It is true that single party states need enemies, but it is a whole other issue as to if they "invent" these enemies just because they are needed. Stalin possibly purged 20 million people in the USSR between 1924 and 1939, but these people were not simply created out of nowhere. Stalin carefully c...

Joseph Stalin When most people see or hear the name Joseph Stalin, they most commonly associate it with a violent and ruthless political leader of the Soviet Union who managed to send more Russians to their deaths than Hitler did Jews. Aside from this fact, most individuals know very little about...

Josef Stalin is perhaps the most praised, reviled and recognised dictator in the modern world. His influence as such has reached across the globe, affecting leaders and citizens alike. Many of his techniques have been adopted by prominent leaders, today and in the past. One such example is fellow s...

Napoleon: Napoleon is Orwell's chief villain in Animal Farm. The name Napoleon is very coincidental since Napoleon, the dictator of France, was thought by many to be the Anti-Christ. Napoleon, the pig, is really the central character on the farm. Obviously a metaphor for Stalin, Comrade Napoleon rep...

Changes within the Iron Curtain of Soviet Russia varied greatly based on the individual in power. Stalin represented a conservative and nationalist regime, which was later de-Stalinized by Nikkita Khrushchev. Yet this change was also reversed in some ways when Loenid Brezhnev took power and began...

1984 vs. Animal Farm 1984, by George Orwell, is a very powerful drama which involves man and totalitarian society. It is a story of a lonely rebel whose only valuable is his mind and who later conspires with another in an attempt to separate from their increasingly dominant hate-infested s...

How far was Stalinism the outcome of Leninist political practice?The political system which existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin was a system of terror. The purges of the 1930s sent millions of Russians to their deaths or to the Gulags, the population was scared of the secret police, the NKVD, t...

Many people associate the 1920's in Russia as a preparation for Stalin, and the period of time after 1953 as a long recovery from his dictatorship. People who were anti-revolution pointed to the horror and fatality under Stalin as justification for their position on the issue of the revolution. On t...

Although we are looking at two different forms of government rule it can be perhaps suggested that there were similarities in these forms of government but it may also be suggested that fundamentally and ideologically they were completely different types of states. Both were centralist states, which...

Ideological differences between Liberalism in England and Leninism in the Soviet Union place the two nations at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The former advocates for the importance of individualism and the ability of the market to regulate itself, whereas the latter prioritizes the stat...

Corruption of Power In the words of Winston Churchill, "Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely". This statement echo's a typical yet sometimes unpleasant characteristic of human nature. Time and again throughout history mankind has repeatedly demonstrated an inheren...

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin, was born on April 22, 1870, in the sleepy little town of Simbrisk, Russia. Childhood in Simbrisk was serene and pleasant for Lenin, and his father, Ilya Nikolaievich, was highly respected by many of the nobles in this province. Vladimir took just as much intere...

LENIN A New Biography Dmitri Volkogonov, a former General in the Soviet army, was given unprecedented access to the clandestine Soviet archives during Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's rule, by Boris Yeltsin. In 1994, Volkogonov wrote a revealing book entitled, LENIN A New Biography, which rocked the Len...

When the Bolsheviks came into power, everything was in a state of chaos. In 1917, the level of literacy was low. However, soon there were nearly seven times more specialists who had higher education than in 1913, while those with secondary education increased by almost twenty- eight times. Illite...

1984 vs. Animal Farm 1984, by George Orwell, is a very powerful drama which involves man and totalitarian society. It is a story of a lonely rebel whose only valuable is his mind and who later conspires with another in an attempt to separate from their increasingly dominant hate-infested society. In...

The philosopher George Santayana once said that \"those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.\" The definition of \"condemned\" means \"sentenced to punishment\". Santayana warns mankind that to forget the past sentences us to repeat it over and over again. It means that man is un...

TITLE:Why did the British government follow a policy of appeasement in the 1930s? After World War I Germany limped back, licking its wounds that the Treaty of Versailles had so mercilessly rubbed in salt. As one looks back on the events leading up to World War II it has to be asked whether France an...

A single operation changed the outcome of the world's greatest war. Operation "Overlord" was designed to be the largest amphibious invasion in history. There are four major categories D-day can be divided into. How and where the actual invasion took place. The new advances in technology and the mist...

Julius and Ethel RosenbergThe outcome of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial for espionage in 1951 and their subsequent execution in 1953 was directly related to the political climate at that time. The government's evidence against the Rosenbergs was not overwhelming, but due to a combination of f...

Ashley SmithHistory 4061/26/00 Book Report #1In his book, The Warlords, AJP Taylor defines a warlord as "...a man of great, of unique, power dominating both the military and civil affairs of his country; a dictator whose power was unlimited and who made all vital decisions" (Taylor 16). Taylor i...

Adolf Hitler - Loser?"History only remembers the winners. Losers like Hitler deserve to be forgotten."The above statement blatantly refers to Hitler as a loser, who deserves to be forgotten. The statement was correct; Hitler was eventually a loser, but it was not for his suicide marking the end of...

Throughout Europe around the time of World War II, there were many countries who became totalitarian. Specifically, Italy, Germany, and Russia evolved new government systems as a result of many factors, some from World War I.Italy converted to their government of Fascism for many reasons. During Wor...

Enemy at the GatesInspired by a true story, Enemy at The Gates, is set in Stalingrad, Russia in the Fall of 1942 during the height of the second world war. The story opens aboard a rail car where soldiers are herded in like cattle to be taken to the battlegrounds in Stalingrad. Soldiers are practi...

"Unless we accept the claim that Lenin's coup d'etat gave birth to an entirely new state, and indeed to a new era in the history of mankind, we must recognize in today's Soviet Union the old empire of the Russians -- the only empire that survived into the mid 1980's" (Luttwak, 1). In their Comm...

A Decade in EuropeThe 1960'sEurope is an ever-changing landscape of culture and society. Many major advances in technology and knowledge were introduced to this scene in the nineteen-sixties. Political transformation took place in this decade as well as social and ethnic changes. The beginning of...