"Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, has concentrated limitless power in his hands, and I am not sure that he will always manage to use this power with sufficient caution." (Bullock 120)

The man who would eventually lead the nation of Russia in a downward spiral, from which it has still not escaped, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin, was born on December 21, 1879 in Gori, Georgia. His parents were both Georgian peasants. Although neither of them spoke Russian, Stalin was forced to learn it because it was the language of instruction at the Gori church school that he attended in 1888-94. He was the best pupil in the school and earned a full scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary. While he studied the priesthood, Stalin read forbidden literature, including Marx's Das Kapital, and soon converted to a new orthodoxy: Russian Marxism. Before graduation he quit the seminary to become a full-time revolutionary. Stalin began his career in the Social-Democratic party in 1899 as a propagandist among Tbilisi railroad workers. Between

In 1928, with his position as leader of Russia cemented at least in practice, Stalin faced enormous adversity with the terrible conditions in Russia resulting from the revolution ten years earlier. Russia found itself socially distraught. The "revolution of the proletariat" promised the people by Lenin had been slow to come. Economic conditions within the cities were terrible, and many peasants left the cities to find agricultural work in the country. Peasants who had envisioned their rise to power found themselves worse-off than they had been under the tsarist regime. As tensions mounted, civil war erupted between supporters of the Communists, often referred to as "Red," and supporters of the former monarchy, called "Whites" (See Appendix Photo). The seeds for social unrest were sown, and with the social unrest came economic unrest, as the Communist party began to realize that its idealistic interpretation of Marxist teachings was quite inaccurate in practice.

"We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization - to socialism, leaving behind the age-long "Russian" backwardness. We are becoming a country of metal, a country of automobiles, a country of tractors...When we have put the USSR on an automobile, and the muzhik on a tractor, let the esteemed capitalists, who boast so loudly of their "civilization," try to overtake us! We shall see which countries may then be "classified" as backwards and which as advanced." (54)

While the Five-Year Plan was a social disaster, the economic ramifications, while nowhere near what Stalin had envisioned, were a great leap ahead of the case beforehand. Agricultural production was down; in 1928 there had been 70.5 million head of cattle, down to 38.4 million; pigs, 26 million to 12.1 million; sheep and goats, 146.7 million to 50.2 million (Bullock 286). The obvious neglect of agriculture came mostly as a result of resistance to Stalin's collectivization. One thing that Stalin had counted on in his vision of Communist "Utopia" was the honesty of his workers. However, the workers soon realized that producing excess livestock and crops that would only be taken by the government was a waste of time, and thusly the agricultural economy plummeted. The industrial steps made during this period were great, though. Russia had become a world leader in industry. While industry was up, the immense social upheaval created left the peasants dissatisfied with Stalin. The standard of living had fallen greatly for most people. As tensions among the people increased, Stalin felt threatened all around him.

While Stalin's objective was to put his Allies at his mercy diplomatically, he eventually created so much distrust among them that their image of the Soviet Union became one based on fear. The distrust of the West by Stalin, and the resultant distrust of Stalin by the West, led to the deep divisions still in effect today between Russia and the United States and Britain in particular. The West began to react to Stalin's threats with policies of more action and less words than might otherwise have been necessary. The ultimate result of Stalin's diplomacy was the Cold War, which would define the freeze on US/Russian relations for in excess of 30 years.

W. Averell Harriman, then ambassador to the Soviet Union, writes of Stalin to President Roosevelt in 1945, "We must clearly recognise the Soviet programme is the establishment of totalitarianism, the end of individual freedom and democracy in our understanding of these words" (Kudryashov 20). The "revolution of the proletariat" envisioned first by Marx, later by Lenin, and finally (in theory) by Stalin, had failed miserably. Was it due to an imperfect idea, an idealistic

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