Joseph Stalin Was a Cruel

Joseph Stalin was a Cruel Ruler

Joseph Stalin: A Cruel and Ruthless Leader

Stalin's rule represents a very dark period in Russia's history. His several decades in power saw great cruelties done to the Russian people. Stalin was an incredibly cruel leader because he refused to allow anyone to oppose him, committed mass genocide on groups like the Kulaks, and even murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people to secure his power.

Stalin's rise to power was fraught with struggle. Joseph Stalin was born in 1879 to a working class family in Gori Georgia (Spartacus Educational, 2012). He suffered in poverty growing up. He eventually found himself engaged in labor dispute warfare against the Czarist regime as a member of the Social Democratic Labor Party. He fought passionately against the Czarist regime, and eventually gained the respect of the first Communist leader, Vladimir Lenin. Stalin succeeded Lenin in 1928 after Lenin's death. Once in power, Stalin ruled Communist Russia with an iron fist. He ruled for decades, until his death in 1953.

Stalin showed his cruelty in many instances, but the first act of sheer ruthlessness was his removal of Leon Trotsky and all of his supporters in a cold move to gain the top seat in the Communist government. Lenin had eventually caught on to how ruthless Stalin was, and decided to endorse Leon Trotsky as his successor. Trotsky was a much more level-headed man, who cared deeply for the plight of the people (). Stalin saw how much of a threat Trotsky was, because he was directly in the way of Stalin taking over complete control. As General Secretary at the time, Stalin abused his powers and had Trotsky removed from the government (Spartacus Educational, 2012). Trotsky was later banished to Kazakhstan and was later assassinated by Stalinist forces in 1940. This shows his cruelty in not allowing for a fair voice to be in government, He simply refused to allow anyone to oppose him.

Additionally, Stalin showed his cruelty with his first big action as a ruler, the attack against the Kulaks. In the 1920s and 30s there was a great famine that forced Stalin to have to take control of the agricultural industry in Russia. One of his biggest opponents was the Kulaks, who were a wealthy group of farmers (Jones, 2002). They were the closest concept to a middle class in Communist Russia, because they were wealthier than peasants and owned their own land. When Stalin went to take their lands under the name of the government, they resisted. As a result, Stalin launched a campaign to wipe them out completely. After taking their lands, "thousands of Kulaks were executed and an estimated five million were deported to Siberia or Central Asia. Of these, approximately five percent perished by the time they reached their destination" (Spartacus Educational, 2012). This massive genocide against the Kulaks shows the clear cruelty that was present in Stalin's rule.

In his rule, Stalin murdered thousands of his own people, as well as the obvious groups who opposed him like the Kulaks. Stalin also went to purge many people within his own party and in Russian institutions in order to strengthen his grip over the country. Stalin used his secret police, known as the NKVD, to assassinate, imprison and exile thousands of Russian people (Jones, 2002). He went after people who published research that went against the progress he tried to show his government policies were showing. Stalin even went after many within the Communist Party that either slightly opposed his policies or did not perform up to the level of his extremely high expectations. The research suggests that there was "absurdly minor infractions for which individuals were sentenced to ten years in labor camps -- a standard death sentence" (Jones, 2002). He ruled over Russia with an iron fist, using fear as a primary tactic to keep people in line.