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.

" Pasternak became frantic, pacing around his apartment repeating over and over that he must write to Stalin to explain what he had meant and to also say that injustices were being committed in the name of the Leader.

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.

According to Ivinskaya, Pasternak had regarded Stalin as a, " giant of the pre-Christian era.

After all that had happened, open shadowing, friends turning away, Pasternak ’ s suicidal condition at the time, one can ... understand her: the memory of Stalin ’ s camps was too fresh, she tried to protect him.

The burdens the Red Army and the Soviet Union endured had earned it massive respect which, had it been fully exploited by Joseph Stalin, had a good chance of resulting in a communist Europe.

Stalin had respected his agreement with Winston Churchill to not intervene, but Yugoslavia and Albania defied the USSR's advice and sent supplies during the Greek Civil War to the partisan forces of the Communist Party of Greece, the ELAS ( National Popular Liberation Army ).

The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in July 1953 after the death of Stalin, who had been insisting that the North Koreans continue fighting.

He had cause for alarm, because as Anastas Mikoyan noted in his memoirs, Stalin strived to prevent as many pro-Trotsky officials as possible being elected as congress delegates.

At the 14th Party Congress ( 18 – 31 December 1925 ) Kamenev and Zinoviev were forced into the same position that Trotsky had been forced into previously ; they proclaimed that the center was usurping power from the regional branches, and that Stalin was a danger to inner-party democracy.

Under Khrushchev, an investigation into the matter concluded that the Central Committee had lost its ruling function under Stalin ; from 1929 onwards all decisions in the Central Committee were taken unanimously.

At the 20th Party Congress Khrushchev, in his speech " On the Personality Cult and its Consequences ", stated that Stalin, the Stalinist cult of personality and Stalinist repression had deformed true Leninist legality.

The party became synonymous with a person, not the people – the true nature of the party had become deformed under Stalin, and needed to be revitalised.

Khrushchev had began to initiate nepotistic policies, initiated policies without the consent of either the Presidium or the Central Committee, a cult of personality had developed and, in general, Khrushchev had developed several characteristics which he himself criticised Stalin of having at the 20th Party Congress.

At the 21st Party Congress Khrushchev boldly declared that Leninist legality had been reestablishing, when in reality, he himself was beginning to following some of the same policies, albeit not at the same level, as Stalin had.

Membership had its risks, however, especially in the 1930s when the party was subjected to purges under Joseph Stalin.

Media reports also exposed crimes committed by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet regime, such as the gulags, his treaty with Adolf Hitler, and the Great Purges, which had been ignored by the official media.

Trotsky and Rykov tried to reorganise the party in early 1923, by debureaucratising it, however, in this they failed, and Stalin managed to enlarge the Central Committee.

Stalin managed to liquidate the Central Committee with the committee's own consent, as Molotov once put it " This gradually occured.

However, Joseph Stalin, an elected General Secretary of the Communist Party, managed to put down all opposition groups within the party and consolidate much power in his hands.

Stalin managed to wrestle control of the Communist Party from Trotsky.

However, in 1940, a Spanish Stalin supporter by the name of Ramón Mercader managed to gain entry to the house and to kill Trotsky with an ice pick.

He was the only Soviet politician who had managed to be a member of the highest body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Politburo, throughout the eras of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

At the time of the Tito – Stalin split in 1948, Bulgaria broke its relationship with Yugoslavia because " nationalist elements " had " managed to reach a dominant position in the leadership " of the CPY.

During the siege of Leningrad, the city leaders were practically autonomous from Moscow and still managed to build impenetrable defense that saved the city during the 900-days-long siege and won the battle on their own, while Stalin and his Kremlin cabinet did not control Leningrad.

Stalin had control over who was and who was not arrested during the Great Terror and its aftermath: it is noteworthy that despite the deaths of nearly all of his former colleagues, Frenkel managed to remain alive.

Claiming his theories corresponded to Marxism, he managed to talk Joseph Stalin in 1948 into banning population genetics and several other related fields of biological research ; this decision was only reversed in the 1960s.

Eventually the Soviets managed to slow the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg, halting the Nazi offensive in December 1941 outside the gates of Moscow, in part because mobilized troops with winterized clothing from Siberia were transferred from there after Stalin realized that Japan was not going to attack the USSR ( Japan had just attacked Pearl Harbor ).

Barbusse in turn was harshly criticized for his admiration of Stalin and his propagandistic activities on behalf of Soviet Russia by his former comrade Victor Serge, who noted that Barbusse had dedicated a book to Leon Trotsky before Stalin had definitively won the power struggle against Trotsky, only to denounce Trotsky as a traitor after the latter's fall from power.

However a month later, in October 1939, Stalin transferred Druskininkai to Lithuania which in turn was annexed in August of the following year and incorporated into the Soviet Union.

But in 1929 the party leadership fell into disfavour with the Comintern, which under orders from Joseph Stalin had taken a turn to extreme revolutionary rhetoric ( the so-called " Third Period "), and an emissary, the American Communist Harry Wicks, was sent to correct the party's perceived errors.

More importantly, in its efforts to seek moral and financial support from the Eastern Orthodox Church, Joseph Stalin decided to turn to the more popular and traditional Russian Orthodox Church led by Sergius, rather than to its largely unsuccessful rivals.

Anne Applebaum states, " Even if Frenkel did not invent every aspect of the system, he did find a way to turn a prison camp into an apparently profitable economic institution, and he did so at a time, in a place, and in a manner which may well have brought that idea to the attention of Stalin.

Other notable TV appearances include his turn as Joseph Stalin in the British serial Reilly, Ace of Spies and the John Wyndham science fiction story Random Quest.

Following Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin took power in the Communist Party through the office of General Secretary of the Central Commmittee, the leading Secretary of the Secretariat.

Following Lenin's forced departure due to ill health, a power struggle began, which involved Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Tomsky, Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev.

Democracy became an important topic following Lenin's health leave ; Trotsky and Zinoviev were its main backers, but Zinoviev later changed his position when he aligned himself with Stalin.

Within five years of Vladmir Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin completed his rise to power in the Soviet Union.

The term " Marxism – Leninism " is often used by those who believe that Lenin's legacy was successfully carried forward by Joseph Stalin ( Stalinists ).

It was officially created after Lenin's death during the regime of Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union and continued to be the official ideology of the Soviet Communist Party after de-Stalinization.

However, party members believed that Stalin had improved his reputation in 1923 and ignored Lenin's order.

Initially a supporter of Joseph Stalin after Vladimir Lenin's death, he came to oppose a large number of Stalin's policies and was one of Stalin's most prominent victims during the " Moscow Trials " and purges of the Old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s.

Also while in Vienna in 1913, he helped the Georgian Bolshevik Joseph Stalin write an article Marxism and the National Question at Lenin's request.

Stalin wanted to impose the death penalty on those involved, despite Lenin's injunction against bloodletting among Party members, but he was resisted by moderates.

" After Lenin's death in January 1924, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – then increasingly under the control of Joseph Stalin – rejected the theory that socialism could not be built solely in the Soviet Union, in favour of the concept of Socialism in One Country.

Totalitarian historians such as Richard Pipes tend to see Stalinism as the natural consequence of Leninism, that Stalin " faithfully implemented Lenin's domestic and foreign policy programmes ".

They also note that Lenin put a ban on factions within the Russian Communist Party and introduced the one-party state in 1921-a move that enabled Stalin to get rid of his rivals easily after Lenin's death, and cite Felix Dzerzhinsky, who, during the Bolshevik struggle against opponents in the Russian Civil War, exclaimed " We stand for organised terror – this should be frankly stated ".

Opponents of this view include revisionist historians and a number of post – Cold War and otherwise dissident Soviet historians including Roy Medvedev, who argues that although " one could list the various measures carried out by Stalin that were actually a continuation of anti-democratic trends and measures implemented under Lenin ... in so many ways, Stalin acted, not in line with Lenin's clear instructions, but in defiance of them ".

Once Stalin was in power, he turned his former support for Lenin's New Economic Policy into opposition.

Nevertheless, Zinoviev and especially Kamenev helped Stalin retain his position as General Secretary of the Central Committee at the XIIIth Party Congress in May – June 1924 during the first Lenin's Testament controversy.

During Lenin's illness, Zinoviev, his close associate Kamenev, and Joseph Stalin formed a ruling ' triumvirate ' ( or ' troika ') in the Communist Party, playing a key role in the marginalization of Leon Trotsky.

Nevertheless, Zinoviev and Kamenev helped Stalin retain his position as General Secretary of the Central Committee at the XIIIth Party Congress in May – June 1924 during the first Lenin's Testament controversy.

Brzezinski then attended Harvard University to work on a doctorate, focusing on the Soviet Union and the relationship between the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin's state, and the actions of Joseph Stalin.

This was the position, contrary to that of " Classical Marxism " which by that time had been further illuminated by active life, shared by Trotsky and Lenin and the Bolsheviks until 1924 when Joseph Stalin, who along with Kamenev in February 1917 had taken the Menshevik position of first the bourgeois revolution, only to be confronted by Lenin and his famous April Thesis on Lenin's return to Russia, after the death of Lenin and seeking to consolidate his growing bureaucratic control of the Bolshevik Party began to put forward the slogan of " Socialism in one country ".

During the power struggles which followed Lenin's death in 1924, Molotov remained a loyal supporter of Stalin against his various rivals: first Leon Trotsky, later Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev and finally Nikolai Bukharin.

Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the RCP, became Lenin's successor and continued as " Head of State " for the Soviet Union clear into the 1950s.