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First Figure - Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1929 to 1953.

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First Figure - Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1929 to 1953.

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* Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union and  he ruled by terror and millions of his OWN citizens died during his time.

It wasnt until Vladimir Lenin passed away on January 21st in 1994 that Joseph became a leader. His main focuses were rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture.

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https://nwinans.medium.com/was-hitler-a-great-leader-5c35383f7c17

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Photo Credit- Erika Fletcher

One of the most notorious leaders of all time is Adolf Hitler. Considered by many to be one of the most villainous people to have ever lived, one of the most prominent questions that arise is if he was a great leader.

What sparks this debate is that he put his country first and wanted what was best for his fellow countrymen and women. However, in doing so, millions of people were killed, suffered, fell victim to his ruthless regime.

Many of his decisions were met with criticism, scrutiny, and reservations because they were considered too hostile. It turns out, they were right. So if there was so much negativity that came from his reign, why and how can people consider him a great leader?

Hitler viewed his country negatively and wanted to make a change. He felt that Germany was weak and constantly taken advantage of and his idea was to rebuild it, strengthen it, and bring prosperity back to its citizens. While many of his goals and methods were pushed back on and scrutinized, he felt he was doing what was best for his country. While he was doing what he thought was best for Germany, he continued to disregard citizens and other countries who warned about the negative impacts of his methodologies and vision.

Hitler focused on creating a supreme race. A race that was strong, built to last, and that looked similar to one another. Essentially, a world with perfect humans- in his eyes.

He wanted a strong military to show strength and authority rather than building up Germany's economy. He had manufacturers discontinue the production of consumer goods to focus on producing arms and military defense products.

The views he had disregarded facts and he was unable to accept changing circumstances that posed a problem for him and his vision. His ideology took

Disregarded facts and inability to accept changing circumstances. His ideology took precedent over his skilled and knowledgable experts in his party. If anyone stood in his way or disagreed with him, they were fired, exiled, and ostracized to ensure his ideals were promoted, and his alone.

To promote his views and show the strength of the country, he hosted rallies to ensure his voice was heard and so he could promote his message for all to hear. At these rallies, he promoted the idea of nationalism, disparaged immigrants to increase border strength, and how he was treated unfairly by his opponents and the press.

At the heart of Hitler's propaganda was nationalism, ruling by fear, promoting loyalty, and that he could and should not be questioned. He continued to attack the rule of law and media while calling opponents parasites, criminals, and leftist scum.

One method that was used to promote this propaganda was transistor radios that received one channel to prohibit people from other news outlets from showing the truth. He coined the term "lying press" and utilized the Gestapo to keep people in line.

Even though Hitler won the election, he did so by not winning the popular vote of his fellow Germans. Throughout his tenure, he degraded the voting process and wanted to change voter rules in an effort to ensure he could stay in power without winning the popular vote.

Hitler rose to power with promises of helping Germany to become a powerful nation with a prosperous economy. In his early stages, he led Germany into France with resounding success which helped gain the support of politicians and citizens. He was once referred to as a "genius" because of his leadership qualities and war tactics.

In addition, he built a flourishing economy, albeit it was short-lived and turned out to be a hollow shell that looked better than it actually was.

The measurement of Hitler's success relied on the economy, Germany's military, and a large number of supporters. Where he fell short was in his overconfidence in himself and his views. He believed enemies to be weaker than suggested and disregarded his commanding officers who advised against many of his tactics.

While he built what appeared to be a great economy, money in Germany was essentially worthless and a wheelbarrow full of money would rarely buy a loaf of bread due to such high levels of inflation.

He failed to inspire Germans without the use of fear and was often referred to as delusional, incompetent, and arrogant. In other words, Hitler was not a great leader. He was a great master of disguise and continued to divert the attention from his negative shortcomings to other issues that were plaguing his country.

If at this point you believe this sounds eerily similar to how things are in America, you would be absolutely correct. Donald Trump is not Hitler. He is not out to create a supreme race and kill millions of people. He is however utilizing the same tactics to enrich himself and stay in power.

Trump touts the idea that he is putting the United States first, even if it means pulling out of treaties that benefit the United States and is ill-advised amongst people in his chamber. This is all to promote his view of nationalism.

He portrays the media as "fake news", similar to Hitler's "lying press", to push the rhetoric that he is treated unfairly when people disagree with him. Even when his closest allies in news outlets speak out against him, he immediately blasts them and tries to diminish them all because they correct his incorrect information.

Rather than the Nazi party (in some cases his supporters identify as a Nazi), there are MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters who follow his rhetoric rather than seeking the truth. These are also the same supporters who do not support the wealthy (1%ers) but buy Trump gear to directly enrich him and line his pockets.

While America had a strong economy heading into the 2016 election, Trump made several deals that appeared to improve the economy in America. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the economy plummeted quickly due to his inability to lead and self arrogance. It proved that the deals were short-lived and hollow, similar to the promises of Hitler.

In no way do I believe that Donald Trump is attempting to replicate Adolf Hitler by killing millions of people. I want it to be clear that he has simply taken the same tactics and implemented them into his campaign to ensure he personally benefits and can stay in power.

So if Hitler is deemed an ineffective leader and Trump is closely aligned with him, does that mean Trump is a failure as well?
Whether you identify as a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green Party, or other, be sure to always check sources, review several different news outlets before believing information, and always be sure to seek out the truth. Division will not bring us together. It will only continue to dig us deeper and deeper into a hole which grows ever more difficult every day.

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One of the most notorious leaders of all time is Adolf Hitler. Considered by many to be one of the most villainous people to have ever lived, one of the most prominent questions that arise is if he was a great leader.

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Second Figure - Adolf Hitler , the leader of Nazi Germany, orchestrated both World War II and the Holocaust,

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Second Figure - Adolf Hitler , the leader of Nazi Germany, orchestrated both World War II and the Holocaust,

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Hitler was appointed chancellor by the German President Paul von Hindenburg

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There were many points in time where Hitler took advantage of his people , he didn't see Germany as a strong country so he figured lets just lie to them , they wont mind. For example he used propoganda for "nationalism" to trick them into thinking he was all for being a community and building each other up

He assumed that Germany's enemies were weaker than them and they could take them down easy peasy, as usyal, he was very very wrong. 31,595,000 people died while he was a "leader"

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Joseph Stalin rose to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party, becoming a Soviet dictator upon Vladimirs Death

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Joseph Facts & Info: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/intn.html

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Repression and Terror: Stalin in Control

During the second half of the 1920s, Joseph Stalin set the stage for gaining absolute power by employing police repression against opposition elements within the Communist Party. The machinery of coercion had previously been used only against opponents of Bolshevism, not against party members themselves. The first victims were Politburo members Leon Trotskii, Grigorii Zinov'ev, and Lev Kamenev, who were defeated and expelled from the party in late 1927. Stalin then turned against Nikolai Bukharin, who was denounced as a "right opposition," for opposing his policy of forced collectivization and rapid industrialization at the expense of the peasantry.

Stalin and colleagues, 1929

Stalin had eliminated all likely potential opposition to his leadership by late 1934 and was the unchallenged leader of both party and state. Nevertheless, he proceeded to purge the party rank and file and to terrorize the entire country with widespread arrests and executions. During the ensuing Great Terror, which included the notorious show trials of Stalin's former Bolshevik opponents in 1936-1938 and reached its peak in 1937 and 1938, millions of innocent Soviet citizens were sent off to labor camps or killed in prison.

By the time the terror subsided in 1939, Stalin had managed to bring both the party and the public to a state of complete submission to his rule. Soviet society was so atomized and the people so fearful of reprisals that mass arrests were no longer necessary. Stalin ruled as absolute dictator of the Soviet Union throughout World War II and until his death in March 1953.
Translation of letter from Rykov
Repression and Terror: Kirov Murder and Purges

The murder of Sergei Kirov on December 1, 1934, set off a chain of events that culminated in the Great Terror of the 1930s. Kirov was a full member of the ruling Politburo, leader of the Leningrad party apparatus, and an influential member of the ruling elite. His concern for the welfare of the workers in Leningrad and his skill as an orator had earned him considerable popularity. Some party members had even approached him secretly with the proposal that he take over as general secretary.

It is doubtful that Kirov represented an immediate threat to Stalin's predominance, but he did disagree with some of Stalin's policies, and Stalin had begun to doubt the loyalty of members of the Leningrad apparatus. In need of a pretext for launching a broad purge, Stalin evidently decided that murdering Kirov would be expedient. The murder was carried out by a young assassin named Leonid Nikolaev. Recent evidence has indicated that Stalin and the NKVD planned the crime.

Stalin then used the murder as an excuse for introducing draconian laws against political crime and for conducting a witch-hunt for alleged conspirators against Kirov. Over the next four-and-a-half years, millions of innocent party members and others were arrested-many of them for complicity in the vast plot that supposedly lay behind the killing of Kirov. From the Soviet point of view, his murder was probably the crime of the century because it paved the way for the Great Terror. Stalin never visited Leningrad again and directed one of his most vicious post-War purges against the city-Russia's historic window to the West.
Translation of speech of Bukharin
Secret Police

From the beginning of their regime, the Bolsheviks relied on a strong secret, or political, police to buttress their rule. The first secret police, called the Cheka, was established in December 1917 as a temporary institution to be abolished once Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power. The original Cheka, headed by Feliks Dzerzhinskii, was empowered only to investigate "counterrevolutionary" crimes. But it soon acquired powers of summary justice and began a campaign of terror against the propertied classes and enemies of Bolshevism. Although many Bolsheviks viewed the Cheka with repugnance and spoke out against its excesses, its continued existence was seen as crucial to the survival of the new regime.

Once the Civil War (1918-21) ended and the threat of domestic and foreign opposition had receded, the Cheka was disbanded. Its functions were transferred in 1922 to the State Political Directorate, or GPU, which was initially less powerful than its predecessor. Repression against the population lessened. But under party leader Joseph Stalin, the secret police again acquired vast punitive powers and in 1934 was renamed the People's Comissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. No longer subject to party control or restricted by law, the NKVD became a direct instrument of Stalin for use against the party and the country during the Great Terror of the 1930s.

Lavrenti Beria

After Stalin's death in 1953 the loyal Beria was purged from the Communist Party and power and later executed. (The young girl in Beria's lap is Stalin's daughter Svetlana; the man at right, rear, is unidentified.)

The secret police remained the most powerful and feared Soviet institution throughout the Stalinist period. Although the post-Stalin secret police, the KGB, no longer inflicted such large-scale purges, terror, and forced depopulation on the peoples of the Soviet Union, it continued to be used by the Kremlin leadership to suppress political and religious dissent. The head of the KGB was a key figure in resisting the democratization of the late 1980s and in organizing the attempted putsch of August 1991.

The Gulag

The Soviet system of forced labor camps was first established in 1919 under the Cheka, but it was not until the early 1930s that the camp population reached significant numbers. By 1934 the Gulag, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps, then under the Cheka's successor organization the NKVD, had several million inmates. Prisoners included murderers, thieves, and other common criminals-along with political and religious dissenters. The Gulag, whose camps were located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North, made significant contributions to the Soviet economy in the period of Joseph Stalin. Gulag prisoners constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and industrial enterprises in remote regions. GULAG manpower was also used for much of the country's lumbering and for the mining of coal, copper, and gold.

Stalin constantly increased the number of projects assigned to the NKVD, which led to an increasing reliance on its labor. The Gulag also served as a source of workers for economic projects independent of the NKVD, which contracted its prisoners out to various economic enterprises.

Conditions in the camps were extremely harsh. Prisoners received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which made it difficult to endure the severe weather and the long working hours; sometimes the inmates were physically abused by camp guards. As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and disease in the camps was high. After Stalin died in 1953, the Gulag population was reduced significantly, and conditions for inmates somewhat improved. Forced labor camps continued to exist, although on a small scale, into the Gorbachev period, and the government even opened some camps to scrutiny by journalists and human rights activists. With the advance of democratization, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience all but disappeared from the camps.

Collectivization and Industrialization

The next 1932 letter documents in great detail the devastating effects of collectivization in the Novosibirsk area of Siberia. An accompanying physician's report describes the deleterious medical conditions the famine has produced. This document is among the first detailed descriptions of the collectivization and its results in Siberia.

The next document is an order from Lenin to communists in Penza, August 11, 1918, demanding that they publicly hang at least 100 kulaks and confiscate their grain, to set an example.

Anti-religious Campaigns

The Soviet Union was the first state to have as an ideological objective the elimination of religion. Toward that end, the Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and most organized religions were never outlawed.

The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labor camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited. By 1939 only about 500 of over 50,000 churches remained open.

After Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Joseph Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church to intensify patriotic support for the war effort. By 1957 about 22,000 Russian Orthodox churches had become active. But in 1959 Nikita Khrushchev initiated his own campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church and forced the closure of about 12,000 churches. By 1985 fewer than 7,000 churches remained active. Members of the church hierarchy were jailed or forced out, their places taken by docile clergy, many of whom had ties with the KGB.

Campaigns against other religions were closely associated with particular nationalities, especially if they recognized a foreign religious authority such as the Pope. By 1926, the Roman Catholic Church had no bishops left in the Soviet Union, and by 1941 only two of the almost 1,200 churches that had existed in 1917, mostly in Lithuania, were still active. The Ukrainian Catholic Church (Uniate), linked with Ukrainian nationalism, was forcibly subordinated in 1946 to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches of Belorussia and Ukraine were suppressed twice, in the late 1920s and again in 1944.

Attacks on Judaism were endemic throughout the Soviet period, and the organized practice of Judaism became almost impossible. Protestant denominations and other sects were also persecuted. The All-Union Council of Evangelical Christian Baptists, established by the government in 1944, typically was forced to confine its activities to the narrow act of worship and denied most opportunities for religious teaching and publication. Fearful of a pan-Islamic movement, the Soviet regime systematically suppressed Islam by force, until 1941. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union that year led the government to adopt a policy of official toleration of Islam while actively encouraging atheism among Muslims.

Here is a letter of March 19, 1922, from Lenin via Molotov to members of the Politburo, outlining a brutal plan of action against the "Black Hundreds" clergy and their followers, who were defying the government decree to remove church valuables (purported by the government to be used to fund famine relief). Lenin proposed the arrest and quick trial of the insurrectionists in Shuia, followed by a ruthless campaign to shoot a large number of the reactionary clergy and bourgeoisie and urged that removal of valuables from the richest churches and monasteries be finished quickly.

Attacks on Intelligentsia: Early Attacks

Attacks on Intelligentsia: Renewed Attacks

Attacks on Intelligentsia: Censorship

Creative writers enjoyed great prestige in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union because of literature's unique role as a sounding board for deeper political and social issues. Vladimir Lenin believed that literature and art could be exploited for ideological and political as well as educational purposes. As a result, the party rapidly established control over print and electronic media, book publishing and distribution, bookstores and libraries, and it created or abolished newspapers and periodicals at will.

Communist Party ideology influenced the creative process from the moment of artistic inspiration. The party, in effect, served as the artist's Muse. In 1932 the party established socialist realism as the only acceptable aesthetic-measuring merit by the degree to which a work contributed to building socialism among the masses. The Union of Writers was created the same year to harness writers to the Marxist-Leninist cause. Goskomizdat (State Committee for Publishing Houses, Printing Plants, and the Book Trade), in conjunction with the Union's secretariat, made all publishing decisions; the very allocation of paper became a hidden censorship mechanism. Glavlit (Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs), created in 1922, was responsible for censorship, which came later in the creative process. The party's guidance had already affected the process long before the manuscript reached the censor's pen. The Soviet censorship system was thus more pervasive than that of the tsars or of most other recent dictatorships.

Mikhail Gorbachev needed to enlist the support of writers and journalists to promote his reforms. He did so by launching his policy of glasnost' in 1986, challenging the foundations of censorship by undermining the authority of the Union of Writers to determine which works were appropriate for publication. Officials from the Union were required to place works directly in the open market and to allow these works to be judged according to reader preferences, thereby removing the barrier between writer and reader and marking the beginning of the end of Communist party censorship.

Statistical report of March 21, 1988, from V. Chebrikov, chairman of the KGB, detailing 1987 investigations of the distribution of anonymous publications hostile to the Soviet government and the Communist Party.

Attacks on Intelligentsia: Suppressing Dissidents

In a telegram from 1971, noted Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov supports the protests of two dissidents, V. Fainberg and V. Borisov, who have been hospitalized in a Leningrad psychiatric institution for "asocial behavior." An accompanying memorandum from the USSR Minister of Health affirms the legitimacy and advisability of hospitalizing the two dissidents in the institution, run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and denies the use of mind-altering medications in their treatment.
Read the translation
Ukrainian Famine

The dreadful famine that engulfed Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932-1933 was the result of Joseph Stalin's policy of forced collectivization. The heaviest losses occurred in Ukraine, which had been the most productive agricultural area of the Soviet Union. Stalin was determined to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Thus, the famine was accompanied by a devastating purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian Communist party itself. The famine broke the peasants' will to resist collectivization and left Ukraine politically, socially, and psychologically traumatized.

The policy of all-out collectivization instituted by Stalin in 1929 to finance industrialization had a disastrous effect on agricultural productivity. Nevertheless, in 1932 Stalin raised Ukraine's grain procurement quotas by forty-four percent. This meant that there would not be enough grain to feed the peasants, since Soviet law required that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the members of the farm until the government's quota was met. Stalin's decision and the methods used to implement it condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation. Party officials, with the aid of regular troops and secret police units, waged a merciless war of attrition against peasants who refused to give up their grain. Even indispensable seed grain was forcibly confiscated from peasant households. Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective farm could be, and often was, executed or deported. Those who did not appear to be starving were often suspected of hoarding grain. Peasants were prevented from leaving their villages by the NKVD and a system of internal passports.

The death toll from the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million. According to a Soviet author, "Before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings." Yet one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine stated in 1933 that the famine was a great success. It showed the peasants "who is the master here. It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay."

Deportations

The Jewish Antifascist Committee

Chernobyl

Perestroika

From modest beginnings at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986, perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's program of economic, political, and social restructuring, became the unintended catalyst for dismantling what had taken nearly three-quarters of a century to erect: the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist totalitarian state.

The world watched in disbelief but with growing admiration as Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan, democratic governments overturned Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Germany was reunited, the Warsaw Pact withered away, and the Cold War came to an abrupt end.

In the Soviet Union itself, however, reactions to the new policies were mixed. Reform policies rocked the foundation of entrenched traditional power bases in the party, economy, and society but did not replace them entirely. Newfound freedoms of assembly, speech, and religion, the right to strike, and multicandidate elections undermined not only the Soviet Union's authoritarian structures, but also the familiar sense of order and predictability. Long-suppressed, bitter inter-ethnic, economic, and social grievances led to clashes, strikes, and growing crime rates.

Gorbachev introduced policies designed to begin establishing a market economy by encouraging limited private ownership and profitability in Soviet industry and agriculture. But the Communist control system and over-centralization of power and privilege were maintained and new policies produced no economic miracles. Instead, lines got longer for scarce goods in the stores, civic unrest mounted, and bloody crackdowns claimed lives, particularly in the restive nationalist populations of the outlying Caucasus and Baltic states.

On August 19, 1991, conservative elements in Gorbachev's own administration launched an abortive coup d'état to prevent the signing of a new union treaty the following day and to restore the party's power and authority. Boris Yeltsin, who had become Russia's first popularly elected president in June 1991, made the seat of government of his Russian republic, known as the White House, the rallying point for resistance to the organizers of the coup. Under his leadership, Russia embarked on even more far- reaching reforms as the Soviet Union broke up into its constituent republics and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States.

A conference convened in Leningrad in October, 1990, by the conservative communist organization "Unity-for Leninism and Communist Ideals" demanded radical changes in Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of perestroika and its implementation. Participants in the conference accused Gorbachev of following a course that would restore capitalism in the Soviet Union, and they appealed to party organizations and members to demand convocation of an extraordinary Party Congress to remove Gorbachev from power. This resolution was given to the Central Committee on November 29, 1990, and assigned for action to two Politburo members by V. Ivashko, who notes on the document, "Please think about this, and let's talk."
Read the translation

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Revelations from the Russian Archives Internal Workings of the Soviet Union

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Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks used ruthless methods to surprises political rivals with tight centralization and secret police to enforce power with terror.