Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) was the armed wing of the Zimbabwe African People's Union, a political party in Rhodesia. It participated in the Second Chimurenga against white minority rule in the former Rhodesia.

ZIPRA was formed during the 1960s by the nationalist leader Jason Moyo, the deputy of Joshua Nkomo. Because ZAPU's political strategy relied more heavily on negotiations than armed force, ZIPRA developed as elaborately training both regular soldiers and guerrilla fighters ZANLA, although by 1979 it had an estimated 20,000 combatants, based in camps around Lusaka, Zambia and at the front. ZIPRA's crossing points into Zimbabwe were at Feira in Zambia opposite Mashonaland East and west. For example, the operational boundary was Sipolilo where ZIPRA, ZANLA and Rhodesian forces clashed. ZIPRA operated alone in Mashonaland west. There was no ZANLA in that area. Zipra was a non tribalist organisation with cadres drawn from a wide spectrum of the country's population. Beside the overall political ideologies, the main differences between ZIPRA and ZANLA were that: ZIPRA drew its recruits from the Kalanga, Sutho, Ndebele, Shona ethnic groups while ZANLA only recruited from the Shona. ZIPRA did not follow ZANLA's (inspired by Maoism) but followed Soviet Marxist Leninist principles and enjoyed close relationship with local peasant populations. For example, ZIPRA forces in Mashonaland west were never sold out by the population because they respected locals and their culture. ZIPRA controlled liberated zones from Sipolilo to Plumtree. The enemy forces could not venture out of the keep in Kazangarare for instance..Zipra had some of itsforces who served in the new Zimbabwe national like Philip Sibanda ,Tshinga Dube Roy Reagen Ndlovu and Eddie Sigoge who was arrested in the 1980s

ZIPRA was in formal alliance with Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) the ANC's militant wing. ZIPRA and MK mounted a celebrated (if militarily unsuccessful) mission in Southern Rhodesia in the mid-1960s.

In 1978 and 1979 ZIPRA downed two civilian passenger planes of Air Rhodesia, killing a total of 102 passengers and crew.

Air Rhodesia Flight 825

Air Rhodesia Flight 825 was a scheduled flight from Kariba to Salisbury that was shot down on September 3, 1978 by ZIPRA guerrillas using a SAM-7 surface-to-air missile. Eighteen of the fifty-six passengers survived the crash, with most of these having been seated in the rear. Five of the survivors went to a local village to ask for water. However upon returning, they heard African voices and automatic gunfire - ZIPRA guerrillas killed 10 of the survivors still at the aircraft before looting it. Three crash survivors who remained at the aircraft managed to avoid being killed by running away and hiding in the bush.

Further reading

Rasmussen, R. K., & Rubert, S. C., 1990. A Historical Dictionary of Zimbabwe, Scarecrow Press, Inc., Metuchen, NJ, United States of America.

Sunday mail, Sunday, October 8, 2006, Zimbabwe’s true armed struggle history must be told

Category:History of Zimbabwe Category:Guerrilla organizations Category:Military wings of political parties Category:Rebel groups in Zimbabwe

Coordinates	40°26′30″N80°00′00″N
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 economic 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

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.

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, the most notable legacy during Stalin's time was his public endorsement of the Agronomist Trofim Lysenko who rejected Mendelian genetics as "bourgeois pseudosciences" and instead supported Hybridization theories that caused widespread agricultural destruction and major setbacks in Soviet knowledge in biology. Although many scientists opposed his views, those who publicly came out were imprisoned and denounced. 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.]] . 25 June 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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Coordinates	40°26′30″N80°00′00″N
Native name	中华人民共和国Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó
Conventional long name	People's Republic of China
Common name	China
Symbol type	Emblem
Map width	220px
National anthem	"March of the Volunteers"《义勇军进行曲》 (Pinyin: "Yìyǒngjūn Jìnxíngqǔ")
Official languages

| languages_type = Official scripts | languages = Simplified Chinese | leader_title1 = President | leader_name1 = Hu Jintao | leader_title2 = Premier | leader_name2 = Wen Jiabao | leader_title3 = Congress Chairman | leader_name3 = Wu Bangguo | leader_title4 = Conference Chairman | leader_name4 = Jia Qinglin | leader_title5 = CPC General Secretary | leader_name5 = Hu Jintao | legislature = National People's Congress | sovereignty_type = Establishment | established_event1 = People's Republic of China proclaimed. | established_date1 = 1 October 1949 | area_footnote = or 9,671,018 km² | area_km2 = 9,640,821 | area_sq_mi = 3704427 | area_rank = 3rd/4th | area_magnitude = 1 E12 | percent_water = 2.8 | population_census = 1,339,724,852 | population_census_year = 2010 | population_census_rank = 1st | pop_den_footnote = | population_density_km2 = 139.6 | population_density_sq_mi = 363.3 | population_density_rank = 53rd | GDP_nominal = $5.878 trillion | GDP_PPP_rank = 2nd | GDP_PPP_per_capita = $7,518 | Gini_year = 2007 | HDI_year = 2010 | HDI = 0.663 | HDI_rank = 89th | HDI_category = medium | currency = Chinese yuan (renminbi) (¥) | currency_code = CNY | time_zone = China Standard Time | utc_offset = +8 | date_format = yyyy-mm-dd or yyyymd (CE; CE-1949) | drives_on = right, except for Hong Kong & Macau | cctld = .cn .中國 .中国 | calling_code = +86 | footnotes = a. See also Names of China.

b. Simple characterizations of the political structure since the 1980s are no longer possible. d. Information for mainland China only. Hong Kong, Macau and territories under the jurisdiction of the Republic of China, commonly known as Taiwan, are excluded. }}

The People's Republic of China (PRC), commonly known as China, is the most populous state in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, it is a single-party state governed by the Communist Party of China (CPC). The PRC exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four directly administered municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and two highly autonomous special administrative regions (SARs) – Hong Kong and Macau. Its capital city is Beijing.

At about 9.6 million square kilometres (3.7 million square miles), the PRC is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area, depending on the definition of what is included in that total, and the second largest by land area. Its landscape is diverse, with forest steppes and deserts (the Gobi and Taklamakan) in the dry north near Mongolia and Russia's Siberia, and subtropical forests in the wet south close to Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. The terrain in the west is rugged and elevated, with the Himalayas and the Tian Shan mountain ranges forming China's natural borders with India, Nepal and Central Asia. In contrast, mainland China's eastern seaboard is low-lying and has a long coastline (the 11th longest in the world), bounded on the southeast by the South China Sea and on the east by the East China Sea, beyond which lie the Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.

The ancient Chinese civilization—one of the world's earliest—flourished in the fertile basin of the Yellow River which flows through the North China Plain. China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies (also known as dynasties) from time of the Xia (approx. 2000 BC). However, it was the Qin Dynasty that first unified China in 221 BC. The last dynasty, the Qing, ended in 1911 with the founding of the Republic of China (ROC) by the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Party. The first half of the 20th century saw China plunged into a period of disunity and civil wars that divided the country into two main political camps – the Kuomintang and the communists. Major hostilities ended in 1949, when the communists essentially won the civil war and established the People's Republic of China in mainland China. The KMT-led Republic of China relocated their capital to Taipei on Taiwan; its jurisdiction is now limited to Taiwan, Kinmen, Matsu and several outlying islands. Since then, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been involved in political disputes with the Republic of China over issues of sovereignty, the political status of Taiwan, and battle for international diplomatic recognition.

Since the introduction of market-based economic reforms in 1978, China has become the world's fastest growing major economy, the world's largest exporter and second largest importer of goods. It is the world's second largest economy by both nominal GDP and purchasing power parity (PPP) and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. It is also a member of formal/informal multilateral organizations including the WTO, APEC, BRIC, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and G-20. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the world's largest standing army with the second-largest defense budget. China has been characterized as a potential superpower by a number of academics, military analysts, and public policy and economics analysts.

History

Major combat in the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949 with the Communist Party of China in control of mainland China, and the Kuomintang (KMT) retreating to Taiwan. On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. "Communist China" and "Red China" were two common names for the PRC.

proclaiming the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949.]] The economic and social plan known as the Great Leap Forward resulted in an estimated 45 million deaths. In 1966, Mao and his allies launched the Cultural Revolution, which would last until Mao's death a decade later. The Cultural Revolution, motivated by power struggles within the Party and a fear of the Soviet Union, led to a major upheaval in Chinese society. In 1972, at the peak of the Sino-Soviet split, Mao and Zhou Enlai met Richard Nixon in Beijing to establish relations with the United States. In the same year, the PRC was admitted to the United Nations in place of the Republic of China for China's membership of the United Nations, and permanent membership of the Security Council.

After Mao's death in 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four, blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping quickly wrested power from Mao's anointed successor Hua Guofeng. Although he never became the head of the party or state himself, Deng was in fact the Paramount Leader of China at that time, his influence within the Party led the country to significant economic reforms. The Communist Party subsequently loosened governmental control over citizens' personal lives and the communes were disbanded with many peasants receiving multiple land leases, which greatly increased incentives and agricultural production. This turn of events marked China's transition from a planned economy to a mixed economy with an increasingly open market environment, a system termed by some "market socialism", and officially by the Communist Party of China "Socialism with Chinese characteristics". The PRC adopted its current constitution on 4 December 1982.

In 1989, the death of pro-reform official Hu Yaobang helped to spark the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, during which students and others campaigned for several months, speaking out against corruption and in favour of greater political reform, including democratic rights and freedom of speech. However, they were eventually put down on 4 June when PLA troops and vehicles entered and forcibly cleared the square, resulting in numerous casualties. This event was widely reported and brought worldwide condemnation and sanctions against the government. The "Tank Man" incident in particular became famous.

CPC General Secretary, President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji, both former mayors of Shanghai, led post-Tiananmen PRC in the 1990s. Under Jiang and Zhu's ten years of administration, the PRC's economic performance pulled an estimated 150 million peasants out of poverty and sustained an average annual gross domestic product growth rate of 11.2%. The country formally joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Although the PRC needs economic growth to spur its development, the government has begun to worry that rapid economic growth has negatively impacted the country's resources and environment. Another concern is that certain sectors of society are not sufficiently benefiting from the PRC's economic development; one example of this is the wide gap between urban and rural areas. As a result, under current CPC General Secretary, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, the PRC has initiated policies to address these issues of equitable distribution of resources, but the outcome remains to be seen. More than 40 million farmers have been displaced from their land, usually for economic development, contributing to the 87,000 demonstrations and riots across China in 2005. For much of the PRC's population, living standards have seen extremely large improvements, and freedom continues to expand, but political controls remain tight and rural areas poor.

Geography

The People's Republic of China is the second largest country in the world by land area The uncertainty over size is related to (a) the validity of claims by China on territories such as Aksai Chin and Trans-Karakoram Tract (both territories also claimed by India), and (b) how the total size of the United States is calculated: The World Factbook gives , and the Encyclopædia Britannica gives . The area statistics do not include the of territory ceded to the PRC by the Parliament of Tajikistan on 12 January 2011, which ended a centuries-long dispute.

China borders 14 nations, more than any other country (shared with Russia); counted clockwise from south: Vietnam, Laos, Burma, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia and North Korea. Additionally the border between the PRC and the ROC is located in territorial waters. China has a land border of , the largest in the world.

The territory of China lies between latitudes 18° and 54° N, and longitudes 73° and 135° E. It contains a large variety of landscapes. In the east, along the shores of the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, there are extensive and densely populated alluvial plains, while on the edges of the Inner Mongolian plateau in the north, grasslands can be seen. Southern China is dominated by hill country and low mountain ranges. In the central-east are the deltas of China's two major rivers, the Yellow River and Yangtze River (Chang Jiang). Other major rivers include the Xi, Mekong, Brahmaputra and Amur. To the west, major mountain ranges, notably the Himalayas, with China's highest point at the eastern half of Mount Everest, and high plateaus feature among the more arid landscapes such as the Taklamakan and the Gobi Desert.

A major issue is the continued expansion of deserts, particularly the Gobi Desert. Although barrier tree lines planted since the 1970s have reduced the frequency of sandstorms, prolonged drought and poor agricultural practices result in dust storms plaguing northern China each spring, which then spread to other parts of East Asia, including Korea and Japan. According to China's environmental watchdog, Sepa, China is losing a million acres (4,000 km²) per year to desertification. Water, erosion, and pollution control have become important issues in China's relations with other countries. Melting glaciers in the Himalayas could also lead to water shortages for hundreds of millions of people.

China has a climate mainly dominated by dry seasons and wet monsoons, which leads to temperature differences between winter and summer. In winter, northern winds coming from high latitude areas are cold and dry; in summer, southern winds from sea areas at lower latitude are warm and moist. The climate in China differs from region to region because of the country's extensive and complex topography.

Biodiversity

One of 17 megadiverse countries, China lies in two of the world's major ecozones, the Palearctic and the Indomalaya. In the Palearctic zone are found such mammals as the horse, camel, tapir, and jerboa. Among the species found in the Indomalaya region are the Leopard Cat, bamboo rat, treeshrew, and various species of monkeys and apes. Some overlap exists between the two regions because of natural dispersal and migration, and deer or antelope, bears, wolves, pigs, and rodents are found in all of the diverse climatic and geological environments. The famous giant panda is found only in a limited area along the Yangtze. There is a continuing problem with trade in endangered species, although there are now laws to prohibit such activities.

China contains also a variety of forest types. Both northeast and northwest reaches contain mountains and cold coniferous forests, supporting animal species which include moose and Asiatic black bear, along with some 120 types of birds. Moist conifer forests can have thickets of bamboo as an understorey, replaced by rhododendrons in higher montane stands of juniper and yew. Subtropical forests, which dominate central and southern China, support an astounding 146,000 species of flora. Tropical rainforest and seasonal rainforests, though confined to Yunnan and Hainan Island, actually contain a quarter of all the plant and animal species found in China.

Environment

s in Xinjiang. The Dabancheng project is Asia's largest wind farm.]]

China has some relevant environmental regulations: the 1979 Environmental Protection Law, which was largely modeled on US legislation. But the environment continues to deteriorate. While the regulations are fairly stringent, enforcement of them is poor as they are frequently disregarded by local communities or governments while seeking economic development. 12 years after the law, only one Chinese city was making an effort to clean up its water discharges.

Part of the price China is paying for increased prosperity is damage to the environment. Leading Chinese environmental campaigner Ma Jun has warned that water pollution is one of the most serious threats facing China. According to the Ministry of Water Resources, roughly 300 million Chinese are drinking unsafe water. This makes the crisis of water shortages more pressing, with 400 out of 600 cities short of water.

Yet, with $34.6 billion invested in clean technology in 2009, China is the world's leading investor in renewable energy technologies. China produces more wind turbines and solar panels each year than any other country.

Politics

.]] The PRC is regarded by several political scientists as one of the last five Communist states (along with Vietnam, North Korea, Laos, and Cuba), but simple characterizations of PRC's political structure since the 1980s are no longer possible. The PRC government has been variously described as communist and socialist, but also as authoritarian, with heavy restrictions remaining in many areas, most notably on the Internet, the press, freedom of assembly, reproductive rights, and freedom of religion.

Compared to its closed-door policies until the mid-1970s, the liberalization of the PRC has resulted in the administrative climate being less restrictive than before. The PRC is far different from liberal democracy or social democracy that exists in most of Europe or North America, and the National People's Congress (highest state body) has been described as a "rubber stamp" body. The PRC's incumbent President is Hu Jintao who is also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and his Premier is Wen Jiabao who is also a member of the CPC Politburo Standing Committee.

in Beijing, where the National People's Congress convenes.]] The country is ruled by the Communist Party of China (CPC), whose power is enshrined in China's constitution. The political system is very decentralized with limited democratic processes internal to the party and at local village levels, although these experiments have been marred by corruption. There are other political parties in the PRC, referred to in China as democratic parties, which participate in the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

There have been some moves toward political liberalization, in that open contested elections are now held at the village and town levels, and that legislatures have shown some assertiveness from time to time. However, the Party retains effective control over government appointments: in the absence of meaningful opposition, the CPC wins by default most of the time. Political concerns in the PRC include lessening the growing gap between rich and poor and fighting corruption within the government leadership.

The level of support to the government action and the management of the nation is among the highest in the world, with 86% of people who express satisfaction with the way things are going in their country and with their nation's economy according to a 2008 Pew Research Center survey.

Administrative divisions

The People's Republic of China has administrative control over 22 provinces and considers Taiwan to be its 23rd province, despite not having control over Taiwan which is currently administered by the Republic of China. The PRC's claim is disputed by the Republic of China. There are also five autonomous regions, each with a designated minority group; four municipalities; and two Special Administrative Regions that enjoy some degree of autonomy. The 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, and four municipalities can be collectively referred to as "mainland China", a term which usually excludes Hong Kong and Macau.

Foreign relations

with former US President George W. Bush]] China maintains diplomatic relations with most major countries in the world. China has diplomatic relations with 171 countries and maintains embassies in 162. Sweden was the first western country to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic on 9 May 1950. In 1971, the PRC replaced the Republic of China as the sole representative of China in the United Nations and as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. The PRC was also a former member and leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, and still considers itself an advocate for developing countries.

Under its interpretation of the One-China policy, the PRC has made it a precondition to establishing diplomatic relations that the other country acknowledges its claim to Taiwan and severs official ties with the Republic of China government; it has protested when any country shows signs of diplomatic overture, or sells armaments to Taiwan. It also opposes political meetings between foreign government officials and the 14th Dalai Lama.

The PRC has been playing an increasing role in calling for free trade areas and security pacts amongst its Asia-Pacific neighbors. In 2004, the PRC proposed an entirely new East Asia Summit (EAS) framework as a forum for regional security issues that pointedly excluded the United States. The EAS, which includes ASEAN Plus Three, India, Australia and New Zealand, held its inaugural summit in 2005. The PRC is also a founding member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), with Russia and the Central Asian republics.

In 2000 the U.S. Congress approved "permanent normal trade relations" (PNTR) with China, allowing Chinese exports in at the same low tariffs as goods from most other countries. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush asserted that free trade would gradually open China to democratic reform. Bush was an advocate of China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). China has a significant trade surplus with the United States, its most important export market. U.S. politicians have recently argued that the Chinese yuan is undervalued, giving China an unfair trade advantage.

Sinophobic attitudes often target Chinese minorities and nationals living outside of China. Sometimes the anti-Chinese attitudes turn violent, such as the 13 May Incident in Malaysia in 1969 and the Jakarta riots of May 1998 in Indonesia, in which more than 2,000 people died. In recent years, a number of anti-Chinese riots and incidents have also occurred in Africa and Oceania. Anti-Chinese sentiment is often rooted in socio-economics.

Much of the current foreign policy is based on the concept of Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence of Zhou Enlai – non-interference in other states' affairs, non-aggression, peaceful coexistence, and equality and mutual benefits. China's foreign policy is also driven by the concept of "harmony without uniformity" which encourages diplomatic relations between states despite ideological differences. This has led China to support states that are regarded as dangerous by Western nations, such as Zimbabwe, North Korea, or Iran. Conflicts with foreign countries have occurred at times in its recent history, particularly with the United States; for example, the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict in May 1999 and the US-China spy plane incident in April 2001. Its foreign relations with many Western nations suffered for a time following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, though they have since recovered.

The relationship between China and Japan has been strained at times by Japan's refusal to acknowledge its wartime past to the satisfaction of the PRC; take for instance revisionist comments made by prominent Japanese officials and in some Japanese history textbooks. Another point of conflict between the two countries is the frequent visits by Japanese government officials to the Yasukuni Shrine. However, Sino-Japanese relations have warmed considerably since Shinzo Abe became the new Japanese Prime Minister in September 2006. A joint historical study conducted by the PRC and Japan released a report in 2010 which pointed toward a new consensus on the issue of WWII atrocities.

Equally bordering the most countries in the world alongside Russia, China was party to a number of international territorial disputes resulting from the legacy of unequal treaties imposed on China during the historical period of New Imperialism. Since the 1990s, the PRC has been entering negotiations to resolve its disputed land borders, usually by offering concessions and accepting less than half of the disputed territory with each party. The PRC's only remaining land border disputes are a disputed border with India and an undefined border with Bhutan. China is a party in multilateral disputes over the ownership of several small islands in the East and South China Seas.

While accompanying a rapid economic rise, the PRC since the 1990s seeks to maintain a policy of quiet diplomacy with its neighbors. It does so by keeping economic growth steady and participating in regional organizations and cultivating bi-lateral relations in order to ease suspicion over China's burgeoning military capabilities. The PRC has started a policy of wooing African nations for trade and bilateral co-operation. Xinhua, China's official news agency, states that there are no less than 750,000 Chinese nationals working or living in Africa. There are some discussions about whether China will become a new superpower in the 21st century, with certain commentators pointing out its economic progress, military might, very large population, and increasing international influence but others noting the dangers posed by the bubbles that exist in the mainland Chinese economy.

Military

fighter aircraft]]

With 2.3 million active troops, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is the largest military in the world, commanded by the Central Military Commission (CMC). The PLA consists of an army, navy (PLAN), air force, and strategic nuclear force. The official announced budget of the PLA for 2009 was $70 billion. However, the United States claims China does not report its real military spending. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimates that the real Chinese military budget for 2008 could be anywhere from US$105 to US$150 billion.

China, with possession of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, is considered a major military regional power and an emerging military superpower. China is the only member of the UN Security Council to have limited power projection capabilities As a consequence, it has been establishing foreign military relationships that have been compared to a String of Pearls.

Much progress has been made in the last decade and the PRC continues to make efforts to modernize its military. It has purchased state-of-the-art fighter jets from Russia, such as the Sukhoi Su-30s, and has also produced its own modern fighters, specifically the Chinese J-10s and the J-11s. It has also acquired and improved upon the Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, which are considered to be among the best aircraft-intercepting systems in the world, albeit Russia has since produced the new generation S-400 Triumf, with China reportedly already having spent $500 million on a downgraded export version of it. The PRC's armored and rapid-reaction forces have been updated with enhanced electronics and targeting capabilities. In recent years, much attention has been focused on building a navy with blue-water capability.

Little information is available regarding the motivations supporting China's military modernization. A 2007 report by the US Secretary of Defense notes that "China's actions in certain areas increasingly appear inconsistent with its declaratory policies". For its part, China claims it maintains an army purely for defensive purposes.

On March 13, 2011, the PLAN Missile Frigate Xuzhou was spotted off the coast of Libya, making it the first time in history a Chinese warship sailed in the Mediterranean. The entrance into the Mediterranean was part of a humanitarian mission to rescue PRC nationals and a few non-Chinese out of Libya, though analysts such as Fareed Zakaria also view this trip as part of the PRC"s attempts to increase its global presence.

Sociopolitical issues and reform

The Chinese democracy movement, social activists, and certain members of the Communist Party of China have all identified the need to address sociopolitical issues with reform. While economic and social controls have been greatly relaxed in China since the 1970s, political freedom is still tightly restricted. The Constitution of the People's Republic of China states that the "fundamental rights" of citizens include freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, universal suffrage, and property rights. However, these provisions do not afford significant protection in practice against criminal prosecution by the State.

With the Chinese economic reform, tens of millions of rural Chinese who have moved to the cities find themselves treated as second-class citizens by China's obsolescent household registration system that controls state benefits, called hukou. The system of property rights is weak, and eminent domain land seizures has abused peasants.

Censorship of political speech and information, including on the Internet, is openly and routinely used to silence criticism of government and the ruling Chinese Communist Party. In 2005, Reporters Without Borders ranked the PRC 159 (out of 167 states) in its Annual World Press Freedom Index. The government has put down demonstrations from organizations and beliefs that it considers a potential threat to "social stability" and control, as was the case with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The Communist Party has had mixed success in controlling information: a very strong media control system faces very strong market forces, an increasingly educated citizenry, and cultural change that are making China more open, especially on environmental issues. However, attempts are still made by the Chinese government to control the information available from the outside world from reaching their populace.

A number of foreign governments and NGOs routinely criticize the PRC, alleging widespread civil rights violations including systematic use of lengthy detention without trial, forced confessions, torture, mistreatment of prisoners, restrictions of freedom of speech, assembly, association, religion, the press, and labor rights. China executes more people than any other country, accounting for 72% of the world's total in 2009, though it is not the largest executioner per capita.

The PRC government has responded by arguing that the notion of human rights should take into account a country's present level of economic development, and focus more on the people's rights to subsistence and development in poorer countries. The rise in the standard of living, literacy, and life expectancy for the average Chinese in the last three decades is seen by the government as tangible progress made in human rights. Efforts in the past decade to combat deadly natural disasters, such as the perennial Yangtze River floods, and work-related accidents are also portrayed in China as progress in human rights for a still largely poor country.

As the social, cultural and political as well as economic consequences of market reform become increasingly manifest, tensions between the conservative and reformists in the party are sharpening. Some Chinese scholars such as Zhou Tianyong, the vice director of research of the Central Party School, argue that gradual political reform as well as repression of those pushing for overly rapid change over the next thirty years will be essential if China is to avoid an overly turbulent transition to a middle class dominated polity. Some Chinese look back to the Cultural Revolution and fear chaos if the Communist Party should lose control due to domestic upheavals and so a robust system of monitoring and control is in place to counter the growing pressure for political change.

Economy

building at Shanghai's Lujiazui financial district]] From its founding in 1949 to late 1978, the People's Republic of China was a Soviet-style centrally planned economy. Private businesses and capitalism did not exist. To propel the country towards a modern, industrialized communist society, Mao Zedong instituted the Great Leap Forward. Following Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping and the new Chinese leadership began to reform the economy and move to a more market-oriented mixed economy under one-party rule. Collectivization of the agriculture was dismantled and farmlands were privatized to increase productivity. In 1978, China and Japan had normalized diplomatic relations and China had decided to borrow money from Japan in soft loans. Since 1978, Japan has been China's No. 1 foreign donor. China's economy is mainly characterised as a market economy based on private property ownership and is one of the leading examples of state capitalism.

A wide variety of small-scale enterprises were encouraged while the government relaxed price controls and promoted foreign investment. Foreign trade was focused upon as a major vehicle of growth, which led to the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) first in Shenzhen (near Hong Kong) and then in other Chinese cities. Inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were restructured by introducing western-style management system and the unprofitable ones were closed, resulting in massive job losses. By the latter part of 2010, China was reversing some of its economic liberalization initiative whereby state-owned companies were buying up independent businesses in the steel, auto and energy industries.

initiated the PRC's market-oriented reforms.]] Since economic liberalization began in 1978, the PRC's investment- and export-led economy has grown 90 times bigger and is the fastest growing major economy in the world. According to IMF that PRC's annual average GDP growth for the period of 2001–2010 was 10.5 percent and predicted to grow with 9.5 percent for the period of 2011–2015. From 2007 to 2011 China global economic growth is same as G7 growth combined together. As Global Growth Generators countries announced by Citigroup at February 2011, China has high 3G Index. It now has the world's second largest nominal GDP at 39.8 trillion yuan (US$6.05 trillion), although its per capita income of US$4,300 is still low and puts the PRC behind roughly a hundred countries. The primary, secondary, and tertiary industries contributed 10.6%, 46.8%, and 42.6% respectively to the total economy in 2009. If PPP is taken into account, the PRC's economy is second only to the US at $10.085 trillion corresponding to $7,518 per capita.

The inaugural Global Wealth Report by Credit Suisse Research Institute collects data across more than 200 countries in mid-2010 stated China is expected to overtake Japan as the second wealthiest country in the world by 2015 ($35 trillion) on the back of rapid economic growth and strong domestic consumption. Ten years ago, China was the seventh largest country in global wealth and China currently holds $16.5 trillion, 35 percent ahead of the wealthiest European country, France.

In November 2010 Japan's government said, output in China, the largest maker of mobile phones, computers and vehicles, surpassed Japan for the second straight quarter in the three months through September 2010. The Chinese economy overtook the UK as the fourth largest in 2005 and tipped Germany from third place in 2007.

The PRC is the fourth most visited country in the world with 50.9 million inbound international visitors in 2009. It is a member of the WTO and is the world's second largest trading power behind the US with a total international trade of US$2.21 trillion – US$1.20 trillion in exports (#1) and US$1.01 trillion in imports (#2). Its foreign exchange reserves have reached US$2.85 trillion at end of 2010 and it means increased by 18.7 percent from last year, making it by far the world's largest for the last few years. The PRC owns an estimated $1.6 trillion of US securities. The PRC, holding US$1.16 trillion in Treasury bonds, is the largest foreign holder of US public debt. It is the world's third largest recipient of inward FDI by attracting US$92.4 billion in 2008 alone, while the country itself increasingly invests abroad with a total outward FDI of US$52.2 billion in 2008 alone becoming the world's sixth largest outward investor. FDI inward in 2010 was $106 billion rose 16 percent from 2009.

The PRC's success has been primarily due to manufacturing as a low-cost producer. This is attributed to a combination of cheap labor, good infrastructure, relatively high productivity, favorable government policy, and some say, an undervalued exchange rate. The latter has been sometimes blamed for the PRC's bulging trade surplus (US$262.7 billion in 2007) and has become a major source of dispute between the PRC and its major trading partners – the US, EU, and Japan – despite the yuan having been de-pegged and risen in value by 20% against the US$ since 2005.

The state still dominates in strategic "pillar" industries (such as energy and heavy industries), but private enterprise (30 million private businesses) now accounts for anywhere between 33% (People's Daily 2005) to 70% (BusinessWeek, 2005) of GDP in 2005, while the OECD estimate is over 50% of China's national output, up from 1% in 1978. Its stock market in Shanghai (SSE) is raising record amounts of IPOs and its benchmark Shanghai Composite index has doubled since 2005. SSE's market capitalization reached US$3 trillion in 2007 and is the world's fifth largest exchange.

in Shanghai is one of the world's busiest shopping streets.]]

China now ranks 29th in the Global Competitiveness Index and ranked 135^th among the 179 countries measured in the Index of Economic Freedom. 46 Chinese companies made the list in the 2010 Fortune Global 500 (Beijing alone with 30). Measured using market capitalization, four of the world's top ten most valuable companies are Chinese. Some of these include first-ranked PetroChina (world's most valuable oil company), third-ranked Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (world's most valuable bank), fifth-ranked China Mobile (world's most valuable telecommunications company) and seventh-ranked China Construction Bank.

Although a middle income country by the world's standard, the PRC's rapid growth managed to pull hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty since 1978. Today, about 10% of the Chinese population (down from 64% in 1978) live below the poverty line of US$1 per day (PPP) while life expectancy has dramatically increased to 73 years. More than 93% of the population is literate, compared to 20% in 1950. Urban unemployment declined to 4 percent in China by the end of 2007 (true overall unemployment might be higher at around 10%).

Its middle class population (defined as those with annual income of at least US$17,000) has now reached more than 100 million, while the number of super-rich individuals worth more than 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million) is estimated to be 825,000 according to Hurun Report. China's retail market is worth RMB 8.9 trillion (US$1.302 trillion) in 2007 and growing at 16.8% annually. It is also now the world's second biggest consumer of luxury goods behind Japan with 27.5% of the global share.

The PRC's growth has been uneven when comparing different geographic regions and rural and urban areas. The urban-rural income gap is getting wider in the PRC with a Gini coefficient of 46.9%. Development has also been mainly concentrated in the eastern coastal regions while the remainder of the country are left behind. To counter this, the government has promoted development in the western, northeastern, and central regions of China.

The economy is also highly energy-intensive and inefficient – it uses 20%–100% more energy than OECD countries for many industrial processes. It has now become the world's largest energy consumer but relies on coal to supply about 70% of its energy needs. Coupled with a lax environmental regulation, this has led to a massive water and air pollution (China has 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities). In 2010, China became the largest wind energy provider worldwide, with the installed wind power capacity reaching 41.8 GW. On January 1, 2011, Russia said it had begun scheduled oil shipments to China, with the plan to increase the rate up to 300,000 barrels per day in 2011.

Science and technology

.]]

After the Sino-Soviet split, China started to develop its own nuclear weapons and delivery systems, successfully detonating its first surface nuclear test in 1964 at Lop Nur. A natural outgrowth of this was a satellite launching program, which culminated in 1970 with the launching of Dong Fang Hong I, the first Chinese satellite. This made the PRC the fifth nation to independently launch a satellite.

In 1992, the Shenzhou manned spaceflight program was authorized. After four unmanned tests, Shenzhou 5 was launched on 15 October 2003, using a Long March 2F launch vehicle and carrying Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei, making the PRC the third country to put a human being into space through its own endeavors. China completed its second manned mission with a crew of two, Shenzhou 6 in October 2005. In 2008, China successfully completed the Shenzhou 7 mission, making it the third country to have the capability to conduct a spacewalk. In 2007, the PRC successfully sent the Chang'e spacecraft, named after the ancient Chinese moon goddess, to orbit and explore the moon as part of their Chinese Lunar Exploration Program. China has plans to build a space station in the near future and to achieve a lunar landing in the next decade. There are also plans for a manned mission to planet Mars.

China has the world's second largest research and development budget, and is expected to invest over $136 billion in 2006 after growing more than 20% in 2005. The Chinese government continues to place heavy emphasis on research and development by creating greater public awareness of innovation, and reforming financial and tax systems to promote growth in cutting-edge industries.

In 2006, Hu Jintao called for China to make the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to an innovation-based one and the National People's Congress have approved large increases in research funding. Stem cell research and gene therapy, which some in the Western world see as controversial, face minimal regulation in China. China has an estimated 926,000 researchers, second only to the 1.3 million in the United States.

China is also actively developing its software, semiconductor and energy industries, including renewable energies such as hydro, wind and solar power. In an effort to reduce pollution from coal-burning power plants, China has been pioneering the deployment of pebble bed nuclear reactors, which run cooler and safer, and have potential applications for the hydrogen economy.

In 2010, China developed Tianhe-IA, the world's fastest supercomputer, currently stored in the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin. The system is expected to process seismic data for oil exploration, conduct bio-medical computing and help design aerospace vehicles. Besides China's National SuperComputer Center's Tianhe-1A above, China has the Nebulae which is also among the world's top 10 supercomputers.

Communications

China currently has the most cell phone users in the world with over 800 million users in July 2010. It also has the largest number of internet and broadband users in the world. At the end of 2010 internet users became 457 million or grew by 19 percent over the previous year, although there are government censors for pornographic and political issues and at the end of March 2011 touch 477 million. Based on China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China's average internet speed is 100.9 kbps or less than a half of the global average at 212.5 kbps.

China Telecom and China Unicom are two mammoth broadband service providers, accounted for 20% of global broadband subscribers, whereas the ten largest broadband service providers are 39% of the world's broadband customers. China Telecom with more than 55 million broadband subscribers and China Unicom with more than 40 million whereas the third rank is NTT with only less than 18 million. The gaps between the top two operator and the world's remaining broadband service providers will continue to grow rapidly, whereas the other top ten broadband ISPs operate in mature markets, with high levels of broadband penetration and rapidly slowing subscriber growth.

Transport

near exit 10, outside Beijing. There are 74,000 km (45,980 mi) of divided expressways in China, just 1000 miles short of the US interstate system.]]

) leaving a station in Shanghai. China has the longest high-speed rail system in the world, with over 7,000 km (4,500 miles) of routes in service.]]

Transportation in the mainland of the People's Republic of China has improved significantly since the late 1990s as part of a government effort to link the entire nation through a series of expressways known as the National Trunk Highway System (NTHS). The total length of expressway is at the end of 2010, second only to the United States. China has also the world’s longest high-speed rail network with over of service routes which of them has been serving with train with top speed of 220 mph.

Private car ownership is growing rapidly surpassing the United States as the largest automobile market in the world by 2009 with total sales of over 13.6 million.

Domestic air travel has increased significantly, but remains too expensive for most. Long distance transportation is dominated by railways and charter bus systems. Railways are the vital carrier in China; they are monopolized by the state, divided into various railway bureaus in different regions. At the rates of demand it experiences, the system has historically been subject to overcrowding during travel seasons such as Chunyun during the Chinese New Year.

The PRC's railway system is increasing in development. The major cities have rapidly expanding networks of underground or light rail systems. Hong Kong has one of the most developed transport systems in the world. Shanghai has a Maglev rail line connecting its urban area to its main international airport, Pudong International Airport.

Demographics

As of July 2010, there are 1,338,612,968 people in the PRC. About 21% (male 145,461,833; female 128,445,739) are 14 years old or younger, 71% (male 482,439,115; female 455,960,489) are between 15 and 64 years old, and 8% (male 48,562,635; female 53,103,902) are over 65 years old. The population growth rate for 2006 was 0.6%.

With a population of over 1.3 billion, the PRC is very concerned about its population growth and has attempted, with mixed results, to implement a strict family planning policy. The government's goal is one child per family, with exceptions for ethnic minorities and flexibility in rural areas. The government's goal is to stabilize population growth early in the 21st century, though some projections estimate a population of anywhere ranging from 1.4 billion to 1.6 billion by 2025. Hence, the country's family planning minister has indicated that China will maintain its one-child policy until at least the year 2020.

The policy is resisted, particularly in rural areas, because of the need for agricultural labour and a traditional preference for boys (who can later serve as male heirs). Families who breach the policy often lie during the census. Official government policy opposes forced sterilization or abortion, but allegations of coercion continue as local officials, who are faced with penalties for failing to curb population growth, may resort to forced abortion or sterilization, or manipulation of census figures.

The decreasing reliability of PRC population statistics since family planning began in the late 1970s has made evaluating the effectiveness of the policy difficult. Recent studies suggest that over 40 million girls and women are 'missing' in China (Klasen and Wink 2003).

Ethnic groups

The PRC officially recognizes 56 distinct ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Han Chinese, who constitute about 91.9% of the total population. Large ethnic minorities include the Zhuang (16 million), Manchu (10 million), Hui (9 million), Miao (8 million), Uyghur (7 million), Yi (7 million), Tujia (5.75 million), Mongols (5 million), Tibetans (5 million), Buyei (3 million), and Koreans (2 million).

Urbanization

In the past decade, China's cities expanded at an average rate of 10% annually. The country's urbanization rate increased from 17.4% to 46.8% between 1978 and 2009, a scale unprecedented in human history. Between 150 and 200 million migrant workers work part-time in the major cities and return home to the countryside periodically with their earnings.

Today, the People's Republic of China has dozens of major cities with one million or more long-term residents, including the three global cities of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

The figures below are from the 2008 census, and are only estimates of the population within administrative city limits; a different ranking exists when considering the total municipal populations (which includes suburban and rural populations). The large floating populations of migrant workers make conducting censuses in urban areas difficult; the figures below do not include the floating population, only long-term residents.

Education

in Beijing is a well regarded university in mainland China.]]

In 1986, China set the long-term goal of providing compulsory nine-year basic education to every child. As of 2007, there were 396,567 primary schools, 94,116 secondary schools, and 2,236 higher education institutions in the PRC. In February 2006, the government advanced its basic education goal by pledging to provide completely free nine-year education, including textbooks and fees. Free compulsory education in China consists of elementary school and middle school, which lasts for 9 years (age 6–15); almost all children in urban areas continue with 3 years of high school.

, 93.3% of the population over age 15 are literate. China's youth (age 15 to 24) literacy rate was 98.9% (99.2% for males and 98.5% for females) in 2000. In March 2007, China announced the decision of making education a national "strategic priority"; the central budget of the national scholarships will be tripled in two years and 223.5 billion Yuan (US$28.65 billion) of extra funding will be allocated from the central government in the next 5 years to improve the compulsory education in rural areas.

In 2009, Chinese students from Shanghai achieved the best results in mathematics, science and reading in the test of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide evaluation of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance.

The quality of Chinese colleges and universities varies considerably across the country. The consistently top-ranked universities in mainland China are:

Beijing: Peking University, Tsinghua University, Renmin University of China, Beijing Normal University

Shanghai: Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tongji University, East China Normal University

Harbin: Harbin Institute of Technology

Tianjin: Nankai University, Tianjin University

Xi'an Jiaotong University (Xi'an)

Nanjing University (Nanjing)

University of Science and Technology of China (Hefei)

Zhejiang University (Hangzhou)

Wuhan University (Wuhan)

Guangzhou: Sun Yat-sen University (aka Zhongshan University)

Many parents are highly committed to their children's education, often investing large portions of the family's income on education. Private lessons and recreational activities, such as in foreign languages or music, are popular among the middle-class families who can afford them.

Health

The Ministry of Health, together with its counterparts in the provincial health bureaux, oversees the health needs of the Chinese population. An emphasis on public health and preventive medicine characterized health policy since the early 1950s. At that time, the Communist Party started the Patriotic Health Campaign, which was aimed at improving sanitation and hygiene, as well as attacking several diseases. This has shown major results as diseases like cholera, typhoid, and scarlet fever were nearly eradicated.

With economic reform after 1978, the health of the Chinese public improved rapidly because of better nutrition despite the disappearance, along with the People's Communes, of much of the free public health services provided in the countryside. Health care in China became largely private fee-for-service. The country's life expectancy at birth jumped from about 35 years in 1949 to 73.18 years in 2008, and infant mortality went down from 300 per thousand in the 1950s to about 23 per thousand in 2006. Malnutrition stood at 12% of the population according to United Nations FAO sources.

Despite significant improvements in health and the introduction of western style medical facilities, China has several emerging public health problems, which include respiratory problems as a result of widespread air pollution and hundreds of millions of cigarette smokers, a possible future HIV/AIDS epidemic, and an increase in obesity among urban youths. China's large population and close living quarters has led to some serious disease outbreaks in recent years, such as the 2003 outbreak of SARS (a pneumonia-like disease) which has since been largely contained.

Estimates of excess deaths in China from environmental pollution (apart from smoking) are placed at 760,000 people per annum from air and water pollution (including indoor air pollution). In 2007, China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest producer of carbon dioxide. Some 90% of China's cities suffer from some degree of water pollution, and nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water. Reports by the World Bank and the New York Times have claimed industrial pollution, particularly of the air, to be significant health hazards in China.

Religion

", Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism are one, a litang style painting portraying three men laughing by a river stream, 12th century, Song Dynasty.]]

in Beijing, where the Emperor communed with Heaven.]]

In mainland China, the government allows a limited degree of religious freedom, however official tolerance is only extended to members of state-approved religious organizations and not to those who worship underground, such as house churches. An accurate number of religious adherents is hard to obtain because of a lack of official data, but there is general consensus that religion has been enjoying a resurgence over the past 20 years. A survey by Phil Zuckerman on Adherents.com found that in 1998, 59% (over 700 million) of the population was irreligious. Meanwhile, another survey in 2007 found that there are 300 million (23% of the population) believers as distinct from an official figure of 100 million. while Taoists number 400 million (~30%). However, because of the fact that one person may subscribe to two or more of these traditional beliefs simultaneously and the difficulty in clearly differentiating Buddhism, Taoism, and Chinese folk religions, the number of adherents to these religions can be overlaid. In addition, subscribing to Buddhism and Taoism is not necessarily considered religious by those who follow the philosophies in principle but stop short of subscribing to any kind of divinity.

in Harbin, northeast China. Harbin had a sizable Russian population, 100,000, by 1921.]]

Most Chinese Buddhists are nominal adherents because only a small proportion of the population (over 8% or over 100 million) may have taken the formal step of going for refuge. Even then, it is still difficult to estimate accurately the number of Buddhists because they do not have congregational memberships and often do not participate in public ceremonies. Mahayana (大乘, Dacheng) and its subsets Pure Land (Amidism), Tiantai and Chán (better known in the west by its Japanese pronunciation Zen) are the most widely practiced denominations of Buddhism. Other forms, such as Theravada and Tibetan, are practiced largely by ethnic minorities along the geographic fringes of the Chinese mainland.

Christianity in China was first introduced during the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century with the arrival of Nestorian Christianity in 635 CE. This was followed by Franciscan missionaries in the 13th century, Jesuits in the 16th century, and finally Protestants in the 19th century. Of the minority religions, Christianity has been particularly noted as one of the fastest-growing. The total number of Christians is difficult to determine, as many belong to unauthorized house churches, but estimates of their number have ranged from 40 million (3%) to 54 million (4%) to as many as 130 million (10%). Official government statistics put the number of Christians at 16 million, but these count only members of officially-sanctioned church bodies. China is believed to now have the world's second-largest evangelical Christian population — behind only the United States — and if current growth rates continue, China will become a global center of evangelical Christianity in coming decades

Islam in China dates to a mission in 651, 18 years after Muhammad's death. Muslims came to China for trade, dominating the import/export industry during the Song Dynasty. They became influential in government circles, including Zheng He, Lan Yu and Yeheidie'erding. Nanjing became an important center of Islamic study. The Qing Dynasty waged war and genocide against Muslims in the Dungan revolt and Panthay rebellion. Statistics are hard to find, and most estimates figures that there are 20 to 30 million Muslims (1.5% to 2% of the population).

There are also followers of minority religions including Hinduism, Dongbaism, Bön, and a number of new religions and sects (particularly Xiantianism). In July 1999, the Falun Gong spiritual practice was officially banned by the authorities, and many international organizations have criticized the government's treatment of Falun Gong that has occurred since then. There are no reliable estimates of the number of Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Culture

For centuries, opportunity for economic and social advancement in China could be provided by high performance on Imperial examinations. The literary emphasis of the exams affected the general perception of cultural refinement in China, such as the belief that calligraphy and literati painting were higher forms of art than dancing or drama. China's traditional values were derived from various versions of Confucianism and conservatism.

A number of more authoritarian and rational strains of thought have also been influential, such as Legalism. There was often conflict between the philosophies, such as the individualistic Song Dynasty neo-Confucians, who believed Legalism departed from the original spirit of Confucianism. Examinations and a culture of merit remain greatly valued in China today. In recent years, a number of New Confucians have advocated that democratic ideals and human rights are quite compatible with traditional Confucian "Asian values."

The first leaders of the People's Republic of China were born in the old society but were influenced by the May Fourth Movement and reformist ideals. They sought to change some traditional aspects of Chinese culture, such as rural land tenure, sexism, and a Confucian education, while preserving others, such as the family structure and obedience to the state.

Many observers believe that the period following 1949 is a continuation of traditional Chinese dynastic history, while others say that the CPC's rule has damaged the foundations of Chinese culture, especially through political movements such as the Cultural Revolution, where many aspects of traditional culture were labeled 'regressive and harmful' or 'vestiges of feudalism' by the regime and thus, were destroyed. They further argue that many important aspects of traditional Chinese morals and culture, such as Confucianism, Chinese art, literature, and performing arts like Beijing opera, were altered to conform to government policies and propaganda at the time.

Today, the Chinese government has accepted a great deal of traditional Chinese culture as an integral part of Chinese society, lauding it as an important achievement of the Chinese civilization and emphasizing it as vital to a Chinese national identity. Since the Cultural Revolution ended, various forms of traditional Chinese art, literature, music, film, fashion and architecture have seen a vigorous revival, and folk and variety art in particular have gained a new found respectability, and sparked interest nationally and even worldwide.

Chinese culture and the West were linked by the Silk Road. Artifacts from the history of the silk route, as well as from the natural history of the Gobi desert, are displayed in the Silk Route Museum.

Cuisine

The overwhelmingly large variety of Chinese cuisine comes mainly from the practice of dynastic period emperors hosting banquets with 100 dishes per meal. A countless number of imperial kitchen staff and concubines were involved in the food preparation process.

Over time, many dishes became part of the everyday-citizen culture. Some of the highest quality restaurants with recipes close to the dynastic periods include Fangshan restaurant in Beihai Park, Beijing and the Oriole Pavilion. Besides football, some of the most popular sports in the country include martial arts, table tennis, badminton, swimming, basketball and snooker. Board games such as Go (Weiqi), and Xiangqi (Chinese chess) and recently chess are also commonly played and have organized competitions.

Physical fitness is widely emphasized in Chinese culture. Morning exercises are a common activity and often one can find the elderly practicing qigong and tai chi chuan in parks or students doing stretches on school campuses.

Young people are also keen on basketball, especially in urban centers with limited space and grass areas. The NBA has a huge following among Chinese youths, with Yao Ming being the idol of many. Major sporting events were also held in Beijing such as the 1990 Asian Games and the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Many traditional sports are also played. The popular Chinese dragon boat racing occurs during the Dragon Boat Festival. In Inner Mongolia, sports such as Mongolian-style wrestling and horse racing are popular. In Tibet, archery and equestrianism are a part of traditional festivals.

China has participated at the olympics since 1952. China finished first in gold medal count at the most recent Summer Olympic Games which were held in Beijing from 8 to 24 August 2008.

See also

Index of China-related articles

International rankings of the People's Republic of China

Outline of China

References

; Further reading

Farah, Paolo, Five Years of China’s WTO Membership. EU and US Perspectives on China’s Compliance with Transparency Commitments and the Transitional Review Mechanism, Legal Issues of Economic Integration, Kluwer Law International, Volume 33, Number 3, pp. 263–304, 2006. Abstract.

Heilig, Gerhard K., China Bibliography – Online. 2006, 2007.

External links

Overviews

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Maps

Category:Central Asian countries Category:East Asian countries Category:Countries bordering the South China Sea Category:Countries bordering the Pacific Ocean Category:Socialist states Category:Communist states Category:Single-party states Category:Republics Category:Chinese-speaking countries and territories Category:States and territories established in 1949 Category:Member states of the United Nations

Coordinates	40°26′30″N80°00′00″N
Name	Donna Summer
Background	solo_singer
Background	solo_singer
Alias	Donna Gaines
Birth name	LaDonna Adrian Gaines
Born	December 31, 1948 Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Origin	Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA
Genre	Dance-pop, disco, pop, rock, new wave
Occupation	Singer-songwriter
Voice type	Mezzo-soprano
Years active	1968–present
Instrument	Vocals, piano
Label	Oasis RecordsCasablanca (1975–1980)Geffen (1980–1988)Atlantic (1988–1991)Mercury (1994–1996) Warner-Elektra-Atlantic (Outside of U.S. 1980–1991)Epic (1999–2001)Burgundy (2006–present)
Associated acts	Giorgio Moroder, Brooklyn Dreams

LaDonna Adrian Gaines (born December 31, 1948), known by her stage name, Donna Summer, is an American singer/songwriter who gained prominence during the disco era of the 1970s. Summer is a five-time Grammy winner and was the first artist to have three consecutive double albums reach number one on the US Billboard chart. She also charted four number-one singles in the US within a thirteen-month period.

Early life and career

Born on New Year's Eve 1948 in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, Summer was one of seven children raised by devout Christian parents. Influenced by Mahalia Jackson, Summer began singing in the church at a young age. In her teens, she formed several musical groups including one with her sister and a cousin, imitating Motown girl groups such as The Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas in Boston.

In the late 1960s, Summer was influenced by Janis Joplin after listening to her albums as member of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and joined the psychedelic rock group the Crow as lead singer. Beforehand, Summer dropped out of school convinced that music was her way out of Boston, where she had always felt herself to be an outsider, even among her own family who ridiculed her for her voice and her looks. The group was short-lived, as they split upon their arrival in New York. In 1968, Summer auditioned for a role in the Broadway musical, Hair. She lost the part of Sheila to Melba Moore. When the musical moved to Europe, Summer was offered the role. She took it and moved to Germany for several years. While in Germany, she participated in the musicals Godspell and Show Boat. After settling in Munich, she began performing in several ensembles including the Viennese Folk Opera and even sang as a member of the pop group FamilyTree – "invented" and created by the German music producer Guenter "Yogi" Lauke & the Munich Machine. She came to the group in 1973 and toured with the 11-people pop group throughout Europe. She also sang as a studio session singer and in theaters. In 1971, while still using her birth name Donna Gaines, she released her first single, a cover of "Sally Go 'Round the Roses", though it was not a hit. In 1972, she married Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer and gave birth to their daughter Mimi Sommer in 1973. Citing marital problems caused by his frequent absences, she divorced him but kept his last name, changing the "o" to a "u".

Early success

It was while singing background for the hit-making 1970s trio Three Dog Night that Summer met producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. She eventually made a deal with the European label Groovy Records and issued her first album, Lady of the Night, in 1974. Though not a hit in America, the album found some European success on the strength of the song "The Hostage", which reached number one in France and Belgium and number two in the Netherlands. Summer's early material consisted of pop rock and folk rock material. She stated years later that had she not recorded disco, she would have been a black rock singer, but considering there was not a market for black rock singers, Summer thought it would be hard to get promoted as such.

In 1975, Summer approached Moroder with an idea for a song he and Bellotte were working on for another singer. She had come up with the lyrics "love to love you, baby". Moroder was interested in developing the new sound that was becoming popular and used Summer's lyric to develop the song. Moroder persuaded Summer to record what was to be a demo track for another performer. She later said that she had thought of how the song might sound if Marilyn Monroe had sung it and began cooing the lyrics. To get into the mood of recording the song, she requested the producers turn off the lights while she sat on a sofa inducing moans and groans. After hearing playback of the song, Moroder felt Summer's seductive version should actually be distributed. Released as "Love to Love You" in Europe, some radios stations refused to play it, but the song found modest chart success in several countries there.

The song was then sent to America and arrived in the office of Casablanca Records president Neil Bogart in hopes of getting a US release. Casablanca was known around the industry for throwing lavish parties. At one of these parties, Bogart, still undecided about releasing the song, had the DJ play "Love To Love You" so he could gauge the reaction of people on the dancefloor. The crowd took to the song (which was less than five minutes) so strongly that they kept asking for it to be played over and over consecutively so they could continue dancing in the same groove. Soon after that night, Bogart informed Summer and Moroder he would release the song but requested that Moroder produce a longer version, about 15 to 20 minutes in length. Moroder, Bellotte, and Summer returned with a 17 minute version that included a soulful chorus and an instrumental break where Summer invoked even more moans. Bogart stated the name would be slightly changed to "Love to Love You Baby" for the American release. Casablanca signed Summer and it released the single in November 1975. The shorter version of the single was promoted to radio stations while clubs received the 17 minute version (the 17 minute version would also appear on the album). When Casablanca released the 17 minute version as a single, it became one of the first record companies to help make popular a format that would later be known as the 12 inch. By early 1976, "Love To Love You Baby" had reached #2 on the US Billboard Hot 100, while the parent album of the same name sold over a million copies. The song generated controversy for Summer's moans and groans and some US radio stations, like several in Europe, refused to play it. Time magazine would report that 22 orgasms were simulated in the making of the song. Other upcoming singles included "Try Me, I Know We can Make It", US #80; "Could It Be Magic", US #52; "Spring Affair", US #58; and "Winter Melody", US #43. The subsequent albums Love Trilogy and Four Seasons of Love both went gold in the US.

In 1977, Summer released the concept album I Remember Yesterday. This album included her second top ten single, "I Feel Love", which reached number six in America and number one in the UK. These Hot 100 entries on the singles chart would help get Summer deemed in the press as "The First Lady of Love", a title which she was not totally comfortable with.

Another concept album, also released in 1977, was the double album, Once Upon a Time, which told of a modern-day Cinderella "rags to riches" story through the elements of orchestral disco and ballads. This album would also attain gold status. In 1978, Summer released her version of the Richard Harris ballad, "MacArthur Park", which became her first number one US hit. The song was featured on Summer's first live album, Live and More, which also became her first album to hit number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, and went platinum selling over a million copies. Other studio tracks included the top ten hit, "Heaven Knows", which featured the group Brooklyn Dreams accompanying her on background and Joe "Bean" Esposito singing alongside her on the verses. Summer would later be involved romantically with Brooklyn Dreams singer Bruce Sudano and the couple married two years after the song's release. Also in 1978, Summer acted in the film, Thank God It's Friday, playing a singer determined to perform at a hot disco club. The film met modest success, but a song from the film, entitled "Last Dance", reached number three on the US Hot 100 and resulted in Summer winning her first Grammy Award. Its writer, Paul Jabara, won an Academy Award for the composition. Despite her musical success, Summer was struggling with anxiety and depression and fell into a prescription drug addiction for several years.

In 1979, Summer was a performer on the world-televised Music for UNICEF Concert. The United Nations organization Unicef had declared 1979 as the Year of the Child. Summer joined contemporaries like Abba, Olivia Newton-John, the Bee Gees, Andy Gibb, Rod Stewart, John Denver, Earth, Wind and Fire, Rita Coolidge and Kris Kristofferson for an hour's TV special that raised funds and awareness for the world's children. Artists donated royalties of certain songs, some in perpetuity, to benefit the cause.

Bad Girls and the break from disco

Following her recovery from prescription drug addiction, Summer worked on her next album with Moroder and Bellotte. The result was Bad Girls, an album that had been in production for nearly two years. Summer based the concept of the album on a prostitute, as was made clear in the lyrics. The album became a success, spawning the number one hits "Hot Stuff" and Bad Girls, and the number two ballad "Dim All the Lights" With MacArthur Park, Hot Stuff, Bad Girls, and the Barbra Streisand duet "No More Tears (Enough is Enough)", which appeared on Streisand's album, Summer achieved four number-one hits within a thirteen month period. Those aforementioned songs, along with Heaven Knows, Last Dance, Dim All The Lights, and On the Radio (from her upcoming double-album) would give her eight US Top 5 singles within a two year period. "Hot Stuff" later won her a second Grammy in the Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, which was the first time that category was ever brought to the award's show. That year, Summer played eight sold-out nights at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles.

Summer released her first greatest hits set in 1979, a double-album entitled . The album reached number one in the US, becoming her third consecutive number one album. A new song from the compilation, "On the Radio", reached the US top five. After the release of the greatest hits album, Summer wanted to branch out and record other formats in addition to disco. This led to tensions between her and Casablanca Records. Sensing that they could no longer come to terms, Summer and the label parted ways in 1980, and she signed with Geffen Records, the label started by David Geffen. Summer's first release on Geffen Records was The Wanderer; it replaced the disco sound of Summer's previous releases with more of the burgeoning new wave sound and elements of rock, such as the material being recorded at this time by Pat Benatar. The first single, the title track, became a hit and peaked at #3 in the US, subsequent singles were moderate hits. The album achieved gold status in the US, but met limited success on the UK charts.

Summer's projected second Geffen release, entitled I'm a Rainbow, was shelved by Geffen Records (though two of the album's songs would surface in soundtracks of the 1980s films Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Flashdance). Summer reluctantly parted company with Moroder after seven years working together as Geffen had recruited Quincy Jones to produce her next album. The result was the 1982 album Donna Summer. The album had taken a lengthy six months to record. The album's first single, the dance-funky "Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)", became an American top ten hit on the Hot 100. The next singles, "State of Independence"(#41 pop) and "The Woman In Me"(#33 pop), were moderate hits. Problems then increased between Summer and Geffen Records after they were notified by Polygram Records, the parent company of Summer's former label Casablanca, that she needed to deliver them one more album to fulfill her agreement with them. Summer delivered the album "She Works Hard for the Money" and Polygram released it on its Mercury imprint in 1983. The title song became a hit reaching number three on the US Hot 100, and Summer would receive a Grammy nomination for this song. The album also featured the reggae-flavored top 20 UK hit "Unconditional Love", which featured the group Musical Youth who were riding high from the success of their single "Pass the Dutchie". The third US single, "Love Has A Mind of Its Own", reached the top forty of the Billboard R&B; chart. With the album She Works Hard For the Money being certified gold, spawning a US and a European hit, and receiving a Grammy nomination for the title song, David Geffen was reportedly upset that the album was a success but had not been released by his label, with whom Summer was currently contracted.

In late 1984, with no more albums due to Polygram, Summer returned on Geffen Records with her next release. Geffen, wanting to keep the momentum going, enlisted She Works Hard For the Money's producer Michael Omartian to produce Cats Without Claws. The album, however, was not as successful as She Works Hard For the Money or The Wanderer. It included a moderate hit in "There Goes My Baby", which just missed the US Top 20, peaking at #21. But the album failed to attain gold status of 500,000 copies sold in the US, becoming her first album since her 1974 debut not to do so.

Summer experienced success in the 1980s with several hit singles and gold albums, but she was mainly seen as a disco artist from the 70s, along with acts such as Gloria Gaynor, the Bee Gees, and KC and the Sunshine Band. In the 1980s, other acts began to make their impression on the music charts. The New Wave sounds of the Second British Invasion was very high profile, which included Culture Club, Wham, and the Eurythmics among others. Laura Branigan found success in a dance power-belt singing style reminiscent of Summer. Established American Soul singers like Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and Chaka Kahn experienced pop chart success in this period, and new American singers such as Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, and Whitney Houston had redirected the tastes of the record-buying public in the 1980s.

Later career and current work

In 1987, Summer returned with the album All Systems Go, which did not sell well, becoming her second consecutive album not to go gold. It featured the minor US hit of Brenda Russell's composition "Dinner with Gershwin". The song, however, became a UK hit. The title song, "All Systems Go", was a UK only release, and it became a minor hit in that country. For Summer's next release, Geffen Records hired and paired the artist with the hit production team of Stock Aitken Waterman. SAW as they were also known, had experienced very strong success by writing and producing for such acts as Kylie Minogue, Dead or Alive, Bananarama, and Rick Astley among others. However, Geffen decided not to release the album, entitled Another Place and Time, and Summer and Geffen Records parted ways in 1988.

Another Place and Time was released in Europe on Warner Bros. Records, which had been Summer's label of release in Europe since 1982. The single "This Time I Know It's For Real" had become a top ten hit in several countries in Europe, sparking Warner Bros. sister company under WEA, Atlantic Records, to sign Summer in the US and pick up the album for a North American release in 1989. Atlantic, too, had great success with the single as it peaked at #7 on the Hot 100 in America. The single was certified gold, becoming her twelfth gold single in the US. It became Summer's final top forty hit on the American pop charts. She scored two more UK hits from the album, "I Don't Wanna Get Hurt" (UK #7) and "Love's About To Change My Heart" (UK #20).

In 1991, Summer released the new jack swing-driven album Mistaken Identity. It did not sell strongly, but it did contain the #18 R&B; hit "When Love Cries".

In 1993, Polygram Records released an extended greatest hits collection entitled "The Donna Summer Anthology". It included over two and a half hours of music from 34 songs. It not only included songs from the Polygram-owned labels of Casablanca and Mercury, but also material from Atlantic and Geffen Records as well.

In 1994, Summer return with a new album on Mercury/Polygram, a gospel-influenced Christmas album entitled Christmas Spirit. It included classic Christmas songs such as "O Holy Night", "Joy To The World", and "O Come All Ye Faithful" as well as some original songs.

Some of Summer's dance releases including "Carry On" (her first collaboration with Moroder in a decade) and "Melody of Love (Wanna Be Loved)" charted on the US Dance Chart, with "Melody of Love" reaching number one on that chart and also reaching number 21 on the UK Singles Chart

Also in 1994, Polygram would release yet another Summer album (Polygram's third Summer album within a two year period); a collection called "". The differences between this greatest hits album and the Anthology collection would be that this package contained 18 songs, while Anthology contained 34; and the songs here were mainly the radio versions heard at the time of their release, while Anthology contained somewhat longer versions of the songs.

While touring, Summer found work as an actor guest-starring on the sitcom Family Matters as Steve Urkel's (Jaleel White) Aunt Oona in 1994 and again in 1997. In 1998, Summer received a Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording, being the first to do so, after a remixed version of her 1992 collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, "Carry On", was released in 1997. In 1999, Summer taped a live television special for VH1 titled Donna Summer – Live and More Encore, producing the second highest ratings that year for the network, after their annual Divas special. (Incidentally, Donna appeared the next year on the third annual concert, honoring Diana Ross and singing her own hits.) A CD of the event was released by Epic Records and featured two studio recordings, "I Will Go with You (Con te partirò)" and "Love Is the Healer". Summer scored top ten hits on Billboard's Dance Chart in the beginning of the new millennium. In 2004, Summer was inducted to the Dance Music Hall of Fame alongside The Bee Gees and Barry Gibb as an artist. Her classic song, "I Feel Love", was also inducted that night. Also, that year, she became one of the first acts, as both an Artist Inductee and a Record Inductee (for 1977’s “I Feel Love”) into the Dance Music Hall of Fame in New York City. It is estimated that Donna Summer has sold more than 130 million albums and singles worldwide and It was commented on her interview with David Letterman and others.

In 2008, Summer released her first studio album of original music in 14 years entitled Crayons, which brought her American success, peaking at #17 on the US Top 200 Album Chart, and modest international success. The album was released on the Sony BMG label Burgundy Records. The songs "I'm A Fire", "Stamp Your Feet", and "Fame (The Game)" reached number one on the US Billboard Dance Chart. The ballad "Sand on My Feet" was released to adult contemporary stations and reached number thirty on that chart.

While commenting on the album, Summer said, “I wanted this album to have a lot of different directions on it. I did not want it to be any one baby. I just wanted it to be a sampler of flavors and influences from all over the world. There’s a touch of this, a little smidgeon of that, a dash of something else…like when you’re cooking.”

On the song “The Queen Is Back,” Donna Summer reveals her wry and witty self-awareness of her musical legacy and her public persona. “I’m making fun of myself,” she admits. “There’s irony, it’s poking fun at the idea of being called a queen. That’s a title that has followed me, followed me, and followed me. We were sitting and writing and that title kept popping up in my mind and I’m thinking, ‘Am I supposed to write this? Is this too arrogant to write?’ But people call me ‘the queen,’ so I guess it's ok to refer to myself as what everybody else refers to me as. We started writing the song and thought it was kind of cute and funny.”

Summer wrote “The Queen Is Back” and “Mr. Music” with J.R. Rotem and Evan Bogart, the son of Neil Bogart, Casablanca Records founder. Neil Bogart died from cancer at the age of 39. He signed Summer to his Casablanca Records label in 1975 and released what would be most of her biggest albums and singles during the 70s decade. “I adored him and would have given up everything for him to be alive,” says Summer, remembering a time backstage long ago “when the nail person didn’t show up and Neil got on his knees and did my toenails. In many ways he was my mentor and I didn’t get to say goodbye to him.” When Summer met Evan Bogart, she was struck by his uncanny resemblance to his father. “It’s almost like they chiseled him out of his father,” Summer observed. “I’m in the studio looking at him and I get tears in my eyes, he has no idea why. I just wanted to hug him because it’s like I’m seeing someone I haven’t seen since his father passed away. It’s almost like Neil is looking at me through him. Evan and I hit it off immediately; there was a synergy that happened really quickly.”

On December 11, 2009, Summer performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway, in honor of US President Barack Obama. She was backed by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra.

In August 2010, she released the single "To Paris With Love", co-written with Bruce Roberts and produced by Peter Stengaard. In October 2010, the single reached #1 on the US Billboard Dance Chart. Also that month Donna taped and closed the show for the PBS Special "David Foster and Friends". Highlights include a duet with Seal: a medley with the songs "Unbreak My Heart / Crazy / On the Radio.".

On July 29, 2010, Summer gave an interview with allvoices.com where she was asked if she would consider doing an album of standards. She replied:

:"I actually am, probably in September. I will begin work on a standards album. I will probably do an all-out dance album and a standards album. I'm gonna do both, and we will release them however were gonna release them. We are not sure which is going first."

On September 15, 2010, Summer appeared as a guest celebrity singing alongside rising star Prince Poppycock on the television show America's Got Talent.

On October 16, 2010, she performed at a benefit concert at the Phoenix Symphony.

Awards and recognition

One NAACP Image Award.

One time Juno Award nomination for Best Selling International Single,"I feel Love".

Three Multi-Platinum albums in the US.

Eleven of her albums went Gold in the US.

Twelve Gold singles.

Six American Music Awards.

She was the first female African American to receive an MTV Video Music Awards nomination. ("Best Female Video" and "Best Choreography" for "She Works Hard For The Money")

Academy Award for Best Original Song "Last Dance".

Two Golden Globe Award nominations (one win for "Last Dance" Song and one nominated for "The Deep" John Barry's Song).

Summer has received five Grammy Awards.

*1979 – Best R&B; Vocal Performance (Female), Last Dance

*1980 – Best Rock Vocal Performance (Female), Hot Stuff

*1984 – Best Inspirational Performance, He's a Rebel

*1985 – Best Inspirational Performance, Forgive Me

*1998 – Best Dance Recording, Carry On

Twelve Grammy Award nominations (total of seventeen).

*1979 – Best Pop Vocal Performance (Female), MacArthur Park

*1980 – Album of the Year, Bad Girls

*1980 – Best Pop Vocal Performance (Female), Bad Girls

*1980 – Best R&B; Vocal Performance (Female), Dim All the Lights

*1980 – Best Disco Recording, Bad Girls

*1981 – Best Pop Vocal Performance (Female), On the Radio

*1982 – Best Rock Vocal Performance (Female), Cold Love

*1982 – Best Inspirational Performance, I Believe in Jesus

*1983 – Best Rock Vocal Performance (Female), Protection

*1983 – Best R&B; Vocal Performance (Female), Love is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)

*1984 – Best Pop Vocal Performance (Female), She Works Hard for the Money

*2000 – Best Dance Recording, I Will Go with You (Con te Partiro)

Summer placed a Top Forty hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in every year from 1976 ("Love to Love You Baby") to 1984 ("There Goes My Baby").

Summer was the first artist to score three consecutive number-one double albums.

Summer was twice honored by the Dance Music Hall of Fame; once with her induction as a recording artist and again with the induction for her influential single "I Feel Love". Summer's music career has landed her as the eighth most successful female recording artist in history according to Billboard .

Summer's career span of Billboard number-one Disco/Club Play hits spans from 1975's "Love to Love You Baby" through 2010's "[To Paris With Love]".

Summer was nominated for 2010 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but was not chosen.

Cover versions by other artists

"I Feel Love" has been sampled several times. The song was sampled by Madonna, Whitney Houston, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, Moloko, Britney Spears, Robbie Williams, Darren Hayes, Mylo, David Guetta, Stuart Price, and Moby among others. "I Feel Love" was recorded by classical pop musician Vanessa-Mae for her 1998 album Storm. Italian company Gucci used a special version of it in the "Flora" perfume advertising, filmed by Chris Cunningham. "I Feel Love" has been covered onstage by Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante, Kylie Minogue, Blondie, Basement Jaxx, and Finnish progressive rock band Kingston Wall. Venus Hum with Blue Man Group also performed this song with Japanese singer Kumi Koda for their album The Complex, and in 2006, Tracy Bonham stood in for Hum on the Blue Man Group tour, performing the song. Bronski Beat and Marc Almond released the track as a duet with an added bridge section and titled it "I Feel Love/Johnny Remember Me", reaching number 3 in the UK charts in April 1985. In 1992 U.K. alterna-pop group Curve recorded a version for the NME's 40th anniversary compilation Ruby Trax, which became an instant underground classic.

"Love to Love You Baby" was sampled in Beyoncé Knowles's "Naughty Girl" and by TLC on their original version of "I'm Good at Being Bad", but was removed by request of Summer on later editions. The song has been covered in portions onstage by Dionne Warwick.

"I Feel Love" was covered by French Canadian artist Jorane for her 2004 album The You and the Now. LA based band Dengue Fever covered this song on their album Radio Dance Floor. Kylie Minogue's team also sampled this for her 2002 KylieFever. Kylie performed "Light Years" which contains elements of "I Feel Love".

Madonna combined her song "Future Lovers" from her hit album Confessions on a Dancefloor with "I Feel Love" as the opening song on her Confessions Tour in 2006.

Summer's "Starting Over Again" was a number one hit on the Hot Country Songs chart as a single for Dolly Parton in 1980. It also was a top-forty hit for Parton on the Billboard Hot 100. Reba McEntire named her 1995 album after the song, and McEntire's version hit no. 17 on the country singles chart in 1996. McEntire stated in the album's liner notes that her recording of the song was intended as something of a tribute to Summer and Parton, both artists whom she admired.

Summer's "On the Radio" was covered by country artist Emmylou Harris for her 1983 album White Shoes. British singer and actress Martine McCutcheon recorded a version that reached number 7 in the UK charts in February 2001. An acoustic rendition was released by alt. rock band Hypnogaja in January 2010.

Summer's "Sunset People" was covered by E.G. Daily on her Wild Child album (1985).

Summer's "Dim All the Lights" was a Top 40 Dance hit for Laura Branigan in 1995, appearing on her The Best of Branigan album.

Summer's "Last Dance" and "On the Radio" were covered by Tejano/pop singer Selena, most famously at one of her last shows at the Houston Astrodome, on February 26, 1995.

Summer's "All Through the Night" was covered in 1982 by KC and The Sunshine Band on their Painter album, and in 1995 by supermodel Naomi Campbell for her album Baby Woman, featuring Luther Vandross on backing vocals.

Summer's "Bad Girls" was recorded by British Jazz and US pop singer Juliet Roberts in 1998, and again in 2000 by Cheryl Chase for the Nick film .

Summer's "Love Is in Control" was covered by pop singer Sheena Easton on her 2000 disco album Fabulous.

In 1985 Dusty Springfield reached number 83 on the UK charts with a cover of "Sometimes like Butterflies".

Summer's "Heaven Knows" was recorded by Faith Evans for inclusion on the soundtrack for the film, The Fighting Temptations.

Summer's "The Woman In Me" was recorded by Heart in the early 1990s.

Summer's "She Works Hard For The Money" was often performed by Millie Jackson during her 1980s concerts. "She Works Hard For The Money" was covered by Kris Allen during an American Idol Season 8 episode and recorded by Allen for the American Idol Season 8 CD.

Jeffree Star covered her song "Bad Girls" for the upcoming movie called "Turn The Beat Around" for MTV.

Monica Naranjo Fuego de pasion "Love's About To Change My Heart".

In 2010, Keri Hilson portrayed Summer in her music video for her hit-single, Pretty Girl Rock.

In 2010 – Rhythm Masters and MYNC Project released a remake of "I Feel Love" on CR2 Records in the UK, with vocals by American Electro/Pop/Dance Artist Wynter Gordon.

Donna Summer concert tours

Once Upon A Time Tour (1977–1978)

Bad Girls Tour (1979)

The Wanderer Tour (1981)

Hard For The Money Tour (1983)

The Rainbow Tour (1984)

Silver Girl Tour (1986)

All Systems Go Tour (1987)

Endless Summer Tour (1995)

Mid Summer Nights Dream Tour ( 1996–1997)

Live & More Encore Tour (1999)

Greatest Hits Tour (2005)

Crayons Tour (2008)

Discography

1974: Lady of the Night

1975: Love to Love You Baby

1976: A Love Trilogy

1976: Four Seasons of Love

1977: I Remember Yesterday

1977: Once Upon a Time

1979: Bad Girls

1980: The Wanderer

1981: I'm a Rainbow

1982: Donna Summer

1983: She Works Hard for the Money

1984: Cats Without Claws

1987: All Systems Go

1989: Another Place and Time

1991: Mistaken Identity

1994: Christmas Spirit

2008: Crayons

See also

Brooklyn Dreams

Best selling music artists

References

External links

Official website

A hit search page

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