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Joseph Stalin, second leader of the Soviet Union, died on 5 March 1953 at his Kuntsevo Dacha after suffering a stroke, at age 74.He was given a state funeral in Moscow on 9 March, with four days of national mourning declared.
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.
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.
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] The validity of these confessions is debated by historians, but there is consensus that Kirov's death was the flashpoint at which Stalin decided to take action and begin the purges.
Joseph Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin supports a similar view, stating that while "there is no question of Stalin's responsibility for the famine" and many deaths could have been prevented if not for the "insufficient" and counterproductive Soviet measures, there is no evidence for Stalin's intention to kill the Ukrainians deliberately. [146]
Map of the sites related to the Katyn massacre. The Katyn massacre [a] was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Stalin's order in April and May 1940.
Stalin “killed systematically rather than episodically,” the Stanford historian Norman Naimark has observed. An elderly woman passes a house shelled by Russians in the village of Krasylivka ...
Stalin helped to organise a public demonstration outside the prison which was joined by much of the town. The demonstrators stormed the prison in an attempt to free the imprisoned strike leaders, but were fired upon by Cossack troops. 13 protesters were killed and 54 wounded. [103] Stalin escaped with a wounded man. [99]