The second, as any of my students at Michigan, or earlier at Oberlin or the University of Chicago, would know: I have a great interest in socialism, Marxism, the labor movement, Russian social democracy, and so forth. Hitler. Just after the turn of the century, in 1902, local peasants in a place called Guria in western Georgia revolted against their landlords. Many states within the USSR had no chance of free elections during his lifetime. His dad was shoe maker and an alcoholic and his mother is a maid. What did the Gilded Age reformers have in common with Jackson era reformers? So I learned that in graduate school. How was Josef Stalin manipulative? The struggle between the two party leaders entered its open phase, due to Lenins illness the leader of the party couldnt engage in political activity anymore; he simply withdrew. When the Nazi blitzkrieg struck in June 1941, the Soviet Army was completely unprepared and immediately suffered massive losses. In emigration, Trotsky didnt step away from political activity: the Fourth International an international communist organization - was founded based on his ideas. Why was the leader of nations so afraid of his former ally? That positive opinion is boosted by current frustration over social policy and economic hardship, she said. It was during this time that he adopted the name Stalin, meaning "steel" in Russian. Latest answer posted October 06, 2019 at 11:40:56 AM. He continued his reign until his death in 1953. The. Then the archives started being opened. In the Soviet army, it takes more courage to retreat than advance. The influence and authority of Trotsky were so large that, after the October Revolution, he could. Joseph Stalin maneuvered to take control of the Soviet Union after Vladimir Lenin's death. Reason 1: he praised Hitler Reason 2: he suppressed his people. It proved to be very successful, even though it took a long time, because you have that central figure you can follow through this very complex and shifting history from roughly his birth, in December 1878, to the revolution in 1917. Thats the message of What Is to Be Done?. What crisis occurred in Italy that allowed Mussolini to take power? Accessed 1 Mar. This election is a test of Stalin's. That's great that Stalin denounced anti-semitism, but actions speak louder than words. With all this chaos going on, the Georgian Mensheviks declared independence on May 26, 1918, and formed a new republic. In 1917, there was a euphoria of popular participation, committees, resolutions, and so forth. Trotsky making a speech in front of the soldiers. In his books and articles, written in emigration, Trotsky called his opponent Hitlers intendant and criticized his cult of personality, totalitarianism and especially bureaucracy. Students also viewed. As you said, the book covers from his birth to the 1917 revolution, the young Stalin. Biography and associated logos are trademarks of A+E Networksprotected in the US and other countries around the globe. You mention that he was not a great theorist, but one of the key moments in his career was the publication of his writings on the national question, which raised his profile in the movement. Stalin was called off from the front to Moscow, but, soon after, he was appointed as a member of the Revolutionary Military Council. Stalin simply had massive powers of coercion and used those powers to force people to do things unwillingly. Which then, as you say, in the extra-European world becomes more of a model. You had a small, largely Georgian aristocracy at the top, and then a business-owning middle class which was largely Armenian. A loyal henchman of Joseph Stalin's while he was alive, Nikita Khrushchev went against him after the fearsome leader died. Thats what made Stalin successful. It's complicated. Montefiore wrote a very readable book. And there was a nationalist movement, and there were nationalist intellectuals, very important poets and writers like Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, and so forth. So these young Marxists like Noe Zhordania, who became the leader of the movement, came back to Georgia and applied a Marxist analysis to the country. As I started to write in the 1980s and signed my first contract, I realized that the Soviet Union was shifting (though I didnt know it was going to collapse). Beauregid Genden is a shrewd and proud politician. So he and Ordzhonikidze not only sent the army to get rid of the Mensheviks, but, for the next couple years, they fought against local Georgian national Bolsheviks, who wanted to have greater autonomy for Soviet Georgia. So they shifted what could have been a more ethnically oriented opposition into a kind of class or social opposition. One of the most extraordinary things about Soviet history is that after the revolution, they not only recognized these republics but created literally thousands of villages and areas in Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere for other nationalities. Stalin suffered another foreign policy defeat after he encouraged North Korean Communist leader Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea, believing the United States would not interfere. Some might say he was a good. The Death of Stalin was one of the most acclaimed films of recent years. Josef Stalin served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. Hundreds of thousands of people came to see the Generalissimo in the mausoleum. So I just put it aside to write some other books: The Soviet Experiment, They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide, The Revenge of the Past, a number of other things. In his lifetime he was worshipped by. An ice ax, a revolver and a dagger were hidden under the raincoat: the moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice ax from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head, Mercader said after his arrest. Coming to pick his girlfriend up after work, he slowly began to gain the trust of the inhabitants of the house: he was invited in, he showed interest towards Trotskys ideas and brought presents for his grandson. But his book is a popular book. In 2008-2014 most respondents had a neutral attitude towards Stalin. 2013, https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/do-you-think-stalin-was-good-leader-427444. Thats extraordinary. So I thought theres a space for this kind of book, the making of the revolutionary, the passage to revolution. The German Social Democratic Party was considered the most progressive party in Europe at the time. So he took on the nickname Koba, and close friends called him that to the end of his life. "It is difficult for me to imagine what . Get the week's best stories straight to your inbox. At first, he had people removed from power through bureaucratic shuffling and denunciations. It went from being a very backwards country to being a world power. Stalin joined the group in 1898. Stalin also set in motion rapid industrialization that initially achieved huge successes, but over time cost millions of lives and vast damage to the environment. He was more like a good slavedriver, not a good leader. Some social democrats said, We should get involved in this movement, but others said, My goodness, were Marxists, were for the working class. But that was not the position in this pamphlet, or in Lenins earlier work. He won the war and built the country from ruins," Aleksey Zorov, 44, a local businessman who is the sponsor of the new center inaugurated May 8, told NBC News. For a time, he found work as a tutor and later as a clerk at the Tiflis Observatory. Let us know your assignment type and we'll make sure to get you exactly the kind of answer you need. But he was not a good leader. In order for workers to become revolutionary, social democrats need to bring the message to them so they can understand fully the repression they live under and the need for revolution. The first post-Stalin Soviet leader perceived a sharp break between the legality of Lenin's period in office and the illegality of Stalin's rule. "Do you think Stalin was a good leader?" Yet he is increasingly paranoid and purges the Communist party and Army of anyone who might oppose him. It is enough that the people know there was an election. Stalin is seen as the main figure who defeated fascism, who gets the honours for victory in the Great Patriotic War. No, I do not think that Stalin was a good leader. Lenin resolved this conflict in favor of Trotsky. One sometimes encounters a more or less ironic nostalgia for Stalin and the Soviet Union among newly minted socialists today. But given the dominance of bourgeois culture, of the hegemony, as he called it, of bourgeois ideas, its very difficult for them to gravitate spontaneously toward socialism. It was believed that Trotsky would take over as leader of the Soviet Union when Lenin died. His newest book is the long-awaited biography Stalin: Passage to Revolution, which chronicles the transformation of a sensitive Georgian boy named Iosib Soso Djugashvili into the man known to the world as Stalin. A-. Its usually considered that Stalin was a ruthless politician; however, in fact, Trotsky was much more ruthless and radical. Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany nicknamed Der Fhrer (German for The Leader). The death of Joseph Stalin leaves the Soviet Union without a leader. On a hot day, Mercader came dressed in a raincoat, but that didnt alert anyone such a regular he was in the house. Despite the fact that Trotsky was chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Stalin didnt obey his orders and sent letters to Lenin, demanding to grant him military authority: If Trotsky will, without thinking twice, grant mandates left and right then we can confidently say that, in the North Caucasus, everything will fall apart in a months time Ram it into his head For the good of the cause, I need military authority I wont be stopped by the fact that Trotsky hasnt issued me any papers. Trotsky, in turn, demanded Stalin be dismissed. was stalin a fair leader. Of course, some people would say that was a mistake, because ultimately these republics fought against the central Soviet Union and became independent states. The new position provided Stalin with a fair amount of power, as he was able to appoint his friends to government jobs, and develop a base of political support. We strive for accuracy and fairness. Lets ally with the poor peasantry and the working class. Joseph Stalin as a Machiavellian leader. Some scholars have argued that Stalin's record of killings amount to genocide and make him one of history's most ruthless mass murderers. They became leaders of the social-democratic faction in the duma, and later the leaders of the Russian revolution of 1917 after February, until the Bolsheviks took over later that year. Lenin believed that workers do have natural tendencies toward socialism. Lenin said, No, nationalism is around, its part of the capitalist bourgeois stage of history, and we must recognize its power. was stalin a fair leader. Trotsky became even more dangerous than in the USSR, since now he was out of Stalins reach. Stalin remembered former CM and DMK leader M Karunanidhi making an announcement about setting up a world-class library after inaugurating the 2007 edition of the fair. What are some examples of his manipulation? Keith Wagstaff. Its a little bit, in my taste, sensationalist. Some really wanted independence from the empire. Stalin had real talents. Lets say you have a Jewish village in Ukraine somewhere, and theres a majority of Jews there, and its fairly coherent. Through his education there, his own nationality seemed threatened by those Russifying priests who called Georgians dogs, called their language a dog language. Advertisement Advertisement Stalin, who did not tolerate competition, had reasons for a personal animosity towards Trotsky. By March, the tsar had abdicated the throne and was placed under house arrest. It destroyed many of the important achievements that were won earlier. Around 1913, he produced a pamphlet which is sometimes called Marxism and the National Question it has various titles. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin terrorised his own people, but for the first time a survey suggests that most Russians view him favourably. At the first of these meetings, in Tehran, Iran, in late 1943, the recent victory in Stalingrad put Stalin in a solid bargaining position. Lenin had a 'great modesty', was a 'patient educator', and displayed a 'keen and solicitous concern . Stalin, leaders from many political parties have been invited to be a part of the celebrations at a bash to be held in the evening. Stalin had been suspicious of the West since the inception of the Soviet Union, and once the Soviet Union had entered the war, Stalin had demanded the Allies open up a second front against Germany. Joseph Stalin was the leader and dictator of the USSR from 1922 to 1953. That led to a temporary thaw in political repression, as thousands of prisoners were freed from Stalin's labour camps. New Stalin statues have gone up in various places. Sudoplatov, the main organizer of Trotskys assassination, later recalled that Stalin explained the necessity to get rid of his former ally in such words: Trotsky has to be eliminated within a year, before inevitable war commences. He is the author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972), among many other works. So Stalin moved very quickly toward this Leninist posture, which did have some support in Georgia at this time, 190204. . Despite some of its achievements, it shouldnt be celebrated. Stalin was opposed to the views of others like the Georgian Mensheviks, or the Jewish Bund, or the Austro-Marxists, who argued for something that you can call extraterritorial national cultural autonomy. This would mean that citizens of the state carry their ethnicity and nationality around with them wherever they live in the state. British parliamentary elections had replaced Prime Minister Churchill with Clement Attlee as Britain's chief negotiator. So there were debates within the movement, and before the revolution, Stalin fought against many of these kinds of things. What's he waiting for? A Mexican policeman holds the short- handled pickax used by Ramon Mercader. What were the 34 most significant differences between ideas of regional identity in the North and in the South during the Civil War? In 1956, after Stalin's death, came a watershed moment: Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Stalin personality cult and dictatorship, in a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress. Though never a strong orator like Vladimir Lenin or an intellectual like Leon Trotsky, Stalin excelled in the mundane operations of the revolution, calling meetings, publishing leaflets and organizing strikes and demonstrations. Well have a democratic coalition of the lower classes, and we can make a revolution that way.. It was a strategy to gather them back into a Russian state. Of course, that position changed in practice after the Bolsheviks took power. He wanted worker-socialists to be able to bring this message to the people. 4 U.S. Presidents Who Won the Nobel Peace Prize, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads, Name: Joseph Stalin, Birth Year: 1878, Birth date: December 18, 1878, Birth City: Gori, Georgia, Birth Country: Russia. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago, and Senior Researcher at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Karl Kautsky, the great theorist of German social democracy, came to the country and wrote a book called Georgia: A Social-Democratic Peasant Republic, praising this democratic experiment. To be fair to everyone, we should consider each person and the knowledge, experience, skill, confidence, commitment and motivation he or she brings to each task, activity or behavior. Stalin forced rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agricultural land, resulting in millions dying from famine while others were sent to labor camps. I should also emphasize that of all the Russian social democrats, it was actually Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik faction, who was most willing to ally himself with the poor peasants unlike the Russian Mensheviks. In his memoirs, Trotsky judged Stalin to be basically irrelevant to the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1917. No man - no problem.". Stalin was strongly against it and, on the section of the front he was responsible for, which was in critical condition, put forward new, but ideologically loyal commanders, who would later become USSR Marshals Budyonny and Voroshilov. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images). 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