I would like to pose this question: Was Stalin a great mind (as in: "is he a genius")?
The following is my "Great Minds" essay for English class on Stalin. I think he was a great mind for reasons which I present in the following:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Great Minds: Joseph Stalin
There are many kinds of great minds: mathematicians, physicists, chemists, engineers, philosophers and, most importantly, leaders. What then makes a leader deserve to be ranked among the great minds of history? They need to 1) have an aggressive and flexible mind in international and internal politics; 2) be able to learn from their mistakes and respect other’s opinions and 3) always strive to keep their nations united and strong. Joseph Stalin, through his 27-year career as a dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), had all of these qualities to make him a great mind in leadership.
Stalin was a great diplomatist and statesman. What he did was not just for consolidating his power but for the benefit of the Soviet Union as a whole. In some people’s opinions, Stalin was not good at diplomacy at all because of the fact that he became a partner with Hitler by signing the Nazi-Soviet pact and this was his greatest blunder. After the Great Purge of 1938, Stalin realized that the entire command structure of the Soviet Union was seriously weakened. He needed time to reorganize and to recover by signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact. However, he made the misjudgment of trusting Hitler. In fact, other than Winston Churchill, most major Western politicians made that mistake. After World War Two, he carved out large concessions from the Allied powers for the benefit of the Soviet Union. At the many conferences during the war, Franklin D. Roosevelt always felt he knew how to deal with Stalin, but Stalin always outmaneuvered him. Stalin successfully played around the deal drawn at the Yalta Conference of 1) forming broadly representative interim governments, pledged to free elections, and 2) facilitating such elections. He set up puppet governments in Soviet occupied territories in Poland, Romania, East Germany, etc., and held so-called free elections, that was, to let the voters freely elect among pre-selected candidates that the communist party wanted. As a result, Russia received huge reparations from Germany and stripped the occupied territories most of their industrial equipment. Unlike Lenin, Stalin did not care for the wellbeing of the Russian people. He simply maximized their output in labour camps, factories, laboratories and anywhere else that manpower was need. Because of this, Stalin was able to turn a country that was made up mostly of illiterate peasants into a military superpower in a short period of time.
Stalin fulfilled the second requirement through his action during World War Two by being the commander-in-chief of the Soviet armed forces. Early in the invasion of USSR by Germany, Stalin made many strategic errors. The biggest mistake was moving troops from the Stalin Line to the frontiers of the newly conquered territories: Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. When the Germans assaulted, the panzer thrusts quickly broke through the local divisional garrisons and immediately encircled them. Russia almost lost the war to Germany because of this strategic oversight. Thanks to the many industries in eastern Russia and to the ingenious scorched-earth policy, which deprived the Germans of any shelter or readily available resources, proposed and implemented by Stalin, the Red forces quickly recovered from their losses. Stalin learned from his mistakes and immediately gave rise to those generals who had great potential to replace those lost in the Great Purge. Unlike Hitler, who was also commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Stalin respected his generals’ opinions in strategy. “Stalin did not decide…important military questions personally, for he well understood the necessity for collective work in those complicated questions,” said Marshal Georgii Zhukov. For this close cooperation with his generals, he successfully coordinated and directed many battles that changed the course of the war. Some of those were the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and various offensives in the drive for Berlin.
Stalin was everything that a cruel dictator should be. He utilized anything and everything possible to hold his iron-fisted rule over the Russians. After the communist revolution, Lenin created the Cheka, which was later known as the NKVD ("Narodnii Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del", The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs), to terrorize the opposition. These organizations were so brutally efficient in their purpose that the much-feared German Gestapo was modeled after them. With terror as a political weapon, Stalin was able to control the Russian people very effectively by giving them two choices, either to obey or to die. If a person were even suspected of uttering a bad word against the government, he would disappear at night and might never return. In doing so, he was also able to hold such a vast nation together. No matter how many people argue that Stalin made many unforgivable mistakes or even committed crimes against humanity, one hard fact cannot be ignored: Stalin had successfully reigned for 27 years during which the Soviet Union was strong and his power was never questioned.
Stalin, a name that literally meant “man of steel”, was truly a dictator with a great mind who had an iron grip on his country. He had all the qualities of being a great leader and deserves to be ranked among the great minds of history. People tend to overlook Stalin’s contributions because he was a communist dictator and had caused the deaths of many innocent people. However, few people could transform a country from a pre-industrialized one to a superpower. Because of the firm foundation he had laid, the Soviet Union was able to be the first, in the world, to send a satellite, the Sputnik, and a man into space. Also, the Soviet Union was able to keep up with the United States of America in a military race, known as the Cold War, for over 40 years.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
So, what do you think, is Stalin a great mind (as in: is he a genius)? I have to admit the essay sucks, but still... I'm only in high school, dudes and dudettes, and English is my second language (BTW, that's my excuse for everything involving English
)- Linlu
