Help me understand the personality of Stalin...

Help me understand the personality of Stalin. You rarely see any pics of Stalin between 1917 - 1924 despite being at the heart of the events. He wasn't an intellectual and was considered "unintelligent" by Lenin and "mediocrity" by Trotsky. He was looked down upon by most top Bolsheviks like Kamenev and Sverdlov. He wasn't that guy who could speak in front of a large crowd like Lenin, Zinoviev or Trotsky. He didn't have a military leadership/bravery skills. Yet he somehow managed to gain power slowly but very efficiently from a group of the shrewdest and most brutal wolves one can ever meet and held it until he died 30 years later.

The personality of Stalin is very intriguing to say the least. Like Stephen Kotkin said, Stalin to dictatorship is like Beethoven to classical music. How did he do it?

I believe he must've totalled on the fear of others, while he may not have been an excellent public speaker, often shying away from those events, but in order to grab power like that, you must press other's buttons and guess their movements. If you do this, you can always conquer your opposing enemy.

...

>I believe he must've totalled on the fear of others

Yes, that's what most people say, but how? most Bolsheviks were fearless motherfuckers.

Get the book/audiobook by simon seabag montifore called 'young stalin'. A very good biography of him as a young man. Can find a torrent if thats your thing but its worth buying.

Afterwords 'the court of the red tsar' by the same author is also excellent.

He was a proffesional revolutionary with a priests training. Robbed banks, had people murderd, set up illegeal papers, escaped from siberean exile several times and was possibly an okrahana agent.

He was smart, philandering, self agrandising, manipultive and completely obssesed with the cause.

Also he was underestimated. Or people would rather throw him a bone if it meant depriving a rival of some advantage.

>You rarely see any pics of Stalin between 1917 - 1924 despite being at the heart of the events. He wasn't an intellectual and was considered "unintelligent" by Lenin
The second part is an explanation for the first part.
Stalin simply wasn't significant at the time period simply because he didn't align with Lenin very well. They had a fairly different perception of reality and revolution, with Lenin being noticeably more aggressive and idealist.

It's likely he wouldn't be very relevant if Lenin lasted longer.

>You rarely see any pics of Stalin between 1917 - 1924 despite being at the heart of the events.
Because cameras were expensive and it took a lot of time to make a good photo.

> It's likely he wouldn't be very relevant if Lenin lasted longer

Stalin was one of the very few who was elected to the politburo since its inception in 1917 or 1918 AFAIK. Even Trotsky and Zinoviev weren't in the politburo at the time.

Stalin was the one who hid Lenin in the July days and he was the one who conveyed his letters to other Bolsheviks and his command to begin the revolution in October

Stalin always worked behind the scene and he wasn't that showman type of person. I guess he truly believed in Lenin and the cause

You examples are from before Civil war and Bolshevik victory. The difference in internal party politics before and after victory was actually very significant.
>Stalin always worked behind the scene
Stalin was working behind the scenes because his opinions often didn't align with "mainstream" thought of the party which was at the time Lenin's thought.
Stalin and Lenin really appreciated each other (early on Stalin was flat out fascinated by) as communists and political leaders but the growing differences in political thought has split them.

It also didn't help that Lenin "favored" Trotsky more in in early 1920s who Stalin absolutely hated.
This combined with Lenin's illness in 1921 actually caused Stalin to push himself further into a spotlight.
As a response Lenin started to see Stalin as a dangerous person that could easily split party in half. In 1922 he wrote a letter that essentially served as his will and was publicly read after his death in front of the party heads.
In it Stalin was described as a brutish person unfit for a leading political position and Lenin essentially asked for him to stand down.
It didn't happen because party was already dominated by Stalin at that point.

>Stalin to dictatorship is like Beethoven to classical music.
>forces orchestras to play symphonies while cities are under siege by German forces
>doesn't purge Shostakovich

patrician

>In 1922 he wrote a letter that essentially served as his will
Kotkin covers than in his book, he cant actually find any early (i.e. that it was actually written/transcribed by Lenin) evidence of it, and concludes that it was either forged completely of highly embellished.
Doesn't help that their are several different versions of it.
Most of the current understanding of Lenin/Stalin relations comes from Trotsky and his crowd, it seems as though they where much closer in reality.

From what i read it seems stalin was right wing and lenin of course was left wing

Stalin hated gays and any degeneration while lenin wanted liberation sexual and all that degenerate bs

If I recall, he used his time as party secretary to obtain a lot of dirt on pretty much everyone. Thus he could blackmail and denounce his way to the top

>he cant actually find any early (i.e. that it was actually written/transcribed by Lenin) evidence of it
It's a letter and it was transcribed (allegedly) by him and delivered by his wife much like a multitude of other letters he wrote during that time period.
You are not going to have a ton of hard evidence for something that simple, but his wife wife herself had a set of issues with Stalin so yeah, it's kind of tainted.
But as far as russian historians go, there's no unity on it being true or faked.

>Most of the current understanding of Lenin/Stalin relations comes from Trotsky and his crowd, it seems as though they where much closer in reality.
Lenin's sister left a few interesting letters detailing the situation with "lenin's will" letter and she was actually on Stalin's side at a time. While she thought Stalin's opposition (so basically Trotsky) was overstating the importance of letter she doesn't deny the existence of tensions between two late in Lenin's life, she actually details them fairly well.

Molotov (decades after Stalin and Lenin both died) mentioned that Lenin simply didn't have any friends in the party, only working relationships but he was closer to Stalin than most.

Low cunning and healthy cynism. Also, while "intellectuals" were, mostly, bitching over the most kosher verison of communism, Stalin's part of the party, well, was doing shit.

>while lenin wanted liberation sexual and all that degenerate bs
that couldn't be further from the truth. Lenin was more tolerant than stalin but he was against degeneracy

>Because cameras were expensive and it took a lot of time to make a good photo.

Not true. Cheap essentially disposable cameras existed at that time, although a brownie was probably hard to come by in Russia then. Film had enough light sensitivity by then to allow short exposure times, less than 1/60th of a second at noon day sun.

I think Stalin probably read Machiavelli or was just naturally of that mindset, because keeping a low profile while you gain power is a good idea.

"doing shit"

Pretty much.

(((Montefiore))) is novel writer

Not even sure if the gay should really be on the left/right axis anymore. It's more of an authoritarian/libertarian axis thing, ie. the freedom to fuck who you want.

And both Stalin and Lenin were as authoritarian as fuck.

Real talk.
First of all, it's important to mention that Stalin wasn't an idiot - he had a priest's education and he was very well read, but he seemed brutish and unintelligent which he used often against his Party opponents.
After Lenin's death, Stalin was always keeping low and out of Party's inside clashes. When the split in the communist party was imminent between the centrists, right and left wingers, Stalin kept his distance and let them tear each other up, slowly building relations. A man that was neutral in the inside bickering was looked upon as reliable to everyone. He slowly gathered political power from this trust, and converted past enemies to allies. When enough power was obtained, he simply flipped the switch and purged any sort of opposition to strenghten and unify the Party. Stalin had no mercy and he had no intention of keeping even a 0.1% percent of possibility of opposition - something Lenin envisioned in "What is to be done" - a strong Party united through the dictatorship (which was a misinterpretation of an original Marx thought). The bolshevization of the CP was necessary to strenghten the leadership (with a very questionable approach), but it also led to some of the best Marxist thinkers and army generals being executed, which nearly destroyed Soviet Union in the long run (WW2).

>reading sourceless Kh*rschevite propaganda passed off as fact
next you'll tell him to read Applebaum too

No one said Stalin was an idiot or an ignorant, he already published many articles on communism and was praised by Lenin even before the revolution as a writer. But he wasn't the high IQ guy either when you compare him to Lenin, Bukharin or even Trotsky

> was always keeping low and out of Party's inside clashes

Stalin often disagreed with Lenin since 1920 until Lenin's death. Lenin was totally fed up with him in his last year but he was totally paralyzed and couldn't communicate with anyone. Zinoviev in 1923 had the Lenin letter about Stalin's deposing in his hands but he didn't use it because he thought he was the true successor of Lenin and that Trotsky as the real danger to him so he allied himself with Stalin

>The bolshevization of the CP was necessary to strenghten the leadership
>it also led to some of the best Marxist thinkers and army generals being executed
Good post, but i would rather say that Stalin was guy that debolshevized Soviet union. (((Thinkers))) are pretty much irrelevant if you have Stalin and literally all marshals of Red army that were purged were incompetent, including Tuchachevsky that got memed as some god-like general when the only thing he was good was military theory.

> literally all marshals of Red army that were purged were incompetent, including Tuchachevsky

t.

name some successful marshal that got purged or some of the Tuchachevsky´s achievements

Rokossovosky would have a word since he masterminded most of Bagration. Also Zhukov was probably going to be quietened à la Stalin had the man lived beyond 1953.

>Rokosovsky was marshal
>Rokosovsky got executed

He had his fingers broken, his teeth kicked in and other various forms of tortures inflicted on him when he was under questioning. Was that not what you asked examples of you daft dumb cunt?

For extra measure,
>Living relatives say that Svetlana Pavlovna, wife of Marshal Kazakov, confirmed that he sustained injuries including broken and denailed fingers and cracked ribs on top of enduring mock shooting ceremonies. Rokossovsky never discussed his trial and imprisonment with his family, only telling his daughter Ariadne that he always wore a revolver because he would not surrender alive if they came to arrest him again.[9]
He was one of the 4000 officers the USSR had to free in the winter of 1941.

was he shot?

he was released in march 1940

My bad! Sorry about that.

Purge doesn't automatically allude to being murdered. It means being kept out of all forms of power. You could be under house arrest, and it would still mean you'd been purged from power.

Which is why we can say that many of the officers called back into action in 1940/1941 were those from the great purges. Very few had actually done enough to anger or threaten the government to have had action taken against them that was more than being stripped of their rank.

>that filename
i lol'd irl

The achievements don't matter, it's schooling and experience, and most of those leaders were put to death or in gulags which caused Red Army defenses to collapse during 1941. Stalin had to bring them back and put them in charge again because Hitler caught him with his pants down (at least in the military sense).

well lenin oversaw liberalization of laws against homos and legalized marriage and divorce. stalin reversed all those. So Lenin did some sexually libertarian measures but he personally detested debauchery and excess sexuality.

legalized abortion*

yet he made Yezhov to become the NKVD chief with all his known perversion

maybe because he was effective at his job? there's a difference between regulating the whole of society's sexuality and making an exception for degeneracy of one individual who is useful to you (and who you later had killed anyway when they stopped being useful)

>commanders dont have to be good to be good

>but he was totally paralyzed and couldn't communicate with anyone
Then how do you know he was fed up with Stalin?

They don't have to be good, but they have to know how to command.
The Red Army spent 1940-1942 just learning how to move, control and co-ordinate corps, armies and fronts, because they where all regimental and divisional commanders.

He was not totally paralyzed but his interaction with people was heavily limited by doctors orders which Stalin was enforcing.
According to Lenin's sister Lenin even wanted to kill himself with poison and asked for it from Stalin but wasn't provided.

>when you're playing starcraft and don't even know the controls and someone else just makes zerglings and sets the rally point to your base

>Lenin even wanted to kill himself
Why?

I thinkhe was suffering greatly in those last months and wanted control over the circumstances of his own death

Tuchachevsky was that good he lost at Warsaw

The entire polish campaign was dumb on just about every level and likely couldn't be won anyway.
Soviet army was exhausted after years of war and Soviet leadership was quite drunk on civil war victory they started the polish operation. They expected a full on communist revolution to magically ignite in Poland.

Specifically for Warsaw there was a worsening breakdown of communication between different armies and commanders with orders arriving days late, responses to orders arriving days late, people continuing to operate on week old plans while command was shifting gear to do something else entirely.
My favorite part was Trotsky ordering an army to reinforce Tukhachevsky but also ordering them to keep going with their own operation in a different area all in the same order.

And that experience, plus the twenty years in between would of had no benefit during 1941.

I get the impression and I may be wrong here that he has that mob boss personality, he attached himself to some very popular visionaries and then personally profited after their deaths. I don't think he was a very nice guy nor a true believer.

He grew up in hard times, so he became a strong man.

Stalin absolutely was not a nice guy, but I do believe that he was a true believer in communism. By the time he came into power the idea of Socialism in One Country made a lot more sense than continuing to push for an international revolution. His efforts to industrialize and modernize the Soviet Union and educate the citizens demonstrate a commitment to the ideals of communism as well. I think the circumstances of his time convinced him of the need to act decisively and harshly against potential enemies so that he could achieve these goals. If he genuinely believed in communism, he also genuinely believed that the ends justified the means.

> be Stalin
> live your entire 20s and 30s hiding from the tsar police
> no money, no job, no stable life, can't even care for your wife
> get arrested and exiled countless times
> write many articles on communism and get praise from Lenin
> wear the same fucking suit everyday and ask for money from your relatives and old friends and they mostly ignore you
> unless the miracle happened in 1917 at the age of 39, you would have lived your entire life like that

> 100 years later some kid on Veeky Forums says that your are not true believer

also not a nice guy. Don't forget that part. I'm not sure how he personally profited from the direction his life went necessarily indicates his belief in the end goal of communism. It might be true but its not a given.

there was no need for a nice guy to rule Russia at that time (nor anytime tbqh)

I'm pretty sure somebody who gives himself the epithet "Man of Iron" would agree that he was not a nice guy.

This

*Man of Steel

I have no idea why do people push this "Stalin didn't believe in communism" bullshit.
He was a fanatic Marxist, he just had his own idea of what is needed. He saw Soviet Union as terribly backward, and believed it wouldn't survive without breakneck modernization and industrialization.
Of course he had personal flaws that influenced the course of events, but as the guy above said, a man who spent decades of his life in a rather fringe movement, living like a fucking vagabond, you can't really question his dedication, just his actions.
If he was only after power, joining some extremists wasn't really a smart way to do it, and Stalin was a smart man.

>Help me understand the personality of Stalin
he was a sand nigger. who cares? doubt these cockroaches think at all. its all instinct with these animals

Spotted the Trotskyist!

this is the answer

fuck off neckbeard

successful
adjective
accomplishing a desired aim or result.
>achievements don't matter

>he was a sand nigger. who cares?

> Veeky Forums is turning more and more into another /pol/

He was a fan of Ukrainian food and wanted it all to himself.

>Stalin was a sand nigger
What the actual fuck?

bump