A person with Stalin’s paranoid thinking and his way of “taking care of business” is just not right to have such a power as Stalin did. He was an extreme paranoid and was scared that everyone around him was either against him or would turn out to be against him and the only way to get rid of the suspects was to kill them. Nobody felt safe around Stalin and even his own family feared him. In December 1934 Sergei Kirov, the Communist Party leader in Leningrad, was murdered. It is now widely believed that his murder was ordered by Stalin, who was frightened, because Kirov appeared to be more popular than he was. Stalin blamed Kirov's death on foreign powers, the exiled Trotsky, and the moderates and ordered the "purification" of the party. As a result of this murder Stalin initiated 'the Purges' as a means of removing any perceived opposition. In fact one of the first persons to be eliminated by the purges was Stalin’s wife which just proves how paranoid he was. From 1934 to 1938 at least 7,000,000 people disappeared. These included the Bolshevik leaders whom he had forced out from 1925 to 1927, poets, scientists, managers of industries who did not meet their targets for production and millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, who often did not know what they had done to anger Stalin. Local units of secret police were even ordered to arrest a certain percentage of the people in their districts. Most of the senior officers in the Red Army and the Red Navy were also executed. The leading Bolsheviks were given "Show Trials", where they were forced to confess to ridiculous crimes which they could not possibly have committed. In the 1930s Stalin began to rewrite the history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century - school books and encyclopaedias were destroyed or altered, and children in school had to paste over pages in their books with the new versions of what had happened. This became known as the "Revision of History". Stalin wanted to build himself up to be all-powerful and stop anyone opposing his ideas. This became known as the "Cult of Personality". Stalin made out that he was a superman who never made any mistakes. He was called the "wisest man alive", and the "genius of the age". It is an irony of time that Stalin after being the wisest man on earth and the genius of the his age is no more known as a good leader but infect is known as one of the worst and cruelest dictators of the human history.




Bibliography
Mitchner, Alyn & Tuffs, Joanne. Global Forces of the Twentieth Cetury. Toronto:Reidmore Books, 1999.
Falk, J. History twelve student workbook. St.