Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion.

Whoever opposed these concepts, or tried to prove his own viewpoint and the correctness of his own position, was doomed to removal from the leadership collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation.

This was especially true during the period following the 17th Party Congress, when many

prominent party leaders and rank-and-file party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of

communism, fell victim to Stalin's despotism.

Nikita Khrushchev elaborates on Stalin's crimes during his incendiary speech on the cult

of personality and its consequences performed in front of a closed audience of the 24th to 25th

February, 1956.

Music How much impact can one individual make on history?

This question springs to mind when examining some of history's great men.

Rarely it seems as that question applied to the life of Joseph Stalin. This is a strange fact

when you consider what Stalin did between taking power in the aftermath of Lenin's death

and the end of his own life just 30 years later. Stalin had overseen a period of intense and prolonged danger in the Soviet Union

and emerged on the other side to lead one of the world's superpowers by 1945.

On paper, discounting all other variables, facts and figures,

Stalin's achievements in bringing the successor state of the Russian Empire

into such a position seem to verge on miraculous. It is this very one-sided viewpoint which has

led a cult of Stalin to remain in place to this day. Just look at Putin's presentation of himself,

and you'll see there a continuation of Stalin's imperialist legacy,

and I'm even more convinced of this than I was when 1956 first came out. You can probably

tell why. Never before, even during some of the excesses of Ivan the terrible hundreds of years

before, did a Russian leader so terrorize his own people as Stalin did?

...