The Cold War had begun.
Even in his final years, Stalin remained dangerous. He gave Kim Il Sung of North Korea the go-ahead to start the Korean War in 1950, and launched a new series of persecutions at home, this time against the Jews. He seems to have been contemplating further anti-Semitic measures, and possibly a purge of his associates in the Party, when he died on March 5, 1953.
Part 1:The Great Terror and the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
In the early 1930s, a famine developed in the Ukraine; learning of the suffering there, Stalin's wife Nadezhda confronted him, demanding that he remedy the situation. The couple had a tremendous fight, and Stalin ordered the arrest of the students who had informed his wife of the disaster. Shortly thereafter, on November 8, 1932, Nadezhda shot herself. It was the end of any trace of "normal" family life for Stalin, and witnesses saw tears in his eyes at her funeral--the only report that we have of the great dictator crying.
Meanwhile, Stalin remained the unquestioned master of the Soviet Union, with all his enemies vanquished and his position seemingly secure. But while his rivals from the '20s had suffered defeat, they were still alive and in the Party. Meanwhile, members of Stalin's loyal, personally appointed Politburo were beginning to wonder if their leader, who had guided them through the turmoil of collectivization and the Five-Year Plan, could now also prove effective in a relatively peaceful era. Talk circulated about electing a new General Secretary, and Sergei Kirov, a member of the Politburo, was put forth as a possible candidate. Kirov rejected this notion, but at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1934 many members expressed disapproval of Stalin's tight control, and a small percentage of the delegates actually voted against re-electing him the Central Committee.
This brief swell of dissent only shows how egregiously people still misunderstood the nature of Stalin's rule.
