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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin [f] (born Dzhugashvili; [g] 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, revolutionary, and political theorist who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953.
Joseph Stalin's health had begun to deteriorate towards the end of the Second World War. He had atherosclerosis as a result of heavy smoking, a mild stroke around the time of the Victory Parade in May 1945, and a severe heart attack in October 1945.
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher. [5] [6] [7] After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it.
The assassination, in December 1934, led to an investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of Stalin's rivals. [31] Many of those arrested after Kirov's murder, high-ranking party officials among them, also confessed plans to kill Stalin themselves, albeit often under duress. [32]
In 2017, historian Stephen Kotkin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that 65 million people died prematurely under communist regimes according to demographers, and those deaths were a result of "mass deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror" but mostly "from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering."
However, these sorts of accounts declined after World War II; Stalin drew back from public life, and the press instead began to focus on remote contact (i.e. accounts of receiving a telegram from Stalin or seeing the leader from afar). [18] Another prominent part of Stalin's image in the mass media was his close association with Vladimir Lenin.
Near the monument to Holodomor victims in Kyiv in 2006, a woman lights a candle in remembrance of the up to 10 million people who died in Ukraine during the famine of 1932-33. (Genia Savilov/AFP ...
Printed media in the Soviet Union, i.e., newspapers, magazines and journals, were under strict control of the CPSU and the Soviet state. The desire to disseminate propaganda was believed to had been the driving force behind the creation of the early Soviet newspapers.