early 1930s, it became accepted dogma under Stalin to assume that neither Lenin nor the Central Committee could ever be wrong. This was done in opposition of Trotsky who saw it as something that could never be true, for human beings could and did make mistakes[citation needed]. Therefore, it was necessary to remove evidence of situations where they had actually disagreed, since in those situations it was impossible for both to have been right at the same time. Trotsky was a particularly vocal critic of these practices, which he saw as a form of deification.[85] Later, even the fifth “complete” Soviet edition of Lenin’s works (published in 55 thick volumes between 1958 and 1965) left out parts that either contradicted dogma or showed their author in an unfavorable light.[86]

Joseph Stalin From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. (September 2008) Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. Semi-protected "Stalin" redirects here. For other uses, see Stalin (disambiguation). Joseph Stalin Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი Joseph Stalin General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union In office April 3, 1922 – March 5, 1953 Preceded by 	Post Instated Succeeded by 	Georgy Malenkov Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars In office May 6, 1941 – March 19, 1946 Preceded by 	Vyacheslav Molotov Succeeded by 	Post abolished Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR In office March 19, 1946 – March 5, 1953 Preceded by 	Post instated Succeeded by 	Georgy Malenkov Born 	December 18, 1878(1878-12-18)[1] Gori, Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Georgia) Died 	March 5, 1953 (aged 74) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union Nationality 	Georgian Political party 	Communist Party of the Soviet Union Religion 	None (Atheist)

Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин; born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, Georgian: იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი; December 18, 1878 – March 5, 1953) was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953.[2][1][3] He gradually consolidated power and became party leader and dictator of the Soviet Union, establishing the regime now known as Stalinism.[4]

Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Stalin prevailed in a power struggle over Leon Trotsky, who was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union. Stalin launched a command economy in the Soviet Union replacing the New Economic Policy of the 1920s with Five-Year Plans in 1928 and at roughly the same time, forced rapid industrialization of the largely rural country and collective farming by confiscating the lands of farmers. He derogatorily referred to farmers who refused his reforms as "kulaks", a class of rich peasant which had in actuality been wiped out by World War I; millions were killed, exiled to Siberia, or died of starvation after their land, homes, meager possessions, and ability to earn an existence from the land were taken to fulfill Stalin's vision of massive "factory farms".[5] While the Soviet Union transformed from an agrarian economy to a major industrial powerhouse in a short span of time, millions of people died from hardships and famine that occurred as a result of the severe economic upheaval and party policies.[6][7][8]

At the end of 1930s, Stalin launched the Great Purge, a major campaign of political repression. During his continued repressions, millions of people who were a threat to the Soviet politics or suspected of being such a threat were executed or exiled to Gulag labor camps in remote areas of Siberia or Central Asia, where many more died of disease, malnutrition and exposure. A number of ethnic groups in Russia were forcibly resettled for political reasons. Stalin's rule, reinforced by a cult of personality, fought real and alleged opponents mainly through the security apparatus, such as the NKVD. In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's eventual successor, denounced Stalin's rule and the cult of personality, thus initiating the process of "de-Stalinization".

Bearing the brunt of the Nazis' attacks, the Soviet Union under Stalin made the largest and most decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II (1939–1945),[9] despite Stalin's policy mistakes before and during the war. These included a devastating internal policy which weakened the Soviet society and strategic blunders during the first period of Great Patriotic War. Additionally the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and its secret protocol, cleared the way for Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 and the beginning of the war itself.

Under Stalin's leadership, after the war, the Soviet Union went on to achieve recognition as one of just two superpowers in the world. That status lasted for nearly four decades after his death until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Stalin's rule had long-lasting effects on the features that characterized the Soviet state from the era of his rule to its collapse in 1991. Contents [hide]

* 1 Childhood and education, 1878–1899 * 2 Early years as a Marxist revolutionary, 1899–1917 * 3 Russian Revolution of 1917 * 4 Russian Civil War, 1917–1919 * 5 Polish-Soviet War, 1919-1920 * 6 Rise to power o 6.1 Campaign against the left and right opposition o 6.2 Soviet secret service and intelligence * 7 Changes to Soviet society, 1927–1939 o 7.1 Industrialization o 7.2 Collectivization o 7.3 Science o 7.4 Social services o 7.5 Culture o 7.6 Religion o 7.7 Purges and deportations + 7.7.1 The purges + 7.7.2 Ukrainian famine + 7.7.3 Deportations + 7.7.4 Number of victims * 8 World War II, 1939–1945 * 9 Post-war era, 1945–1953 * 10 Theorist * 11 Death * 12 Marriages and family * 13 Religious beliefs * 14 Cult of personality * 15 Policies and accomplishments * 16 Origin of name, nicknames and pseudonyms * 17 Hypotheses, rumors and misconceptions about Stalin o 17.1 Suspected Tsarist connections * 18 See also * 19 Footnotes o 19.1 Explanatory notes o 19.2 Reference list * 20 Further reading * 21 External links

Childhood and education, 1878–1899 Stalin's father 	Stalin's mother Official photograph of Stalin's father, Besarion 	Stalin's mother, Ketevan Stalin's birth house in Gori, Georgia, within the shrine complex built over it in the 1930s.

Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori in the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire, to Besarion Jughashvili, a Georgian[citation needed] cobbler who owned his own workshop,[10] and Ketevan Geladze, a Georgian who was born a serf. He was their third child; their two previous sons died in infancy. The second and third toes of his left foot were webbed.[11]

Initially, the Jugashvilis' lives were prosperous, but Stalin's father became an alcoholic, which gradually led to his business failing and him becoming violently abusive to his wife and child.[12] As their financial situation grew worse, Stalin's family moved homes frequently – at least nine times in Stalin's first ten years of life.[10]

The town where Stalin grew up was a violent and lawless place. It had only a small police force and a culture of violence that included gang-warfare, organized street brawls and wrestling tournaments, some of which were traditions inherited from Georgia's war-torn past.[10]

At the age of seven, Stalin fell ill with smallpox and his face was badly scarred by the disease. He later had photographs retouched to make his pockmarks less apparent. Stalin's native tongue was Georgian; he did not start learning Russian until he was eight or nine years old, and he never lost his strong Georgian accent.

At the age of ten, Stalin began his education at the Gori Church School. His peers were mostly the sons of affluent priests, officials, and merchants. He and most of his classmates at Gori were Georgians and spoke mostly Georgian. However, at school they were forced to speak Russian, which was the policy of Tsar Alexander III. Stalin was one of the best students in the class, earning top marks across the board. He became a very good choir singer and was often hired to sing at weddings. He also began to write poetry, something he would develop in later years.[10]

Stalin's father, who had always wanted his son to be trained as a cobbler rather than be educated, was infuriated when the boy was accepted into the school. In a drunken rage he smashed the windows of the local tavern, and later attacked the town police chief. Out of compassion for Stalin's mother, the police chief did not arrest Besarion, but told him to leave town. He moved to Tiflis where he found work in a shoe factory and left his family behind in Gori.[10] Young Stalin, circa 1894, age 16

About the time Stalin began school, he was struck by a horse-drawn carriage. The accident permanently damaged his left arm; this injury would later exempt him from military service in World War I. At the age of 12, Stalin was struck again by a horse-drawn carriage and injured badly. He was taken to hospital in Tiflis where he spent months in care. After he recovered, his father seized the boy and enrolled him as an apprentice cobbler at the shoe factory where he worked. When his mother, through the aid of contacts in the clergy and school staff, recovered the boy, his father cut off all financial support to his wife and son, leaving them to fend for themselves. Stalin returned to his school in Gori where he continued to excel.[10]

He graduated first in his class and in 1894, at the age of 16, he enrolled at the Georgian Orthodox Seminary of Tiflis, to which he had been awarded a scholarship. The teachers at Tiflis Seminary were also determined to impose Russian language and culture on the Georgian students.[10] Like many of his comrades, young Stalin reacted by being drawn to Georgian patriotism. During this time he gained fame as a poet; his poems were published in several local newspapers. However, his interest in poetry began to fade as he was drawn to rebellion and revolution.

During his time at the seminary, Stalin and numerous other students read forbidden literature that included Victor Hugo novels and revolutionary, including Marxist, material. He was caught and punished numerous times for this. One teacher in particular — Father Abashidze, whom Stalin nicknamed "the Black Spot" — harassed the rebel students through student informers, nightly patrols and surprise dormitory raids. This personal experience of "surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings", in Stalin's own words, influenced the design of his future terror state.[10] He became an atheist in his first year.[10] He insisted his peers call him "Koba", after the Robin Hood-like protagonist of the novel The Patricide by Alexander Kazbegi; he would continue to use this pseudonym as a revolutionary. In August 1898, he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, an organization from which the Bolsheviks would later form.

Shortly before the final exams, the Seminary abruptly raised school fees. Unable to pay, Stalin quit the seminary in 1899 and missed his exams, for which he was officially expelled.[10] Shortly after leaving school, Stalin discovered the writings of Vladimir Lenin and decided to become a revolutionary.

Early years as a Marxist revolutionary, 1899–1917

After abandoning his priestly education, Stalin took a job as a weatherman at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory. Although the pay was relatively low (20 roubles a month), his workload was light, giving him plenty of time for revolutionary activities. He would organise strikes, lead demonstrations and give speeches. He soon caught the attention of the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana. During this time, he met and charmed Simon Ter-Petrossian, nicknamed Kamo, a violent psychopath who became his long-time henchman and enforcer.[13] Stalin in 1902

On the night of April 3, 1901, the Okhrana arrested a number of SD Party leaders in Tiflis, but Stalin spotted their agents waiting in ambush at the Observatory and avoided capture. He went underground, becoming a full-time revolutionary, living off donations from friends, sympathizers and his Party. He began writing revolutionary articles for the Baku-based radical newspaper Brdzola ("Struggle").[10]

In October, Stalin fled to Batumi and got work at an oil refinery owned by the Rothschild family. Organizing the workers there, Stalin was almost certainly involved in a 1902 fire at the refinery designed to trick the management into giving the workers a bonus for putting out the fire. However, the manager suspected arson and refused to pay. This led to a series of strikes, all organized by Stalin, which in turn led to arrests and street clashes with Cossacks. In one attempt to break their comrades out of prison, 13 strikers were killed when Cossacks intervened. Stalin distributed pamphlets portraying the dead as martyrs. On April 18, 1902, the authorities finally arrested Stalin at a secret meeting. At his trial, Stalin was acquitted of leading the riots due to lack of evidence, but was kept in custody whilst the authorities investigated his activities in Tiflis. In 1903, the authorities decided to exile Stalin to Siberia for three years.[10]

Stalin ended up in the Siberian town of Novaya Uda on December 9, 1903. During this time, he heard that two rival factions within the Social-Democrats had formed: the Bolsheviks under Lenin and the Mensheviks under Julius Martov. Stalin, already an admirer, decided to join the Lenin group. He managed to obtain false papers and, on January 17, 1904, escaped Siberia by train, arriving back in Tiflis ten days later.[10]

With no income, Stalin lived off his circle of friends. One of them introduced him to Lev Kamenev (then known as Lev Rosenfeld), his future co-ruler of the USSR after Lenin's death. At this time, Stalin favored a Georgian Social-Democratic party, which caused a rift with the majority who favored international Marxism. Threatened with expulsion, he was forced to write Credo, a paper renouncing his views (because this paper distanced himself from Lenin, when Stalin became ruler of the USSR, he tried to destroy all copies of this Credo, and many of those who had read it were shot).[10] The following month, the Russo-Japanese War broke out between Japan and Russia. The war, which would eventually end in Russia's defeat, severely strained the Russian economy and caused a great deal of restlessness in Georgia. Stalin travelled across Georgia conducting political activity for his party. He also worked to undermine the Mensheviks through a campaign of slander and intrigue; his efforts brought him to Lenin's attention for the first time.

On January 22, 1905, Stalin was in Baku when Cossacks attacked a mass demonstration of workers, killing 200. This was part of a series of events which sparked off the Russian Revolution of 1905. Riots, peasant uprisings and ethnic massacres swept the Russian Empire. In February, ethnic Azeris and Armenians were slaughtering each other in the streets of Baku. Commanding a squad of armed Bolsheviks, Stalin ran protection rackets to raise party funds and stole printing equipment. Afterward, he headed west, where he continued to campaign against the Mensheviks, who enjoyed overwhelming support in Georgia. In the mining town of Chiatura, both Stalin and the Mensheviks competed for the support of the miners; they chose Stalin, preferring his plain and concise manner of speaking to the flamboyant oratory of the Menshevik speaker.[10] From Chiatura, Stalin organized and armed Bolshevik militias across Georgia. With them, he ran protection rackets among the wealthy and waged guerrilla warfare on Cossacks, policemen and the Okhrana.[10] Later that year, in Tiflis, he met Ekaterina Svanidze, who would become his first wife.

In December 1905, Stalin and two other activists were elected to represent the Caucasus at the next Bolshevik conference, which took place in Tammerfors, Finland. There, on January 7, 1906, Stalin met Lenin in person for the first time. Although Stalin was impressed by Lenin's personality and intellect, he was not afraid to contradict him.[10] He objected to Lenin's proposal that they take part in elections to the recently formed Duma; Lenin conceded to Stalin. At the conference he also met Emelian Yaroslavsky, his future propaganda chief, and Solomon Lozovsky, his future Deputy Foreign Commissar. After the conference, Stalin returned to Georgia, where Cossack armies were brutally trying to reconquer the rebellious region for the Tsar. In Tiflis, Stalin and the Mensheviks plotted the assassination of General Fyodo Griiazanov, which was carried out on March 1, 1906. Stalin continued to raise money for the Bolsheviks through extortion, bank robberies and hold-ups.

In April 1906, Stalin attended the Fourth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. At the conference, he met Klimenti Voroshilov, his future Defence Commissar and First Marshal; Felix Dzerzhinsky, future founder of the Cheka; and Grigory Zinoviev, with whom he would share power after Lenin's death. The Congress — in which the Bolsheviks were outnumbered — voted to ban bank robberies. This upset Lenin, who needed the bank robberies to raise money.[10]

Stalin married Ekaterina Svanidze on July 28, 1906. On March 31, 1907, she gave birth to Stalin's first child, Yakov.

Stalin and Lenin both attended the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London in 1907.[14] This Congress consolidated the supremacy of Lenin's Bolshevik faction and debated strategy for communist revolution in Russia. Here, Stalin first met Leon Trotsky in person; Stalin immediately came to hate him, calling him "handsome but useless".[10] After the conference, Stalin would begin to switch his focus away from Georgia, which was rife with feuding and dominated by the Mensheviks, to Russia, and he began writing in Russian.

Upon his return to Tiflis, Stalin readied himself for a major bank robbery. Through contacts in the banking business, he had learned a major shipment of money was due to be delivered in June to the Imperial Bank at the centre of town. Because his party banned bank robberies, Stalin temporarily resigned. On June 26, 1907, Stalin's gang ambushed the armed convoy when it entered Yerevan Square with gunfire and homemade bombs. Around 40 people were killed, but all of Stalin's gang managed to escape alive with 250,000 roubles (around US$3.4 million in today's terms).[10] Stalin and his family left Tiflis two days later. His henchman Kamo delivered the money to Lenin in Finland, who then fled with it to Geneva. The Mensheviks, who had banned bank robberies (and did not get to share in the loot), were outraged and investigated the suspects. Stalin escaped expulsion, though the affair would cause him trouble for years to come.

Stalin's family moved to Baku. Whilst Stalin continued his revolutionary activities, his wife fell ill from Baku's pollution, heat, stress and malnourishment. She eventually contracted typhus (though many historians believe it to have been tuberculosis) and died on December 5, 1907. Stalin was overcome with grief and retreated into mourning for several months. The loss also hardened him; he told a friend: "with her died my last warm feelings for humanity".[10] He abandoned his son, Yakov, who was raised by his deceased wife's family.

When Stalin resumed his activities, he organized more strikes and agitation, this time focusing on the Muslim Azeri and Persian workers in Baku. He helped found a Muslim Bolshevik group called Himmat, and also supported the Persian Constitutional Revolution with manpower and weapons, and even visited Persia to organize partisans. Stalin ordered the murders of many Black Hundreds (right-wing supporters of the Tsar), and conducted protection rackets and ransom kidnappings against the oil tycoons of Baku. He also conducted counterfeiting operations and robberies. He befriended criminal gangs, and used them to obstruct the Mensheviks. Stalin's gangsterism upset the Bolshevik intelligentsia, but he was too influential and indispensable to oppose.[10]

The Okhrana tracked down and arrested Stalin on April 7, 1908. After seven months in prison, he was sentenced to two years' exile in Siberia. He arrived in the village of Solvychegodsk in early March 1909. After seven months in exile, he disguised himself as a woman and escaped on a train to St Petersburg. He returned to Baku in late July.[10]

The Bolsheviks were on the verge of collapse due to Okhrana oppression within the Empire and infighting among the intelligentsia abroad. In desperation, he advocated a reconciliation with the Mensheviks (which Lenin opposed). He demanded the creation of a Russian Bureau to run the Social-Democratic Party from within the Empire, to which he was appointed.

Stalin soon realised the Bolsheviks had been heavily infiltrated by Tsarist spies. He initiated a hunt for the traitors, which failed to root out any real traitors - as revealed by Okhrana records - and caused much disarray in the Party.[10]

On April 5, 1910 Stalin was yet again arrested by the Okhrana. He was banned from the Caucasus for five years and sentenced to complete his previous exile in Solvychegodsk. He was deported back there in September. He briefly escaped in early 1911, but another exile who was supposed to pass much-needed money to him instead ran off with it (Stalin had him shot for this in 1937), and he was forced to return to Solvychegodsk. During his exile, he had an affair with his landlady, Maria Kuzakova, with whom he fathered a son, Constantine. Stalin was released on July 9, 1911, while Maria was still pregnant. Stalin moved to Vologda in late July, where he had been ordered to reside for two months.[10] The information card on Joseph Stalin, from the files of the Tsarist secret police in Saint Petersburg, 1911[10]

In January 1912, at the Prague Party Conference, Lenin led his Bolshevik faction out of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, founding the separate Bolshevik Party. A Central Committee was elected, but when some of its members returned to Russia, they were arrested by the Okhrana, having been secretly betrayed by fellow CC member Roman Malinovsky, an Okhrana spy. To fill the void, Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev coopted Stalin as a member of the Central Committee.[15] When Stalin was informed of this, he left Vologda in late February.

Stalin moved to Saint Petersburg in April 1912, where he took control of the Bolshevik weekly newspaper Zvezda. Stalin had been assigned to convert Zvezda into a daily and rename it Pravda. The first issue was published on May 5.

Shortly afterwards, the Okhrana caught up with him again, and in July 1912 he was again exiled to Siberia for three years, this time to the small village of Narym. He escaped just thirty-eight days after arriving; this was his shortest exile.[10] He returned to Saint Petersburg in September.

Stalin renewed his efforts to reconcile the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks in the hope of salvaging the then struggling Marxist movement. He published editorials in Pravda advocating reconciliation, and secretly met with Menshevik leaders on several occasions. This angered Lenin, who twice summoned Stalin to Kraków to argue policy. On the second visit at the end of 1912, Stalin was removed from his post as editor of Pravda, but was made a leader of the Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin also asked Stalin to write an essay laying out the Bolshevik position on national minorities. Stalin in exile, 1915

After Kraków, Stalin spent several weeks in Vienna with the Troyanovskys, a wealthy Bolshevik couple he met with Lenin in Kraków. During these weeks Stalin used to walk in the park around the Schönbrunn Palace which was also regularly frequented at the time by Adolf Hitler.[16] While there he met for the first time Nikolai Bukharin, who would become a leading politician in the future Soviet government. They continued to discuss the issue of nationalities. Stalin completed his essay on the topic, entitled "Marxism and the National Question", which was published in March 1913 under the pseudonym "K. Stalin" (this was the first time he used the name "Stalin" in a publishing; he began using this alias in 1912).

Stalin returned to Saint Petersburg in February 1913. During this time, many Bolsheviks, including almost the entire Central Committee, had been arrested by the Okhrana, having been betrayed by Roman Malinovsky, a high-ranking Bolshevik who for years had been an Okhrana spy and agent provocateur. That month, an article had been published that outed Malinovsky as a spy, but the Bolsheviks dismissed it as Menshevik libel (ironically, Lenin and Stalin were his strongest defenders). On March 8 Malinovsky persuaded Stalin to attend a Bolshevik fundraising ball, which was raided by the Okhrana.

Stalin was condemned to four years in the remote Siberian province of Turukhansk. He was eventually joined by Kamenev and several other Bolshevik exiles. He spent six months in the small hamlet of Kostino on the Yenisei River. After learning that Stalin was planning an escape (he had received money and supplies from his comrades), the authorities moved him north to Kureika, a hamlet on the edge of the Arctic Circle. There, he lived the life of a hunter-gatherer, having learned fishing and hunting from local Siberian tribesmen. While there he began a 2-year affair with Lidia Pereprygina, then aged 13, with whom he fathered two children. The first died in infancy; the second, named Alexander, was born in April 1917.

In late 1916, Stalin was conscripted into the army. He was taken to Krasnoyarsk in February 1917, but the medical examiner there found him unfit for service due to his damaged left arm (a childhood injury). He spent his last four months of exile in the village of Achinsk.

Russian Revolution of 1917

In the wake of the February Revolution of 1917 (the first phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917), Stalin was released from exile. On March 25 he returned to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) and, together with Lev Kamenev and Matvei Muranov, ousted Vyacheslav Molotov and Alexander Shlyapnikov as editors of Pravda, the official Bolshevik newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were still in exile. Stalin and the new editorial board took a position in favor of supporting Alexander Kerensky's provisional government (Molotov and Shlyapnikov had wanted to overthrow it) and went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown. However, after Lenin prevailed at the April Party conference, Stalin and the rest of the Pravda staff came on board with Lenin's view and called for overthrowing the provisional government. At this April 1917 Party conference, Stalin was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee with the third highest total votes in the party.

In mid-July, armed mobs led by Bolshevik militants took to the streets of Petrograd, killing army officers and bourgeois civilians. They demanded the overthrow of the government, but neither the Bolshevik leadership nor the Petrograd Soviet were willing to take power, having been totally surprised by this unplanned revolt. After the disappointed mobs dispersed, Kerensky's government struck back at the Bolsheviks. Loyalist troops raided Pravda and surrounded the Bolshevik headquarters. Stalin helped Lenin evade capture and, to avoid a bloodbath, ordered the besieged Bolsheviks to surrender.[10]

Convinced Lenin would be killed if caught, Stalin smuggled him to Finland. In Lenin's absence, Stalin assumed leadership of the Bolsheviks. At the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik party, held secretly in Petrograd, Stalin was chosen to be the chief editor of the Party press and a member of the Constituent Assembly, and was re-elected to the Central Committee.[10]

In September 1917, Kerensky suspected his newly appointed Commander-in-Chief, General Lavr Kornilov, of planning a coup and dismissed him. Believing Kerensky was being controlled by the Bolsheviks, Kornilov decided to march his army on Petrograd. In desperation, Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet for help and released the Bolsheviks, who together raised a small army to defend the capital. In the end, Kerensky convinced Kornilov's army to stand down and disband without violence. However, the Bolsheviks were now free, rearmed and swelling with new recruits and under Stalin's firm control, whilst Kerensky had few troops loyal to him in the capital. Lenin decided the time for a coup had arrived. Kamenev and Zinoviev proposed a coalition with the Mensheviks, but Stalin and Trotsky backed Lenin's wish for an exclusively Bolshevik government. Lenin returned to Petrograd in October. On October 29, the Central Committee voted 10-2 in favor of an insurrection; Kamenev and Zinoviev voted in opposition.[10]

On the morning of November 6, Kerensky's troops raided Stalin's press headquarters and smashed his printing presses. Whilst he worked to restore his presses, he missed a Central Committee meeting where assignments for the coup were being issued. Stalin instead spent the afternoon briefing Bolshevik delegates and passing communications to and from Lenin, who was in hiding.[10]

Early the next day, Stalin went to the Smolny Institute from where he, Lenin and the rest of the Central Committee coordinated the coup. Kerensky left the capital to rally the Imperial troops at the German front. By November 8, the Winter Palace had been stormed and Kerensky's Cabinet had been arrested.

Russian Civil War, 1917–1919

See also: Stalin in the Russian Civil War

Communist Party of the Soviet Union History Organization Congress · Central Committee Politburo · General Secretary Secretariat · Orgburo Control Committee Auditing Commission Leaders Vladimir Lenin Joseph Stalin Nikita Khrushchev Leonid Brezhnev Yuri Andropov Konstantin Chernenko Mikhail Gorbachev Other topics Pravda Komsomol Communism portal v • d • e

Upon seizing Petrograd, the Bolsheviks formed the new revolutionary authority, the Council of People's Commissars. Stalin was appointed People's Commissar for Nationalities' Affairs; his job was to establish an institution to win over non-Russian citizens of the former Russian Empire. He was relieved of his post as editor of Pravda so that he could devote himself fully to his new role.[15]

In March 1918, the Menshevik leader Julius Martov published an article exposing Bolshevik crimes committed before the revolution. It stated that Stalin had organised bank robberies and had been expelled from his own party for doing so (the latter part is untrue). Stalin sued Martov for libel and won.

After seizing Petrograd, 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. During this time, only Stalin and Trotsky were allowed to see Lenin without an appointment.

In May 1918, Lenin dispatched Stalin to the city of Tsaritsyn. Situated on the Lower Volga, it was a key supply route to the oil and grain of the North Caucasus. There was a critical shortage of food in Russia, and Stalin was assigned to procure any he could find. The city was also in danger of falling to the White Army. Here, he first met and befriended Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, both of whom would become two of Stalin's key supporters in the military. Through his new allies, he imposed his influence on the military; in July Lenin granted his request for official control over military operations in the region.[15]

Stalin challenged many of the decisions of Trotsky, who at this time was Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic and thus his military superior. He ordered the killings of many former Tsarist officers in the Red Army; Trotsky, in agreement with the Central Committee, had hired them for their expertise, but Stalin distrusted them. This created a lot of friction between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin even wrote to Lenin asking that Trotsky be relieved of his post.[15] 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.

Stalin ordered the executions of any suspected counter-revolutionaries.[6] In the countryside, he burned villages in order to intimidate the peasantry into submission and discourage bandit raids on food shipments.[15]

On his return to Moscow in early 1919, Stalin married Nadezhda Alliluyeva, his second wife. At the Eighth Party Congress in March, Lenin criticised Stalin for using tactics that led to excessive casualties.[15]

In May 1919, Stalin was dispatched to the Western Front, near Petrograd. In order to stem mass desertions and defections of Red Army soldiers, Stalin rounded up deserters and renegades and had them publicly executed as traitors.

Polish-Soviet War, 1919-1920

After the Bolsheviks won the civil war in late 1919, Lenin and many others wanted to expand the revolution westwards into Europe, starting with Poland, which was fighting the Red Army in Ukraine. Stalin, in Ukraine at the time, argued these ambitions were unrealistic, but lost. He was briefly transferred to the Caucasus in February 1920, but managed to get transferred back to Ukraine in May where he accepted joint command of an army.[15]

In late July 1920, Stalin moved against the then-Polish city of Lwów, which conflicted with the general strategy set by Lenin and Trotsky by drawing his troops further away from the forces advancing on Warsaw. In mid-August the Commander-in-Chief Sergei Kamenev ordered the transfer of troops from Stalin's forces to bolster his attack on Warsaw. Stalin refused to counter-sign the order, though he didn't actually block it.[15] In the end, the battles for both Lwów and Warsaw were lost, and Stalin's actions were held partly to blame.

Stalin returned to Moscow in August, where he defended himself before the Politburo by attacking the whole campaign strategy. Although this tactic worked, he nonetheless resigned his military commission, something he had repeatedly threatened to do when he didn't get his way.[15] At the Ninth Party Conference on September 22, Trotsky openly criticised Stalin's war record. Stalin was accused of insubordination, personal ambition and military incompetence. Neither he nor anybody else challenged these attacks.[15]

Rise to power

In late 1920 Trotsky argued for a formal imposition of Party dictatorship over the industrial sectors. Believing this would needlessly upset the trade unions, Lenin asked Stalin to build a support base for him against Trotsky; Lenin's faction eventually prevailed at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921. Lenin still, however, encountered difficulties with various factions in pushing his policies through.[15] With the help of Kamenev, Lenin successfully had Stalin appointed to the post of General Secretary on April 3, 1922. He still held his posts in the Orgburo, the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate and the Commassariat for Nationalities Affairs, though he agreed to delegate his workload to subordinates.

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 severe repression of all opposition within the local Communist party (e.g., the Georgian Affair of 1922), not to mention any manifestations of anti-Sovietism (the August Uprising of 1924).[17] It was in the Georgian affairs that Stalin first began to play his own hand.[18] Stalin visiting Lenin at his dacha in Gorki.

On May 25, 1922, Lenin suffered a stroke while recovering from surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his neck since a failed assassination attempt in August 1918. Severely debilitated, he went into semi-retirement and moved to his dacha in Gorki. Stalin visited him often, acting as his intermediary with the outside world.[15] During this time, the two began to quarrel over economic policy and how to consolidate the Soviet republics.

He was also People's Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspection (1919–1922), a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the republic (1920–1923) and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (from 1917).

Later, in 1924, Stalin himself created a myth around a so-called "Party Centre" which "directed" all practical work pertaining to the uprising, consisting of himself, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, Uritsky, and Bubnov. No evidence was ever shown for the activity of this "centre", which would, in any case, have been subordinate to the Military Revolutionary Council, headed by Trotsky.

Campaign against the left and right opposition

After Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev together governed the party, placing themselves ideologically between Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin (on the right). During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building "Socialism in One Country", in contrast to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution.

In the struggle for leadership after Lenin's death one thing was evident; whoever ended up ruling the party had to demonstrate fealty to the memory of Lenin. Stalin did so by organizing the late leader's funeral, after which he made a speech professing an undying loyalty to Lenin that was almost religious in nature.

Stalin's actual relationship with Lenin, which was far more complex than Stalin's speeches alluded, has been illuminated by a number of sources that were made available after the fall of the Soviet Union, including some from Lenin's sister.[19][20] Joseph Stalin, cartoon by Nikolai Bukharin

Stalin first worked to undermine Trotsky, who was sick at the time, possibly by misleading him about the date of the funeral. Consequently, Trotsky, who was Lenin’s associate throughout the early days of the Soviet regime, lost considerable political support. Stalin made great deal of the fact that Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks just before the revolution, and publicized Trotsky's pre-revolutionary disagreements with Lenin. Another event that helped Stalin's rise was the fact that Trotsky came out against publication of Lenin's Testament in which he pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of Stalin and Trotsky and the other main players, and suggested that he be succeeded by a small group of people.

An important feature of Stalin’s rise to power is the way that he manipulated his opponents and played them off against each other. Stalin formed a "troika" of himself, Zinoviev, and Kamenev against Trotsky. When Trotsky had been eliminated, Stalin then joined Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev, emphasising their vote against the insurrection in 1917. Zinoviev and Kamenev then turned to Lenin's widow, Krupskaya; they formed the "United Opposition" in July 1926.

In 1927 during the 15th Party Congress Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and Kamenev lost his seat on the Central Committee. Stalin soon turned against the "Right Opposition", represented by his erstwhile allies, Bukharin and Rykov.

Stalin gained popular appeal from his presentation as a 'man of the people' from the poorer classes. The Russian people were tired from the world war and the civil war, and Stalin's policy of concentrating in building "Socialism in One Country" was seen as an optimistic antidote to war.

Stalin took great advantage of the ban on factionalism which meant that no group could openly go against the policies of the leader of the party because that meant creation of an opposition. 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. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivization and industrialization, Stalin can be said to have exercised control over the party and the country.

However, as the popularity of other leaders such as Sergei Kirov and the so-called Ryutin Affair were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute power until the Great Purge of 1936–1938.

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.[21]

Changes to Soviet society, 1927–1939

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.[22]

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.[23]

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%,[24] 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.

The two-stage progress of collectivization — interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, "Dizzy with success " (Pravda, March 2, 1930), and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades " (Pravda, April 3, 1930) — is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.

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. [25] 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.[26][27]

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.[28]

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.[29]

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.

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.

In the late 40's, some areas of physics, especially quantum mechanics but also special and general relativity, were also criticized on grounds of "idealism". Soviet physicists, such as K. V. Nikolskij and D. Blokhintzev, developed a version of the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was seen as more adhering to the principles of dialectical materialism.[30][31] However, although initially planned,[32] this process did not go as far as defining an "ideologically correct" version of physics and purging those scientists who refused to conform to it, because this was recognized as potentially too harmful to the Soviet nuclear program.

Linguistics was the only area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that language is a class construction and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, read a letter by Arnold Chikobava criticizing the theory. He "summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently."[33] In this way he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work discussing linguistics is a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions."[34]

Although no great theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics; his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics.

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). They were persecuted for their dissident views, not for their research. Nevertheless, much progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and technology. It laid the ground for the famous achievements of Soviet science in the 1950s, such as the development of the BESM-1 computer in 1953 and the launching of Sputnik in 1957.

Indeed, many politicians in the United States expressed a fear, after the "Sputnik crisis," that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet Union in science and in public education.[citation needed]

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,[6] 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.[6] 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.[35] The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record low numbers, increasing life spans by decades.[35]

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.[35] 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.[36] Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract.[35] Transport links were improved and many new railways built. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovites, received many incentives for their work;[36] 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.[36]

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.[37]

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". Careers were made and broken, some more than once. Famous figures were repressed, and many persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them Isaac Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold) and "non-conformists" (for example, Osip Mandelstam).

A minority, both representing the "Soviet man" (e.g. Arkady Gaidar) and remnants of the older pre-revolutionary Russia (e.g. Konstantin Stanislavski), thrived. A number of émigrés returned to the Soviet Union, among them Alexei Tolstoi in 1925, Alexander Kuprin in 1936, and Alexander Vertinsky in 1943.

Poet Anna Akhmatova was subjected to several cycles of suppression and rehabilitation, but was never herself arrested. Her first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, was shot in 1921, and her son, historian Lev Gumilev, spent two decades in a gulag.

The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general, and in specific instances, has been the subject of discussion. His name was as constantly invoked during his reign in discussions of culture as in just about everything else; in several famous cases his opinion was final.

Stalin's occasional beneficence showed itself in strange ways. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov was driven to poverty and despair; yet, after a personal appeal to Stalin, he was allowed to continue working. His play, The Days of the Turbines, with its sympathetic treatment of an anti-Bolshevik family caught up in the Civil War, was finally staged, apparently also on Stalin's intervention, and began a decades-long uninterrupted run at the Moscow Arts Theater.

Some insights into Stalin's political and esthetic thinking might perhaps be gleaned by reading his favorite novel, Pharaoh, by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus, a historical novel on mechanisms of political power. Similarities have been pointed out between this novel and 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 the many indigenous cultures within the Soviet Union. The politics of Korenizatsiya and forced development of "Cultures National by Form, Socialist by their substance" was arguably beneficial to later generations of indigenous cultures in allowing them to integrate more easily into Russian society.

The attempted unification of cultures in Stalin's later period was very harmful. Political repressions and purges were even more devastating to indigenous cultures than on urban ones as the cultural elites were smaller. The traditional lives of many peoples in the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian provinces was upset and large populations were displaced and scattered in order to prevent nationalist uprisings.

The Hotel Moskva (Moscow) in Moscow was said to have been built with mismatched side wings because Stalin had mistakenly signed off both of the proposals submitted, and the architects had been too afraid to clarify the matter. (The hotel had actually been built by two independent teams of architects with differing ideas.) 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.[38] 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. An Act of Canonical Communion was signed on May 17, 2007, followed immediately by a full restoration of communion with the Moscow Patriarchate; there remain some issues not fully healed to the present day.

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.

Purges and deportations

The purges

Main articles: Great Purge and Stalinist purges in Mongolia

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'. 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.

The purges commenced after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the popular leader of the party in Leningrad. Kirov was very close to Stalin and his assassination sent chills through the Bolshevik party. Publicly Stalin merely reacted to this assassination by tightening security by seeking out alleged spies and counter-revolutionaries, but in effect he was removing those who might have threatened his leadership. This process then transformed itself into extensive purges. Beria's letter to Politburo 	Stalin's resolution 	The Politburo's decision 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

There are two different views on the background of Kirov's murder. According to the first, Stalin was not involved but, fearing that he might be next in line to be assassinated, reacted by deciding to initiate purges instead of passively wait. According to the second, Stalin saw Kirov as a dangerous potential competitor for the top spot in Soviet leadership, and ordered Kirov's killing himself.

In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about Kirov's growing popularity. 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 292 negative votes, the highest of any candidate. Kirov was a close friend with Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and together they formed a moderate bloc in the Politburo. Later in 1934, Stalin asked Kirov to work for him in Moscow. One theory suggests that Stalin did this in order to keep a closer eye on Kirov, this despite the supposed fact that Stalin entirely controlled the NKVD. Kirov refused, however, and according to the same theory he became a competitor in Stalin's eyes.

On December 1, 1934, Kirov was killed by Leonid Nikolaev (also seen spelled as Nikolayev) in the Smolny Institute Leningrad. Kirov had arrived at the Smolny to work in his office, and, apparently leaving his bodyguard downstairs, headed to the upper floors, where the officials had their rooms. Nikolayev emerged from a bathroom and followed Kirov towards his office, shooting him in the back of the neck. Officially Stalin claimed that Nikolayev was part of a larger conspiracy led by Leon Trotsky against the Soviet government. This resulted in the arrest and execution of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and fourteen others in 1936. The death of Kirov ignited the great purge where supporters of Trotsky and other suspected enemies of the state were arrested. It has been speculated that Stalin was the man who ordered the murder of Kirov, and that the shooting was carried out with the help of the NKVD. However, although most historians believe that this second version of why and how Kirov was killed is more likely, it has so far not been unambiguously proven correct and it is still disputed by some.

Several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. There were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938.

Most notably in the case of alleged Nazi collaborator Tukhachevsky, many military leaders were convicted of treason. The large scale purging of the officers of the Red Army cost the Soviet Union dearly during the German invasion of June 22, 1941, and its aftermath.[39]

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. Solzhenitsyn alleges that Stalin drew inspiration from Lenin's regime with the presence of labor camps and the executions of political opponents that occurred during the Russian Civil War. Trotsky's August 1940 assassination in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937, eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. Only three members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) now remained — Stalin himself, "the all-Union Chieftain" (всесоюзный староста) Mikhail Kalinin, and Chairman of Sovnarkom Vyacheslav Molotov. Before After 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.[40] Such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin's rule.

No segment of society was left untouched during the purges. Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited "anti-Soviet activities", was applied in the broadest manner. Initially, the execution lists for the enemies of the people were confirmed by the Politburo.

Over time the procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. People would inform on others arbitrarily, to attempt to redeem themselves, or to gain small retributions. 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. Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam and one of the key memoirists of the purges, recalls being shouted at by Akhmatova: "Don't you understand? They are arresting people for nothing now?" The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD.

Towards the end of the purge, the Politburo relieved NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov, from his position for overzealousness. He was subsequently executed. Some historians such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest postulate that Stalin had Yezhov and his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda, removed in order to deflect blame from himself.

In parallel 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 were executed in the course of the terror,[41] with the great mass of victims being ordinary peasants and workers.[42]

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.[43]

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.[44] 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 November 28, 2006 the Ukrainian Parliament approved a bill, according to which the Soviet-era forced famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.[45]

Deportations

Main article: Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Meeting in a prison cell

Shortly 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[46] were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations, rightly or wrongly. Historian Allan Bullock explains:

Many no doubt had collaborated with the occupying forces … but many had done so not out of disloyalty but from the instinct to survive when abandoned to their fate by the retreating Soviet armies. The individual circumstances were of no interest to Stalin … After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus was over … the entire population of five of the small highland peoples of the North Caucasus, as well as the Crimean Tatars – more than a million souls – (were deported) without notice or any opportunity to take their possessions. There were certainly collaborators among these peoples, but most of those had fled with the Germans. The majority of those left were old folk, women, and children; their men were away fighting at the front, where the Chechens and Ingushes alone produced thirty-six Heroes of the Soviet Union.[47]

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.[48] 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.

Number of victims

Further information: Droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR

Early researchers attempting to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime were forced to rely largely upon anecdotal evidence. Their estimates ranged from 3 to 60 million.[49] After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, evidence from the Soviet archives became available. The archives record that about 800,000 prisoners were executed under Stalin for either political or criminal offences, while around 1.7 million died in the GULAG and some 390,000 perished during kulak forced resettlement – a total of about 3 million victims.

Debate continues, however, since some historians believe the archival figures to be unreliable.[50] For example, Gellately argues the many suspects tortured to death while in "investigative custody" were likely not to have been counted amongst the executed.[51][6] Also, there are categories of victim which were not accuaretly recorded by the Soviets – such as the victims of ethnic deportations, or of German population transfer in the aftermath of WWII.

Thus, while some archival researchers have estimated the number of victims of Stalin's repressions to be 4 million in total or less, others believe the number to be considerably higher.[52] 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.[53]

Some have also included the 6 to 8 million victims of the 1932–1933 famine as victims of 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 or simply an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization.[27][54][55]

Certainly, it appears a minimum of around 10 million surplus deaths—4 million by repression and 6 million from famine — are attributable to the regime, with a number of recent books suggesting a likely total of around 20 million.[56] 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.[57] Others continue to maintain their earlier much higher estimates are correct.[58]

World War II, 1939–1945 Molotov and Stalin, 1944

After the failure of Soviet and Franco-British talks on a mutual defense pact in Moscow, Stalin accepted Adolf Hitler's proposal to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.[59] The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is considered by some historians as a direct consequence of the western policy of appeasement[60][61] while this view is disputed by Werner Maser and Dmitri Volkogonov. The passive policy of France and Britain towards Hitler and the failure of Moscow, London and Paris to sign a mutual defense pact possibly led Stalin to believe that their objective was to collide Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union in an all-out war while virtually remaining neutral in the conflict.[62] The Pact with the Germans was thus viewed by Stalin from two perspectives: to gain time in the inevitable war with Hitler in order to reinforce the Soviet military; and to shift Soviet borders westwards for security reasons.[63]

Officially a non-aggression treaty only, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had a secret annex according to which Central Europe was divided into the two powers' respective spheres of influence. The USSR was promised an eastern part of Poland, primarily populated with Ukrainians and Belarusians, in case of its dissolution, and additionally Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland were recognized as parts of the Soviet sphere of influence. Another clause of the treaty was that Bessarabia, then part of Romania, was to be joined to the Moldovan ASSR, and become the Moldovan SSR under control of Moscow.

On September 1, 1939, the German invasion of Poland started World War II, and on September 17 the Red Army invaded eastern Poland and occupied the territory assigned to it by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin (background right) looks on as Molotov signs the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, August 24, 1939.

In November 1939, Stalin sent troops over the Finnish border, provoking a war of aggression, and probably intended to annex Finland into the Soviet Union, as he had already done in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. But the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland proved to be far more difficult than Stalin and the Red Army were prepared for, and the Soviets sustained surprisingly high casualties. By some estimates, the Soviet Union lost as many as 391,800 lives in this four-month war against Finland alone, or more than the United States suffered in all of World War II against Germany and Japan (1941–1945). The Soviets finally agreed on an interim peace in March, 1940, but only succeeded in annexing the eastern region of Karelia (10% of Finnish territory), a classic example of a Pyrrhic victory. Finland remains an independent country to the present day, but the Red Armies' serious problems had been revealed to the rest of the world, including Germany.

On March 5, 1940, the Soviet leadership approved an order of execution for more than 25,700 Polish "nationalist, educators and counterrevolutionary" activists in the parts of the Ukraine and Belarus republics that had been annexed from Poland. This event has become known as the Katyn Massacre.[64] Stalin and Molotov on the signing of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with the Empire of Japan, 1941

In June 1941, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, thus beginning the Great Patriotic War. Although expecting war with Germany, Stalin may not have expected an invasion to come so soon — and the Soviet Union was relatively unprepared for this invasion. An alternative theory suggested by Viktor Suvorov claims that Stalin had made aggressive preparations from the late 1930s on and was about to invade Germany in summer 1941. Thus, he believes Hitler only managed to forestall Stalin and the German invasion was in essence a pre-emptive strike. This theory was supported by Igor Bunich, Mikhail Meltyukhov (see Stalin's Missed Chance) and Edvard Radzinsky (see Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives). However, most western historians reject this thesis.

In the diary of General Fedor von Boch, it is also mentioned that the Abwehr fully expected a Soviet attack against German forces in Poland no later than 1942. Such speculations are difficult to substantiate, however, as information on the Soviet Army from 1939 to 1941 remains classified, but it is known that the Soviets had received some warnings of the German invasion through their foreign intelligence agents, such as Richard Sorge. The Big Three: Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November 1943.

Even though Stalin received intelligence warnings of a German attack,[65] he sought to avoid any obvious defensive preparation which might further provoke the Germans, in the hope of buying time to modernize and strengthen his military forces. 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.[6]

The Germans initially made huge advances, capturing and killing millions of Soviet troops. The Soviet Red Army put up fierce resistance during the war's early stages. Even so, they were plagued by an ineffective defense doctrine against the well-trained and experienced German forces, despite modern equipment such as the KV-1 and T-34 tanks.

Stalin feared that Hitler would use disgruntled Soviet citizens to fight his regime, particularly people imprisoned in the Gulags. He thus ordered the NKVD to take care of the situation. They responded by murdering around one hundred thousand political prisoners throughout the western parts of the Soviet Union, with methods that included bayoneting people to death and tossing grenades into crowded cells.[66] Many others were simply deported east.[67][68]

Hitler's experts had expected eight weeks of war, and early indications appeared to support their predictions. However, the invading German forces were eventually driven back in December 1941 near Moscow.

Stalin met in several conferences with Churchill and/or Roosevelt in Moscow, Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam to plan military strategy (Truman taking the place of the deceased Roosevelt at Potsdam). The Big Three: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, February 1945.

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."[69]

His shortcomings as strategist are frequently noted regarding massive Soviet loss of life and early Soviet defeats. An example of it is the summer offensive of 1942, which led to even more losses by the Red Army and recapture of initiative by the Germans. Stalin eventually recognized his lack of know-how and relied on his professional generals to conduct the war.

Yet Stalin did rapidly move Soviet industrial production east of the Volga River, far from Luftwaffe-reach, to sustain the Red Army's war machine with astonishing success. Additionally, Stalin was well aware that other European armies had utterly disintegrated when faced with Nazi military efficacy and responded effectively by subjecting his army to galvanizing terror and unrevolutionary, nationalist appeals to patriotism. He also appealed to the Russian Orthodox church and images of national Russian heroes. On November 6, 1941, Stalin addressed the whole nation of the Soviet Union for the second time (the first time was earlier that year on July 2). Time magazine (1943-01-04). Time had previously named Stalin Man of the Year for the year 1939.

According to Stalin's Order No. 227 of July 27, 1942, any commander or commissar of a regiment, battalion or army, who allowed retreat without permission from above was subject to military tribunal. The Soviet soldiers who surrendered were declared traitors; however most of those who survived the brutality of German captivity were mobilized again as they were freed. Between 5% and 10% of them were sent to Gulag (As "traitors of Homeland". Soviet Criminal Code, §58, clause 1B: criminal conviction – 10 or later 25 years of labor camp plus 5 years without "citizen rights").

In the war's opening stages, the retreating Red Army also sought to deny resources to the enemy through a scorched earth policy of destroying the infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize them. This, along with abuse by German troops, caused starvation and suffering among the civilian population that were left behind.

Stalin's personal military leadership was emphasised as part of the "cult of personality" after the publication of Stalin's ten victories extracted from 6 November 1944 speech "27th anniversary of the Great October socialist revolution" (Russian: «27-я годовщина Великой Октябрьской социалистической революции») during the 1944 meeting of the Moscow's Soviet deputies.

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, compared with 3.5 million Soviet POW that died in German camps out of the 5.6 million taken.[70]

Returning Soviet soldiers who had surrendered were viewed with suspicion and some were killed. According to historian Alan Bullock:

The huge number of Russian troops taken prisoner in the first eighteen months of the war convinced Stalin that many of them must have been traitors who had deserted at the first opportunity. Any soldier who had been a prisoner was henceforth suspect … All such, whether generals, officers, or ordinary soldiers, were sent to special concentration camps where the NKVD investigated them … 20% were sentenced to death or twenty-five years in camps; only 15 to 20% were allowed to return to their homes. The remainder were condemned to shorter sentences (five to ten years), to exile in Siberia, and forced labor – or were killed or died on the way home.[71]

According to Soviet archives, the overall increase of the Gulag population was minimal during 1945-46.[72] 3,246,000 of repatriated Soviet POWs and civilians (out of 5,917,000) returned to civilian life, 1,645,000 were drafted, 338,000 sentenced (most of them were liberated by 1953) and about half a million remained in Western countries.[73]

Post-war era, 1945–1953

Domestically, Stalin was seen as a great wartime leader who had led the Soviets to victory against the Nazis. His early cooperation with Hitler was forgotten. That cooperation included helping the German Army violate the Treaty of Versailles limitations, with training in the Soviet Union, the notorious Molotov-von Ribbentrop treaty which partitioned Poland giving the Soviet Union what is now Belarus and granted the Soviet Union a free hand in Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, and Soviet trade with Hitler to counteract the expected French and British trade blockades.

By the end of the 1940s, Russian patriotism increased due to successful propaganda efforts. For instance, some inventions and scientific discoveries were claimed by Russian propaganda. Examples include the boiler, reclaimed by father and son Cherepanovs; the electric bulb, by Yablochkov and Lodygin; the radio, by Popov; and the airplane, by Mozhaysky. Stalin's internal repressive policies continued (including in newly acquired territories), but never reached the extremes of the 1930s, in part because the smarter party functionaries had learned caution.

Internationally, Stalin viewed Soviet consolidation of power as a necessary step to protect the USSR by surrounding it with countries with friendly governments like the variety seen in Finland, to act as a cordon sanitaire (buffer) against possible invaders, while the "West" sought a similar buffer against communist expansion. These competing policies led to an admirable stability, where successful Soviet aggression would depend on enthusiastic cooperation by the satellite nations.

He had hoped that the American withdrawal and demobilization would lead to increased communist influence, especially in Europe. Each side often viewed the other's defensive actions as destabilizing provocations, and these security dilemmas frayed relations between the Soviet Union and its former World War II western allies, leading to a prolonged period of tension and distrust between East and West known as the Cold War (see also Iron curtain).

The Red Army ended World War II occupying much of the territory that had been formerly held by the Axis countries:

In Asia, the Red Army had overrun Manchuria in the last month of the war and then also occupied Korea above the 38th parallel north. Mao Zedong's Communist Party of China, though receptive to minimal Soviet support, defeated the pro-Western and heavily American-assisted Chinese Nationalist Party in the Chinese Civil War. Stalin and Mao Zedong on Chinese Postage stamp

The Communists controlled mainland China while the Nationalists held a rump state on the island of Formosa (now Taiwan). The Soviet Union soon after recognized Mao's People's Republic of China, which it regarded as a new ally. The People's Republic claimed Taiwan, though it had never held authority there.

Diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and China reached a high point with the signing of the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. Both countries provided military support to a new friendly state in North Korea. After various Korean border conflicts, war broke out with U.S.-allied South Korea in 1950, starting the Korean War.

In Europe, there were Soviet occupation zones in Germany and Austria. Hungary and Poland were under practical military occupation. From 1946–1948 coalition governments comprising communists were elected in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria and homegrown communist movements rose to power in Yugoslavia and Albania.

These nations became known as the "Communist Bloc." Britain and the United States supported the anti-communists in the Greek Civil War and suspected the Soviets of supporting the Greek communists, although Stalin refrained from getting involved in Greece, dismissing the movement as premature. Albania remained an ally of the Soviet Union, but Yugoslavia broke with the USSR in 1948. Greece, Italy and France received enormous support from the population, which were at the very least friendly towards Moscow.

Both Superpowers viewed Germany as key. In retaliation to the Western formation of Trizonia, Stalin determined to take action.

Armed with intelligence from the British agent Donald Duart Maclean and other British and American espionage agents, Stalin was well aware that the United States had not proceeded with mass production of atomic weapons, indeed, had not even assembled any after the last was used at Nagasaki. Large numbers would have been needed to destroy Soviet or Communist land forces either in Europe or the Far East. He therefore ordered a blockade of West Berlin, which was under British, French, and U.S. occupation, to test the Western powers.

The Berlin 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. After West Germany was formed by the union of the three Western occupation zones, the Soviets declared East Germany a separate country in 1949, ruled by the communists.

Stalin originally supported the creation of Israel in 1948. The USSR was one of the first nations to recognize the new country.[74] Golda Meir came to Moscow as the first Israeli Ambassador to the USSR that year. But he later changed his mind and came out against Israel.

Contrary to America's policy which restrained armament (limited equipment was provided for infantry and police forces) to South Korea, Stalin extensively armed Kim Il Sung's North Korean army and air forces with military equipment (to include T-34/85 tanks) and "advisors" far in excess of those required for defensive purposes) in order to facilitate Kim's (a former Soviet Officer) aim of conquering the rest of the Korean peninsula. Soviet pilots flew Soviet aircraft from Chinese bases against United Nations aircraft defending South Korea. Post cold war research in Soviet Archives has revealed that the Korean War was begun by Kim Il-sung with the express permission of Stalin, though this is widely disputed by North Korea.

In Stalin's last year of life, one of his last major foreign policy initiatives was the 1952 Stalin Note for German reunification and Superpower disengagement from Central Europe, but Britain, France, and the United States viewed this with suspicion and rejected the offer.

Theorist

Main article: Stalinism

Stalin made few contributions to Communist (or, more specifically, Marxist-Leninist) theory. The contributions he made were accepted and upheld by all Soviet political scientists during his rule. Among Stalin's contributions were his "Marxism and the National Question", a work praised by Lenin; his "Trotskyism or Leninism", which was a factor in the "liquidation of Trotskyism as an ideological trend" within the CPSU(B).

Stalin's Collected Works (in 13 volumes) was released in 1949. A subsequent 16 volume American Edition appeared, in which one volume consisted of the book "History of the CPSU(B) Short Course", although when released in 1938 this book was credited to a commission of the Central Committee.

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.

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.[75]

Death

On March 1, 1953, after an all-night dinner in his residence in Krylatskoye some 15 km west of Moscow centre with interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin did not emerge from his room, having probably suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body.

Although his guards thought that it was odd for him not to rise at his usual time, they were under orders not to disturb him. He was discovered lying on the floor of his room only at about 10 p.m. in the evening. Lavrentiy Beria was informed and arrived a few hours afterwards, and the doctors arrived only in the early morning of March, 2nd. Stalin died four days later, on March 5, 1953, at the age of 74, and was embalmed on March 9. His daughter Svetlana recalls the scene as she stood by his death bed: "He suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse upon all of us. The next moment after a final effort the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh." Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage. His body was preserved in Lenin's Mausoleum until October 31, 1961, when his body was removed from the Mausoleum and buried next to the Kremlin walls as part of the process of de-Stalinization. Stalin's Grave by the Kremlin Wall Necropolis

It has been suggested that Stalin was assassinated. The ex-Communist exile Avtorkhanov argued this point as early as 1975. The political memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claimed that Beria had boasted to Molotov that he poisoned Stalin: "I took him out."

Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after the stroke, gone about "spewing hatred against [Stalin] and mocking him", and then, when Stalin showed signs of consciousness, dropped to his knees and kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria immediately stood and spat.

In 2003, a joint group of Russian and American historians announced their view that Stalin ingested warfarin, a powerful rat poison that inhibits coagulation of the blood and so predisposes the victim to hemorrhagic stroke (cerebral hemorrhage). Since it is flavorless, warfarin is a plausible weapon of murder. The facts surrounding Stalin's death will probably never be known with certainty.[76]

His demise arrived at a convenient time for Beria and others, who feared being swept away in yet another purge. It is believed[who?] that Stalin felt Beria's power was too great and threatened his own. Whether Beria or anyone else was directly responsible for Stalin's death, it is true that the Politburo did not summon medical attention for Stalin for more than a day after he was found.[citation needed][77]

Marriages and family Ekaterina "Kato" Svanidze, Stalin's first wife.

Stalin met his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, in late 1905 when he moved into the Tiflis townhouse where she lived. They were married on the night of July 28, 1906. On March 31, 1907, she gave birth to Stalin's first child, Yakov. In June 1907, after robbing the bank in Tiflis to fund the Bolshevik cause, Stalin and his family fled east to Baku. Stalin was frequently absent as he conducted revolutionary work across Georgia. Meanwhile, Ekaterina suffered under the pollution and heat of Baku, which was an oil boomtown. She contracted typhus and died on December 5, 1907. Stalin was devastated by her death; fearing he was suicidal, his friends took away his pistol.

His son finally shot himself because of Stalin's harshness toward him, but survived. After this, Stalin said "He can't even shoot straight"[35]. Yakov served in the Red Army during World War II and was captured by the Germans. They offered to exchange him for Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered after Stalingrad, but Stalin turned the offer down, stating "You have in your hands not only my son Yakov but millions of my sons. Either you free them all or my son will share their fate."[78] Afterwards, Yakov is said to have committed suicide, running into an electric fence[79] in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was being held.[80] Stalin with his children: Vasiliy and Svetlana

Stalin had a son, Vasiliy, and a daughter, Svetlana, with his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She died in 1932, officially of illness. She may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly political".[81] According to A&E Biography, there is also a belief among some Russians that Stalin himself murdered his wife after the quarrel, which apparently took place at a dinner in which Stalin tauntingly flicked cigarettes across the table at her. Historians also claim her death ultimately "severed his link from reality."[82]

Vasiliy rose through the ranks of the Soviet air force, officially dying of alcoholism in 1962; however, this is still in question. He distinguished himself in World War II as a capable airman. Svetlana emigrated to the United States in 1967. Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva

In his book The Wolf of the Kremlin Stuart Kahan claimed that Stalin was secretly married to a third wife named Rosa Kaganovich, allegedly the sister of Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician. However, the claim is unproven and many have disputed it, including the Kaganovich family, who deny that "Rosa" and Stalin ever met, and even state that Kaganovich's sister wasn't named Rosa. Kahan also claimed that both Lazar and Rosa were responsible for the death of Stalin (by poisoning), however this (as well as most of the remainder of Kahan's assertions) were dismissed as fabrication by the Statement of the Kaganovich Family.

In March 2001 Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson living in Novokuznetsk. Yuri Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage, but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet. The Soviet dissident writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had mentioned a son being born to Stalin and his common-law wife Lida in 1918, during Stalin's exile in northern Siberia.

Religious beliefs

Stalin's beliefs are complicated and sometimes contradictory. He received his education at the Theological Seminary at Tbilisi, where his mother sent him to become a priest, but he became a closet atheist.[83]

Regarding one famous claim about evolution, historians doubt one later Soviet claim that he read The Origin of Species at the age of thirteen while still at Gori, and told a fellow pupil that it proved the nonexistence of God. The story fails on several obvious accounts, including Stalin's remaining religious, even pious, for some years longer.[84] In fact Professor of Religion Hector Avalos noted, "Stalin, in fact, had a complex relationship with religious institutions in the Soviet Union."[85]

Historian Edvard Radzinsky used recently discovered secret archives and noted a story that changed Stalin's attitude toward religion.[86] The story in which Ilya, Metropolitan of the Lebanon Mountains, claimed to receive a sign from heaven that "The churches and monasteries must be reopened throughout the country. Priests must be brought back from imprisonment, Leningrad must not be surrendered, but the sacred icon of Our Lady of Kazan should be carried around the city boundary, taken on to Moscow, where a service should be held, and thence to Stalingrad Tsaritsyn."[86] Shortly thereafter, Stalin's attitude changed and "Whatever the reason, after his mysterious retreat, he began making his peace with God. Something happened which no historian has yet written about. On his orders many priests were brought back to the camps. In Leningrad, besieged by the Germans and gradually dying of hunger, the inhabitants were astounded, and uplifted, to see wonder-working icon Our Lady of Kazan brought out into the streets and borne in procession."[86] Radzinsky asked, "Had he seen the light? Had fear made him run to his Father? Had the Marxist God-Man simply decided to exploit belief in God? Or was it all of these things at once?."[86]

During the Second World War Stalin reopened the Churches. One reason could have been to motivate the majority of the population who had Christian beliefs. The reasoning behind this is that by changing the official policy of the party and the state towards religion, the Church and its clergymen could be to his disposal in mobilizing the war effort.

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. The embalming of the Soviet founder in Lenin's Mausoleum was performed over the objection of Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya. Stalin became the focus of massive adoration and even worship.

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."

Many statues and monuments were erected to glorify Stalin but all of them distorted Stalin's true build. Going by these monuments and statues it would be easy to assume that Stalin was a tall and well built man not unlike Tsar Alexander III. This was not the case however; photographic evidence suggests he was between 5 ft 5 in and 5 ft 6 in (165–168 cm).[87] His physical stature was exaggerated in all portraits and statues to avoid any image of weakness that could harm his cult of personality.

Trotsky criticized the cult of personality built around Stalin as being against the values of socialism and Bolshevism, in that it exalted the individual above the party and class and it disallowed criticism of Stalin. The personality cult reached new levels during the Great Patriotic War, with Stalin's name even being included in the new Soviet national anthem. The reference was later removed during the process of De-Stalinization. Also the soldiers of the Red Army when they charged into battle, they would not only yell out "FOR THE MOTHERLAND", but also most, if not all would also yell out "FOR STALIN". Also the Iosif Stalin tank class was named after Stalin.

Stalin became the focus of a body of literature encompassing poetry as well as music, paintings and film. Artists and writers vied with each other in 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:

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.[88]

In recent years, support of Stalin has resurged. Millions of Russians, exasperated with the downfall of the economy and political instability after the breakup of the Soviet Union, want Stalin back. A recent controversial poll revealed that over thirty-five percent of Russians would vote for Stalin if he were still alive.[89] This is seen by some as a return of Stalin's cult. In Krasnoyarsk, it has been decided to rebuild a communist-era memorial complex dedicated to Josef Stalin.[90] Also, a new statue of Stalin is to be erected in Moscow, “returning his once-ubiquitous image to the streets after an absence of four decades, a top city official said yesterday”.[91]

A survey from late 2006 revealed that 47% of Russian respondents viewed Stalin as a positive figure, and only 29% as a negative one. Some controversy also ensued when a recently approved history textbook for Russia’s schoolchildren attempted to illustrate Stalin’s purges as a necessary evil in the process of state-building.[92] In July 2008, Stalin topped at the list of most popular figures of the Russian history and culture in the nationwide television project "Name of Russia. Historical Choice 2008 " in which 178,881 out of 1,453,390 voted for him.[93]

Stalin's association with the city of Gori in Georgia is emphasized by the Joseph Stalin Museum in downtown Gori and the Stalin monument in front of the City Hall, one of the few such monuments to survive Khrushchev's de-Stalinization program. The monument was a source of controversy in a newly independent Georgia in the 1990s, but the post-communist government acceded to the Gori citizens’ request and left the statue untouched.[94][95]

Policies and accomplishments Grutas Park is home to a monument of Stalin, originally set up in Vilnius. Monument to Stalin in Gori, Georgia.

Under Stalin's rule, the Soviet Union was transformed from an agricultural nation into a global superpower. The USSR's industrialization was successful in that the country was able to defend against and defeat the Nazi invasion in World War II, though at an enormous cost in human life. In 1957, four years after Stalin's death, the nation put into orbit the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1.

Historians argue that Stalin was partly responsible for the initial military disasters and enormous human casualties during WWII, because he eliminated so many experienced military officers during the purges. He especially attacked the most senior officers and had rejected intelligence warning of the German attack.[96]

While Stalin's social and economic policies laid the foundations for the USSR's emergence as a superpower, the harshness with which he conducted Soviet affairs was subsequently repudiated by his successors in the Communist Party leadership, notably in the denunciation of Stalinism by Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956. In his "Secret Speech", On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, delivered to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his cult of personality, and his regime for "violation of Leninist norms of legality".

Stalin's immediate successors preserved major elements of his rule, including the political monopoly of the Communist Party's presiding over a command economy and a security service able to suppress dissent. The large-scale purges of Stalin's era were never repeated, but political repression continued, albeit on a lesser scale.

Origin of name, nicknames and pseudonyms

His first name is also transliterated as Iosif. His original surname, ჯუღაშვილი, is also transliterated as Jugashvili or Jughashvili. The Russian transliteration is Джугашвили, which is in turn transliterated into English as Dzhugashvili and Djugashvili; -შვილი (-shvili) is a Georgian suffix meaning "child" or "son".

There are several etymologies of the ჯუღა (jugha) root. In one version, it is the Ossetian for "rubbish"; the surname Jugayev is common among Ossetians, and before the revolution the names in South Ossetia were traditionally written with the Georgian suffix, especially among Christianized Ossetians. In a second version, the name derives from the village of Jugaani in Kakhetia, eastern Georgia.

An article in the newspaper Pravda in 1988 claimed the word derives from the Old Georgian for "steel" which might be the reason for his adoption of the name Stalin. Сталин (Stalin) is derived from combining the Russian сталь (stal), "steel", with the possessive suffix -ин (-in), a formula used by many other Bolsheviks, including Lenin.

Neo-Nazi and other anti-Semitic sources have claimed that "Dzhuga" or "Jugha" means "Jew" in Georgian and hence "Dzhugashvili" literally means "Jew-son" or son of a Jew. This, however, is incorrect as the word for "Jew" in Georgian is "ebraeli".

Like other Bolsheviks, he became commonly known by one of his revolutionary noms de guerre, of which Stalin was only the most prominent. During his education in Tiflis, he picked up the nickname Koba, a Robin Hood-like brigand and protagonist from the 1883 novel The Patricide by Alexander Kazbegi, this became his favorite nickname throughout his revolutionary life.[97] During conversations, Vladimir Lenin called Stalin "Koba". Among his friends he was sometimes known by his childhood nickname Soso or Sosso.

Stalin is also reported to have used at least a dozen other nicknames, pseudonyms and aliases such as Josef Besoshvili; Ivanov; A. Ivanovich; Soselo (a youthful nickname), K. Kato; G. Nizheradze; Chizhikov or Chizhnikov; Petrov; Vissarionovich; Vassilyi and J.V. Stalin[98]. Directly following World War II, as the Soviets were negotiating with the Allies, Stalin often sent directions to Molotov as Druzhkov.

Stalin was nicknamed "Uncle Joe" by the Western media.[99][100]

Hypotheses, rumors and misconceptions about Stalin

For a long time, the date of birth of Stalin was falsified.[1]

There are a number of hypotheses and popular rumors about the "real" father of Stalin;[101] also see "Death" section for hypotheses about the causes of Stalin's death.

The phrase "death of one man is a tragedy, death of a million is a statistic", sometimes attributed to Stalin,[102] was made by a German writer, Erich Maria Remarque

Suspected Tsarist connections

Stalin has been suspected in the past and in the present of being a Tsarist double-agent during his revolutionary years. Some of this suspicion stems from his ability to evade Tsarists efforts to capture him. His 1909 efforts to root out traitors caused much strife within the party; some accused him of doing this deliberately on the orders of the Okhrana. The Menshevik Razhden Arsenidze said that Stalin was betraying comrades he didn't like to the Okhrana, but there is no proof of this. His ability to anticipate Okhrana actions may have come from moles within the organization. Another historian, Simon Sebag Montefiore, found that in all surviving Okhrana records Stalin is described as a revolutionary and never a spy.[10] In the 1956, the magazine Life published a letter by Colonel Ermin, head of the Tiflis Okhrana, that said Stalin was an agent, but it has since been shown to be a forgery.

In his 1967 biography of Stalin, Edward Ellis Smith argued that Stalin was an Okhrana agent by citing his suspicious ability to escape from Okhrana dragnets, travel unimpeded, and rabble-rouse full time with no apparent source of income. One such example was the raid that occurred on the night of April 3, 1901, when most everyone of importance in the Socialist-Democratic movement in Tiflis was arrested, except for Stalin, who was apparently "enjoying the balmy spring air, and in one of his to-hell-with-the-revolution moods, [which] is too impossible for serious consideration."[103]

See also