Joseph Stalin Research Paper

When people think of villains in the real world, the first person who would most likely be thought of first is Hitler. As the leader of the German Nazis, it is obvious that he would be an abominable human being, putting thousands of millions of people through torture, or ultimately, death. But what people don’t realize is that Stalin, who had agreed to work with Hitler at some point during World War II, had put his own people through pain and suffering. Although the world remembers Hitler as the most villainous man in possibly part of the darkest time in our history, many tend to forget that Stalin was equally despicable or perhaps worse. Putting many of his people through starvation, killing hundreds in purges, and altering his image so people …show more content…
Hitler did purge as well, which was known as The Night of the Long Knives, where he ordered the death of many of his political rivals. The website History of Russia states, “Increasingly paranoid, Stalin unleashed his “Great Terror” in the 1930s. 750,000 members of the military or the Communist Party who he thought might oppose him were executed. Three million were exiled - imprisoned in gulags where they became slave labour,” (History of Russia, 2010). Because of his actions towards the military, his forces were small and would not have been able to fight back had Germany ordered a full blown invasion. When Hitler did try to invade Russia, many of those soldiers who had not been imprisoned or executed had died on the battlefield. Stalin also put on stage trials, as Seventeen Moments In Soviet History states, “The Great Terror was punctuated by three elaborately staged show trials of former high-ranking Communists. In July-August 1936 Lev Kamenev, Grigorii Zinoviev, and fourteen others were convicted of having organized a Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist center that allegedly had been formed in 1932 and was held responsible for the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934,” (Seventeen Moments In Soviet History, 2015). Because of his paranoia, he turned his back on fellow political leaders, and led them to their demises. Stalin wanted to keep …show more content…
Forcing his people into cannibalism for industrialization, murdering hundreds upon thousands out of paranoia, and twisting his own image into that of a savior. Good old ‘Uncle Joe’ should not be remembered as such, and if he is, he should also be remembered as a man who destroyed his own country from the inside. Both men, Hitler and Stalin, have committed crimes against humanity, and essentially changed the world and its way of thinking, and so they should serve as a reminder. They were the darkest part of our history, and they should be symbols of a memory that should never be replayed