Terror, a word you may think u know, but you what you don?t know is that unless you truly witness it you may never know what it truly means.was a man of terror, he along with other dictators from history reminded the people about the horror of terror. He has background information just as everyone does, he was truly a man of terror because he was in charge, he was a killer just like Hitler, and he killed his own people because he was scared of losing his power, he sent his people to work camps, and he was stopped by the Bolsheviks.Joseph Vissarionvich Djvugashvili was the full name of Russia?s former dictator. He later changes his name to Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, Stalin means ?man of steel.?He was born on December 18, 1878 in Gori Georia and he lived until March 5, 1953 in Moscow where he died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 74. His mother was Ekaterina Georgievna and his father was Vissarini Ivanovich Djugashvili. He had two wives during his life. His first wife was Catherine Svanidzl, she died of tuberculosis in 1907. He remarried to a woman named Nadezhada Alliluyeva, she died of natural causes in 1932. He also had three children by his two wives. The first, Yakov, died in a German prison during World War II. The second, Vasily, died in a car accident in 1962. And the third, Svetlana, changed her name to Alliluyeva and moved to the United States ?(Cape 1).?Stalin came to power after the death of Dictator Vladimir Lenin in 1924. There were two main candidates up for Lenin?s spot. There was Stalin and his opponent Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, or also known as Leon Trotsky. Some background information on is that he was Fischer 2
born in Yanovka, Russia on November 7, 1879. His parents were Jewish and owned a farm in the Ukraine. After he turned eight years old his father sent him to Odessa to be educated. Six years later he was transferred to Nikolayev where he was first introduced to the ideas of Karl Marx. In 1897 he became involved in the organization of the underground South Russian Workers’ Union. Eventually he was sent to Siberia because he was arrested for revolutionary activity. Then after four long years in captivity he had escaped and made it to London. There he joined the Social Democratic Party and also while he was in England he got to meet and also work with a group of Marxists that were making the journal Iskra. George Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov were all a part of this group. That was just some background of him and some things he did in his past. And obviously Stalin would become the dictator ?(Spartacus 1, TIMES 1).?Stalin was definitely a man of terror. Would he have oppressed Russia if he didn?t have the power he had? Probably not, but since he had the power and the entire Russian army on his side the people had to obey his orders. An example could be that if he wanted a palace to live in he would have his army force people into manual labor to build it for him. Without Stalin the people of Russia could have never the terror that Stalin portrayed to them. What Stalin did to the people of Russia was horrific it could be considered a good thing. Stalin showed the people what could happen to them. Without him they could?ve never been prepared for what could happen in the future. So not everything about Stalin?s oppression was a bad thing, he
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unknowingly showed them that the people need to take power so a tragedy like this will never happen again in Russia, or even the rest of the world ?(Richardson 303).?Stalin tortured his people like Hitler did. They both had labor camps they sent people to but Stalin was worse than Hitler. Hitler only killed twelve million people, which sound like a lot and it is. Take those twelve million casualties and compare them to Stalin who was responsible for the deaths of seventeen million Russians, not just people like Hitler, but his own civilians. That?s just unbelievable because how can someone kill that many people from his own country. People think Hitler was horrible for what he did but people really don?t realize that Stalin was by far the worst. And it gets worse because he killed around twenty million people total, and out of those twenty million people fourteen and a half million were starved to death. Also Stalin killed around eleven million Christians which is around the same amount of hews that Hitler killed. If people could reverse time and keep either Stalin or Hitler from ever killing people like they did they would probably stop Stalin. By doing this you don?t just keep twenty million people from dying; you also increase the population size of Russia today which could give them a better economy ?(Rayfield 516, Reed 91, 108).?
People think Stalin killed people just because he was horrific. What most people don?t know is that he killed his own people because he wanted to stay in power and was afraid of losing his power. In one of his quotes he says, ?Death is the solution to all problems, no man no problem.? Of course as a leader he will never say that he was afraid of anything because what person wants to say a weakness of theirs. It?s also obvious that he?s afraid of losing his power
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because if you kill off your people there are less people to turn against you. Also if you lived or weren?t in a camp you didn?t want to turn on him because you know that you would be put into a camp or die, but most likely either way you were going to die ?(Rayfield 213).?Stalin had work camps, there around sixty total camps to be more exact. There were also four hundred and twenty-three labor colonies. Out of all of them fifty-three of the camps were a series of camps known as the ?Gulag? ?(Rayfield 517).? Some history of the Gulag is that over fourteen million people went through the Gulag between 1929 and 1953. Out all of them somewhere between six and seven million had been exported to remote areas. According tostudies one million- five hundered- fifty three- eight hundered-twenty nine people died in the Gulag. Most of the inmates weren?t political prisoners. You could be put into a Gulag camp for crimes like petty theft, unexcused absences from work, and anti-government jokes. Somewhere around half of the political prisoners were sent to the Gulag and didn?t even get a trial, data suggests this and that more than two and a half million imprisonment sentences in cases investigated by secret police. The Gulag was reduced in size dramatically after the death of Stalin in 1953. During 1960 the Soviet-wide MVD was shut down in favor of individual republic MVD. The nationwide centralized the Gulag temporarily. Then political prisoners were continued to be held in the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era ?(Wikipedia 1).?It may have been possible that Stalin?s oppression never ended. But thanks to the Bolsheviks it did. The Bolsheviks were the Russian revolution. They fought Stalin?s reign until they had victory. And if you were a Bolshevik it meant that you were a member of the more
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radical majority of the Social Democratic party. Or that you were advocating immediate and forceful seizure of power by the proletariat. It also meant that you were a member of the Russian Communist party. Or it meant that you were a member of any Communist party, disparaging an extreme political radical leader. And it meant that you were a revolution. They got the name Bolshevik from two factions that were originally known as hard and soft. Soon the term was changed to Bolshevik and Mensheviks which came from the Russian word “bolshinstvo” which meant majority, and “menshinstvo” which meant minority. This caused a stir between Lenin and Martov. Based on facts that Lenin’s supporters had just barely defeated Martov’s supporters on the question of whether or not they should have a party membership. Neither Lenin nor Martov had that great of a majority throughout the congress. At the end Congress had finally been split evenly between the two factions. From 1907 on, English articles had sometimes used the term “Maximalist” for Bolshevik and ?Minimalist” for Menshevik, for confusing people and for safety. After all of this Lenin and Martov had finally been split. With the defeat of the revolution and the adoption of a new election law, the Bolsheviks surely began to debate whether or not they should boycott the new parliament, or knowns as the Duma. Lenin and his supporters Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev had argued for participating in the Duma while Lenin’s deputy philosopherand others negan arguing that the social democratic faction had to be recalled. The latter became known as recallists. A smaller group within the Bolsheviks demanded the RSDLP central committee had to give it sometimes unruly Duma faction as a final proposal or statement of condition demanding complete subordination to all party decisions. This group became known as “ultimatists,” allied with the recallists.
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With a majority of Bolshevik leaders either supporting Bogdanov or undecided by 1908 when the differences became non reconcilable. Then Lenin started to concentrate on undermining Bogdanov’s reputation as a philosopher. In 1909 he published a book of criticism that was called Materialism and Empiriocriticism. This wook was accused of assaulting Bogdanov’s position and it also accused him as a philosophical idealism. In 1909, Bogdanov was defeated at a mini-conference that was organized in Paris. This is how they Bolsheviks were fromed and led. They were the people who put an end to Stalin?s oppression.This is how Stalin was a man of terror. He was in charge, he was a killer just like Hitler, he killed his own people because he was scared of losing his power, he had sent his people to work camps, and his oppression wasp put to an end by the Bolsheviks. Stalin was one of the worse men ever to live and to be in power.
Bibliography
?”Joseph Stalin.” Cape Breton-Victoria Regional School Board. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Mar. 2011. <http://www.cbv.ns.ca/dictator/Stalin.html>.
?Bolshevik, 1921 the Kronstadt sailors had become disillusioned with the. “Leon Trotsky : Biography.” Spartacus Educational – Home Page. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Mar. 2011. <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUStrotsky.htm>.
?TIMES, THE NEW YORK. “Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.” The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Mar. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1221.html>.
?Richardson, Rosamond. Stalin’s shadow: inside the family of one of the world’s greatest tyrants. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Print.
?Rayfield, Donald. Stalin and his hangmen: the tyrant and those who killed for him. New York: Random House, 2004. Print.
?Reed, John. Ten days that shook the world . New York: Vintage Books, 1960. Print.
?1950s, the end of the, virtually all “corrective labor camps” were dissolved. Colonies, and however. “Gulag – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Mar. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag>.
?”Bolshevik – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p.,
