# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6KR4cLLVzQ
-Tsar was heavily taxing the peasants to raise money to maintain his regime.
-The Russian people were dealing with soaring inflation, food scarcity, casualties in the millions, and an army often defeated and in retreat.
-The tsar steps down and selected members from different political parties to represent a new provisional government.
-Russia was left in complete chaos, and many political parties were claiming voices in Russia.
-Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, began to promise peace, bread, and land.
-Lenin, along with another Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, helped make the Bolsheviks stand out
-The government, targeted by Bolshevik propaganda and organizing, had grown fatally weak.
-Lenin didn’t believe the revolution could proceed via peaceful change or negotiation with various leaders
-Bolsheviks led a coup at a meeting of the Soviets, taking over government buildings, arms depots, transportation networks, etc.
-Trotsky built a loyal “Red” army  as the newly created “Cheka"
-Lenin inflicted perpetual violence on their people inventing constant threats from civilian enemies Lenin believed such violence was key not just to establishing a Bolshevik state but also to maintaining one in 1922.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Russian Revolution and Civil War: Crash Course European History #35

# data[].attributes.body
Article link - https://www.worldhistoryedu.com/how-did-stalin-rise-to-power/
Video link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOI8wKFCEIA
-Stalin was born on December 18, 1878.
-He was born into a very poor family.
-Stalin's mother pushed him to become a priest and sent him off to Fleece to study.
-He joined a secret organization and began reading the work of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
-In 1901 he joined a Social Democratic Labor Party and organized protests and strikes against Tsarism.
-He was arrested for coordinating a strike (sent to prison).
-After being let out he joined the Bolshevik party and rose to a higher power after impressing the leader, Vladimir Lenin, with his ability to organize and plan meetings and strikes.
-Adopted the name Stalin meaning “Steel” or “Man of Steel”
-Stalin ran the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda
-In 1922, Stalin was appointed general secretary of the communist party, manipulating his role to place him in a powerful position.
-Lenin died in 1924 and it was assumed that Leon Trotsky would assume his position, but Stalin wouldn't let this happen and had any threats in the way of his power exiled from the Central Committee, or killed.
-Stalin became the new dictator of the Soviet Union.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Throughout the early 1900s, Joseph Stalin featured prominently for the Bolsheviks - the militant wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). After getting elected by his local Bolsheviks chapter in 1905, he attended three conferences held by the Russian Social Democrats. These conferences were: Tammerfors in Tampere, Finland (1905); Stockholm (1906); and London (1907).

The conference in Finland was particularly interesting because it was there that Stalin met his mentor and friend Vladimir Lenin. The two hit it off right from the get go. They shared similar ideas and they both agreed to continue committing armed robbery in order to fund their party's ambitions.

Behind closed doors, Stalin bid his time and gradually made his way up the party's hierarchy. In addition to securing funding, he was an expert organizer of his wing's militant activities in Georgia. For example, he and his gang robbed a money delivery truck in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) on June 25, 1907. Stalin gathered the local Bolsheviks and went on a bank heist. They stole about 250,000 Rubles from a Tiflis bank. In addition to armed robbery, Stalin was also engaged in currency counterfeiting, protection racketeering, kidnapping and extortion.

Eventually he got apprehended by the authorities. After his imprisonment in Solvychegodsk, Vologda Province, he broke free disguised as a woman. He headed to Saint Petersburg in June 1909.

In February 1912, Lenin, who was then exiled in Switzerland, appointed him to serve as a member of the Central Committee in the Bolshevik Party.

He wrote a few very crucial articles about the party's agenda and the essence of having Marxist doctrine in Russia. Many of these articles of his were published in the Pravda - the official mouthpieces and newspaper for the Bolshevik Party.

It was also around this time that he selected the name that would come to be etched in history forever - "Stalin". The name is a derivative of the Russian word for steel - "stal".

From around the time that he joined the Bolsheviks up to around 1913, Stalin found himself sent to prison for a total of seven times. He was also exiled a number of times to Siberia.

The manner in which he always went in and out of prison and exiles have raised the question: Was Stalin an agent provocateur for the authorities?

The February and October Revolutions of 1917

February 1917 saw the Russian Empire fall into the hands of middle-class liberals. Protests after protests had forced Tsar Nicholas II to leave his throne. Both Stalin and Lenin saw this as an opportunity for the taking. The two men had just been elected to the Executive Committee of a very influential council of workers in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg).

The Bolsheviks organized a series of protests demanding the resignation of the provisional government. Senior figures of the party such as Stalin, Lenin and Leon Trotsky geared themselves up to seize power from the provisional government. In October 1917, a brave group of Bolsheviks, led by Stalin, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, successfully conducted a coup and forced the provisional government to resign.

Together, the trio laid down the foundation for the Soviet Union. Lenin was selected as the leader of the country and the party. His right hand men were Trotsky and Stalin. They moved the government from Petrograd to Moscow in March 1918. The Kremlin became home to Stalin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Lenin.

Succeeding Lenin and his Rise to Power

Stalin was appointed Secretary General of the Central Committee. He also served as the chairman of the government and the Council of People's Commissars, also known as "Sovnarkom". In his role, he helped draft a constitution for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

Stalin frequently supported Cheka - a security service that committed several heinous crimes and atrocities. Their acts were infamously referred to as the "the Red Terror".

With Lenin's health declining, Stalin placed himself in a favorable position to become Lenin's heir. He deployed clandestine tactics to malign anyone he thought could threaten his ambitions. He cooked up plans to get rid of his fiercest rival, Leon Trotsky who was largely considered as Lenin's replacement.

However, after the death of Lenin in January 1924, Stalin successfully outmuscled and outmaneuvered his opponents to take complete control of the Communist Party.

His first action was to eliminate his opponents one by one. With the help of allies Zinovyev and Lev Kamenev, Stalin expelled Trotsky out of the Soviet Union. Later, Zinovyev and Kamenev would suffer far worse fate than Trotsky did at the hands of Stalin. Both men were believed to have been killed by Stalin.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Did Stalin Rise to Power? - World History Edu

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Throughout the early 1900s, Joseph Stalin featured prominently for the Bolsheviks - the militant wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). After getting elected by his local Bolsheviks chapter in 1905, he attended three conferences held by the Russian Social Democrats. These conferences were: Tammerfors in Tampere, Finland (1905); Stockholm (1906); and London (1907).

# data[].attributes.body
Rabiah

# data[].attributes.headline
Was Stalin supposed to cause all the chaos he did? 

# data[].attributes.subject
Was Stalin supposed to cause all the chaos he did? 

# data[].attributes.body
Initially, it was Trotsky who was to take Lenin's place However Stalin was able to manoeuvre his rivals for control of the party in unimaginable ways.  Trotsky called him a "dull grey blur". Therefore, Stalin was not supposed to be the dictator of the Soviet Union which means that Stalin was NOT supposed to cause the amount of chaos he did. Although there still might have been some if Trotsky took Lenin's place just not as much as there was.

# data[].attributes.body
In the late 1920s, Stalin launched a series of five-year industrial plans that were made to transform the Soviet Union into an industrial superpower instead of a peasant agricultural society as approximately 80% of Russia's population was farming.

# data[].attributes.body
Those who went against was Stalin wanted would be punished and/or killed [Farmers who refused to cooperate with Stalin's orders and give up their land]

# data[].attributes.body
Stalin was starting Chaos left right and centre. He encouraged citizens to spy on one another and had the secret police [NKVD - who worked for Stalin]. Millions of people were killed to sent into forced labour camps.

# data[].attributes.body
Stalin wanted to be idolized and create a cult of personality in the Soviet Union. He wanted cities to be renamed in his honour, his portraits and paintings hung up everywhere, books rewritten to give him more superiority, his own music.

# data[].attributes.body
In 1945, it was clear that Stalin's health was taking a massive decline as he had suffered either from a heart attack or several strokes. It was clear that from this point on, Stalin's health would never be the same. In 1951, Stalin had gone for his regular check-up and his doctor had suggested that Stalin should rest more rather than work. Stalin was not happy about this at all and the doctor was later arrested and was charged with working as a spy for British Intelligence, but his health was still declining. On the night February 28th, Stalin was found on the ground of his room. He was still in his pajamas, and covered in urine.  An empty glass and mineral water were found on the table, so it seemed Stalin had gotten up for a drink, but suffered from a stroke. Stalin was carried onto the dining room sofa by members of the dacha staff, and then covered with a rug. On March 5th, Stalin had Stalin vomited blood and his stomach started hemorrhaging, and finally died that day.

# data[].attributes.body
In 1953, Stalin was 73, he suffered from ether heart attacks or strokes in 1945, his health was never the same since

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-death-stalin-180965119/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Near the end of his life, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had taken to spending almost all of his free time at his dacha in the Moscow suburb of Kuntsevo. Easily depressed when left on his own, he regularly summoned four members of his inner circle to join him there for a movie and a meal.

Stalin's "comrades-in-arms" at that time included Georgy Malenkov, Stalin's likely successor and deputy premier; Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's influential chief of secret police, who was also jockeying for power; Nikita Khrushchev, whom Stalin had summoned to Moscow to balance the power dynamics of Malenkov and Beria; and Nikolai Bulganin, Stalin's defense minister.

"As soon as he woke up, he would ring us- the four of us-and either invite us to see a film or start some long conversation about a question that could have been resolved in two minutes," Khrushchev later recounted.

The move was in part for company, in part to keep an eye on them.

In 1953, Stalin was 73. He suffered either a heart attack or a series of strokes in 1945, and his health hadn't been the same since. His paranoia, too, was at an all-time high.

When he had gone in for his regular check-up in 1951, his doctor told him to rest more and work less, words that Stalin did not take well, biographer Roman Brackman wrote in The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life. "[T]hree decades earlier, plotting to hasten [Premier Vladimir] Lenin's death and pretending to worry about his health, [Stalin] had insisted that Lenin be kept from his daily duties," he explained.

The doctor was arrested and charged with working as a spy for British intelligence. But whether Stalin wanted to admit it or not, his health was indeed flagging. When he summoned a Communist Party Congress-the first in over a decade-in 1952, those attending expected it to outline the roadmap of party succession. Instead, New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote, "If it had seemed for a short time that the great roles at the party congress were to go to Malenkov and Khruschev, such ideas were quickly dispelled. The great role, the only important one at the congress, was played by Stalin himself."

Rather than chart a clear course forward, Stalin proceeded to shake up the Kremlin hierarchy, appointing in a host of young, relative unknowns in positions in ways that were "designed to conceal and confuse the lines of succession rather than clarify," wrote Salisbury.

When it came to members of his inner circle, he especially wanted to remind them they were all disposable. "He liked to repeat to us, you are blind like kittens," Khrushchev recalled. "Without me the imperialists will throttle you."

But in the final months of his life, watchers of the Soviet Union could detect something more was going on with Stalin. As rumors swarmed about who held court in his chain of command, in the winter of 1953, Stalin turned his attention toward the Soviet Jews in a campaign that foreshadowed a new wave of purges and party upheaval reminiscent to the Great Terror of the 1930s that had the potential to shake the foundations of the Soviet Union and its leadership.

The situation was such that it's possible it may have caused his "comrades-in-arms" to risk poisoning Stalin on the night of February 28, 1953.

Late that evening, Stalin summoned Malenkov, Beria, Khruschev and Bulganin like normal to watch a movie. After, they retired to Stalin's Kuntesvo dacha, where they sat down to a meal, during which Stalin inquired whether confessions had been extracted for a trial he would soon oversee. That winter, Stalin had been waging a witch hunt against Kremlin physicians, many of whom were Jewish, claiming they murdered top Soviet officials in a "doctors' plot. The trial against the Kremlin doctors was to commence within weeks.

According to Khrushchev's account of the night, they finished around 5 or 6 in the morning. "We said goodbye to Comrade Stalin and departed," he wrote. "I remember that when we were in the entrance hall Stalin came out as usual to see us off. He was in a jocular mood and joked a lot. He waved his index finger or his fist and prodded me in the stomach, calling me Mikola. He always used the Ukrainian form of my name when he was in good spirits. Well, we left in good spirits too, since nothing had happened during the dinner. Those dinners did not always end on a happy note."

But perhaps all wasn't so rosy the night of the 28th. "[H]ad some great row finally broken out?" Salisbury asked in his memoir. "Were they prepared to let events move forward and possibly engulf them all? Three of them - Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev - were as crafty, as skilled, as tough as any figures to be found in Russia. Did those three march down the path to the precipice without making a move to save themselves?"

The next day, a Sunday, Khrushchev says he remained at home, expecting Stalin to call to extend an invitation for that evening. But Stalin did not call him, or anyone else for that matter. He didn't ring for food, nor had the sensors installed in Stalin's rooms detected movement.

According to later interviews, those working at the dacha claimed they were too scared to disturb Stalin. But in The Unknown Stalin, historians Zhores Medvedev and Roy Medvedev are suspicious of that narrative: "[I]t would not have been normal for the staff to be afraid of entering Stalin's room or even to ring him on the house line," they wrote.

It took until around 10:30 at night for someone to check on Stalin. According to one account, one of the guards, Peter Lozgachev was the one who finally entered Stalin's quarters, ostensibly to drop off official mail from the Kremlin. Other accounts say it was the longtime maid.

Whoever entered the room found the dictator on the ground in his pajamas, the floor soaked with urine. An empty glass and mineral water were on the table, and it appeared as though Stalin had gotten out of bed to get water, but then had a stroke.

Members of the dacha staff carried him onto the dining room sofa, where they covered him with a rug. While the consensus among those present was to call a doctor, the officers on guard wanted to wait on instructions from the party leadership. Eventually, they got Beria on the phone, who demanded they tell no one of Stalin's illness.

Beria and Malenkov arrived first at the dacha. According to testimony compiled by Miguel A. Faria in the journal Surgical Neurology International, Lozgachev said that Beria, upon seeing Stalin snoring, asked, "Lozgachev, why are you in such a panic? Can't you see, Comrade Stalin is sleeping soundly. Don't disturb him and stop alarming us."

Even if no one had poisoned Stalin the night before, Simon Sebag Montefiore in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar suggested they could have observed the state he was in, and made a decision there to hasten his death. Signs pointed to Beria having fallen out of Stalin's good graces-and thus he potentially stood to gain the most from the leader's death. But Beria could have also believed what he was saying; to an untrained eye, Stalin may very well have appeared to be sleeping. And with the doctors' plot trial in the offing, no one wanted to have to be the one to call a doctor. "[The inner circle was] so accustomed to his minute control that they could barely function on their own," Montefiore added.

Intentionally or not, it took until around 7 in the morning for the members to reach a decision to call the Minister of Health to select doctors for an initial look. When the doctors finally arrived, they found Stalin unresponsive, his right arm and leg, paralyzed, and his blood pressure at the alarmingly high rate of 190/110. "They had to examine him, but their hands were too shaky. To make it worse, the dentist took out his dentures, and dropped them by accident," according to Lozgachev's testimony. They ordered complete quiet, put leeches behind his ears, a cold compress on his head and recommended he not eat.

Two days after the doctors first saw him, Radio Moscow made the announcement, revealing Stalin had suffered a stroke on Sunday night.

The message said he was receiving suitable medical treatment under the close eye of party leaders, worded in such a way to reassure a public frenzied by the doctors' plot allegations that none of the doctors treating Stalin were in any way connected to the alleged conspiracy. (Ironically, those consulted actually did include several imprisoned Kremlin doctors, according to Joshua Rubenstein in The Last Days of Stalin. One, a pathologist named Aleksandr Myasnikov, said he was mid-interrogation when his captors suddenly started asking for medical advice instead.)

On March 5, Stalin vomited blood and his stomach started hemorrhaging, a detail cut from the final report issued to the Central Committee, until scholars Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov unearthed the detail in 2003.

The long-buried evidence could suggest a cover up. It's known that on the night of February the 28, Stalin drank "fruit juice" (diluted Georgian wine). Poison, perhaps in the form of the poisonous, tasteless blood thinner warfarin, could have easily been slipped in Stalin's drink and could have caused his stomach hemorrhaging, Faria writes. But whether that's the case will likely forever remain a matter of speculation, Brent and Naumov concluded in Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953. That night, Stalin's iron-fisted 30-year rule over the Soviet Union ended. His death was recorded at 9:50 p.m.

During his three decades in power, the Soviet Premier commanded not just the party leadership, but also the hearts and minds of the Russian public. His personality cult was such that in spite of his reign of terror that caused tens of millions to die, he remained "Uncle Joe," the "father" of all Russians to his final days.

Upon Stalin's death, Beria, with his network of spies and contacts, seemed poised to take over. But he fatally underestimated his opponents. As Khrushchev, the outsider, would soon show, the struggle for who would fill the power vacuum left in Stalin's absence was just beginning.
*Editors' note, March 7, 2022: This story has been edited to reflect that some of the details about Stalin's death were uncovered by scholars in 2003, not 2013 as originally stated.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Near the end of his life, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had taken to spending almost all of his free time at his dacha in the Moscow suburb of Kuntsevo. Easily depressed when left on his own, he regularly summoned four members of his inner circle to join him there for a movie and a meal.

# data[].attributes.headline
New terms/words/acronyms used in Stalin's Russia: 

# data[].attributes.subject
New terms/words/acronyms used in Stalin's Russia: 