Joseph (Iossif) Vissarionovitch Djougachvili (Russian: ИосифВиссарионовичДжугашвили; géorgien: იოსებბესარიონისძეჯუღაშვილი Iosseb Bessarionis dze Djoughachvili ), born the December 18th 1878 - officially the December 21st 1879 - and dead the March 5th 1953, generally known under the name of Joseph Stalin (ИосифСталин), directed the Soviet Union only during twenty-five years, between the end of the Années 1920 and 1953. Of 1922 with 1953, he was general secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Initially called Sosso (“  fade  ”) during its childhood, it was also called Koba (according to a popular hero Georgia N). The name Stalin was it his during the years of clandestinity, it comes from the Russian word сталь ( stal ) which means Acier. Stalin means in Russian “steel man”.

Founder of a totalitarian mode whose obligatory worship returned with its own person was one of the most outstanding features, it undertook to tear off his country with the ancestral backwardness spectacularly. He made collectivize completely the grounds and industrialized the Soviet Union with forced march by the very ambitious five-year plan, without concern of the oppositions, broken, nor of the heavy human costs and social. Its long reign was marked by a mode of terror and paroxystic denouncement, even more prégnant in times of peace that in time of war, and by the setting with dead or the sending with the camps of work of the Gulag of million generally innocent people, in particular during the collectivization of the campaigns and the Grandes Purgings of 1937. It as well practiced massive displacements of population, of which the integral Déportation of about fifteen national minorities, which the forced sedentarisation not less disastrous of Nomade S of Central Asia. He denied also the existence of the Famine S loopholes of 1932 - 1933 (Holodomor) and of 1946 - 1947 after having partly caused them by his brutal policy. The secrecy and the Propagande systematically maintained around its acts made dressing-up of reality and rewriting of last permanent characteristic of its absolute capacity.

Its memory nevertheless is also associated with the military victory of the Soviet Union against the Nazi Germany, whose Churchill said at the end of the war: “We killed the bad pig ( wrong pig )”, topic taken again by Orwell. The Second world war, after having put the USSR at the edge of the pit, covered the “Small Father of the People” of an enormous prestige in the whole world, and allowed to the successor Tsar S and of Lénine to extend its system to an immense empire going from now on from Berlin - Is with the Vietnam North.

Biography

Childhood and training

Born with Gori, in Georgia on December 18th, 1878 of a mother dressmaker and a father shoe-maker, his difficult character would be, according to certain, the consequence of the oppressive temperament of his/her father Vissarion Djougachvili, creating in him a desire of rebellion, still absent at the time of childhood. His/her mother, Ekaterina Gavrilovna Gueladzé, enthusiastic orthodoxe, pushes it towards the priesthood, and tries by all the means of financing her studies which it continues until in 1898 successfully. After the success of its examinations, Iossif (Joseph) Vissarionovich enters to the Séminaire of Tbilissi (Tiflis) and there remains up to twenty years.

To the seminar, it follows various courses, of which readings of the holy texts, religion, right, etc Iossif (Joseph) Vissarionovich does not come yet into contact with the Marxisme. It is only in 1899 that it starts to show rebel with the authority of the seminar. But its attitude cannot be described as revolutionary yet . After having received several corrections for reading of prohibited books (in particular Workers of the Sea of Victor Hugo) and in spite of the favors which the vice-chancellor of the seminar grants to him, it is expelled in 1899 for absence with the examination of biblical readings; the experiment with the seminar marked the future Soviet leader until the end of its life, such as for example, in a text of 1905, published in the Proletariats Brdzola , where he writes:

It reads Dostoïevski assiduously, but will prohibit it under pretext which it was bad for youth.

Iossif Vissarionovich begins its career of revolutionist then, in a clandestine way, under the nickname of Koba (Bear). It is made stop with many recoveries. In 1907, it is implied in steerings of banks being used to finance the Party. It is off-set several times in Siberia and escapes each time. He escapes in particular in 1904 and then adheres to the faction Bolchevik P.O.S.D.R.. It is at that time that it meets for the first time Lénine. It made of it an eulogistic account in 1924, one week after the death of this last:

Paradoxically, if Stalin were eulogistic about Lénine, the reciprocal one was far from being always valid. In 1911, Lénine speaks about him like “marvellous Géorgien”, but in 1915, in a letter with Gorki, it forgot its name. During the civil war, he appreciates Stalin like an executant effective and disciplined, who ensured to him that “hand does not tremble”, but their political relations and personal are degraded appreciably in 1922-1923. Also, in its political legacy, in March 1923, Lénine wrote:

The access to the supreme capacity

After the fall of the mode tsarist at the time of the Revolution of February 1917, Stalin, hardly of return of a long deportation in Siberia, take in hand the direction of the Party with Pétrograd. He then preaches the policy of the “critical support” for the provisional government Réformiste middle-class of Alexandre Kerensky. Nevertheless, as of the return of exile of Lénine, it lined up very quickly with the Thèses of April. Those only advanced the idea that the task of the Bolchevik S was to prepare the revolution Socialiste, with same, according to Lénine, to give the capacity to the people and to stop the war.

Devoted executant, Stalin does not play any leading role in the Russian Révolution, but it with the skill, as always since he is member of the Party, to align itself systematically on the positions of Lénine. That will enable him well later to reproach like crimes his/her comrades the least former divergence with late Lénine.

At the summer 1917, he is founding member of the Politburo.

Stalin, of origin géorgienne, is named Commissaire with Nationalities in the Conseil of the police chiefs of the people resulting from the revolution.

During the Russian Civil war, he is police chief Bolshevik with Tsaritsyne (future Stalingrad). It pointed out there by its propensity to allot to “saboteurs” all the encountered problems, by its visceral mistrust of the “experts” and other “middle-class specialists” recycled by the new mode, mistrust which will never leave it, and by its complete absence of feeling when it takes radical measures and orders executions of number. It runs up against it already against Leon Trotski, supreme leader of the Red Army .

It is as in Tsaritsyne as it forges its clan of faithful which will help it towards walk with the capacity: chiefs of the red cavalry Kliment Vorochilov and Simon Boudienny initially, soon joined by compatriots of the Caucasus (Grigory Ordjonikidze) then men linked by the detestation of Trotski. It is as during the civil war as Stalin ties close relationships with the political police, frightening the Tcheka, and his founder and supreme leader Felix Dzerjinski. This alliance with the police force, which will be the key of the future Stalinist mode, will go being reinforced year by year, so much so that Stalin will entrust to the tchekists the management and the education of its own family.

In 1920, a disobedience of Stalin to the orders of the general Toukhatchevski is one of the important causes of the failure of walk on Warsaw and the defeat in the Russo-Polish war.

Hard and discrete bureaucrat, Stalin climbs the levels silently and becomes General secretary of the party the April 3rd 1922, function which it quickly transformed into the most important station of the country.

The same year, with its compatriot Grigory Ordjonikidze, Stalin planned the invasion of their country of origin, the Georgia, whose government Menchevik was regularly elected and the independence internationally recognized including by Moscow. Violences which accompanied this fastening forced with the Soviet Union caused the impotent anger of Lénine, already patient.

To arrive at the supreme capacity, Stalin is based on the incipient Bureaucratie, the police force, his clan the faithful ones and a skilful play of successive alliances with the various factions within the Party. As of before the death of Lénine (1924), he exerts a considerable authority. Seemingly dull character and little carried to the brilliant theoretical speeches, it is a genius of the underground intrigue. He plays during years with moderate, and leaves with the various groups the care to inveigh and to discredit the ones the others, while weaving his fabric. Many veterans of the Party, but more still the new bureaucrats of plebeian origin than it promotes of number recognize themselves easily in this character of appearance catch, good popularizer, who keep silent from the majority meetings and quietly smokes his pipe between two alleviating words. It is appropriate to them better than a solitary Trotski and too shining for them, which criticizes them bitterly, and which did not know to weave networks in a Party that it joined only in 1917. However, Lénine finds too much it “brutal” and Trotski prefers to him; this is why, after the death of Lénine, Stalin will make disappear the “will from Lénine”, in which this one affirmed its hostility with regard to Stalin.

In 1924 - 1925, combined Kamenev and of Zinoviev, Stalin évince Trotski of the government. In 1926, combined with the right-hand side of Boukharine, it makes draw aside from the Politburo and the Komintern Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev, reconciled meanwhile. Having beaten the left opposition, it is turned over in 1928 - 1929 against the right-wing opposition of Boukharine and Rykov, driven out respectively head of the Comintern and government. In 1929, Stalin makes exile Trotski of the USSR and completes to install his men with all the key positions. The celebration in large pump of its 50 years, the December 21st 1929, mark also beginnings of the worship around its personality.

The Stalinism

See detailed articles Stalinism and History of the USSR under Stalin .

The takeover and the “Great Turning”

Stalin having taken the succession of Lénine, it gives up little by little direction of the collegial type for gradually imposing, while resting on the Bureaucratie born at the time of the civil war, a dictatorship Totalitaire. A mode of absolute personal capacity is set up gradually, process completed at the end of the Années 1930.

Little carried with internationalism Lénine and Trotski, Stalin theorizes his policy under the name of Marxisme-léninisme and of Socialisme in only one country. Almost ever left Russia, scorning towards the Comintern (“the shop”), he does not believe in a world revolution which does not finish any being made wait, and wants to count on the only forces of the Soviet Union. He does not believe either any more in a NEP breathless (re-establishment of rationing, 1928) and which requires time to modernize the USSR. Haunted like all the Bolsheviks by the possibility of a forthcoming confrontation with the capitalist countries, he wants to accelerate industrial modernization at all costs to prepare there. They are direction of its famous speech with XVIe Congress of Party (June 1930) where it hammers that “each time Russia was late, we were beaten”. From where at the end of 1928, absolute priority that Stalin grants to the accumulation of the capital by pressurization of the farming community (until spared there by the NEP), with the development “with any vapor” of the means of production and heavy industry.

From 1929 with 1933, Stalin thus imposes with violence the forced collectivization of the grounds on campaigns which are very largely hostile there. It delivers in fact what east can be regarded as the last country war of the European history. In 1934, the objective is achieved, but at a terrifying price: half of Livestock cut down on the spot by peasants, rich person grain-bearing lands of Ukraine and other areas devastated by famine of 1932-1933 (at least 4 to 5 million of dead) that Stalin did not do anything to prevent even by admitting that it deliberately did not cause it, of innumerable violences, died or destruction, anarchistic escape of 25 million countrymen towards cities quickly over-populated, more than two million alleged Koulak (country supposed “rich”) off-set by whole families in Siberia and given up on the spot with their fate… The system of the Kolkhoz S and the Sovkhoze S makes it possible at the State to buy at cheap price harvests and to finance industrialization. But in front of the passive resistance of the peasants (systematic underproduction), Stalin concedes a private ground piece to them in 1935: at the end of the decade, the latter produce 25% of harvests out of 3% of the grounds, and the majority of the fruit and vegetables of the USSR like 72% of milk and the meat. Russia, first exporting of cereals of the world under the tsars, becomes definitively importing country. To Winston Churchill, Stalin will say that collectivization represented for him a test “worse than the war”. According to Anne Applebaum, if Stalin broke the continuity of the Russian history, it is well in the campaigns.

In parallel, in 1928, Stalin creates the Gosplan, organization of rigid State charged to take care of the good performance of an imperative and very ambitious planning. The first five-year plan (1928-1933) made of the USSR of Stalin a dictatorship alive productivist in obsession to achieve and exceed always raised output norms. Stalin restores the wage the piece and the working booklet, lengthens day's work, encourages the birth of a news working Aristocratie by sponsoring the movement stakhanovist (1935) and makes punish sending with the Gulag any delay repeated of more than 10 minutes. Into a few years, the country changes aspect radically and covers the great work partly completed by the servile labor of the Gulag: Subway of Moscow, new cities, channels, stoppings, enormous factories… But the price is disproportionate as much: financial drain, Inflation, wastings, work bâclés at the origin of the “badly-development” whose USSR will perish in 1991. The sacrifice deliberated on industries of consumption and the pressure exerted on the working class make that under the Foreground, the standard of living of the Soviet workmen drops by 40%.

Starting from 1934, a turning reactionary is also carried out in the field of manners: prohibition of the Avortement (certainly also prohibited in all the other countries), re-establishment of the custodial sentences against the homosexual (what was also practiced in some Western countries), worship of the “socialist family”. Stalin restores also the title of marshal, returns to the Nationalisme large-Russian, the academism in art, the free consumption of the Vodka. Lastly, as of 1935, Stalin bring back the limiting age for the death sentence to 12 years.

Some Marxist claiming Lénine are opposed then to the Marxisme-léninisme of Stalin: the trotskists denounce the dictatorship inside the Party, the bordiguists denounce the economic policy of Stalin like a form of Capitalisme of State. See Lawsuit of Moscow. In 1938, Trotski founds the IV {{E}} Internationale gathering all the parties trotskists. He is assassinated by Ramon Mercader, an agent of Stalin, in 1940 with the Mexico.

With the XVIIe Congress of PCUS, known as Congress of the Winners (February 1934), the worst difficulties of the Great Turning seem last. The name of Stalin is acclaimed and quoted several tens of time in each speech. Itself multiplies the signs of appeasing towards the former opponents and liberalization for the Soviet company. But it measures also the deaf persistence of criticisms in its opposition: he is re-elected at the Central committee only in the last of the list, his name being striped more than one hundred of times. The goal of the Grandes Purgings will be in particular to destroy the last potentialities of resistance within the Party and the population.

Great Purgings, final recasting of the capacity of Stalin
February 1st, 1934, Stalin learns the assassination with Leningrad from his familiar Kirov, chief of the Party of the second capital of the country. It seems established today that it did not organize itself this attack, which had with a revolted young person, but he immediately exploits the event to start again a terror campaign. The evening even, it makes promulgate a decree suspending all the guarantees of right and delivering without call the sentences of death pronounced by the special jurisdictions of NKVD. It unloads in person in Leningrad and in makes off-set thousands of inhabitants.

In August 1936, the first of the three Procès of Moscow engages the physical liquidation of the old guard Bolshevik. Stalin gets rid definitively of his former rivals of the years 1920, already overcome politically for a long time.

Beyond, he undertakes to replace those which supported it and helped in the Années 1920 - 1930 by a new generation of frameworks. The promoted young people of the “generation of 1937” (Khrouchtchev, Beria, Malenkov, Jdanov, Brejnev, etc) knew only Stalin and he owes all. They dedicate a worship without reserve to him, where the preceding generation more saw as a Stalin his owner or a primus inter pares that an alive god, and did not hesitate to sometimes criticize it with honesty but frankness. Between 1937 and 1939, Stalin plans the elimination of half of the Political office, of the three quarters of the members of the Party having adhered between 1920 and 1935, etc Terror does not save any organization: clear cuts strike ministries, Gosplan, Komintern, Red Army and even in the long term… the framing with the Gulag and the police officers of NKVD.

The Grandes Purgings also make it possible Stalin to radically eliminate all the socially suspect elements and all the dissatisfied ones caused by its policy. Whereas the diplomatic tensions accumulate in Europe since the advent of Adolf Hitler, and that the release of the Guerre of Spain in July 1936 makes fear the irruption of a new general conflict, Stalin intends to eliminate all that could constitute a “fifth column” of the enemy in the event of invasion. A series of operations strike per hundreds of dekoulakized thousands impoverished by the collectivization, the vagrants and marginal generated by the latter, the former members of the leading classes and their children, all the individuals maintaining or having maintained the relations with the foreigner (diplomatic corps, war veterans of Spain, agents of the Komintern, and, as show it Robert Conquest, to the esperantists, with the philatelists and the astronomers!).

To more short term, Stalin also provides to the population scapegoats with the difficulties of the daily newspaper, by rejecting all the evil on a plethora of “saboteurs”. He regulates his accounts with the qualified technicians and specialists, who often dared to contradict his directives and its objectives unrealistic, and he is wary since always because of their weak presence to the Party; he replaces them by a generation of new specialists resulting from the popular layers and which, formed under Ier Plan, knew only the revolution and its mode. It breaks as the networks clientelists and the strongholds geographical or ministerial as the members of the government and the Politburo constituted themselves, or, at all the levels, persons in charge of the Party and chiefs of Gulag. It more largely maintains an atmosphere generalized suspicion which breaks friendly solidarity, family or professional.

Pareillement, Stalin considers that the frontier national minorities are by definition suspect: also it orders the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Polish and Baltes, or the transfer in Central Asia of 170.000 Korean S. But it is also the forced Sédentarisation nomads of Central Asia, in particular with the Kazakhstan, which shows a demographic disaster and the loss of many cultural traditions

The principle Totalitaire of the collective responsibility defended by Stalin makes that the “fault” of an individual extends to his spouse, his children, his whole family, all her network of friends and relations. For example, on July 5th, 1937, the Politburo orders with the NKVD to intern all the wives of “traitors” in camp for 5 to 8 years, and to place their children of less than 15 years “under protection of the State”. Order which results in stopping 18.000 wives and 25.000 children, and to place nearly a million children of less than 3 years in Orphelinat S.

In addition, the families of the closest right-hand men to Stalin (Molotov, Kaganovitch, Kalinine, etc) themselves are struck by the purgings. The best friend of Stalin, Grigory Ordjonikidze, which was hostile in front of him with the purging of the executives of industry, sees his shot brother and commits suicide in sign of protest (February 1937). The family even of Stalin is not saved by Terror, with the disappearance and the execution of her close relatives Maria Svanidze, Pavel Allilouiev, Stanislas Redens…

In 1939, with the stop of the Great Purgings - otherwise called Great Terror, the more so as according to calculations of Nicolas Werth, they struck to 94% of the not-Communists - Stalin eliminated the last spheres from autonomy in the party and the company, and definitively imposed its worship and its absolute capacity. It took the risk by doing this to seriously disorganize its army and its country, while at the same time the war approaches.

Foreign policy

In the years 1930, the foreign policy of Stalin is with variable geometry.

First of all, at the time of VIIe Congress of the Comintern in August 1928, it imposes the policy “classifies against class” with the Communist parties. The Social-démocratie, which it described as “moderate wing of Fascism”, is regarded as the priority enemy, and any even tactical agreement with it is prohibited. This policy led the PCF to its worst insulation of the Inter-war period and a notable electoral fall. It especially facilitated the access to the capacity of Adolf Hitler in Germany. In March 1933, whereas the destruction of the Weimar Republic are almost completed and that the German Communists take of number the way of the concentration camps, clandestine KPD and the Komintern repeat inlassablement that the events show the accuracy of the attacks against social democracy and the need for continuing them without change…

Stalin initially thought that the Hitler experiment would not last: “After him, it will be us”. But the Nazi regime is consolidated, and a real military threat planes from now on on the USSR. Consequently, as from June 1934, Stalin charms himself and launches a policy of alliance of the Communist parties with “middle-class parties” to try to make move back the Fascisme and the Nationalisme. He in parallel brings the Soviet Union closer to the Western States, which has as a consequence the late entry of the USSR in SDN (1934) or the conclusion of the Franco-Soviet pact of assistance at the time of the interview Laval - Stalin (May 1935). Thus the Popular front can be constituted in France and Spain and that in China, the September 22nd 1937, Tchang Kaï-chek agrees with Mao Zedong against the Impérialisme of the Japan and signs a non-aggression pact with the USSR. In the USSR even, Stalin endeavors to play liberal more while making promulgate the “Stalinist Constitution” of 1936, formally most democratic of the world, in sign towards the Occident.

In the War of Spain, starting from end October 1936, Stalin is the only Head of State to intervene officially at the sides of the Spanish Republic, threatened by Franco helped of Hitler and Mussolini. But if it sends tanks, planes and advisers, it also benefits from it to make control on the gold of the Banque of Spain, to slow down on the spot the revolutionary movement while putting into orbit the Spanish government, and to make liquidate physically many Anarchistes, Trotskistes and Marxist dissidents of POUM.

The documents of the Komintern show however that even in these years when it has the appearance of allied democracies, Stalin did not give up the secret hope of a pact with Hitler, which would put at the shelter the USSR and would guarantee moreover territorial benefit to him. It regularly makes moderate the attacks of the press against the German mode, or tries some secret surveys in Berlin. The Lawsuit of Moscow and the purgings which meurtrissent the Red Army disturb the Western democracies, where the anticommunism remains very strong, and capacities of the latter make them doubt.

Furious that its country was not invited to the conference which decides Accords of Munich (September 30th 1938), and fearing an agreement of the Westerners with Hitler against the USSR, Stalin clearly announces, at the beginning of 1939, which Moscow will bind to highest offerer.

The August 12th 1939, the plenipotentiary ones of France and the United Kingdom are in visit in the USSR in order to try - well tardily and without conviction - of refonder the alliance of 1914. However Stalin breaks the negotiations and promotes the Pacte germano-Soviet, signed on August 23rd, 1939. To the pact germano-Soviet is joined a secret protocol envisaging the division of the Poland, of which the half would be left with the Red Army, and leaving to the USSR the freehands in Finland and the Baltic States. He was much more advantageous for the USSR than an alliance against Germany.

The Second world war

Before the beginning of the Second world war in Europe, the USSR gains two battles of borders against Japan: the Battle of the lake Khasan in 1938, then the Battle of Halhin Gol in Mongolia in 1939. The September 17th 1939, the troops of Stalin enter to Poland and take with reverse the army of this country attacked by Hitler. November 30th, they attack the Finland, and record spectacular and worrying reverses, before making fold this small State d' Europe septentrional under the number in March 1940. In June, Stalin annexes the Baltic States, then in August the Rumanian Bessarabia, set up in republic of Moldavie. Terror and accelerated sovietization fall down at once on these territories. They result in the deportation of several hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and the murder of part of the local elites. March 5th, 1940, Stalin makes contresign by the Politburo his order to carry out nearly 20.000 captured Polish officers, who will be buried in particular close to Katyn.

Stalin respects scrupulously the Pacte germano-Soviet. Until the night of the 21 to the June 22nd 1941, it delivers punctually and to credit with Hitler the cereals and the raw materials which Reich needs. It also delivers to the Gestapo several tens of German Communists taken refuge in Moscow.

The pact ends on June 22nd, 1941 with the invasion of the USSR by the Wehrmacht.

Contrary to a long time widespread legend, Stalin did not crumble psychologically in front of the treason of Hitler, nor did not remain several days prostrate and unable to react. The files and testimonys agree today to prove that it was at its station harms and day during the first week of invasion, and that it took radical measures at once, with a very unequal happiness.

Nevertheless Stalin refused until the last moment to believe the reports which prevented it since long months of the imminence of an invasion, going even until threatening to liquidate those which were made echo with too much insistence of it. It seems to be let even paralyze by the obsession of a German, Western provocation of its military own bosses. It was hung up again hopelessly with the idea that the year was too advanced so that Hitler makes the same error as Napoleon. So the troops were put in alarm very late and incompletely, while aviation could be destroyed on the ground. And the morning even of June 22nd, the Red Army did not dare to open fire, nor did not have the right to cross the border in the event of victorious counter-attack…

The purgings of the pre-war period, in particular that of 1937, had ravaged the Red Army , since the near total of the generals modernisateurs and qualified had been eliminated. In the same way, on five marshals, only had survived two holding unconditional of the cavalry, friends of always of Stalin, sworn enemies of the tanks… The effort of modernization tried in extremis before the invasion, just as the rehabilitation of thousands of purged officers left in wrecks the Gulag (like the future marshal Rokossovki) could not prevent the initial disasters.

In the first months, Stalin loses thousands of tanks and planes, and lets encircle immense armies. The USSR loses a million square km and several million prisoners, exterminated by the Nazis. Moscow is saved only thanks to the victories over the Japan board (in 1939, incident known as of Khalkin Gol, which removed with the Japanese army any idea to face the Russians) and with the insurance given by Richard Sorge that Japan would not open a face in the Far East - what makes available the Siberian troops to the crucial moment of the winter 1941.

However, the invasion Nazi, started too late, is as of the beginning lower than German waitings, even if Wehrmacht advances very far with limited losses. And of the opinion of his most critical historians even, Stalin showed his coolness and his political genius, while addressing as of the July 3rd 1941 to his Soviet “brother-and-sisters”, by proclaiming the sacred union in the “patriotic Great War”, and especially, while deciding to remain in threatened Moscow, with surprised his close relations. Its presence galvanized energies and stopped a beginning of panic. December 6th, 1941, the Red Army stopped breathless Germans to 22 km of the capital.

After this failure, the army Nazi seeks to be supplied in the East with the oil of the Caucasus. After a short success, the German army leaves overcome Bataille Stalingrad. The city, with the reference symbol, becomes the object of the universal attention. Entirely destroyed under the bombs and by the street battles, 300.000 Germans perish there or are made there prisoners, the 6th encircled Army capitulating the January 30th - February 2nd, 1943.

It is the beginning of the German retreat. At the Battle of Koursk, the greatest confrontation of armoured tanks of the history, 500.000 men and 1500 tanks are put out of combat.

After his dramatic errors in 1941, Stalin knew to make a real military training gradually, and especially to agree to leave a broader autonomy to his generals. If it never went to the face, it loosens the influence of the government on the company, ties a truce with the Churches, stresses the defense of the fatherland and either on the revolution. However its absolute capacity even remains intact and reinforced: chief of the government since May 1941, Stalin is made appoint police chief with Defense in August 1941, ordering as a supreme leader in July 1942, marshal in 1943, Généralissime in 1945. International the cease to be Soviet anthem to be replaced by a patriotic song which mentions its name. And it is also the totalitarian nature of the government which enables him to impose a strategy of offensive at all costs and of frontal attack of the enemy, very expensive as men and abandoned in Occident since the Great War.

Special teams of NKVD thus undertook in Stalingrad mitrailler the soldiers who ebbed backwards. In the same way the prisoners and their families were officially disavowed and regarded as traitors, while generals and officers of any row were shot as of the first days, scapegoats of the errors of the supreme leader. In full German advance of 1941, Stalin diverted also important forces of the face to make completely off-set the German of the Volga, descendants of colonists installed at the 18th century. In 1944, it made entirely off-set ten people (decorated soldiers and Communist militants included/understood) under the false charge of collaboration with the Germans. In March 1944, 600.000 Tchétchènes men, women, children and old men were off-set in six days only, one historical records ever equalized.

In 1944, Stalin reconquers the national territory. Arrived in front of Warsaw, it lets the Germans crush the insurrection of the Polish capital (- October 2nd 1944). If it is true that the Soviet offensive was breathless and that Stalin did not have any more the means of crossing the Vistula, it also refused to parachute weapons and to let the Western planes land on the aerodromes of the Red Army close to the capital. Hundreds of allied aviators hopelessly trying to parachute weapons with the insurrectionists perished at the time of long and expensive return tickets between Italy and Poland. It was enough to say the will of Stalin to let crush a nationalist insurrection which it did not control and which aimed at opposing the installation of a Communist government close to Moscow after the war.

Whereas the Allies unload in Normandy, Soviet who faces ten times more divisions in the East progresses already to Eastern Europe. On the whole, of sure source, they crushed 80% of Wehrmacht: on 783 divisions disseminated on all fronts, 607 fall under Soviet fires.

Goebbels had stated one of the goals ideological of the war in the east: “ the fight against the world Bolchevism is the principal goal of the German policy ”. It is necessary to add to these goals the German will to reconquer what they regard as their “vital space” ( Lebensraum ) and to reduce in slavery the Slavic people considered as submen. As a practitioner a policy of extermination against the Slavic and especially Jewish populations, the Nazis deprived themselves of any support among the Soviet population whereas the dissatisfied ones with the government of Stalin did not miss on their arrival, while managing nevertheless to recruit certain a number of partisans (Armée Vlassov, existence of maquis anticommunists in Ukraine until summer 1946).

The victory treats to at the price million dead: 21.300.000 dead (civilians and soldiers) according to certain sources - 27 million will say one under Gorbatchev, to add of course to all that had preceded: losses of 14-18, civil war and famines. That is to say 12 to 20% of its population. In comparison the United States lost of them only 0,2%, France 1,5%. The material destruction is gigantic, the worst ever undergone by a belligerent in the human history.

The Post-war period

All testimonys contribute to show that with the victory of 1945, the population hopes to preserve the spaces of freedom conceded during the war and not to return to the system of before 1941. But during the summer, Stalin makes the decision to restore this last with the identical one.

The countries of Europe of the East crossed are placed under the control of the USSR and there remain after the Conférence of Yalta. Stalin imposes the Soviet model to them, in particular by the Coup of Prague in 1948 and by the installation of governments pro-Soviet. He creates in 1947 the Kominform, a gathering of European Communist parties to the image of International and directed by PCUS. Impotent to prevent the rupture soviéto-Yugoslavian (1948), Stalin develops an intense campaign against Tito, which it had saved at the time of the Grandes Purgings, and multiplies the faked lawsuits of Communists disgraced in Eastern Europe, in particular with Prague where the majority of the defendants are selected among Jews (Procès of Prague against Rudolf Slánský and other dignitaries of the Czechoslovakian Communist party, 1952). In 1949, it makes reach its country the atomic Arme, partly thanks to its spy networks in the United States and the prisoners of Gulag and the Charachka. In Asia, the Stalinist policy of the post-war period follows a sinuous course: support for the Zionism between 1946 and 1950, followed by a Net reversal anti-Israeli and even Anti-semite, reception very reserved makes with the Chinese, political revolution careful in Korea.

Inside, the worship of the personality of the Vojd (“Guide”) reached its maximum width, culminating with its 70e birthday in 1949. Tens of cities, thousands of streets, farms, factories, etc bear the name of Stalin, who will refuse the proposal to re-elect the capital Moscow “Stalinodar”. The culminating point of the USSR receives the name of “peak Stalin”. “Prix Stalin” decreed since 1941 become the Soviet equivalents of the Nobel Prize.

The system reproduces in all certain Communist parties of the countries brothers, whose leaders are qualified “the better Stalinist ones” of France, of Italy, etc (Maurice Thorez, Palmiro Togliatti, Georgi Dimitrov…). Begun again tsarism, the title of “Small Father of the People” also announces that Stalin succeeded in being identified with the nation thanks to his victory over his old Hitler ally, while this one confers well to him a real prestige in the world beyond the only communist circles.

The “second Stalinism” is also characterized by a return even more marked to nationalism and chauvinism, a reinforcement of Russianization and repression of the minorities, a campaign Antisémite against the “cosmopolitanism”.

The influence of Stalin on the cultural and scientific field is weighed down also considerably. It made rewrite the history permanently, in particular to seem the joint author of the Russian Révolution, to gum the role of its opponents and victims, or to allot to Russians the paternity of all the great contemporary inventions. It accentuated its support for the charlatanesques theories of the biologist Trofim Lyssenko, and thus devastated the Soviet genetics, until there one of most advanced world. It even mixed to intervene in the linguistic debates ( Marxism in the linguistic questions , 1951) and claimed that the handling of the language would allow the advent of “the new man”, claim which inspired with George Orwell the satire of the Novlangue. As for the writers, to the musicians and to the artists, their creation was subjected narrowly to the socialist realism, and Stalin charged his protected Andreï Jdanov to give them to the step by a violent doctrinary campaign ( Jdanovtchina ).

Accentuating an already clear autocratic tendency before the war, Stalin does not join together practically any more the Politburo and spaces to the extreme the Congresses of the Party: five only of 1927 to 1953, including none between 1939 and 1952, whereas it left it per annum even into full Russian Civil war. If it does not practice any more great purgings like pre-war period, it terrorizes its own entourage, often humiliating in public its trusty servants, striking them through their wives, their brothers, etc and making them gleam on any occasion the possibility of a fatal disgrace. It is in particular on the point of eliminating the chief from the police force Lavrenti Beria when death seizes it.

“Political Legacy”

Stalin dies on March 5th 1953 of a brain hemorrhage, whereas it prepared new purgings (Complot of the white blouses).

After one long period of undulation, which is balanced inter alia by the execution of the chief of the KGB Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrouchtchev arrives at the head of the country. In 1956, the the USSR officially breaks with the Stalinisme during the XX {{E}} congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. In 1961, the embaumé body of Stalin is withdrawn from the Mausolée of Lénine and Stalingrad becomes Volgograd. The survivors of the dictatorship are released from the Gulag and the total rehabilitation of the victims of Stalin, initiated by Khrouchtchev, stopped under Brejnev, is started again under Gorbatchev and is completed after the end of the Communist regime.

On the other hand, the successors of Stalin fail to reform the economic system and social inherited its reign, in spite of its increasingly obvious defects (bureaucracy, shortages chronic, underproduction, absence of personal initiative, ecological cost, imbalance of the branches to the profit of an heavy industry less and less adapted to the historical evolution, etc). The collapse of the people's democracies of Eastern Europe (1989) and the disintegration of the USSR (1991) mark “the second dead one of Stalin” (H. Carrère d' Encausse).

After 1961, only the Popular republic of China of Mao Zedong, the North Korea of Kim Jong-il and the Albania of Enver Hodja continue to be claimed openly of Stalin, and until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Even today, the criticism of Stalin is not with the day order in popular China and even less in North Korea, often considered as “the last Stalinist mode of planet”.

Today, on the international plan, several Communist parties of low importance: PC of Greece (KKE), various PC of Russia: Communist party Bolshevik of Nina Andreeva, Russia hard of Viktor Anpilov, working Communist party of Russia de Viktor Tioulkine, Union of the Russian/Belorusse PC of Chénine, Party of the work of Belgium, inter alia announced to have revalued highly the work and the merits of Stalin. Other groups sometimes Maoists continue to be claimed more or less directly of Stalin: guerilla Nepal ease, luminous Path in Peru, or in France the URCF (Union of the communist revolutionists of France). These organizations affirm to incarnate the true Marxism-Leninism. Some rare very discussed communist authors also develop a vision still very favorable of Stalin and his action, of which they overlook or minimize the many remote regions, thus the Belgian Ludo Martens or the French historian Annie Lacroix-Rice.

In Russia, the worship of Stalin is not exclusively the fact nostalgic mode. It is also propagated by ultra-nationalists mediums which consider that the essential merit of Stalin was to create a strong State incarnating the destiny of the Russian nation. This worship is generally associated with the Antisémitisme. The majority of Stalinist consider that they are Jews which incarnated the tendencies more the internationalists of the Marxism (Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc) - Karl Marx being itself Jewish.

Controversies of interpretation

Many contradictory interpretations were caused by the extent of the crimes of Stalin, but also by that of the changes which it made known in Russia (that according to the word of Churchill, it found with a plow to leave it with atomic piles).

During the Grandes Purgings, very many Soviets, in the cities especially, sincerely were convinced that Stalin was unaware of what occurred in the country and that one hid to him the truth. It was there the resumption of the very old topic of the good tsar victim of his bad ministers.

In the same way, of very many Communists, sent abruptly in prison or to the Gulag without being able to include/understand what one could reproach them well, persisted in of all their forces defending Stalin and appealing to him, believer to have in him them recourse. Until the threshold of their execution, condemned to death protested of their love for him and their total devotion to his person and with the Party, writing and informant that they would die with the name of Stalin on the lips. Actually, Stalin was perfectly with the current and controlled in person all the operations of the Great Terror. The files of Moscow raised the last doubts, and updated 383 lists of signed death sentences of the hand of Stalin (either 44000 executions) or the insults which it sometimes griffonnait on the ultimate letters of devotion of his victims.

The alive one even of Stalin, one glosa without end abroad and until the center of the Party on its Caucasian origins, and one was tempted to explain his crimes like a demonstration of “Asian cruelty”. Ossip Mandelstam was off-set without return to have stigmatized in a piece of poetry “the mountain dweller with the Kremlin”, “the man with the broad breast piece of Ossète”.

Armed with their racist prejudices, the Nazis and their collaborators pushed AD nauseam the assimilation of Stalin, Russian or Caucasian, with Asian degenerated and cruel - although Hitler never hid in deprived its admiration for Stalin, only man in his eyes to have known to make go to the step the Slavic “submen”, and of which he envied his capacity to make shoot his generals protestors. The relationships but also the differences quite as notable of the two totalitarian dictators remain an inexhaustible subject of discussion, in particular since work of Hannah Arendt ( Origins of totalitarianism , 1951) and the double biography pionnière of Alan Bullock ( Hitler and Stalin: parallel lives , Paris, Albin Michel, 1993).

Others just like see Stalin before a Russian Head of State, continuator of the Tsar S and incarnation of the national ambitions of old Russia. It would have preserved only for the form a revolutionary varnish of speech. They was wholesale the vision of the general De Gaulle, or that of the German national-Bolsheviks. Stalin invited itself to question his place in the continuity of the Russian history, while comparing himself readily to the despots modernisateurs Ivan the Terrible and Pierre Large the. Nevertheless, there remains difficult to conceive, for example, why Stalin would so much have held to align the Eastern European countries, already under his cut, on the Soviet model, if its imperial ambitions had been foreign with any major adhesion with the revolutionary project inherited the party Bolchevik.

The report/ratio of Stalin to the Russian Révolution pareillement is pareillement discussed. For Nikita Khrouchtchev in 1956, the drift of Stalin would have started only in 1934, which made it possible not to call into question disastrous collectivization nor the choices of exaggerated industrialization, even less the work of Lénine. The Communists were in its eyes the main victims of the dictator, and the Grandes Purgings, fallen on a Party presented like innocent, would be due only to its personal “paranoia” - intolerable explanation today, and moreover very little Marxist. For Trotski and the trotskists, Stalin is initially the representative of the Bureaucratie, which “betrayed the revolution” by depriving it of its international dimension to the profit of “socialism in only one country”, and which liquidated the heritage of Lénine as well as the old guard. With the eyes of Trotski, Stalin represented the “ Thermidor” of the Russian revolution (although contrary to French Thermidor, this one started again the social transformation and terror with a degree that no one would not have dared to envisage).

For many Anarchistic or Social democrat, like for the majority of the current historians, it does not have there contrary to discontinuity between Lénine and Stalin.

No one does not certainly advance that Lénine would have been kind to promote the Bureaucratie, nationalism, the anti-semitism, the academism, the theories of Lyssenko or a worship of its personality. But in the line of the biography pionnière and always usable of Boris Souvarine, the historians stress that it left in Stalin the dictatorship of the infallible party-guide, the democratic Centralisme prohibiting the tendencies, the worship of the secrecy, the apology for violence “necessary” and of the absence of moral scruples in the name of the revolution, as well as a police State the already Almighty having liquidated all the oppositions and employing a certain number of practices improved later on by Stalin (collective responsibility for the families, stigmatization-discrimination collective of social groups, faked lawsuits, censures, religious persecutions, massacres, first camps of work, etc).

In any event, Stalin himself was militant Bolchevik since too a long time so that one can reasonably exonerate the Party of any responsibility in the formation for his personality and his methods. The recent biography of Simon Sebag Montefiore, for example, frequently puts in parallel the behaviors and the sociability of Stalin of the years 1930-1950 (and his/her friends) with those inherited the civil war. Very many Bolsheviks entered to the Party as of adolescence, often well before the revolution, were used besides the policy (and the crimes) as Stalin without state of hearts (Molotov, Kliment Vorochilov, Boudienny, Grigory Ordjonikidze, Kirov, Poskrebytchev, Iagoda, Iejov, etc). In fact, Trotski having always been insulated enough within a Party which reproached him for being rejoined with him only in 1917, one can wonder whether, to suppose that Stalin “betrayed” the Bolchevism well, it did not make it with the approval of a majority of the “old Bolsheviks”.

In addition, if it is certain today that Stalin responsible for died of more than Communists than no dictator anticommunist in the world (even Hitler, comparatively, killed less leaders of KPD), the set of themes making of the Communists the “first victims of Stalin” is strongly relativized. Nicolas Werth watch as 94% of the victims of the Grandes Purgings of 1937-1939 was not communist.

Lastly, one can note that today, the judgment of the Russian people, among the first to have however suffered from the misdeeds of Stalin, is far from being unanimous. Thus, a survey carried out by the institute Youri Levada in May 2006 reveals that the favorable opinions and unfavourable Russians towards the personality of leader of Joseph Stalin balance about (difference of the less unfavourable favorable percentages equalizes to -2). If one compares with the same judgment related for example to Mikhaïl Gorbatchev (- 24), one notes a strong inversion compared to the judgment generally carried by the Occident. One can bring this closer to the judgment carried by a writer like Alexandre Zinoviev, passed of a criticism without concession of Stalinism to a criticism not less corrosive of the current antistalinism.

Assessment of the assassinations of mass and deportations made under Stalin

1922 - 1953: Déportation continues hundreds of thousands of real or supposed opponents, imprisonments arbitrary, prohibition of any dispute of the person of Stalin. The historian Anne Applebaum estimates that 18 million Soviets knew the Gulag under Stalin and six other million the exile forced beyond the Ural. One to two million people died there. In all, an adult Soviet on five knew Gulag from the policy of Stalin ( Gulag, a history , tr. Grasset, 2005). People disappeared to have badly spelled the name of Stalin or to have wrapped a pot of flowers with a page of newspaper including/understanding its photograph.

1930 - 1932: “Deportation - abandonment” (Nicolas Werth) of two million Kulak S (easy or supposed peasants such) beyond the Ural, where they are left with themselves without the least structures nor dwellings to accommodate them.

1932 - 1933: resultant of the forced collectivization of the grounds, the famine devastates the rich person grain-bearing lands Ukrainian, and made between 4,5 and 7 million deaths. If the famine is not the genocide that some wanted to see (the Ukrainians are even surreprésentés with the Party and in the entourage of Stalin), Stalin refused to listen to the many warnings which reached him, and which showed that the continuation of the forced collections would lead to the disaster. He denied the existence even famine. However, according to certain researchers (in particular Mark Tauger or Stephen Wheatcroft), Soviet exports in 1932 and 1933 were lower than two million tons, that is to say less than the average of the previous years and following. For them, the famine is due to a very bad harvest in 1932 and to the abandonment partial of the populations by the mode. The famine was probably avoidable, but Stalin seems to have let it occur more than it deliberately organized it. See the article Holodomor.

1937 - 1938: the Grande Purging leads to the execution of 680.000 people and the sending in the Gulag of an about equivalent number. Many frontier minorities are also moved of force, as the 170.000 Koreans who find themselves in Central Asia, or of very many Baltic and Polish. At the summer 1937, Stalin raised personally the prohibition of the Torture in the prisons, and only at the end of 1938 restores it.

Stalin personally signed 383 lists of collective death sentences, representing a total of 44.000 individuals. At most striping a name of time to others, some words in margin even a simple sign of approval was enough for him to put an end in block and without call to several hundreds of existence. In the evening of the November 25th 1938, it thus signs with Molotov the death warrant of 3.173 people, a record, then will see a film with him.

In spring 1940: Massacre of Katyń (elimination of almost 22.000 prisoners of war Polish).

In 1944, deportation in six days of the whole of the people tchetchene, is 600.000 people, in Eastern Siberia, as well as other people (completely: Germans of the Volga (in 1941), Tatars of the Crimea, Kalmouks, Koreans of Vladivostok (before 1944); or partly: Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians).

Family

The first woman of Stalin, Ekaterina Svanidze, known as “Kato”, dies in 1907, four years only after their marriage. To his funeral, Stalin would have entrusted to a friend who any cordial feeling that it had had for the people had died with her, because she only could look after her heart. During the Great Purgings, in-laws of Stalin, after having divided years its daily newspaper in the Kremlin, was stopped then carried out with its agreement, Aliocha Svanidze and his wife Maria Svanidze being in particular shot in 1941.

Kato had had a son, Iakov Djougachvili, with which Stalin did not get along in the following years. Iakov even tried to commit suicide with a firearm because of the incredible hardness of his/her father towards him, but he survived. After this, Stalin was satisfied to declare: “It cannot even draw right”. Iakov was useful in the Red Army and was captured by the Germans in July 1941. Under the terms of its repressive provisions against the prisoners, considered as traitors and who exposed their families to reprisals, Stalin made stop some time the young woman of her son. In 1943, Stalin refused to exchange it against the Marshal Friedrich Paulus, captured by the Red Army at the time of the Bataille of Stalingrad: “a lieutenant is not worth a general”, would have it says; according to other sources, he would have answered this offer “I do not have wire”. The official report indicates that Iakov committed suicide while being thrown against an electric barrier of the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. If the exact circumstances of its death all were not elucidated, the thesis of the suicide is however hardly discussed.

The second woman of Stalin, Nadejda Allilouieva, dies on November 9th 1932. She committed suicide by means of a firearm ball in the heart after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a letter which according to his/her daughter was “partly personal, partly political”. Officially, she died of disease. The medical file of Nadia, available today, reveals that she suffered from depression and loneliness, her husband having of spare time to hardly devote to him. Militant Bolshevik enthusiastic, and although friends attended at the university briefing it horrors of the Dékoulakisation and famine prevailing in Ukraine (Holodomor), it is more certain today only one opposition to the policy of her husband was the primary reason of its suicide, as it traditionally was supposed.

The couple had two children: a son, Vassili, and a girl, Svetlana Allilouieva.

Shocked by the suicide of his/her mother (it was 13 years old), and marked by her very particular childhood in a family hearth which the agents of NKVD kept, Vassili was a teenager dissolu and absconder, working badly at the school then devoting itself quickly to alcoholism. It rose in the rows of the Soviet air force, fought - rather well - during the war, and died officially of alcoholism in 1962; this point is however sometimes discussed.

The mother of Stalin dies in 1937. Stalin did not come to the funeral, but sent a crown. According to the tradition, when it returned to him in an quasi-official way a last visit in Georgia in 1935, it explained to him why it had become “a kind of tsar now”. She would have answered him: “You would have better done to be a priest”.

In March 2001, Russian chain private NTV discovered a grandson before unknown living in Novokouznetsk. Iouri Davydov told with the NTV that his/her father had informed it of his chalk-lining but, because the countryside against the worship of the personality of Stalin was with his apogee, had said to him to be keep silent. The dissenting writer Alexandre Soljenitsyne had mentioned the existence of a son of Stalin born in 1918 during the exile of Stalin in Siberia of north.

Private life and personality

Stalin left the Russia only exceptionally and knew only the Georgia N and the Russian . After 1929, it saw cloister with the the Kremlin, invisible leader whom one sees in public only on rare occasions. Its time passes between its office and its datcha of Kountsevo close to the capital, with the summer of the holidays with Sotchi at the edge of the Black Sea.

Stalin lived in temporal shift, using the evening and the night to work - then to feast with its “courtiers” - lying down at dawn and rising the afternoon. He imposed his rate/rhythm of existence on his collaborator close relations, and from there with innumerable civils servant of Moscow and the USSR, at all the levels.

Concerned all to control in depth, it practiced the direct intervention in businesses of any degree of importance. The least general with the face, the least kolkhoz or plant manager, the least writer could one day intend his telephone to sound with Stalin in person at the end of the wire. The least letter of Soviet citizen, the least request for assistance - or the least denunciation - could obtain a handwritten answer of Stalin in person. What contributed to reinforce the image of a leader omnipotent and close to people, but also to hold in concern the persons in charge of any kind.

Glutton for work, Stalin had preserved of his past of conspirator an extraordinary memory and frequently worked up to 16 hours per day. Devoured passion of the capacity, it carried out a way of life very Spartan, and forever seemed interested by the luxury and the money that this absolute capacity could offer to him. If it frequently saoulait its entourage during sometimes quasi-orgiaques festive nights, itself actually remained extremely sober and made use of these banquets like political method of control.

Recent work made justice of the traditional representation of coarse and uncultivated Stalin, terrorizing its close relations with blow of angers menaçantes. Like shows it in particular the monumental recent synthesis of Simon Sebag Montefiore ( Stalin. Court of the Red Tsar , tr. fçse, Syrtes, 2005), the “more eminent mediocrity of the Party” ( dixit Trotski) was actually an impassioned autodidact and an avid reader. Its library comprised 20.000 volumes of which much carefully annotated and card-indexed. It had all the reference books of the Marxism, but also all works of its enemies such Trotski or Souvarine. He knew all the great classics géorgiens, Russian and Europeans. He appreciated the ballet and the music, energy to re-examine a score of time incognito the Lake of the Swans . The such formerly Tsar Nicolas I {{er}} censuring in person Pouchkine, it read itself of many manuscripts of poets and novelists, and viewed practically all films to be left to the USSR. If it made eliminate without states from hearts all the writers who had one day which been able to criticize it (Boris Pilniak, Ossip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, etc) it let live Boulgakov, or Boris Pasternak which it considered inoffensive a “soft dreamer”, and limited itself to persecute Anna Akhmatova.

The work of Montefiore, supported on a mass of new documents and testimonys, shows as the share of disconcerting humanity as one of the worst despots of the 20th century could preserve. Like describes it the British historian, the same man who destroyed million existences coldly could also be a very good sincerely overpowered husband of the enigmatic suicide of his wife, an attentive father, and a cordial friend. Especially until the Grandes Purgings of 1937, it reigned on its entourage more by its capacities of charm that by its angers or the terror which it will especially inspire on the end. Neither insane nor paranoiac, Stalin always followed a real political rationality even in his repressive plans or his support to the most lunatic theories (Lyssenkisme, socialist realism in art) for little which they can reinforce his capacity. The Stalin man remains in fact one of the greatest enigmas of the 20th century.

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