When other crises threatened in late 1929, he expanded what had been a moderate collectivization programme into a nationwide offensive against the peasantry. Millions were displaced, and unknown thousands died in the massive collectivization. The industrialization campaigns over which Stalin presided in the 1930s were much more successful; these raised the backward Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the rank of the industrial powers.

In the mid-1930s Stalin launched a major campaign of political terror. The purges, arrests, and deportations to labour camps touched virtually every family. Former rivals Zinovyev, Kamenev, and Bukharin admitted to crimes against the state in show trials and were sentenced to death. Untold numbers of party, industrial, and military leaders disappeared during the "Great Terror", making way for a rising generation that included such leaders as Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Fear instilled by a political secret police formed an essential part of the system called Stalinism.

The War Leader

In part because the purges stripped the military of its leadership, the Soviet Union suffered greatly in World War II. Stalin personally directed the war against Nazi Germany. By rallying the people, and by his willingness to make great human sacrifices, he turned the tide against the Germans, notably at the Battle of Stalingrad.
Stalin participated in the Allies' meetings at Tehran (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945), where he obtained recognition of a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and after the war he extended Communist domination over most of the countries liberated by the Soviet armies. His single-minded determination to prevent yet another devastating assault on the USSR from the West had much to do with the growth of the Cold War. In his last years, increasingly paranoid and physically weak, Stalin apparently was about to start another purge. In January 1953 he ordered the arrest of many Moscow doctors, mostly Jews, charging them with medical assassinations. The so-called Doctors' Plot seemed to herald a return to the 1930s, but Stalin's sudden death on March 5, 1953, in Moscow forestalled another bloodbath.

Evaluation

In spite of his role as the ironfisted ruler of a mighty nation, Stalin has remained an enigmatic figure and his place in history a controversial one. Soviet historians assess his regime as a great one, although marred by some errors, but Western scholars assail the bloody terror of his rule. The question is whether or not the Soviet Union would have made the same progress under less despotic leadership.