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Stalin repeatedly requested that the United States and Britain open a second front on Continental Europe; but the Allied invasion did not occur until June 1944, more than two years later. In the meantime, the Russians suffered high casualties, and the Soviets faced the brunt of German strength.
The Treaty of Rapallo between Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia was signed by German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau and his Soviet colleague Georgy Chicherin on April 16, 1922, during the Genoa Economic Conference, annulling all mutual claims, restoring full diplomatic relations, and establishing the beginnings of close trade relationships, which made Weimar Germany the main trading and ...
Historians have debated whether Stalin was planning an invasion of German territory in the summer of 1941. The debate began in the late 1980s when Viktor Suvorov published a journal article and later the book Icebreaker in which he claimed that Stalin had seen the outbreak of war in Western Europe as an opportunity to spread communist revolutions throughout the continent, and that the Soviet ...
During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin's Five Year Plans and industrialization drive built the productive base necessary to modernize the Red Army. As the likelihood of war in Europe increased later in the decade, the Soviet Union tripled its military expenditures and doubled the size of its regular forces to match the power of its potential enemies.
Despite the Soviets' possession of Hitler's remains, Stalin did not believe that his old nemesis was actually dead, a belief that persisted for years after the war. [178] [179] Stalin later directed aides to spend years researching and writing a secret book about Hitler's life for his own private reading. [180]
In the early 1930s, the socialist movements that did not support the Bolshevik party line were condemned by the Communist International and called social fascism. [ 12 ] Soviet democracy granted voting rights to the majority of the populace who elected the local soviets, who elected the regional soviets and so on until electing the Supreme ...
A secret speech was allegedly given by Joseph Stalin, on 19 August 1939, to members of the Politburo, wherein he justified the Soviet strategy to promote military conflict in Europe, which would be beneficial for the future territorial expansion of the Communist system.
The Soviet Colossus: History and Aftermath (7th ed. 2010) 502pp; Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014), scholarly biography Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin vol 2 1929–1941 (2017) Lincoln, W. Bruce. Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914–1918 (1986) online; Lewin, Moshe. Russian Peasants and ...