Stalin History Channel Notes

Stalin Declassified

“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic”

• Murders more than his own country than all killed in war Russia were in wars combined

• May 1945, victory. USSR celebrate end of WWII. Victory at great cost. Death toll at 7mill according to Stalin. Soviet documents declassified rose and said at 9million military, 17 military civilians. 26 million total.

• January 1924 Lenin dead. Stalin began to emerge as the chief

• Goal of soviet communism- world domination. But in 1920’s USSR weak. Stalin’s challenge was to strengthen it.

• Achieve aims of state through a proletariat dictatorship. He believed morality was a bourgeois concept.

• Even Tsar f Russia, an autocrat, was bound by the obligations of the ruling class. Stalin was not bound by anything

• 1928, government move peasants to collectivised farms in order to make collection of crops easier. Both a political/economic decision. Brought 5 year plan. Stalin forced peasants to hand over grain to state-coerced citizens into a unified state.

• Stalin took land from richer peasants, Kulaks. More than 1 million Kulaks deported to Siberia. He began to liquidate, and arbitrarily decide who was and who was not a Kulak.

• Dr. Sergei Khrushchev “everybody fought everybody” no one had time

• Intimidation and fear were agents for the consolidation of Stalin’s power. He subdued the peasantry at large, nearly causing a civil war among the peasants.

• Brzezinski “terror systematically organised” though inhuman calculation.

• NKVD-secret police was a main agent of Stalin’s power. He would create a wave of terror and then put in a new leader of the NKVD, then purge that leader and so forth

• 30’s 7 different leaders of the NKVD - Sergei Khrushchev

• End of 1930’s Stalin moved on to other sectors of society. There was a lack of rationality, which meant wide spread terror. Any one can be accused of being an enemy to the state

• Stalin