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He also took military positions in the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War. Stalin was one of the Bolsheviks' chief operatives in the Caucasus and grew closer to Lenin, who saw him as tough, loyal, and capable of getting things done behind the scenes. Stalin played a decisive role in engineering the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia.
Stalin initiated a military build-up, with the Red Army more than doubling between January 1939 and June 1941, although in haste many of its officers were poorly trained. [366] Between 1940 and 1941 Stalin purged the military, leaving it with a severe shortage of trained officers when war eventually broke out. [367]
Churchill wanted to meet Roosevelt alone before the Cairo Conference to discuss the Grand Alliance plan of action in Europe for fear of heavy casualties to British forces, but the United States did not want to postpone the counterattack because of Stalin's insistence for the Anglo-Americans to open a second front to relieve the pressure faced ...
Order No. 227 (Russian: Приказ № 227, romanized: Prikaz No. 227) was an order issued on 28 July 1942 by Joseph Stalin, who was acting as the People's Commissar of Defence. It is known for its line "Not a step back!" (Ни шагу назад!, Ni shagu nazad!), [1] which became the primary slogan of the Soviet press in summer 1942. [2]
But Stalin argued that the proletarian state (as opposed to the bourgeois state) must become stronger before it can wither away. In Stalin's view, counter-revolutionary elements will attempt to derail the transition to full communism , and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them.
Yet if we apply the perverse logic of Stalinism, the greatest subversive agent to undermine the promise of the revolution of 1917 and transform the aspirations of millions into bloody despotism — objectively, as Stalinists would have said — was the dictator himself. Stalin killed more communists and did more to undermine the international ...
Stalin was arguably the first dictator to rule through the political police, and that became part of the merger between the KGB and now the way politics works in Putin’s Russia.
Stalin's Battle Squads had to go into hiding and operate from the underground. [151] When Stalin returned to the city, he co-organised the assassination of Griiazanov with local Mensheviks. [152] Stalin also established a small group which he called the Bolshevik Expropriators Club, although it would more widely be known as the Group or Outfit ...