Joseph Stalin
It is difficult to count how many millions of deaths Joseph Stalin was responsible for, but the fact that this figure is in the millions is not in doubt (Cavendish, 2003). Up until the twilight of his life, when he was in his seventies and approaching his own death, his subordinates continued to carry out his murderous orders.

Stalin was paranoid and in his later years he suffered from arteriosclerosis. There is a theory that this may have aggravated his temper, which became worse as he grew older. His doctor, Vladimir Vinogradov, noticed a significant decline in Stalin's health early in 1952. When he suggested that the dictator start to relax, the patient flew into a furious rage and had him arrested.

Several other doctors were arrested in 1952 (Cavendish, 2003). Some of them were Jewish and newspaper tirades against "murderers in white gowns" provoked widespread rumors about a medical conspiracy.….

They intended to turn the country into a great political and economical power that would match and, eventually, pass the Western countries that at the time dominated the world. Their competition was not only with the rest of Europe but with the United States as well. In order to achieve this Stalin needed extra devoted work from his people. He created new strategies to improve the industrial development of the country. To control such a massive population Stalin used clever manipulation, teaching children from school age to worship his image, devote themselves to the communist party and turning them away from the capitalist ideas, by shutting the country away from any foreign influence.
Most of this manipulation was based on fear, as he used very hard punishment for those that opposed him or were even suspects of rebelling against his ideas. Almost every family in Russia had at least one….

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 ussian 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 ussian 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 ussia with an iron fist,….

He advanced the NEP as the new economic strategy. (Tucker 1990)
Means for achieving power

Stalin used propaganda as the main tool for reaching out to the population. Therefore, he tried through every means possible to convince the people to follow his political ideas and to worship his personality.

He used manipulation to induce the population a completely new mentality and to erase any possible reminiscence of the old regime. This in turn reduced the working class to an atomized society, willing to submit to every order given by Stalin.

The political adversaries were a real threat for Stalin's goals. Therefore, he constantly persecuted, locked, or even killed them. This era, known as the Great Terror Era, saw most dissidents and those opposing the leader, parish at the hands of his regime. (Zuchlke 2006)

Conclusion

Joseph Stalin was the result of the era he lived in. The social, political, and economic background of his time….

The czar had absolute power over the country and denied people's freedom to express themselves or oppose the government. Communism functioned considerably in the same way. Stalin's power was almost as absolute as the czar's. He alone had had complete power to make decisions, and denied people's freedom to express themselves or openly speak their opinions about the way the politics were conducted.
Stalin made the people worship his image practically in the same way kings had done in the past. He wanted his person to occupy the most important place in every institution and house which was practically the same policy a czar himself would have followed. His image had to be a national cult of unconditional respect and adoration from his people, whether voluntary or imposed, by manipulation or force.

His opponents were immediately persecuted, arrested and eliminated. This all together follows the same situation that can be seen….

Domestically, Novosti disseminated information on life in other countries and on life in the Soviet Union. All of these institutional structures fell under the authority of the Party.
The television system in the Soviet Union was centrally controlled through the State Committee for Tele- vision and Radio (Gostelradio), which coordinated the communication of the ideological message sent down from above. The reorganization and elevation of this committee to the all-union level in 1970 made the Chairman of Gostelradio directly responsible to the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the Politburo. (Indeed, the Chairman of Gostelradio had on his desk a series of telephones, one connected directly to the General Secretary.) Directives were passed down to various departments which produced the television programs that aired on Soviet television.

The state owned all of the equipment, paid all salaries, and monitored all broadcasts. In addition to centralized control over the mass media….

He decided to develop industrial progress to help improve agriculture and make the people work harder, as he knew this was the only way to make socialism work. He leaned on the Red rigade as a tool to control and dominate the people and made concentration camps where opposers where arrested and sentenced to hard work. He used fear and threat to dominate the people, setting very hard laws against those that attempted to disagree with his ideas. Dissidents where persecuted, locked up or executed. Stalin consolidated a very severe regime, not tolerating any kind of opposition to his officialism. He made his image an obligatory national cult.
The result of this was a total brainwash of population and the setting of a whole new mentality for the entire country. This brought a robotization of the masses, turning them into workers that abandoned personal vision in order to follow the….

During this time to end the Russian Revolution, he would be captured by the secret police and sent to prison camps in Siberia, where he escaped every time. After the last successful escape, Stalin went to Saint Petersburg and was able to take control of the newspaper Pravda. Over the course of time, this position would allow Stalin to become closer to Lenin, as he would be able to protect and support the Revolution when all seemed lost. To achieve these objectives, he formed alliances with political allies and then would go after his enemies. Once the communists came to power, this approach was used to destroy the former Czarist elements in Russian army and force the peasants in the country side to support these changes through intimidation. After Lenin died, Stalin was able to use these tactics to gain power. This would create a state that was based….

Also the country was going through an economical crisis after World War I that had devastated most of its economy that was already quite fragile after the prolonged years of poverty under the rule of Czar Nicholas. To achieve the absolute power he sought for, Stalin used a lot of propaganda, advertising his image, to convince people to worship him as a saver, a hero for his country. He set a complex strategy of suggestion to induce the masses to believe in his revolutionary ideas. Stalin also used fear as a weapon against his possible enemies that were persecuted and arrested immediately, even for being mere suspects of opposing his ideas. His goals were to transform Russia into an economical and industrial power, through the exploitation of the working class and achieve absolute power of the world by controlling the greatest country. However his methods only brought more years….

In other words, the Soviet Union has lost in men several times more than Britain and the United States together." Stalin's reply to Churchill reflects his nations' sentiments of fear and vulnerability, even while he disingenuously rages that Eastern Europe has 'chosen' communism and alliance with the Soviet block in the arsaw Pact: "One can ask therefore, what can be surprising in the fact that the Soviet Union, in a desire to ensure its security for the future, tries to achieve that these countries should have governments whose relations to the Soviet Union are loyal? How can one, without having lost one's reason, qualify these peaceful aspirations of the Soviet Union as 'expansionist tendencies' of our Government?"
Stalin's justifiable reputation as a cruel and ruthless dictator makes it tempting to discount everything he said in his reply to Churchill. However, it is important to understand his words because of what….

The custom was to revere authority, rather than to respect the rights of the individual or to assume one's freedoms would be protected by the judicial system. Kangaroo courts under Stalin were the norm. Officially, in word alone, the freedoms of the individual were legally protected in the U.S.S.R. But this was a legal fiction.
Terror was the real ultimate mechanism of enforcing the will of the government, not a commandeered respect through popular charisma. People were afraid of being labeled traitors, anti-communists, or spies, so the did all they could to bow to Stalin's will. This was not true simply of citizens, but member of the ruling elite. Everyone knew that Stalin had no compunction about sending even his friends to death, if it could further solidify his hold upon power.

Stalin chose to do so because, in a large, sprawling land that was an unwieldy alliance of disparate republics,….

(Van Ree, 2002)
Foreign policy is an important vehicle for propelling one's image, be it on the domestic arena, or the international scene. Stalin took advantage of this element and used both socialist countries and western states as an indirect instrument for promoting his personality on the political scene.

The doctrine he had promoted also gave him advantage over capitalism in other countries around the world, which, in turn offered him a broader political support. Socialism was the strong opponent of foreign intervention in the internal affairs of national states. Therefore, newly independent states were reluctant to any sign of international interference. From this perspective, Stalin's approach was rather appealing and enabled them to find an alternative to capitalism. (Tucker, 1990)

In relation to the western block, Stalin, through the specific means he had to run foreign policy, gave the Russian people a sense of the long time glory of the Russian….

A civil war in ussia, which lasted from 1918 to 1921, squelched the dreams of the Bolsheviks. ussia's supplies and trade and the nation was forced into battle on multiple fronts. Industrial and agricultural productivity decreased as resources were directed to fighting the invading armies. The working class was literally decimated. Without a working class and without production, workers' control of production was impossible and the workers' state became unhinged from its social basis.
Stalinism emerged as a break from the Bolshevik tradition. Stalin had to defeat the Bolshevik Party of 1917 in order to consolidate his power and the victory of the bureaucracy. Stalin's plan is summed up in the phrase he first used in the fall of 1924: "socialism in one country.

After decades in power, first in ussia and later in many other countries, it is finally obvious that Stalinism is the total opposite of a liberated society….

In many ways, Russia is still recovering from it, trying to deal with the fact that only a few decades ago, it inflicted on itself one of the worst holocausts in human memory" (Hochschild, 1993). Therefore, the purges were used on the one hand to discourage the people and the elites in particular from establishing a dissident opposition or a negative pole of power that could have countered the Soviet regime.
Also, another possible justification of the way in which the Soviet regime acted in that period was the complete elimination of the possible negative influences from the old regimes or more precisely of the opposing forces in Russia. More precisely, "the decade of the 1930s saw the renewal of the Soviet leading stratum. During the period the.regime progressively unburdened itself of its legacy of class prejudice and rose to its full totalitarian posture" (Unger, 1969, 2). The regime of….

Hitler-Stalin Pact
Beyond doubt, the world was in an anarchical state in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly as the Great Depression devastated the global economy and aggressive, fascist regimes took power in Germany and Japan. International organizations hardly existed at the time, and in economic policy most countries adopted strategies of nationalism, autarky and protectionism, while the 'revisionist' states like Germany, Japan and Italy made it perfectly clear that they intended to solve their economic problems through creating new empires and spheres on influence at the expense of older empires like Britain and France. Hitler made no secret of the fact that the chief goal of his Lebensraum policy would be conquest of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which would become a source of raw materials, foodstuffs and slave labor for the Germans. He was also determined to exterminate the 'Jewish-Bolshevik worldview', as he always described Communism, and the basis….