Honorific-prefix	Generalissimo
Name	Joseph Stalin
Office	Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union
1blankname	First Deputies
1namedata	Nikolai VoznesenskyVyacheslav Molotov
Term start	6 May 1941
Term end	5 March 1953
Predecessor	Vyacheslav Molotov
Successor	Georgy Malenkov
Office2	General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union(office abolished in October 1952)
Term start2	3 April 1922
Term end2	5 March 1953
Predecessor2	Established
Successor2	Nikita Khrushchevafter vacancy
Office3	People's Commissar for the Defense of the Soviet Union
Premier3	Himself
Term start3	19 July 1941
Term end3	25 February 1946
Predecessor3	Semyon Timoshenko
Successor3	Nikolai Bulganinafter vacancy
Birth date	December 18, 1878
Birthname	Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili
Birth place	Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire
Death date	March 05, 1953
Death place	Kuntsevo Dacha near Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Nationality	Soviet
Ethnicity	Georgian, with some Ossetian roots
Spouse	Ekaterina Svanidze (1906–1907)Nadezhda Alliluyeva (1919–1932)
Children	Yakov Dzhugashvili, Vasily Dzhugashvili, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Konstantin Kuzakov
Alma mater	Tiflis Theological Seminary
Allegiance	Soviet Union
Serviceyears	1943–1953
Rank	Generalissimo of the Soviet Union
Commands	All (supreme commander)
Battles	World War II
Signature	Stalin Signature.svg

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878

During the late 1930s, Stalin launched the Great Purge (also known as the "Great Terror"), a campaign to purge the Communist Party of people accused of sabotage, terrorism, or treachery; he extended it to the military and other sectors of Soviet society. In practice, the purges were indiscriminate. Targets were often executed, imprisoned in Gulag labor camps or exiled. In the years which followed, millions of members of ethnic minorities were also deported.

In 1939 Stalin entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, followed by the Soviet invasion of Poland, Finland, the Baltics, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. After Germany violated the pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet Union joined the Allies to play an important role in the Axis defeat, at the cost of the largest death toll for any country in the war (mostly due to the mass deaths of civilians in territories occupied by Germany). After the war, Stalin installed subservient communist governments in most countries in Eastern Europe, forming the Eastern bloc, behind what was referred to as an "Iron Curtain" of Soviet rule during the Cold War. Stalin's government was also the driving force in the removal of political killings from the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Modern views of Stalin in the Russian Federation remain mixed, with some viewing him as a tyrant while others consider him a capable leader. Following his death, Stalin and his regime have both been questioned and denounced on numerous occasions. In 1956, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced his legacy and drove the process of de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union. In November 2010, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration blaming Stalin, amongst other officials, for having personally ordered the Katyn massacre.

Early life

Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili () on 18 December 1878 The official Soviet version states that he was expelled for reading illegal literature and forming a Social Democratic study circle.

Shortly after leaving the seminary, Stalin discovered the writings of Vladimir Lenin and decided to become a Marxist revolutionary, eventually joining Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1903. After being marked by the Okhranka (the Tsar's secret police) for his activities, he became a full-time revolutionary and outlaw. He became one of the Bolsheviks' chief operatives in the Caucasus, organizing paramilitaries, inciting strikes, spreading propaganda and raising money through bank robberies, ransom kidnappings and extortion.

In the summer of 1906, Stalin married Ekaterina Svanidze, who later gave birth to Stalin's first child, Yakov. Stalin temporarily resigned from the party over its ban on bank robberies and his link to the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, a large raid on a bank shipment in the crowded Yeveran Square that resulted in the deaths of 40 people and the injuring of 50 people. and then fled to Baku, where Ekaterina died of typhus. In Baku, Stalin organized Muslim Azeris and Persians in partisan activities, including the murders of many "Black Hundreds" right-wing supporters of the Tsar, and conducted protection rackets, ransom kidnappings, counterfeiting operations and robberies.

Stalin was captured and sent to Siberia seven times, but escaped most of these exiles. After release from one such exile, in April 1912 in Saint Petersburg, Stalin created the newspaper Pravda from an existing party newspaper. He eventually adopted the name "Stalin", from the Russian word for steel, which he used as an alias and pen name in his published works.

During his last exile, Stalin was conscripted by the Russian army to fight in World War I, but was deemed unfit for service because of his damaged left arm.

Revolution, Civil War, and Polish-Soviet War

Role during the Russian Revolution of 1917

After returning to Saint Petersburg from exile, Stalin ousted Vyacheslav Molotov and Alexander Shlyapnikov as editors of Pravda. He then took a position in favor of supporting Alexander Kerensky's provisional government. However, after Lenin prevailed at the April 1917 Party conference, Stalin and Pravda supported overthrowing the provisional government. At this conference, Stalin was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee. After Lenin participated in an attempted revolution, Stalin helped Lenin evade capture and, to avoid a bloodbath, ordered the besieged Bolsheviks to surrender. Thereafter, civil war broke out in Russia, pitting Lenin's Red Army against the White Army, a loose alliance of anti-Bolshevik forces. Lenin formed a five-member Politburo which included Stalin and Trotsky. In May 1918, Lenin dispatched Stalin to the city of Tsaritsyn. Through his new allies, Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, Stalin imposed his influence on the military. and burned villages in order to intimidate the peasantry into submission and discourage bandit raids on food shipments. He would ensure the death of Trotsky, secure Lviv in the Nazi-Soviet pact, execute Polish veterans of the Polish-Soviet War in the Katyn massacre; establish the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe; and at Yalta, demand that Lviv be ceded by Poland to the Soviet Union.

Rise to power

Stalin played a decisive role in engineering the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia, following which he adopted particularly hardline, centralist policies towards Soviet Georgia, which included the Georgian Affair of 1922 and other repressions. This created a rift with Lenin, who believed that all the Soviet states should stand equal.

Lenin still considered Stalin to be a loyal ally, and when he got mired in squabbles with Trotsky and other politicians, he decided to give Stalin more power. With the help of Lev Kamenev, Lenin had Stalin appointed as General Secretary in 1922. Stalin countered Trotskyist critisizm by making a secret speech in which he said that Chiang's right wing Kuomintang were the only ones capable of defeating the imperialists, that Chiang Kai-shek had funding from the rich merchants, and that his forces were to be utilized until squeezed for all usefulness like a lemon before being discarded. However, Chiang quickly reversed the tables in the Shanghai massacre of 1927 by massacring the Communist party in Shanghai midway in the Northern Expedition.

Stalin pushed for more rapid industrialization and central control of the economy, contravening Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP). At the end of 1927, a critical shortfall in grain supplies prompted Stalin to push for collectivisation of agriculture and order the seizures of grain hoards from kulak farmers.

Cult of personality

Stalin created a cult of personality in the Soviet Union around both himself and Lenin. Many personality cults in history have been frequently measured and compared to his. Numerous towns, villages and cities were renamed after the Soviet leader (see List of places named after Stalin) and the Stalin Prize and Stalin Peace Prize were named in his honor. He accepted grandiloquent titles (e.g., "Coryphaeus of Science," "Father of Nations," "Brilliant Genius of Humanity," "Great Architect of Communism," "Gardener of Human Happiness," and others), and helped rewrite Soviet history to provide himself a more significant role in the revolution. At the same time, according to Nikita Khrushchev, he insisted that he be remembered for "the extraordinary modesty characteristic of truly great people." Statues of Stalin depict him at a height and build approximating Alexander III, while photographic evidence suggests he was between 5 ft 5 in and 5 ft 6 in (165–168 cm).

Trotsky criticized the cult of personality built around Stalin. It reached new levels during World War II, with Stalin's name included in the new Soviet national anthem. Stalin became the focus of literature, poetry, music, paintings and film, exhibiting fawning devotion, crediting Stalin with almost god-like qualities, and suggesting he single-handedly won the Second World War. It is debatable as to how much Stalin relished the cult surrounding him. The Finnish communist Arvo Tuominen records a sarcastic toast proposed by Stalin at a New Year Party in 1935 in which he said "Comrades! I want to propose a toast to our patriarch, life and sun, liberator of nations, architect of socialism [he rattled off all the appellations applied to him in those days] Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, and I hope this is the first and last speech made to that genius this evening."

In a 1956 speech, Nikita Khrushchev gave a denunciation of Stalin's actions: "It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god." Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps, to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.

In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 1,108 negative votes. After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev. The investigations and trials expanded. Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts", which were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys or appeals, followed by a sentence to be executed "quickly."

Thereafter, several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited anti-Soviet activities as counterrevolutionary crime was applied in the broadest manner. The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "enemy of the people", starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD -NKVD troika- with sentencing carried out within 24 hours. {| border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="2" style="margin:5px; width:20%; border:solid 1px #bbb; float:left;" |- | |- | |- | style="text-align:left;"|Nikolai Yezhov, walking with Stalin in the top photo from the 1930s, was shot in 1940. Following his death, Yezhov was edited out of the photo by Soviet censors. Such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin's rule. |}

Many military leaders were convicted of treason, and a large scale purging of Red Army officers followed. The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin. In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937; this eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. The only three "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) that remained were Stalin, Mikhail Kalinin, and Chairman of Sovnarkom Vyacheslav Molotov.

Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities) such as Poles, ethnic Germans, Koreans, etc. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed. Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed to a story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.

In light of revelations from the Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and 328,612 in 1938) were executed in the course of the terror, with the great mass of victims being "ordinary" Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, beggars. Many of the executed were interred in mass graves, with some of the major killing and burial sites being Bykivnia, Kurapaty and Butovo.

Some experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete or unreliable. For example, Robert Conquest suggests that the probable figure for executions during the years of the Great Purge is not 681,692, but some two and a half times as high. He believes that the KGB was covering its tracks by falsifying the dates and causes of death of rehabilitated victims.

Stalin personally signed 357 proscription lists in 1937 and 1938 which condemned to execution some 40,000 people, and about 90% of these are confirmed to have been shot. In addition, Stalin dispatched a contingent of NKVD operatives to Mongolia, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika and unleashed a bloody purge in which tens of thousands were executed as 'Japanese Spies.' Mongolian ruler Khorloogiin Choibalsan closely followed Stalin's lead.

During the 1930's and 40's the Soviet leadership sent NKVD squads into other countries to murder defectors and other opponents of the Soviet regime. Victims of such plots included Yevhen Konovalets, Ignace Poretsky, Rudolf Klement, Alexander Kutepov, Evgeny Miller, Leon Trotsky and the POUM leadership in Catalonia (e.g. Andreu Nin).

Population transfer

Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million

Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations, rightly or wrongly. Individual circumstances of those spending time in German-occupied territories were not examined. After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus, the entire population of five of the small highland peoples and the Crimean Tatars more than a million people in total were deported without notice or any opportunity to take their possessions.

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninism, and reversed most of them, although it was not until 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhetians and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic States, Tatarstan and Chechnya, even today.

Collectivization

Stalin's regime moved to force collectivization of agriculture. This was intended to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, and to make tax collection more efficient. Collectivization meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced violent reaction among the peasantry.

In the first years of collectivization it was estimated that industrial production would rise by 200% and agricultural production by 50%, but these estimates were not met. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks proper made up only 4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the slightly better-off peasants who took the brunt of violence from the OGPU and the Komsomol. These peasants were about 60% of the population). Those officially defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge. Archival data indicates that 20,201 people were executed during 1930, the year of Dekulakization. and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades"—is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.

Famines

Famine affected other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people. The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, had caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths. Most modern scholars agree that the famine was caused by the policies of the government of the Soviet Union under Stalin, rather than by natural reasons. According to Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop was no worse than that of 1931 ... it was not a crop failure but the excessive demands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have alleviated the famine, while continuing to export grain; he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away, and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response. Other historians hold it was largely the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine, with the successful harvest of 1933 ending the famine. Soviet and other historians have argued that the rapid collectivization of agriculture was necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians; Alec Nove claims that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than because of, its collectivized agriculture.

The USSR also experienced a major famine in 1947 as a result of war damage and severe droughts, but economist Michael Ellman argues that it could have been prevented if the government did not mismanage its grain reserves. The famine cost an estimated 1 to 1.5 million lives as well as secondary population losses due to reduced fertility.

Ukrainian famine

The Holodomor famine is sometimes referred to as the Ukrainian Genocide, implying it was engineered by the Soviet government, specifically targeting the Ukrainian people to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a political factor and social entity. While historians continue to disagree whether the policies that led to Holodomor fall under the legal definition of genocide, twenty six countries have officially recognized the Holodomor as such. On 28 November 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament approved a bill, according to which the Soviet-era forced famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. Professor Michael Ellman concludes that Ukrainians were victims of genocide in 1932–33, according to a more relaxed definition, which is favored by some specialists in the field of genocide studies. He asserts that Soviet policies greatly exacerbated the famine's death toll (such as the use of torture and execution to extract grain (see Law of Spikelets), with 1.8 million tonnes of it being exported during the height of the starvation—enough to feed 5 million people for one year, the use of force to prevent starving peasants from fleeing the worst affected areas, and the refusal to import grain or secure international humanitarian aid to alleviate the suffering) and that Stalin intended to use the starvation as a cheap and efficient means (as opposed to deportations and shootings) to kill off those deemed to be "counterrevolutionaries," "idlers," and "thieves," but not to annihilate the Ukrainian peasantry as a whole. He also claims that, while this is not the only Soviet genocide (e.g. The Polish operation of the NKVD), it is the worst in terms of mass casualties.

Current estimates on the total number of casualties within Soviet Ukraine range mostly from 2.2 million to 4 to 5 million.

A Ukrainian court found Josef Stalin and other leaders of the former Soviet Union guilty of genocide by "organizing mass famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933" in January 2010. However, the court "dropped criminal proceedings over the suspects' deaths".

Industrialization

The Russian Civil War and wartime communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism. Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

With seed capital unavailable because of international reaction to Communist policies, little international trade, and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization both by restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the kulaks.

In 1933 workers' real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. Common and political prisoners in labor camps were forced to do unpaid labor, and communists and Komsomol members were frequently "mobilized" for various construction projects. The Soviet Union used numerous foreign experts, to design new factories, supervise construction, instruct workers and improve manufacturing processes. The most notable foreign contractor was Albert Kahn's firm that designed and built 521 factories between 1930 and 1932. As a rule, factories were supplied with imported equipment.

In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While it is generally agreed that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate of growth is disputed. It is not disputed, however, that these gains were accomplished at the cost of millions of lives. Official Soviet estimates stated the annual rate of growth at 13.9%; Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that Soviet growth became temporarily much higher after Stalin's death.

According to Robert Lewis the Five-Year Plan substantially helped to modernize the previously backward Soviet economy. New products were developed, and the scale and efficiency of existing production greatly increased. Some innovations were based on indigenous technical developments, others on imported foreign technology. Despite its costs, the industrialization effort allowed the Soviet Union to fight, and ultimately win, World War II.

Science

Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control by Stalin and his government, along with art and literature. There was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic—the most notable examples being the "bourgeois pseudosciences" genetics and cybernetics. Some areas of physics were criticized, However, although initially planned, while Stalin personally and directly contributed to study in Linguistics, the principle work of which is a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions." Scientific research was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to labor camps (including Lev Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939) or executed (e.g. Lev Shubnikov, shot in 1937).

Social services

Under the Soviet government people benefited from some social liberalization. Girls were given an adequate, equal education and women had equal rights in employment, The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record low numbers, increasing life spans by decades. Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract.

During Stalin's reign the official and long-lived style of Socialist Realism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama and literature. Previously fashionable "revolutionary" expressionism, abstract art, and avant-garde experimentation were discouraged or denounced as "formalism".

Famous figures were repressed, and many persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them Isaac Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Lev Gumilev) and "non-conformists" (for example, Osip Mandelstam). Small amounts of remnant of pre-revolutionary Russia survived. The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general, and in specific instances, has been the subject of discussion. Stalin's favorite novel Pharaoh, shared similarities with Sergei Eisenstein's film, Ivan the Terrible, produced under Stalin's tutelage.

In architecture, a Stalinist Empire Style (basically, updated neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by the Seven Sisters of Moscow) replaced the constructivism of the 1920s. Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect on indigenous cultures within the Soviet Union, though the politics of Korenizatsiya and forced development were possibly beneficial to the integration of later generations of indigenous cultures.

Religion

Stalin followed the position adopted by Lenin that religion was an opiate that needed to be removed in order to construct the ideal communist society. To this end, his government promoted atheism through special atheistic education in schools, massive amounts of anti-religious propaganda, the antireligious work of public institutions (especially the Society of the Godless), discriminatory laws, and also a terror campaign against religious believers. By the late 1930s it had become dangerous to be publicly associated with religion.

Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction as a public institution: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937–1938. During World War II, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, after the NKVD had recruited the new metropolitan, the first after the revolution, as a secret agent. Thousands of parishes were reactivated until a further round of suppression in Khrushchev's time. The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.

Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects were outlawed and persecuted. Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.

Theorist

Stalin and his supporters have highlighted the notion that socialism can be built and consolidated by a country as underdeveloped as Russia during the 1920s. Indeed this might be the only means in which it could be built in a hostile environment. In 1933, Stalin put forward the theory of aggravation of the class struggle along with the development of socialism, arguing that the further the country would move forward, the more acute forms of struggle will be used by the doomed remnants of exploiter classes in their last desperate efforts and that, therefore, political repression was necessary.

In 1936, Stalin announced that the society of the Soviet Union consisted of two non-antagonistic classes: workers and kolkhoz peasantry. These corresponded to the two different forms of property over the means of production that existed in the Soviet Union: state property (for the workers) and collective property (for the peasantry). In addition to these, Stalin distinguished the stratum of intelligentsia. The concept of "non-antagonistic classes" was entirely new to Leninist theory. Among Stalin's contributions to Communist theoretical literature were "Dialectical and Historical Materialism," "Marxism and the National Question", "Trotskyism or Leninism", and "The Principles of Leninism."

Calculating the number of victims

Researchers before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union attempting to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million. After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives also became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.

The official Soviet archival records do not contain comprehensive figures for some categories of victims, such as the those of ethnic deportations or of German population transfers in the aftermath of WWII. By 1948, according to Nicolas Werth, the mortality rate of the 600,000 people deported from the Caucasus between 1943 and 1944 had reached 25%. Other notable exclusions from NKVD data on repression deaths include the Katyn massacre, other killings in the newly occupied areas, and the mass shootings of Red Army personnel (deserters and so-called deserters) in 1941. The Soviets executed 158,000 soldiers for desertion during the war, and the "blocking detachments" of the NKVD shot thousands more. Also, the official statistics on Gulag mortality exclude deaths of prisoners taking place shortly after their release but which resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps. Some historians also believe the official archival figures of the categories that were recorded by Soviet authorities to be unreliable and incomplete. In addition to failures regarding comprehensive recordings, as one additional example, Robert Gellately and Simon Sebag-Montefiore argue the many suspects beaten and tortured to death while in "investigative custody" were likely not to have been counted amongst the executed.

Historians working after the Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines. Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million a total of about 9 million victims of repression.

Some have also included deaths of 6 to 8 million people in the 1932–1933 famine as victims of Stalin's repression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others, or simply an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization.

Accordingly, if famine victims are included, a minimum of around 10 million deaths—6 million from famine and 4 million from other causes—are attributable to the regime, with a number of recent historians suggesting a likely total of around 20 million, citing much higher victim totals from executions, gulags, deportations and other causes. Adding 6–8 million famine victims to Erlikman's estimates above, for example, would yield a total of between 15 and 17 million victims. Researcher Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million. In his most recent edition of The Great Terror (2007), Conquest states that while exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, the various terror campaigns launched by the Soviet government claimed no fewer than 15 million lives. Others maintain that their earlier higher victim total estimates are correct.

World War II, 1939–1945

and Stalin at the signing of the Pact]]

Pact with Hitler

After a failed attempt to sign an anti-German military alliance with France and Britain and talks with Germany regarding a potential political deal, on 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, negotiated by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Officially a non-aggression treaty only, an appended secret protocol, also reached on 23 August 1939, divided the whole of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.

The eastern part of Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and part of Romania were recognized as parts of the Soviet sphere of influence, Stalin and Ribbentrop traded toasts on the night of the signing discussing past hostilities between the countries.

Implementing the division of Eastern Europe and other invasions

On 1 September 1939, the German invasion of its agreed upon portion of Poland started World War II. Eleven days later, the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was modified, allotting Germany a larger part of Poland, while ceding most of Lithuania to the Soviet Union. After Stalin declared that he was going to "solve the Baltic problem", by June 1940, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were merged into the Soviet Union, after repressions and actions therein brought about the deaths of over 160,000 citizens of these states. After facing stiff resistance in an invasion of Finland, an interim peace was entered, granting the Soviet Union the eastern region of Karelia (10% of Finnish territory). In June 1940, Stalin directed the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, proclaiming this formerly Romanian territory part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. But in annexing northern Bukovina, Stalin had gone beyond the agreed limits of the secret protocol. After a conference in Berlin between Hitler, Molotov and Ribbentrop, Germany presented the Molotov with a proposed written agreement for Axis entry. On 25 November, Stalin responded with a proposed written agreement for Axis entry which was never answered by Germany. Shortly thereafter, Hitler issued a secret directive on the eventual attempts to invade the Soviet Union.

Hitler breaks the pact

During the early morning of 22 June 1941, Hitler broke the pact by implementing Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Soviet held territories and the Soviet Union that began the war on the Eastern Front. Although Stalin had received warnings from spies and his generals, he felt that Germany would not attack the Soviet Union until Germany had defeated Britain. In the initial hours after the German attack commenced, Stalin hesitated, wanting to ensure that the German attack was sanctioned by Hitler, rather than the unauthorized action of a rogue general. However, some documentary evidence of orders given by Stalin contradicts these accounts, leading some historians to speculate that Khruschev's account is inaccurate. By the end of 1941, the Soviet military had suffered 4.3 million casualties and German forces had advanced 1,050 miles (1,690 kilometers).

Soviets stop the Germans

While the Germans pressed forward, Stalin was confident of an eventual Allied victory over Germany. In September 1941, Stalin told British diplomats that he wanted two agreements: (1) a mutual assistance/aid pact and (2) a recognition that, after the war, the Soviet Union would gain the territories in countries that it had taken pursuant to its division of Eastern Europe with Hitler in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The British agreed to assistance but refused to agree upon the territorial gains, which Stalin accepted months later as the military situation deteriorated somewhat in mid-1942. On 5 December, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive, pushing German troops back 40–50 miles from Moscow, the Wehrmacht's first significant defeat of the war. While Red Army generals saw evidence that Hitler would shift efforts south, Stalin considered this to be a flanking campaign in efforts to take Moscow. During the war, Time Magazine named Stalin Time Person of the Year twice and he was also one of the nominees for Time Person of the Century title.

Soviet push to Germany

The Soviets repulsed the important German strategic southern campaign and, although 2.5 million Soviet casualties were suffered in that effort, it permitted the Soviets to take the offensive for most of the rest of the war on the Eastern Front. , and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November 1943.]] Germany attempted an encirclement attack at Kursk, which was successfully repulsed by the Soviets. Kursk marked the beginning of a period where Stalin became more willing to listen to the advice of his generals. Soviet military industrial output also had increased substantially from late 1941 to early 1943 after Stalin had moved factories well to the East of the front, safe from German invasion and air attack.

In November 1943, Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt in Tehran. The parties later agreed that Britain and America would launch a cross-channel invasion of France in May 1944, along with a separate invasion of southern France. Stalin insisted that, after the war, the Soviet Union should incorporate the portions of Poland it occupied pursuant to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, which Churchill tabled.

In 1944, the Soviet Union made significant advances across Eastern Europe toward Germany, including Operation Bagration, a massive offensive in Belorussia against the German Army Group Centre.

Final victory

By April 1945, Nazi Germany faced its last days with 1.9 million German soldiers in the East fighting 6.4 million Red Army soldiers while 1 million German soldiers in the West battled 4 million Western Allied soldiers. While initial talk existed of a race to Berlin by the Allies, after Stalin successfully lobbied for Eastern Germany to fall within the Soviet "sphere of influence" at Yalta, no plans were made by the Western Allies to seize the city by a ground operation.

On 30 April, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, after which Soviet forces found their remains, which had been burned at Hitler's directive. German forces surrendered a few days later. Despite the Soviets' possession of Hitler's remains, Stalin did not believe that his old nemesis was actually dead, a belief that remained for years after the war.

Fending off the German invasion and pressing to victory in the East required a tremendous sacrifice by the Soviet Union. Soviet military casualties totaled approximately 35 million (official figures 28.2 million) with approximately 14.7 million killed, missing or captured (official figures 11.285 million). Although figures vary, the Soviet civilian death toll probably reached 20 million. Some 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages were destroyed. Thereafter, Stalin was at times referred to as one of the most influential men in human history.

Nobel Prize in Peace nominations

In 1945, he was mentioned by Halvdan Koht among seven candidates that were qualified for the Nobel Prize in Peace. However, he did not explicitly nominate any of them. The person actually nominated was Cordell Hull.

In 1948, he was officially nominated for the Nobel Prize in Peace by Wladislav Rieger.

Questionable tactics

to Stalin proposing execution of Polish officers]] After taking around 300,000 Polish prisoners in 1939 and early 1940, 25,700 Polish POWs were executed on 5 March 1940, pursuant to a note to Stalin from Lavrenty Beria, in what became known as the Katyn massacre. While Stalin personally told a Polish general they'd "lost track" of the officers in Manchuria, The massacre became a source of political controversy, with the Soviets eventually claiming that Germany committed the executions when the Soviet Union retook Poland in 1944. The Soviets did not admit responsibility until 1990.

Stalin introduced controversial military orders, such as Order No. 270, requiring superiors to shoot deserters on the spot while their family members were subject to arrest. Thereafter, Stalin also conducted a purge of several military commanders that were shot for "cowardice" without a trial. and soldiers guilty of disciplinary procedures to be forced into "penal battalions", which were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front lines. The order also directed "blocking detachments" to shoot fleeing panicked troops at the rear. while others were deported east.

After the capture of Berlin, Soviet troops reportedly raped from tens of thousands to two million women, and 50,000 during and after the occupation of Budapest. In former Axis countries, such as Germany, Romania and Hungary, Red Army officers generally viewed cities, villages and farms as being open to pillaging and looting.

In the Soviet Occupation Zone of post-war Germany, the Soviets set up ten NKVD-run "special camps" subordinate to the gulag. These "special camps" were former Stalags, prisons, or Nazi concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen (special camp number 7) and Buchenwald (special camp number 2). According to German government estimates, "65,000 people died in those Soviet-run camps or in transportation to them."

According to recent figures, of an estimated four million POWs taken by the Soviets, including Germans, Japanese, Hungarians, Romanians and others, some 580,000 never returned, presumably victims of privation or the Gulags. Soviet POWs and forced laborers who survived German captivity were sent to special "transit" or "filtration" camps to determine which were potential traitors. Of the total, 2,427,906 were sent home and 801,152 were reconscripted into the armed forces. 89,468 remained in the transit camps as reception personnel until the repatriation process was finally wound up in the early 1950s. After resistance by Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin promised a re-organization of the current Communist puppet government on a broader democratic basis in Poland.

The parties at Yalta further agreed that the countries of liberated Europe and former Axis satellites would be allowed to "create democratic institutions of their own choice", pursuant to "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live." The parties also agreed to help those countries form interim governments "pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections" and "facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections." Stalin pushed for reparations from Germany without regard to the base minimum supply for German citizens' survival, which worried Truman and Churchill who thought that Germany would become a financial burden for Western powers. By July 1945, Stalin's troops effectively controlled the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, and refugees were fleeing out of these countries fearing a Communist take-over. The western allies, and especially Churchill, were suspicious of the motives of Stalin, who had already installed communist governments in the central European countries under his influence.

In these conferences, his first appearances on the world stage, Stalin proved to be a formidable negotiator. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary noted: "Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all. Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated."

Post-war era, 1945–1953

The Iron Curtain and the Eastern Bloc

After Soviet forces remained in Eastern and Central European countries, with the beginnings of communist puppet regimes in those countries, Churchill referred to the region as being behind an "Iron Curtain" of control from Moscow. The countries under Soviet control in Eastern and Central Europe were sometimes called the "Eastern bloc" or "Soviet Bloc". until 1989]] In Soviet-controlled East Germany, the major task of the ruling communist party in Germany was to channel Soviet orders down to both the administrative apparatus and the other bloc parties pretending that these were initiatives of its own, with deviations potentially leading to reprimands, imprisonment, torture and even death. vote rigging was employed to win a majority in the carefully controlled poll. Following the forged referendum, the Polish economy started to become nationalized.

In Hungary, when the Soviets installed a communist government, Mátyás Rákosi, who described himself as "Stalin's best Hungarian disciple" and "Stalin's best pupil", took power. Rákosi employed "salami tactics", slicing up these enemies like pieces of salami, to battle the initial postwar political majority ready to establish a democracy. Rákosi, employed Stalinist political and economic programs, and was dubbed the "bald murderer" for establishing one of the harshest dictatorships in Europe. Approximately 350,000 Hungarian officials and intellectuals were purged from 1948 to 1956. The Soviet military commander in Sofia assumed supreme authority, and the communists whom he instructed, including Kimon Georgiev, took full control of domestic politics. and which were now, increasingly, cut off from their traditional markets and suppliers in Western Europe. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland had remained interested in Marshall aid despite the requirements for a convertible currency and market economies. In July 1947, Stalin ordered these communist-dominated governments to pull out of the Paris Conference on the European Recovery Programme. This has been described as "the moment of truth" in the post-World War II division of Europe.

North Korea

Contrary to America's policy which restrained armament (limited equipment was provided for infantry and police forces) to South Korea, Stalin extensively armed Kim Il Sung's North Korean army and air forces with military equipment (to include T-34/85 tanks) and "advisors" far in excess of those required for defensive purposes) in order to facilitate Kim's (a former Soviet Officer) aim of conquering the rest of the Korean peninsula.

The North Korean Army struck in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, 25 June 1950, crossing the 38th parallel behind a firestorm of artillery, beginning their invasion of South Korea. During the Korean War, Soviet pilots flew Soviet aircraft from Chinese bases against United Nations aircraft defending South Korea. Post-Cold war research in Soviet Archives has revealed that the Korean War was begun by Kim Il-sung with the express permission of Stalin, though this is disputed by North Korea.

Israel

Stalin originally supported the creation of Israel in 1948. The USSR was one of the first nations to recognize the new country. Golda Meir came to Moscow as the first Israeli Ambassador to the USSR that year. However, after providing war materiel for Israel through Czechoslovakia, he later changed his mind and came out against Israel.

Falsifiers of History

In 1948, Stalin personally edited and rewrote by hand sections of the cold war book Falsifiers of History. Falsifiers was published in response to the documents made public in Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of The German Foreign Office, which included the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and other secret German-Soviet relations documents. Falsifiers originally appeared as a series of articles in Pravda in February 1948,

The book did not attempt to directly counter or deal with the documents published in Nazi-Soviet Relations and rather, focused upon Western culpability for the outbreak of war in 1939. The book also included the claim that, during the Pact's operation, Stalin rejected Hitler's offer to share in a division of the world, without mentioning the Soviet offers to join the Axis. Historical studies, official accounts, memoirs and textbooks published in the Soviet Union used that depiction of events until the Soviet Union's dissolution. The prevailing opinion of many scholars outside the Soviet Union is that Stalin intended to use the resulting doctors' trial to launch a massive party purge. The plot is also viewed by many historians as an antisemitic provocation. and the secret execution of thirteen members on Stalin's orders in the Night of the Murdered Poets.

Thereafter, in a December Politburo session, Stalin announced that "Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the United States (there you can become rich, bourgeois, etc.). They think they're indebted to the Americans. Among doctors, there are many Jewish nationalists." To mobilize the Soviet people for his campaign, Stalin ordered TASS and Pravda to issue stories along with Stalin's alleged uncovering of a "Doctors Plot" to assassinate top Soviet leaders, including Stalin, in order to set the stage for show trials.

The next month, Pravda published stories with text regarding the purported "Jewish bourgeois-nationalist" plotters. Kruschev wrote that Stalin hinted him to incite anti-Semitism in the Ukraine, telling him that "the good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews." Stalin also ordered falsely accused physicians to be tortured "to death". Regarding the origins of the plot, people who knew Stalin, such as Kruschev, suggest that Stalin had long harbored negative sentiments toward Jews, and anti-Semitic trends in the Kremlin's policies were further fueled by the exile of Leon Trotsky. In 1946, Stalin allegedly said privately that "every Jew is a potential spy." At the end of January 1953, Stalin's personal physician Miron Vovsi (cousin of Solomon Mikhoels, who was assassinated in 1948 at the orders of Stalin) using a "Deportation Commission" that would purportedly act to save Soviet Jews from an engraged Soviet population after the Doctors Plot trials. Others argue that any charge of an alleged mass deportation lacks specific documentary evidence. and had told Politburo members "You are blind like young kittens. What will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies." Stalin arrived at his Kuntsevo residence some 15 km west of Moscow centre with interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev where he retired to his bedroom to sleep. At dawn, Stalin did not emerge from his room, having probably suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body.

Although his guards thought that it was odd for him not to rise at his usual time, they were under strict orders not to disturb him and left him alone the entire day. At around 10 p.m. he was discovered by Peter Lozgachev, the Deputy Commandant of Kuntsevo, who entered his bedroom to check up on him and recalled a horrifying scene of Stalin lying on the floor of his room wearing pyjama bottoms and an undershirt with his clothes soaked in stale urine. A frightened Lozgachev asked Stalin what happened to him, but all he could get out of the Generalissimo was unintelligible responses that sounded like "Dzhh." Lozgachev frantically called a few party officials asking them to send good doctors. Lavrentiy Beria was informed and arrived a few hours afterwards, and the doctors only arrived in the early morning of 2 March in which they changed his bedclothes and tended to him. The bedridden Stalin died four days later, on 5 March 1953,

Later analysis of death

In 2003, a joint group of Russian and American historians announced their view that Stalin ingested warfarin, a powerful rat poison that inhibits coagulation of the blood and which predisposes the victim to hemorrhagic stroke (cerebral hemorrhage). Since it is flavorless, warfarin is a plausible weapon of murder. The facts surrounding Stalin's death will probably never be known with certainty.

His demise arrived at a convenient time for Lavrenty Beria and others, who feared being swept away in yet another purge. It is believed that Stalin felt Beria's power was too great and threatened his own. According to Molotov's memoirs, Beria claimed to have poisoned Stalin, saying, "I took him out." Whether Beria or anyone else was directly responsible for Stalin's death, it is true that the Politburo did not summon medical attention for Stalin for more than a day after he was found.

Reaction by successors

is home to a monument of Stalin, originally set up in Vilnius.]] until 2010 when it was demolished and moved to the Museum of Soviet Occupation.]] The harshness with which Soviet affairs were conducted during Stalin's rule was subsequently repudiated by his successors in the Communist Party leadership, most notably by Nikita Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalinism in February 1956. In his "Secret Speech", On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, delivered to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his cult of personality, and his regime for "violation of Leninist norms of legality".

Views on Stalin in Russian Federation

Results of a controversial poll taken in 2006 stated that over 35% of Russians would vote for Stalin if he were still alive. Fewer than a third of all Russians regarded Stalin as a murderous tyrant; however, a Russian court in 2009, ruling on a suit by Stalin's grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, against the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, ruled that referring to Stalin as a "bloodthirsty cannibal" was not libel. In a July 2007 poll 54% of the Russian youth agreed that Stalin did more good than bad while 46% (of them) disagreed that Stalin was a cruel tyrant. Half of the respondents, aged from 16 to 19, agreed Stalin was a wise leader.

In December 2008 Stalin was voted third in the nationwide television project Name of Russia (narrowly behind 13th century prince Alexander Nevsky and Pyotr Stolypin, one of Nicholas II's prime ministers), leading to accusations from Communist Party of the Russian Federation that the poll had been rigged in order to prevent him or Lenin being given first place.

On 3 July 2009, Russia's delegates walked out of an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe session to demonstrate their objections to a resolution for a remembrance day for the victims of both Nazism and Stalinism.

In a Kremlin video blog posted on 29 October 2009, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev denounced the efforts of people seeking to rehabilitate Stalin's image. He said the mass extermination during the Stalin era cannot be justified.

Personal life

Origin of name, nicknames and pseudonyms

Stalin's original Georgian is transliterated as "Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili" (Georgian: იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი). The Russian transliteration of his name (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили) is in turn transliterated to English as "Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili". Like other Bolsheviks, he became commonly known by one of his revolutionary noms de guerre, of which "Stalin" was only the last. Prior nicknames included "Koba", "Soselo", "Ivanov" and many others.

Stalin is believed to have started using the name "K. Stalin" sometime in 1912 as a pen name.

During Stalin's reign his nicknames included:

"Uncle Joe", by western media, during and after World War II. "Kremlin Highlander" (), in reference his Caucasus Mountains origin, notably by Osip Mandelstam in his Stalin Epigram. "Little Father of the Peoples" or "Papa Stalin". A common nickname in the USSR during his time in power, as he was portrayed as the paternal figure of the Revolution.

Vozhd' (, "the Chieftain"), a term from pre-Tsarist times.

Appearance

While photographs and portraits portray Stalin as physically massive and majestic (he had several painters shot who did not depict him "right"), (President Harry S. Truman, who stood only five feet nine inches himself, described Stalin as "a little squirt".) His mustached face was pock-marked from small-pox during childhood. After a carriage accident in his youth, his left arm was shortened and stiffened at the elbow, while his right hand was thinner than his left and frequently hidden. Yakov served in the Red Army during World War II and was captured by the Germans. They offered to exchange him for Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered after Stalingrad, but Stalin turned the offer down, stating "You have in your hands not only my son Yakov but millions of my sons. Either you free them all or my son will share their fate." Afterwards, Yakov is said to have committed suicide, running into an electric fence in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was being held. Yakov had a son Yevgeny, who is recently noted for defending his grandfather's legacy in Russian courts.

Stalin had a son, Vasiliy, and a daughter, Svetlana, with his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She died in 1932, officially of illness. She may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly political". According to A&E; Biography, there is also a belief among some Russians that Stalin himself murdered his wife after the quarrel, which apparently took place at a dinner in which Stalin tauntingly flicked cigarettes across the table at her. Historians also claim her death ultimately "severed his link from reality."

Vasiliy rose through the ranks of the Soviet air force, officially dying of alcoholism in 1962; however, this is still in question. He distinguished himself in World War II as a capable airman. Svetlana emigrated to the United States in 1967. Stalin may have married a third wife, Rosa Kaganovich, the sister of Lazar Kaganovich. In March 2001 Russian Independent Television NTV interviewed a previously unknown grandson living in Novokuznetsk, Yuri Davydov, who stated that his father had told him of his lineage, but, was told to keep quiet because of the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality.

Beside his suite in the Kremlin, Stalin had numerous domiciles. In 1919 he started with a country house near Usovo, he added dachas at Zuvalova and Kuntsevo (Blizhny dacha built by Miron Merzhanov). Before WWII he added the Lipki estate and Semyonovskaya, and had at least four dachas in the south by 1937, including one near Sochi. A luxury villa near Gagri was given to him by Beria. In Abkhazia he maintained a mountain retreat. After the war he added dachas at Novy Alon, near Sukhumi, in the Valdai Hills, and at Lake Mitsa. Another estate was near Zelyony Myss on the Black Sea. All these dachas, estates, and palaces were staffed, well furnished and equipped, kept safe by security forces, and were mainly used privately, rarely for diplomatic purposes. Between places Stalin would travel by car or train, never by air; he flew only once when attending the 1943 Tehran conference.

Habits

Stalin enjoyed heavy drinking, but could keep it under control. He would also often force those around him to join in the drinking. He would often sleep until evening in his dacha, and after waking up summon high-ranking Soviet politicians to watch foreign movies with him in the Kremlin movie theater. One story reports that while he studied at a seminary, he became a closet atheist. However, this story fails on several obvious accounts, including Stalin's remaining religious, even pious, for some years longer. One account states that Stalin's reversal on bans against the church during World War II followed a sign that he believed he received from heaven.

Historian Edvard Radzinsky used recently discovered secret archives and noted a story that changed Stalin's attitude toward religion. Stalin's greater tolerance for religion after 1943 was limited, and persecutions resumed at the end of the war, although on a lesser scale than had been existent in the 1930s. For these reasons it is unlikely that Stalin had changed his atheistic rejection of religion during this last portion of his lifetime.

Hypotheses, rumors and misconceptions about Stalin

There are conflicting accounts of Stalin's birth, who listed his birth year in various documents as being in 1878 before coming to power in 1922. The phrase "death of one man is a tragedy, death of a million is a statistic", sometimes attributed to Stalin, was made by the German writer and pacifist Erich Maria Remarque. In addition, hypotheses and popular rumors exist about Stalin's real father. Some Bolsheviks and others have accused Stalin of being an agent for the Okhrana.

Works

"Anarchism or Socialism?," 1907

"Marxism and the National Question," 1913

"The Principles of Leninism," 1924

"Trotskyism or Leninism?," 1924

"Dialectical and Historical Materialism," 1938

"The Questions of Leninism," 1946

"Marxism and Problems of Linguistics," 1950

"Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.," 1952

Works. Volume 1–13: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1950s/"Volume 14": Red Star Press, London 1978

See also

;Index of Soviet Union-related articles

Stalinism

Neo-Stalinism

Stalin Society

Anti-Stalinist left

De-Stalinization

Stalinist architecture

Stalin Peace Prize

Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori

Stalin Monument in Budapest

Stalin Monument (Prague)

List of places named after Joseph Stalin

Stalin's antisemitism

Stalin Bloc — For the USSR

Yanks for Stalin

References

Notes

Bibliography

Further reading

Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny. Harpercollins, 1983 (ISBN 0060390271)

Brent, Jonathan. Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia. Atlas & Co., 2008 (ISBN 0977743330) Introduction online

Brent, Jonathan; Naumov, Vladimir Pavlovich. Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953. New York: HarperCollins, 2003 (ISBN 0-06-019524-X); as Stalin's Last Crime: The Doctor's Plot. London: John Murray, 2004 (ISBN 0-7195-6508-1).

Broekmeyer, Marius. Stalin, the Russians, and Their War, 1941–1945. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004 (ISBN 0-299-19590-2).

Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. London: HarperCollins, 1991 (ISBN 0002154943).

Boterbloem, Kees. Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945–1953. Montreal, Quebec; Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999 (ISBN 0-7735-1811-8).

Robert Conquest. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 (ISBN 0-19-507132-8).

Robert Conquest. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986 (ISBN 0-19-505180-7).

Davies, Sarah; Harris, James R. Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 (ISBN 0-521-85104-1).

Isaac Deutscher. Stalin: A Political Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967 (ISBN 0-19-500273-3); London: Penguin Books, 1990 (ISBN 0140135049).

Milovan Đilas. Conversations With Stalin. Harcourt Trade Publishers New York, 1962 (ISBN 0151225907)

Orlando Figes. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. Metropolitan Books, 2007 (ISBN 0805074619)

Gellately, Robert. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf, August 2007 (ISBN 1400040051).

Gill, Graeme. Stalinism (2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998 (ISBN 0-312-17764-X).

Jonge, Alex de. Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union. New York: William Morrow, 1986 (ISBN 0-688-04730-0); 1987 (ISBN 0688072917).

Keep, John L.H.; Litvin, Alter L. Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the Millennium (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions). New York: Routledge, 2004 (ISBN 0-415-35108-1)

Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Stalin. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2006 (ISBN 0-582-78479-4).

Kuromiya, Hiroaki. The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. Yale University Press, 24 December 2007. ISBN 0300123892

The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, edited by Apor, Balázs; Jan C. Behrends, Polly Jones and E.A. Rees. Houndmills, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 (ISBN 1-4039-3443-6).

The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions), edited by Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin. New York: Routledge, 2004 (ISBN 0-7146-5493-0).

Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner, 1990 (ISBN 0684192039).

Mace, James E. "The Man-Made Famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine", Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933: A Memorial Exhibition, edited by Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko. Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986 (ISBN 0-920862-43-8), pp. 1–14.

Mawdsley, Evan. The Stalin Years: The Soviet Union, 1929–53. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003 (ISBN 0-7190-6377-9).

McDermott, Kevin. Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War (European History in Perspective). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 (ISBN 0-333-71121-1).

McLoughlin, Barry and McDermott, Kevin (eds). Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. ISBN 1403901198

Roy Medvedev; Zhores Medvedev The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death, and Legacy. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003 (ISBN 1-86064-768-5)

Simon Sebag Montefiore. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004 (ISBN 1-4000-4230-5); New York: Vintage, 2005 (ISBN 1400076781).

Simon Sebag Montefiore. Young Stalin. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007 (ISBN 9780297850687). An excerpt.

Murphy, David E. What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa. Yale University Press, 2005 (ISBN 0300107803).

Norman Naimark Stalin's Genocides (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity). Princeton University Press, 2010. ISBN 0691147841

Richard Overy. Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. Allen Lane, 2004 (ISBN 0-393-32797-3).

Parrish, Michael. The Lesser Terror: Soviet state security, 1939–1953. Praeger Press, 1996 (ISBN 0275951138)

Richard Pipes. Communism: A History. Modern Library Chronicles, 2001 (ISBN 0679640509)

Priestland, David. Stalin and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia. New York: Oxford University Press (U.S.), 2006 (ISBN 0-19-924513-4).

Edvard Radzinsky. Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives. Doubleday, 1996 (ISBN 0-385-47397-4). Chapter 1.

Donald Rayfield. Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him. New York: Random House, 2004 (ISBN 0-375-50632-2).

Redefining Stalinism (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions), edited by Harold Shukman. New York: Routledge, 2003 (ISBN 0-7146-5415-9).

Ree, Erik van. The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism. London; New York: Routledge Courzon, 2002 (ISBN 0-7007-1749-8).

Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. New Heaven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2006 (ISBN 0300112041).

Rosefielde, Steven. Red Holocaust. Routledge, 2009. (ISBN 0415777577)

Rudolph Rummel Death By Government. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994 (ISBN 1560001453).

Rudolph Rummel Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990 (ISBN 0887383335)

Sandag, Shagdariin; Kendall, Harry H.; Wakeman, Frederic E. Poisoned Arrows: The Stalin-Choibalsan Mongolian Massacres, 1921–1941. Westview Press (October 1999). ISBN 0813337100

Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005 (ISBN 0-674-01697-1).

Timothy Snyder. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010. ISBN 0465002390

Boris Souvarine. Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2005 (ISBN 1-4191-1307-0)Online.

Stalin's Terror Revisited. Edited by Melanie Ilic and Stephen G. Wheatcroft. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 (ISBN 1-4039-4705-8).

Robert C. Tucker Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality. (W.W. Norton, 1973) online edition

Robert C. Tucker Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990 (ISBN 0-393-02881-X).

Tzouliadis, Tim. The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia. The Penguin Press, 2008 (ISBN 1594201684)

Ulam, Adam Bruno. Stalin: The Man and His Era. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989 (ISBN 0-8070-7005-X)

Vaksberg, Arkady. The Murder of Maxim Gorky. A Secret Execution. (Enigma Books: New York, 2007. ISBN 978-1-929631-62-9.)

Dmitri Volkogonov (Author); Shukman, Harold (Editor, Translator). Autopsy for an Empire: the Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime. Free Press, 1998 (ISBN 0684834200)

Ward, Chris. The Stalinist Dictatorship. London: Arnold Publishers, 1998 (ISBN 0-340-70640-6).

Ward, Chris. "Stalin Through Seventeenth-Century Eyes", Journal of European Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2. (2006), pp. 181–200.

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev (Author); Austin, Anthony (Translator). A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Yale University Press, 2002 (ISBN 0300087608)

External links

Stalin Library (with all 13 volumes of Stalin's works and "volume 14")

Library of Congress: Revelations from the Russian Archives

Electronic archive of Stalin's letters and presentations

Sovetika.ru A site about the Soviet era

"Another view of Stalin" by Ludo Martens, Progressive Labor Party website

"The Revolution Betrayed" by Leon Trotsky

Stalin and the 'Cult of Personality'

Stalin Biography from Spartacus Educational

A List of Key Documentary Material on Stalin

"Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform, Part One" and "Part Two" by Grover Furr.

Stalinka: The Digital Library of Staliniana

Modern History Sourcebook: Stalin's Reply to Churchill, 1946

Modern History Sourcebook: Nikita S. Khrushchev: The Secret Speech — On the Cult of Personality, 1956

The political economy of Stalinism: evidence from the Soviet secret archives / Paul R. Gregory

"Demographic catastrophes of the 20th century", chapter from Demographic Modernization in Russia 1900–2000, ed. A. G. Vishnevsky, 2006 ISBN 5983790420 – estimates of the human cost of Stalin's rule

Annotated bibliography for Joseph Stalin from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

"Secret documents reveal Stalin was poisoned" study by the Russian paper Pravda of events behind possible death by poisoning

Over 2,000 original German WWII soldier photographs from the Eastern Front

Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Current Intelligence. Death of Stalin, 16 July 1953.

How Many Did Stalin Really Murder? by Professor R.J. Rummel

Death of the Butcher by Hoover fellow Arnold Beichman

A secret revealed: Stalin's police killed Americans (1997 Associated Press article)

Stalin giving a speech in Russian with English subtitles

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986)

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Name	Adolf Hitler
Nationality	Austrian citizen until 7 April 1925German citizen after 1932
Caption	Hitler in 1937
Birth date	20 April 1889
Birth place	Braunau am Inn, Austria–Hungary
Death date	April 30, 1945
Death place	Berlin, Germany
Death cause	Suicide
Party	National Socialist German Workers' Party (1921–1945)
Otherparty	German Workers' Party (1920–1921)
Religion	See Adolf Hitler's religious views
Spouse	Eva Braun(29–30 April 1945)
Occupation	Politician, soldier, artist, writer
Order	Führer of Germany
Term start	2 August 1934
Term end	30 April 1945
Chancellor	Himself
Predecessor	Paul von Hindenburg(as President)
Successor	Karl Dönitz(as President)
Order2	Chancellor of Germany
Term start2	30 January 1933
Term end2	30 April 1945
President2	Paul von HindenburgHimself (Führer)
Deputy2	Franz von PapenVacant
Predecessor2	Kurt von Schleicher
Successor2	Joseph Goebbels
Signature	Hitler Signature2.svg
Allegiance
Branch	Reichsheer
Unit	16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment
Serviceyears	1914–1918
Rank	Gefreiter
Battles	World War I
Awards	Iron Cross First and Second ClassWound Badge

Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (, abbreviated NSDAP), commonly known as the Nazi Party. He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and served as head of state as Führer und Reichskanzler from 1934 to 1945.

A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the precursor of the Nazi Party (DAP) in 1919, and became leader of NSDAP in 1921. He attempted a failed coup d'etat known as the Beer Hall Putsch, which occurred at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich on November 8–9, 1923. Hitler was imprisoned for one year due to the failed coup, and wrote his memoir, "My Struggle" (in German Mein Kampf), while imprisoned. After his release on December 20, 1924, he gained support by promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and propaganda. He was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, and transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism.

Hitler ultimately wanted to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe. To achieve this, he pursued a foreign policy with the declared goal of seizing Lebensraum ("living space") for the Aryan people; directing the resources of the state towards this goal. This included the rearmament of Germany, which culminated in 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. In response, the United Kingdom and France declared war against Germany, leading to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

Within three years, German forces and their European allies had occupied most of Europe, and most of Northern Africa, and the Japanese forces had occupied parts of East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. However, with the reversal of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Allies gained the upper hand from 1942 onwards. By 1944, Allied armies had invaded German-held Europe from all sides. Nazi forces engaged in numerous violent acts during the war, including the systematic murder of as many as 17 million civilians, including an estimated six million Jews targeted in the Holocaust and between 500,000 and 1,500,000 Roma, added to the Poles, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents.

In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress Eva Braun and, to avoid capture by Soviet forces, the two committed suicide less than two days later on 30 April 1945.

Adolf is sometimes refered to as an Antichrist due to the effects he and the Nazi Party had on society and for causing World War II in general. While Hitler is most remembered for his central role in World War II and the Holocaust, his government left behind other legacies as well, including the Volkswagen, the Autobahn, jet aircraft and rocket technology.

Early years

Ancestry

Hitler's father, Alois Hitler, was an illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, so his paternity was not listed on his birth certificate; he bore his mother's surname. In 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Maria and in 1876 Alois testified before a notary and three witnesses that Johann was his father. Despite this testimony, Alois' paternity has been the subject of controversy. After receiving a "blackmail letter" from Hitler's nephew William Patrick Hitler threatening to reveal embarrassing information about Hitler's family tree, Nazi Party lawyer Hans Frank investigated, and, in his memoirs, claimed to have uncovered letters revealing that Alois' mother was employed as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Graz and that the family's 19-year-old son, Leopold Frankenberger, fathered Alois. Frank's claims were widely believed in the 1950s, but by the 1990s, were generally doubted by historians. Ian Kershaw dismissed the Frankenberger story as a "smear" by Hitler's enemies, noting that all Jews had been expelled from Graz in the 15th century and were not allowed to return until well after Alois was born. in Passau, Germany, where Hitler would acquire Lower Bavarian rather than Austrian as his lifelong native dialect. In 1894, the family relocated to Leonding near Linz, then in June 1895, Alois retired to a small landholding at Hafeld near Lambach, where he tried his hand at farming and beekeeping. During this time, the young Hitler attended school in nearby Fischlham. As a child, he played "Cowboys and Indians" and, by his own account, became fixated on war after finding a picture book about the Franco-Prussian War among his father's belongings.

His father's efforts at Hafeld ended in failure, and the family relocated to Lambach in 1897. Hitler attended a Catholic school located in an 11th-century Benedictine cloister, where the walls were engraved in a number of places with crests containing the symbol of the swastika. It was in Lambach that the eight-year-old Hitler sang in the church choir, took singing lessons, and even entertained the fantasy of one day becoming a priest. In 1898, the family returned permanently to Leonding.

His younger brother Edmund died of measles on 2 February 1900, causing permanent changes in Hitler. He went from a confident, outgoing boy who excelled in school, to a morose, detached, sullen boy who constantly battled his father and his teachers.

Hitler was attached to his mother, though he had a troubled relationship with his father, who frequently beat him, especially in the years after Alois' retirement and disappointing farming efforts. Alois wanted his son to follow in his footsteps as an Austrian customs official, and this became a huge source of conflict between them. Hitler was expelled, never to return to school again.

At age 15, Hitler took part in his First Holy Communion on Whitsunday, 22 May 1904, at the Linz Cathedral. His sponsor was Emanuel Lugert, a friend of his late father.

Early adulthood in Vienna and Munich

From 1905 on, Hitler lived a bohemian life in Vienna on an orphan's pension and support from his mother. He was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1907–1908), citing "unfitness for painting", and was told his abilities lay instead in the field of architecture. Following the school rector's recommendation, he too became convinced this was his path to pursue, yet he lacked the proper academic preparation for architecture school:

In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become an architect. To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the studies I had neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely needed. One could not attend the Academy's architectural school without having attended the building school at the Technic, and the latter required a high-school degree. I had none of all this. The fulfillment of my artistic dream seemed physically impossible.

On 21 December 1907, Hitler's mother died of breast cancer at age 47. Ordered by a court in Linz, Hitler gave his share of the orphans' benefits to his sister Paula. When he was 21, he inherited money from an aunt. He struggled as a painter in Vienna, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists. After being rejected a second time by the Academy of Arts, Hitler ran out of money. In 1909, he lived in a shelter for the homeless. By 1910, he had settled into a house for poor working men on Meldemannstraße. Another resident of the house, Reinhold Hanisch, sold Hitler's paintings until the two men had a bitter falling-out.

Hitler said he first became an anti-Semite in Vienna,

Loosely translated it reads: "For peace, freedom // and democracy // never again fascism // millions of dead remind [us]"

Some people have referred to Hitler's legacy in neutral or favourable terms. Former Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat spoke of his 'admiration' of Hitler in 1953, when he was a young man, though it is possible he was speaking in the context of a rebellion against the British Empire. Louis Farrakhan has referred to him as a "very great man". Bal Thackeray, leader of the right-wing Hindu Shiv Sena party in the Indian state of the Maharashtra, declared in 1995 that he was an admirer of Hitler. Friedrich Meinecke, the German historian, said of Hitler's life that "it is one of the great examples of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life".

Religious views

Hitler was raised by Roman Catholic parents, but after he left home, he never attended Mass or received the sacraments. Hitler favoured aspects of Protestantism if they were more suitable to his own objectives. At the same time, he adopted some elements of the Catholic Church's hierarchical organization, liturgy and phraseology in his politics. After he had moved to Germany, where the Catholic and the Protestant church are largely financed through a church tax collected by the state, Hitler never "actually left his church or refused to pay church taxes. In a nominal sense therefore," the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall (whose views on Christianity and Nazism are admittedly outside the consensus) states, Hitler "can be classified as Catholic." Yet, as Steigmann-Gall has also pointed out in the debate about religion in Nazi Germany: "Nominal church membership is a very unreliable gauge of actual piety in this context."

In public, Hitler often praised Christian heritage, German Christian culture, and professed a belief in an Aryan Jesus Christ, a Jesus who fought against the Jews. In his speeches and publications Hitler spoke of his interpretation of Christianity as a central motivation for his antisemitism, stating that "As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice." His private statements, as reported by his intimates, show Hitler as critical of traditional Christianity, considering it a religion fit only for slaves; he admired the power of Rome but had severe hostility towards its teaching. Here Hitler's attack on Catholicism "resonated Streicher's contention that the Catholic establishment was allying itself with the Jews." In light of these private statements, for John S. Conway and many other historians it is beyond doubt that Hitler held a "fundamental antagonism" towards the Christian churches. The various accounts of Hitler's private statements vary strongly in their reliability; most importantly, Hermann Rauschning's Hitler speaks is considered by most historians to be an invention.

In the political relations with the churches in Germany however, Hitler readily adopted a strategy "that suited his immediate political purposes". The leader of the Hitler Youth stated "the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement" from the start, but "considerations of expedience made it impossible" publicly to express this extreme position. a belief system purged of what he objected to in orthodox Christianity, and featuring added racist elements. By 1940 however, it was public knowledge that Hitler had abandoned advocating for Germans even the syncretist idea of a positive Christianity. Hitler maintained that the "terrorism in religion is, to put it briefly, of a Jewish dogma, which Christianity has universalized and whose effect is to sow trouble and confusion in men's minds."

Hitler once stated, "We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany."

Attitude to occultism

Some writers believe that, in contrast to some Nazi ideologues, Hitler did not adhere to esoteric ideas, occultism, or Ariosophy. Nevertheless, other writers believe the young Hitler was strongly influenced, particularly in his racial views, by an abundance of occult works on the mystical superiority of the Germans, such as the occult and anti-semitic magazine Ostara, and give credence to the claim of its publisher Lanz von Liebenfels that Hitler visited Liebenfels in 1909 and praised his work. The historians are still divided on the question of the reliability of Lanz' claim of a contact with Hitler. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke considers his account reliable, Brigitte Hamann leaves the question open and Ian Kershaw, although questioning to what degree he was influence by it, notes that, "Most likely, Hitler did read Ostara, along with other racist pulp which was prominent on Vienna newspaper stands.

Health

Hitler's health has long been the subject of debate. He has variously been said to have had irritable bowel syndrome, skin lesions, irregular heartbeat, Parkinson's disease, He had problems with his teeth and his personal dentist Hugo Blaschke stated that he fitted a large dental bridge to his upper jaw in 1933 and that on 10 November 1944 he carried out surgery to cut off part of the left rear section of the bridge that was causing an infection of his gums. He was also suffering from a sinus infection.

After the early 1930s, Hitler generally followed a vegetarian diet, although he ate meat on occasion. There are reports of him disgusting his guests by giving them graphic accounts of the slaughter of animals in an effort to make them shun meat. A fear of cancer (from which his mother died) is the most widely cited reason, though it is also asserted that Hitler, an antivivisectionist, had a profound concern for animals. Martin Bormann had a greenhouse constructed for him near the Berghof (near Berchtesgaden) to ensure a steady supply of fresh fruit and vegetables for Hitler throughout the war.

Hitler was a non-smoker and promoted aggressive anti-smoking campaigns throughout Germany. (See Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany.) Hitler "despised" alcohol.

Syphilis

Hitler's tremors and irregular heartbeat during the last years of his life could have been symptoms of tertiary (late stage) syphilis, which would mean he had a syphilis infection for many years. Along with another doctor, Theodor Morell diagnosed the symptoms as such by early 1945 in a joint report to SS head Heinrich Himmler. Historians have speculated he may have caught the affliction from a German prostitute at a time when the disease was not yet treatable by modern antibiotics, which would also explain his avoidance of normal sexual relations with women. However, syphilis had become curable in 1910 with Dr. Paul Ehrlich's introduction of the drug Salvarsan.

Since the 1870s, however, it was a common rhetorical practice on the völkisch right to associate Jews with diseases such as syphilis. Historian Robert Waite claims Hitler tested negative on a Wassermann test as late as 1939, which does not prove that he did not have the disease, because the Wassermann test was prone to false-negative results. Regardless of whether he actually had syphilis or not, Hitler lived in constant fear of the disease, and took treatment for it no matter what his doctors told him. journalist and Académie française member Joseph Kessel wrote that in the winter of 1942, Kersten heard of Hitler's medical condition. Consulted by his patient, Himmler, as to whether he could "assist a man who suffers from severe headaches, dizziness and insomnia," Kersten was shown a top-secret 26-page report. It detailed how Hitler had contracted syphilis in his youth and was treated for it at a hospital in Pasewalk, Germany. However, in 1937, symptoms re-appeared, showing that the disease was still active, and by the start of 1942, signs were evident that progressive syphilitic paralysis (Tabes dorsalis) was occurring. Himmler advised Kersten that Morell (who in the 1930s claimed to be a specialist venereologist) was in charge of Hitler's treatment, and that it was a state secret. The book also relates how Kersten learned from Himmler's secretary, Rudolf Brandt, that at that time, probably the only other people privy to the report's information were Nazi Party chairman Martin Bormann and Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe.

Monorchism

It has been alleged that Hitler had monorchism, the medical condition of having only one testicle. Hitler's personal doctor, Johan Jambor, supposedly described the dictator's condition to a priest who later wrote down what he had been told in a document which was uncovered in 2008, 23 years after the doctor's death.

Soviet doctor Lev Bezymensky, allegedly involved in the Soviet autopsy, stated in a 1967 book that Hitler's left testicle was missing. Bezymensky later admitted that the claim was falsified. Hitler was routinely examined by many doctors throughout his childhood, military service and later political career, and no clinical mention of any such condition has ever been discovered. Records do show he was wounded in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme, and some sources do describe his injury as a wound to the groin.

Parkinson's disease

It has also been speculated Hitler had Parkinson's disease. Newsreels of Hitler show he had tremors in his hand and a shuffling walk (also a symptom of tertiary syphilis, see above) which began before the war and continued to worsen until the end of his life. Morell treated Hitler with a drug agent that was commonly used in 1945, although Morell is viewed as an unreliable doctor by most historians and any diagnoses he may have made are subject to doubt.

A more reliable doctor, Ernst-Günther Schenck, who worked at an emergency casualty station in the Reich Chancellery during April 1945, also claimed Hitler might have Parkinson's disease. However, Schenck only saw Hitler briefly on two occasions and, by his own admission, was extremely exhausted and dazed during these meetings (at the time, he had been in surgery for numerous days without much sleep). Also, some of Schenck's opinions were based on hearsay from Dr. Haase.

Other complaints

From the 1930s he suffered from stomach pains, in 1936 a non-cancerous polyp was removed from his throat and he developed eczema on his legs. He suffered ruptured eardrums as a result of the July 20 plot bomb blast in 1944 and 200 wood splinters had to be removed from his legs, but he was otherwise uninjured. Some doctors dismiss Hitler's ailments as hypochondria, pointing out the apparently drastic decline of Hitler's health as Germany began losing World War II.

Addiction to amphetamine

Hitler began using amphetamine occasionally after 1937 and became addicted to amphetamine after the late summer of 1942. Albert Speer stated he thought this was the most likely cause of the later rigidity of Hitler’s decision making (never allowing military retreats).

Historians' views

In a 1980 article, the German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler dismissed theories that sought to explain Nazi Germany as due to some defect, medical or otherwise in Hitler. In his opinion, besides the problem that such theories about Hitler's medical condition were extremely difficult to prove, they had the effect of personalizing the phenomena of Nazi Germany by attributing everything that happened in the Third Reich to one flawed individual. The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw agreed that it was better to take a broader view of German history by seeking to examine what social forces led to the Third Reich and its policies, as opposed to the "personalized" explanations for the Holocaust and World War II. All three women attempted suicide (two succeeded), a fact that has led to speculation that Hitler may have had sexual fetishes, such as urolagnia (aroused by urine or urination), as was claimed by Otto Strasser, a political opponent of Hitler. Reiter, the only one to survive the Nazi regime, denied this. Some theorists have claimed that Hitler had a relationship with British fascist Unity Mitford. Lothar Machtan argues in The Hidden Hitler that Hitler was homosexual.

Family

Paula Hitler, the last living member of Adolf Hitler's immediate family, died in 1960.

The most prominent and longest-living direct descendant of Adolf Hitler's father, Alois, was Adolf's nephew William Patrick Hitler. With his wife Phyllis, he eventually moved to Long Island, New York, changed his last name, and had four sons. None of William Hitler's children have had any children of their own.

Over the years, various investigative reporters have attempted to track down other distant relatives of the Führer. Many are now alleged to be living inconspicuous lives and have long since changed their last name.

Klara Hitler, mother

Alois Hitler, father

Alois Hitler, Jr., half-brother

Angela Hitler Raubal, half-sister

Bridget Dowling, sister-in-law

Eva Braun, mistress and then wife

Geli Raubal, niece

Gretl Braun, sister-in-law through Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun

Heinz Hitler, nephew

Hermann Fegelein, brother-in-law through Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun

Ilse Braun, sister-in-law through Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun

Johann Georg Hiedler, presumed grandfather

Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, maternal great-grandfather, presumed great uncle and possibly Hitler's true paternal grandfather

Leo Raubal Jr, nephew

Maria Schicklgruber, grandmother

Paula Hitler, sister

William Patrick Hitler, nephew

Hitler in media

Oratory and rallies

Hitler was a gifted orator who captivated many with his beating of the lectern and growling, emotional speech. He honed his skills by giving speeches to soldiers during 1919 and 1920. He became adept at telling people what they wanted to hear (the stab-in-the-back, the Jewish-Marxist plot to conquer the world, and the betrayal of Germany in the Versailles treaty) and identifying a scapegoat for their plight. Over time, Hitler perfected his delivery by rehearsing in front of mirrors and carefully choreographing his display of emotions. He was allegedly coached by Erik-Jan Hanussen, a self-styled clairvoyant who focused on hand and arm gestures and who, ironically, had Jewish heritage. Munitions minister and architect Albert Speer, who may have known Hitler as well as anyone, said that Hitler was above all else an actor.

(June 1942)]] Massive Nazi rallies staged by Speer were designed to spark a process of self-persuasion for the participants. By participating in the rallies, by marching, by shouting heil, and by making the stiff armed salute, the participants strengthened their commitment to the Nazi movement. This process can be appreciated by watching Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which presents the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. The camera shoots Hitler from on high and from below, but only twice head-on. These camera angles give Hitler a Christ-like aura. Some of the people in the film are paid actors, but most of the participants are not. Whether the film itself recruited new Nazis out of theatre audiences is unknown. The process of self-persuasion may have affected Hitler. He gave the same speech (though it got smoother and smoother with repetition) hundreds of times first to soldiers and then to audiences in beer halls.

Recorded in private conversation

Hitler visited Finnish Field Marshal Mannerheim on 4 June 1942. During the visit an engineer of the Finnish broadcasting company YLE, Thor Damen, recorded Hitler and Mannerheim in conversation, something which had to be done secretly since Hitler never allowed recordings of him off-guard. Today the recording is the only known recording of Hitler not speaking in an official tone. The recording captures 11½ minutes of the two leaders in private conversation. Hitler speaks in a slightly excited, but still intellectually detached manner during this talk (the speech has been compared to that of the working class). The majority of the recording is a monologue by Hitler. In the recording, Hitler admits to underestimating the Soviet Union's ability to conduct war.

Patria picture disc

Adolf Hitler even released a 7-inch picture disc with one of his speeches. Known as the Patria (Fatherland) picture disc, the obverse bears an image of Hitler giving a speech and has a recording of both a speech by Hitler and also Party Member Hans Hinkel. The reverse bears a hand holding a swastika flag and the Carl Woitschach recording (1933 – Telefunken A 1431) "In Dem Kampf um die Heimat – Faschistenmarsch".

Documentaries during the Third Reich

Hitler appeared in and was involved to varying degrees with a series of films by the pioneering filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl via Universum Film AG (UFA):

Der Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith, 1933).

Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1934), co-produced by Hitler.

(Day of Freedom: Our Armed Forces, 1935).

Olympia (1938).

Hitler was the central figure of the first three films; they focused on the party rallies of the respective years and are considered propaganda films. Hitler also featured prominently in the Olympia film. Whether the latter is a propaganda film or a true documentary is still a subject of controversy, but it nonetheless perpetuated and spread the propagandistic message of the 1936 Olympic Games depicting Nazi Germany as a prosperous and peaceful country. As a prominent politician, Hitler was featured in many newsreels.

Television

Hitler's attendance at various public functions, including the 1936 Olympic Games and Nuremberg Rallies, appeared on television broadcasts made between 1935 and 1939. These events, along with other programming highlighting activity by public officials, were often repeated in public viewing rooms. Samples from a number of surviving television films from Nazi Germany were included in the 1999 documentary Das Fernsehen unter dem Hakenkreuz (Television Under the Swastika).

Documentaries post Third Reich

The World at War (1974): a Thames Television series which contains much information about Hitler and Nazi Germany, including an interview with his secretary, Traudl Junge.

Adolf Hitler's Last Days: from the BBC series "Secrets of World War II" tells the story about Hitler's last days during World War II.

The Nazis: A Warning From History (1997): six-part BBC TV series on how the cultured and educated Germans accepted Hitler and the Nazis up to its downfall. Historical consultant is Ian Kershaw.

Cold War (1998): a CNN series about the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The series begins with World War II footage, including Hitler, and how the Cold War began in earnest after Germany surrendered.

Im toten Winkel – Hitlers Sekretärin (Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary) (2002): an exclusive 90 minute interview with Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary. Made by Austrian Jewish director André Heller shortly before Junge's death from lung cancer, Junge recalls the last days in the Berlin bunker. Clips of the interview were used in Downfall (film).

Undergångens arkitektur (The Architecture of Doom) (1989): documentary about the National Socialist aesthetic as envisioned by Hitler.

Das Fernsehen unter dem Hakenkreuz (Television Under the Swastika) (1999): documentary by Michael Kloft about the domestic use of television in Nazi Germany for propaganda purposes from 1935 to 1944.

Ruins of the Reich (2007): four-part series of the Rise and Fall of Hitler's Reich and its effects, created by Third Reich historian R.J. Adams

Films and series

Fritz Diez depicted Hitler in Ernst Thälmann - Führer seiner Klasse (East Germany, 1955), Die gefrorene Blitze (East Germany, 1967), Já, spravedlnost (Czechoslovakia, 1967), Osvobozhdenie (1970-1, Soviet Union), 17 Moments of Spring (1973, TV production, Soviet Union), Vibor Tzeli (1974, Soviet Union) and Soldaty Svobodee (1977, Soviet Union).

The Death of Adolf Hitler, a British (7 January 1973) made-for-television production, starring Frank Finlay. The movie depicts the last days of Hitler.

(1973): movie depicting the days leading up to Adolf Hitler's death, starring Sir Alec Guinness.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler – Ein Film aus Deutschland () (1977): a seven-hour work in four parts. The director uses documentary clips, photographic backgrounds, puppets, theatrical stages, and other elements.

The Bunker (1981): a U.S. made-for-television movie describing the last days in the Führerbunker covering 17 January 1945 to 2 May 1945. The film stars Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Europa, Europa (1990): based on the true story of a German Jew who joined the Hitler Youth in order to avoid capture. Hitler is portrayed by Ryszard Pietruski.

Fatherland (1994): a hypothetical view of Germany in 1964, had Hitler won World War II, adapted from the novel by former journalist Robert Harris.

The Empty Mirror (1996): a psychodrama which speculates on the events following Hitler (portrayed by Norman Rodway) surviving the fall of Nazi Germany.

Moloch (1999): Hitler portrayed by Leonid Mozgovoy in a fictional drama set at his Berghof Retreat in the Bavarian Alps.

Max (2002): fictional drama depicting a friendship between Jewish art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack) and a young Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) as a failed painter in Vienna.

(2003): two-part TV series about the early years of Adolf Hitler and his rise to power (up to 1933), starring Robert Carlyle.

Der Untergang (Downfall) (2004): German movie about the last days of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, starring Bruno Ganz. This film is partly based on the autobiography of Traudl Junge, a favorite secretary of Hitler's. In 2002, Junge said she felt great guilt for "... liking the greatest criminal ever to have lived."

Valkyrie (2008): Hitler, played by David Bamber, is portrayed as a target of the famous assassination plot by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg.

Plays

Dr Freud Will See You Now Mr Hitler (2008): radio drama by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran presenting an imagined scenario in which Sigmund Freud treats the young Hitler. Toby Jones played Hitler.

See also

Adolf Hitler's directives

Führermuseum

Glossary of Nazi Germany

Glossary of German military terms

List of books by or about Adolf Hitler

List of former Nazi Party members

List of Nazi Party leaders and officials

Poison Kitchen

Footnotes

References

Fischer, Thomas. Soldiers Of the Leibstandarte. J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing, Inc. 2008. ISBN 978-0-921991-91-5.

Joachimsthaler, Anton (1999), The Last Days of Hitler – The Legends – The Evidence – The Truth, Brockhampton Press, ISBN 1-86019-902-X

Linge, Heinz (2008), With Hitler to the End. Frontline Books-Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. ISBN 1-60239-804-6.

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Further reading

Medical books

External links

;Images and videos (The Character portrayed in film and television)

Color Footage of Hitler during WWII

Adolf Hitler: Up Close - slideshow by Life magazine

Download "The Young Hitler I Knew" on archive.org

Did Hitler have only one testicle? from The Straight Dope

OSS document alleging sexual deviancy

History Channel's Episode – High Hitler

;Speeches and publications

A speech from 1932 (text and audiofile), German Museum of History Berlin

Hitler's book Mein Kampf (full English translation)

Adolf Hitler's Private Will, Marriage Certificate and Political Testament, April 1945 (34 pages)

"The Discovery of Hitler's Wills" Office of Strategic Services report on how the testament was found

The Testament of Adolf Hitler the Bormann-Hitler documents (transcripts of conversations in February–2 April 1945)

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