Russia had many interesting dicatators
during its communist period, starting with Lenin, then moving to Stalin,
who was proceed by Khrushchev, He gave way to Brehznez, and lastly followed
by Gorbachov.
LENIN
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was born on April 10th 1870 in Simbirsk. He
was an organizer of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and founder
of the Soviet state. Born in the family of a public-school inspector.
His elder brother Alexander, a member of the "People's Freedom" movement,
was sentenced to death in 1887 for participation in preparations for an
assassination attempt on the Czar. In 1887 Lenin entered the law faculty
of Kazan University. He was arrested in December 1887 for participation
in a student revolutionary movement, was expelled from the university and
exiled to the village of Kokushkino in Kazan Province. In October 1888
he returned to Kazan, where he became a member of a Marxist society. In
1989 he moved to the city of Samara. In 1891 he became a lawyer at the
St. Petersburg University and got work as assistant to a justice of the
law in Samara. In 1893 he moved to St. Petersburg. In Autumn 1895 he set
up the St Petersburg "Union for the liberation of the working class". At
the beginning of December 1895 he was arrested and in February 1897 exiled
to Siberia for three years. During the revolution of 1905 -1907 Lenin
developed the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois
democratic revolution, and worked out the theory of the expansion of the
bourgeois democratic revolution into socialist revolution. In December
1905 he directed the 1st conference of the Bolsheviks, and from December
1907 onwards, as an emigrant, he continued the fight for the survival and
unity of the party. In June 1912 he moved from Paris to Krakow, where he
supervised publication of the Bolshevik newspaper "PRAVDA". At the
end of July 1914 he was arrested by the Austrian police, but was soon released
and left for Switzerland. Following the bourgeois-democratic revolution
of April 1917, he moved to Petrograd and pointed the socialist revolution
towards victory, all the while being a sneay monkey and hiding from the
law. During this time he developed a plan for the proletariat to
seize power by means of an armed uprising. In October at a session
of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party a resolution put forward
by Lenin regarding armed uprising was passed. On October 24th Lenin arrived
at Smolny and took charge of the October Uprising. He was elected head
of the Soviet Government. In March of 1918, together with the Party
Central Committee and the Soviet Government, Lenin moved to Moscow, which
then became the capital of the Soviet state. In 1922 he fell seriously
ill. In December 1922 - March 1923 he dictated a series of articles which
formed his legacy to the Party and the Soviet people in their struggle
for socialism and communism. V.I. Lenin died on January 21st 1924.
STALIN
Stalin was born in Gori, Georgia, on December 21st 1879 the son of an unsuccesful
cobbler and ex-serf. Stalin had a troublesome youth and managed to
be arrested many times and exiled seven times! He studied at Tiflis
Orthodox Theological Seminary, from which he was smooth enough to be expelled
from in 1899. After joining a Georgian Social Democratic Organization in
1898, he became active in the revolutionary underground. As a leading
Bolshevik he played an active role in the October Revolution, and became
people's Commissar for Nationalities in the first Soviet government and
a member of the Communist Party Politburo. In 1922 he became general secretary
of the Party Central Committee, a post he held until his death, and also
occupied other tight positions which enabled him to build up enormous personal
power in the party and government. After Lenin's death in 1924 he
pursued a policy of building "socialism in one country', and gradually
isolated and made his political rivals look stupid, especially Trotsky.
In 1928 he launched the campaign for the collecting of agriculture during
which millions of peasants perished, and the first 5-year plan for the
forced industrializing of the economy. Between 1934 and 1938 he busted
out a massive purge of the party, government, and armed forces. in which
millions of so-called "enemies of the people' were imprisoned, exiled,
or shot. In 1938 he signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler which bought
the Soviet Union two years respite from involvement in World War II. After
the German invasion in 1941, the USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance,
and Stalin, as war leader, assumed the title of generalissimo. He took
part in the conferences of Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam which resulted in
Soviet military and political control over the liberated countries.
From 1945 until his death he resumed his repressive measures at home, and
conducted foreign policies which contributed to the Cold War between the
Soviet Union and the USA. He was posthumously denounced by Khrushchev at
the 20th Party Congress in 1956 for crimes against the party and for building
a "cult of personality". Soviet Authorities tried to revert from
the "Stalinist" type ruling in order to save Russia's image.
KRUSHCHEV
Nikita Krushchev came into power in 1953, and the support of the
Soviet military. He offered the Soviet people hope for a better life.
In 1953, he started de-stalinizing Russia. He began to trash
Stalin, for bringing nothing but misery and brutality to the country.
Thousands of people were released from the labor camps and were rehabilitated.
Writers were allowed to speak freely of the government and restrictions
were removed on the movement of people in the Soviet Union Krushchev's
new plan was to increase the production of food and consumer goods, which
was often neglected under Stalin's rule. Agriculture never did improve
under Krushchev. In 1956, Krushchev sent the Soviet Army into
Hungary to put out a Soviet Revolution. In 1961, under Krushchev's
orders the East German's built the Berlin Wall. He also played a
part in the Cuban Missile Crisis, by sending nuclear warheads to Cuba.
This brought the world a scary few weeks, and was the closest we ever came
to nuclear war. On October 4th, 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik
1 the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth, thus comencing the
space race between the US and Russia Krushchev was removed from power on
October 4th, 1964. He was replace by Leonid Brezhnev.
He was blamed for tarnishing the Soviet Union's image. He died in
1971 and was buried in Moscow.
BREZHNEV
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born in 1906 At age thrity he joined the
Communist party and rose steadily into the toprankings of government. In
1952 he became a secretary of the party's central committee. After suffering
a slight political setback following Joseph Stalin's death (1953), Brezhnev
filled a number of party posts. In 1957, as protege of Nikita Khrushchev,
he became a member of the presidium of the central committee. He
was chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Following Nikita
Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964, which Brezhnev helped to engineer,
he was named first secretary of the Communist party. Although
sharing power with Alexei Kosygin, Brezhnev emerged as the chief figure
in Soviet politics. In 1968, in support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia,
he talked about the "Brezhnev doctrine," asserting that the USSR could
step in domestic affairs of any Soviet block nation if Communist rule were
threatened. In 1977 he assumed the presidency of the USSR, thereby
becoming head of state and head of the party, and basically the big cheese.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, cold war tensions returned with
an acceleration in the arms race. Following his death, he was succeeded
by Mikhail Gorbachev, Brezhnev's regime was criticized for its corruption
and failed economic policies.
GORBACHOV
Mikhail Gorbachov was a soviet statesman, general secretary of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and president of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
He was born in Privolnoye, Russia. He studied at Moscow State University
and Stavropos Agricultural Institute. He worked as a machine operator,
among the jobs he held, and joined the Communist Party in 1952. In which
he held a variety of senior posts in the Stavropol city and district Party
organization and was elected a deputy to the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1970
and a member of the Party Central Committee in 1971. He became secretary
for agriculture from 1979 to 1985, a member of the Politburo in 1980, and,
general secretary of the Central Committee. In 1988 he also became chairman
of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and in 1990, the first (and last)
executive president of the USSR. On becoming party general secretary he
launched a radical program of reform and restructuring of the Soviet
economic and political system. He worked to establish a greater degree
of civil liberty, public debate, journalistic and cultural freedom, and
a re-evalutation of Soviet history, which was allowed under the policy
of glasnost. Glasnost was a policy that imposed inforation be more
open.. In foreign and defence affairs he reduced military use, and was
in favor of destroying nuclear weapons. In 1991 there was a coup
that managed to remove Gorbachov from the Kremlin for a while. However
the coup was unsuccessful and Gorbachov returned to power only to relinquish
command to Boris Yeltsin, thus ending the communist rule in Russia.
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