Joseph Stalin
By: Katie Cane
Background:
-instituted a reign of terror while modernizing Russia
-helped defeat Nazism
"Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem."
Background Facts
-General Secretary of the Communist Party
-Red Army helped defeat Nazi Germany during WWII.
Road to Dictatorship
-Around 1929, Stalin reversed the Bolshevik agrarian policy by seizing land given earlier to the peasants and organizing collective farms.
Stalin's Secret Police
-a law enforcement agency of the Soviet Union that directly executed the will of the All Union Communist Party
-related to the Soviet secret police
The Great Purge
-campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936-1938
-purge on people from the Communist Party
Liquidation of the Kulaks
-The soviet campaign of political repressions
-includes arrests, deportations, and executions
-consisted of the expropriation of the richer peasants' households, the kulaks,
expulsion of members from the village.
1. counterrevolutionary kulak activists: subject to incarceration or execution; families were exiled
2. kulak activists: exiled to distant parts of the Soviet Union
3. the majority: resettled outside collective farms
Two million peasants of the first two categories were deported in 1930-1931.
Joseph Stalin's Death
-stroke
-His body was embalmed and preserved in Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square until 1961
The Gulags
-Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps
-operated the Soviet system of forced labor camps in the Stalin era.
-existed throughout the Soviet Union
-largest camps in Arctic north to the Siberian east and the Central Asian south
-Prisoners went thru endemic violence, extreme climate, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary conditions
-high death rates
-even after Stalin’s death in 1953, forced labor camps and political prisoners continued to exist in the Soviet Union right up to the Gorbachev era