Joseph Stalin

Stalin was dictator of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953. When he was young he was a bank robber, an agitator, and an assassin. After a long road to get into power, he became a paranoid, ruthless, unforgiving, brutal and vengeful dictator. He created a 30 year reign of violence, terror, destruction and murdering. Anyone who spied on him, displeased him, or voted against him was doomed to die. His first plan was to create the Soviet Union into an industrial superpower country.

To do that would cause the deaths of countless numbers of people. People were sent to slave labors and were forced to work to death. Huge industrial schemes became a living hell for hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. He signed the death warrants for tens of thousands of people. Stalin only liked people who fourfold his orders, but if you were a popular figure, an intelligent, and independent person, Stalin would order you to be tortured, imprisoned for many years or life, or shot you. He would kill family members of people who loved him and family members of people who horned him as a god. Stalin once kissed a small girl in public, she had become famous and thought Stalin cared for her and her family, but he later killed her parents. People were sometimes killed with an ice pick. About 10 million people died in a famine.

Stalin once said “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is simply a statistic.” He killed the wives of some of his friends. He exiled his daughter’s boyfriend, Aleksie Kapler. Stalin’s wife was driven into despair by his treatment of her, which caused her to kill herself. His son died in a Nazi concentration camp after Stalin refused to trade for his life. He would even kill people who were defending their country against the Nazis. People were in prison were force to fight in World War II, but if they returned they would be sent back to prison. Hundreds of thousands of people from other countries were tortured, raped, or killed. People were often killed by mustard gas bombs. More than 1.5 million German women were raped from the Soviet Union. Recent evidence shows that Stalin had his own Final Solution in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were exiled or killed. Stalin wanted the Soviet Union to become a country strong enough to rival the U.S., but if they were stronger than the U.S., he would want the 2 countries to fight a war. Stalin killed 20 to 60 million people. He died in 1953 from a stroke.