Native name	Союз Советских Социалистических РеспубликSoyuz Sovietskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik
Conventional long name	Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Other names
Common name	Soviet Union
Continent	Eurasia
Status	Federation
Government type	Union socialist soviet republic, single-party communist state
Year start	1922
Year end	1991
Date start	30 December
Date end	26 December
P1	Russian SFSR
Flag p1	Flag RSFSR 1918.svg
P2	Transcaucasian SFSR
Flag p2	Flag of Transcaucasian SFSR.svg
P3	Ukrainian SSR
Flag p3	Flag of the Ukrainian SSR (1927-1937).svg
P4	Byelorussian SSR
Flag p4	Flag of the Byelorussian SSR (1919).svg
S1	Russia
Flag s1	Flag of Russia 1991-1993.svg
S2	Georgia (country)Georgia
Flag s2	Flag of Georgia (1990-2004).svg
S3	Ukraine
Flag s3	Flag of Ukraine.svg
S4	Moldova
Flag s4	Flag of Moldova.svg
S5	Belarus
Flag s5	Flag of Belarus (1991-1995).svg
S6	Armenia
Flag s6	Flag of Armenia.svg
S7	Azerbaijan
Flag s7	Flag of Azerbaijan.svg
S8	Kazakhstan
Flag s8	Flag of Kazakh SSR.svg
S9	Uzbekistan
Flag s9	Flag of Uzbekistan.svg
S10	Turkmenistan
Flag s10	Flag of Turkmen SSR.svg
S11	Kyrgyzstan
Flag s11	Flag of Kyrgyz SSR.svg
S12	Tajikistan
Flag s12	Flag of Tajik SSR.svg
S13	EstoniaEstonia3
Flag s13	Flag of Estonia.svg
S14	LatviaLatvia3
Flag s14	Flag of Latvia.svg
S15	LithuaniaLithuania3
Flag s15	Flag of Lithuania 1989-2004.svg
|image flag	Flag of the Soviet Union.svg
Flag	Flag of the Soviet Union
Image coat	Coat_of_arms_of_the_Soviet_Union.svg
Symbol	State Emblem of the Soviet Union
Symbol type	State Emblem
Image map size	220px
Image map caption	The Soviet Union after World War II
Capital	Moscow
Largest city	Moscow
National motto	Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!(Translit.: Proletarii vsekh stran, soyedinyaytes'!)English: Workers of the world, unite!
National anthem	The Internationale (1922–1944)Hymn of the Soviet Union (1944–1991)
Common languages	Russian, many others
Demonym	Soviet
Religion	State atheism
Currency	Soviet ruble (руб) (SUR)
Currency code	SUR
Leader1	Vladimir Lenin
Leader2	Mikhail Gorbachev
Year leader1	1922–1924 (first)
Year leader2	1985–1991 (last)
Title leader	Leader
Legislature	Congress of Soviets and Central Executive Committee (1922-1937) Supreme Soviet (1937-1989; 1991)Congress of People's Deputies and Supreme Soviet (1989-1991)
Stat year1	1991
Stat area1	22402200
Stat pop1	293047571
Utc offset	+2 to +13
Cctld	.su2
Calling code	7

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, , abbreviated СССР, SSSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union (), was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991. A more informal name also used among its residents was the Union (Soyuz).

The Soviet Union had a single-party political system dominated by the Communist Party until 1990. Although the USSR was nominally a union of Soviet republics (15 in all after 1956) with the capital in Moscow, it was actually a highly centralized state with a planned economy.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought about the downfall of the Russian Empire. Its successor, the Russian Provisional Government, was short-lived. After the Bolsheviks won the ensuing Russian Civil War, the Soviet Union was founded in December 1922 with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Following the death of the first Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, in 1924, Joseph Stalin eventually won a power struggle and led the country through a large-scale industrialization with a command economy and political repression. In World War II, in June 1941, Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, a country with which it had signed a non-aggression pact. After four years of brutal warfare, the Soviet Union emerged victorious as one of the world's two superpowers, the other being the United States.

The Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states engaged in the Cold War, a prolonged global ideological and political struggle against the United States and its Western Bloc allies, which it ultimately lost in the face of economic troubles and both domestic and foreign political unrest. In the late 1980s, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the state with his policies of perestroika and glasnost, but the Soviet Union collapsed and was formally dissolved in December 1991 after the abortive August coup attempt. The Russian Federation assumed its rights and obligations.

Geography, climate and environment

With an area of , the Soviet Union was the world's largest state. Covering a sixth of the Earth's land surface, its size was comparable to that of North America. The European portion accounted for a quarter of the country's area, and was the cultural and economic center. The eastern part in Asia extended to the Pacific Ocean to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and was much less populous. It spanned over east to west across 11 time zones, and almost north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, and mountains.

The Soviet Union had the world's longest border, measuring over , two-thirds of it a coastline of the Arctic Ocean. Across the Bering Strait was the United States. The Soviet Union bordered Afghanistan, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Turkey from 1945 to 1991.

The Soviet Union's longest river was the Irtysh. Its highest mountain was Communism Peak (now Ismail Samani Peak) in Tajikistan, at . The world's largest lake, the Caspian Sea, lay mainly within the Soviet Union. The world's largest freshwater and deepest lake, Lake Baikal, was in the Soviet Union.

History

The last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, ruled the Russian Empire until his abdication in March 1917, due in part to the strain of fighting in World War I. A short-lived Russian provisional government took power, to be overthrown in the 1917 October Revolution (N.S. November 1917) by revolutionaries led by the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.

The Soviet Union was officially established in December 1922 with the union of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Transcaucasian Soviet republics, each ruled by local Bolshevik parties. Despite the foundation of the Soviet state as a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities, the term "Soviet Russia"strictly applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republicwas often incorrectly applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers and politicians.

Revolution and the foundation of a Soviet state

Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament—the State Duma—was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905, but the Tsar resisted attempts to move from absolute to constitutional monarchy. Social unrest continued and was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities. addressing a crowd in 1920.]]

A spontaneous popular uprising in Saint Petersburg, in response to the wartime decay of Russia's economy and morale, culminated in the February Revolution and the toppling of the imperial government in March 1917. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, which intended to conduct elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I.

At the same time, workers' councils, known as Soviets, sprang up across the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for socialist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets. In November 1917, during the October Revolution, they seized power. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets quit the war for good and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

A long and bloody Russian Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds victorious. It included foreign intervention, the execution of Nicholas II and his family and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million. In March 1921, during a related conflict with Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. The Soviet Union had to resolve similar conflicts with the newly established Republic of Finland, the Republic of Estonia, the Republic of Latvia, and the Republic of Lithuania.

Unification of the Soviet Republics

On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty of Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were confirmed by the 1st Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations, Mikhail Kalinin, Mikha Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky, and Aleksandr Chervyakov, on 30 December 1922.

On 1 February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the British Empire. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union.

An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan, which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of the country. The plan was developed in 1920 and covered a 10- to 15-year period. It included construction of a network of 30 regional power plants, including ten large hydroelectric power plants, and numerous electric-powered large industrial enterprises. The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was basically fulfilled by 1931.

Stalin's rule

From its beginning, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). After the economic policy of War Communism during the Civil War, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax (see New Economic Policy).

Soviet leaders argued that one-party rule was necessary to ensure that "capitalist exploitation" would not return to the Soviet Union and that the principles of Democratic Centralism would represent the people's will. Debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a "troika" consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of Ukraine, Lev Kamenev of Moscow, and Joseph Stalin of Georgia.

On 3 April 1922, Stalin was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and out-maneuvering his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union and, by the end of the 1920s, established totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Grigory Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.

In 1928, Stalin introduced the First Five-Year Plan for building a socialist economy. While encompassing the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the course of the Revolution, it also aimed to build socialism in one country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, collective farms were established all over the country.

Famines ensued, causing millions of deaths; surviving kulaks were persecuted and many sent to Gulags to do forced labour. Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the execution or detainment of many "Old Bolsheviks" who had participated in the October Revolution with Lenin. The death toll is uncertain, with a wide range of estimates. According to declassified Soviet archives, in 1937 and 1938, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day. The excess deaths during the 1930s as a whole were in the range of 10–11 million. Yet despite the turmoil of the mid-to-late 1930s, the Soviet Union developed a powerful industrial economy in the years before World War II.

The 1930s

The early 1930s saw closer cooperation between the West and the USSR. From 1932 to 1934, the Soviet Union participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established. In September 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new Soviet Constitution. The constitution was seen as a personal triumph for Stalin, who on this occasion was described by Pravda as a "genius of the new world, the wisest man of the epoch, the great leader of communism." By contrast, western historians and historians from former Soviet occupied countries have viewed the constitution as a meaningless propaganda document.

The late 1930s saw a shift towards the Axis powers. In 1938, after the United Kingdom and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the USSR dealt with the Nazis as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. The two countries concluded the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact and the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement. The nonaggression pact made possible Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland. In late November of the same year, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border back from Leningrad, Joseph Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland.

In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with the Japanese Empire in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, USSR signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with the Empire of Japan, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state.

World War II

multiple rocket launchers fire on Berlin, April 1945.]] Although it has been debated whether the Soviet Union had any intention of invading Germany once it was strong enough, Germany itself broke the treaty and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, starting what was known in the USSR as the "Great Patriotic War". The Red Army stopped the seemingly-invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow, aided by an unusually harsh winter. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to the Germans from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point of the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945.

, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (left to right) confer in Tehran in 1943.]] The same year, the USSR, in fulfillment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, denounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

The Soviet Union suffered greatly in the war, losing around 27 million people. Despite this, it emerged as a military superpower. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the Soviet Union had official relations with practically every nation by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the Soviet Union became one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions (see Soviet Union and the United Nations).

The Soviet Union maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, economic strength, aid to developing countries, and scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.

The Cold War

During the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control. It aided post-war reconstruction in the countries of Eastern Europe, while turning them into satellite states, binding them in a military alliance (the Warsaw Pact) in 1955, and an economic organization (The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon) from 1949 to 1991, the latter a counterpart to the European Economic Community. Later, the Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Chinese Communist Party, and saw its influence grow elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly using mostly proxies.

Khrushchev Era

, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and before the official Sino–Soviet split of 1961]] Stalin died on 5 March 1953. In the absence of a mutually-agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly. Nikita Khrushchev, who had won the power struggle by the mid-1950s, denounced Stalin's use of repression in 1956 and eased repressive controls over party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.

Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a buffer zone for the forward defense of its western borders, and ensured its control of the region by transforming the East European countries into satellite states. Soviet military force was used to suppress anti-communist uprisings in Hungary and Poland in 1956.

In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the USSR's rapprochement with the West and what Mao perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism led to the Sino–Soviet split. This resulted in a break throughout the global Communist movement, with Communist regimes in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China in place of the USSR.

During this period, the Soviet Union continued to realize scientific and technological exploits: launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1; a living dog, Laika; and later, the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, into Earth's orbit. In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space, and Alexey Leonov became the first person to walk in space, in 1965.

Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated a crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Soviet Union backed down after the United States initiated a naval blockade, causing Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige. He was removed from power in 1964.

Brezhnev Era

Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader. In 1968 the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to halt the Prague Spring reforms. and Jimmy Carter sign SALT II treaty, 18 June 1979, in Vienna.]] Brezhnev presided over a period of détente with the West (see SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) while at the same time building up Soviet military might.

In October 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. The prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change. The long period of Brezhnev's rule had come to be dubbed one of "standstill", with an aging and ossified top political leadership.

Reforms of Gorbachev and dissolution of the Soviet Union

in one-on-one discussions with U.S. President Ronald Reagan.]] Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in Beyond Oil that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, so that the USSR's hard currency reserves became depleted.

Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called perestroika. His policy of glasnost freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the Soviet Union abandoned its nine-year war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the late 1980s, he refused military support to the Soviet Union's former satellite states, resulting in the toppling of multiple communist regimes. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East Germany and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain came down.

In the late 1980s, the constituent republics of the Soviet Union started legal moves towards or even declaration of sovereignty over their territories, citing Article 72 of the USSR constitution, which stated that any constituent republic was free to secede. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the "War of Laws".

In 1989, the Russian SFSR, which was then the largest constituent republic (with about half of the population) convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the USSR's laws. The period of legal uncertainty continued throughout 1991 as constituent republics slowly became de facto independent.

A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991, with the majority of the population voting for preservation of the Union in nine out of the 15 republics. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the Soviet Union into a much looser federation, was agreed upon by eight republics.

in 1991.]] The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example), while the other twelve republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union.

On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev yielded to the inevitable and resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin, the President of Russia.

The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body of the Soviet Union, dissolved itself. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state. Many organizations, such as the Soviet Army and police forces, continued to remain in place in the early months of 1992, but were slowly phased out and either withdrawn from or absorbed by the newly independent states.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991, Russia was internationally recognized as its legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed overseas Soviet properties as its own. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations.

Politics

There were three power hierarchies in the Soviet Union: the legislative branch represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the government represented by the Council of Ministers and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only legal party and the ultimate policymaker in the country.

The Communist Party

At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party Congresses and Conferences. The Central Committee in turn voted for a Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952–1966), Secretariat and the General Secretary (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the highest office in the USSR. Depending on the degree of power consolidation, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the General Secretary, who always was one of the Politburo members, that effectively led the party and the country (except for the period of the highly personalized authority of Stalin, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers rather than the Politburo after 1941). They were not controlled by the general party membership, as the key principle of the party organization was democratic centralism, demanding strict subordination to higher bodies, and elections went uncontested, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.

The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state largely through its control over the system of appointments. All senior government officials and most deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the party heads themselves, Stalin in 1941–1953 and Khrushchev in 1958–1964 were Premiers. Upon the forced retirement of Khrushchev, the party leader was prohibited from this kind of double membership, but the later General Secretaries for at least some part of their tenure occupied the largely ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state. The institutions at lower levels were overseen and at times supplanted by primary party organizations.

In practice, however, the degree of control the party was able to exercise over the state bureaucracy, particularly after the death of Stalin, was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that were at times in conflict with the party. Nor was the party itself monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were officially banned.

The government

, seat of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, in 1982]] The Supreme Soviet (successor of the Congress of Soviets and Central Executive Committee) was nominally the highest state body for most of the Soviet history, at first acting as a rubber stamp institution, approving and implementing all decisions made by the party. However, the powers and functions of the Supreme Soviet were extended in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It gained additional powers when it came to the approval of the Five-Year Plans and the Soviet state budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium to wield its power between plenary sessions, the Procurator General and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), headed by the Chairman (Premier) and managing an enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society. State and party structures of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other constituent republics, for most of its history had no republican branch of the CPSU, being ruled directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were organized likewise into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.

The state security police (the KGB and its predecessor agencies) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in the Stalinist terror, but after the death of Stalin, the state security police was brought under strict party control. Under Yuri Andropov, KGB chairman in 1967–1982 and General Secretary from 1982 to 1983, the KGB engaged in the suppression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informers, reasserting itself as a political actor to some extent independent of the party-state structure, culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Separation of power and reform

The Soviet constitutions, which were promulgated in 1918, 1924, 1936 and 1977, did not limit state power. No formal separation of powers existed between the Party, Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers, due to the belief of certain Bolsheviks that parliamentarism and the separation of power was created by the bourgeois to fool the poor and the working class. The fusion of executive and legislative functions was pervasive. The system was governed less by statute than by informal conventions, and no settled mechanism of leadership succession existed. Bitter and at times deadly power struggles took place in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin and Joseph Stalin, as well as after Khrushchev's dismissal, itself due to a coup in both the Politburo and the Central Committee. and Khrushchev, both dismissed from the party leadership amid internal struggle within the party. In 1988–1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms shifting power away from the highest bodies of the party and making the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, the majority of whose members were directly elected in competitive elections held in March 1989. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, much stronger than before. Although still largely conservative, for the first time since the 1920s, it refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party and Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the position of the President of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party, and subordinated the government, now renamed the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, to himself.

Tensions grew between the union-wide authorities under Gorbachev, reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin and controlling the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and Communist Party hardliners. On 19–21 August 1991, a group of hardliners staged an abortive coup attempt. Following the failed coup, the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest organ of state power "in the period of transition". Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, only remaining President for the final months of the existence of the USSR.

Judicial system

The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts (People's Court) and applied the law as established by the Constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and acts. The Soviet Union utilized the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, procurator, and defense attorney collaborate to establish the truth.

Political divisions

Constitutionally, the Soviet Union was a union of Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), although the rule of the highly centralized Communist Party made the union merely nominal. In August 1940, the Soviet Union formed the Moldavian SSR from parts of the Ukrainian SSR and parts of Bessarabia annexed from Romania. It also annexed the Baltic states as the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian SSRs. The Karelo-Finnish SSR was split off from the RSFSR in March 1940 and merged back in 1956. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).

On 16 November 1988, the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR passed the Estonian Sovereignty Declaration that asserted Estonia's sovereignty and declared the supremacy of Estonian laws over those of the Soviet Union. In March 1990, the newly-elected Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR declared independence, followed by the Georgian Supreme Soviet in April 1991. Although the symbolic right of the republics to secede was nominally guaranteed by the constitution and the union treaty,

Economy

, one of many hydroelectric power stations in the Soviet Union]] The Soviet Union became the first country to adopt a planned economy, whereby production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was the policy of War Communism, which involved nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of output, coercive requisition of agricultural production, and attempts to eliminate the circulation of money, as well as private enterprises and free trade. As it had aggravated a severe economic collapse caused by the war, in 1921, Lenin replaced War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), legalizing free trade and private ownership of smaller businesses. The economy recovered fairly quickly.

Although the Soviet Union adopted a planned economy after WWII, (in contrast to the US which used economic-based planning for its economy), the Soviet Union used technology-based planning. In the early 1980s, the US intelligence community initiated Project Socrates to examine economic and military competitiveness worldwide both at the present time and in the past. What Project Socrates determined was that the USSR was executing technology-based planning to very aggressively out-maneuver the US in the acquisition and utilization of the worldwide technology--to include technology in the US. It was technology-based planning that enabled the USSR to match and in some cases surpass the US militarily, from an economy that was significantly smaller than the US' economy.

Following a lengthy debate among the members of Politburo over the course of economic development, by 1928–1929, upon gaining control of the country, Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP and pushed for full central planning, starting forced collectivization of agriculture and enacting draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which greatly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s. As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian economy into a great industrial power, leading the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. During the war, the Soviet economy and infrastructure suffered massive devastation and required extensive reconstruction.

By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period up until the creation of Comecon, only a very small share of domestic products was traded internationally. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, external trade rose rapidly. Still the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grain and sophisticated consumer manufactures became major import articles from around the 1960s. |- !||USSR||US |- |GNP (PPP adjusted, 1989)||US$2.6595 trillion ||US$5.2333 trillion |- |Population (July 1990) ||290,938,469||250,410,000 |- |GNP per capita (PPP adjusted)||US$9,211||US$21,082 |- |Labour force (1989)||152,300,000||125,557,000 |} A number of basic services were state-funded, such as education and healthcare. In the manufacturing sector, heavy industry and defense were assigned higher priority than the production of consumer goods. A massive unplanned second economy grew up alongside the planned one at low levels, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not. Legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965. by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid 1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet economy experienced comparatively high growth and was catching up to the West. However, after 1970, the growth, while still positive, steadily declined, much more quickly and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in the capital stock, (the rate of increase in capital was only surpassed by Japan).

In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of perestroika. His policies relaxed state control over enterprises, but did not yet allow it to be replaced by market incentives, ultimately resulting in a sharp decline in production output. The economy, already suffering from reduced petroleum export revenues, started to collapse. Prices were still fixed, and property was still largely state-owned until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. though in per capita terms the Soviet GDP was behind that of the First World countries.

Energy

The need for fuel declined in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s, both per ruble of gross social product and per ruble of industrial product. At the start, this decline grew very rapidly, but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 and 1980, it grew even slower, only 2.6 percent. David Wilson, a historian, believed that the gas industry would account for 40 percent of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the USSR's collapse. The USSR, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of 2–2.5 percent during the 1990s because of Soviet energy fields. However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, among them the country's high military expenditure and hostile relations with the First World (pre-Gorbachev era).

In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of for crude oil and another for natural gas. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union heavily relied on fossil fuel exports to earn hard currency.

Science and technology

The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology within its economy, however, the most remarkable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the world's first space satellite, typically were the responsibility of the military. Lenin believed that the USSR would never overtake the developed world if it remained as technologically backward as it was. Soviet authorities proved their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks, research and development organizations. By 1989, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World.

Project Socrates, under the Reagan administration, determined that the Soviet Union addressed the acquisition of science and technology in a manner that was radically different than what the US was using at that time. In the case of the US, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous R&D; as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the Soviet Union was offensively and defensively maneuvering in the acquisition and utilization of the worldwide technology, to increase the competitive advantage that they acquired from the technology, while preventing the US from acquiring a competitive advantage. However, in addition, the Soviet Union's technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-centric manner that greatly hindered its flexibility. It was this significant lack of flexibility that was exploited by the US to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus foster its reform.

Transport

Transport was a key component of the nation's economy. The economic centralisation of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure on a massive scale, most notably the establishment of Aeroflot, an aviation enterprise. The country had a wide variety of modes of transport by land, water and air. it was also better developed than most of its Western counterparts. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists were calling for the construction of more roads to alleviate some of the burden from the railways and to improve the Soviet state budget. The road network and automobile industry remained underdeveloped, and dirt roads were common outside major cities. Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take care of even the few roads the country had. By the early to mid-1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the road problem by ordering the construction of new ones. The underdeveloped road network led to a growing demand for public transport.

Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for transport infrastructure and services.

The Soviet merchant fleet was one of the largest in the world.

Demographics

(blue) from 1961 to 2009.]] The first fifty years of the 20th century in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union were marked by a succession of disasters, each accompanied by large–scale population losses. Excess deaths over the course of World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, some 10 million in the 1930s,

The crude birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, largely due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The crude death rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post–World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanization and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility.

The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as largely real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services. The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet government simply stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed and researchers could delve into the real causes.

Education

, Czechoslovakia in 1985.]] Prior to 1917, in the Russian Empire, education was not free, and was therefore either inaccessible or barely accessible for many children from lower-class working and peasant families. Estimates from 1917 recorded that 75–85 percent of the Russian population was illiterate.

Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissariat for Education of Soviet Russia. At the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the elimination of illiteracy. People who were literate were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Joseph Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. In the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, the country's educational system expanded dramatically. This expansion had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all Soviet children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in creating the New Soviet Man.

Access to higher education was restricted, however; only 20 percent of all applicants were accepted. The rest entered the labor market or learned a skill at a vocational technical school or technicum. According to statistics from 1986, the number of students per 10,000 population was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US. Students from families of dubious political reliability were barred from higher education. Brezhnev introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the Komsomol party secretary. Applicants who were rejected were not allowed to reapply.

All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the mother. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the Mingrelians of the Georgian SSR, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians. Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians shared close cultural ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory, ethnic antagonisms developed over the years.

Health

In 1917, before the Bolshevik uprising, health conditions were significantly behind the developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice". The Soviet principle of health care was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. However, the Soviet Union's health care system was not able to fulfill all the needs of its people. Before Leonid Brezhnev rose to power, Soviet socialised medicine was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed however, from Brezhnev's accession and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, the Soviet health care system was heavily criticised for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision. Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such Soviet success as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognised the system's deficiencies and felt that billions of Soviet rubles were squandered.

After the communist takeover, the life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic was used by authorities to "prove" that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s, when the life expectancy in the Soviet Union surpassed that of the United States. It remained fairly stable during most years, although in the 1970s, it went down slightly, probably because of alcohol abuse. Most western sources put the blame on growing alcohol abuse and poor health care; this theory was also implicitly accepted by the Soviet authorities. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on this. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was highest, while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.

Language

The Soviet government headed by Vladimir Lenin gave small language groups their own writing systems. The development of these writing systems was very successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed dialectally greatly from each other. When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, that language would attain "official language" status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system, therefore their speakers were forced to have a second language. There are examples where the Soviet government retreated from this policy, most notable under Stalin's regime, where education was discontinued in languages which were not widespread enough. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian. During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy.

As the most widely-spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian de facto functioned as an official language as the "language of interethnic communication" (), but only assumed the de jure status of the official national language in 1990.

Religion

Christianity and Islam had the greatest number of adherents among the Soviet state's religious citizens. Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the Soviet Union's largest Christian denomination. About 90 percent of the Soviet Union's Muslims were Sunnis, with Shiites concentrated in the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic. The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling classes.

In Soviet law, the "freedom to hold religious services" was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism. Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929, a half-decade into Stalin's rule, included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized Bible study.

Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, the Stalin regime began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s. Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during the Soviet war with Nazi Germany. Amid other accommodations to religious faith, churches were reopened, Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Sergius I of Moscow was held in 1943.

The Soviet establishment again clashed with the churches under General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's leadership in 19581964, a period when atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views. The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the Soviet government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexey II with Soviet decorations, including the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.

Culture

The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's 70-year existence. During the first eleven years following the Revolution (1918–1929), there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles in an effort to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, for example Nikolay Gumilev (shot for conspiring against the Bolshevik regime) and Yevgeny Zamyatin (banned).

The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maksim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. Film, as a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, received encouragement from the state; much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.

Later, during Stalin's rule, Soviet culture was characterised by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, for example Mikhail Bulgakov's works. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.

Following the Khrushchev Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, censorship was diminished. Greater experimentation in art forms became permissible once again, with the result that more sophisticated and subtly critical work began to be produced. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. An underground dissident literature, known as samizdat, developed during this late period. In architecture the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch.

In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost significantly expanded freedom of expression in the media and press.

See also

Index of Soviet Union-related articles

Notes

Bibliography

Madhavan K. Palat, Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia, ed. (Macmillan, Palgrave, UK, and St Martin’s Press, New York, 2001)

Further reading

;Surveys

A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former). Library of Congress Country Studies, 1991.

Brown, Archie, et al., eds.: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Gilbert, Martin: The Routledge Atlas of Russian History (London: Routledge, 2002).

Goldman, Minton: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Connecticut: Global Studies, Dushkin Publishing Group, Inc., 1986).

Grant, Ted: Russia, from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London, Well Red Publications,1997

Howe, G. Melvyn: The Soviet Union: A Geographical Survey 2nd. edn. (Estover, UK: MacDonald and Evans, 1983).

Pipes, Richard. Communism: A History (2003), by a leading conservative scholar

;Lenin and Leninism

Clark, Ronald W. Lenin (1988). 570 pp.

Debo, Richard K. Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1921 (1992).

Marples, David R. Lenin's Revolution: Russia, 1917–1921 (2000) 156pp. short survey

Pipes, Richard. A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (1996) excerpt and text search, by a leading conservative

Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik Regime. (1994). 608 pp.

Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography (2002), 561pp; standard scholarly biography; a short version of his 3 vol detailed biography

Volkogonov, Dmitri. Lenin: Life and Legacy (1994). 600 pp.

;Stalin and Stalinism

Daniels, R. V., ed. The Stalin Revolution (1965)

Davies, Sarah, and James Harris, eds. Stalin: A New History, (2006), 310pp, 14 specialized essays by scholars excerpt and text search

De Jonge, Alex. Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union (1986)

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed. Stalinism: New Directions, (1999), 396pp excerpts from many scholars on the impact of Stalinism on the people (little on Stalin himself) online edition

Hoffmann, David L. ed. Stalinism: The Essential Readings, (2002) essays by 12 scholars

Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (1990)

Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (2004) excerpt and text search

Lee, Stephen J. Stalin and the Soviet Union (1999) online edition

Lewis, Jonathan. Stalin: A Time for Judgement (1990)

McNeal, Robert H. Stalin: Man and Ruler (1988)

Martens , Ludo. Another view of Stalin (1994), a highly favorable view from a Maoist historian

Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography (2004), along with Tucker the standard biography

Trotsky, Leon. Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, (1967), an interpretation by Stalin's worst enemy

Tucker, Robert C. Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929 (1973); Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1929–1941. (1990) online edition with Service, a standard biography; online at ACLS e-books

;World War II

Bellamy, Chris. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (2008), 880pp excerpt and text search

Broekmeyer, Marius. Stalin, the Russians, and Their War, 1941–1945. 2004. 315 pp.

Overy, Richard. Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941–1945 (1998) excerpt and text search

Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (2006).

Seaton, Albert. Stalin as Military Commander, (1998) online edition

;Cold war

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1989)

Edmonds, Robin. Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years (1983)

Goncharov, Sergei, John Lewis and Litai Xue, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (1993) excerpt and text search

Gorlizki, Yoram, and Oleg Khlevniuk. Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (2004) online edition

Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (1996) excerpt and text search

Mastny, Vojtech. Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945 (1979)

Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (1998) excerpt and text search; online complete edition

Nation, R. Craig. Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917–1991 (1992)

Sivachev, Nikolai and Nikolai Yakolev, Russia and the United States (1979), by Soviet historians

Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2004), Pulitzer Prize; excerpt and text search

Ulam, Adam B. Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973, 2nd ed. (1974)

Zubok, Vladislav M. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War (1996) 20% excerpt and online search

Zubok, Vladislav M. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007)

;Collapse

Beschloss, Michael, and Strobe Talbott. At the Highest Levels:The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (1993)

Bialer, Seweryn and Michael Mandelbaum, eds. Gorbachev's Russia and American Foreign Policy (1988).

Garthoff, Raymond. The Great Transition: American–Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (1994), detailed narrative

Grachev, A.S. Gorbachev's Gamble: Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (2008) excerpt and text search

Hogan, Michael ed. The End of the Cold War. Its Meaning and Implications (1992) articles from Diplomatic History

Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (2008) excerpt and text search

Matlock, Jack. Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1995)

Pons, S., Romero, F., Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations, (2005) ISBN 978–0–7146–5695–X

Remnick, David. Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, (1994), ISBN 978–0–679–75125–4

;Specialty studies

Armstrong, John A. The Politics of Totalitarianism: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1934 to the Present. New York: Random House, 1961.

Katz, Zev, ed.: Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities (New York: Free Press, 1975).

Moore, Jr., Barrington. Soviet politics: the dilemma of power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse, New Society Books, 2008, ISBN 978–0–86571–606–3

Rizzi, Bruno: "The Bureaucratization of the World : The First English edition of the Underground Marxist Classic That Analyzed Class Exploitation in the USSR" , New York, NY : Free Press, 1985.

Schapiro, Leonard B. The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase 1917–1922. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955, 1966.

External links

Impressions of Soviet Russia, by John Dewey.

Documents and other forms of media from the Soviet Union: 1917–1991.

A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former)

Soviet Union Exhibit at Global Museum on Communism with essay by Richard Pipes

The Soviet Union

Category:History of the Soviet Union and Soviet Russia Category:Communist states Category:Early Soviet republics Category:States and territories established in 1922 Category:Former Slavic countries Category:Single-party states Category:History of Russia Category:Former polities of the Cold War Category:Superpowers

Name	Eddy Huntington
Background	solo_singer
Born	29 October 1965
Genre	Italo disco, Europop
Occupation	Singer, teacher
Years active	1983–present
Label	ZYX

Edward "Eddy" Huntington (born 29 October 1965) is a pop star from the UK, popular in Europe and the former USSR.

Huntington was born in the north east of England and moved to London at the age of 18, where he became a music video extra and model.

He was discovered by Baby records, an Italian record label who took him to Milan to record the song "USSR" written by R. Turatti, M. Chieregato and T. Hooker.

When "USSR" was released throughout Europe in 1986 on ZYX Records it became a hit in mainland Europe and in the Soviet Union and is widely popular to this day. Huntington went on to have other lesser hits including "May Day" and "Meet My Friend". He also released the album Bang Bang Baby in 1988.

Huntington left the music industry in the early 1990s and trained to become a primary school teacher in the UK. He taught at Eldon Grove Primary School in Hartlepool teaching children in year 1. He provided after school drama and singing lessons as well as everyday lessons. He then moved to Thailand for 2 years with his wife teaching at Bangkok Patana School. There his youngest son was born, which prompted a move back to England, where he is the deputy head of a community primary school.

In 2005 Huntington made a brief return to music opening the Discoteka '80s concerts in Russia. These were two performances of European and Soviet 1980s pop stars held in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, also headlining were; Bonnie Tyler, Alphaville, Sabrina Salerno, Mike Mareen and Savage. Both concerts played to large stadium crowds, appeared on national television and were released on DVD.

References

External links

http://www.disco80.ru/?an=fest2005

Category:1965 births Category:Living people Category:English male singers

Name	Paul Robeson
Birth name	Paul Leroy Robeson
Born	April 09, 1898Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.
Died	January 23, 1976Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Instrument	Vocals
Genre	SpiritualsInternational folkMusicals
Voice type	Bass-Baritone
Occupation	Actor, concert singer, athlete, lawyer, social activist
Years active	1917–1963
Background	solo_singer

Name	Paul "Robey" Robeson
Position	End
Birthdate	April 9, 1898
Deathdate	January 23, 1976
Heightft	6
Heightin	3
Weight	219
Debutyear	1921
Debutteam	Akron Pros
Finalyear	1922
Finalteam	Milwaukee Badgers
College	Rutgers
Teams
Statseason	1922
Statlabel1	Games played
Statvalue1	15
Statlabel2	Games started
Statvalue2	13
Statlabel3	TD
Statvalue3	1
Nfl	ROB361120
Collegehof	10080

Paul Leroy Robeson (April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976) was an African-American concert singer (bass-baritone), recording artist, athlete and actor who became noted for his political radicalism and activism in the civil rights movement. Robeson was the first major concert star to popularize the performance of Negro spirituals. He was the first black actor of the 20th century to portray Shakespeare's Othello in a production with an all-white cast.

A nationally renowned football player from 1917 to the early 1920s, Robeson was an All-American athlete, and Phi Beta Kappa Society laureate during his years at Rutgers University. In 1923, Robeson drifted into amateur theater work, and within a decade he had become an international star of stage, screen, radio and film. Robeson was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal, the Stalin Peace Prize and honorary memberships in over half a dozen trade unions. James Earl Jones, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte have cited Robeson's lead film roles as being the first to display dignity for black actors and pride in African heritage. Though one of the most internationally famous people of the 20th century, Robeson was blacklisted during the Cold War and his activism was nearly erased from mainstream accounts of that period. Under heavy and daily surveillance by both the FBI and the CIA and publicly condemned for his beliefs, Robeson's income fell dramatically and he was blacklisted from performing on stage, screen, radio and television. Robeson's right to travel was restored in 1958, but his already faltering health broke down under controversial circumstances in 1963. By 1965, he was forced into permanent retirement. He spent his final years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, unapologetic about his political views and career. Advocates of Robeson's legacy have restored his name to history books and sports records, honoring his memory with posthumous recognitions.

Early life

Class of 1919 and a member of Cap and Skull]]

Paul Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898. His father, William Drew Robeson I, was descended from the Igbo people of Nigeria, and had run away during the American Civil War from the Robeson plantation in North Carolina where he was born a slave. He served in the Union Army in Pennsylvania, earned a degree from Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), and became a minister of the gospel. His mother Maria Louisa Bustill was from a prominent black abolitionist Quaker family of mixed ancestry: African, Anglo-American, and Lenape.

From 1881 until 1901, William Robeson was minister of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton. Robeson refused to bow to pressure from the "white residents of Princeton" to cease his tendency to "speak out against social injustice." Louisa Robeson was nearly blind from cataracts and died in a house fire in 1904 when her son Paul was six years old.

The Robesons had four other children: William Drew Robeson II, a physician who practiced in Washington, D.C.; Rev. Benjamin C. Robeson, Pastor of Mother AME Zion Church in NY City, the oldest Black Church in NY State; Reeve Robeson (called Reed); and Marian Robeson, who lived in Philadelphia. William Drew Robeson was said to be a stern disciplinarian when it came to the children's studies and behavior. When he was eight years old, Robeson moved with his family to Westfield, New Jersey, where he attended the public schools together with white children. In 1910, when the family relocated to Somerville, New Jersey, he continued to impress upon Paul that he could achieve anything that white people could.

Scholarship

Robeson was only the third African-American student accepted at Rutgers, and the only black student during his time on campus. Robeson was also one of three classmates at Rutgers accepted into Phi Beta Kappa in his third year, and one of four students selected in 1919 to Cap and Skull, Rutgers' honor society.

Campus clubs and racism

Paul Robeson was also active on the Rutgers debate team and in oratorical contests both on and off campus, winning the statewide prize four years in a row. He sang with the campus Glee club, but due to the racist climate at the time, he was not welcome to travel with the latter group out of town or at social events following its on-campus performances. He was elected to the Rutgers literary society, the Philoclean Society, but was not allowed to fully share in its festivities.

All-American and varsity sports

At Rutgers he also excelled as a sportsman. Robeson earned a total of 15 varsity letters in American football, baseball, basketball, and track and field. For his accomplishments as an end in football, he was named a first-team All-America in 1917 and 1918. He was Rutgers' first All-American football player (of any race). During scrimmages while Robeson initially tried out for the football team, he faced both racism and harsh physical injury: for instance, a senior member of the team injured Robeson's hand with a cleated foot, tearing off fingernails.

Though Robeson later said he gave thought to quitting, he persevered and was described by football coach Walter Camp as "the greatest defensive end to ever trot the gridiron." Lou Little of Columbia University football said of him, "there has never been a greater player in the history of football than Robeson."

Graduation honors

Chosen to be the 1919 class valedictorian, during his oration Robeson exhorted his classmates to "catch a new vision", while the "class prophecy" envisioned that he would become a governor of New Jersey by 1940 and "leader of the colored race in America." Robeson's senior thesis was entitled "The Fourteenth Amendment, the Sleeping Giant of the American Constitution", in which he expressed optimism about white intentions to end segregation. Sports historian Francis C. Harris wrote that Robeson "...established a level of excellence as a scholar-athlete that few others, if any, have ever attained."

Columbia Law School

After graduation from Rutgers, Robeson moved to Harlem and entered Columbia Law School. Between 1920 and 1923, Robeson helped pay his way through law school by working both as an athlete and as a performer.

He played professional football in the American Professional Football Association (later called the National Football League) with the Akron Pros and Milwaukee Badgers. He served as assistant football coach at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. There he was initiated into Alpha Phi Alpha, the fraternity for African-American college men, of which Noble Sissle and W.E.B Du Bois were also members. He also played for the St. Christopher Club traveling basketball team during their 1918–19 season.

His first entry into stage performance was as a Columbia law student. He played Simon in Simon the Cyrenian at the Harlem YMCA in 1920, followed in 1922 by Jim in Taboo by Mary Hoyt Wiborg at the Sam Harris Theater in Harlem. Also in 1922, Eubie Blake heard Robeson sing casually and encouraged him to appear in his production of Shuffle Along and Lew Leslie's Plantation Revue as a member of the close-harmony singing quartet the Harmony Kings. The production of Taboo, renamed Voodoo, was taken to cities in Britain in summer 1922. Directed by Mrs Patrick Campbell, it gave greater prominence to Robeson's singing, which was praised by critics. In London, Robeson was able to meet with prominent African-American expatriates.

Robeson graduated from Columbia in 1923, in the same law school class as William O. Douglas — later a United States Supreme Court Justice. Robeson's academic record was not as stellar as it had been at Rutgers, and he had a mostly C average. He was not enthusiastic about the law after graduation. His broken tenure at the school due to his work in theater made him ineligible for the Columbia Law Review. Editor-in-chief Charles Ascher in later years said that the "Southerners on the board would have put up a fight..." In the 1930s, the couple began legal proceedings toward divorce when Robeson fell in love with Yolanda Jackson, a British woman, but the relationship ended abruptly. Eslanda and Robeson stayed together, continuing an open marriage until Eslanda died on December 23, 1965. Eslanda wrote the first biography of Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson: Negro. Told in the third person, she wrote part fiction, part memoir about the problems in their marriage and Robeson's early life and career. She incorrectly added "Bustill" as Robeson's middle name in this book.

They had one son, Paul Robeson, Jr., born November 2, 1927. He has spent much of his life safeguarding his father's legacy by founding The Robeson Family Archives and The Paul Robeson Foundation. Paul Robeson also had two grandchildren, David Robeson (1951–1998) and Susan Robeson (1953- ), who became a documentary filmmaker. In 1980, Susan Robeson published a pictorial biography of her grandfather.

Religious views

Robeson did not follow in his father's footsteps as a regular congregant in the African Methodist Episcopal church, but he had a lifelong reverence for the black church. In 1998, close family friend Bishop J. Clinton Hoggard, who eulogized Robeson at his funeral, stated, "He was a Christian, he believed in God, which is why he is one who could sing the great hymns of the church, they come out of his soul." In a 1929 entry in his diary, Robeson expressed the thought that his career and marriage were part of a "higher plan", writing: "God watches over me and guides me. He's with me and let's me fight my own battles and hopes I'll win." Later when his left-wing activism became controversial, accusations that he was a "'godless' Communist" were not accepted by his black churchgoing audiences, who felt he "personified the spirituals in his music". Robeson never expressed "even the remotest allegiance to 'materialistic atheism'". In a 1958 BBC television interview, Robeson reminisced of his days growing up in his father's church, "every Sunday morning there would be a rolling up of a great sermon and 'bow down on bended knees, oh Lord and hail Mary' and it became very much like an opera."

Early career (1920–1928)

Robeson started working for the law firm of Stotesbury (a Rutger's alumnus) and Miner in New York City, assisting on a litigation trial over Jay Gould's estate. Though his brief was used in the Gould trial, Robeson, the only black person in the law firm, quit after a white secretary refused to take dictation from him, saying: "I never take dictation from a nigger."

In the 1920s, Robeson found fame as an actor and singing star of both stage and radio with his bass voice and commanding presence. His voice could descend as low as C below the bass clef. Robeson and his accompanist and arranger Lawrence Brown were the first to bring spirituals to the concert stage; their association lasted through four decades.

Robeson was acclaimed for his 1924 Provincetown Playhouse performance in the title role of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. Charles Sidney Gilpin had premiered the role in 1920. He also gained recognition for his starring performance in the premier production of O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924). He portrayed the husband of an abusive white woman (played by Mary Blair). Resenting him, she destroys his promising career as a lawyer. The interracial marriage was controversial for many members of both black and white audiences. He next played Crown in the stage version of DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy. This work was later adapted by George and Ira Gershwin as the opera Porgy and Bess.

During his days at Columbia Law School, Robeson had sung professionally though giving little thought to a career. In 1924 when unable to whistle for a performance in Taboo, he sang a spiritual instead, pleasing both the cast and audiences. He had reconnected with the accompanist and arranger Lawrence Brown in 1924, and they rapidly established a successful musical partnership. Robeson later credited Brown for guiding him "...to the beauty of my own folk music and to the music of all other Peoples so like our own."

Lawrence Brown had previously worked with the gospel singer Roland Hayes, and he had an extensive repertoire of African-American folk songs. His partnership with Robeson helped bring these works to much wider attention both in the U.S. and abroad. Robeson became a hugely popular concert draw in New York City, and his wife Esland acted as his agent and manager. Carl Sandburg distinguished between Robeson's interpretation of spirituals and that of Roland Hayes, saying that "Hayes imitates white culture... Robeson is the real thing...." Robeson was broadcast in performance on New York radio, usually performing Negro spirituals; on June 7, 1927 he was a featured performer on the Edison Hour. Robeson became interested in the folk music of the world; his standard repertoire after the 1920s included songs in Chinese, Russian, Yiddish and German.

Robeson's earliest film was Body and Soul (1925), a silent American race film directed by Oscar Micheaux. Robeson played both a conniving preacher, and his twin brother. Disapproving of seeing a preacher as a negative character, the New York Motion Pictures Commission ordered Micheaux to reduce that part.

Move to Britain and political involvement (1928–1939)

In the late 1920s, the Robesons moved to England, where they lived until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Robeson made extended singing tours and appeared in nine films, all but two of them British productions.

Show Boat

In 1928 Robeson played the role of Joe, which was written for him, in the London production of the American musical Show Boat. His rendition of Ol' Man River is widely considered the definitive version of the song. Robeson sang the song as written when he performed in the musical, but in later recitals, he altered the lyrics to transform it to a song of black defiance and perseverance. While Show Boat was immensely popular with white audiences, black theater reviewers were less than impressed. J.A. Rodgers of The Amsterdam News wrote that he had spoken to "fully some thirty Negros of intelligence and self respect" who urged "their disapprobation of the play" and he had "heard many harsh things said against Robeson... if anyone had called him (Robeson) a 'nigger', he'd be the first to get offended and there he is singing 'nigger, nigger' before all these white people."

Involvement with Welsh miners' cause

While performing in Show Boat, Robeson met a group of unemployed miners, who had taken part in a hunger march from South Wales. After taking them for their first meal in days, he decided to help their cause. He visited the Rhondda Valley and the Talygarn Miners' Rest Home, and performed for miners and their families in Cardiff, Neath and Aberdare. At the invitation of a group of Labour MPs, he was the first actor to be invited for lunch at the House of Commons.

Othello

In 1930, Robeson starred for the first time in the title role in William Shakespeare's Othello in England. Peggy Ashcroft co-starred as Desdemona. When the play opened on May 19, Robeson became the first black actor in nearly a century, since Ira Aldridge, to play Othello opposite a white cast. The production met with mostly positive reviews with a few lukewarm notices pointing out Robeson's "highly civilized quality" and lack of the "grand style." He had a brief affair with Ashcroft.

Political activities

In an interview with W. R. Titterton in 1930, Robeson rejected "political activism, political advocacy and commitment to a 'cause' as suitable modes for an artist", believing that the artist must be "ultimately accountable only to himself and his art; the prophet and the warrior are by definition at odds with the artist." His son Paul Robeson, Jr. later said, "In 1930, Paul had not yet jettisoned the 'don't upset white folks' dictum of his boyhood days, thus interfering with his ability to project the regal and commanding posture that Othello should deliver from the outset..."

In 1934, he performed in Caernarfon to benefit the victims of a major disaster at Gresford Colliery, near Wrexham, where 264 miners died. In 1938, he performed for an audience of 7,000 at the Welsh International Brigades National Memorial in Mountain Ash, to commemorate the 33 men from Wales killed while fighting on the side of the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Because of his public stands, he became a popular cultural figure in Wales. Robeson often stayed in Tiger Bay with his American uncle by marriage, Aaron Mossell, a black Communist active in Pan-Africanism.

In 1940, Robeson appeared in The Proud Valley, playing a black laborer who arrives in the Rhondda and wins the hearts of the local people.

While continuing his professional singing and acting career, through 1939 Robeson became increasingly involved with the struggles of British workers. He performed for them on numerous occasions, entered the pits with miners to see their working conditions, and befriended them. Returning to England in 1949, he said his earlier time there had a profound influence on his political development:

I learned my militancy and my politics, from your Labor Movement here in Britain.... That was how I realized that the fight of my Negro people in America and the fight of oppressed workers everywhere was the same struggle.

Film work

Robeson's second film was the experimental classic Borderline. Shot in Switzerland in 1930 by a trio of avant garde artists known as the Pool Group, and co-starring his wife, Eslanda, the film chronicles race relations in a small European village. In 1933, he returned briefly to the U.S. where he reprised his title role in Dudley Murphy's film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. The American version of The Emperor Jones was censored to leave out a dramatic scene featuring Robeson's killing a white prison guard who had ordered his character to beat a fellow prisoner who had been caught escaping. The 1936 Universal Pictures film Show Boat was a box office hit for Robeson. It is the most frequently shown of all his films, and his performance of the main song "Ol' Man River" was particularly notable.

At the height of his popularity in the 1930s, Robeson became an international box office attraction in British films such as Song of Freedom (1936) and Sanders of the River (1935). He was also King Umbopa in the 1937 version of King Solomon's Mines. In films such as Jericho and Proud Valley, he portrayed strong black American male leading roles without the subservience typical of roles for blacks at the time. Because of his growing political and racial consciousness, he was one of the first actors of any race to demand (and receive) final cut approval on a film (Song of Freedom). He was the first black actor to have roles that expressed both dignity and pride in African heritage.

Theatre work

Robeson played the role of Toussaint L'Ouverture in the 1936 play Black Majesty by C.L.R. James, alongside the actor Robert Adams. He had long wanted to play the role, but the production closed after two weeks. Adams went on to co-star in two of Robeson's films, Song of Freedom and King Solomon's Mines, and founded the Negro Repertory Arts Theater.

In 1938, Robeson appeared in a well-received two-month run of Herbert Marshall's Plant in the Sun. The play dealt with sit-down strikes and union organizing in the US, and was produced by the Unity Theatre.

Identification with African anti-imperialism

Living in London, Robeson became aware of knowledge about African history and culture that was not available in the United States. During the 1930s he met with African students in London, who urged him to travel to the Soviet Union. Paul and Eslanda Robeson were named honorary members of the West African Students' Union in London, where they became good friends with future national presidents Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta. In essays such as "I want to be African", Robeson wrote of his desire to embrace his heritage. He compared the issues of peoples in the colonial possessions of Western Europe and African Americans. Robeson's experiences during the 1930s caused him to alter how he felt about the relationship between art and activism. His African studies, contacts in the anti-imperialism movement, and half-decade association with British socialists led him to visit the Soviet Union. He did not make any public declaration of support for socialism, saying: "In England they call me a 'Communist' because of my views, but I'm certainly not a member of the Communist Party." He was so disappointed by the final cut of the Sanders of the River (1935) , a stereotypical portrayal of Africa under imperialist rule, that he became "more conscious politically." By the end of the 1930s, Robeson had become an outspoken artist-activist.

, a School of Oriental and African Studies hall of residence opened in 1998.]] Though officially enrolled in phonetics and Swahili at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1934, Robeson also studied other languages there and independently while in London, including Igbo, Yoruba, Zulu, Chinese, Russian and Hindi. Robeson is honoured at SOAS through the Paul Robeson House, opened in 1998. In the 1940s he was studying Chinese, when the FBI stole one of his notebooks and had it translated in an unsuccessful attempt to link him to Communist activities. When asked how many languages Robeson spoke, historian Sterling Stuckey answered, "Some claim twelve, others claim twenty; he certainly sang in a great many."

First visit to the Soviet Union

Robeson journeyed to the Soviet Union in December 1934, via Germany, having been given an official invitation. He and Eslanda were nearly attacked by Nazi Sturmabteilung (Storm troopers) at the stopover in Berlin. In the Soviet Union, Robeson was welcomed by playwrights, artists and filmmakers, among them the film director Sergei Eisenstein, who became a close friend. Robeson also met with African Americans who had migrated to the USSR, including his two brothers-in-law. He found the USSR free of racism and racial segregation; Russians ran up to greet him in the streets. He spoke of the "joy and happiness and friendliness, this utter absence of any embarrassment over a 'race question' is all the more keenly felt by me because of the day I spent in Berlin on the way here, and that was a day of horror—in an atmosphere of hatred, fear and suspicion."

Robeson declared that African American spiritual music resonated to Russian folk traditions. He told the press: "Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life ... I walk in full human dignity."

The Spanish Civil War

Robeson had a long association with the International Brigades who served in the Spanish Civil War. This close association endures to present day. Throughout his life he cited the struggle against fascism in Spain as an essential part of shaping his transformation into a political artist and activist, writing in his autobiography that Spain was "the turning point of my life." Robeson is one of only three people to have been given honorary membership in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the volunteers from the United States who served in the Spanish Civil War for the International Brigades.

As fascism escalated in Europe, "Save Spain" rallies were organized. The first rally was at the Albert Hall in 1937 sponsored by W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells, among others, as a benefit concert for the National Joint Committee for Spanish Refugees in Aid of the Basque Refugee Children's Fund. The program cover was designed by Pablo Picasso. In Moscow Robeson recorded a message to be related by radio to the concert, but when Germany threatened to jam the broadcast, and the Albert Hall managers did not wish it to be received, he decided to fly to London to attend the rally in person. In his performance, he changed the lyrics of "Old Man River" from "I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin'" to "I must keep fightin' until I'm dyin'." He also stated, "The liberation of Spain from the oppression of fascist reactionaries is not a private matter of the Spaniards, but the common cause of all advanced and progressive humanity." Robeson's recorded message included this statement, which became his epitaph:

The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. The history of the capitalist era is characterized by the degradation of my people: despoiled of their lands, their culture destroyed, ... denied equal protection under law, and deprived their rightful place in the respect of their fellows. Not through blind faith or coercion but conscious of my course, I take my place with you.

By December 1937 Robeson had addressed four rallies for the Republican cause. He had also denounced fascist attacks on Ethiopia by Italy and spoke out in favor of the emerging Communist revolution in China. His British entertainment manager was concerned about the implications of his becoming a political artist. Robeson decided to establish his political events as primary, explaining to the press that, "something inside me has turned". No longer would he appear in "decadent Hollywood films", he stated, but instead would portray "the life, hopes and aspirations of the struggling people from which I come."

Visiting Spain in 1938, Robeson met with the American men and women of The Abraham Lincoln Brigade on the battlefields, including about ninety-five African Americans. Back in Europe, he raised funds for the Spanish Republic, and to aid returning wounded Lincoln veterans in need of medical care.

The Council on African Affairs

Robeson co-founded with Max Yergan the International Committee on African Affairs in 1937 (from 1941, the Council on African Affairs, CAA). The CAA provided information about Africa across the U.S., particularly to African-Americans. During World War II, it functioned as a coalition including a variety of activists from varying leftist backgrounds. Its most successful campaign was probably that for South African famine relief in 1946. Under the weight of internal disputes, government repression, and financial hardships, the CAA disbanded in 1955.

Height of fame and World War II (1939–1945)

Ballad for Americans

After his return from Europe in 1939, Robeson quickly became a national celebrity once again when he performed Ballad for Americans, an American patriotic cantata with lyrics by John La Touche and music by Earl Robinson. Originally titled The Ballad for Uncle Sam, it was written for a Works Progress Administration theatre project called Sing for Your Supper. Robeson performed "Ballad" on the CBS radio network in 1943, accompanied by chorus and orchestra. Bing Crosby made a commercially successful recording of the piece, but the song is closely associated with Robeson, standing at the pinnacle of his music and radio career prior to the Cold War.

He sang Ballad for Americans at The Hollywood Bowl to the largest sold-out crowd in its history.

Wartime performances

When Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Robeson was among the first performers to give benefit concerts on behalf of the American war effort, making him one of the top American actors and singers of that era. In an interview published in all the black weeklies and the July–August issue of TAC, magazine of the Theatre Arts Committee, Robeson was asked what prompted his decision to return to the US to live, he replied:

I've learned that my people are not the only ones oppressed. That it is the same for Jews or Chinese as for Negroes, and that such prejudice has no place in a democracy. I have sung my songs all over the world, and everywhere found that some common bond makes the people of all lands take to Negro songs, as to their own....{A]ll oppressed people cry out against their oppressors....[These experiences] have made me come home to sing my songs so that we will see that our democracy does not vanish. If I can contribute to this as an artist, I shall be happy.

Film work

In 1942 Robeson lent his speaking and singing talents to the Frontier Films production of Native Land. A combination of a documentary format and staged reenactments, the film depicted the struggle of trade unions against anti-union corporations. It was based on the 1938 report of the La Follette Committee's investigation of the repression of labor organizing. The FBI labeled it "...obviously a Communist project."

The same year, in Hollywood, Robeson participated in the anthology film Tales of Manhattan. His segment depicted black people's living conditions under the sharecropping system. Robeson was dissatisfied, calling it "very offensive to my people. It makes the Negro childlike and innocent and is in the old plantation hallelujah shouter tradition". He attempted to remove the film from distribution but buying up all prints proved far too expensive. Robeson held a press conference, announcing that he would no longer act in Hollywood films because of the demeaning roles available to black actors and would gladly join others in picketing the film. During this period, Robeson also turned down roles in Moby Dick, Gone With The Wind, Song of the South and Porgy and Bess.

Japanese Americans

In February 1942, Robeson was approached by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi to join a panel of prominent non-Asians testifying before Congress to the loyalty of Japanese Americans, in order to avert mass removal. Robeson volunteered but the panel idea was dropped once Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

Robeson remained attentive to Nisei concerns. In a 1943 speech, he praised "the workers from Mexico and from the east--Japan and the Philippines--whose labor has helped make the west and the southwest a fruitful land." In 1946, he opposed a move by the Canadian government to deport thousands of Japanese Canadians. Robeson accepted honorary life membership of the Japanese Canadian Committee for Democracy and gave a concert in Salt Lake City, then home to the Japanese American Citizens League.

Civil Rights activism

In winter 1943, Robeson traveled to Boston where he called for a full investigation into the recent rash of antisemitic acts of vandalism against a Jewish cemetery and a synagogue. The following month he spoke at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, at 12th Annual Herald Tribune Forum, on the participation of African Americans in the fight against the Axis powers. In December, 1943, Robeson addressed an annual meeting of Major League Baseball club owners, demanding they admit black players to major league baseball, helping to pave the way for Jackie Robinson to break the "color bar" in baseball two years later.

The Broadway Othello

Robeson reprised the role of Othello in New York in 1943 under the direction of Margaret Webster, and toured the US with it until 1945. , his run of Othello is the longest of any Shakespeare play on Broadway, running for 296 performances. Uta Hagen played Desdemona, and José Ferrer played Iago. For his portrayal, Robeson received a Donaldson Award, as well as the Gold Medal for the best diction in the American theater, which had only been awarded nine times since its inception in 1924. in the Theatre Guild production of Othello.]]The play had its Broadway run at the Shubert Theatre, and Robeson was the first African American to play the role with a white supporting cast on the Broadway stage. At the opening night performance, the audience gave the cast a twenty-minute standing ovation, for ten curtain calls. Despite his popularity, Robeson was not permitted to dine at Sardi's, a once-segregated restaurant located just across the street from the Theatre. Robeson toured with Othello in the US and Canada until 1945 and continued to perform solo excerpts from the play at his concert performances for the remainder of his career.

Civil rights activism and post war politics (1945–1948)

During World War II, Robeson's support for the Allied War effort had made him the world's most famous African-American and his previous statements and advocacy for socialism had been ignored by both the media and the white establishment. The start of the Cold war led to a social climate in which most civil rights and anti-imperialist groups in the United States were considered "Communist affiliated."Many of Robeson's closest friends and associates including Benjamin Davis, Howard Fast and William L. Patterson, were CPUSA members.

Spingarn medal

In 1945, Robeson was awarded the Spingarn medal by the NAACP for his "distinguished achievements in the theatre and concert stage as well as his active concern for the rights of the common man for every race, color, religion and nationality."

American Crusade to End Lynching

In July 1946, as Chairman of the Council on African Affairs, Robeson telegramed President Truman on the lynching of four African Americans in Georgia, demanding that the federal government "take steps to apprehend and punish the perpetrators ... and to halt the rising tide of lynch law.

In September of that year, Robeson spoke at a large rally against lynching, at Madison Square Gardens. Also that September, Robeson headed a protest at the Lincoln Memorial, for the American Crusade Against Lynching, a coalition of organizations and public figures, including Albert Einstein. Following the rally, he led a delegation to the White House to present a legislative and educational program to President Truman aimed at ending mob violence; demanding that lynchers be prosecuted and calling on Congress to enact a federal anti-lynching law. Robeson then warned Truman that if the government did not do something to end lynching, "the Negroes will". He contrasted the United States lead in prosecuting Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials with the continuation of lynching at home. Truman refused the request to issue a formal public statement against lynching, stating that it was not "the right time." Robeson also gave a radio address, calling on all Americans of all races to demand that Congress pass civil rights legislation.

Tenney Committees

On October 7, 1946, Robeson testified before the Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California (Tenney Committee) that he was not a Communist Party member. He was never identified as an official member of any Communist organization. At the party's convention in Philadelphia, Robeson joined forces with the delegates from the Nisei for Wallace. The Progressive Party went on record in favor of evacuation claims for former camp residents, repeal of discriminatory laws against Japanese aliens, plus equal immigration and naturalization rights. During the campaign, Robeson organized a fund-raising concert tour in Hawaii under the auspices of the Longshoreman's Union.

Trade union activism

Robeson's belief that the labor movement and trade unionism were crucial to the civil rights of oppressed people of all races became central to his political beliefs. Many unions during the 1940s and 1950s were still characterized by segregation. Robeson's close friend, the union activist Revels Cayton, pressed for "black caucuses" in each union, with Robeson's encouragement and involvement. Domestically and internationally, Robeson enjoyed long friendships with various unions for his devotion to their causes.

Robeson also supported "Camp Wo-Chi-Ca" (Workers' Children's Camp) in New Jersey, an interracial summer camp for working class children established by the International Workers Order. Robeson would visit the camp every summer from 1940 to 1949, singing playing baseball with the children and developing an extensive musical program. In summer of 1949, Robeson also visited the largely Jewish Camp Kinderland in New York. Robeson had also become the target of conservative journalists Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper. With the United States government and media pressuring the entertainment industry into blacklisting him, in 1949 Robeson had to go overseas to work. Robeson's 1949 tour of Europe, took him to France, Britain, Scandinavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union.

There had been travel conditions put on him by the U.S. State Department upon the renewal of his passport and he signed a waiver to not make any "political or charitable appearances while on tour." Robeson was also under heavy surveillance by the CIA while abroad.

The Paris Peace Congress

As an authorized speaker for the Coordinating Committee of the Colonial Peoples of London, in April 1949, Robeson attended the Paris Peace Congress sponsored by the Soviet Union and by pro-Communist and Communist organizations. There he sang Joe Hill and spoke extemporaneously about why he thought the progressives in America did not want war. The widely publicized speech cased extreme controversy in the United States when it was misquoted by the Associated Press. Numerous biographers and historians concur that this one single event signaled the start of Robeson's status as an "enemy" of the United States government and the end of his popularity with mainstream America during the Cold War. A direct translation from the French transcripts of the live audio is as follows,

"We in America do not forget that it was the backs of white workers from Europe and on the backs of millions of Blacks that the wealth of America was built. And we are resolved to share it equally. We reject any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. We shall not make war upon the Soviet Union. We oppose those who wish to support imperialism Germany and to establish fascism in Greece. We wish peace with Franco's Spain despite her fascism. We shall support peace and friendship among all nations, with Soviet Russia and the People's Republics. "

What came over the wires to news agencies via the AP in the United States was as follows,

"We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States government which is similar to Hitler and Goebbels. We want peace and liberty and will combat for them along with the Soviet Union and the Democracies of Eastern Europe, China and Indonesia. It is unthinkable that American Negros would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has lifted our people to full human dignity. "

Research has shown that AP had put the dispatch on the wires as Robeson was starting his speech. The misquote was very similar in structure to previous Robeson speeches and his questioning at the Mundt-Nixon Bill hearings with the difference being that at the hearing Robeson had claimed to be only speaking for himself. The reaction by the press, both liberal and right wing, in the United States was nearly universal condemnation with radio commentator Walter Winchell broadcasting daily vitriolic attacks at Robeson approved by J Edgar Hoover. Jersey Home newspaper called for Robeson to be "executed in the electric chair"and Boston Sunday called him "an undesirable citizen", regretting that he had been "U.S. born."

At the urging of the State Department to make a formal statement, NAACP leaders dissociated themselves from Robeson. Roy Wilkins stated that regardless of the number of lynchings that were occurring or would occur, Black America would always serve in the armed forces. The black-owned Chicago Defender was one of the few American newspapers willing to question accuracy of the AP bulletin, while the progressive National Guardian and the Communist Daily Worker printed quotes of Robeson's speech verbatim.

USSR and Itzik Feffer

In June, he arrived in the Soviet Union, where he participated in celebrating Alexander Pushkin's 150th anniversary, including performances at Bolshoi Theatre and Tchaikovsky Hall. According to his son, Robeson was disturbed as to why he could not find his many Jewish friends, most notably Itzik Feffer, a Yiddish poet, and Solomon Mikhoels, an actor and director. As Robeson persisted, the KGB brought Feffer to Robeson who told him that the room was bugged and that Solomon Mikhoels had been murdered by the NKVD. Feffer also communicated that his own life was in danger. As neither Robeson nor Feffer ever went public about the meeting, the event and its details remains a matter of both conjecture and controversy. During his concert in Tchaikovsky Hall on June 14 - which was broadcast across the entire country - Robeson publicly paid tribute to Feffer and the late Mikhoels, singing the Vilna Partisan song "Zog Nit Keynmol" in both Russian and Yiddish. Recordings of the concert survived but Robeson's spoken words are lost.

Back in the United States, Robeson stated that he did not encounter any persecution of Jews and other political prisoners, stating that he "met Jewish people all over the place.... I heard no word about it". Herbert Hill, former labor director of the NAACP, commented on the reputed event fifty years later stating "just think what it would have meant if he had denounced this evil while in the Soviet Union and instead he comes back and he lies, he lies again and again and he knows better." Paul Robeson, Jr. said "he wasn't about to come to the United States and criticize the Soviet Union which in his mind was a barrier to world domination by the right wing of the United States."

Congressional statement by Jackie Robinson

This subsequent controversy over Robeson's remarks in Paris caused the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to investigate Robeson.

HUAC sought Jackie Robinson's testimony on the subject. Robinson was reluctant to testify to HUAC on these matters, in part because of Robeson's prior advocacy on behalf of integration in professional baseball. In July 1949, Robinson eventually agreed to testify before HUAC, fearing that declining to do so might negatively and permanently damage his career. His testimony was a major media event, with Robinson's carefully worded statement appearing on the front page of The New York Times the following day. While Robeson declined to comment on Robinson personally: "I am not going to permit the issue to boil down to a personal feud between me and Jackie. To do that, would be to do exactly what the other group wants us to do."

Civil Rights Congress and Trotskyists

In January 1949, Robeson led a conference of delegates to march on the White House, again demanding government action against lynching; President Truman refused to see them. Robeson spoke at the "Bill of Rights Conference", in New York, sponsored by CRC, again calling for an end to segregation and lynching. The 1,200 delegates issued a statement which said, in part, "We declare that Robeson does, indeed, speak for us, not only in his fight for full democratic rights, but also in his fight for peace." Robeson also spoke at a mass meeting of 1,500 sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress in support of the Trenton Six. At a Bill of Rights Conference in New York in July 1949, Robeson denounced a motion, which called for the freeing of nineteen members of the Socialist Workers Party convicted in 1941, calling the imprisoned Trotskyists- who were at odds with the Soviet leadership-"the allies of Fascism who want to destroy the new democracies of the world...let's not get confused, they are the enemies of the working class. Would you give civil rights to the Ku Klux Klan?" Biographer Martin Duberman wrote, "it was not Robeson's finest hour." On August 4, 1949 Robeson also led a picket line in front of White House, called by United Public Workers of America to protest racist hiring practices at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, challenging President Truman to make good on his civil rights promises and enforce the Fair Employment Practices Act.

Peekskill Riots

In 1949, a popular concert by Robeson in Peekskill, New York, to benefit the Civil Rights Congress resulted in the Peekskill Riots caused by anti-Communist and anti-civil rights members of local Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion chapters and also by local residents. The concert, organized as a benefit for the Civil Rights Congress, was scheduled to take place on August 27 in Lakeland Acres, just north of Peekskill. Before Robeson arrived, a mob of locals attacked concert-goers with baseball bats and rocks. Thirteen people were seriously injured before the police intervened. The concert was postponed until September 4.

The rescheduled event, on September 4, 1949, was attended by 20,000 people and went off without incident but, after the concert, a violent mob, caught on film by the press, chanting "Go back to Russia you white Niggers" and "Dirty Kikes", threw rocks through the windshields of cars and buses. Standing off the angry mob of rioters, some of the concertgoers, and union members, along with writer Howard Fast and others assembled a non-violent line of resistance, locked arms, and sang the song "We Shall Not Be Moved." Some people were reportedly dragged from their vehicles and beaten. Over 140 people were injured and numerous vehicles were severely damaged as police stood by. Following the riots, more than 300 Robeson supporters went to Albany to voice their indignation to Governor Thomas Dewey, who refused to meet with them, blaming "Communists for provoking the violence." Twenty-seven plaintiffs filed a civil suit against Westchester County and two veterans groups. The charges were dismissed three years later. Paul Robeson called the actions of the New York state troopers, who were caught on film beating concert goers, including World War I veteran and first decorated Black aviator, Eugene Bullard, as "Fascist stormtroopers who will knock down and club anyone who disagrees with them" Photographs of Eugene Bullard being beaten by two policeman, a state trooper and concert-goer were later published in Susan Robeson's pictorial biography of her grandfather.

Passport confiscation and Communist associations (1950–1955)

In March 1950, NBC canceled Robeson's scheduled appearance on former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's television program, Today with Mrs. Roosevelt. A spokesman for NBC declared that Robeson would "never appear on NBC." Press releases of the Civil Rights Congress objected that "censorship of Mr. Robeson's appearance on TV is a crude attempt to silence the outstanding spokesman for the Negro people in their fight for civil and human rights" and that our "basic democratic rights are under attack under the smoke-screen of anti-Communism." Protesters picketed NBC offices and protests arrived from numerous public figures, organizations and others.

Passport confiscated

In 1950, the State Department denied Robeson a passport and issued a "stop notice" at all ports, effectively confining him within the United States. Robeson was not allowed to travel to Canada or Mexico, countries that US citizens could visit without a passport. Far from seeking to revoke his U.S. citizenship and deport him, the FBI and state department records indicate that the US government believed that a blacklisted existence inside the United States borders would offer Robeson less freedom of expression than his presence internationally would. When Robeson and his lawyers met with officials at the State Department on August 23, 1950 and asked why it was "detrimental to the interests of the United States Government" for him to travel abroad, they were told that "his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries"—it was a "family affair." When Robeson inquired about being re-issued a passport, the State Department declined, citing Robeson's refusal to sign a statement guaranteeing "not to give any speeches while outside the U.S."

In a symbolic act of defiance against the travel ban, labor unions in the U.S. and Canada organized a concert at the International Peace Arch on the border between Washington state and the Canadian province of British Columbia on May 18, 1952. Paul Robeson stood on the back of a flat bed truck on the American side of the U.S.-Canada border and performed a concert for a crowd on the Canadian side, variously estimated at between 20,000 and 40,000 people. Robeson returned to perform a second concert at the Peace Arch in 1953, and over the next two years two further concerts were scheduled. In this period, with the encouragement of his friend the Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan, Robeson recorded a number of radio concerts for supporters in Wales. In 1956, Robeson left the United States for the first time since the travel ban was imposed, performing concerts in two Canadian cities, Sudbury and Toronto, in March of that year. The travel ban ended in 1958 when Robeson's passport was returned to him after eight years of protracted legal struggles and defeats.

"We Charge Genocide" petition

Although unable to travel outside the United States, Robeson continued to be politically active. He presented to the United Nations in New York on December 17, 1951 an anti-lynching petition, "We Charge Genocide". It was also presented to a UN delegation in Paris. The document asserted that the U.S. federal government, by its failure to act against lynching in the United States, was "guilty of genocide" under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention.

"Paul Robeson - the Lost Shepherd"

In 1951 an article titled "Paul Robeson - the Lost Shepherd" was published in The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, under the pseudonym "Robert Alan", described as "a well known New York journalist". In actuality, the author was NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins.

J. Edgar Hoover and the United States State Department arranged for the article to be printed and distributed in Africa. Guidelines issued through the US Consulate in Accra, Ghana, on how to deal with Robeson's reputation included the following instructions:

"USIE in the Gold Coast, and I suspect everywhere else in Africa, badly needs a through-going, sympathetic and regretful but straight talking treatment of the whole Robeson episode...there's no way the Communists score on us more easily and more effectively out here, than on the US. Negro problem in general, and on the Robeson case in particular. And, answering the latter, we go a long way toward answering the former. "

Another article by Roy Wilkins, called "Stalin's Greatest Defeat", denounced Robeson as well as the Communist Party of the USA in terms consistent with the FBI's information. In April 1953, shortly after Stalin's death, Robeson penned a eulogy entitled To You Beloved Comrade, praising Stalin as being dedicated to peace and a guidance to the world: "Through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage."

After Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalinism at the 1956 Party Congress, Robeson neither publicly denounced nor praised Stalin, though he continued to praise the Soviet Union. In 1956, Robeson, along with close friend W. E. B. Du Bois, compared the anti-Stalinist revolution in Hungary to the "same sort of people who overthrew the Spanish Republican Government" and supported the Soviet invasion and suppression of the revolt.

Robeson is often criticized for accepting the Stalin Peace Prize, eulogizing Stalin, and continuing to support the Soviet Union and not formally denouncing the regime, despite conflicting accounts that show his awareness of state-sponsored intimidation and murder. Robeson refused; in his opinion, the existence of the USSR was the guarantee of political balance in the world. Robeson's biographers, including Martin Duberman, Philip S Foner, Scott Allen Nollen, Dr, Charles Wright, Marie Seton, Paul Robeson Jr and Lloyd Brown, argue that he felt that criticism of the Soviet Union by someone of his international standing would only serve to shore up reactionary elements in the U.S. Robeson's experiences in the USSR continue to cause controversy among historians and scholars as well as fans and journalists.

Blacklisting and international response (1956–1958)

In 1956, Robeson was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities after he refused to sign an affidavit affirming that he was not a Communist. In response to questions concerning his alleged party membership, Robeson insisted that the Communist Party was a legal party and invited its members to join him in the voting booth before he invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to respond. Robeson refused to discuss Joseph Stalin, calling it "a question for the Soviet Union", instead lambasting committee members on civil rights issues and the enslavement and exploitation of blacks throughout American history. Asked why he had not remained in the Soviet Union, he replied that "because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you and no fascist minded people will drive me from it! Is that clear?"

"Let Paul Robeson Sing"

Campaigns were simultaneously launched in the USA and UK to protest the passport ban. In the UK, The National Paul Robeson Committee was formed, sponsored by Members of Parliament as well as writers, scholars, actors, lawyers, trade union leaders and others. The Committee began a "Let Paul Robeson Sing" mass petition, which gathered signatures from tens of thousands of supporters. Over the next four years, many prominent figures in Britain argued for the restoration of Robeson's right to travel. The group held a conference and concert at St Pancras Town Hall, London headed by Cedric Belfrage, on May 26, 1957 with Robeson singing direct from New York over a telephone connection.

Trans-Atlantic telephone concert for the Welsh miners

In 1957, Robeson was invited by Welsh miners to be the honored guest at the annual Eisteddfod Music Festival. An appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States to restitute his confiscated passport had been rejected, but through the newly completed trans-Atlantic telephone hook-up between New York and Porthcawl, Wales, Robeson was able to sing to the 5,000 gathered there as he had earlier in the year to London. Journalist Gil Noble called the concert "perhaps the most emotional and moving in Robeson's long concert career."

Disappearance from the media

Because of the controversy surrounding him, Paul Robeson's recordings and films lost mainstream distribution and he was universally condemned in the mainstream U.S press. During the height of the Cold War it became increasingly difficult in the United States to hear Robeson sing on commercial radio, buy his music or to see any of his films, including Show Boat.

In the United States very little media footage of Robeson now exists, including in the Library of Congress, as the majority of U.S. newsreel footage has been either destroyed or has the sound erased.

Erasure from sports records

The 1950 volume, College Football Hall of Fame, labeled "the most complete record on college football", omits Robeson, identifying only a ten-man team. Martin Duberman wrote that due to his blacklisting within the mainstream media, the concert stage, theater, radio, film and the civil rights movement, Robeson became an outcast, very nearly a nonperson."

Comeback (1958–1961)

Robeson's autobiography, Here I Stand, was published by a British publishing company in 1958. As part of his "comeback", he gave two sold-out recitals that month in Carnegie Hall, which were released on LP and later on CD. They were his only stereo recordings.

Also that year, Robeson's 60th birthday was celebrated in several US cities and twenty-seven countries across Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, as well as in the Soviet Union. Later, in May 1958, his passport was finally restored and he was able to travel again, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Kent vs. Dulles, that the Secretary of State had no right to deny a passport or require any citizen to sign an affidavit because of his political beliefs. Robeson and Eslanda moved to the United Kingdom landing there on July 11, 1958 and traveled extensively, using London as their base of operations. During this period Robeson was under constant surveillance by the CIA, MI6 and the State Department.

Tours of Britain and the USSR

In the United Kingdom, Robeson found himself deluged with professional offers. His numerous appearances included a formal concert at the Albert Hall and a book autographing party at Selfridges.

In August, 1959 he left for Moscow where he received a tumultuous reception and needed a police escort at the airport. A crowd of eighteen thousand people filled the Lenin Stadium (Khabarovsk) to capacity on August 17, 1959 where Robeson sang classic Russian songs along with his standards. Robeson and Eslanda then flew to Crimea to spend time at Yalta resting, working with a documentary film crew and spending time with Nikita Khrushchev. Robeson also visited Young Pioneer camp Artek before returning to the UK.

On October 11, 1959 Robeson took part in a historic service at St.Paul's Cathedral, being the first black and the first secular performer to sing there. Four thousand people attended the evensong performance with hundreds overflowing onto the streets. Robeson had then planned to leave for India as a guest of Nehru but was prevented by the weather. The US State Department had circulated negative literature about him through the media in India; one censored CIA memo suggested that Robeson's appearance could be used to thwart the desegregation of a swimming pool.

On a trip to Moscow, Robeson started to develop bouts of dizziness and the beginning of heart problems. His trip India was definitively canceled, and he was hospitalized for two months along with his wife Eslanda who was diagnosed with operable cancer.

Wales and final performance of Othello

Robeson recovered and returned to the U.K. to fulfill his engagements.In 1958, he visited the National Eisteddfod in Ebbw Vale as the guest of the local MP Aneurin Bevan, revisited his ties to the black community in Cardiff's Butetown and gave performances throughout Europe. During his run at the Royal Shakespeare Company playing Othello in Tony Richardson's 1959 production at Stratford-upon-Avon, he befriended actor Andrew Faulds who's family he was staying with in the nearby village of Shottery while performing. Robeson inspired him to take up a career in politics after admonishing him for being apolitical. The production of Othello was geared towards Robeson's health concerns but gave him a lucrative seven month run and chance to participate in an updated version of the play directed by Tony Richardson. In 1960, in what would prove to be Paul Robeson's final concert performance in Great Britain, he sang with the Welsh Male Voice Choir, Côr Meibion Cwmbach, to raise money for the Movement for Colonial Freedom at the Royal Festival Hall.

Tour of Australia and New Zealand

Though starting to show the beginning of heart problems and fatigue, Robeson accepted a lucrative tour of Australia, and New Zealand in October to November 1960.

The most notable of his appearances was at the Sydney Opera House, still under construction. Robeson stood on the foundations and sang Ol Man River and 'Joe Hill. Many of the workers had him autograph their hard hats following the performance.

Apart from his public concerts, he spoke about unionism and the indigenous peoples of both countries then sang several numbers. Robeson also sang to striking waterside workers in Wellington and accepted membership in their union.

Visiting rural community centers and presented with indigenous art including a painting by Australian artist Albert Namatjira, Davis recalled Robeson's arrival in Perth on the last leg of his tour,

"...when he spotted a group of local aborigines shyly hanging back, he instantly headed for them, moving through the crowd like a full back. When he reached them, he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms, and when he moved toward his waiting transport, the aborigines moved with him. Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, 'Mum, he likes us.'"

Lloyd Davis felt that Robeson's words and gestures during his tour "gave a tremendous boost to the aboriginal cause"

During this tour for the first time news-sources of diverse political views reported that he was responding to questions at press conferences with "anger and bitterness." Some headlines included The Herald printing, "Would Back Russia in a War" and "Robeson Bitterly Critical of the U.S.", with the Telegraph stating "I Wish He Was Still Bosambo."

In Auckland he reputedly told the press he was only "here to sing" and then declared himself a "rigid Marxist.". While expressing concern about the mistreatment of the Māoris Robeson said, "I want to learn Māori songs and as much as I can of the Māori language." and "...the people of the lands of Socialism want peace dearly,"

The nine week tour would prove to be the final concert tour of his forty year career.

Back in London, he began to plan his return to the U.S. to participate in the Civil Rights Movement, stopping off in Africa, China and Cuba along the way. His wife Eslanda argued to stay in London, fearing that he'd be "killed" if he returned to the US and "unable to make any money" due to harassment by the US government. Robeson disagreed and made his own travel arrangements, stopping off in Moscow in March 1961.

Health breakdown (1961–1965)

In spring of 1961, Robeson again traveled to the Soviet Union, his last visit there. During an uncharacteristically wild party in his Moscow hotel room, he locked himself in his bedroom and attempted suicide by cutting his wrists.

Robeson stayed at the Barvikha Sanatorium until September 1961, when he left Moscow for London. There his depression re-emerged, and after another period of recuperation in Moscow, he returned to London. Three days after arriving back he became suicidal and suffered a panic attack while passing the Soviet Embassy. He was admitted to The Priory hospital, where he underwent electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and was given heavy doses of drugs for nearly two years, with no accompanying psychotherapy.

During his treatment at the Priory, Robeson was being monitored by the British MI5. Both U.S. and British intelligence services were well aware of Robeson's suicidal state of mind. An FBI memo described Robeson's debilitated condition, remarking that his "death would be much publicized" and would be used for Communist propaganda, making continued surveillance imperative. Numerous memos also advised that Robeson should be denied a passport renewal which would ostensibly jeopardize his fragile health and the recovery process he was engaged in overseas. Given psychotherapy and less medication, his physicians found him still "completely without initiative" and they expressed "doubt and anger" about the "high level of barbiturates and ECT" that had been administered in London. He rapidly improved, though his doctor stressed that "what little is left of Paul's health must be quietly conserved."

Paul Robeson, Jr. argued for years that his father's health problems stemmed from attempts by CIA and MI5 to "neutralize" his father. He remembered that his father had such fears prior to his prostate operation. He said that three doctors treating Robeson in London and New York had been CIA contractors, Martin Duberman's view was that given the most available evidence, Paul Robeson's health breakdown was brought on by a combination of factors including extreme emotional and physical stress, bipolar depression, exhaustion and the beginning of circulatory and heart problems. Duberman added that "even without an organic predisposition and accumulated pressures of government harassment he might have been susceptible to a breakdown".

Later years (1966–1976)

, Philadelphia]] In 1963, Robeson eventually returned to the United States and for the remainder of his life lived in quiet seclusion. He had intended to assume a role in the civil rights movement, making a few major public appearances before falling seriously ill during a tour, nearly dying from double pneumonia and a kidney blockage in 1965. Robeson moved in with his son's family in an Upper West Side apartment in New York City and in 1968, he finally settled at his sister's home in Philadelphia. Robeson agreed, but Malcolm X was assassinated before the meeting could be arranged.

Following Hansberry's funeral, Robeson was also contacted by both Bayard Rustin and James L. Farmer, Jr. about the possibility of becoming involved with the mainstream of the Civil Rights movement. Due to Rustin's past anti-Communist stances, Robeson declined to meet with him. Robeson eventually met with Farmer but was asked to denounce Communism and the Soviet Union in order to assume a place in the mainstream, Robeson adamantly declined.

Life in Philadelphia

Living at his sister Marian's home Robeson saw few visitors aside from very close friends and gave few statements apart from a few messages to support current civil rights and international movements, feeling that his record "spoke for itself". In her book Paul Robeson's Last Days in Philadelphia, Charlotte Turner Bell, a local music teacher and Robeson friend chronicled the time she spent accompanying Robeson on the piano each Sunday and of his life in retirement.

Birthday celebrations

In 1968, events were held all over the world in honor of Paul Robeson's 70th birthday including a three day celebration in East Germany. There was also an evening of music and poetry in London at the Royal Festival Hall featuring Mary Ure, Peggy Ashcroft, Peter O'Toole and Michael Redgrave. In Moscow, speakers included the writer Boris Nikolaevich Polevoy and the poet Mikhail Kotov. The black commission of the CPUSA celebration remarked that "the white power structure has generated a conspiracy of silence around Paul Robeson. It wants to blot out all knowledge of this pioneering Black American warrior..." He lay in state for a viewing at Benta's Funeral Home in Harlem for two days. His granddaughter, Susan Robeson, recalled "...watching this parade of humanity who came to pay their respects...from the numbers runner on the corner to Gustaf VI Adolf, King of Sweden."

Condolences came from around the world, including Coretta Scott King, who deplored "America's inexcusable treatment" of a man who had had "the courage to point out her injustices." According to Robeson biographer, Martin Duberman:

"The white press, after decades of harassing Robeson, now tipped its hat to a 'great American,' paid its gingerly respect in editorials that ascribed the vituperation leveled at Robeson in his lifetime to the Bad Old Days of the Cold War, implied those days were forever gone, downplayed the racist component central to his persecution, and ignored the continuing inability of white America to tolerate a black maverick who refused to bend. The black press made no such mistakes. It had never, overall, been as hostile to Robeson as the white press, (though at some points in his career, nearly so)." Thousands more, mostly African Americans, stood outside in the rain throughout the service, listening on the public address system as speakers, including Harry Belafonte, paid tribute. continue to celebrate his memory as an ally, as do the people of Wales. In the arts, his popularizing of Negro Spirituals has been cited and paid tribute to by singers including Sir Willard White. While film industry figures and historians have written of his groundbreaking work in cinema as the first major black actor unwilling to play stereotypes.

Paul Robeson Archives

, 1981]] The Paul Robeson Archive was established in East Berlin in 1965. Robeson was a popular figure in East Germany, where he received an honorary doctorate from Humboldt University in 1960 among other awards. The archives were founded by Victor Grossman, a journalist for GDR radio and are now located at the John F. Kennedy School in Berlin. Due to meticulous collecting by Eslanda Robeson, over 55,000 pieces of Robeson related memorabilia, film, books, photos and ephemera were archived and cataloged into "The Paul and Eslanda Robeson Archives." Formally frhn The collection is reposited at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

Omission and restoration to historical records

Due to Robeson's lengthy and extensive blacklisting during the 1950s, his long career and achievements are difficult to find in most mainstream interpretations of history, including in-depth books on sports history, entertainment, civil rights and black history.In the United States very little media footage of Robeson now exists, including in the Library of Congress, as the majority of U.S. newsreel footage has been either destroyed or has the sound erased. Atkinson chronicles African-American performers, Show Boat and Eugene O'Neill but only mentions Robeson briefly in context with Othelllo. In the early 1970s, The New York Times and The New York Daily News both ran extensive pieces on black actors who played Othello with no mention of Robeson. Robeson's name was also not listed in the American edition of Marquis Who's Who, appearing in only the international editions. In the early 1970s, Rutgers professor Eugene H. Robinson found that Robeson was not mentioned in nine different American encyclopedias. Professor Harold Weaver estimated that 75% of black students at Rutgers did not know who Robeson was. In 1949, Robeson's name was retroactively struck from the roster of the 1917 and 1918 college All-America football team. In 1995, 45 years after his erasure, Robeson's name was fully restored to the Rutgers University sports records and his name placed in the College Football Hall of Fame.

Posthumous honors

1970s

The first memorial following Robeson's 1976 funeral was a tribute held in US House of Representatives January 28, 1976. Throughout 1976 memorials were held at Rutgers; The World Peace Council in Athens, Greece; Columbia University, New York City; Toronto; Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.; and by Actor's Equity in Los Angeles. Directed by Saul J. Turell, it won an Academy Award for best short documentary.

In 1976 NBC approached Paul Robeson, Jr. asking permission to create a three hour documentary on his father. Robeson, Jr. turned down the request, regarding it as offensive given their treatment of his father during his lifetime.

Beginning in 1978, Paul Robeson's films were finally shown again on American television, with Show Boat making its cable television debut in 1983. In recent years, all of Robeson's films have appeared on Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics channels.

Also in 1978, the former "Stolpestrasse" in East-Berlin, Germany, was renamed Paul-Robeson-Strasse in honor of the popular performer. To this day (2011), it is still named so.

1990s

On January 18, 1995 Paul Robeson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, a step taken by the National Football Foundation which many called "long-overdue". and art gallery after him. and Rutgers University New Brunswick Campus named one of their cultural centers, The Paul Robeson Cultural Center. and the Rutgers-Camden campus also named their library, the Paul Robeson Library.

During the centenary of Paul Robeson's birth in 1998, around the world, over four hundred celebrations took place with over twenty Robeson centennial events held in the San Francisco Bay area alone. These included film showings, musical and educational programs, art exhibitions, a two-hour PBS documentary, as well as the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award. President Bill Clinton sent a greeting to celebration of the Robeson Centennial in Westchester County, New York, stating: "A century after Paul Robeson's birth, we live in a nation that is stronger because of his vision and eloquent voice."

In 1998 the San Francisco Bay Area Post of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade presented "Paul Robeson: The Artist Must Take Sides" in tribute. The program consisted of a dramatic performance by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, with slides and commentary, and keynote speaker Professor Sterling Stuckey. Paul Robeson's image is also featured prominently in a historical monument dedicated to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade which was unveiled on The Embarcadero, San Francisco in 2008 by actor Peter Coyote.

2000s

Robeson has remained a celebrated cultural figure in Wales. The exhibition Let Paul Robeson Sing! was unveiled in Cardiff in 2001. A number of Welsh artists have celebrated Robeson's life: the Manic Street Preachers' song "Let Robeson Sing" appears on the album Know Your Enemy. Martyn Joseph's song "Proud Valley Boy" on his 2005 album Deep Blue is also based on Robeson's Welsh connections. In 2010 Susan Robeson launched a project by Swansea University and the Welsh Assembly, to create an online learning resource in her grandfather's memory.

An English Heritage Blue Plaque was unveiled in 2002 at the house in Hampstead, London where Robeson resided during the 1920s and 1930s.

In 2004 Paul Robeson was featured on a US postage stamp, the 27th stamp in the Black Heritage Series. The Stamp Unveiling Ceremony was held at Princeton University, with Paul Robeson, Jr. participating.

In 2006 a Tribute to Paul Robeson was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

On September 26, 2009, Edgecombe Avenue and 160th Street in Washington Heights, Manhattan, were renamed as Paul Robeson Boulevard and Count Basie Place.

Published works

Here I Stand. Beacon Press (1958), 1971 edition with Preface by Lloyd L. Brown. 1988 edition with an Introduction by Sterling Stuckey. ISBN 0-8070-6445-9 ISBN 0-304-70351-6

Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918–1974, edited with an introduction by Philip S. Foner, Brunner, 1978.

Paul Robeson: Tributes, Selected Writings, compiled and edited by Roberta Yancy Dent with the assistance of Marilyn Robeson and Paul Robeson, Jr., The Archives, 1976.

"The Great Forerunner" in Freedomways, 1971; Dodd, 1978; enlarged, 1985.

Filmography

Body and Soul (1924)

Camille (1926)

Borderline (1930)

The Emperor Jones (1933)

Sanders of the River (1935)

Show Boat (1936)

Song of Freedom (1936)

Big Fella (1937)

My Song Goes Forth (1937)

King Solomon's Mines (1937)

Jericho/Dark Sands (1937)

The Proud Valley (1940)

Native Land (1942)

Tales of Manhattan (1942)

The Song of the Rivers (1954)

Notes

References

Bogle, Donald (2001). Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, Fourth Edition

Boyle, Sheila Tully, and Andrew Bunie (2001). Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement. University of Massachusetts Press ISBN 1-55849-149-X

Brown, Lloyd (1998) On My Journey Now: The Young Paul Robeson Basic Books ISBN 0-8133-3177-3

Duberman, Martin Bauml (1988). Paul Robeson Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Also Reissue edition (1995) New Press. ISBN 1-56584-288-X.

Foner, Henry (2001). Paul Robeson: A Century of Greatness

Foner, Philip S. (1978). Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, and Interviews, a Centennial Celebration. Citadel Press; Reprint edition (September 1, 1982). 644 pages. ISBN 0-8065-0815-9.

Ford, Carin T (2001). Paul Robeson: "I Want to make Freedom Ring". Enslow Publishers

Goudsouzian, Aram. (2004). Sidney Poitier: man, actor, icon. University of North Carolina Press

Naison, Mark (1998). "Paul Robeson and the American Labor Movement" in Stewart, Jeffrey C. (ed.) Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen. Rutgers University Press and The Paul Robeson Cultural Center. ISBN 0-8135-2510-1 ISBN 0-8135-2511-X

Nollen, Scott Allen (2010). Paul Robeson: Film Pioneer.. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-3520-8

Robeson, Eslanda. Paul Robeson, Negro, V. Gollancz; 1st edition (1930) ASIN: B0006E8ML4

Robeson, Paul, Jr. (1971) "Paul Robeson: Black Warrior", in Freedomways The Great Forerunner, pages 3–16

Robeson Paul, Jr. (2001) The Undiscovered Paul Robeson, An Artist's Journey, 1898-1939. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-24265-9

Robeson Paul, Jr. (2010) The Undiscovered Paul Robeson, Quest for Freedom, 1940-1976. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-40973-1

Robeson, Susan (1981). The Whole World in His Hands: A Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson Citadel Press; 1st edition ISBN 0-8065-0754-3

Robinson, Eugene H. (1971) "A Distant Image: Paul Robeson and Rutgers' Students", in Freedomways The Great Forerunner, pages 178–188.

Seton, Marie (1958). Paul Robeson. D. Dobson.

Smethurst, James Edward (2005). The Black Arts Movement: literary nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. University of North Carolina Press

Harris, Francis C. (1998) "Paul Robeson: An Athlete's Legacy" in Stewart, Jeffrey C. (ed.) Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen. Rutgers University Press and The Paul Robeson Cultural Center. ISBN 0-8135-2510-1 ISBN 0-8135-2511-X

Wright, Charles (1975) Paul Robeson: Labor's Forgotten Champion. Balamp Pub Co. ISBN 0-913642-06-1

Turner, Charlotte (1986). Paul Robeson's Last Days in Philadelphia

Further reading

Balaji, Murali. The Professor and the Pupil: The Politics and Friendship of W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson (Nation Books, 2007) ISBN 1-56858-355-9

Dorinson, Joseph and William Pencak with foreword by Henry Foner. Paul Robeson: Essays on His Life and Legacy (Oct 15, 2004) ISBN 0-7864-1153-8

Du Bois, Shirley Graham. Paul Robeson, Citizen of the World. (Julian Messner, June 1, 1971) ISBN 0-671-32464-0; (Greenwood Pub Group, January 1, 1972) ISBN 0-86543-468-9; (Africa World Pr, January 1, 1998), ISBN 0-86543-469-7; (Africa World Pr, April 1, 1998), ISBN 0-8371-6055-3

Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: British Film Institute, 1986; Routledge, 2003, 2nd ed.) ISBN 0-415-31026-1 Robeson is one of the three film stars profiled.

Holmes, Burnham. ''Paul Robeson: A Voice of Struggle (Heinemann Library, September 1, 1994) ISBN 0-8114-2381-6

Larsen, Rebecca. Paul Robeson: Hero Before His Time (Franklin Watts, September 1, 1989), ISBN 0-531-10779-5

McKissack, Pat, Fredrick McKissack and Michael David Biegel (illustrator). Paul Robeson: A Voice to Remember. Library (Enslow Pub Inc, May 1, 2001), ISBN 0-89490-310-1

Nash, Elizabeth. "Autobiographical Reminiscences of African-American Classical Singers, 1853-Present".(Edwin Mellen Press, 2007). ISBN 0-7734-5250-8.(192-194, 438-445)

Rappaport, Louis. Stalin's War Against the Jews: The Doctors Plot & The Soviet Solution, Free Press (October 1, 1990) ISBN 0-02-925821-9

Reiner, Carl. How Paul Robeson Saved My Life and Other Mostly Happy Stories (Cliff Street Books, October 1, 1999), Cassette/Spoken Word (Dove Entertainment Inc, October 1, 1999). ISBN 0-06-019451-0

Stuckey, Sterling. I Want to Be African: Paul Robeson and the Ends of Nationalist Theory and Practice, 1919–1945 (Univ of California Center for Afro, June 1, 1976) ISBN 0-934934-15-0

Wright, David K. Paul Robeson: Actor, Singer, Political Activist (Univ of California Center for Afro, June 1, 1976) ISBN 0-934934-15-0

Film documentaries about Robeson

The Tallest Tree in Our Forest (1977)

(1979)

(1998)

(1999) PBS American Masters, directed by St. Clair Bourne

External links

The Paul Robeson Foundation, Inc.

Paul Robeson digital archive at Rutgers University

The Paul Robeson House and stories history project

Testimony of Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, June 12, 1956

The FBI Files of Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson Biography, The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany

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Name	Paul McCartney
Birth name	James Paul McCartney
Background	solo_singer
Img alt	A man in his sixties, wearing a white shirt and black suspenders during a concert, playing a bass guitar.
Birth name	James Paul McCartney
Born	June 18, 1942Liverpool, England
Instrument	Vocals, bass guitar, guitar, piano, organ, mellotron, keyboards, drums, ukulele, mandolin, double bass, recorder, trumpet, flugelhorn, melodica
Genre	Rock, pop, psychedelic rock, experimental rock, rock and roll, hard rock, classical music
Occupation	Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, composer, film producer, painter, activist, businessman
Years active	1957–present
Label	Hear Music, Apple, Parlophone, Capitol, Columbia, Concord Music Group, EMI, One Little Indian, Vee-Jay
Associated acts	The Quarrymen, The Beatles, Wings, The Fireman, Linda McCartney, John Lennon, Denny Laine
Url
Notable instruments	Höfner 500/1Rickenbacker 4001SGibson Les PaulEpiphone TexanEpiphone CasinoFender EsquireFender Jazz BassYamaha BB1200 BassWal 5-String BassMartin D-28

Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE (born 18 June 1942) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of The Beatles (1960–1970) and Wings (1971–1981), McCartney is the most commercially successful songwriter in the history of popular music, according to Guinness World Records.

McCartney gained worldwide fame as a member of The Beatles, alongside John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. McCartney and Lennon formed one of the most influential and successful songwriting partnerships and wrote some of the most popular songs in the history of rock music. After leaving The Beatles, McCartney launched a successful solo career and formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine. McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the "most successful musician and composer in popular music history", with 60 gold discs and sales of 100 million singles in the UK.

BBC News Online readers named McCartney the "greatest composer of the millennium", and BBC News cites his Beatles song "Yesterday" as the most covered song in the history of recorded music—by over 2,200 artists—and since its 1965 release, has been played more than 7,000,000 times on American television and radio according to the BBC. Based on the 93 weeks his compositions have spent at the top spot of the UK chart, and 24 number one singles to his credit, McCartney is the most successful songwriter in UK singles chart history. As a performer or songwriter, McCartney was responsible for 32 number one singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, and has sold 15.5 million RIAA certified albums in the US alone.

McCartney has composed film scores, classical and electronic music, released a large catalogue of songs as a solo artist, and has taken part in projects to help international charities. He is an advocate for animal rights, for vegetarianism, and for music education; he is active in campaigns against landmines, seal hunting, and Third World debt. He is a keen football fan, supporting both Everton and Liverpool football clubs. His company MPL Communications owns the copyrights to more than 3,000 songs, including all of the songs written by Buddy Holly, along with the publishing rights to such musicals as Guys and Dolls, A Chorus Line, and Grease. McCartney is one of the UK's wealthiest people, with an estimated fortune of £475 million in 2010.

Childhood

McCartney was born in Walton Hospital in Liverpool, England, where his mother, Mary (née Mohan), had worked as a nurse in the maternity ward. He has one brother, Michael, born 7 January 1944. McCartney was baptised Roman Catholic but was raised non-denominationally: his mother was Roman Catholic and his father James, or "Jim" McCartney, was a Protestant turned agnostic.

In 1947, he began attending Stockton Wood Road Primary School. He then attended the Joseph Williams Junior School and passed the 11-plus exam in 1953 with three others out of the 90 examinees, thus gaining admission to the Liverpool Institute. In 1954, while taking the bus from his home in the suburb of Speke to the Institute, he met George Harrison, who lived nearby. Passing the exam meant that McCartney and Harrison could go to a grammar school rather than a secondary modern school, which the majority of pupils attended until they were eligible to work, but as grammar school pupils, they had to find new friends.

now attracts large numbers of tourists.|alt=Exterior of a two-story brick building, with a hedge in front of it. Six windows are visible, three on each level, as are two doorways on the lower level.]] In 1955, the McCartney family moved to 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton. Mary McCartney rode a bicycle to houses where she was needed as a midwife, and an early McCartney memory is of her leaving when it was snowing heavily. On 31 October 1956, Mary McCartney, a heavy smoker, died of an embolism after a mastectomy operation to stop the spread of her breast cancer. The early loss of his mother later connected McCartney with John Lennon, whose mother Julia died after being struck by a car when Lennon was 17.

McCartney's father was a trumpet player and pianist who had led Jim Mac's Jazz Band in the 1920s and encouraged his two sons to be musical. Jim had an upright piano in the front room that he had bought from Epstein's North End Music Stores. McCartney's grandfather, Joe McCartney, played an E-flat tuba. Jim McCartney used to point out the different instruments in songs on the radio, and often took McCartney to local brass band concerts. McCartney's father gave him a nickel-plated trumpet, but when skiffle music became popular, McCartney swapped the trumpet for a £15 Framus Zenith (model 17) acoustic guitar. As he was left-handed, McCartney found right-handed guitars difficult to play, but when he saw a poster advertising a Slim Whitman concert, he realised that Whitman played left-handed with his guitar strung the opposite way to a right-handed player. McCartney wrote his first song ("I Lost My Little Girl") on the Zenith, and also played his father's Framus Spanish guitar when writing early songs with Lennon. He later learned to play the piano and wrote his second song, "When I'm Sixty-Four". On his father's advice, he took music lessons, but since he preferred to learn 'by ear' he never paid much attention to them.

McCartney was heavily influenced by American Rhythm and Blues music. He has stated that Little Richard was his idol when he was in school and that the first song he ever sang in public was "Long Tall Sally", at a Butlins holiday camp talent competition.

Musical career

1957–1960

At the age of 15, McCartney met John Lennon and The Quarrymen at the St. Peter's Church Hall fête in Woolton on 6 July 1957. He formed a close working relationship with Lennon and they collaborated writing many songs. Harrison joined the group in early 1958 as lead guitarist, followed in early 1960 by Lennon's art school friend, Stuart Sutcliffe on bass. By May 1960, they had tried several new names, including "Johnny and the Moondogs" and "The Silver Beetles", playing a tour of Scotland under that name with Johnny Gentle. They finally changed the name of the group to "The Beatles" in mid-August 1960 and recruited Pete Best at short-notice to become their drummer for an imminent engagement in Hamburg.

1960–1970: The Beatles

and John Lennon]] From August 1960, The Beatles were booked by Allan Williams, to perform at a club in Hamburg. During extended stays over the next two years, The Beatles performed as a resident group in a number of Hamburg clubs. On returns to Liverpool they played at the Cavern club. Prior to the end of the residency, Sutcliffe left the band, so McCartney, reluctantly, became The Beatles' bass player. The Beatles recorded their first published musical material in Hamburg, performing as the backing group for Tony Sheridan on the single "My Bonnie". This recording later brought the Beatles to the attention of a key figure in their subsequent development and commercial success, Brian Epstein, who became their next manager. Epstein eventually negotiated a record contract for the group with Parlophone in May 1962. After replacing Best with Ringo Starr on drums, The Beatles became popular in the UK in 1963 and in the US in 1964. In 1965, they were each appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). After performing concerts, plays, and tours almost non-stop for a period of nearly four years, and giving more than one thousand four hundred live performances internationally, The Beatles gave their last commercial concert at the end of their 1966 US tour. They continued to work in the recording studio from 1966 until their break-up in 1970. In the eight years from 1962 to 1970, the group had released twenty-four UK singles and twelve studio albums, often released in different configurations in the USA and other countries (see discography).

Since 1970

concert, 1976]] After the break-up of The Beatles, McCartney continued his musical career, in solo work as well as in collaborations with other musicians. After releasing his solo album McCartney in 1970, he worked with Linda McCartney to record the album Ram in 1971. Later the same year, the pair were joined by guitarist Denny Laine and drummer Denny Seiwell to form the group Wings, which was active between 1971 and 1981 and released numerous successful singles and albums (see discography). McCartney also collaborated with a number of other popular artists including Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Eric Stewart, and Elvis Costello. In 1985, McCartney played "Let It Be" at the Live Aid concert in London, backed by Bob Geldof, Pete Townshend, David Bowie, and Alison Moyet. The 1990s saw McCartney venture into orchestral music, and in 1991 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society commissioned a musical piece by McCartney to celebrate its sesquicentennial.

He collaborated with Carl Davis to release Liverpool Oratorio; involving the opera singers Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Sally Burgess, Jerry Hadley and Willard White, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the choir of Liverpool Cathedral. The Prince of Wales later honoured McCartney as a Fellow of The Royal College of Music and Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music (2008). Other forays into classical music included Standing Stone (1997), Working Classical (1999), and Ecce Cor Meum (2006). It was announced in the 1997 New Year Honours that McCartney was to be knighted for services to music, becoming Sir Paul McCartney. In 1999, McCartney was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist and in May 2000, he was awarded a Fellowship by the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters. The 1990s also saw McCartney, Harrison, and Starr working together on Apple's The Beatles Anthology documentary series.

Having witnessed the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks from the JFK airport tarmac, McCartney took a lead role in organising The Concert for New York City. In November 2002, on the first anniversary of George Harrison's death, McCartney performed at the Concert for George. He has also participated in the National Football League's Super Bowl, performing in the pre-game show for Super Bowl XXXVI and headlining the halftime show at Super Bowl XXXIX.

in 2009.]] McCartney has continued to work in the realms of popular and classical music, touring the world and performing at a large number of concerts and events; on more than one occasion he has performed again with Ringo Starr. In 2008, he received a BRIT award for Outstanding Contribution to Music and an honorary degree, Doctor of Music, from Yale University. The same year, he performed at a concert in Liverpool to celebrate the city's year as European Capital of Culture. In 2009, he received two nominations for the 51st annual Grammy awards, while in October of the same year he was named songwriter of the year at the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Awards. On 15 July 2009, more than 45 years after The Beatles first appeared on American television on The Ed Sullivan Show, McCartney returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater and performed atop the marquee of Late Show with David Letterman. McCartney was portrayed in the 2009 film Nowhere Boy, about Lennon's teenage years, by Thomas Sangster.

On 2 June 2010, McCartney was honoured by Barack Obama with the Gershwin Prize for his contributions to popular music in a live show for the White House with performances by Stevie Wonder, Lang Lang and many others.

McCartney's enduring popularity has helped him schedule performances in new venues. He played three sold out concerts at newly-built Citi Field in Queens, New York (built to replace the Shea Stadium) in July 2009. On 18 August 2010, McCartney opened the Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

McCartney has been touring for the past ten years with guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray, Paul "Wix" Wickens on keyboards and drummer Abe Laboriel, Jr. They performed together on 13 July 2010 in Salt Lake City as part of the Up and Coming Tour.

There are plans for an upcoming Paul McCartney tribute album to be released in 2010 with recordings of McCartney songs by Kiss, Garth Brooks, Billy Joel, B.B. King and others.

Creative outlets

During the 1960s, McCartney was often seen at major cultural events, such as the launch party for the International Times and at The Roundhouse (28 January and 4 February 1967 respectively). He also delved into the visual arts, becoming a close friend of leading art dealers and gallery owners, explored experimental film, and regularly attended movie, theatrical and classical music performances. His first contact with the London avant-garde scene was through John Dunbar, who introduced him to the art dealer Robert Fraser, who in turn introduced McCartney to an array of writers and artists. McCartney later became involved in the renovation and publicising of the Indica Gallery in Mason's Yard, London—John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at the Indica. The Indica Gallery brought McCartney into contact with Barry Miles, whose underground newspaper, the International Times, McCartney helped to start. Miles would become de facto manager of the Apple's short-lived Zapple Records label, and wrote McCartney's official biography, Many Years From Now (1997).

While living at the Asher house, McCartney took piano lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which The Beatles' producer Martin had previously attended. McCartney studied composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio. McCartney later wrote and released several pieces of modern classical music and ambient electronica, besides writing poetry and painting. McCartney is lead patron of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, an arts school in the building formerly occupied by the Liverpool Institute for Boys. The 1837 building, which McCartney attended during his schooldays, had become derelict by the mid-1980s. for the American network Westwood One, which he described as being "wide-screen radio". During the 1990s, McCartney collaborated with Youth of Killing Joke under the name The Fireman, and released two ambient electronic albums: Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest (1993) and Rushes (1998). In 2000, he released an album titled Liverpool Sound Collage with Super Furry Animals and Youth, utilising the sound collage and musique concrète techniques that fascinated him in the mid-1960s. In 2005, he worked on a project with bootleg producer and remixer Freelance Hellraiser, consisting of remixed versions of songs from throughout his solo career which were released under the title Twin Freaks. The Fireman's third album Electric Arguments was released on 25 November 2008. McCartney told L.A. Weekly in a January 2009, "Fireman is improvisational theatre ... I formalise it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I’m about to do. I usually have a song, and I know the melody and lyrics, and my performance is the only unknown."

Film

McCartney was interested in animated films as a child, and later had the financial resources to ask Geoff Dunbar to direct a short animated film called Rupert and the Frog Song, in 1981. McCartney was the producer, he wrote the music and the script, and also added some of the character voices. McCartney wrote and starred in the 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street. The film and soundtrack featured the popular hit "No More Lonely Nights", and the album reached #1 in the UK, but the film did not do well commercially or critically. Roger Ebert awarded the film a single star and wrote, "You can safely skip the movie and proceed directly to the sound track." Dunbar worked again with McCartney on an animated film about the work of French artist Honoré Daumier, in 1992, which won both of them a Bafta award. They also worked on Tropic Island Hum, in 1997. In 1995, McCartney made a guest appearance in the Lisa the Vegetarian episode of The Simpsons, and directed a short documentary about The Grateful Dead.

In May 2000, McCartney released , a retrospective documentary that features behind-the-scenes films and photographs that Paul and Linda McCartney (who had died in 1998) took of their family and bands. Interspersed throughout the 88 minute film is an interview by Mary McCartney with her father. Mary was the baby photographed inside McCartney's jacket on the back cover of his first solo album, McCartney, and was one of the producers of the documentary.

Painting

In 1966, McCartney met art gallery-owner Robert Fraser, whose flat was visited by many well-known artists. McCartney met Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Peter Blake, and Richard Hamilton there, and learned about art appreciation. McCartney later started buying paintings by Magritte, and used Magritte's painting of an apple for the Apple Records logo. He now owns Magritte's easel and spectacles.

McCartney's love of painting surfaced after watching artist Willem de Kooning paint, in Kooning's Long Island studio. McCartney took up painting in 1983. In 1999, he exhibited his paintings (featuring McCartney's portraits of John Lennon, Andy Warhol, and David Bowie) for the first time in Siegen, Germany, and included photographs by Linda. He chose the gallery because Wolfgang Suttner (local events organiser) was genuinely interested in his art, and the positive reaction led to McCartney showing his work in UK galleries. The first UK exhibition of McCartney's work was opened in Bristol, England with more than 50 paintings on display. McCartney had previously believed that "only people that had been to art school were allowed to paint"—as Lennon had.

As an artist, Paul McCartney designed a series of six postage stamps issued by the Isle of Man Post on 1 July 2002. According to BBC News, McCartney seems to be the first major rock star in the world who is also known as a stamp designer.

Writing and poetry

When McCartney was young, his mother read him poems and encouraged him to read books. McCartney's father was interested in crosswords and invited the two young McCartneys (Paul and his brother Michael) to solve them with him, so as to increase their "word power". McCartney was later inspired—in his school years—by Alan Durband, who was McCartney's English literature teacher at the Liverpool Institute. Durband was a co-founder and fund-raiser at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, where Willy Russell also worked, and introduced McCartney to Geoffrey Chaucer's works. McCartney later took his A-level exams, but passed only one subject—Art.

In 2001 McCartney published 'Blackbird Singing', a volume of poems, some of which were lyrics to his songs, and gave readings in Liverpool and New York City. Some of them were serious: "Here Today" (about Lennon) and some humorous ("Maxwell's Silver Hammer"). In the foreword of the book, McCartney explained that when he was a teenager, he had "an overwhelming desire" to have a poem of his published in the school magazine. He wrote something "deep and meaningful", but it was rejected, and he feels that he has been trying to get some kind of revenge ever since. His first "real poem" was about the death of his childhood friend, Ivan Vaughan. McCartney collaborated with author Philip Ardagh and animator Geoff Dunbar to write the book.

Contact with fellow ex-Beatles

John Lennon

Although McCartney's post-Beatles relationship with John Lennon was troubled, they became close again briefly in 1974 and even played together for the only time since The Beatles split (see A Toot and a Snore in '74). In later years, the two grew apart again. McCartney would often call Lennon, but was never sure of what sort of reception he would get, such as when McCartney once called Lennon and was told, "You're all pizza and fairytales!" McCartney understood that he could not just phone Lennon and only talk about business, so they often talked about cats, baking bread, or babies. According to May Pang, during Lennon's "Lost Weekend" with her they planned to visit McCartney in New Orleans, where McCartney was recording the Venus and Mars album, but Lennon went back to Ono the day before the planned visit after Ono said she had a new cure for Lennon's smoking habit.

In a 1980 interview, Lennon said that the last time he had seen McCartney was when they had watched the episode of Saturday Night Live (May 1976) in which Lorne Michaels had made his $3,000 cash offer to get Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr to reunite on the show. McCartney and Lennon had seriously considered going to the studio, but were too tired. This event was fictionalised in the 2000 television film Two of Us. His last telephone call to Lennon, which was just before Lennon and Ono released Double Fantasy, was friendly. During the call, Lennon said (laughing) to McCartney, "This housewife wants a career!" which referred to Lennon's househusband years, while looking after Sean Lennon. In 1984, McCartney said this about the phone call: "Yes. That is a nice thing, a consoling factor for me, because I do feel it was sad that we never actually sat down and straightened our differences out. But fortunately for me, the last phone conversation I ever had with him was really great, and we didn't have any kind of blow-up." Linda McCartney, speaking in the same 1984 interview stated: "I know that Paul was desperate to write with John again. And I know John was desperate to write. Desperate. People thought, well, he's taking care of Sean, he's a househusband and all that, but he wasn't happy. He couldn't write and it drove him crazy. And Paul could have helped him... easily." Lennon's death created a media frenzy around the surviving members of The Beatles. On the evening of 9 December, as McCartney was leaving an Oxford Street recording studio, he was surrounded by reporters and asked for his reaction to Lennon's death. He was later criticised for what appeared, when published, to be an utterly superficial response: "It's a drag". McCartney explained, "When John was killed somebody stuck a microphone at me and said: 'What do you think about it?' I said, 'It's a dra-a-ag' and meant it with every inch of melancholy I could muster. When you put that in print it says, 'McCartney in London today when asked for a comment on his dead friend said, "It's a drag."' It seemed a very flippant comment to make." McCartney was also to recall: }} In 1983, McCartney said: }} In a Playboy interview in 1984, McCartney said that he went home that night and watched the news on television—while sitting with all his children—and cried all evening.

McCartney carried on recording after the death of Lennon but did not play any live concerts for some time. He explained that this was because he was nervous that he would be "the next" to be murdered. This led to a disagreement with Denny Laine, who wanted to continue touring and subsequently left Wings, which McCartney disbanded in 1981. Also in June 1981, six months after Lennon's death, McCartney sang backup on George Harrison's tribute to Lennon, "All Those Years Ago", which also featured Ringo Starr on drums. McCartney would go on to record "Here Today", a tribute song to Lennon.

George Harrison

In 1977, Harrison had this to say about working with McCartney: "There were a lot of tracks though where I played bass...because what Paul would do, if he's written a song, he'd learn all the parts for Paul and then come in the studio and say, 'Do this.' He'd never give you the opportunity to come out with something. Paul would always help along when you'd done his ten songs—then when he got 'round to doing one of my songs, he would help. It was silly. It was very selfish, actually." While being interviewed circa 1988, Harrison said McCartney had recently mentioned the possibility of the two of them writing together, to which Harrison laughed, "I've only been there about 30 years in Paul's life and it's like now he wants to write with me."

In September 1980, Lennon said of Harrison and McCartney's working relationship: "I remember the day [Harrison] called to ask for help on "Taxman", one of his bigger songs. I threw in a few one-liners to help the song along, because that's what he asked for. He came to me because he could not go to Paul, because Paul would not have helped him at that period.

In late 2001, McCartney learned that Harrison was losing his battle with cancer. Upon Harrison's death on 29 November 2001, McCartney told Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra, Good Morning America, The Early Show, MTV, VH1 and Today that George was like his "baby brother". Harrison spent his last days in a Hollywood Hills mansion that was once leased by McCartney. On the day Harrison died, McCartney said, "George was a fantastic guy...still laughing and joking...a very brave man...and I love him like...he's my brother." While guesting on Larry King Live alongside Ringo Starr, McCartney said of the last time he saw Harrison, "We just sat there stroking hands. And this is a guy, and, you know, you don't stroke hands with guys, like that, you know it was just beautiful. We just spent a couple of hours and it was really lovely it was like...a favourite memory of mine." On the first anniversary of Harrison's death, McCartney played Harrison's "Something" on a ukulele at the Concert for George.

Linda McCartney

In 1969, McCartney married American photographer Linda Eastman, whom he described as the woman who gave him "the strength and courage to work again" after the break-up of The Beatles. The pair had met previously at a 1967 Georgie Fame concert at The Bag O'Nails club, during her UK assignment to take photographs of "Swinging Sixties" musicians in London. Paul and Linda were both vegetarian and supported the animal rights organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. They had four children—Linda's daughter Heather (who was adopted by Paul), Mary, Stella and James—and remained married until Linda's death from breast cancer in 1998.

Heather Mills

In 2002, McCartney married Heather Mills, a former model and anti-landmines campaigner. The couple had a child, Beatrice, in 2003. They separated in May 2006 and were divorced in May 2008.

Nancy Shevell

McCartney has been dating New Yorker Nancy Shevell since November 2007. She is a member of the board of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority as well as vice president of a family-owned transportation conglomerate which owns New England Motor Freight. On 6 May 2011, it was reported that McCartney would wed Shevell.

Lifestyle

Drugs

McCartney's introduction to drugs started in Hamburg, Germany. The Beatles had to play for hours, and they were often given "Prellies" (Preludin) by German customers or by Astrid Kirchherr (whose mother bought them). McCartney would usually take one, but Lennon would often take four or five.

McCartney remembered getting "very high" and giggling when The Beatles were introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan in New York, in 1964. McCartney's use of cannabis became regular, and he was quoted as saying that any future Beatles' lyrics containing the words "high", or "grass" were written specifically as a reference to cannabis, as was the phrase "another kind of mind" in "Got to Get You into My Life". John Dunbar's flat at 29 Lennox Gardens, in London, became a regular hang-out for McCartney, where he talked to musicians, writers and artists, and smoked cannabis. In 1965, Barry Miles introduced McCartney to hash brownies by using a recipe for hash fudge he found in the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. During the filming of Help!, he occasionally smoked a spliff in the car on the way to the studio during filming, which often made him forget his lines. Help! director Dick Lester said that he overheard "two beautiful women" trying to cajole McCartney into taking heroin, but he refused.

McCartney's attitude about cannabis was made public in the 1960s, when he added his name to an advertisement in The Times, on 24 July 1967, which asked for the legalisation of cannabis, the release of all prisoners imprisoned because of possession, and research into marijuana's medical uses. The advertisement was sponsored by a group called Soma and was signed by 65 people, including The Beatles, Epstein, RD Laing, 15 doctors, and two MPs.

McCartney was introduced to cocaine by Robert Fraser, and it was available during the recording of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He admitted that he used the drug multiple times for about a year but stopped because of the unpleasant comedown.

In 1967, on a sailing trip to Greece (with the idea of buying an island for the whole group) McCartney said everybody sat around and took LSD, although McCartney had first taken it with Tara Browne, in 1966. He took his second "acid trip" with Lennon on 21 March 1967 after a studio session. McCartney was the first British pop star to openly admit using LSD, in an interview in the now-defunct "Queen" magazine. His admission was followed by a TV interview in the UK on ITN on 19 June 1967, and when McCartney was asked about his admission of LSD use, he said:

McCartney was not arrested by Norman Pilcher's Drug Squad, as had been Donovan, and several members of the Rolling Stones.

Meditation

On 24 August 1967, McCartney met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the London Hilton, and later went to Bangor, in North Wales, to attend a weekend 'initiation' conference, at which time he and the other Beatles learned Transcendental Meditation (TM). "The whole meditation experience was very good and I still use the mantra. . . I find it soothing and I can imagine that the more you were to get into it, the more interesting it would get." The time McCartney later spent in India at the Maharishi's ashram was highly productive, as practically all of the songs that would later be recorded for The White Album and Abbey Road were composed there by McCartney, Lennon, or both together. Although McCartney was told that he was never to repeat the mantra to anyone else, he did tell Linda McCartney, and said he meditated a lot while he was in jail in Japan. In 2009, McCartney, along with Ringo Starr, headlined a benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall, raising three million dollars for the David Lynch Foundation to fund instruction in Transcendental Meditation for at-risk youth.

Activism

Paul and Linda McCartney became outspoken vegetarians and animal-rights activists. They said that their vegetarianism was realised when they happened to see lambs in a field as they ate a meal of lamb. McCartney has also credited the 1942 Disney film Bambi—in which the young deer's mother is shot by a hunter—as the original inspiration for him to take an interest in animal rights. In his first interview after Linda's death, he promised to continue working for animal rights. In 1999, McCartney spent £3,000,000 to make sure Linda McCartney's food range remained free of GM ingredients. In 2002, McCartney gave his support to a campaign against a proposed ban on the sale of certain vitamins, herbs, and mineral products in the European Union. Following his marriage to Heather Mills, McCartney joined with her to campaign against landmines; He also wore an anti-landmines t-shirt on the Back in the World tour.

In 2006, the McCartneys travelled to Prince Edward Island to bring international attention to the seal hunt (their final public appearance together). Their arrival sparked attention in Newfoundland and Labrador where the hunt is of economic significance. The couple also debated with Newfoundland's Premier Danny Williams on the CNN show Larry King Live. They further stated that the fishermen should quit hunting seals and begin a seal watching business. McCartney has also criticised China's fur trade and supports the Make Poverty History campaign.

McCartney has been involved with a number of charity recordings and performances. In 2004, he donated a song to an album to aid the "US Campaign for Burma", in support of Burmese Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, and he had previously been involved in the Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, Ferry Aid, Band Aid, Live Aid, and the recording of "Ferry Cross the Mersey" (released 8 May 1989) following the Hillsborough disaster.

In a December 2008 interview with Prospect Magazine, McCartney mentioned that he tried to convince the Dalai Lama to become a vegetarian. In a letter to the Dalai Lama, McCartney took issue with Buddhism and meat-eating being considered compatible, saying, "Forgive me for pointing this out, but if you eat animals then there is some suffering somewhere along the line." The Dalai Lama replied to McCartney by saying his doctors advised him to eat meat for health reasons. In the interview McCartney said, "I wrote back saying they were wrong."

Football

The Beatles were advised by Epstein to make no comments about the football clubs they supported because it could alienate some fans, though it was well known that McCartney was a supporter of Everton Football Club, and that his father and relatives used to take him to matches. His allegiance later shifted to Liverpool F.C., as on 28 July 1968, The Beatles were photographed in a photographer's studio at 192-212 Gray's Inn Road, with McCartney wearing a Liverpool F.C. rosette. Linda McCartney later said: "We spent last night listening to Liverpool football team on the radio, wanting them to win so badly. Paul supports Liverpool. He was for Everton for a while because of his family — but it's all Liverpool now."

Lennon and McCartney were present to watch the 1966 FA Cup Final at Wembley, between Everton and Sheffield Wednesday, and McCartney attended the 1968 FA Cup Final (18 May 1968) which was played by West Bromwich Albion against Everton. After the end of the match, McCartney shared cigarettes and whisky with other football fans.

At the end of the live version of "Coming Up" recorded in Glasgow in 1979 (later to become a US number one single) the crowd begins to sing "Paul McCartney!" until McCartney takes over and changes the chant to "Kenny Dalglish!", referring to the current Liverpool and Scotland striker. At the same concert, Gordon Smith, former football player who played for Rangers and Brighton & Hove Albion, met the McCartneys, and later accepted an invitation to visit their home in East Sussex in 1980. Smith later said that McCartney was "thrilled I knew Kenny Dalglish", to which Linda added: "I like Gordon McQueen of Man United", and Smith replied, "I know him too."

McCartney attended the 1986 FA Cup Final between Liverpool and Everton, McCartney performed at the Liverpool F.C. Anfield stadium on 1 June 2008, as a part of Liverpool's European Capital of Culture year. Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters sang with McCartney on "Band on the Run", and played drums on "Back in the U.S.S.R.". Ono and Olivia Harrison attended the concert, along with Ken Dodd, and the former Liverpool F.C. football manager Rafael Benítez.

In an interview in 2008, McCartney ended speculation about his allegiance when he said:

"Here's the deal: my father was born in Everton, my family are officially Evertonians, so if it comes down to a derby match or an FA Cup final between the two, I would have to support Everton. But after a concert at Wembley Arena I got a bit of a friendship with Kenny Dalglish, who had been to the gig and I thought 'You know what? I am just going to support them both because it's all Liverpool and I don't have that Catholic-Protestant thing.' So I did have to get special dispensation from the Pope to do this but that's it, too bad. I support them both. They are both great teams, but if it comes to the crunch, I'm Evertonian."

In 2010, there was heavy speculation surrounding McCartney that he was to head up a consortium launching a take-over bid for struggling Charlton Athletic. Links between the club and the famous musician go a long way back with Charlton's famous supporters anthem - Valley, Floyd Road - using the tune and a number of lyrics from the Wings song "Mull of Kintyre".

Business

McCartney is one of Britain's wealthiest musicians, with an estimated fortune of £750 million ($1.2 billion) in 2009, although Justice Bennett, in his judgement on McCartney's divorce case found no evidence that McCartney was worth more than £400 million. In December 1998, he was approached to purchase a stake in Everton Football Club by former school friend Bill Kenwright who wished to put a consortium together but McCartney chose to decline the offer. In addition to his interest in Apple Corps, McCartney's MPL Communications owns a significant music publishing catalogue, with access to over 25,000 copyrights. McCartney earned £40 million in 2003, making him Britain's highest media earner. This rose to £48.5 million by 2005. In the same year he joined the top American talent agency Grabow Associates, who arrange private performances for their richest clients. Northern Songs was established in 1963, by Dick James, to publish the songs of Lennon/McCartney.

The Beatles' partnership was replaced in 1968 by a jointly held company, Apple Corps, which continues to control Apple's commercial interests. Northern Songs was purchased by Associated Television (ATV) in 1969, and was sold in 1985 to Michael Jackson. For many years McCartney was unhappy about Jackson's purchase and handling of Northern Songs.

MPL Communications is an umbrella company for McCartney's business interests, which owns a wide range of copyrights, as well as the publishing rights to musicals. In 2006, the Trademarks Registry reported that MPL had started a process to secure the protections associated with registering the name "Paul McCartney" as a trademark. The 2005 films, Brokeback Mountain and Good Night and Good Luck, feature MPL copyrights.

In April 2009, it was revealed that McCartney, in common with other wealthy musicians, had seen a significant decline in his net worth over the preceding year. It was estimated that his fortune had fallen by some £60m, from £238m to £175m. The losses were attributed to the ongoing global recession, and the resultant decline in value of property and stock market holdings.

In the US, McCartney has achieved thirty-two number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, including twenty-one with The Beatles, McCartney is the only artist to reach the UK number one as a soloist ("Pipes of Peace"), duo ("Ebony and Ivory" with Stevie Wonder), trio ("Mull of Kintyre", Wings), quartet ("She Loves You", The Beatles), quintet ("Get Back", The Beatles with Billy Preston), and as part of a musical ensemble for charity (Ferry Aid).

McCartney was voted the "Greatest Composer of the Millennium" by BBC News Online readers and McCartney's song "Yesterday" is thought to be the most covered song in history with more than 2,200 recorded versions After its 1977 release, the Wings single "Mull of Kintyre" became the highest-selling record in British chart history, and remained so until 1984. (Three charity singles have since surpassed it in sales; the first to do so, in 1984, was Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in which McCartney was a participant.)

On 2 July 2005, he was involved with the fastest-released single in history. His performance of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" with U2 at Live 8 was released only 45 minutes after it was performed, before the end of the concert. The single reached number six on the Billboard charts, just hours after the single's release, and hit number one on numerous online download charts across the world. McCartney played for the largest stadium audience in history when 184,000 people paid to see him perform at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 21 April 1990.

McCartney's scheduled concert in St Petersburg, Russia was his 3,000th concert and took place in front of 60,000 fans in Russia, on 20 June 2004. Over his career, McCartney has played 2,523 gigs with The Beatles, 140 with Wings, and 325 as a solo artist. Only his second concert in Russia, with the first just the year before on Moscow's Red Square as the former Communist U.S.S.R. had previously banned music from The Beatles as a "corrupting influence", McCartney hired 3 jets, at a reported cost of $36,000 (€29,800) (£28,000), to spray dry ice in the clouds above Saint Petersburg's Winter Palace Square in a successful attempt to prevent rain.

The day McCartney flew into the former Soviet country, he celebrated his 62nd birthday, and after the concert, according to RIA Novosti news agency, he received a phone call from a fan; then-President Vladimir Putin, who telephoned him after the concert to wish him a happy birthday. from President Barack Obama in the White House, June 2010]] In the concert programme for his 1989 world tour, McCartney wrote that Lennon received all the credit for being the avant-garde Beatle, and McCartney was known as "baby-faced", which he disagreed with. People also assumed that Lennon was the "hard-edged one", and McCartney was the "soft-edged" Beatle, although McCartney admitted to "bossing Lennon around." Linda McCartney said that McCartney had a "hard-edge"—and not just on the surface—which she knew about after all the years she had spent living with him. McCartney seemed to confirm this edge when he commented that he sometimes meditates, which he said is better than "sleeping, eating, or shouting at someone".

The minor planet 4148, discovered in 1983, was named "McCartney" in his honour.

On 18 June 2006, McCartney celebrated his 64th birthday, a milestone that was the subject of one of the first songs he ever wrote, at the age of sixteen, The Beatles' song "When I'm Sixty-Four". Paul Vallely noted in The Independent: }}

Discography

Tours

Arms

Notes	Sir Paul McCartney's agent was Hubert Chesshyre, LVO, Clarenceux King of Arms
Crest	On a Wreath of the Colours A Liver Bird calling Sable supporting with the dexter claws a Guitar Or stringed Sable.
Escutcheon	Or between two Flaunches fracted fesswise two Roundels Sable over all six Guitar Strings palewise throughout counterchanged.
Motto	ECCE COR MEUM (Behold my heart)

References

;Footnotes

;Bibliography

External links

Paul McCartney's Official Website

Paul McCartney's Animation Website

Paul McCartney Ecce Cor Meum audio Podcast

Liverpool celebrates Irish ancestry

Paul McCartney: Financial Accounts

Category:1942 births Category:1960s singers Category:1970s singers Category:1980s singers Category:1990s singers Category:2000s singers Category:2010s singers Category:English-language singers Category:English male singers Category:English multi-instrumentalists Category:English pop singers Category:English rock bass guitarists Category:English rock guitarists Category:English rock pianists Category:English rock singers Category:English singer-songwriters Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English vegetarians Category:Backing vocalists Category:20th-century classical composers Category:Apple Records artists Category:Best Original Music Score Academy Award winners Category:BRIT Award winners Category:Capitol Records artists Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Ivor Novello Award winners Category:Knights Bachelor Category:Members of the Order of the British Empire Category:Music from Liverpool Category:Parlophone artists Category:Mercury Records artists Category:People convicted of drug offenses Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:The Beatles members Category:The Quarrymen members Category:Wings members Category:World record holders Category:Musicians from Liverpool Category:Living people Category:Honorary Members of the Royal Academy of Music Category:Transcendental Meditation practitioners Category:Liverpool Institute alumni Category:British billionaires Category:Silver Clef Awards winners Category:Animal rights advocates

Honorific-prefix	Generalissimus
Name	Joseph Stalin
Caption	Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, July 1945.
Office	Chairman of the Council of Ministers
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
Term start2	3 April 1922
Term end2	16 October 1952
Predecessor2	Vyacheslav Molotov(as Responsible Secretary)
Successor2	Nikita Khrushchev(office reestablished)
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 (stroke)
Death place	Kuntsevo Dacha near Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Nationality	Soviet
Ethnicity	Georgian
Spouse	Ekaterina Svanidze (1906–1907)Nadezhda Alliluyeva (1919–1932)
Children	Yakov Dzhugashvili, Vasily Dzhugashvili, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Konstantin Kuzakov(disputed)
Allegiance	Soviet Union
Serviceyears	1943–1953
Rank	Marshal of the Soviet Union (1943-1945)Generalissimus of the Soviet Union (1943-1953)
Commands	All (supreme commander)
Battles	World War II
Signature	Stalin Signature.svg

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 However, during this period of rapid economical and social changes, millions of people were sent to penal labor camps, including many political convicts, and millions were deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.

In August 1939, after the failure to establish an Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance, Stalin's USSR entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, dividing their spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. This pact allowed the Soviet Union to regain some of the former territories of the Russian Empire in Poland, Finland, the Baltics, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina during the early period of World War II. After Germany violated the pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941 and thus opening the largest and bloodiest theatre of war in history, the Soviet Union joined the Allies. Despite heavy human and territorial losses in the initial period of war, the Soviet Union managed to stop the Axis advance in the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad. Eventually, the Red Army drove through Eastern Europe in 1944–45 and captured Berlin in May 1945. Having played the decisive role in the Allied victory, the USSR emerged a recognized superpower after the war.

Stalin headed the Soviet delegations at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, which defined the map of post-war Europe. Communist-dominated leftist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were installed in the Eastern Bloc satellite states as the USSR entered a struggle for global dominance, known as the Cold War, with the United States and NATO. In Asia, Stalin established good relations with Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung, and the Stalin-era Soviet Union in various ways served as a model for the newly-formed People's Republic of China and Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).

In power until his death in 1953, Stalin led the USSR during the period of post-war reconstruction, marked by the dominance of Stalinist architecture (most famously represented by the Stalin skyscrapers). The successful development of the Soviet nuclear program enabled the country to become the world's second nuclear weapons power; the Soviet space program was started as spin-off of the nuclear project. In his last years, Stalin also launched the so-called Great Construction Projects of Communism and the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature.

Following his death, Stalin and his regime have both been questioned on numerous occasions, the most significant of these being the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, when Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced his legacy and drove the process of de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union. Modern views of Stalin in the Russian Federation remain mixed, with some viewing him as a tyrant while others consider him a capable leader.

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. A year later she died of typhus in Baku.

Stalin was captured and sent to Siberia seven times, but escaped most of these exiles. 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 Kerensky ordered the arrest of Lenin following the July Days, Stalin helped Lenin evade capture.

Role in the Polish-Soviet War, 1919–1921

After their Russian Civil War victory, the Bolsheviks moved to establish a sphere of influence in Central Europe, starting with what became the Polish–Soviet War. As commander of the southern front, Stalin was determined to take the Polish-held city of Lviv. This conflicted with general strategy set by Lenin and Trotsky, which focused upon the capture of Warsaw further north.

Trotsky's forces engaged with those of Polish commander Władysław Sikorski at the Battle of Warsaw, but Stalin refused to redirect his troops from Lviv to help. Consequently, the battles for both Lviv and Warsaw were lost, for which Stalin was blamed. Stalin returned to Moscow in August 1920, where he defended himself and resigned his military commission. At the Ninth Party Conference on 22 September, Trotsky openly criticized Stalin's behavior.

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. This post allowed Stalin to appoint many of his allies to government positions.

Lenin suffered a stroke in 1922, forcing him into semi-retirement in Gorki. Stalin visited him often, acting as his intermediary with the outside world. Stalin countered Trotsky's criticism 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. Bukharin and Premier Alexey Rykov opposed these policies and advocated a return to the NEP, but the rest of the Politburo sided with Stalin and removed Bukharin from the Politburo in November 1929. Rykov was fired the following year, and was replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov on Stalin's recommendation.

In December 1934, the popular Sergei Kirov was murdered. Stalin blamed Kirov's murder on a vast conspiracy of saboteurs and Trotskyites. He launched a massive purge against these internal enemies, putting them on rigged show trials and then having them executed or imprisoned in Siberian gulags. Among these victims were old enemies, including Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Stalin made the loyal Nikolai Yezhov head of the secret police, the NKVD, and had him purge the NKVD of veteran Bolsheviks. With no serious opponents left in power, Stalin ended the purges in 1938. Yezhov was held to blame for the excesses of the Great Terror, and was dismissed and later executed.

Changes to Soviet society, 1927–1939

Bolstering Soviet secret service and intelligence

Stalin vastly increased the scope and power of the state's secret police and intelligence agencies. Under his guiding hand, Soviet intelligence forces began to set up intelligence networks in most of the major nations of the world, including Germany (the famous Rote Kappelle spy ring), Great Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Stalin made considerable use of the Communist International movement in order to infiltrate agents and to ensure that foreign Communist parties remained pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin.

One of the best examples of Stalin's ability to integrate secret police and foreign espionage came in 1940, when he gave approval to the secret police to have Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico.

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."

Purges and deportations

Purges and executions

{| border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" style="margin:5px; width:30%; border:solid 1px #bbb; float:right;" |- | | | |- | colspan="3" style="text-align:left;"|Left: Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities"Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (support).Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin |}

Stalin, as head of the Politburo, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party, justified as an attempt to expel 'opportunists' and 'counter-revolutionary infiltrators'. 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 killed in 1940. Following his execution, 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.

With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Joseph Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenin's original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.

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 Western experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete or unreliable.

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 1930s and 40s 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 Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (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 were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.

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. 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.

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".

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, and 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 (including the Eastern Catholic Churches), 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 World War II. Eric D. Weitz wrote, "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 Khrushchev'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 opposed.

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 Peace Prize nominations

In 1945, he was mentioned by Halvdan Koht among seven candidates that were qualified for the Nobel Peace Prize. 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 Peace Prize 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, Stalin 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.|}}

Various foreign scientific discoveries and inventions (such as the Wright Brothers' airplane) were attributed to Russians in post-war Soviet propaganda. Examples include the boiler, reclaimed by father and son Cherepanovs; the electric light, by Yablochkov and Lodygin; the radio, by Popov; and the airplane, by Mozhaysky. Stalin's internal repressive policies continued (including in newly acquired territories), but never reached the extremes of the 1930s.

"Doctors' plot"

The "Doctors' plot" was a plot outlined by Stalin and Soviet officials in 1952 and 1953 whereby several doctors (over half of whom were Jewish) allegedly attempted to kill Soviet officials. 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. Nikita Khrushchev 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 Khrushchev, 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."

On the early morning hours of 1 March 1953, after an all-night dinner and a movie 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.

Reaction by successors

is home to a monument of Stalin, originally set up in Vilnius.]] . June 25, 2010]] 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".

A 1974 Soviet work describes Stalin's leadership in the following manner:

Views on Stalin in the 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; 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.

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 Ио́сиф Виссарио́нович Джугашви́ли 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. "Dear father" (, batyushka), 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. Yevgeny is married to a Georgian woman, has two sons, and grandchildren.

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. 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 World War II 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.

In 1967 Svetlana defected to the USA and later married William Wesley Peters and by him had a daughter Olga (surname now Evans).

Habits

Stalin enjoyed drinking, but could keep it under control. He would also often force those around him to join in. 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. Historians Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov have suggested that "[Stalin's] atheism remained rooted in some vague idea of a God of nature." 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.

During the Second World War Stalin reopened the Churches. One reason could have been to motivate the majority of the population who had Christian beliefs. The reasoning behind this is that by changing the official policy of the party and the state towards religion, the Church and its clergymen could be to his disposal in mobilizing the war effort. On 4 September 1943, Stalin invited Metropolitan Sergius, Metropolitan Alexy and Metropolitan Nikolay to the Kremlin and proposed to reestablish the Moscow Patriarchate, which had been suspended since 1925, and elect the Patriarch. On 8 September 1943, Metropolitan Sergius was elected Patriarch.

The CPSU Central Committee continued to promote atheism and the elimination of religion during the remainder of Stalin's lifetime after the 1943 concordat. Stalin's greater tolerance for religion after 1943 was limited by party machinations. Whether persecutions after World War II were more aimed at certain sections of society over and above detractors is a disputed point.

contingent at London May Day march in 2008, carrying a banner of Stalin.]]

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

Stalin was also a well-regarded poet in his youth. Some of his poems were published in Ilia Chavchavadze's journal Iveria and later anthologized.

See also

;Index of Soviet Union-related articles

Stalinism

Neo-Stalinism

Stalin Society

Anti-Stalinist left

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.

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)

Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse? by Timothy Snyder

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