After leaving the Seminary in 1899, he joined the Social Democrats, Russia's Marxist political party, and became a professional revolutionary. He worked in Tiflis, and then in the Black Sea port of Batumi, organizing worker protests, which led to his arrest in 1902. Exiled to Siberia, he would soon escape, setting a pattern for the next ten years: from 1902 to 1913 he would be arrested and exiled six times, escaping almost every time. (Siberian exile, in Tsarist Russia, was notoriously easy to escape from.) During this period, the Social Democrats split into two factions, the Bolsheviks, under the le

Once in power, Stalin began a drive to industrialize and modernize the Soviet Union, with a Five-Year Plan (1927-32) based on Marxist principles championing government control of the economy. Central to his program was the collectivization of agriculture, in which the government would redistribute the land by taking over the estates of the "kulaks", the wealthiest peasants. But the kulaks were essentially a figment of Marxist propaganda (there existed no real difference between these "wealthiest" peasants and all other peasants), and collectivization reaped disaster--the government persecuted and killed the peasantry, famine swept the country, and as many as ten million may have died. But Stalin's grip on power was not shaken, save perhaps in his home, where his wife Nadezhda committed suicide in 1932.

So began the "Great Terror," the aptly named period when Stalin effectively liquidated all traces of opposition to his rule. Large-scale purges struck the country, targeting all levels of society--including children: Stalin reasoned that parents were more likely to confess to trumped-up charges of subversion and disloyalty if they knew their children's lives were at risk. Then, in August of 1936, Stalin engineered the first of what came to be known as the Show Trials, in which he accused Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates of conspiring (with the exiled Trotsky) against Stalin and the government. In an amazing scene that was broadcast around the world--and which played a large role in exposing the true nature of the Soviet regime--every one of the accused Bolsheviks confessed their supposed crimes. Only later did the world discover that these confessions were elicited after long months of psychological torture and physical abuse. All of the confessors were sentenced to death.

Throughout his meetings with the two western leaders, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Stalin pushed for military and economic assistance for the Soviet Union while demanding that they recognize Soviet dominance of Eastern and Central Europe. At the Tehran Conference in 1943, and again at Yalta in February of 1945, he pushed them to allow what amounted to a “Soviet bloc” extending from the Baltic States across Poland and into Germany, and then down through Southern Europe into Yugoslavia.

Some topics in this essay:
Soviet Union, Red Army, Marx Marxism, Five-Year Plan, Nazi-Soviet Pact, Zinoviev Kamenev, Secondly Marx's, March Stalin, Trotsky Stalin, Korean War, soviet union, red army, world war, world war ii, civil war, war ii, cold war, german troops, secret police, war stalin, late 1940s, president franklin roosevelt, cold war begun, march 5 1953, sergei kirov politburo,