Where Was Stalin Is the Battle of Moscow
Role in World War II of Joseph Stalin
During World War II Stalin emerged, after an unpromising start, as the most successful of the supreme leaders thrown up by the belligerent nations. In August 1939, after first attempting to form an anti-Hitler alliance with the Western powers, he concluded a pact with Hitler, which encouraged the German dictator to attack Poland and begin World War II. Anxious to strengthen his western frontiers while his new but palpably treacherous German ally was still engaged in the West, Stalin annexed eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania; he also attacked Finland and extorted territorial concessions. In May 1941 Stalin recognized the growing danger of German attack on the Soviet Union by appointing himself chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of the government); it was his first governmental office since 1923.
(From left) Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, 1945.
Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives-
Study how Stalin's Soviet Union employed scorched-earth tactics against German troops on the Eastern Front
German armoured divisions rolled deep into the Soviet Union in June 1941, but by winter they found their supply lines stretched thin and the Soviets determined to fight. From The Second World War: Triumph of the Axis (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.
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Examine how Stalin's Red Army defeated Hitler's Fourth and Sixth armies in the Battle of Stalingrad
In the Battle of Stalingrad (1942–43), the advancing Germans were finally stopped by the Red Army in desperate house-to-house fighting. From The Second World War: Allied Victory (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.See all videos for this article
Stalin's prewar defensive measures were exposed as incompetent by the German blitzkrieg that surged deep into Soviet territory after Hitler's unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union of June 22, 1941. Khrushchev claimed that Stalin was shocked into temporary inactivity by the onslaught, but, if so, he soon rallied and appointed himself supreme commander in chief. When the Germans menaced Moscow in the winter of 1941, he remained in the threatened capital, helping to organize a great counter-offensive. The Battle of Stalingrad (in the following winter) and the Battle of Kursk (in the summer of 1943) were also won by the Soviet Army under Stalin's supreme direction, turning the tide of invasion against the retreating Germans, who capitulated in May 1945. As war leader, Stalin maintained close personal control over the Soviet battlefronts, military reserves, and war economy. At first over-inclined to intervene with inept telephoned instructions, as Hitler did, the Soviet generalissimo gradually learned to delegate military decisions.
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Learn about the Potsdam Conference attended by Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin to decide the future of Germany and Europe after World War II
Overview of the Potsdam Conference.
Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, MainzSee all videos for this articleStalin participated in high-level Allied meetings, including those of the "Big Three" with Churchill and Roosevelt at Tehrān (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945). A formidable negotiator, he outwitted these foreign statesmen; his superior skill has been acclaimed by Anthony Eden, then British foreign secretary.
Last years
After the war, Stalin imposed on eastern Europe a new kind of colonial control based on native Communist regimes nominally independent but in fact subservient to himself. He thus increased the number of his subjects by about a hundred million. But in 1948 the defection of Titoist Yugoslavia from the Soviet camp struck a severe blow to world Communism as a Stalin-dominated monolith. To prevent other client states from following Tito's example, Stalin instigated local show trials, manipulated like those of the Great Purge of the 1930s in Russia, in which satellite Communist leaders confessed to Titoism, many being executed.
Joseph Stalin on a Soviet propaganda poster, 1952; the text translates to "Forward to the victory of communism!"
© Fine Art Images/age fotostockFar from continuing his wartime alliance with the United States and Great Britain, Stalin now regarded these countries—and especially the United States—as the arch-enemies that he needed after Hitler's death. At home, the primacy of Marxist ideology was harshly reasserted. Stalin's chief ideological hatchet man, Andrey Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee, began a reign of terror in the Soviet artistic and intellectual world; foreign achievements were derided, and the primacy of Russians as inventors and pioneers in practically every field was asserted. Hopes for domestic relaxation, widely aroused in the Soviet Union during the war, were thus sadly disappointed.
Increasingly suspicious and paranoid in his later years, Stalin ordered the arrest, announced in January 1953, of certain—mostly Jewish—Kremlin doctors on charges of medically murdering various Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov. The dictator was evidently preparing to make this "Doctors' Plot" the pretext for yet another great terror menacing all his senior associates, but he died suddenly on March 5, according to the official report; so convenient was this death to his entourage that suspicions of foul play were voiced.
Where Was Stalin Is the Battle of Moscow
Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Stalin/Role-in-World-War-II