Before his death, Lenin came to regard the flaws in Stalin's personality and conduct as political liabilities. In his political "testament" Lenin doubted whether the party's general secretary would use his great power with sufficient caution. He also attacked Stalin as being "too rude" and called for his removal. Luck and adroit maneuvering enabled Stalin to suppress Lenin's testament. By skillful manipulation and clever sloganeering, but especially by interpreting Lenin's precepts to a new generation coming of age in the 1920s, Stalin bested all his rivals. By his 50th birthday (1929), Stalin had cemented his position as Lenin's recognized successor and entrenched his power as sole leader of the Soviet Union.


After the 1924 death of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin vied for power. Victorious over Trotsky at the end of the
1920s, Stalin carried out massive industrialization efforts, the collectivization of agriculture, and extensive
purges of the party and military. His policies directly resulted in the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens.

"We are for peace. Stalin." Soviet poster from 1952.

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.

Since the end of his era, Stalin's time in power has been furiously debated and his motives have been extremely controversial.

Stalin sacrificed friends and family to power. He was not a very affectionate man and revolutionary traits hardened him even more. He had four simple rules of success in life to achieve desired end men must be discarded when they are no longer useful, alienators are made to be broken, any method is justified if it helps to achieve the ultimate goal and, ideas have no existence under the chariot of power. At the funeral of his first wife, Stalin commented that any warm feelings he had for people died along with her, for she was the only person who was able to melt his heart.

At his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin joined Lenin in the vault of the Mausoleum, but in 1961, Stalin's body was removed and buried simply next to the Kremlin wall next to other Communist leaders.

Within a few weeks of Stalin's death, the Soviet leaders began a campaign to whittle down Stalin's reputation, which culminated in a devastating attack by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th party congress in February 1956. By that time virtually every country in the Communist bloc was in turmoil.

Stalin's method of personal rule was replaced by group rule and more orderly processes of government, the terror apparatus was largely dismantled, the economy was notably modernized, and foreign policy was conducted with much greater diplomatic initiative and flexibility. But the Soviet leadership continued to cling tenaciously to the authoritarian system of party supremacy that shapes every aspect of life in the Soviet Union and to Soviet dominance over the Communist countries on its western borders.