With Stalin nearing 70, the post-war years were dominated by a concealed struggle for succession among his supporters.

Meanwhile, Stalin used his control of the Party machine to replace Bukharin's supporters in the Rightist power base in Moscow, trade unions, and Comintern.

Although Bukharin had not challenged Stalin since 1929, his former supporters, including Martemyan Ryutin, drafted and clandestinely circulated an anti-Stalin platform, which called Stalin the “ evil genius of the Russian Revolution ”.

While Trotsky remained firm in his opposition to Stalin after his expulsion from the Party and subsequent exile, Zinoviev and Kamenev capitulated almost immediately and called on their supporters to follow suit.

In May 1926, Stalin, weighing his options in a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, directed his supporters to concentrate their attacks on Zinoviev since the latter was intimately familiar with Stalin's methods from their time together in the triumvirate.

While Trotsky remained firm in his opposition to Stalin after his expulsion from the Party and subsequent exile, Zinoviev and Kamenev capitulated almost immediately and called on their supporters to follow suit.

She even asked Joseph Stalin directly why he had slaughtered so many Russians, but many of her criticisms were translated into innocuous statements instead, leading many of her conservative supporters to fear she had " gone soft " on Communism.

Stalin reacted to the growing strength of Trotsky's supporters with a major political massacre of people within the Soviet Union, and the assassination of Trotsky's supporters and family abroad.

While Khrushchev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union's supporters in the West viewed the Gulag as a deviation of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn and the opposition tended to view it as a systemic fault of Soviet political culture — an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik political project.

Stalin now moved against Bukharin by appropriating Trotsky's criticisms of his right wing policies and he promoted a new general line favouring collectivization of the peasantry and rapid industrialization of industry forcing Bukharin and his supporters into a Right Opposition.

Similar shifting alliances were played out amongst various dissident factions within the CPSU, such as the Workers Opposition and Left Communists, with Joseph Stalin and his supporters gaining absolute power within the party by the mid-1920s.

The term comes from an English translation of a condemnation made in 1929 by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin criticizing Communist supporters of Jay Lovestone for the heretical belief that America was independent of the Marxist laws of history " thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions.

Some of the committee members were vocal supporters of the State of Israel, established in 1948, something that Stalin supported very briefly.

Khrushchev was considered a " revisionist " by supporters of the late Stalin, which led to a rupture in the Communist movement in various countries.

The supporters of the poisoning theory claim that Stalin did not like the " Balkan Federation " idea of Dimitrov and his closeness with Tito.

At the 15th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in December 1927, Joseph Stalin attacked the left by expelling Leon Trotsky and his supporters from the party and then moving against the right by abandoning Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy which had been championed by Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Ivanovich Rykov.

Some of the committee members were vocal supporters of the State of Israel, established in 1948, something that Stalin supported very briefly.

Originally, the battle lines were drawn between Trotsky and his supporters who signed The Declaration of 46 in October 1923, on the one hand, and a triumvirate ( known by its Russian name troika ) of Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin and Politburo chairman Lev Kamenev on the other hand.

After the expulsion by the XVth Congress, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters surrendered to Stalin, " admitted their mistakes " and were readmitted to the Communist Party in 1928, although they never regained their former influence and eventually perished in the Great Purge.

Trotsky and his supporters, on the other hand, refused to bow to Stalin and were exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union in early 1928.

His supporters remained in exile, but their resolve began to waver in 1929 as Stalin turned against Bukharin and Rykov and adopted the policy of collectivization, which appeared to be close to the policies that the Left Opposition advocated earlier.

Stalin responded that he " had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the Communist International.

But he rejects, perhaps a little too sweepingly, the theory that disloyal and pro-Communist influences may have contributed to the policy of appeasing Stalin which persisted until after the end of the war and reached its high point at the Yalta Conference in February, 1945.

And Harry Dexter White, implicated in F.B.I. reports in Communist associations, was one of the architects of the Morgenthau Plan, which had it ever been put into full operation, would have simply handed Germany to Stalin.

Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's name off an execution list during the Great Purge.

Pasternak later said, " If, in a bad dream, we had seen all of the horrors in store for us after the war, we should have been sorry not to see Stalin go down together with Hitler: an end to the war in favour of our allies, civilized countries with democratic traditions, would have meant a hundred times less suffering for our people than that which Stalin again inflicted on it after his victory.

Hitler and Stalin would be merely the 20th century's most prominent examples ; there have been numerous others.

Some individuals, notably Joseph Stalin, have stated that all problems emanate from man, and absent man, no problems ensue.

In 1942, commenting on journalist E. H. Carr's pro-Soviet views, Orwell stated: " all the appeasers, e. g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin.

However, he did give him some praise saying in an article in the left-leaning New Statesman magazine, " I have never met a man more fair, candid, and honest " and making it clear that he felt the " sinister " image of Stalin was unfair or simply false.

Some hotels have gained their renown through tradition, by hosting significant events or persons, such as Schloss Cecilienhof in Potsdam, Germany, which derives its fame from the Potsdam Conference of the World War II allies Winston Churchill, Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin in 1945.

Stalin and his regime have been condemned on numerous occasions, the most significant being the in 1956, when Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced his legacy and initiated a process of de-Stalinization.

Some historians have argued that Stalin was also planning to send millions of Jews to four large newly built labor camps in Western Russia using a " Deportation Commission " that would purportedly act to save Soviet Jews from an engraged Soviet population after the Doctors Plot trials.

" Lozgachev used the bedroom telephone where he frantically called a few party officials telling them that Stalin may have had a stroke and asked them to send good doctors to the Kuntsevo residence immediately.

Stalin is believed to have started using the name " K. Stalin " sometime in 1912 as a pen name.

They offered to exchange him for Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered after Stalingrad, but Stalin turned the offer down, stating " You have in your hands not only my son Yakov but millions of my sons.

She may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was " partly personal, partly political ".

Some Bolsheviks and others have accused Stalin of being an agent for the Okhrana.

There have also been claims that Stalin was a Jesuit priest working covertly for the Vatican, whilst carrying out his purges, and that he had died by poisoning.

From 1929 to 1934, during the period when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was trying to collectivize agriculture, Kazakhstan endured repeated famines, similar to the Holodomor in Ukraine, for which it may have provided a model, because peasants had slaughtered their livestock in protest against Soviet agricultural policy.

Frunze's position was compatible with the Troika ( Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Stalin ), but Stalin preferred to have a close ally in charge ( as opposed to Frunze, a " Zinovievite ").