In July 1947, Stalin ordered these communist-dominated governments to pull out of the Paris Conference on the European Recovery Programme.

" To mobilize the Soviet people for his campaign, Stalin ordered TASS and Pravda to issue stories along with Stalin's alleged uncovering of a " Doctors Plot " to assassinate top Soviet leaders, including Stalin, in order to set the stage for show trials.

" Stalin also ordered falsely accused physicians to be tortured " to death ".

Stalin ordered for kulaks " to be liquidated as a class " and this liquidation was considered by many historians to have resulted in the Soviet famine of 1946 – 47.

The Soviet Union would not invade Poland until the Nomonhan incident was officially concluded by the Molotov-Togo agreement, which it was on 15 September 1939, taking effect on 16 September, at which time Stalin ordered Soviet forces to invade Poland on 17 September 1939.

Stalin did not know that Hitler had been secretly discussing an invasion of the Soviet Union since summer 1940, and that Hitler had ordered his military in late 1940 to prepare for war in the east regardless of the parties ' talks of a potential Soviet entry as a fourth Axis Power.

Stalin had ignored several warnings that Germany was likely to attack, and ordered no full-scale mobilization of forces.

A 1941 Stalin directive ordered the suicide of every Red Army officer and soldier rather than surrender ; Soviet law regarded all captured Red Army soldiers as traitors.

** In the Soviet Union, Politburo member Sergei Kirov is shot and killed at the Communist Party headquarters in Leningrad by Leonid Nikolaev ( it is widely thought that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered this murder ).

During this campaign Joseph Stalin ordered the regiment to style itself Normandie-Niemen in recognition of its participation in the battles to liberate the river of the same name.

Stalin then ordered the supposed psychic to gain entry into his country house using his abilities.

) When in 1952 the Soviet Union football team lost to Yugoslavia at the Summer Olympics, Stalin ordered that all footage of the event be destroyed.

" Nonetheless, a few hours after the conviction, Stalin ordered their execution for that night.

Soon Ching-kuo was an enthusiastic student of Communist ideology, particularly Trotskyism ; though following the Great Purge, Joseph Stalin privately met with him and ordered him to publicly denounce Trotskyism.

In response to this threat the government of Joseph Stalin ordered the evacuation of strategically crucial industrial centers to the East.

Joseph Stalin ordered the Soviet military to prepare in all possible areas, including the ground forces that would be defending the Soviet Union against invading German panzer tanks, storm troopers, and special forces.

Sergei Kirov, head of the Party organisation in Leningrad, was killed in 1934 ; some believed his death was ordered by Stalin.

Since the Americans had a much larger air force than the Soviet Union, and the United States maintained advance air bases near Soviet territory, in 1947 Stalin ordered the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles ( ICBMs ) in order to counter the perceived American threat.

In July 1947, Stalin ordered these countries to pull out of the Paris Conference on the European Recovery Programme, which has been described as " the moment of truth " in the post – World War II division of Europe.

Stalin ordered the conversion of the Cominform into an instrument to monitor and control internal affairs of other Eastern Bloc parties.

In Bulgaria, when it appeared that Traicho Kostov, who was not a Moscow cadre, was next in line for leadership, in June 1949, Stalin ordered Kostov's arrest, followed soon thereafter by a death sentence and execution.

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Joseph Stalin ordered both soldiers and civilians to initiate a scorched earth policy to deny the invaders basic supplies as they moved eastward.

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.

`` Behind that Charlie Chaplin moustache and that truant lock of hair that always covered his forehead, behind the tirades and the sulky silences, the passionate orations and the occasional dull evasive stare, behind the prejudices, the cynicism, the total amorality of behavior, behind even the tendency to great strategic mistakes, there lay a statesman of no mean qualities: Shrewd, calculating, in many ways realistic, endowed -- like Stalin -- with considerable powers of dissimulation, capable of playing his cards very close to his chest when he so desired, yet bold and resolute in his decisions, and possessing one gift Stalin did not possess: The ability to rouse men to fever pitch of personal devotion and enthusiasm by the power of the spoken word ''.

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.

In response, one month later, the Soviet Union published Falsifiers of History, a Stalin edited and partially re-written book attacking the West.

To make matters worse, Stalin began espousing his policy of socialism in one country – a policy often viewed, wrongly, as an attack on Trotsky, when it was really aimed at Zinoviev.

The Congress became divided between two factions, between the one supporting Stalin, and those who supported Kamenev and Zinoviev.

However after his death Joseph Stalin established Socialism in one country for the Soviet Union creating the model for subsequent inward looking Stalinist states, and purging the early Internationalist elements.

During the war, Time magazine named Stalin Time Person of the Year twice and he was also one of the nominees for Time Person of the Century title.

Thereafter, Stalin was at times referred to as one of the most influential men in human history.

Indeed, after something like thirty years ' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice.

In Stalin's last year of life, one of his last major foreign policy initiatives was the 1952 Stalin Note for German reunification and Superpower disengagement from Central Europe, but Britain, France, and the United States viewed this with suspicion and rejected the offer.

In December 2008 Stalin was voted third in the nationwide television project Name of Russia ( narrowly behind 13th century prince Alexander Nevsky and Pyotr Stolypin, one of Nicholas II's prime ministers ).

Like other Bolsheviks, he became commonly known by one of his revolutionary noms de guerre, of which " Stalin " was only the last.

The phrase " death of one man is a tragedy, death of a million is a statistic " is sometimes attributed to Stalin, but was actually made by the German writer and pacifist Erich Maria Remarque.

In particular, attempts to initiate peace talks with Hitler in 1941 through the ambassador of Bulgaria were classified as treason ; no one mentioned that Beria was acting on the orders of Stalin and Molotov.

In the first edition of the book Osnovy Leninizma ( Foundations of Leninism, 1924 ), Stalin argued that revolution in one country is insufficient.

In one of the clearest signs of Soviet control over the region, the Czechoslovakian foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, was summoned to Moscow and berated by Stalin for thinking of joining the Marshall Plan.

On 22 August, one day after the talks broke down with France and Britain, Moscow revealed that Ribbentrop would visit Stalin the next day.

As Lenin neared death after suffering strokes, he declared in his testament of December 1922 an order to remove Joseph Stalin from his post as General Secretary and replace him by " some other person who is superior to Stalin only in one respect, namely, in being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades ".

According to Joseph Stalin writing in 1913 in Marxism and the National Question: " a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people ;" " a nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people "; " a common language is one of the characteristic features of a nation "; " a nation is formed only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation "; " a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation "; " a common economic life, economic cohesion, is one of the characteristic features of a nation "; " a common psychological make-up, which manifests itself in a common culture, is one of the characteristic features of a nation "; " A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.