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Joseph Stalin. "Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?" Joseph Stalin was a dictator for the U.S.S.R. from 1929 until 1953. He ruled with an "iron - hand." He wanted to turn Russia into a powerful industrial state. Stalin was Lenin's successor during WWII. He felt the same way that Lenin did. Only Stalin thought Lenin's ideas were not moving fast enough for the economy. So Stalin became harsh and brutal. He felt that his way, had to be everybody's way. So because of this way of thinking, the Soviet people had cause to hate Stalin. Much of the world feared him as well! His industrial reforms were quickly forced upon the people of Russia. Moscow became the fastest-growing city in the world. In the mid 1930's, most of the Bolshevik leaders were forced to confess to evil crimes they did not commit. After a confession, they were brutally executed on Stalin's orders. About eighty of the well-trained senior army officers were also killed. These many purges controlled any remaining threat to Stalin's absolute power. In World War II, Russia teamed up with the U.S and Great Britian against Germany. Stalin disagreed, and many times betrayed his allies prior to WW II's end. The last years that Stalin ruled the Soviet Union were marked by the Cold War with U.S, in which many non-Communist nations banded together to stop the spread of Communism. Sad to say, a few countries still believe in Communism. One of these countries is Cuba.
Lenin was the initiator of the central drama--the tragedy--of our era, the rise of totalitarian states. A bookish man with a scholar's habits and a general's tactical instincts, Lenin introduced to the 20th century the practice of taking an all-embracing ideology and imposing it on an entire society rapidly and mercilessly; he created a regime that erased politics, erased historical memory, erased opposition. In his short career in power, from 1917 until his death in 1924, Lenin created a model not merely for his successor, Stalin, but for Mao, for Hitler, for Pol Pot. 1923 Warns against Stalin as successor. 1924 Dies after a series of strokes
Nikita Khrushchev. After the war, Khrushchev was called back to Moscow, where he soon became one of Stalin's top advisers. When Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin won a power struggle against Stalin's successor, Georgi Malenkov, and secret police chief Lavrenti Beria. Beria was executed, and Malenkov was forced to resign. Bulganin became premier, but Khrushchev, in charge of the Communist Party, soon became the dominant figure.
Khrushchev's leadership marked a crucial transition for the Soviet Union. From the beginning, Khrushchev set out to make the Soviet system more effective by curbing Stalin's worst excesses. In an historic speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, he attacked Stalin for his crimes -- acknowledging what many people believed, but which no Soviet leader had ever dared mention. What Khrushchev dared not mention was his own complicity in those crimes.
Khrushchev's advocacy of reforms contributed to a groundswell of independence movements among Soviet satellite nations in Eastern Europe. While promoting change, Khrushchev would not tolerate dissent: he supported sending tanks into Budapest in 1956 to brutally suppress a Hungarian rebellion. The Iron Curtain remained in place.
In relations with the West, Khrushchev's tenure was marked by a series of high-stakes crises: the U-2 affair, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile crisis. At the same time, he was the first Soviet leader to advocate "peaceful coexistence" with the West, and to negotiate with the United States on reducing Cold War tensions.
By 1964, his reforms had alienated too many powerful Soviet constituencies. A group of conservatives led by Leonid Brezhnev ousted Khrushchev, and he retired to a dacha in rural Russia, where he died in 1971.
| 1. Joseph Stalin |
2. Vladimir Lenin |
3.Nikita Khrushchev |
Can you identify this CIS Republic?
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4. Name this country