Joseph stalin biography breve coffee

Beyond that, she adds, "was the surge of energy from the Jewish intelligentsia, and new industrialist class, made possible following their being granted full citizenship rights by Franz Joseph in 1867, and full access to schools and universities."

And, though this was still a largely male-dominated society, a number of women also made an impact.

Alma Mahler, whose composer husband had died in 1911, was also a composer and became the muse and lover of the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the architect Walter Gropius.

Though the city was, and remains, synonymous with music, lavish balls and the waltz, its dark side was especially bleak. Vast numbers of its citizens lived in slums and 1913 saw nearly 1,500 Viennese take their own lives.

No-one knows if Hitler bumped into Trotsky, or Tito met Stalin. But works like Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mr Hitler - a 2007 radio play by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran - are lively imaginings of such encounters.

The conflagration which erupted the following year destroyed much of Vienna's intellectual life.

The empire imploded in 1918, while propelling Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Tito into careers that would mark world history forever.

You can hear more about Vienna's role in shaping the 20th Century on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on 18 April.

You can follow the Magazine on Twitter, external and on Facebook, external

He lays a hand on my arm. He looks me in the eyes, and then, resignedly, he looks off toward the mountains. Then at me again. “I killed a man, Witold, do you understand?” Again he looks away, at the sky; clearly, talking to me is not bringing him the kind of relief he might have been hoping for. “He was standing next to me, roughly as far away as my brother is now.” And he points at his brother, who is sitting quite close by. “And I shot him dead, you see?”

Then he waits for me to say something.

I don’t know what to say. And I don’t know how to enter into the mood of this conversation. It’s 2009 and in the place we’re sitting, just a year earlier, the Russian invasion of Georgia was under way. I’m wondering how to get myself out of this pickle. I’m on my own, drunk, among some Georgians the size of oak trees; we’re surrounded by mountains I can’t name. A while ago they told me they’re descended from princes—as I already know, here in the Caucasus there’s often someone claiming to be royalty.

But then they started telling me that their great-uncle was Stalin’s brother—that’s an advance on the usual story, because although everyone in Georgia is proud of Stalin, I’ve never met any of his cousins before.

Especially since I know that Stalin’s brothers died as soon as they were born.

But now they’re telling me about the Russian soldiers they killed during the recent war between Russia and Georgia. Four big, beefy guys, with necks like tree trunks.

It’s all too much for me. I’m trying to devise an escape plan.

But before I can make a move, one of the men lunges at me. He pins me down. And holds on.

*

He couldn’t stand cooking. When he was a child, his mother had various jobs. One of them was as a cook. Supposedly that was why for

On February 9, 1946, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin delivered with much fanfare an election speech at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Yes, an election speech. The Soviet Union held elections every four years for the Supreme Soviet. Stalin was a candidate. He had no opponents.

This was Joseph Stalin’s first speech since the end of World War II. So, it was special. But few suspected he would use the occasion to declare tacit war on the United States.

The most striking feature of the speech is the drastic change in tone from Stalin’s wartime orations. For the first time in almost five years, the Soviet leader boldly reasserts a Marxist-Leninist view of the world. During World War II, Stalin had shrouded his Communist convictions in patriotic rhetoric about “Mother Russia.” He’d played down his Communism to reassure his American and British allies that he was a faithful partner in their war against Hitler. Russian nationalism also helped rally the people behind a Total War to evict the Nazi German invaders.

Then, at the Bolshoi, Stalin reversed himself with two bold claims.

The first claim was that capitalism caused World War II. “The war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism,” he says. Just as in World War I, competition over markets and access to raw materials brought capitalist countries to war with one another between 1939-1945. One of these belligerent capitalist camps–the Axis countries of Germany, Japan, and Italy—was so cruel and despotic that the USSR entered into an “anti-fascist coalition” with the US and Great Britain.

Despite the victory over fascism, Joseph Stalin continues, the threat of capitalism remains. “Under

Ben Fulton

The historical facts regarding Soviet-Russian dictator and revolutionary Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler’s sadistic roommate in the twentieth-century house of horrors, fall like so many blows to the head.

As with so many Russians and many things Russian, Stalin—although technically Georgian—is a figure whose reputation precedes him. His “kill rate,” so to speak, is up for debate.

Shedding the quasi-charming moniker of “Koba” for “Stalin,” or “Man of Steel,” he deliberately murdered at least six million people, and at least three million more by famine and execrable executive decisions pinned on the tenets of communism. Throw forced labor gulags into the mix and some say the body count rises to—swallow hard—sixty million lives lost.

Precious little of this was casual cruelty, either. So ferocious was Stalin’s bloodlust that he relished Soviet secret police (NKVD) reports of detainees bludgeoned to death in the face at the end of rifle butts, or hands thrust into boiling water for hours on end. And that was just the fate of female detainees. Soviet archives describe, as did novelist Vassily Grossman, pharmacological accounts of torture in which men were injected with massive amounts of amphetamine to keep them awake for days so as to feel the full intensity of their pain after NKVD agents had broken their bones, electrocuted their genitals, or unleashed any other Grand Guignol technique transforming their once viable bodies into “living corpses.” All this, and so much more needless suffering, from a man who loved his only daughter Svetlana dearly. Stalin’s associates also said their General Secretary spoke in a soft voice.

Oddly, I heard my most memorable account of Stalin while sitting in the pews of my hometown Presbyterian church. I was near late adolescence, you