About the Book
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 219. Chapters: Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Zhukov, Leonid Brezhnev, Lavrentiy Beria, Ivan Bagramyan, Todor Zhivkov, Alexander Pokryshkin, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, Yuri Gagarin, Sergei Kramarenko, Nikolai Kamanin, Lydia Litvyak, Konstantin Rokossovsky, Richard Sorge, Vladimir Komarov, Rodion Malinovsky, Hero of the Soviet Union, Valentina Tereshkova, Walter Ulbricht, Kirill Meretskov, Dmitriy Ustinov, Ivan Panfilov, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Ivan Maslennikov, Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Krivoshein, Baurzhan Momyshuly, Alexey Leonov, Ivan Konev, Musa Calil, Leonid Govorov, Ludvik Svoboda, Grigory Kulik, Andrey Yeryomenko, Sergei Krikalev, Nikolai Fyodorovich Vatutin, Vasily Chuikov, Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen, Pavel Belyayev, Semyon Budyonny, Ivan Kozhedub, Timofey Khryukin, Valery Chkalov, Nikolay Gerasimovich Kuznetsov, Mikhail Baranov, Ivan Isakov, Georgy Beregovoy, Arnold Meri, Nikolai Gastello, Valeri Polyakov. Excerpt: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: born Ioseb Besarionis dze Dzhugashvili, Georgian: 18 December 1878 - 5 March 1953) was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 until his death on 5 March 1953. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the Russian Revolution in 1917, Stalin held the position of General Secretary of the party's Central Committee from 1922 until his death. While the office was initially not highly regarded, Stalin used it to consolidate more power after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, gradually putting down all opposition. This included Leon Trotsky, the principal critic of Stalin among the early Soviet leaders. Whereas Trotsky advocated world permanent revolution, Stalin's concept of socialism in one country became primary policy as he emerged the leader of the Soviet Union. In 1928, Stalin replaced the decade's New Economic Policy with a highly centralised command economy and Five-Year Plans, launching a period of industrialization and collectivization in the countryside. As a result, the USSR was rapidly transformed from an agrarian society into an industrial power, the basis for its emergence as the world's second largest economy after World War II. However, the rapid changes saw millions of people sent to correctional labour camps, and deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932-1933. In 1937-38, a campaign against alleged enemies of the Stalinist regime culminated in the Great Purge, a period of mass repression against the population in which hundreds of thousands of people were executed. Major figures in the Communist Party such as Trotsky and Red Army leaders, were killed, convicted of participating in plots to overthrow the Soviet government and Stalin. In August 1939, after Stalin's attempts to establish an Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance failed, Stalin entered into a pact with Na
