How Did Joseph Stalin Rise To Power

It may be coincidental that the name “Stalin” roughly translates to “Man of Steel,” yet there seems to be no better title for one of the most ruthless leaders in history. Immediately following Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, Josef Stalin rose to power as the dictator of the USSR. Like any strong leader, Stalin had a vision of transforming the USSR into an industrial and military superpower, and developed ways to achieve this vision. One of these strategies was the development of the Russian labor camps, which were created by Lenin in 1918 to isolate individuals who opposed his political opinions. Stalin continued to expand the camps and they eventually made up a system known as the Gulag, holding individuals from political prisoners to criminals.

Being the central control organization of the Gulag, the Moscow Gulag Administration completed frequent investigations of the camps and enforced rules that would sustain the prisoners and improve their ability to work. During one examination in 1942, the Gulag administrators took note of the strenuous labor that the prisoners did and implemented the rule that inmates must sleep for a minimum of eight hours each night (Applebaum 193). Despite this new rule, the local commanders maximized the sleeping hours of the prisoners at only four to five hours (Applebaum 193). These commanders believed that by shortening the prisoners’ time for sleep, they would be able to accomplish more work during the day. Instead, the prisoners grew weak from exhaustion, losing their strength to work (Applebaum 193). Another investigation by the Moscow Gulag Administration revealed that the cleanliness of the camps contributed to the increasing mortality rates among the inmates. During this investigation, the administrators discovered that the dirt, crowding, and poor hygiene of the camps led to infestations of lice and bedbugs, which were rapidly increasing in population (Applebaum 202). Realizing the lethal dangers of the insects, the Gulag administrators required the prisoners to bathe every ten days using specific amounts of soap (Applebaum 202). However, the sheer disinterest of the local commanders meant that the inmates bathed only once every two months, resulting in 25,552 cases of typhus in the Gulag during the winter of 1929 (Applebaum 24). As the number of deaths among the prisoners increased due to the local commanders’ failure to follow these rules, the productivity of the camps began to decrease, which contributed to the insufficient results produced by the