Joseph Stalin Research Paper

Joseph Stalin was a relentless totalitarian dictator of the USSR during the years 1941-1953. He is infamous for the millions of lives he took. Stalin was known to be an active reader of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. This explains why many ponder if Stalin really was a Machiavellian prince? Throughout his years in power he continually demonstrated ideologies focused in The Prince. For example, Stalin had a mind that always thought of war. He engulfed the idea that he should be a military leader. He also thought that he should be a feared leader; one that is not hated for being too generous or hated for attempting to keep order and justice, which would lead to taxing the people and using many resources. Lastly, he believed that he should

He was an active reader of The Prince and in that book Machiavelli says that a “prince” should “never take his mind from this exercise of war, and in peacetime he must train himself more than in time of war...he must turn [peacetime] to his advantage in order to be able to profit from [it] in times of adversity, so that, when fortune changes, she will find him prepared to withstand such times” (Machiavelli 50-51). Stalin demonstrated this when he turned the Soviet Union from a peasant society to an industrial and military society, when he first took control. Stalin eventually was able to have 14 million civilians prepared for war. In the beginning of World War Two the Soviets began to gain some power when they were able to” annex parts of Poland and Romania, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania”( "Joseph Stalin."). However, this strong beginning came to an abrupt halt when the Germans invaded and broke the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Although the Soviets suffered major losses at the Battle of Stalingrad it was still a turning point in favor of the Soviets as they did drive out the Germans. The Soviets seemed to only go uphill after this as their Military industrial output skyrocketed from 1941 to early 1943 (because of Stalin’s strategic movement of the factories to the East of the front, which was away from the Germans) and the Red Army grew to 11 million in 1942 when it was 5 million to

In the beginning of World War Two the Soviet Union had to remain neutral, due to the non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But, when Germany invaded on June 22nd, 1942, this broke the pact. This made Stalin infuriated and gave him a reason to seek revenge somehow. Consequently, he had to join the Allied Side in the war. Stalin was now fighting with Poland, France, Britain, and, later, USA. This move completely goes by what Niccolo Machiavelli believed a prince should do. Machiavelli believed that “a prince is respected when he is a true friend and a true enemy; that is, when he declares himself on the side of one prince against another without any reservation. Such a policy will always be more useful than that of neutrality; for if two powerful neighbors of yours come to blows, they will be of the type that, when one has emerged victorious, you will either have cause to fear the victor or you will not” (Machiavelli 74-75). Stalin knew that he could not remain neutral after being betrayed when Germany invaded, thus using Machiavelli’s advice to his advantage and choosing the opposite side as Germany. This was also strategic in a way that now Stalin followed another one of Machiavelli’s ideologies stating that by joining a side that was weaker than the Soviets was “in winning [the ally] is at your discretion, and it is impossible for him not to win with you aid” (Machiavelli