Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
The biography delves into Joseph Stalin's formative years, exploring his transformation from a poverty-stricken, idealistic youth to a cunning and formidable figure in Russian history. Suny examines Stalin's early life in the Caucasus, tracing his evolution from a Georgian nationalist to a ruthless political operative within the Bolshevik ...
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.
Stalin's father, Besarion, was a shoemaker and owned a workshop that at one point employed as many as ten people, [7] but which slid into ruin as Stalin grew up. [8] Beso had specialised in producing traditional Georgian footwear and did not produce the European-style shoes that were becoming increasingly fashionable. [3]
Students of a military-sponsored school attend the opening of a series of busts of Russian leaders, including Josef Stalin (center), in Moscow, on September 22, 2017.
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 is the first volume in the three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin by American historian and Princeton Professor of History Stephen Kotkin. It was originally published in November 2014 by Penguin Random House and as an audiobook in December 2014 by Recorded Books.