Kennett's B Period iPad Research Paper

The KKK see themselves as Good, Upstanding, All American Patriotic Christians and claim that lighting the cross is a symbol of their faith. The fire signifies Christ as the light of the world. Light drives away darkness and gloom. Fire cleanses and purifies.

Although Lenin found Stalin's boorishness offensive at times, he valued his loyalty, and appointed him after the Revolution to various low-priority leadership positions in the new Soviet government.

After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin methodically went about destroying all the old leaders of the Party, taking advantage of their weakness for standing on arcane intellectual principle to simply divide and conquer them.

Stalin switched tactics, culminating in a vast reign of terror and spectacular show trials in the 1930s during which the founding fathers of the Soviet Union were one by one unmasked as "enemies of the people" who had supposedly always been in the employ of Capitalist intelligence services and summarily shot.

This depleted the Soviet Union of its brainpower, and left Stalin as the sole intellectual force in the country--an expert on virtually every human endeavor

Although the Soviet Union boasted that its economy was booming while the Capitalist world was experiencing the Great Depression, and its industrialization drive did succeed in rapidly creating an industrial infrastructure where there once had been none, the fact is that all this was done at exorbitant cost in human lives.

the discovery of a source of cheap labor through the arrest of millions of innocent citizens led to countless millions of deaths from the worst man-made famine in human history and in the camps of the Gulag.

As war clouds were gathering on the horizon in 1939, Stalin felt that he had scored a coup by striking a non-aggression pact with Hitler,

As a result, when the attack came, the Soviet army was completely unprepared and suffered horrible defeats, while Stalin spent the first several days after the attack holed up in his office in shock. Because the military had been purged of its best minds in the mid-1930s, it took some time, and many lives, before the Soviets were able to regroup and make a credible defense.

The Soviet Union was now a recognized world superpower, with its own permanent seat on the Security Council, and the respect that Stalin had craved all his life. Still, he was not finished. Returning soldiers and refugees were arrested and either shot or sent to the labor camps as traitors, entire nationalities that had been deported during the War, also as traitors, were not allowed to return to their homes, and in 1953, a plot to kill Stalin was ostensibly uncovered in the Kremlin itself.

In the wake of the February Revolution of 1917 (the first phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917), Stalin was released from exile.

On March 28, together with Lev Kamenev and Matvei Muranov Stalin ousted Vyacheslav Molotov and Alexander Shlyapnikov as editors of Pravda, the official Bolshevik newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were still in exile. Stalin and the new editorial board took a position in favor of the Provisional Government (Molotov and Shlyapnikov had wanted to overthrow it) and went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's 'letters from afar' arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown.

On June 24, Stalin threatened to resign when Lenin turned against the idea of an armed demonstration when the Soviet refused to support it.

Stalin put Lenin in five different hiding places, the last being the Alliluyev family apartment. Convinced Lenin would be killed if caught, Stalin persuaded him not to surrender and smuggled him to Finland[dubious – discuss]. He shaved off Lenin's beard and moustache, took him to Primorsky station then to a shack north of Petrograd, then to a barn in Finland.

Stalin challenged many of the decisions of Trotsky, who at this time was Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and thus his military superior.

Stalin returned to Moscow in August 1920, where he defended himself before the Politburo by attacking the whole campaign strategy. Although this tactic worked, he nonetheless resigned his military commission, something he had repeatedly threatened to do when he didn't get his way.

In 1902, he was exiled to Siberia for his role in organizing a strike at a factory

"more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, more considerate of his comrades" succeed him.

In 1945, following Lenin's death and a brief power struggle with Leon Trotsky and his supporters, Stalin took control of the Soviet Union.

The 1930s saw the Soviet Union enter a period of political repression and purges known as the 'Great Terror.' The Communist Party, the Red Army and the secret police themselves were purged of 'disloyal' and counter-revolutionary members, and many executed following short interrogations.

"Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem," said Stalin at the height of the purges.

"Not a step back," was Stalin's slogan, and it was often literally enforced, with Soviet troops in some cases ordered to shoot to kill retreating soldiers. After the war, many Red Army men who had fallen into the hands of the enemy were sent to Gulags, the system of prison camps set up in the harsher areas of the Soviet Union.

killed Stalin by - at the very least - denying him medical aid after a stroke.

Beria, a well-known sadist and rapist whose favorite pastime was to cruise the streets of Moscow looking for girls to bring back to his house to assault, had designs on seizing the reins of the fledgling nuclear state following Stalin's death.

Stalin's legacy lives on today. Despite the purges and the famine in Ukraine, Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Russian Communist Party has compared Stalin to "the most grandiose figures of the Renaissance."

A recent poll by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center showed that more than half of all respondents believed Stalin's role in Russian history to be positive. 20% called him "wise and humane." Indeed a Russian schoolbook published in 2007 characterized Stalin's reign as "effective."