Joseph Stalin came to power in 1928 when he became the de facto leader and the dictator of the Soviet Union until his death in 1953. He was the general secretary of the Bolshevik central committee of the communist party which influenced the Soviet Union profoundly until its decease in 1991. This essay is going to focus on the issues faced by Russia at the time of Stalin’s rise to power, his rise to power and the consolidation of this throughout the making of the Soviet Union.
Throughout the centuries Russia obtained a unique regime stemming from Ivan the Terrible (1533-84). Russia’s mission was to create a ‘third Rome’ with Moscow after Constantinople had fallen and so the system became commonly known as autocratic where absolute rule of the state and the church and serfdom of the peasantry came to effect. Later, such rulers became known as Tsar which had an empiric value and was used to describe these rulers until 1917. Due to revolutionary war and the upheaval of the monarchy this resulted in the execution of the last Tsar, Nicholas II and in place, a provisional government creating Russia’s first liberal democracy.
The Soviet Union then became established by the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks and Vladimir Lenin due to a great rise in political activity and the formation of political and social organisations. And in November 1917, Lenin advocated the seizure of power from the provisional government with little resistance from Petrograd. He established a state based on soviets from his April thesis on his return from hiding. Lenin’s approach to rule was similar to that of Leon Trotsky’s who believed the way to overcome Russia’s backward economy and to become a socialist state was to aim for a permanent revolution. However, the Bolsheviks rule did not come smoothly. The Russian civil war lasted between 1917-1922 between the communist Red-Army and the anti-communists of the White-army.
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