Joseph Stalin - Communism's Man of Steel Documentary

[Music] the man known to history as Joseph Vissarionovich oh gosh Willy or Joseph Stalin was born on the 18th of December 1878 in the eastern Georgian town of Gouri his father BeeZee and oh gosh Willy was a cobbler and for a while had a thriving business but he failed to change with the times and his shoes eventually became unfashionable which resulted in poverty in his family Joseph's mother Ekaterina kaladze was a devout Orthodox Christian who had married B's Ian at the age of 16 and went on to give birth to three sons the two oldest of which both died in infancy resulting in a Caterina placing much of her hopes for the future in her only surviving son it is clear that Yosa spare ins had a tempestuous relationship to say the least and often argued and fought one another over their son's future with the Caterina wanting him to join the priesthood Osby Xion was adamant than he should become a cobbler when Yosef was 10 Ekaterina left B's e'en as he was by this time an abusive alcoholic who'd on his infrequent visits home beat his wife and son and on one occasion gave Yosef such a severe thrashing that here blood in his urine for a week to escape her husband Ekaterina sought the help of a family friend named Yakov Angus Willy who had been the best man at her wedding to be Xion and had also been the Godfather of her two to see sons this acquaintance named both mother and son to live in relative security for a time and to get by Ekaterina undertook housework for her friends in the local area including a priest named Christa poor chunk Vianney who later helped gain Yosef her place in the gooery church school in 1888 where he proved himself to be a capable student and quickly rose to the top of his class despite this upturn in fortune Yosef was nearly denied the chance of further progression in life as around this time he narrowly survived a smallpox epidemic which left his face pockmarked and he also had another close encounter with death soon afterwards when his left arm was mangled in the wheel of a horse-drawn cart that left it withered for the rest of his days after recovering Joseph continued to shine academically but also gained a reputation for fighting and being naughty with his classmates but despite his unruly nature was soon recommended by his teacher to join the spiritual seminary school at Tbilisi and was finally admitted in 1894 after this Joseph continued to perform well and even had some of his poetry published in local newspapers but his performance soon went into a steep decline after he began to openly state he was an atheist in class and was often disrespectful to the local monks this contempt for the old order was seen increased when yoseop began to read forbidden publications such as nikolaich Ermakov Sookie's famous novel what is to be done and the notorious capital by carl marx of whom he subsequently became great admirer Yosef then joined secret Socialist Workers meetings with in Georgia as resentment and anger was growing in the region at the oppression of the Russian Czarist government and soon after this he began to become active in the local resistance and left the spiritual seminary school as a result by the end of the 19th century the Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia with an iron fist for 300 years and although various attempts have been made to modernize the country is still lagged behind his Western rivals as its economy was largely based on agriculture rather than industry at this time a third of Russia's 126 million people were living in serfdom even though had been abolished in 1861 and the vast majority of the populace also lived in abject poverty and had little or no chance of an education or advancement spending their lives tilling the soil or serving in the army the government of the country was also highly centralized during this period with ultimate power lying in the hands of the czars who had near total control over virtually every aspect of Russian life and had along with the deeply conservative Orthodox Church ruled the Russian people's hearts and minds from time immemorial but this grip on power was beginning to erode by the time of Stalin's birth as resentment within the country was reaching boiling point and was fueled by technology such as printing presses becoming more and more widespread which meant that when the restrictions on the press were lifted in 1912 the reality of modern affairs became accessible to the literate citizens of Russia and political expression became more prevalent in many ways the centralization of power was Russia's greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness as the fortunes the Romanov dynasty as well as those of the nation as a whole largely depended on the qualities or deficiencies of the sovereign which had until 1894 bins are Alexander the 3rd Alexander had ascended to the Russian throne in 1881 after his own father Alexander the second who was arguably the most liberal of the Tsar's had been assassinated by socialist radicals in a bomb attack just before he was due to announce the creation of a parliament within the Russian state which was designed to give the people a greater say in governance enraged by the death of his father Alexander the 3rd scrapped his father's reforms and initiated an authoritarian clamp down on the country ending any hope of a more libertarian Russia this decision more than any other would later unleash widespread resentment and hatred across the country but as Alexander the third was a strong capable Tsar the likelihood of revolution was remote as any discontent was stamped on mercilessly as soon as it rose then in 1894 Alexander the third died suddenly of kidney disease and the relatively young age of 49 I was replaced by his timid and inexperienced son nicholas ii who possessed average intelligence and was nowhere near as capable or ruthless as his late father nicholas then continued with Alexander's authoritarian policies but as he did not have the wherewithal or willpower to carry them out effectively it was not long before unrest and revolution began to rear their ugly heads and over the next two decades the Tsar's incompetence and weakness slowly allowed those within the country who were now toughened by oppression and filled with hatred at their lot in life to rise up and overthrow the Romanov dynasty Georgia had itself been a part of the Russian Empire since 1801 but had since the assassination of alexander ii been relegated to the status of a mere colony and restrictions were implemented on his population such as the learning of the georgian language this inevitably only fueled the flames of resentment within Georgia over the following decades and also provided the perfect conditions for the proliferation of radical anti-establishment ideas in 1899 Joseph began works as a meteorologist in Tbilisi which was an easy stress-free job meaning that he was able to read more revolutionary literature whilst at work and he soon developed an even more fierce hatred and opposition of the Czarist regime as well as the Orthodox Church during this period Joseph also began to give talks to local workers and attend clandestine meetings in which he organized strikes in local factories which inevitably attracted the attention of the Czar a secret police or a Khurana and to avoid arrest he then went into hiding and lived off the charity of his friends and socialist supporters Joseph then joined the fledgling Russian social democratic Labor Party or our SDLP in 1899 which was a left-wing socialist movement had been founded in 1898 that would eventually become the Communist Party in 1912 the tactics the party used were often infiltration and agitation where members would obtain jobs in local factories in which they would then stir up opposition against the workers employers as well as the local authorities that would then result in strikes and demonstrations which would often result in fighting with the local police Yosef was particularly gifted at this kind of agitation or rabble-rousing and he soon proved himself to be one of the more radical or hardline members of the party as he had a reputation for promoting the use of violence which was a tactic he would come to excel at over the coming years he then rose rapidly within the tably sea branch of the rsd LP and helped to organise further strikes in the local area which resulted in him being nominated to join the Committee of the local party in 1901 but fearing arrest he then moved to Batumi on the coast of the Black Sea where he again organized protests at one of which many people were shot by the local police a year later Yosef was involved in the instigation of an attack on a local prison where several party leaders were being detained during which over a dozen of the attackers were killed and after he organized yet another protest on the day of his comrades funerals he was arrested and sentenced in 1903 to three years exile in Siberia this was at the time not a death sentence in all but name as it would later become as people were sent to Siberia as a punishment for a definite period after which they could return but Yosef would later use this punishment as one of his instruments of terror and order the Exile of millions of dissidents political enemies and class traitors to labor camps in the frozen wastes of the Russian hinterland despite being exiled Yosef had no intention of respecting his duration and eventually managed to return to Tbilisi where he helped edit an underground newspaper called the proletarian struggle in which he advocated for the Georgian branch of the rsd LP to split off from the Russian branches as he began to become disillusioned with the movements methods and objectives it was also around this time that divisions began to occur within our SDLP which would eventually split into various sub factions or groups including the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin and the Mensheviks under Julius Martov the Bolsheviks were seen as the hardline wing of the party who advocated strict membership rules as well as the nationalization or collectivization of farmland whilst the Mensheviks argued that worker productivity would be increased if a degree of private ownership was maintained Josef who was himself a hardliner as well as being pro violence naturally sided with the Bolsheviks as he hated many local Menshevik party members within Georgia who were also in the minority then on the 22nd of January 1905 at a mass protest in st. Petersburg Zara's troops opened fire on thousands of unarmed civilians in which hundreds were killed and many times more were injured this caused large-scale unrest and civil disorder throughout the country which would become known as the 1905 revolution and in Georgia itself rioting and ethnic violence broke out between various groups which prompted Yosef to form the Bolshevik battle squad with which he undertook robberies raided arms caches stole printing equipment and attacked government troops having now established himself as a leader within the Bolsheviks in Georgia Yosef was then sent in November of 1905 to st. Petersburg where a party conference was taking place and it was at this meeting that Yosef would meet Vlad domaine Lenin for the first time he then a year later travelled to the Swedish capital Stockholm to attend the 4th Congress of the our SDLP at which a vote was taken to restrict the raising of party funds to peaceful means only which both Lenin and Yosef disagreed with and they then determined to continue with their armed robbery's regardless as a result of this Yosef increased his campaign of violent robberies culminating in him planning along with Lenin a notorious robbery when an armed convoy in Tbilisi which was carrying a large amount of money to the Imperial Bank and after the gunfire had died down around 40 Bolsheviks dead but Yosef escaped unharmed with the loot as well as armed robbery's Yosef also undertook other forms of illegal money raising such as kidnapping the children of wealthy locals and holding them to ransom but this spree of violence and intimidation soon enabled the Czarist secret police to catch up with him and he was eventually arrested and exiled once again in 1912 Yosef was asked by Lenin to join the Bolshevik Central Committee which he agreed to but he was then later that he arrested once again and sent into exile but soon escaped and went underground in st. Petersburg where he secretly edited the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda meaning truth and it was whilst working on this newspaper that Yosef started to use the pseudonym Stalin meaning steel which he would be known as for the rest of his life indeed it was the editorship of Pravda that brought Stalin to the attention of many Bolsheviks within the Communist Party and also cemented his position as one of Lenin's right-hand men until by the outbreak of the first world war he was one of the most influential men in the movement over the coming years Starlin was arrested and exiled on several occasions and after the first world war broke out and the situation on the front became more and more desperate both he and his fellow exiles were conscripted into the Russian army although he was then after medical ruled out of military service due to his disabled left arm Stalin then requested to be allowed to serve the rest of his exile in Siberia which was accepted but whilst he was there the February Revolution of 1917 broke out in Saint Petersburg which culminated in nicholas ii being forced to abdicate the russian throne and he was then replaced by a provisional government headed by alexander kerensky but the new regime's grip over the country was still relatively weak meaning that the influence of the far left in the shape of the Bolsheviks continued to grow unchecked over the coming months and eventually after a series of crackdowns Lenin secured a majority within the party to try coup and in the early hours of the 7th of November 1917 the Bolsheviks took control of power stations in st. Petersburg along with other important public services such as the telephone exchange then the soviet controlled warship the aurora which was anchored off the shore of the city opened fire and are now surrounded Winter Palace which soon afterwards forced the provisional government surrender meaning that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were now in power in Russia and they then began the process of consolidation in this clampdown Lenin use newly formed Bolshevik secret police or the checker to crush anyone who is deemed to pose a threat to the new regime and estimates indicate that over a hundred thousand people were killed over the following months many consisting of Czarist supporters the middle class and the intellectual elite the capital of the newly instated Russian Soviet Federative Republic was then moved to Moscow mainly because of his centralized location and also because Lenin wanted to distance the new regime from saint-petersburg which have been the Zara's capital since the reign of Peter the Great despite this success Russia was still at war with Germany and Austria and as the dilapidated Russian economy had been unable to sustain the army during the conflict the resulting food shortages discontent and widespread chaos when the Lenin was eager to sue for peace another reason for peace being necessary was that the Bolsheviks needed to consolidate their power over Russia and any continuation of the war could potentially weaken their tenuous grip over the country but their position was soon strengthened when a ceasefire was agreed with Germany on the 15th of December 1917 and hostilities with the central powers then formally ceased with the signing of the Treaty of brest-litovsk on the 3rd of March 1918 despite the conclusion of Russia's involvement in the first world war there was still fierce resistance against Lenin's regime within the country itself as the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October Revolution had effectively unify people from all corners of the political spectrum against the Communists who became known as the white Russians and it was not long before fighting broke out between the two factions igniting the conflict known to history as the Russian civil war this war effectively split Russia into dozens of regions and in some cases States therefore one another for supremacy over or independence from Moscow however the Bolsheviks with the help of Leon Trotsky who had established a million strong fighting force by this time in the shape of the Red Army was eventually able after fierce fighting to subdue the government's enemies as well as the intervention of foreign powers on the side of the White Russians and till by the 1920s they held the upper hand and controlled the country once again as food and supplies were often scarce in Russia during the conflict Stalin who had returned from exile in the aftermath of the February Revolution in 1918 and had been an important supporter in Lenin's later coup was sentence of writs in which he would later name Stalingrad in order to procure food supplies and oversee the Red Army's campaign against the whites in the region during his mission of food procurement Stalin ordered the execution of anyone who defied his orders and his tenure as the commander of the Red Army in the region was largely met with criticism from his Bolshevik Party comrades who disapproved of his strategy of sending mass numbers of Red Army troops against the whites which often resulted in massive losses it is clear that in their campaign against the white Russians the Bolsheviks had started to use methods which far outweighed the former Czarist regime in terms of brutality and ruthlessness although to be fair both sides in the Russian Civil War committed to trosset ease however it is clear that one of the most effective and relentless advocates of the communist policy of terror was Stalin he was more and more seen as a hardliner within the regime as he more than anything wanted to eradicate resistance in all its forms perhaps the most famous example of the increasingly ruthless approach the communists employed then came on the 17th of July in 1918 when nicholas ii and his wife and children were executed by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg where they were being held in which desire and his family were peppered with bullets and then bayonetted and clubbed to death by their communist captors during this period Stalin was assigned to various military commands during the latter stages of the Russian civil war in which he proved to be ruthless in dealing with the deserters and was ultimately rewarded by the government with the order of the red banner for his services to the Communist cause shortly after this Stalin was also involved in the polish-soviet war which had started when the newly re-established Republic of Poland had sought to capitalize on the state of upheaval within Russia in order to expand its eastern frontier during the conflict Stalin often disobeyed orders and again received criticism from within the Bolshevik Party of his increasingly harsh methods however the war eventually ended in poland's favor and a peace treaty was signed shortly afterwards as Russia was still too weak to fight on multiple fronts this treaty combined with the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War finally allowed them to concentrate their efforts on internal affairs which in the early years of the regime's rule was centered around centralizing control of the country in virtually every respect however in the early 1920s opposition to the Soviet regime resurfaced in the shape of strikes and unrest particularly from the country's rural population who had by and large not been involved in the Communist seizure of power and what on the whole supporters of the deposed czar or the white Russians the Civil War had also caused massive upheaval across the country itself as although the Soviets controlled the urban centers nearly 80% of the Russian population were rural peasants whose lives and farms had been most affected by the fighting and soon led to widespread food shortages across the country that caused a mass exodus from Russia's northern cities as its urban population migrated south to find food this migration was a problem for the Bolsheviks because the vast majority of their supporters were industrial workers and city dwellers who were now becoming more and more dissatisfied with the regime's inability to secure adequate food supplies to resolve this issue the Soviets then ramped up their policy on food requisitioning that was put in place to concentrate Russian agriculture output and feed the Red Army as well as the dwindling population of the country's urban centers such as Moscow but this policy soon resulted in mass starvation and famine across rural southern Russia as hundreds of thousands of farmers crops were simply taken from them which left both they and their families with no source of income or food and culminated in the Russian Famine of 1921 to 1922 in which several million peasants died from starvation this dire situation then prompted Lenin in 1921 to make concessions in his new economic policy which allowed state industry and private enterprise to co-exist and replace food requisitioning with taxation that allowed the country's farmers to keep and sell the crops they produced this policy was largely successful in restoring adequate food production however it was unpopular with certain members of the communist regime such as Trotsky who argued that the state should repossess all worker output whilst economic moderates such as Lenin and Stalin were in favor of a degree of private enterprise so long as it was controlled and directed by the state Starlin support of lenin had made him an important figure within the regime by this time and was then in 1922 nominated to become the party's new general secretary which was an administrative position that placed him in charge a party membership along with disciplinarian duties this role also gave Stalin a foothold in virtually every aspect of the governance of Russia as after all the party was the state and his power was highly centralized the responsibility of Stalin's new role was spread across the entirety of the Soviet government and therefore the country this meant he was able to gather information on potential enemies and he then gradually and quietly began to accumulate power through ever-expanding bureaucracy which lay at the root of his eventual rise then in May 1922 Lenin suffered a severe stroke which left him partially paralyzed and bedridden although he was still able to make decisions and dictate policy and Stalin who is now his right-hand man acted as a messenger between him and the Council of people's commissar which kept him fully informed of all political events and decisions but also enabled him to control Lenin's communications soon after this Lenin began to complain to his wife about Stalin saying he was unintelligent and later perhaps fearing death was imminent dictated document that is now known as Lenin's Testament in which he urged for a reform within the party's ruling elite and criticized his leaders and also recommended that Stalin should be removed from his position as general secretary this document which Lenin wanted read out on the 12th Party Congress could have if it had ever seen the light of day ended Stalin's career but both he and his fellow party leaders who were also criticised in Lenin's Testament had the document suppressed and did not allow it to be released to subordinate party members it was around this time in late December of 1922 that the separate Soviet republics of Russia Ukraine Belarus and the Transcaucasian Soviet which was comprised of states such as Armenia Azerbaijan and Georgia agreed to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that would last until 1991 and would with Stalin's help become the second most powerful nation on earth in a matter of decades Lenin however would never see his brainchild reached the zenith or his power as he died on the 21st of January 1924 and the major figures within the Soviet regime then began to vie with one another for control of the Communist Party and Stalin as general secretary then began to position himself as one leading candidate to succeed his former master perhaps his biggest rival in this power struggle came in the shape of Leon Trotsky who had joined the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks just before the October Revolution of 1917 and had founded the Red Army and led it to victory in the Russian Civil War which made him hero in many people's eyes within the Communist Party and secured his position as one of Lenin's most trusted lieutenants initially Trotsky seemed at least by outward appearances to be the favorite to succeed Lenin however Stalin had over the previous years been using his position as general secretary which controlled party appointments to surround himself with loyal followers who owed their promotions to him and meant he was gradually able to wrest control of the party away from Trotsky and his allies and fill its leading positions with persons answerable to him Trotsky himself then began to criticize Stalin whom he saw as a rightist arguing the Lenin's capitalist new economic policy should be reversed and then began to ally himself with other leading Bolshevik members known as the Left Opposition and later the United Opposition who were opposed to the general Secretary's ever-increasing grip of the Soviet Union Stalin's positions general secretary also gave him another advantage over his opponents as he now had control over the now widespread bureaucracy across Russia which fed him information on political developments as well as people and it is certainly fair to say that even though Stalin in his early life had proven himself to be brutal and ruthless he was also incredibly intelligent and cunning Stalin then capitalizing on trotsky's growing weakness and isolation within the party that lined himself with influential people within the regime many of whom owed their careers to him until within a matter of months his rival was alienated and excluded from the country's governance this policy of surrounding himself with very effective yes-men proved to be extremely effective in securing power for Stalin as well as maintaining it but eventually proved to be counterproductive as later in World War two government officials and Red Army generals were terrified of making independent decisions in fear of provoking the bosses wrath for the time being at least Starlin was secured the center as bureaucratic or spider's web which enabled him to replace his enemies from important government positions until Trotsky himself was removed as the people's Commissioner of military and naval affairs in January of 1925 I was then also expelled from the Central Committee in October of 1927 and later from the Soviet Union altogether in 1929 during his exile Trotsky became the figurehead of the opposition to his old rival and went on to write numerous books and articles condemning his former comrade until finally Starling ordered his secret services to assassinate his arch enemy which succeeded after Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe by a Soviet agent at his house in Mexico City and after being taken to hospital died from his injuries on the 21st of August 1940 trotsky's exile meant that Josef Stalin was now the leader of a coalition within the Central Committee of the Soviet regime and as most of his fellow committee members were under his thumb he was now the boss in all but name as the role of the head of government lay in the hands of his right-hand man fascists love Molotov who was one of his most trusted supporters Molotov would later play a crucial role in the re-establishment of the collectivization of Agriculture and would also in his later role of Minister of Foreign Affairs become one of the most famous and recognized members of Stein's in a circle as he met with world leaders including Hitler and the lead up to World War two for some time during the 1920s there were growing concerns that Lenin's new economic policy was to caps list as there were fears that the peasant farmers who had benefited from Lenin's reforms were profiteering by controlling the sale of their crops and this sense of distrust was then further compounded by grain supplies plummeting by 70% between 1926 and 1927 which prompted Stalin to revise Lenin's economic policy as he could not afford Russia's urban centers to experience food shortages yet again another reason for the need for economic change was the relative backwardness of the Soviet industry that lagged decades behind its Western rivals and it was this combined with the dwindling food production that finally prompted Starling to enact the first of his five-year plans from 1928 to 1930 - in which collectivization was reintroduced and the growth of heavy industry was given priority this resulted over the coming years in hundreds of factories mines and plants being opened across the Soviet Union that doubled the country's industrial workforce from three to six million in five years and also increased industrial output by over one hundred percent this rapid and forced industrialization which arguably came at the cost of tens of thousands of peasants limes eventually would give the Soviet Union the industrial capability it needed to maintain the war against Nazi Germany as without it the country would almost certainly have not been able to manufacture the thousands of tanks aircraft and other war materials that were required in order to claim victory another part of Stalin's first five-year plan was the ramping up of his policy of collectivization which inevitably meant that the soviet union's farmers who had hitherto enjoyed a degree of freedom or private ownership would have to be brought into line under state control these affluent farmers who were known as cool acts were a class of landowner who had through reforms in the 19th century and Lenin's new economic policy accumulated some degree of wealth as they have been allowed to sell their crops instead of handing them over to government on the condition they paid taxes instead this was effectively capitalism in many people's eyes within the Soviet regime and it was this assertion combined with the drop in food production and rumors of profiteering that prompted Stalin and the Central Committee to order the seizure of the kulaks grain supply along with their farms by force after which it was declared that they were to be liquidated as a class resulting in hundreds of thousands of arrests across the country estimates vary but the number of cool acts who were either arrested sent to Siberia or killed is thought to number in the hundreds of thousands and very likely the millions but this policy of arrest exile and eradication meant that the class of people who are primarily responsible for producing most of Russia's grain was wiped out in the space of a few years and would eventually lead to mass starvation and famine the cool acts were then replaced with collectives and communes which involve peasants working on the now state-owned farms although as those involved in this state-run system of agriculture did not own the land they worked on or indeed the food they produced productivity slumped as there were no positive incentives for the communal farmers to work hard riots and uprisings then broke out across the Soviet Union in the late 1920s as a result of these policies that were then stamped out by the Red Army and NKVD which controlled internal affairs across the Soviet Union and would eventually be combined with the secret police in 1934 and become Stalin's most dreaded tool of terror and suppression Stalin then in 1929 enacted a further cultural clamp down on the population of the Soviet Union in which schools were brought fully under state control as were newspapers and libraries and religion was also effectively outlawed and churches were either burnt to the ground or demolished in short Stalin was seeking to bring about total state control over every aspect of life from cradle to grave and some have since suggested that he was merely concerned with gaining absolute power over the Soviet population but it could also be argued that he saw state control as a necessity in order to suppress ideas such as individualism which had to be prevented in order to lay the ground for a true communist society which religion money and social classes were not a part of in essence Stalin faced a choice between allowing a degree of private enterprise to continue as well as freedom of thought and speech which would have potentially resulted in the death of socialism and by extension communism itself or enacted the principles of socialism which inevitably meant that he would have to end all individual freedoms as many people throughout the country simply did not want to live under a socialist state capitalist historians argue that this is perhaps the greatest weakness that lays in the heart of socialism which seeks to end class structure within nations as well as private ownership in order to pave the way for a true communist utopia that is free of money and the state as implementing socialism is entirely dependent on the population of a given nation wanting to give up their private property which has always resulted in every country collectivization has been attempted in the state having to use force which is arguably best exemplified by Stalin's Russia in essence Stalin's solution to the resistance of those who did not agree with his policies of collectivization was the use of force and suppression which inevitably meant that the state control of speech and thought was also necessary in order to crush dissent modern-day socialists in the Western world have argued that the path to true socialism must lie in gaining the approval of a given population for collectivization via democratic means however as no socialist country has successfully enacted a class free communal society the validity of true socialism as a form of governance not to mention his economic merits remains hotly debated and deeply contentious to say the least in the case of Stalin's Soviet Union at least the state was everything state farms state schools state libraries state industry and everything a person thought or did was influenced and dictated by the state and any dissension no matter how minor was stamped on with merciless efficiency Stalin and his allies were in effect bringing about the most ruthless and all-powerful dictatorship in human history as control was totaled by the early 1930s an outside influence was zero but these policies of the centralization of power soon backfired in early 1932 when a particularly harsh winter in the Ukraine and southern Russia along with collectivized farming resulted in an unprecedented famine that would ultimately result in the deaths of nearly three million people this was despite the fact the grain harvest in the Soviet Union was roughly the same as in 1930 but the government's increasingly harsh requisitions of grain resulted in the majority of the country's food being sent to its population centers culminating in massive food shortages in rural areas another cause of these shortages was that Stalin had enacted the policy of selling the Soviet Union's grain supplies abroad for which he in return received aid and materials for the country's industrial base that he was attempting to modernize and enlarge at breakneck speed many have argued that this famine was entirely avoidable and that Stalin's policies of redistribution had been its direct cause although he himself blamed subversive elements within the Ukraine and southern Russia and attempted to deflect the blame from himself what then followed is known as the great terror and the great purge which was instigated after the murder of Stalin's close friend Sergei Kirov the head of the Communist Party in Leningrad formerly st. Petersburg in December of 1934 some have claimed that it was in fact Stalin who ordered the murder of Kirov as he suspected him of disloyalty and was resentful of his growing popularity within the communist party whatever the reason and whoever gave the order Stalin used his friend's death as a pretext to ordered the arrest and execution of anyone he thought was complicit in the incident as well as anyone who had opposed him in the preceding years during the great purge which lasted from 1936 to 1938 Stalin ordered the NKVD to undertake massive clamp downs on the Soviet population the Red Army and the Communist Party itself in which potential dissidents were arrested including many high-ranking government officials who were often exiled or executed after public show trials estimates vary but the total number of deaths that resulted from this purge is thought to have been as high as one and a quarter million people including former aristocrats business owners and clergymen many of whom posed no kind of threat to Stalin who even had the wife's of many of his closest followers arrested and sometimes killed in order to terrify them into submission another weapon in Stalin's arsenal of Terror with a dual axe which was a government-run system of forced labor camps that had been set up in the early 30s in mostly remote areas where people were sent as punishment and where many cases worked to death as many as 18 million people passed through the gulag system between 1930 and 1950 but the exact number of deaths is still unknown however some historians state that the total number to be around one and a half million people as previously mentioned a major part of Stalin's Great Purge was his liquidation of the officer corps of the Red Army which was instigated to rid any opposition within the Armed Forces and further consolidate Stalin's control in which hundreds of Red Army officers and generals were arrested and executed as well as former White Army soldiers from amongst the civilian population the historical consensus is that this purge severely weakened the fighting capability of the Red Army as many of his best and brightest were arrested exiled or killed meaning that when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union the Army's leadership had in effect been crippled and this arguably contributed to many of the massive defeats and losses the Russians experienced in the early stages of the war by this time Germany was a rising power in Europe and Stalin was well aware of Adolf Hitler's hatred of Bolshevism and as a result starts to prepare for a possible war with Germany but due to the purges of the Red Army its ability to fight was minimal to say the least and its equipment although plentiful was in many cases outdated or in a state of disrepair - by time the Soviet premier then pursued a tactic of appeasement with Germany during the late 1930s that culminated in Russia signing a non-aggression pact with Germany on the 23rd of August 1939 and after Germany defeated the poles in their invasion one month later the Soviets occupied the eastern half of Poland which had been arranged as part of the agreement between the two nations during this occupation the Red Army and the NKVD captured thousands of Polish officers who were later executed on Stalin's orders along with members of the country's intelligentsia in the Katty and massacre of April and May 1940 in which upwards of 22,000 poles were murdered this occupation of the western half of Poland then prompted both Britain and France to declare war on Germany on the 3rd of September 1939 and anticipating as many did that the war between the Allies and the Germans would be a long drawn-out affair much the same as World War one Stalin offered Germany support in the shape of food and oil supplies whilst Germany was preoccupied with the Western powers Stalin turned his attention to his northern neighbor Finland which he saw as an easy target as he wanted to use the country as a buffer zone against the possible future war with Hitler and also wanted to secure naval ports for the Soviet Navy in the Baltic Sea Stalin then attempted to intimidate the Finns into submission by offering their government an ultimatum in October of 1939 to hand over the border region of Finland to Soviet control along with numerous Baltic Islands and also allow Soviet troops to be stationed in Finnish territory but the Finns refused the Soviet demands and after negotiations broke down Stalin ordered a full-scale invasion of the country which began on the 30th of November 1939 despite the fact that the Red Army was the largest on earth at this time the Finns who had constructed an elaborate defense network along their southern border wore down the advance of Stalin's troops in which he lost some 250,000 men whilst the Finns only lost 25,000 this was seen as a humiliation for Stalin himself as his Red Army had been unable to steamroller the numerically inferior Finnish army and after a peace treaty was signed in March 1940 that secured the buffer zone that the Soviets had wanted a rapid overhaul of the Red Army was instigated over the coming months in which tactics training and equipment were reformed and overhauled Stalin who was himself responsible for the massive losses the Red Army had endured privately acknowledged they had made mistakes in the lead-up to the war and afterwards sought to reform the leadership of the Red Army by sacking his defense commissar Clemente Voroshilov and replace him with Semyon Timoshenko it could be argued however that Stalin's disastrous invasion of Finland in the end worked to his benefit as many of the deficiencies within the Red Army were identified during the conflict which enabled the Soviets to prepare for the later German invasion the flipside to this is that the ineffectiveness of the Red Army in the Winter War as it is now known only further encouraged Adolphe Hitler to hasten his invasion plans of the Soviet Union and at one point he even stated in reference to Stalin's regime you only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down next Stalin turned his attention to the Baltic states of Estonia Latvia and Lithuania as well as northern Romania which he again wanted to use as buffer zones between him and Germany and after they were incorporated into the Union of Soviet republics in August 1940 mass arrests and deportations were instigated to subdued the local population during his early years as Soviet premier Stalin regarded France and in particular Britain as greater threats than Germany as they had supported the White Army during the Civil War however as fascism and in particular German National Socialism began to manifest itself during the 1920s and early 1930s the Man of Steel was forced to take the threat of Hitler's Third Reich seriously and thusly began to build up his nation's armed forces it could also be argued that the signing of the non-aggression pact with Germany gave Stalin a full sense of security as he understandably calculated that a war between Germany and the Western powers would last for years and would give him plenty of time to build up his defenses the strength of which he hoped would make Hitler think twice before starting any war then both to Stalin and to the world surprised Germany defeated the French and Allied forces in just six weeks between May to June 1940 culminating in the French surrender which left Britain alone in the war and Hitler after failing to invade the iron nation during the Battle of Britain perhaps inevitably made the Soviet Union his next target this invasion which was scheduled to begin in the early summer of 1941 was codenamed red beard or Barbarossa after the G tonic King that had fought the Slavs in the Middle Ages and was comprised of three massive army thrusts involving three million German troops who would use blitzkrieg or lightning war to surround and annihilate Stalin's forces before driving onwards towards Leningrad in the north Kiev in the Ukraine as well as Moscow itself Stalin in contrast to popular myth received no concrete intelligence on Hitler's true intentions before the invasion began as the report he did receive vague or unclear therefore he continued to stall for time as he believed the German reassurances that the build-up of his troops on the Soviet border would not part of an invasion and hoped at worst they were to be used to threaten him and were part of an impending ultimatum the reality was however that Hitler was planning to invade the Soviet Union and he then gave the go-ahead for the invasion by broadcasting the word Dusseldorf on the afternoon on the 21st of June 1941 and at around 3:15 in the morning on the 22nd of June Operation Barbarossa began with bombing raids on cities across the western Soviet Union as far afield as Leningrad and after a massive artillery barrage had ceased Hitler's forces crossed the Soviet border over the coming weeks the Germans cut through the Russians like a knife through butter and it seemed to all including Stalin that disastrous defeat was certain however despite the colossal losses the Red Army sustained during the opening stages of Barbarossa which numbered in the millions it ultimately managed to mount one of the greatest military comebacks in human history and defeated Hitler's Germany once and for all another myth which is often cited about Stalin is that he failed to prepare the Soviet Union for the war with Hitler however when the fact is considered that the Red Army in 1941 had the most men tanks and aircraft of any army in the world the Man of Steel can hardly be said to have neglected the country's defenses if anything the Soviet Red Army was too large or on wildy as resupplying and equipping it with modern equipment inevitably took time and as the Russians had never fought a modern large-scale industrialized war against a major European power before the true effectiveness of its armed forces as well as its equipment was still unknown at this time it should also be remembered that the German army in 1941 had just defeated the armies of France and Britain in a very short period of time therefore it should be no surprise that the Russians folded under the German onslaught during the early stages of Barbarossa as they were fighting the most highly organized fighting machine in the world at that time since World War two many theories have been put forward regarding why and how the Soviet Union was triumphant over Nazi Germany some claim that Hitler was incompetent and simply declared war in the wrong countries at the wrong time whilst others state that it was a close-run thing and could have gone either way and many often claim that Stalin himself was incompetent and only won the war because he allowed his generals to do their jobs in truth or the parties involved including Stalin Hitler and all the leading generals and military commanders on both sides made massive mistakes during the war in Russia therefore it is overly simplistic to attribute blame or praise to any one person or site any given mistake as being a turning point in the conflict although the Soviet Union was far poorer than the Western powers its greatest advantage in its war with Hitler was arguably the sheer size of its population which in the early 1940s totalled around 200 million people whilst Germany on the other hand had a population of 90 million including Austria Czechoslovakia and occupied Poland more importantly around 45% of the population in the Soviet Union was under the age of 20 in 1941 compared with only 33 percent of the German population meaning this starting to cool on around 45 million men in total if needed whilst Hitler had a maximum of around 15 million men of fighting age this meant that Germany had a far smaller pool of potential troops to call upon during the war on the Eastern Front as by 1943 both the German and Russian armies that had started the conflict had effectively been wiped out but the Russians were soon able to replace their lost comrades with men of fighting age whilst Germany by the end of the war had to call upon reserves of men who were not a fighting age such as children and even pensioners these figures do not include the 800,000 women who served in the Soviet armed forces during World War two many of whom were deployed in combat roles including fighter pilots bomber crews and even snipers one of the most famous of whom Tatiana cost Rina omastar staggering 120 kills during the early stages of the war before she herself died in hand-to-hand combat in 1943 and was later posthumously awarded the title of hero of the Soviet Union another important and better known factor was geography as the Russians could afford to lose massive expanses of ground to the Germans after the invasion began which in turn stretched their supply lines to the limit and combined with freezing Russian winters and the ill preparedness of Germany's industry to supply a large-scale war soon led to disaster this of course ignores the massive impact the Western Allies had on Germany during the conflict across multiple theaters such as the blockade of Germany by Britain's Royal Navy its Arctic Convoys to Russia the Allied bombings of Germany throughout the war the German Enigma codes being cracked and the axis defeat in North Africa which in terms of the troops lost was comparable to Stalingrad it should also be noted that the first stage of the war in Russia from a German perspective were incredibly successful and the fact that the Vale marked maintained its fighting capabilities in the Soviet Union for so long against such overwhelming odds is a testament to the talent of its commanders as well as the fighting ability of its soldiers as the near total success that Hitler's armies enjoyed during the early stages of the war have as much to do with German military brilliance as they have with Soviet deficiencies in the initial stages of Hitler's invasion his soldiers wiped out entire Soviet divisions who often surrendered by the hundreds of thousands and after the fall of the city of Minsk a week after the start of the invasion Stalin was left in such a state of shock that he locked himself away for days resulting in the paralysis of the country's government since world war ii much has been made of the fact that stalin at the start of the war at least acted in competently as he refused to move troops up to his border with Germany before the fighting began however it could be argued that this was the correct strategy as the primary goal of blitzkrieg was to surround and destroy the enemy forces in the field therefore Stalin choosing to hold back large portions of his troops in the lead-up to the invasion could be said to have been the correct decision as they would have almost certainly been eradicated in the first few days of Operation Barbarossa if they had been stationed closer to the German border as well as this recent research undertaken by German military historian States the Soviet counter-attacks caused severe delays and losses to the verb marked in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa and in the end delayed them for long enough to make the seizure of Moscow in 1941 impossible it should also be remembered that the German army and German industry were geared to fighting short-term quick decisive Wars thusly the longer styling could prolong the conflict the more likely a positive outcome became as Hitler's armies were at their strongest at the very started the invasion and with every day that passed his numbers dwindled his resources declined and its supply lines lengthened in short although many of Stalin's counter-offensives early in the war results in colossal losses he had more than enough reserves behind the front to replace them as in a brutal war of ideologies which the Russian invasion became the normal rules of warfare were increasingly ignored and each side fought with a ferocity that was hitherto unknown in the annals of warfare [Music] essentially world war ii in the east was about numbers which stalin came to appreciate more than anyone certainly more than hitler as he understood that the key to victory lay in manpower efficient and plentiful logistics and perhaps most of all in industrial capacity an excellent example of this soviet numerical advantage in equipment was in the production figures of their most celebrated tank the t-34 which the Russians were able to produce 35,000 of between 1941 and 1945 and these numbers were then added to by them producing nearly 30,000 t-34 85 tanks which were the t-34s upgraded with an 85 millimeter gun that was designed to take on the powerful German Panther and Tiger tanks these figures compare starkly with the Germans producing around 50,000 tanks from the pre-war period in the mid to late 30s until 1945 which included all variants of German tank design from the Panzer 1 which was a light tank fitted with machine guns to the massive Tiger twos or King Tigers in short the Russians produced more models of one world class tank in four years than the entire German tank output from the mid 30s until 1945 excluding self-propelled guns which if included in these figures means that the Soviets produced some 100,000 tanks and self-propelled guns in four years while the Germans only produced around 63,000 tanks and self-propelled guns in 10 years also when one takes into consideration that tens of thousands of American Sherman tanks as well as all the other types of Allied tanks and self-propelled guns the Germans were vastly out produced and outnumbered on all fronts in terms of tanks and self-propelled guns by nearly three to one these figures also exclude aircraft transport vehicles food oil and manpower which were limited for the Axis powers but almost unlimited for the Russians and the Western Allies another staggering fact about the Soviet Union during World War two was the demolition transport and rebuilding of hundreds of factories in the wake of the German invasion which involved entire industrial complexes being taken apart and moved by railcar sometimes for thousands of miles to the east where they were then rebuilt safely out of the reach of Hitler's Luftwaffe Soviet archives and records stayed that in each case up to 10,000 rail cars were required to move a single factory which must have presented a colossal logistical nightmare for the people responsible for overseeing this mass transportation and also caused a huge amount of upheaval to the Soviet rail network which was already strained to the limit with moving and supplying the Red Army let alone the transportation of as many as 1,500 factories all in all these mind-bending figures paint a picture of a country which was by 1942 completely geared to fight a long-term industrialized war where in contrast Hitler did not place the German economy on a total war footing until well after the war was lost therefore it could be said that the most crucial factor in the Soviet Union winning the war against Germany was simply the fact that Stalin's regime did not collapse and it was almost entirely down to his own willpower determination and absolute control that continuing the fight against Hitler's invasion was possible let alone winnable in comparison when one looks at the Russian defeat in the First World War the main reason the country capitulated to the Germans was the fall of the Czar's regime itself were in contrast in 1812 the Tsar demand the Russian population had remained steadfast in the face of Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion and one as a consequence therefore the fact that Stalin's Russia did not collapse in 1941 and halted the German advance outside of Moscow made victory order more likely which was then made all but certain by the Americans entering the war at the end of that year after the German reversal in Moscow in the winter of 1941 the story of World War two in Russia was one of continuing heavy losses on both sides until the strength of the German army was finally broken in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk after which the Soviets ground down German resistance until in 1945 the country collapsed and with Berlin surrounded Hitler committed suicide although Stalin is rightly considered as being responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his own people it must be remembered and respected that both he and Russia itself defeated Hitler's Germany during World War two losing nearly 26 million troops and civilians in the process and it is hard to see how anyone else other than Stalin could have held the Soviet Union together during the conflict as his near total control of the country was essential in securing victory this in a nutshell is one of the greatest paradoxes of Stalin's Russia as although he committed some of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated in the history of mankind without the resolve of the Man of Steel as well as the massive sacrifices of the Russian people during world war ii the later Allied invasions of Italy and France would have almost certainly have ended in failure as Hitler's armies would have been far too strong to overcome in many ways World War two transform the Soviet Union into the world power it would remain until the early 1990s but despite the massive size of its armed forces which to Wharf the American military in 1945 and occupied the entirety of Eastern Europe the United States still emerge from the conflict as the world's only superpower as it had been the first to produce nuclear weapons Stalin had known that the Americans were developing an atomic bomb for some time and discussions have been ongoing in the Soviet Union since the 1930s regarding the possibility of building such a weapon and after the Americans delivered the coup de Grasse on the Japanese with the aid of nuclear weapons in 1945 the Soviet program was greatly accelerated until in August 1949 the Russians tested their first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan this made so he had Russia the world's second superpower along with the United States and with the two countries now facing off against each other they're now started an atomic arms race in which Stalin continued to build up his nuclear and conventional forces over the coming years this consisted of each side creating larger and more powerful nuclear bombs which ultimately led to the development and testing of the hydrogen bomb named IV Mike that was detonated by the Americans on November 1st 1952 and the Soviet soon followed suit by detonating their first hydrogen bomb on November 22nd 1955 which was codenamed RDS 37 but Stalin would never see the creation of this ultimate weapon however as his health was now failing him meaning that he took longer and longer breaks away from government sometimes for months at a time and would often not allow doctors to examine him but his increasingly serious ailments and even had several of his physicians arrested through fear they wanted to kill him the Man of Steel had in 1945 alone suffered a minor stroke as well as a severe heart attack that was no doubt at least in part caused by the massive stress he had been under over the preceding 30 years along with the fact that he was a heavy smoker and a regular drinker then on the 1st of March 1953 Stalin was found semi-conscious at his valen Skoda sure he had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and despite the best efforts of the available doctors died on the 5th of March 1953 his daughter later stating that his end was difficult and terrible Joseph Stalin went from being a peasant in the 19th century to being one of the most powerful men who has ever lived in the late 1940s in his early years he was little more than a crime boss stealing money and killing his enemies but by the time he died he'd ordered the deaths of tens of millions of people either through execution forced labor or warfare during what many regard to be the greatest communist experiment of the 20th century it is also said of him that he abandoned the ideals of Marxism by centralizing control under him and in doing so created a highly centralized dictatorship which only served to increase his own power as he denied the workers any say in the governance of the country which remained in the hands of the few rather than the many in opposition to this many capitalist state that every time socialist states have tried to bring about true communism the processes failed as many people naturally did not want to give up their families property in assets that often resulted in the state having to use force and in many millions of cases resulted in violence and death this is why many people around the world today still hope for the realization of true communism which is a society based on communal ownership has many fill'd the transition from capitalism to socialism and then communism has never been enacted as many socialist governments perhaps inevitably are taken over by power-hungry people such as Stalin who denied the workers the right to govern their own destinies whether he is a true socialist or not many historians consider Joseph Stalin to be the most successful dictator in human history as a Dolf Hitler for example only ruled over Germany for 13 years while styling on the other hand led Russia for nearly three decades and transformed the country from the weak man of Europe into the continents only superpower which on the global stage was only rivaled by the United States in the modern world there are still those who argue that both Stalin and Mao Zedong were justified in ordering the deaths of millions of their own people as in their eyes there was no other way of transforming Russia and China whose population largely consisted of peasants into modern industrialized States other historians have countered this by stating that there is no justification for the millions of deaths ordered by Stalin and Chairman Mao as industrialization could have been achieved with free markets and property rights such as in the West it is also argued that millions of deaths under communism were inevitable as there was no other way of capitalism and property rights ever being ended in Soviet Russia or Maoist China other than the use of force and as the state controlled every aspect of life reducing the population to near slave status and crushing all opposition to the ending of private property was necessary in order to compete with the advanced Western nations when he was young Joseph Stalin grew up hating the oppression of the Czarist regime but in the end he personified the Orwellian observation that those perset in overturning the hierarchical structure of society often seek power for themselves when offered the opportunity and in the end the man have still created a state that was authoritarianism base 'iv I was far more terrifying than anything those living under the Czarist Empire could ever have imagined no one really has an accurate idea of how many deaths Joseph Stalin is responsible for conservative estimates range from 20 to 30 million whilst others estimate the number to be far greater whatever the true figure there is little argument that Joseph Stalin was one of the three greatest mass murderers in human history along with Adolf Hitler Mouser doom in the West we tend to think we had an important role in defeating Nazi Germany which in many ways is true however it is widely accepted that it was the Soviet Union and its people that crush Nazi Germany and won world war ii in europe has despite massive losses the country still had the largest army in the world when the conflict was over and dominated the geopolitical landscape for the next 50 years this gives one an idea of how ruthless Stalin's Russia walls and it is no surprise that he is still considered to be a hero in Russia today as he after all oversaw the defeat of Hitler's Germany and turned the Soviet Union into the superpower it remained until 1991 all in all Joseph Stalin was an intelligent hard-working ruthless pragmatist who destroyed every enemy who dared oppose him during his lifetime and in doing so built the most powerful and all-encompassing dictatorship in history in which he ordered the deaths of millions and in the end got away with it what do you think of Joseph Stalin was he the gold standard of dictators or a hero who brought about the downfall of Hitler's Germany and transformed his country into a superpower let us know in the comment section and until next time thank you very much for watching you you

Channel: The People Profiles

Views: 643,350

Keywords: Biography, History, Historical, Educational, The People Profiles, Biography channel, the biography channel

Id: QHfB3aP-pn4

Length: 69min 3sec (4143 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 21 2019