Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili
Predecessor:	Position established; he himself as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR
Successor:	Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov
Predecessor:	Position established; he himself as People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR
Successor:	Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bulganin
Predecessor:	Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko
Successor:	Position abolished; he himself as People's Commissar of the Armed Forces of the USSR
Predecessor:	Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov
Successor:	Position abolished; he himself as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR
1st People's Commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate of the RSFSR February 24, 1920 - April 25, 1922
Predecessor:	Position established; he himself as People's Commissar of State Control of the RSFSR
Successor:	Alexander Dmitrievich Tsyurupa
Predecessor:	Lander, Karl Ivanovich
Successor:	Position abolished; he himself as People's Commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate of the RSFSR
1st People's Commissar for Nationalities of the RSFSR October 26 (November 8), 1917 - July 7, 1923
Predecessor:	Position established
Successor:	Position established
Predecessor:	Position established
Successor:	Position established
	1) RSDLP (1903-1917) 2) RSDLP (b) (1917-1918) 3) RCP(b) (1918-1925) 4) VKP(b) (1925-1952) 5) CPSU (since 1952)
Birth:	December 6 (18), 1878, according to the official version, December 9 (21), 1879, Gori, Tiflis province, Russian Empire
Buried:	Necropolis near the Kremlin wall
	Vissarion Ivanovich Dzhugashvili
	Ekaterina (Ketevan) Geladze
	Ekaterina Svanidze (1904-1907) Nadezhda Alliluyeva (1919-1932)
	sons: Yakov and Vasily daughter: Svetlana adopted son: Artyom Sergeev
Military service
Years of service:	1918 - 1920 1941 - 1953
Affiliation:	RSFSR the USSR
	Generalissimo of the Soviet Union
Commanded:	Supreme Commander of the USSR Armed Forces (since 1941) Chairman of the State Defense Committee (1941-1945)
Autograph:

Biography

Childhood and youth

revolutionary activity

Defense of Tsaritsyn

Participation in the creation of the USSR

Fighting the opposition

Collectivization of the USSR

Industrialization

urban planning

Pre-war foreign policy

Domestic politics

Foreign policy

Creation of the Soviet atomic bomb

Post-war economy of the USSR

Death of Stalin

Assessment of Russian officials

Polls public opinion

Notable Facts

(real name - Dzhugashvili, cargo. იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი, December 6 (18), 1878 (according to the official version, December 9 (21), 1879), Gori, Tiflis province, Russian Empire - March 5, 1953, Kuntsevo, Moscow region, RSFSR, USSR) - Russian revolutionary and Soviet state, political , party and military figure. People's Commissar for Nationalities of the RSFSR (1917-1923), People's Commissar of State Control of the RSFSR (1919-1920), People's Commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate of the RSFSR (1920-1922); General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) (1922-1925), General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (1925-1934), Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (1934-1952), Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (1952-1953); Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (1941-1946), Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (1946-1953); Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of the USSR (since 1941), Chairman of the State Defense Committee (1941-1945), People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR (1941-1946), People's Commissar of the Armed Forces of the USSR (1946-1947). Marshal of the Soviet Union (since 1943), Generalissimo of the Soviet Union (since 1945). Member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (1925-1943). Honorary Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (since 1939). Hero of Socialist Labor (since 1939), Hero of the Soviet Union (since 1945).

During the period when Stalin was in power, a number of important events in the history of the USSR and the world in the 20th century took place, in particular: the forced industrialization of the USSR, the creation of large-scale mechanized agriculture in the USSR; participation in the Second World War, mass labor and front-line heroism, the transformation of the USSR into a superpower with significant scientific, military and industrial potential, the strengthening of the geopolitical influence of the Soviet Union in the world; as well as forced collectivization, famine in 1932-1933 on part of the territory of the USSR, the establishment of a dictatorial regime, mass repressions, deportations of peoples, numerous casualties (including as a result of wars and German occupation), the division of the world community into two warring camps, the establishment socialist system in Eastern Europe and East Asia, the beginning of the Cold War. Public opinion about the role of Stalin in these events is characterized by extreme polarity.

Biography

Childhood and youth

Childhood

Joseph Stalin was born into a poor Georgian family (in a number of sources there are versions about the Ossetian origin of Stalin's ancestors), in the house number 10 on Krasnogorskaya street (the former quarter of Rusis-ubani) in the city of Gori, Tiflis province Russian Empire. Father - Vissarion Ivanovich Dzhugashvili - was a shoemaker by profession, later - a worker in the shoe factory of the manufacturer Adelkhanov in Tiflis. Mother - Ekaterina Georgievna Dzhugashvili (nee - Geladze) - came from the family of a serf peasant Geladze in the village of Gambareuli, worked as a day laborer.

During the period of Stalin's life and subsequently in encyclopedias, reference books and biographies, the date of birth of I.V. Stalin was marked on December 9 (21), 1879. The anniversaries celebrated during his lifetime were timed to coincide with this date. A number of researchers, with reference to the first part of the metric book of the Gori Assumption Cathedral Church, intended for registration of births, have established a different date for Stalin's birth. Historian G. I. Chernyavsky writes that in the registration book of the Assumption Cathedral in the city of Gori, the name of Joseph Dzhugashvili is listed, and then the entry follows: "1878. Born December 6th. Baptized on December 17th. Parents - residents of the city of Gori, peasant Vissarion Ivanov Dzhugashvili and his legal wife Ekaterina Georgieva. Godfather- a resident of Gori peasant Tsikhatrishvili ". He concludes that the true date of Stalin's birth is December 6 (18), 1878. It is noted that according to the information of the St. Petersburg provincial gendarme department, the date of birth of I. V. Dzhugashvili is December 6, 1878, and in the documents of the Baku gendarme department, the year of birth is 1880. At the same time, there are documents of the police department, where the year of birth of Joseph Dzhugashvili is 1879 and 1881. In the document, personally filled out by I. V. Stalin in December 1920, the date of birth is indicated in the questionnaire of the Swedish newspaper Folkets Dagblad Politiken - 1878.

Joseph was the third son in the family, the first two (Mikhail and George) died in infancy. His native language was Georgian. Stalin learned Russian later, but always spoke with a noticeable Georgian accent. According to Svetlana's daughter, however, Stalin sang in Russian with virtually no accent.

Ekaterina Georgievna was known as a strict woman, but who dearly loved her son; she tried to give her child an education and hoped for such a development in his career, which she associated with the position of the priest. According to some testimonies, Stalin was extremely respectful of his mother. Stalin could not come to his mother's funeral in May 1937, but sent a wreath with an inscription in Russian and Georgian: . Perhaps his absence was due to the trial unfolding in those days in the “Tukhachevsky Case”.

At the age of five in 1884, Joseph fell ill with smallpox, which left marks on his face for life. Since 1885, due to a severe bruise - a phaeton flew over him - Joseph Stalin had a defect in his left hand throughout his life. Stalin's height in his youth was 174 cm (according to the Baku Gendarmerie Administration), in old age it dropped to 172 cm (according to the Kremlin medical card).

Education. Entry into revolutionary activities

In 1886, Ekaterina Georgievna wanted to appoint Joseph to study at the Gori Orthodox Theological School. However, since the child did not know the Russian language at all, it was not possible to enter the school. In 1886-1888, at the request of his mother, the children of the priest Christopher Charkviani undertook to teach Joseph the Russian language. The result of the training was that in 1888 Soso did not enter the first preparatory class at the school, but immediately into the second preparatory class. Many years later, on September 15, 1927, Stalin's mother, Ekaterina Dzhugashvili, wrote a letter of thanks to the teacher of the Russian language at the school, Zakhary Alekseevich Davitashvili:

In 1889, Joseph Dzhugashvili, having successfully completed the second preparatory class, was admitted to the school. In July 1894, after graduating from college, Joseph was noted as the best student. His certificate contains "five" in many subjects. After graduating from college, Joseph was recommended for admission to the theological seminary.

A pupil of the Gori Theological School, Dzhugashvili Joseph ... entered the first grade of the school in September 1889 and, with excellent behavior (5), showed success:
According to the sacred history of the Old Testament
According to the Sacred History of the New Testament
According to the Orthodox Catechism
Explanation of worship with the church charter
Languages:
Russian with Church Slavonic
Greek	- (4) very good
Georgian	- (5) excellent
Arithmetic	- (4) very good
Geography
Calligraphy
Church singing:
Russian
and Georgian
Fragment of Stalin's certificate

In September 1894, Joseph, having brilliantly passed the entrance exams, was enrolled in the Orthodox Tiflis Theological Seminary, which was located in the center of Tiflis. There he first became acquainted with the ideas of Marxism. By the beginning of 1895, seminarian Iosif Dzhugashvili became acquainted with underground groups of revolutionary Marxists exiled by the government to Transcaucasia (among them: I. I. Luzin, O. A. Kogan, G. Ya. Franceschi, V. K. Rodzevich-Belevich, A. Ya. Krasnova and others). Subsequently, Stalin himself recalled: “I entered the revolutionary movement from the age of 15, when I got in touch with underground groups of Russian Marxists who then lived in the Transcaucasus. These groups had a great influence on me and instilled in me a taste for underground Marxist literature.”

In 1896-1898, in the seminary, Joseph Dzhugashvili led an illegal Marxist circle, which gathered at the apartment of the revolutionary Vano Sturua at No. 194 on Elizavetinskaya Street. In 1898, Joseph joined the Georgian Social Democratic organization Mesame-Dasi (Third Group). Together with V. Z. Ketskhoveli and A. G. Tsulukidze, I. V. Dzhugashvili forms the core of the revolutionary minority of this organization. Subsequently - in 1931 - Stalin, in an interview with the German writer Emil Ludwig, asked “What pushed you to the opposition? Perhaps the mistreatment by the parents? answered: "Not. My parents treated me quite well. Another thing is the theological seminary where I studied then. Out of protest against the mocking regime and the Jesuit methods that existed in the seminary, I was ready to become and really became a revolutionary, a supporter of Marxism ... ".

In the book of memoirs "Stalin and the tragedy of Georgia", published in Berlin in 1932 in German, Joseph Dzhugashvili's classmate at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, Joseph Iremashvili, argued that young Stalin was characterized by vindictiveness, vindictiveness, deceit, ambition and lust for power.

In 1898-1899, Joseph led a circle in the railway depot, which included Vasily Bazhenov, Alexei Zakomoldin, Leon Zolotarev, Yakov Kochetkov, Pyotr Montin (Montyan). He also conducts classes in working circles at the Adelkhanov shoe factory, at the Karapetov factory, at the Bozardzhianets tobacco factory, and at the Main Tiflis railway workshops. Stalin recalled this time: “I remember 1898, when I first received a circle of workers from railway workshops ... Here, in the circle of these comrades, I then received my first baptism of fire ... My first teachers were Tiflis workers”. On December 14-19, 1898, a six-day strike of railway workers took place in Tiflis, one of the initiators of which was the seminarian Iosif Dzhugashvili. April 19, 1899 Iosif Dzhugashvili in Tiflis participates in a working may day.

Having not completed the full course, in the fifth year of study, before the exams on May 29, 1899, he was expelled from the seminary with motivation "for failing to appear for exams for an unknown reason"(probably the actual reason for the exclusion, which was also adhered to by the official Soviet historiography, was the activity of Iosif Dzhugashvili in propagating Marxism among seminarians and railway workshop workers). The certificate issued to Iosif Dzhugashvili upon expulsion indicated that he could serve as a teacher in elementary public schools.

After being expelled from the seminary, Iosif Dzhugashvili was engaged in tutoring for some time. Among his students, in particular, was S. A. Ter-Petrosyan (the future revolutionary Kamo). From the end of December 1899, I. V. Dzhugashvili was admitted to the Tiflis Physical Observatory as an observer-computer.

1900-1917

On July 16, 1904, in the Tiflis Church of St. David, Joseph Dzhugashvili married Ekaterina Svanidze. She became the first wife of Stalin. Her brother studied with Joseph Dzhugashvili at the Tiflis Theological Seminary. But three years later, his wife died of tuberculosis (according to other sources, the cause of death was typhoid fever). From this marriage in 1907, Stalin's first son, Yakov, will appear.

Until 1917, Joseph Dzhugashvili used a large number of pseudonyms, in particular: Besoshvili, Nizheradze, Chizhikov, Ivanovich. Of these, in addition to the pseudonym "Stalin", the most famous was the pseudonym "Koba". In 1912, Joseph Dzhugashvili finally takes the pseudonym "Stalin".

revolutionary activity

On April 23, 1900, Iosif Dzhugashvili, Vano Sturua and Zakro Chodrishvili organized a May Day meeting, which was attended by 400-500 workers. At the rally, which was opened by Chodrishvili, Iosif Dzhugashvili spoke among others. This speech was Stalin's first appearance in front of a large gathering of people. In August of the same year, Dzhugashvili participated in the preparation and conduct of a major demonstration of the workers of Tiflis - a strike in the Main Railway Workshops. Revolutionary workers M. I. Kalinin, S. Ya. Alliluyev, and also M. Z. Bochoridze, A. G. Okuashvili, and V. F. Sturua took part in organizing the workers’ protests. From 1 to 15 August, up to four thousand people took part in the strike. As a result, more than five hundred strikers were arrested. The arrests of Georgian Social Democrats continued in March-April 1901. Coco Dzhugashvili, as one of the leaders of the strike, escaped arrest: he quit his job at the observatory and went underground, becoming an underground revolutionary.

In September 1901, the Nina printing house, organized by Lado Ketskhoveli in Baku, published the illegal newspaper Brdzola (Struggle). The front line of the first issue, entitled "Editorial", owned by twenty-two-year-old Coco. This article is the first known political work of I. V. Dzhugashvili-Stalin.

In 1901-1902, Joseph was a member of the Tiflis and Batumi committees of the RSDLP. On April 5, 1902, he was arrested for the first time in Batumi. On April 19 he was transferred to the Kutaisi prison. After a year and a half in prison and transfer to Butum, he was exiled to Eastern Siberia. On November 27, he arrived at the place of exile - in the village of Novaya Uda, Balagansky district, Irkutsk province. After more than a month, Iosif Dzhugashvili made his first escape and returned to Tiflis, from where he later moved again to Batum.

After the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP (1903), held in Brussels and London, he was a Bolshevik. On the recommendation of one of the leaders of the Caucasian Union of the RSDLP, M. G. Tskhakaya, Koba was sent to the Kutaisi region to the Imeretino-Mingrelian Committee as a representative of the Caucasian Union Committee. In 1904-1905, Stalin organized a printing house in Chiatura, participated in the December 1904 strike in Baku.

During the First Russian Revolution of 1905-1907, Joseph Dzhugashvili was busy with party affairs: he wrote leaflets, participated in the publication of Bolshevik newspapers, organized a combat squad in Tiflis (autumn 1905), visited Batum, Novorossiysk, Kutais, Gori, Chiatura. In February 1905, he took part in arming the workers of Baku in order to prevent Armenian-Azerbaijani clashes in the Caucasus. In September 1905, he participated in an attempt to capture the Kutaisi arsenal. In December 1905, Stalin participated as a delegate to the 1st conference of the RSDLP in Tammerfors, where he first met with V. I. Lenin. In May 1906, he was a delegate to the 4th Congress of the RSDLP, held in Stockholm.

In 1907, Stalin was a delegate to the 5th Congress of the RSDLP in London. In 1907-1908 one of the leaders of the Baku Committee of the RSDLP. Stalin is involved in the so-called. "Tiflis expropriation" in the summer of 1907.

At the plenum of the Central Committee after the 6th (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (1912), he was co-opted in absentia to the Central Committee and the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. Trotsky in his work “Stalin” claimed that this was facilitated by a personal letter from Stalin to V. I. Lenin, where he said that he agreed to any responsible work.

On March 25, 1908, Stalin was again arrested in Baku and imprisoned in the Bayil prison. From 1908 to 1910 he was in exile in the city of Solvychegodsk, from where he corresponded with Lenin. In 1910, Stalin fled from exile. After that, Stalin was detained by the authorities three times, and each time he escaped from exile to the Vologda province. From December 1911 to February 1912 in exile in the city of Vologda. On the night of February 29, 1912, he fled from Vologda.

In 1912-1913, while working in St. Petersburg, he was one of the main contributors to the first mass Bolshevik newspaper Pravda. At the suggestion of Lenin at the Prague Party Conference in 1912, Stalin was elected a member of the Central Committee of the party and placed at the head of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee. On May 5, 1912, on the day of the publication of the first issue of the Pravda newspaper, Stalin was arrested and exiled to the Narym Territory. A few months later he fled (5th escape) and returned to St. Petersburg, where he settled with the worker Savinov. From here he led the election campaign of the Bolsheviks to the 4th State Duma. During this period, the wanted Stalin lives in St. Petersburg, constantly changing apartments, under the pseudonym Vasiliev.

In November and at the end of December 1912, Stalin twice went to Krakow to see Lenin for meetings of the Central Committee with party workers. At the end of 1912-1913 in Krakow, Stalin, at the insistence of Lenin, wrote a long article "Marxism and the national question", in which he expressed Bolshevik views on the ways of solving the national question and criticized the program of "cultural-national autonomy" of the Austro-Hungarian socialists. The work gained notoriety among Russian Marxists, and from that time Stalin was regarded as an expert on national problems.

Stalin spent January 1913 in Vienna. Soon, in the same year, he returned to Russia, but in March he was arrested, imprisoned and exiled to the village of Kureika in the Turukhansk Territory, where he spent 4 years - until the February Revolution of 1917. In exile he corresponded with Lenin.

Until 1917, Joseph Dzhugashvili used a large number of pseudonyms, in particular: Besoshvili, Nizheradze, Chizhikov, Ivanovich. Of these, in addition to the pseudonym "Stalin", the most famous was the pseudonym "Koba". In 1912, Joseph Dzhugashvili finally takes the pseudonym "Stalin".

1917. Participation in the October Revolution

After the February Revolution he returned to Petrograd. Before Lenin's arrival from exile, he was one of the leaders of the Central Committee of the RSDLP and the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolshevik Party. In 1917, he was a member of the editorial board of the Pravda newspaper, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and the Military Revolutionary Center. At first, Stalin supported the Provisional Government. In relation to the Provisional Government and its policy, he proceeded from the fact that the democratic revolution was not yet completed, and the overthrow of the government was not a practical task. However, then he joined Lenin, who advocated the transformation of the "bourgeois-democratic" February revolution into a proletarian socialist revolution.

April 14 - 22 was a delegate to the I Petrograd city conference of the Bolsheviks. April 24 - 29 at the VII All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (b) spoke in the debate on the report on the current situation, supported the views of Lenin, made a report on the national question; elected a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b).

In May - June he was a participant in anti-war propaganda; was one of the organizers of the re-elections of the Soviets and in the municipal campaign in Petrograd. June 3 - 24 participated as a delegate to the I All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies; was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and a member of the Bureau of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from the Bolshevik faction. Also participated in the preparation of demonstrations on June 10 and 18; published a number of articles in the newspapers Pravda and Soldatskaya Pravda.

In view of the forced departure of Lenin into the underground, Stalin spoke at the VI Congress of the RSDLP (b) (July - August 1917) with a report of the Central Committee. At a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) on August 5, he was elected a member of the narrow membership of the Central Committee. In August - September, he mainly conducted organizational and journalistic work. On October 10, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), he voted in favor of a resolution on an armed uprising, was elected a member of the Political Bureau, created "for political leadership in the near future."

On the night of October 16, at an enlarged meeting of the Central Committee, he opposed the position of L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinoviev, who voted against the decision to insurrection; was elected a member of the Military Revolutionary Center, in which he entered the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee.

On October 24 (November 6), after the junkers destroyed the printing house of the Rabochy Put newspaper, Stalin ensured the publication of the newspaper, in which he published the editorial "What do we need?" with a call for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and its replacement by the Soviet government, elected representatives of the workers, soldiers and peasants. On the same day, Stalin and Trotsky held a meeting of the Bolsheviks - delegates to the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets of the RSD, at which Stalin made a report on the course of political events. On the night of October 25 (November 7), he participated in a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), which determined the structure and name of the new Soviet government.

1917-1922. Participation in the Russian Civil War

After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Stalin entered the Council of People's Commissars as People's Commissar for Nationalities. At that time, the Civil War broke out between various social, political and ethnic groups on the territory of the former Russian Empire. At the II All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, Stalin was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. On the night of October 28, at the headquarters of the Petrograd Military District, he was a participant in the development of a plan to defeat the troops of A.F. Kerensky and P.N. Krasnov, advancing on Petrograd. On October 28, Lenin and Stalin signed a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars prohibiting the publication of "all newspapers closed by the Military Revolutionary Committee."

On November 29, Stalin entered the Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), which also included Lenin, Trotsky and Sverdlov. This body was given "the right to decide all urgent matters, but with the obligatory involvement in the decision of all members of the Central Committee who were at that moment in Smolny." At the same time, Stalin was re-elected to the editorial board of Pravda. In November - December 1917, Stalin mainly worked in the People's Commissariat for Nationalities. On November 2 (15), 1917, Stalin, together with Lenin, signed the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia.

In April 1918, Stalin, together with Kh. G. Rakovsky and D. Z. Manuilsky, negotiated in Kursk with representatives of the Ukrainian Central Rada on the conclusion of a peace treaty.

During the Civil War from October 8, 1918 to July 8, 1919 and from May 18, 1920 to April 1, 1922, Stalin was also a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR. Stalin was also a member of the Revolutionary Military Councils of the Western, Southern, Southwestern Fronts.

As the doctor of historical and military sciences M. M. Gareev notes, during the Civil War, Stalin gained vast experience in the military-political leadership of large masses of troops on many fronts (the defense of Tsaritsyn, Petrograd, on the fronts against Denikin, Wrangel, the White Poles, etc.).

The French journalist Henri Barbusse cites the words of Stalin's assistant for the people's commissariat S. S. Pestkovsky regarding the period of the Brest negotiations in early 1918:

About the Brest negotiations in the work "Stalin" L. D. Trotsky wrote:

Defense of Tsaritsyn

In May 1918, after the start of the civil war in connection with the aggravation of the food situation in the country, the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR appointed Stalin responsible for food supplies in southern Russia and was sent as an extraordinary representative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for the procurement and export of grain from the North Caucasus to industrial centers. Arriving in Tsaritsyn on June 6, 1918, Stalin took power in the city into his own hands. He took part not only in the political, but also in the operational-tactical leadership of the district. In particular, he canceled the orders of the military leader Snesarev and on July 16 launched an offensive to the west and south of Tsaritsyn, which ended in failure.

At this time, in July 1918, the Don army of Ataman P. N. Krasnov launched the first offensive against Tsaritsyn. On July 22, the Military Council of the North Caucasian Military District was created, with Stalin as chairman. The council also included K. E. Voroshilov and S. K. Minin. Stalin, taking charge of the defense of the city, showed a tendency to take tough measures.

The first military measures taken by the Military Council of the North Caucasus Military District, headed by Stalin, turned into defeats for the Red Army. At the end of July, the White Guards captured the Trade and Grand Dukes, and in connection with this, Tsaritsyn's connection with North Caucasus. After the failure of the Red Army offensive on August 10-15, Krasnov's army surrounded Tsaritsyn from three sides. The group of General A.P. Fitskhelaurov broke through the front north of Tsaritsyn, occupying Erzovka and Pichuzhinskaya. This allowed them to go to the Volga and break the connection of the Soviet leadership in Tsaritsyn with Moscow.

The defeats of the Red Army were also caused by the betrayal of the chief of staff of the North Caucasian military district, the former tsarist colonel A. L. Nosovich. Historian D. A. Volkogonov writes:

So, blaming the “military experts” for the defeats, Stalin made large-scale arrests and executions. In his speech at the VIII Congress on March 21, 1919, Lenin condemned Stalin for the executions in Tsaritsyn.

At the same time, from August 8, the group of General K.K. Mamontov was advancing in the central sector. On August 18-20, military clashes took place on the near approaches to Tsaritsyn, as a result of which Mamontov's group was stopped, and on August 20, the Red Army troops threw back the enemy north of Tsaritsyn with a sudden blow and liberated Yerzovka and Pichuzhinskaya by August 22. On August 26, a counteroffensive was launched on the entire front. By September 7, the White troops were driven back beyond the Don; while they lost about 12 thousand killed and captured.

In September, the White Cossack command decided on a new offensive against Tsaritsyn and additional mobilization was carried out. Soviet command took measures to strengthen the defense and improve command and control. By order of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic of September 11, 1918, the Southern Front was created, commanded by P.P. Sytin. Stalin became a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front (until October 19, K. E. Voroshilov until October 3, K. A. Mekhonoshin from October 3, A. I. Okulov from October 14).

On September 19, 1918, in a telegram sent from Moscow to Tsaritsyn to the front commander Voroshilov, the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Lenin and the chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front, Stalin, in particular, noted: "Soviet Russia notes with admiration the heroic deeds of the communist and revolutionary regiments of Kharchenko, Kolpakov, Bulatkin's cavalry, Alyabyev's armored trains, and the Volga Flotilla."

Meanwhile, on September 17, the troops of General Denisov launched a new offensive against the city. In early October, Stalin was recalled to Moscow and withdrawn from the RVS of the Southern Front. Shortly thereafter, on October 18, the Whites were driven back from the city for several months.

1919-1922

In January 1919, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky leave for Vyatka to investigate the reasons for the defeat of the Red Army near Perm and the surrender of the city to the forces of Admiral Kolchak. The Stalin-Dzerzhinsky Commission contributed to the reorganization and restoration of the combat capability of the defeated 3rd Army; however, on the whole, the situation on the Permian front was corrected by the fact that Ufa was taken by the Red Army, and Kolchak already on January 6 gave the order to concentrate forces in the Ufa direction and go on the defensive near Perm.

In the summer of 1919, Stalin organizes a rebuff to the Polish offensive on the Western Front, in Smolensk.

By a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of November 27, 1919, Stalin was awarded the first Order of the Red Banner. "in commemoration of his merits in the defense of Petrograd and selfless work on the Southern Front".

Created on the initiative of Stalin, the First Cavalry Army, headed by S. M. Budyonny, K. E. Voroshilov, E. A. Shchadenko, supported by the armies of the Southern Front, defeated Denikin's troops. After the defeat of Denikin's troops, Stalin directs the restoration of the destroyed economy in Ukraine. In February - March 1920, he headed the Council of the Ukrainian Labor Army and led the mobilization of the population for coal mining.

In the period May 26 - September 1, 1920, Stalin was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southwestern Front as a representative of the RVSR. There he led the breakthrough of the Polish front, in the liberation of Kyiv and the advance of the Red Army to Lvov. On August 13, Stalin refused to comply with the directive of the commander-in-chief based on the decision of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) of August 5 on the transfer of the 1st Cavalry and 12th armies to help the Western Front. During the decisive Battle of Warsaw on August 13-25, 1920, the troops of the Western Front suffered a heavy defeat, which turned the tide of the Soviet-Polish war. On September 23, at the 9th All-Russian Conference of the RCP(b), Stalin tried to blame the failure near Warsaw on the Commander-in-Chief Kamenev and the Commander Tukhachevsky, but Lenin reproached Stalin for his biased attitude towards them.

In the same 1920, Stalin participated in the defense of the south of Ukraine from the offensive of Wrangel's troops. Stalin's instructions formed the basis of Frunze's operational plan, according to which Wrangel's troops were defeated.

As the researcher Shikman A.P. "the rigidity of decisions, the enormous capacity for work and the skillful combination of military and political activities allowed Stalin to gain many supporters".

1922-1930

Participation in the creation of the USSR

In 1922, Stalin participated in the creation of the USSR. Stalin considered it necessary to create not a union of republics, but rather a unitary state with autonomous national associations. This plan was rejected by Lenin and his associates.

On December 30, 1922, at the First All-Union Congress of Soviets, a decision was made to unite the Soviet republics into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics- THE USSR. Speaking at the congress, Stalin said:

“Today is a turning point in the history of Soviet power. He places milestones between the old, already passed period, when the Soviet republics, although they acted together, but went apart, preoccupied primarily with the question of their existence, and the new, already opened period, when the separate existence of the Soviet republics is put to an end, when the republics unite into a single union a state for the successful struggle against economic disruption, when the Soviet government is no longer thinking only about existence, but also about developing into a serious international force that can influence the international situation, can change it in the interests of the working people "

Fighting the opposition

See also Trotsky, Lev Davidovich, Right Opposition in the CPSU(b), Left Opposition in the RCP(b) and the CPSU(b), Letter to the Congress.

Beginning in late 1921, Lenin increasingly interrupted his work in leadership of the party. Stalin had to carry out the main work in this direction. During this period, Stalin was a permanent member of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), and at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) on April 3, 1922, he was elected to the Politburo and the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), as well as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). Initially, this position meant only the leadership of the party apparatus, while Lenin, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, formally remained the leader of the party and government.

Stalin's demeanor forced Lenin to reconsider his appointment, and in an addendum to the "Letter to the Congress" dated January 4, 1923, Lenin stated:

“Stalin is too rude, and this shortcoming, which is quite tolerable in the environment and in communications between us communists, becomes intolerable in the position of general secretary. Therefore, I suggest that the comrades consider a way to move Stalin from this place and appoint another person to this place, who in all other respects differs from Comrade. Stalin with only one advantage, namely, more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capriciousness, etc. This circumstance may seem like an insignificant trifle. But I think that from the point of view of preventing a split and from the point of view of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky, this is not a trifle, or is it such a trifle that can get crucial.»

Nevertheless, Lenin did not propose another candidate, and also spoke sharply about a number of other party leaders (possible rivals of Stalin), including Trotsky's "non-Bolshevism", with his "self-confidence and excessive enthusiasm for the purely administrative side of things". These accusations were more serious for a member of the RCP(b) than rudeness. Before the beginning of the XIII Congress of the RCP (b) (May, 1924), N. K. Krupskaya handed over Lenin's "Letter to the Congress." In response, Stalin, according to Trotsky, announced his resignation for the first time:

Kamenev proposed to resolve the issue by voting. The majority voted in favor of keeping Stalin as General Secretary of the RCP(b), only Trotsky's supporters voted against. Subsequently, a proposal was made that the document should be read out in private meetings of individual delegations. Thus, the "Letter to the Congress" was not mentioned in the materials of the congress. Later, this fact was used by the opposition to criticize Stalin and the party (it was alleged that the Central Committee "concealed" Lenin's "testament"). Stalin himself rejected these accusations.

In the 1920s, the highest power in the party, and in fact in the country, belonged to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Before Lenin's death, in addition to Lenin, it included six more people: Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Rykov and Tomsky. All issues were decided by majority vote. Since 1922, due to illness, Lenin actually retired from political activity. Inside the Politburo, Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev organized "troika" based on opposition to Trotsky. Kamenev supported Zinoviev in almost everything. Tomsky, being the leader of the trade unions, had a negative attitude towards Trotsky since the time of the so-called. trade union discussions. Rykov could become the only supporter of Trotsky.

On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. Immediately after the death of Lenin, several groups formed within the leadership of the party, each of which claimed power. The Troika united with Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky and Kuibyshev, forming the so-called Politburo (where they included Rykov as a member and Kuibyshev as a candidate member). "seven".

Trotsky considered himself the main contender for leadership in the country after Lenin, and underestimated Stalin as a competitor. Soon, other oppositionists, not only the Trotskyists, sent a similar so-called to the Politburo. "Statement of the 46". The Troika then showed its power, mainly using the resources of the apparatus led by Stalin.

At the XIII Congress of the RCP (b) all oppositionists were condemned. Stalin's influence greatly increased. The main allies of Stalin in the "seven" were Bukharin and Rykov. In 1925, the city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad.

A new split appeared in the Politburo in October 1925, when Zinoviev, Kamenev, G.Ya. living worse than before the First World War, there was strong dissatisfaction with low wages and rising prices for agricultural products, which led to the demand for pressure on the peasantry and especially on the kulaks). "Seven" broke up. At that moment, Stalin began to unite with the "right" Bukharin-Rykov-Tomsky, who expressed the interests of the peasantry above all. In the inner-party struggle that had begun between the "rights" and "lefts", he provided them with the forces of the party apparatus, they (namely Bukharin) acted as theoreticians. The "new opposition" of Zinoviev and Kamenev was condemned at the Fourteenth Congress.

By that time, "the theory of the victory of socialism in one country" had arisen. This view was developed by Stalin in the pamphlet "On Questions of Leninism" (1926) and by Bukharin. They divided the question of the victory of socialism into two parts - the question of the complete victory of socialism, that is, the possibility of building socialism and the complete impossibility of restoring capitalism by internal forces, and the question of final victory, that is, the impossibility of restoration due to the intervention of the Western powers, which would be ruled out only by establishing a revolution in the West.

Trotsky, who did not believe in socialism in one country, joined Zinoviev and Kamenev. The so-called. United Opposition. Having strengthened himself as a leader, in 1929 Stalin accused Bukharin and his allies of a “right deviation” and began to actually implement (in extreme forms at the same time) the program of the “left” to curtail the NEP and accelerate industrialization through the exploitation of the countryside. At the same time, the 50th anniversary of Stalin is widely celebrated (whose date of birth was then changed, according to Stalin's critics - in order to somewhat smooth out the "excesses" of collectivization by celebrating the round anniversary and to demonstrate in the USSR and abroad who is the true and beloved by all the people master countries).

Modern researchers believe that the most important economic decisions in the 1920s were made after open, wide and sharp public discussions, through open democratic voting at the plenums of the Central Committee and congresses of the Communist Party.

On January 1, 1926, Stalin was again approved by the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

Various historians believe that the years from 1926 to 1929 should be considered the time when Stalin came to sole power.

1930-1941

February 13, 1930 Stalin was awarded the second Order of the Red Banner for "services on the front of socialist construction". In 1932, Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide.

In May 1937, Stalin's mother dies, but he could not come to the funeral, but sent a wreath with an inscription in Russian and Georgian: "Dear and beloved mother from her son Joseph Dzhugashvili (from Stalin)".

On May 15, 1934, Stalin signed the decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR "On the teaching of national history in the schools of the USSR", in accordance with which the teaching of history in secondary and higher schools was resumed.

In the second half of the 1930s, Stalin was working on preparing for the publication of the textbook "A Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks", of which he was the main author. On November 14, 1938, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution “On the organization of party propaganda in connection with the release of the Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks”. The resolution officially made the textbook the basis of Marxism-Leninism propaganda and established its compulsory study in universities.

Management of the USSR economy in the 1930s

Collectivization of the USSR

After the disruption of grain procurements in 1927, when extraordinary measures had to be taken (fixed prices, closing markets and even repressions), and the disruption of the grain procurement campaign of 1928-1929, the issue had to be resolved urgently. The way to create farming through the stratification of the peasantry was incompatible with the Soviet project for ideological reasons. A course was taken for collectivization. This also meant the liquidation of the kulaks. On January 5, 1930, I. V. Stalin signs the main document of the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR - the Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the rate of collectivization and measures of state assistance to collective farm construction”. In accordance with the decree, in particular, it was planned to carry out collectivization in the North Caucasus, the Lower and Middle Volga by the autumn of 1930, and no later than the spring of 1931. The document also stated: “In accordance with the growing pace of collectivization, it is necessary to further intensify work on the construction of factories that produce tractors, combines, and other tractor and trailer implements, so that the deadlines given by the Supreme Council of National Economy for completing the construction of new factories are in no case delayed.”

On March 2, 1930, Pravda published an article by I.V. Stalin “Dizziness from Success. On the Issues of the Collective-Farm Movement”, in which he, in particular, accused "zealous socializers" in "decomposition and discredit" collective farm movement and condemned their actions, "pouring water on the mill of our class enemies". On the same day, an exemplary charter for an agricultural artel was published, in the development of which Stalin was directly involved.

Until March 14, 1930, Stalin was working on the text of the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks "On the fight against distortions of the party line in the collective farm movement", which was published in the newspaper Pravda on March 15. This decree allowed the dissolution of collective farms that were not organized on a voluntary basis. The result of the decision was that by May 1930, cases of dissolution of collective farms affected more than half of all peasant farms.

Industrialization

An important issue of the time was also the choice of the method of industrialization. The discussion about this was difficult and long, and its outcome predetermined the nature of the state and society. Not having, unlike Russia at the beginning of the century, foreign loans as an important source of funds, the USSR could only industrialize at the expense of internal resources.

An influential group (member of the Politburo N. I. Bukharin, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars A. I. Rykov and chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions M. P. Tomsky) defended the "sparing" option of gradual accumulation of funds through the continuation of the NEP. L. D. Trotsky - a forced version. JV Stalin at first stood on the point of view of Bukharin, but after Trotsky's expulsion from the Central Committee of the party at the end of 1927, he changed his position to a diametrically opposite one. This led to decisive victory supporters of forced industrialization. And after the start of the world economic crisis in 1929, the foreign trade situation deteriorated sharply, which completely destroyed the possibility of the survival of the NEP project.

As a result of industrialization, in terms of industrial production, the USSR came out on top in Europe and second in the world, overtaking England, Germany, France and second only to the United States. The share of the USSR in world industrial production reached almost 10%. A particularly sharp leap was achieved in the development of metallurgy, power engineering, machine tool building, and the chemical industry. In fact, a number of new industries emerged: aluminum, aviation, automotive, bearings, tractor and tank building. one of the most important results of industrialization was the overcoming of technical backwardness and the establishment of the economic independence of the USSR. For the years 1928-1940, according to the CIA, the average annual growth of the gross national product in the USSR was 6.1%, which was inferior to Japan, was comparable to the corresponding indicator in Germany and was significantly higher than the growth in the most developed capitalist countries experiencing the "Great Depression" .

Industrialization was accompanied by disruptions in production and disruption of planned targets, followed by a series of ostentatious trials of the so-called "pests" - managers and specialists of enterprises. The first of these was the Shakhty case (1928), about which Stalin said: “The Shakhty people are now sitting in all branches of our industry. Many of them have been caught, but not all of them have been caught yet.”

In the summer of 1933, Stalin decides to establish the Northern Fleet of the Soviet Navy. This decision was made after Stalin visited the village of Polyarnoye in the Murmansk region in July 1933.

urban planning

Stalin was one of the main initiators of the implementation of the Master Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow in accordance with the canons of urban planning, which resulted in massive construction in the center and on the outskirts of Moscow. In the second half of the 1930s, many significant objects were also being built throughout the USSR. Stalin was interested in everything in the country, including construction. His former bodyguard Rybin recalls:

I. Stalin personally inspected the necessary streets, going into the yards, where basically the huts that breathed incense leaned sideways, and a lot of mossy sheds on chicken legs huddled. The first time he did it was during the day. Immediately a crowd gathered, which did not allow to move at all, and then ran after the car. I had to reschedule my appointments for the night. But even then, passers-by recognized the leader and accompanied him with a long tail. As a result of long preparations, the master plan for the reconstruction of Moscow was approved. This is how Gorky Street, Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya Street, Kutuzovsky Prospekt and other beautiful highways appeared. During another trip along Mokhovaya, Stalin said to the driver Mitryukhin: We need to build a new Lomonosov University so that students study in one place, and not wander around the city.

Among the construction projects begun under Stalin was the Moscow Metro. It was under Stalin that the first metro in the USSR was built. During the construction process, on the personal order of Stalin, the Sovetskaya metro station was adapted for the underground command post of the Moscow Civil Defense Headquarters. In addition to the civilian metro, complex secret complexes were built, including the so-called Metro-2, which Stalin himself used. In November 1941, a solemn meeting on the occasion of the anniversary of the October Revolution was held in the metro at the Mayakovskaya station. Stalin arrived by train along with guards, and he did not leave the building of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command on Myasnitskaya, but went down from the basement into a special tunnel that led to the subway.

Domestic politics and mass repression

On the use of physical force to those arrested in the practice of the NKVD.
Circular of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. January 10, 1939

The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks became aware that the secretaries of the regional committees, regional committees, checking the workers of the UNKVD, accuse them of using physical force on those arrested as something criminal. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks explains that the use of physical coercion in the practice of the NKVD was allowed, that physical coercion is an exception, and, moreover, only in relation to such obvious enemies of the people who, using the humane method of interrogation, brazenly refuse to extradite the conspirators, do not testify for months , are trying to slow down the exposure of the conspirators who remained at liberty, therefore, they continue the fight against the Soviet government also in prison. Experience has shown that such a policy gave its results, greatly speeding up the work of exposing the enemies of the people. True, later in practice the method of physical influence was defiled by scoundrels Zakovsky, Litvin, Uspensky and others, for they turned it from an exception into a rule and began to apply it to honest people accidentally arrested, for which they suffered due punishment. But this does not in the least discredit the method itself, since it is correctly applied in practice. It is known that all bourgeois intelligence services use physical force against representatives of the socialist proletariat, and, moreover, they use it in the most ugly forms. The question is why socialist intelligence should be more humane towards inveterate agents of the bourgeoisie, sworn enemies of the working class and collective farmers. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks considers that the method of physical influence must continue to be applied, as an exception, against open and non-disarming enemies of the people as an absolutely correct and expedient method. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks requires the secretaries of regional committees, regional committees, the Central Committee of the National Communist Parties to be guided by this explanation when checking employees of the UNKVD.

Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks I. Stalin

On February 10, 1934, the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which Stalin had held since 1922, was abolished, and the work of managing the apparatus was divided among the three secretaries of the Central Committee - I. V. Stalin, L. M. Kaganovich and A. A. Zhdanov.

Domestic policy in the USSR in the second half of the 1930s is characterized by harsh repressive measures carried out by the Soviet government bodies with the participation of party organs of the CPSU (b). According to many historians, the assassination of the head of the Leningrad Party Organization of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, S. M. Kirov, committed on December 1, 1934 in Leningrad, served as a signal for the start of mass repressions in the USSR. In the historical literature, there are versions that claim Stalin's involvement in this murder. After the XX Congress of the CPSU, on the initiative of Khrushchev, a Special Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU headed by N. M. Shvernik with the participation of party leader O. G. Shatunovskaya was created to investigate the issue (repressed in 1937). Molotov V.M. in 1979 stated: “The commission came to the conclusion that Stalin was not involved in the murder of Kirov. Khrushchev refused to publish it - not in his favor.. In 1990, in the course of an investigation conducted by the prosecutorial and investigative team of the USSR Prosecutor's Office, the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office and the USSR State Security Committee, together with employees of the Party Control Committee under the CPSU Central Committee, a conclusion was made: “In these cases, there is no data on the preparation in 1928-1934. the assassination attempt on Kirov, as well as the involvement of the NKVD and Stalin in this crime, is not contained. Despite this decision of the prosecutor's office, the literature often expresses both the point of view about Stalin's involvement in the murder of Kirov, and everyday - in favor of the version of the lone killer.

According to the historian O. V. Khlevnyuk, Stalin used the fact of Kirov's assassination to "own political goals", first of all, as a pretext for the final elimination of former political opponents - leaders and members of the opposition of the 20s and early 30s.

After the conviction (January 16, 1935) of G. E. Zinoviev and L. B. Kamenev, with the participation of Stalin, a closed letter of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of January 18, 1935 “Lessons from the events connected with the villainous murder of comrade. Kirov. The letter stated that the terrorist act against Kirov was prepared by the Leningrad group of Zinovievites (“Leningrad Center”), which, according to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, was inspired by the so-called. the "Moscow center" of the Zinovievites, headed by Kamenev and Zinoviev. According to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, these "centers" were "essentially a disguised form of a White Guard organization, well deserving of its members being treated like White Guards".

On January 26, 1935, Stalin signed a resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, according to which 663 former supporters of G. E. Zinoviev were to be deported from Leningrad to the north of Siberia and Yakutia for a period of three to four years.

From September 1936 to November 1938, the repressions were carried out under the leadership of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs N. I. Yezhov. As O. V. Khlevnyuk notes, there is a large amount of documentary evidence that Stalin carefully controlled and directed Yezhov’s activities during these years. During the repressions of the second half of the 1930s, not only potential political rivals were eliminated, but also many party leaders loyal to Stalin, officers of law enforcement agencies, factory managers, officials and foreign communists hiding in the USSR.

During the mass repressions of the Yezhovshchina period, measures of physical coercion (torture) were used against those arrested. On February 8, 1956, the “Pospelov Commission” created by the Presidium of the Central Committee of the VPK (b) submitted a report on repressions in the USSR, to which was attached a circular of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated January 10, 1939, signed by Stalin, and confirming the practice established by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks "use of physical force" during interrogations. According to N. Petrov, Stalin's handwritten resolutions were preserved on the documents that came to him from the NKVD of the USSR, in which he demanded that torture be used against those arrested.

At a meeting of combine operators in 1935, to a replica of the Bashkir collective farmer A. Gilba “Although I am the son of a kulak, I will honestly fight for the cause of the workers and peasants and for the building of socialism” Stalin expressed his attitude to this issue with the phrase "The son is not responsible for the father".

The European organization PACE condemned Stalin's policy, which, according to PACE, led to the famine and the death of millions of people.

Pre-war foreign policy

After Hitler came to power, Stalin drastically changed the traditional Soviet policy: if earlier it was aimed at an alliance with Germany against the Versailles system, and along the line of the Comintern - at fighting the Social Democrats as the main enemy (the theory of "social fascism" - Stalin's personal attitude ), now it consisted in creating a system of "collective security" as part of the USSR and the former countries of the Entente against Germany and an alliance of communists with all leftist forces against fascism ("popular front" tactics). This position was initially not consistent: in 1935, Stalin, alarmed by the German-Polish rapprochement, secretly offered Hitler a non-aggression pact, but was refused. After that, the policy of "collective security", advocated by Litvinov, turns out to be uncontested. However, at the same time, Stalin demanded that diplomats not give any specific obligations to partners. However, France and England were afraid of the USSR and hoped to "appease" Hitler, which was manifested in the history of the "Munich agreement" and later in the failure of negotiations between the USSR and England, France on military cooperation against Germany. Immediately after Munich, in the autumn of 1938, Stalin made allusions to Germany about the desirability of improving mutual relations on the trade side. On October 1, 1938, Poland in an ultimatum demanded that the Czech Republic transfer to it the Teszyn region, the subject of territorial disputes between it and Czechoslovakia in 1918-1920. And in March 1939, Germany occupied the part that remained from Czechoslovakia. On March 10, 1939, Stalin makes a report at the 18th Party Congress, in which he formulates the goals of Soviet policy as follows:

1. “Continue to pursue a policy of peace and strengthening business ties with all countries.
2. ... Do not let our country be drawn into conflicts by provocateurs of war, who are accustomed to rake in the heat with the wrong hands.

This was noted by the German embassy as a hint of Moscow's unwillingness to act as allies of England and France. In May, Litvinov, a Jew and an ardent supporter of the "collective security" course, was removed from the post of head of the NKID and replaced by Molotov. In the leadership of Germany, this was also regarded as a favorable sign.

By that time, the international situation was sharply aggravated due to Germany's claims to Poland, England and France this time showed their readiness to go to war with Germany, trying to attract the USSR to the alliance. In the summer of 1939, Stalin, while maintaining negotiations on an alliance with Britain and France, began negotiations with Germany in parallel. As historians note, Stalin's allusions towards Germany intensified as relations between Germany and Poland deteriorated and strengthened between Britain, Poland and Japan. From this it is concluded that Stalin's policy was not so much pro-German as anti-British and anti-Polish; Stalin was categorically not satisfied with the old status quo, but he, in his own words, did not believe in the possibility of a complete victory for Germany and the establishment of its hegemony in Europe.

According to the official Soviet concept, Stalin was forced to conclude a pact, since the unscrupulous behavior of the Western countries left him no other choice (which is also confirmed by the correspondence of the Western participants in the negotiations between the USSR and England, France); according to another, Stalin did not exhaust all the possibilities of an alliance against Hitler and conspired with him because he considered such a situation the most beneficial for himself, both in terms of territorial acquisitions and in terms of the opportunity to take the position of the “third rejoicing” in the impending war of “imperialist powers." Stalin said:

"The war is going on between two groups of capitalist countries (the poor and the rich in terms of colonies, raw materials, etc.). For the redivision of the world, for dominance over the world! We are not averse to them having a good fight and weakening each other. Not bad if the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) was shaken by Germany's hands Hitler himself, without understanding or wanting this, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system.<...>We can maneuver, push one side against the other, so that we better tear ourselves apart.<...>What would be bad if, as a result of the defeat of Poland, we extended the socialist system to new territories and populations?

There is, however, every reason to believe that in this respect the USSR was no different from England and France, who in the same way hoped to enter the war after Germany and the USSR had exhausted each other. It seems obvious that at the time of the conclusion of the Munich agreements, the USSR seemed to the leaders of Britain and France a more dangerous neighbor than Nazi Germany. Thus, one should not evaluate Stalin's position as the leader of the USSR as something unusual in international relations.

According to historians A. S. Barsenkov and A. I. Vdovin, the conclusion of the pact with Germany made it possible to buy time to strengthen the defense capability of the USSR, weakened unity within the fascist bloc, and to a large extent predetermined the victorious outcome of the Great Patriotic War for the USSR.

In its issue of January 1, 1940, Time magazine named Stalin "man of the year." The magazine explained its choice by the conclusion of the "Nazi-Communist" non-aggression pact and the outbreak of the Soviet-Finnish war, as a result of which, according to Time, Stalin radically changed the balance of political forces and became Hitler's partner in aggression. The article suggested that Stalin was motivated by an obsessive fear of a simultaneous war with a number of capitalist countries, but that in practice his actions would backfire and unite the whole world against him.

Stalin and the Great Patriotic War

Since 1941, Stalin has been chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. During the Great Patriotic War, Stalin served as Chairman of the State Defense Committee, People's Commissar for Defense and Supreme Commander of all the Armed Forces of the USSR.

During the Battle of Moscow in 1941, after Moscow was declared under a state of siege, Stalin remained in the capital. On November 6, 1941, Stalin spoke at a solemn meeting held at the Mayakovskaya metro station, which was dedicated to the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution. In his speech, Stalin explained the start of the war, unsuccessful for the Red Army, in particular, "lack of tanks and partly aviation". The next day, November 7, 1941, at the direction of Stalin, a traditional military parade was held on Red Square.

At the same time, according to modern historians, arguments about the quantitative or qualitative superiority of German technology on the eve of the war are unfounded. On the contrary, in terms of individual parameters (the number and weight of tanks, the number of aircraft), the Red Army grouping along the western border of the USSR significantly exceeded the Wehrmacht's similar grouping. A number of historians blame Stalin personally for the unpreparedness of the Soviet Union for war and huge losses, especially in the initial period of the war. Other historians take the opposite view. So, the historian A.V. Isaev claims: “intelligence officers and analysts, with a lack of information, drew conclusions that did not reflect reality ... Stalin simply did not have information that could be 100% trusted”.

This statement of the historian Isaev, however, is in conflict with the fact that back in the May holidays of 1941, the Soviet secret services installed listening devices in the office of the German ambassador Schulenburg, as a result of which, a few days before the war, information was received about Germany's intention to attack the USSR. In addition, many other sources named June 22, 1941 as the date of the German attack. Even I. A. Bunin, being in occupied France, already on Saturday, June 21, 1941, wrote: “Alarm everywhere: Germany wants to attack Russia? Finland is evacuating women and children from the cities…”, which shows that the German attack was not unexpected even for contemporary Parisians.

According to the Doctor of Historical Sciences O. A. Rzheshevsky, on June 17, 1941, the head of the 1st Directorate of the NKGB P. M. Fitin, I. V. Stalin was presented with a special message from Berlin: “All military measures in Germany to prepare an armed uprising against the USSR are completely completed, a strike can be expected at any time. According to the version common in historical works, on June 15, 1941, Richard Sorge radioed to Moscow about the exact date of the start of the Great Patriotic War - June 22, 1941. According to the press officer of the Service foreign intelligence Russian Federation V.N. Karpov, the alleged telegram to Sorge about the date of the attack on the USSR on June 22 is a fake created under Khrushchev, and Sorge called several dates for the attack on the USSR, which were never confirmed. According to V. N. Karpov, “intelligence did not give an exact date, they did not say unequivocally that the war would begin on June 22. No one doubted that the war was inevitable, but no one had a clear idea of ​​when and how it would begin” Stalin did not doubted the inevitability of the war, however, the terms named by intelligence passed, but it did not begin. A version arose that these rumors were being spread by England in order to push Hitler against the USSR. Therefore, on the intelligence reports, Stalin's resolutions appeared like "Isn't this a British provocation?"

January 4, 1943 magazine Time(New York) named Stalin "man of the year". The criteria for choosing someone as Person of the Year is the impact that person has had on the world. An article about this event began like this:

During the war, Stalin's eldest son Yakov was captured and killed. According to another version, which is also followed by the granddaughter of Joseph Stalin (daughter of Yakov) Galina Dzhugashvili and adopted son Artyom Sergeev, Yakov died in battle, and her father was given as a double agent from the Abwehr.

), but simply "comrade Stalin" "Comrade Vasiliev". As E. Radzinsky said, among the Soviet nomenclature, Stalin was also called "Master".

Domestic policy. The fight against cosmopolitanism

After the war, the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, under the leadership of I.V. Stalin, set a course for the accelerated restoration of the economy destroyed by the war.

In the late 1940s, patriotic and Great Russian propaganda intensified, as did the struggle against cosmopolitanism. In the early 1950s in the countries of Eastern Europe, and then in the USSR, several high-profile anti-Semitic trials were held. All Jewish educational institutions, theaters, publishing houses and mass media were closed (except for the newspaper of the Jewish Autonomous Region Birobidzhaner stern(“Birobidzhan Star” and the magazine “Soviet Gameland”)). Mass arrests and dismissals of Jews began. In the winter of 1953, there were rumors about an allegedly impending deportation of the Jews; the question of whether these rumors corresponded to reality is debatable.

Stalin himself repeatedly issued statements severely condemning anti-Semitism. On the other hand, V. G. Bazhanov, a former member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, who emigrated from the USSR in 1928, claims that in his presence Stalin once said about one of the leaders of the Komsomol: “What is this lousy little Jew imagining!”. N. S. Khrushchev accuses Stalin of latent anti-Semitism. In his Memoirs, he claims that when the problem arose of protest actions at one of the Moscow factories, the initiative of which was attributed to the Jews, Stalin told him: “It is necessary to organize healthy workers, and let them, taking clubs in their hands, beat these Jews”. According to the Polish General Vladislav Anders, in 1941, during negotiations with Polish representatives (Prime Minister V. Sikorsky and General V. Anders himself), Stalin expressed complete solidarity with the position of the Poles, emphasizing twice: "Jews are bad soldiers"

After the war, repressions were resumed for some time and among the highest commanders Armed forces of the USSR. So, in 1946-1948. according to the so-called. A number of major military leaders from the inner circle of Marshal of the Soviet Union G.K. Zhukov were arrested and put on trial in the "trophy case", including Air Chief Marshal A.A. Novikov, Lieutenant General K.F. Telegin.

In October 1952, at the 19th Congress of the CPSU, Stalin resigned as First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. However, already in October, at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, he was again elected one of the secretaries of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Since Stalin was elected to the Central Committee without his consent, he did not take part in the work of the Central Committee of the party as a secretary. An unusual and abnormal situation arose due to the fact that there was no leader in the party. In November 1952, G.M.

1945-1953

Domestic politics

After the war, the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Stalin, set a course for the accelerated restoration of the economy destroyed by the war.

Since 1948, the scientific life in the country has been affected by the struggle against cosmopolitanism and the so-called "crooking before the West."

After the war, repressions were resumed for some time among the highest command staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR. So, in 1946-1948. according to the so-called. A number of major military leaders from the inner circle of Marshal of the Soviet Union G.K. Zhukov were arrested and put on trial in the "trophy case", among them - Air Chief Marshal A.A. Novikov, Lieutenant General K.F. Telegin.

In October 1952, at the 19th Congress of the CPSU, Stalin tried to resign as Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. Until his death, Stalin retained the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

In the late 1940s, patriotic propaganda intensified in the USSR, as well as the fight against cosmopolitanism, which began after the adoption on March 28, 1947 of the decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the Courts of Honor in the ministries of the USSR and central departments”, signed by Stalin. According to this decree, a special body was created in each department - the "Court of Honor", which was entrusted with "consideration of anti-patriotic, anti-state and anti-social acts and actions committed by leading, operational and scientific workers of ministries of the USSR and central departments, if these misconduct and actions are not subject to criminal punishment". Some authors who study this campaign attribute to it an anti-Semitic character. We know Stalin's statement severely condemning anti-Semitism ( "Anti-Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous survival of cannibalism"). On the other hand, there are witnesses of Stalinist statements disparaging Jews.

In the post-war period, massive campaigns began against the departure from the “party principle”, against the “abstract-academic spirit”, “objectivism”, as well as against “anti-patriotism”, “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “belittling Russian science and Russian philosophy”.

Stalin paid personal attention to the construction of new buildings of the Moscow State University. The Moscow City Committee of the CPSU and the Moscow City Council proposed to build a four-story town in the Vnukovo area, where there were wide fields, based on economic considerations. President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR S. I. Vavilov and Rector of Moscow State University A. N. Nesmeyanov proposed to build a modern ten-story building. However, at a meeting of the Politburo, which was personally led by Stalin, he said:

... this complex is for Moscow University, and not 10-12, but 20 floors. We will instruct Komarovsky to build. To accelerate the pace of construction, it will have to be carried out in parallel with the design ... It is necessary to create living conditions by building dormitories for teachers and students. How long will students live? Six thousand? This means that the hostel should have six thousand rooms. Special care should be taken for family students.

On June 29, 1948, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR I.V. Stalin signed Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 2369, in accordance with which the Institute of Fine Mechanics and computer science them. S. A. Lebedeva.

At the same time, a whole scientific area - genetics, with the direct participation of Stalin, was declared bourgeois and banned, which, according to historians, slowed down the development of this field of science in the USSR for decades.

In 1950, Stalin took part in a discussion on questions of linguistics, in his work “Marxism and Questions of Linguistics” Stalin opposed the great Soviet linguist N. Ya. new doctrine of language). In his last theoretical work, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1952), Stalin put forward and developed a number of new propositions of political economy, relying on the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Foreign policy

In the states of Eastern Europe liberated by the Soviet Army, with the open support of Stalin, pro-Soviet communist forces came to power, later entering into an economic and military alliance with the USSR in its confrontation with the United States and the NATO bloc. Post-war contradictions between the USSR and the USA in the Far East led to the Korean War, in which Soviet pilots and anti-aircraft gunners took a direct part. USSR in the post-war world. The defeat of Germany and its satellites in the war radically changed the balance of power in the world. The USSR has become one of the leading world powers, without which, according to Molotov, not a single issue of international life should now be resolved.

However, during the war years, the power of the United States grew even more. Their gross national product rose by 70%, and the economic and human losses were minimal. Having become an international creditor during the war years, the United States got the opportunity to expand its influence on other countries and peoples.

All this led to the fact that instead of cooperation in Soviet-American relations, a period of mutual distrust and suspicion set in. The Soviet Union was worried about the US nuclear monopoly. America saw a threat to its security in the growing influence of the USSR in the world. All this led to the start of the Cold War.

Soviet intelligence had information about the work in the West to create an atomic bomb. This information was reported by Beria to Stalin. However, it is believed that a letter addressed to him in early 1943 by the Soviet physicist Flerov, who managed to explain the essence of the problem in a popular way, was of decisive importance. As a result, on February 11, 1943, the State Defense Committee adopted a resolution on the start of work on the creation of an atomic bomb. The English historian Anthony Beaver believes that Stalin's desire to take Berlin as soon as possible was not so much a political issue as a desire to study the German experience in nuclear technology. He bases his opinion on a letter from Beria and Malenkov to Stalin, in which they report the capture of 3 tons of uranium oxide at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

On July 24, 1945, in Potsdam, Truman, as it were, “incidentally,” informed Stalin that the United States “now has a weapon of extraordinary destructive power.” According to Churchill's memoirs, Stalin smiled, but did not become interested in the details. From this, Churchill concluded that Stalin did not understand anything and was not aware of the events. Some modern researchers believe that this was blackmail. That same evening, Stalin ordered Molotov to speak with Kurchatov about speeding up work on the atomic project. On August 20, 1945, to manage the atomic project, the GKO created a Special Committee with emergency powers, headed by L.P. Beria. Under the Special Committee, an executive body was created - the First Main Directorate under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (PSU). Vannikov was appointed head of the PGU. Stalin's directive obliged PGU to ensure the creation of atomic bombs, uranium and plutonium, in 1948. Already in November 1947, Molotov declared that "the secret of the atomic bomb has ceased to be a secret." This statement was regarded in the West as a bluff.

In 1946, Stalin signed about sixty documents that determined the development of atomic science and technology. The implementation of these decisions resulted in the creation of an atomic bomb, as well as the construction of the world's first nuclear power plant in Obninsk (1954) and the subsequent development of nuclear energy.

The successful test of the first Soviet atomic bomb was carried out on August 29, 1949 at the constructed test site in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan. On September 25, 1949, the Pravda newspaper published a TASS report.

Post-war economy of the USSR

After the war and the famine (drought) of 1946, ration cards were abolished in 1947, although many goods remained in short supply, in particular, in 1947 there was again a famine. In addition, on the eve of the abolition of cards, prices for rations were raised, which made it possible to reduce them repeatedly in 1948-1953. In 1952, the cost of bread was 39% of the price of the end of 1947, milk - 72%, meat - 42%, sugar - 49%, butter - 37%. As noted at the 19th Congress of the CPSU, at the same time the price of bread rose by 28% in the USA, by 90% in England, and in France more than doubled; the cost of meat in the US increased by 26%, in England - by 35%, in France - by 88%. If in 1948 real wages were on average 20% below the pre-war level, then in 1952 they already exceeded the pre-war level by 25%. In general, during 1928-1952. greatest growth the standard of living was among the party and labor elite, while for the vast majority of rural residents it did not improve or worsened.

In 1948, in the USSR, on the initiative of Stalin, the so-called. "Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature", according to which a grand offensive against drought began by planting forest plantations (along with other activities).

Death of Stalin

On March 1, 1953, Stalin, lying on the floor in the small dining room of the Near Dacha (one of Stalin's residences), was discovered by security officer P.V. Lozgachev. On the morning of March 2, doctors arrived at the Near Dacha and diagnosed paralysis on the right side of the body. On March 5, at 21:50, Stalin died. Stalin's death was announced on March 5, 1953. According to the medical report, death was the result of a cerebral hemorrhage.

There are numerous conspiracy theories suggesting the unnaturalness of death and the involvement of Stalin's entourage in it. According to one of them (which, in particular, the historian E. S. Radzinsky adheres to), L. P. Beria, N. S. Khrushchev and G. M. Malenkov contributed to his death without providing assistance. According to another, Stalin was poisoned by his closest associate Beria.

Stalin became the only Soviet leader for whom a memorial service was performed by the Russian Orthodox Church (See Stalin and the Russian Orthodox Church).

According to journalist Vasily Golovanov, at Stalin's funeral, due to the huge number of people who wanted to say goodbye to Stalin, there was a stampede, as a result of which there were victims. According to the journalist, "the exact number of dead is unknown or classified".

The embalmed body of Stalin was placed on public display in the Lenin Mausoleum, which in 1953-1961 was called the "Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin." On October 30, 1961, the XXII Congress of the CPSU decided that “serious violations of Lenin’s precepts by Stalin ... make it impossible to leave the coffin with his body in the Mausoleum”. On the night of October 31 to November 1, 1961, Stalin's body was taken out of the Mausoleum and buried in a grave near the Kremlin wall. Subsequently, a monument was opened on the grave (a bust by N. V. Tomsky).

Personality and the "Personality Cult of Stalin"

During Stalin's lifetime, Soviet propaganda created a halo around him. "great leader and teacher". A number of towns and streets were named after Stalin. settlements in the USSR and countries of Eastern Europe; many enterprises, institutions, collective farms, hydraulic structures received an additional name to their name "them. I.V. Stalin»; also, his name could be found in the names of Soviet equipment produced in the 1930-1950s. In the Soviet press of the Stalin era, his name was mentioned on a par with Marx, Engels and Lenin. He has been frequently referenced in songs, fiction, and films.

Estimates of Stalin's personality are controversial and there is a huge range of opinions about him, and often they describe him with opposite characteristics. On the one hand, many who spoke with Stalin spoke of him as a broadly and versatilely educated and extremely intelligent person. On the other hand, Stalin is often described negatively.

Some historians believe that Stalin established a personal dictatorship; others believe that until the mid-1930s the dictatorship was collective. The political system implemented by Stalin is usually referred to as "totalitarianism". According to the conclusions of many historians, the Stalinist dictatorship was a highly centralized regime that relied primarily on powerful party-state structures, terror and violence, as well as on the mechanisms of ideological manipulation of society, the selection of privileged groups and the formation of pragmatic strategies. According to Oxford University professor R. Hingley, for a quarter of a century before his death, Stalin had more political power than any other figure in history. He was not just a symbol of the regime, but a leader who made fundamental decisions and was the initiator of all significant state measures.

After the so-called. "Debunking Stalin's Personality Cult" By the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, N. S. Khrushchev, at the XX Congress of the CPSU, Soviet historians assessed Stalin taking into account the position of the ideological bodies of the USSR. This position, in particular, can be illustrated by a quote from the index of names to the Complete Works of Lenin, published in 1974, where the following is written about Stalin:

In Stalin's activities, along with the positive side, there was also a negative side. While holding the most important party and state posts, Stalin committed gross violations of the Leninist principles of collective leadership and the norms of party life, violation of socialist legality, unjustified mass repressions against prominent state, political and military figures of the Soviet Union and other honest Soviet people. The Party resolutely condemned and put an end to the personality cult of Stalin alien to Marxism-Leninism and its consequences, approved the work of the Central Committee to restore and develop the Leninist principles of leadership and the norms of party life in all areas of party, state and ideological work, took measures to prevent such errors and distortions in the future.

Personality assessments by Stalin's contemporaries

During Stalin's lifetime, attitudes towards him ranged from benevolent and enthusiastic to negative. Their reviews of Stalin were left, in particular, by foreign writers who met with the Soviet leader: English - Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and H. G. Wells(1866-1946), French - Henri Barbusse (1873-1935). In particular, such statements by the laureate are known Nobel Prize B. Show about Stalin: "Stalin is a very pleasant person and really the leader of the working class", "Stalin is a giant, and all Western figures are pygmies". In the book The Experience of Autobiography, G. Wells wrote about Stalin: “I have never met a person more sincere, decent and honest; there is nothing dark and sinister in him, and it is precisely these qualities that should explain his enormous power in Russia. I thought before, before I met him, maybe he was thought badly because people were afraid of him. But I found that, on the contrary, no one is afraid of him and everyone believes in him. Stalin is completely devoid of the cunning and deceit of the Georgians. The words of A. Barbusse about Stalin became widely known in literature: "Stalin is Lenin today"; “This is iron man. The surname gives us his image: Stalin - steel "; this is a man "with the head of a scientist, with the face of a worker, in the clothes of a simple soldier".

Anti-Stalinist positions were occupied by a number of communist leaders who accused Stalin of destroying the party, of departing from the ideals of Lenin and Marx. This approach originated in the environment of the so-called. "Lenin Guard" (F. F. Raskolnikov, L. D. Trotsky, N. I. Bukharin, M. N. Ryutin). The most significant opponent of Stalin, L. D. Trotsky (1879-1940), called Stalin "outstanding mediocrity" forgiving no one "spiritual superiority".

Stalin's former secretary Boris Bazhanov (1900-1982), who fled the USSR in 1928, characterizes Stalin in his memoirs as "uncultured", "cunning", "ignorant" person. In the book of memoirs "Stalin and the Tragedy of Georgia", published in 1932 in Berlin in German, Joseph Dzhugashvili's classmate at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, Joseph Iremashvili (1878-1944), claimed that young Stalin had "vindictiveness, vindictiveness, cunning, ambition and lust for power".

Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR V. I. Vernadsky (1863-1945), in his diary entry dated November 14, 1941, describing his impressions of Stalin's speech at the Parade on Red Square on November 7, 1941, noted: “Only yesterday did we get the text of Stalin's speech, which made a huge impression. Previously listened to on the radio from the fifth to the tenth. The speech, no doubt, of a very intelligent person.”. The Soviet military leader I. G. Starinov conveys the impression made on him by Stalin's speech: We listened with bated breath to Stalin's speech. (...) Stalin talked about what worried everyone: about people, about cadres. And how convincingly he spoke! Here I first heard: “Cadres decide everything.” Words about how important it is to take care of people, take care of them…”.

Assessments of Stalin's personality by modern specialists

Describing the personality of Stalin, many historians note Stalin's tendency to read a large amount of literature. Stalin was a very readable, erudite person and was interested in culture, including poetry. He spent a lot of time reading books, and after his death, his personal library remained, consisting of thousands of books, on the margins of which his notes remained. Stalin, in particular, read the books of Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde, N. V. Gogol, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, L. D. Trotsky, L. B. Kamenev. According to V. A. Reasonable Stalin preferred Kant to Hegel. Among the authors admired by Stalin are Emile Zola and F. M. Dostoevsky. He quoted long passages from the Bible, the works of Bismarck, the works of Chekhov. Stalin himself spoke to some visitors, pointing to a stack of books on his desk: “This is my daily norm - 500 pages”. Up to a thousand books were produced this way a year. Historian R. A. Medvedev, opposing "often extremely exaggerated estimates of the level of his education and intelligence", at the same time warns against understatement. He notes that Stalin read a lot, and diversified, from fiction to popular science. In the pre-war period, Stalin paid most of his attention to historical and military-technical books, after the war he switched to reading works of a political direction, such as the History of Diplomacy, Talleyrand's biography. Medvedev notes that Stalin, being responsible for the death of a large number of writers and the destruction of their books, at the same time patronized M. Sholokhov, A. Tolstoy and others, returns E. V. Tarle from exile, whose biography of Napoleon he treated with great interest and personally oversaw its publication, suppressing tendentious attacks on the book. Medvedev emphasizes Stalin's knowledge of the national Georgian culture, in 1940 Stalin himself makes changes to the new translation of The Knight in the Panther's Skin

The English writer and statesman Charles Snow also characterized Stalin's educational level as quite high:

There is evidence that back in the 1920s, Stalin visited the play "Days of the Turbins" by the writer M. A. Bulgakov eighteen times. Stalin also maintained personal contacts with other cultural figures: musicians, film actors, directors. Stalin personally entered into polemics with the composer D. D. Shostakovich. Stalin also loved cinema and was willingly interested in directing. One of the directors with whom Stalin was personally acquainted was A.P. Dovzhenko. Stalin liked such films by this director as "Arsenal", "Aerograd". Stalin also personally edited the script for the film Shchors.

Russian historian L. M. Batkin, recognizing Stalin's love of reading, believes that he was a reader "aesthetically dense". Batkin believes that Stalin had no idea "on the existence of such a 'subject' as art", about "special art world" and about the structure of this world. According to Batkin, Stalin "some kind of energy" half-educated and middle class people brought to "pure, strong-willed, outstanding form". According to Batkin, Stalin's oratorical style is extremely primitive: it is distinguished “catechetical form, endless repetitions and reversals of the same thing, the same phrase in the form of a question and in the form of a statement, and again it is the same through negative particle» . The Israeli expert on Russian literature, Mikhail Weiskopf, also argues that Stalin's argument was built "on more or less hidden tautologies, on the effect of stupefying pounding".

On the other hand, the Russian philologist G. G. Khazagerov elevates Stalin's rhetoric to the traditions of solemn, homiletic (preaching) eloquence and considers it didactic-symbolic. According to the author, “The task of didactics is, based on symbolism as an axiom, to streamline the picture of the world and convey this ordered picture intelligibly. Stalinist didactics, however, took on the functions of symbolism. This was manifested in the fact that the zone of axioms grew to entire curricula, and evidence, on the contrary, was replaced by a reference to authority.. Russian philologist V. V. Smolenenkova notes the strong impact that Stalin's speeches had on the audience. Smolenenkova explains the effect of Stalin's speeches by the fact that they were quite adequate to the mood and expectations of the audience. The English historian S. Sebag-Montefiore notes that Stalin's style was distinguished by clarity and, often, refinement.

Assessment of Russian officials

Russian President D. A. Medvedev, speaking of the Katyn tragedy, called this act a crime of Stalin: “From our side, all assessments have been given for a long time. The Katyn tragedy is a crime of Stalin and a number of his henchmen. The position of the Russian state on this issue has long been formulated and remains unchanged.. In an interview with the Izvestia newspaper, the President, in particular, noted that “Stalin committed a lot of crimes against his people ... And despite the fact that he worked hard, despite the fact that under his leadership the country achieved success, what was done in relation to his own people cannot be forgiven”. According to Medvedev's position, Stalin's role in the victory in the Great Patriotic War was "very serious", although Medvedev believes that the war was "won by our people". In general, according to Medvedev, Stalin “had both weak decisions and very strong decisions, including during the war period. This also cannot be ruled out."

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in 2009: “Obviously, from 1924 to 1953, the country, and the country was then led by Stalin, changed radically, it turned from an agrarian into an industrial one. True, the peasantry did not remain, but industrialization really took place. We won the Great Patriotic War. And no matter who and no matter what they say, victory was achieved.. At the same time, the prime minister noted the repressions that took place during that period. According to Putin, Katyn massacre was Stalin's revenge "for the death of 32 thousand Red Army soldiers who died in Polish captivity".

According to the position of the former President of the USSR M. S. Gorbachev, "Stalin is a man covered in blood".

According to the Chairman of the Federation Council S. M. Mironov: "Stalin - bloody executioner, and no matter what anyone says, he is and will be so".

According to the Chairman of the State Duma B. V. Gryzlov, as the leader of the USSR, Stalin "I did a lot during the Great Patriotic War", although "kinks along domestic politics» his "do not decorate". “We know how respected he was from those who opened a second front”, - said the head of the lower house of the legislature of Russia.

The State Duma, in its statement "On the Katyn tragedy and its victims" dated November 26, 2010, officially recognized that the execution of Polish officers near Katyn was carried out on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders. According to Russian media reports, the majority of deputies from the United Russia, Just Russia and LDPR factions voted for the adoption of this statement. Deputies from the Communist Party faction voted against the adoption of the statement, insisting that the assertion that the Soviet leadership was guilty of the Katyn tragedy was based on falsified documents. Regarding the version of the communists about "falsifications" documents, Russian President D. A. Medvedev on December 6, 2010 stated the following: “ Stalin and his henchmen are responsible for this crime. And I have the relevant documents, which were obtained from the so-called "special folder". These documents are now available on the Internet, they are publicly available with all the resolutions. Attempts to question these documents, to say that someone falsified them, is simply not serious. This is done by those who are trying to whitewash the nature of the regime that Stalin created at a certain period in our country..

Opinion polls

According to a public opinion poll on February 18 - 19, 2006 (Public Opinion Foundation), 47% of Russian residents considered Stalin's role in history to be positive, 29% - negative. Only in one socio-demographic group, among citizens with higher education, the historical figure of Stalin was perceived positively less often than negatively (39% and 41%). 59% believed that "in Stalin's times, mostly innocent people ended up in camps and prisons", 12% - "mostly those who deserved it." Among citizens under the age of 35, 39% had a positive attitude towards Stalin and 30% negatively. At the same time, 38% believed that now Stalin and his activities are "denigrated", and 29% - "are assessed objectively."

During a multi-month (May 7 - December 28, 2008) electronic public opinion poll organized by the Rossiya TV channel, Stalin held leading positions by a wide margin. The final official data, according to which Stalin took second place (519,071 votes), losing 5,504 votes (1% of the vote) to Alexander Nevsky.

Notable Facts

• Currently, Stalin is listed as an honorary citizen of the city of Ceske Budejovice (Czech Republic). From November 7, 1947 to April 29, 2004, Stalin was listed as an honorary citizen of Budapest. From 1947 to 2007 he was also an honorary citizen of the Slovak city of Kosice.
• January 1, 1940 American magazine Time named Stalin "man of the year" (1939). The editors of the journal explained their choice by the conclusion "Nazi-Communist" non-aggression pact and the outbreak of the Soviet-Finnish war, as a result of which, according to Time, Stalin radically changed the balance of political power and became Hitler's partner in aggression. On January 4, 1943, the magazine named Stalin "Person of the Year" for the second time. The article about this event said: “Only Joseph Stalin knows exactly how close Russia came to defeat in 1942. And only Joseph Stalin knows for certain what he had to do in order for Russia to overcome this ... "
• During the Great Patriotic War, Stalin was usually addressed not by his first name and patronymic or military rank ( "Comrade Marshal (Generalissimo) of the Soviet Union"), but simply "comrade Stalin". Austrian Chancellor Karl Renner began his message to Stalin like this: "Dear Generalissimo Comrade Stalin!". In military documents, reports and reports, Stalin used the pseudonym "Comrade Vasiliev".
• In addition to Georgian and Russian, Stalin read German relatively fluently, knew Latin, well-known ancient Greek, Church Slavonic, understood Farsi (Persian), and understood Armenian. In the mid-1920s, he also studied French.
• On January 13, 2010, the Kyiv Court of Appeal found Stalin and other Soviet leaders guilty of the genocide of the Ukrainian people in 1932-1933, as a result of which, according to the judges, 3 million 941 thousand people died in Ukraine. The European organization PACE also condemned the policy of Stalin, which, according to PACE, led to the famine and the death of millions of people.

I have long wanted to write. The attitude towards Stalin in our country is largely polar. Some hate him, others praise him. I always liked to look at things soberly and try to understand their essence.
So Stalin was never a dictator. Moreover, he was never the leader of the USSR. Do not rush to snort skeptically. Although let's do it easier. I will now ask you two questions. If you know the answers to them, you can close this page. What follows will seem uninteresting to you.
1. Who was the leader of the Soviet state after Lenin's death?
2. When exactly did Stalin become dictators, at least a year?

Let's start from afar. In each country there is a position, occupying which, a person becomes the head of this state. This is not always the case, but exceptions only prove the rule. And in general, it doesn’t matter what this position is called, the president, the prime minister, the chairman of the great khural, or just the leader and beloved leader, the main thing is that it always exists. Due to certain changes in the political formation of a given country, it can also change its name. But one thing remains unchanged, after the person occupying it leaves his place (for one reason or another), another always takes his place, who automatically becomes the next first person of the state.
So now the next question - what was the name of this position in the USSR? General Secretary? Are you sure?
Well let's look. So Stalin became the General Secretary of the CPSU(b) in 1922. Then Lenin was still alive and even tried to work. But Lenin was never General Secretary. He only held the post of chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. After him, this place was taken by Rykov. Those. what does it mean that Rykov became the leader of the Soviet state after Lenin? I'm sure some of you have never even heard of this name. At the same time, Stalin did not yet have any special powers of authority. Moreover, purely legally, the CPSU (b) was at that time just one of the departments in the Comintern, on a par with the parties of other countries. It is clear that the Bolsheviks gave money for all this anyway, but formally everything was exactly like that. The Comintern was then led by Zinoviev. Maybe he was at that time the first person of the state? It is unlikely that, in terms of his influence on the party, he was far inferior, for example, to the same Trotsky.
Then who then was the first person and leader? The next one is even funnier. Do you think Stalin was already a dictator in 1934? I think you now answer in the affirmative. So this year, the post of General Secretary was abolished altogether. Why how? Well, like this. Formally, Stalin remained a simple secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. By the way, he signed it in all documents later. And in the charter of the party there was no position of general secretary at all.
In 1938, the so-called "Stalinist" constitution was adopted. According to it, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR was called the supreme executive body of our country. Which was headed by Kalinin. Foreigners called him the "president" of the USSR. What kind of power he actually had, you all know very well.
Well, think about it, you say. There is also a decorative president in Germany, and the Chancellor rules everything. Yes it's true. But only so it was before Hitler and after him. In the summer of 1934, Hitler was elected Fuhrer (leader) of the nation in a referendum. Incidentally received 84.6% percent of the vote. And only then did he become, in essence, a dictator, i. a person with unlimited power. As you understand, Stalin legally did not have such powers at all. And this greatly limits the possibilities of power.
Well, it's not important, you say. On the contrary, such a position was very advantageous. He, as it were, stood above the fight, did not formally answer for anything and was the referee. Okay, let's move on. On May 6, 1941, he suddenly became Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. On the one hand, this is generally understandable. War is coming soon and we need to have real levers of power. But, the bottom line is that during the war, military power comes to the fore. And the civilian becomes just a part of the military structure, simply speaking, the rear. And just during the war, the military was led by the same Stalin as Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Well, that's okay. The next one is even funnier. On July 19, 1941, Stalin also became the People's Commissar for Defense. This already goes beyond any idea of ​​the dictatorship of one particular person. To make it clearer to you, it's as if the General Director (and owner) of the enterprise concurrently became the Commercial Director and Head of the Supply Department. Nonsense.
People's Commissar of Defense during the war is a very secondary position. For this period, the General Staff takes the main power and, in our case, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, headed by the same Stalin. And the People's Commissar of Defense becomes something like a foreman of the company, who is responsible for the supply, weapons and other everyday issues of the unit. A very secondary position.
This can at least somehow be understood for the period of hostilities, but Stalin remained People's Commissar until February 1947.
Okay, let's move on. Stalin dies in 1953. Who became the leader of the USSR after him? What are you saying Khrushchev? Since when is a simple secretary of the Central Committee in our country in charge of the whole country?
Formally, it turns out that Malenko. It was he who became the next, after Stalin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers. I saw somewhere on the net where this was clearly hinted at. But for some reason, no one in our country later considered him to be the leader of the country.
In 1953, the post of party leader was revived. They named her First Secretary. And he became them in September 1953, Khrushchev. But somehow it is very unclear. At the very end of what seemed to be a plenum, Malenkov stood up and asked how the audience looked at electing the First Secretary. The audience answered in the affirmative (by the way, this is a characteristic feature of all the transcripts of those years, remarks, comments and other reactions to certain speeches in the presidium are constantly coming from the audience. Even negative ones. Sleeping with your eyes open at such events will already be under Brezhnev. Malenkov suggested voting for Khrushchev, which they did.
So when did Khrushchev become the de facto leader of the USSR? Well, probably in 1958, when he threw out all the old people and also became the Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Those. can we assume that, in fact, occupying this position and leading the party, a person began to lead the country?
But here's the problem. Brezhnev, after Khrushev was removed from all posts, became only the First Secretary. Then, in 1966, the post of General Secretary was revived. It seems like you can assume that it was then that it actually began to mean the complete leadership of the country. But again there are rough edges. Brezhnev became the leader of the party after the post of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Which. as we all know very well, it was generally quite decorative. Why, then, in 1977, Leonid Ilyich returned to it again and became both the General Secretary and the Chairman? Did he lack power?
But Andropov got enough. He became only Gensekov.
And that's not really all. I took all these facts from Wikipedia. If you go deeper, then the devil will break his leg in all these ranks, positions and powers of the highest echelon of power in the 20-50s.
Well, now the most important thing. In the USSR, the highest power was collective. And all the main decisions, on one or another significant issue, were made by the Politburo (under Stalin it was a little different, but essentially true). In fact, there was no single leader. There were people (like the same Stalin) who, for various reasons, were considered the first among equals. But not more. You can't talk about any dictatorship. It never existed in the USSR and could not exist. The same Stalin simply did not have legal leverage to make serious decisions on his own. Everything has always been taken collectively. On which there are many documents.
If you think that I came up with all this myself, then you are mistaken. This is the official position of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union represented by the Politburo and the Central Committee of the CPSU.
Don't believe? Well, let's move on to the documents.
Transcript of the July 1953 plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Just after the arrest of Beria.
From Malenkov's speech:
First of all, we must openly admit, and we propose to record this in the decision of the Plenum of the Central Committee, that in our propaganda in recent years there has been a deviation from the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the question of the role of the individual in history. It is no secret that party propaganda, instead of correctly explaining the role of the Communist Party as the guiding force in the construction of communism in our country, strayed into a cult of personality.
But, comrades, it is not only a matter of propaganda. The question of the cult of personality is directly and immediately connected with the question of collective leadership.
We have no right to hide from you that such an ugly cult of personality has led to peremptory individual decisions and in recent years began to cause serious damage to the leadership of the party and the country.

This must be said in order to resolutely correct the mistakes made on this score, to extract necessary lessons and further ensure in practice collective leadership on the principle basis of the Leninist-Stalinist doctrine.
We must say this so as not to repeat the mistakes associated with lack of collective leadership and with a wrong understanding of the question of the personality cult, for these mistakes, in the absence of Comrade Stalin, will be thrice dangerous. (Voices. Right).

No one alone dares, cannot, must not, and does not want to claim the role of successor. (Voices. That's right. Applause).
The successor to the great Stalin is a tightly knit, monolithic team of party leaders ....

Those. in fact, the question of the cult of personality is not connected with the fact that someone made mistakes there (in this case, Beria, the plenum was devoted to his arrest), but with the fact that making serious decisions on his own is a deviation from the very foundation of party democracy as a principle of governing the country.
By the way, since my childhood as a pioneer, I remember such words as Democratic centralism, election from the bottom to the top. It was purely legal in the Party. Everyone was always elected, from the petty secretary of a party cell to the general secretary. Another thing is that under Brezhnev it became largely a fiction. But under Stalin it was just that.
And of course the most important document is ".
At the beginning, Khrushchev says what the report will actually be about:
Due to the fact that not everyone still imagines what the cult of personality led to in practice, what enormous damage was caused violation of the principle of collective leadership in the Party and the concentration of immense, unlimited power in the hands of one person, the Central Committee of the Party considers it necessary to report materials on this issue to the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union .
Then he scolds Stalin for a long time for deviations from the principles of collective leadership and attempts to subdue everything for himself.
And at the end he concludes with a policy statement:
Secondly, consistently and persistently continue the work carried out in recent years by the Central Committee of the Party on the strictest observance in all Party organizations, from top to bottom, Leninist principles of party leadership and above all the highest principle - collective leadership, to observe the norms of Party life, enshrined in the Rules of our Party, to develop criticism and self-criticism.
Third, fully restore the Leninist principles Soviet socialist democracy expressed in the Constitution of the Soviet Union, to fight against the arbitrariness of persons who abuse power. It is necessary to completely correct the violations of revolutionary socialist legality that have accumulated over a long period as a result of the negative consequences of the cult of personality.

And you say dictatorship. The dictatorship of the party, yes, but not one person. And those are two big differences.

December 18, 1878(according to other versions, December 21, 1879) - was born in the city of Tori, Tiflis province, Russian Empire. Father, Vissarion Ivanovich Dzhugashvili, was a shoemaker and subsequently opened a shoe factory.

1888-1894- Joseph Stalin studied at the Gori Orthodox Theological School.

In September 1894 he graduated from college and entered the Orthodox Tiflis Theological Seminary. At this time, he became acquainted with the ideas of Marxism and began to associate with underground groups of revolutionary Marxists.

1897-1898- began to actively join the social democratic movement, became the leader of an illegal circle in the seminary, was engaged in the propaganda of Marxism.

May 29, 1899, before the exams, Stalin was expelled from the seminary. One of the most likely reasons is his propaganda activity, which the leaders were aware of. educational institution. A certificate was issued to Stalin, according to which he could work as a teacher in elementary public schools.

December 1899- Stalin was hired as a computer-observer at the Tiflis Physical Observatory.

Since the 1900s he began to be even more actively engaged in revolutionary propaganda activities.
April 5, 1902 was arrested for organizing strikes and rallies. After one and a half years of imprisonment in the Kutaisi prison, he was exiled to Siberia, from where he fled.

In 1906 Stalin visited the IV Congress of the RSDLP in Stockholm (Sweden), where he met many famous revolutionaries and entered into a debate with Vladimir Lenin regarding agrarian policy.

July 16, 1906 Joseph Stalin married seventeen-year-old Ekaterina Svanidze in the St. David Church in Tiflis. In 1907 their son Yakov was born.

March 25, 1908 a year later, he was arrested again and imprisoned in the Bayil prison. Being exiled to the city of Solvychegodsk, Vologda province, he again escaped. After the capture, he was again in custody, then again made attempts to escape. The last escape was made on February 29, 1912.

1912-1913 - worked in St. Petersburg in the underground editorial office of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda. After the publication of the first issue of the newspaper, he was arrested and exiled to the Narym Territory. Subsequently, he fled and hid in St. Petersburg, and also engaged in the development of Bolshevik views at the insistence of Lenin.

March 1913.- arrest of Stalin and his exile in the Turukhansk region of the Yenisei province. From exile he returned to St. Petersburg only in March 1917.

1917- worked in the editorial office of Pravda, took over the management of the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks and the Central Committee. Became a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. He took part in the events of the October Revolution. After the Bolshevik victory, Stalin became a member of the Council of People's Commissars (SNK) as People's Commissar for Nationalities.

May 1918- Stalin married for the second time the daughter of a Russian revolutionary, Nadezhda Alliluyeva.

1917-1922- the period of the Civil War in Russia. Stalin, on a party assignment, traveled to the south of Russia, supervised the export of Caucasian grain to industrial centers, participated in the defense of Tsaritsyn, and was engaged in preparing the defense of Smolensk. In 1919, he was appointed People's Commissar of State Control at the suggestion of Lenin. In 1921, Stalin adopted the son of his deceased friend Artyom, and in the same year his second son, Vasily, was born. By 1922, due to Lenin's illness, Stalin was in fact the head of the country.

In 1926 Stalin was again re-elected General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, he continued to develop the ideas of "the victory of socialism in one country." In the same year, Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, was born in Leningrad.

1926-1930- a period of gradual concentration of all power in the hands of Stalin. At party meetings, he equated any disagreement with the party line to a crime.

Since the 1930s, Stalin became the sole leader of the entire people, and all who had previously been part of the anti-Stalinist opposition (Trotsky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Zinoviev, etc.) were expelled from the party and recognized as "enemies of the people."

Forced collectivization was carried out, the so-called. dispossession, mass repressions. Stalin also decided to head for industrialization - industrial facilities were built throughout the country.

In 1932 Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide, and in 1937 Stalin's mother died, but he did not come to her funeral.

The second half of the 1930s was marked by mass terror. "Enemies of the people" were exiled en masse to camps or were executed in the cellars of the NKVD. Repression affected almost all sectors of society.

August 23, 1939 year, a non-aggression pact was signed with Nazi Germany - the so-called. "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact".

June 22, 1941 German troops invaded the territory of the USSR. During the Great Patriotic War 1941 -1945 Stalin was proclaimed Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, as well as People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR, took part in the planning of military operations, led the course of hostilities from Moscow, participated in the creation of the anti-Hitler coalition together with US President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill. During the war, Stalin's first son, Yakov, died at the front.

In June 1945 Stalin for military merit received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and the specially introduced military rank of Generalissimo of the Soviet Union. In October of the same year, he was diagnosed with a microstroke.

March 19, 1946 Stalin accepted the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the post of Minister of the Armed Forces of the USSR. Starting from 1946 until the early 1950s, a course was set for the accelerated restoration of the country, devastated after the war. Stalin also actively promoted the implementation of the Soviet "atomic project" in the conditions of the "cold war" with the United States.

From August 9, 1951 to February 12, 1952 Stalin was on a long vacation for health reasons. At the end of 1952, Stalin asked to be removed from the post of Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, but the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU rejected his request.

In February 1953 Stalin held his last meeting with Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin and Khrushchev at his residence called "Near Dacha".

March 5, 1953 Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His body in a sarcophagus was installed in the Mausoleum next to the body of Lenin.

October 31, 1961 year, at the initiative of Khrushchev, Stalin's body was reburied behind the Mausoleum near the Kremlin wall.

People speak of Stalin as the Leader and General Secretary among the people, less often as the Prime Minister, Chairman of the Government of the USSR. All this is true, but if you ask whether Stalin was the General Secretary until his death, then most of the respondents will be mistaken in saying that Iosif Vissarionovich died in the post of General Secretary. Many historians are also mistaken when they say that Stalin wanted to leave the post of general secretary in the fifties.
The fact is that Stalin eliminated the post of General Secretaries of the CPSU (b) in the thirties and until the sixties, already under Brezhnev, there were no general secretaries (already the Central Committee of the CPSU!) in the USSR. Khrushchev was First Secretary and Head of Government after Stalin's death. What post did Stalin himself hold from the thirties until his death, what post did he want to leave? Let's look into this.

Was Stalin the General Secretary? This question will surprise almost everyone. The answer will follow - of course it was! But if you ask an elderly person who remembers the late 1930s - early 50s about this, whether Stalin was called that then, he will answer: "I don’t remember something. You know, for sure - no."
On the other hand, we have heard many times that in April 1922, at the plenum of the Central Committee after the 21st Party Congress, "at Lenin's suggestion" Stalin was elected General Secretary. And after that there was a lot of talk about his secretaryship.

Should be sorted out. Let's start from afar.
The secretary, according to the original meaning of the word, is a clerical position. Not a single state or political institution can do without office work. The Bolsheviks, from the very beginning aimed at seizing power, paid much attention to their archives. It was inaccessible to most of the party members, but Lenin often looked into it for his polemics, in other words, scolding. He had no difficulties - Krupskaya kept the archive.

After the February Revolution, Elena Stasova became secretary of the Central Committee (still with a small letter). If Krupskaya kept the party archive in her desk, then Stasova was given a room in Kseshinskaya's mansion, she got a staff - 3 assistants. In August 1917, after the 6th Congress of the Central Committee, a secretariat was established, headed by Sverdlov.

Further more. Bureaucratization gradually embraced the Bolshevik Party. In 1919, the Politburo and the Orgburo arose. Stalin entered both. In 1920, Krestinsky, a supporter of Trotsky, became the head of the secretariat. A year after the next discussion, it's easier otherwise - squabbles, Krestinsky and other "Trotskyites" were taken out of all the highest bodies of the party. Stalin, as usual, skillfully maneuvered and remained senior in the Orgburo, which included the secretariat.

While Lenin and other "best minds" of the party were engaged in big politics, Stalin, in the words of Trotsky, "outstanding mediocrity", was preparing his army - the party apparatus. Separately, it should be said about Molotov, a typical party official, completely devoted to Stalin. He is in 1921-22. led the secretariat, i.e. was his predecessor.

By April 1922, when Stalin became General Secretary, his position was quite strong. Almost no one noticed this appointment itself. In the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in the article "VKP(b)" (1928), Stalin is never mentioned separately and there is not a word about any general secretariat. And it was formalized in "working order", among others, "listened-decided", at the suggestion, by the way, of Kamenev.

Most often, the General Secretary was remembered in connection with the so-called "Lenin's Testament" (in fact, the document was called "Letter to the Congress"). One should not think that Lenin only spoke badly about Stalin: "too rude," and offered to replace him with someone else. The most humane person did not say a kind word about any of his "Parteigenosse".

There is an important feature of Lenin's statement about Stalin. Lenin dictated the proposal to remove him on January 4, 1923, after he learned of Stalin's rudeness towards Krupskaya. The main text of the "Testament" was dictated on December 23-25, 1922, and it says rather reservedly about Stalin: "concentrated immense power in his hands," and so on. In any case, not much worse than about others (Trotsky is self-confident, Bukharin is a scholastic, does not understand dialectics, and in general, almost a non-Marxist). So much for the "principled" Vladimir Ilyich. Until Stalin got nasty to his wife, he did not even think about removing Stalin.

I will not dwell on the further history of the Testament. It is important to emphasize that Stalin, by skillful demagogy, flexible tactics, and blockade with various "Tsekists", ensured that the post of General Secretary remained with him. Let us go straight to 1934, when the 17th Party Congress took place.

It has already been written many times that some of the congress delegates decided to replace Stalin with Kirov. Naturally, there are no documents about this, and "memoir evidence" is extremely contradictory. The charter of the party, based on the notorious "democratic centralism", completely excludes any personnel transfers by decision of congresses. The congresses elected only the central bodies, but no one personally. Such issues were resolved in a narrow circle of the party elite.

Nevertheless, the "Testament" was not forgotten, and Stalin could not yet consider himself guaranteed against all sorts of accidents. At the end of the 1920s, the "Testament" was mentioned openly or veiled at various party gatherings. They talked about him, for example, Kamenev, Bukharin and even Kirov. Stalin had to defend himself. He interpreted Lenin's words about his rudeness as praise that he was rude to those who "rudely and treacherously destroy and split the party."

By 1934, Stalin decided to put an end to all talk of the Testament. In the era of the "great terror", the possession of this Leninist document began to be equated with counter-revolutionary activity. With related findings. Neither at the 17th Congress nor at the subsequent plenum of the Central Committee was the question of the General Secretary raised. Since then, Stalin signed all the documents modestly - the Secretary of the Central Committee, even after the Presovnarkom Molotov. This was until May 1940, when he combined both positions.

In October 1952, at the plenum after the 19th Congress, the post of General Secretary was abolished - officially, however, there was no information about this. No one should have remembered this story at all.

They revived the General Secretariat many years later, in the Brezhnev era.
In conclusion, it should be emphasized that the topic of this note is rather secondary, and in no case should Stalin's unwillingness to be called General Secretary after 1934 be regarded as a sign of his "modesty". This is just his petty maneuver, aimed at quickly forgetting about Lenin's letter and all the vicissitudes associated with it.

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Stalin was one of many who claimed power after Lenin. How did it happen that a young revolutionary from the Georgian town of Gori ended up becoming what they called the “father of nations”? A number of factors have led to this.

Fighting youth

Lenin said about Stalin: "This cook will cook only spicy dishes." Stalin was one of the oldest Bolsheviks, he had a truly militant biography. He was repeatedly in exile, took part in the Civil War, in the defense of Tsaritsyn.

In his youth, Stalin did not disdain expropriations. At the 1907 congress in London, "exes" were banned (the congress was held on June 1), but already on June 13, Koba Ivanovich, as Stalin was then called, organized his most famous robbery of two carriages of the State Bank, because, firstly, Lenin supported "exes" Secondly, Koba himself considered the decisions of the London Congress to be Menshevik.

During this robbery, Koba's group managed to get 250 thousand rubles. 80 percent of this money was sent to Lenin, the rest went to the needs of the cell.

Stalin's activity, however, could become an obstacle in his party career. In 1918, the head of the Mensheviks, Julius Martov, published an article where he cited three examples of Koba's illegal activities: the robbery of the carriages of the State Bank in Tiflis, the murder of a worker in Baku, and the seizure of the Nicholas I steamer in Baku.

Martov even wrote that Stalin had no right to hold government posts, since he was expelled from the party in 1907. An exception did take place, but it was carried out by the Tiflis cell, controlled by the Mensheviks. Stalin was furious at this article by Martov and threatened Martov with a revolutionary tribunal.

Aikido principle

Stalin, during the struggle for power, skillfully used the theses of party building, which did not belong to him. That is, he used their own strengths to fight competitors. Thus, Nikolai Bukharin, a “bukharchik,” as Stalin called him, helped the future “father of peoples” write a work on the national question, which would become the basis of his future course.

Zinoviev, on the other hand, promoted the thesis of German social democracy as "social fascism".

Stalin also used Trotsky's developments. The doctrine of accelerated "super-industrialization" by draining funds from the peasantry was first developed by the economist Preobrazhensky close to Trotsky in 1924. The economic directives drawn up in 1927 for the first five-year plan were guided by the "Bukharin approach", but by the beginning of 1928, Stalin decided to revise them and gave the green light to forced industrialization.

Even the official slogan "Stalin is Lenin today" was put forward by Kamenev.

Personnel decides everything

When talking about Stalin's career, they conclude that he was in power for more than 30 years, but when he took the post of General Secretary in 1922, this position was not yet a key one. The General Secretary was a subordinate figure, he was not the leader of the party, but only the head of its "technical apparatus". However, Stalin managed to make a brilliant career in this post, using all its possibilities.

Stalin was a brilliant personnel officer. In his 1935 speech, he said that "cadres decide everything." Here he did not dissemble. For him, they really solved "everything."

Having become General Secretary, Stalin immediately began to widely use the methods of selection and appointment of personnel through the Secretariat of the Central Committee and the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Central Committee subordinate to him.

Already in the first year of Stalin's activity as General Secretary, the Uchraspred made about 4,750 appointments to responsible posts.
It must be understood that no one envied Stalin's appointment to the post of General Secretary - this post involved routine work. However, Stalin's trump card was precisely his predisposition to such methodical activity. Historian Mikhail Voslensky called Stalin the founder of the Soviet nomenklatura. According to Richard Pipes, of all the major Bolsheviks of that time, only Stalin had a taste for "boring" clerical work.

Fight with Trotsky

Trotsky was Stalin's main opponent. The creator of the Red Army, the hero of the revolution, the apologist for the world revolution, Trotsky was excessively proud, quick-tempered and self-centered.

The confrontation between Stalin and Trotsky began much earlier than their direct confrontation. In his letter to Lenin on October 3, 1918, Stalin angrily wrote that "Trotsky, who had just joined the party yesterday, is trying to teach me party discipline."

Trotsky's talent manifested itself during the revolution and the Civil War, but his military methods did not work in peacetime.

When the country began the path of internal construction, Trotsky's slogans about inciting a world revolution began to be perceived as a direct threat.

Trotsky "lost" immediately after Lenin's death. He did not attend the funeral of the leader of the revolution, being at that time on treatment in Tiflis, from where Stalin strongly advised him not to return. Trotsky himself also had reasons for not returning; believing that "Ilyich" was poisoned by conspirators led by Stalin, he could assume that he would be next.

The plenum of the Central Committee in January 1925 condemned Trotsky's "totality of speeches" against the party, and he was removed from the post of chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council and People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. This post was taken by Mikhail Frunze.

Trotsky's cardinality turned even his closest associates away from him, to which Nikolai Bukharin can be counted. Their relationship went wrong due to disagreements on NEP issues. Bukharin saw that the policy of the NEP was bearing fruit, that the country now did not need to be "raised" once again, this could destroy it. Trotsky, on the other hand, was adamant, he was "stuck" on war communism and the world revolution. As a result, it was Bukharin who turned out to be the person who organized Trotsky's exile.

Leon Trotsky became an exile and tragically ended his days in Mexico, while the USSR was left to fight the remnants of Trotskyism, which resulted in the mass repressions of the 1930s.

"Purges"

After Trotsky's defeat, Stalin continued the struggle for sole power. Now he concentrated on the fight against Zinoviev and Kamenev.

The left opposition in the CPSU(b) of Zinoviev and Kamenev was condemned at the XIV Congress in December 1925. On the side of the "Zinovievites" was only one Leningrad delegation. The controversy turned out to be very stormy; both sides willingly resorted to insults and attacks on each other. Quite typical was the accusation of Zinoviev of turning Leningrad into a "feudal lord", of inciting a factional split. In response, Leningraders accused the center of turning into "Moscow senators."

Stalin took on the role of Lenin's successor and began to plant a real cult of "Leninism" in the country, and his former associates, who became Stalin's support after the death of "Ilyich" - Kamenev and Zinoviev, became unnecessary and dangerous to him. Stalin eliminated them in the apparatus struggle, using the entire arsenal of methods.

Trotsky, in a letter to his son, recalled one significant episode.

“In 1924, on a summer evening,” writes Trotsky, “Stalin, Dzerzhinsky and Kamenev sat over a bottle of wine, chatting about various trifles until they touched on the question of what each of them loves most in life. I don't remember what Dzerzhinsky and Kamenev said, from whom I know this story. Stalin said:

The sweetest thing in life is to mark the victim, prepare the blow well, and then go to sleep.