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Andrew Basyuk
Professor Keneda
English Comp II
04 November 2015
Joseph Stalin and His Necessity
Many great leaders have come to be in our history. Sometimes their own
greatness is shadowed by their actions. Joseph Stalin was one of the many great
leaders who had both positive and negative actions. Joseph Stalin was perhaps a
necessary evil for his country’s survival and prosperity. He also could have been just a
ruthless, cold blooded killer. Evidence suggests that there is also an area of
compromise through all of his actions, good and bad.
Joseph Stalin was born on December 18th 1878 to a pauper family. His father
was a cobbler and his mother was a washerwoman. Stalin’s father was an alcoholic and
an abuser, and Stalin was also bullied at school. He did not grow up in a good
environment; yet his family wanted him to pursue a variety of different careers like being
a lawyer or a priest. He always had a hunger for greatness. In his teenage years he
became very fascinated by the revolution taking place in Russia. As a young adult he
took part in different rallies and secret police services. He was very loyal and thus
began to rank up quickly. He marveled at Lenin and all of his accomplishments. He
actually had a chance to rescue Lenin from the Tsar-lead police and from there their
relationship was great. Stalin even robbed a bank to fuel his rallies and revolution. Like
Lenin, Stalin wanted a socialistic economic system and wanted to unite the eastern
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bloc. He eventually became the right hand man for Lenin, and at his death was the one
to take over. During his reign as dictator, Stalin did many things, mostly horrific, however
some good things. He did starve many people and banished or exiled many others. He
also industrialized what used to be an agricultural country into one of the main powers
of the world. Was he and what he did necessary and vital for his country’s survival or
was it far overboard is the question waiting to be answered.
Most would argue that Stalin was an evil and terrible man. Perhaps it is true.
However, some do think that he did do enough good things to his country in order to be
necessary. After all, Stalin’s USSR was in the looming darkness behind Hitler’s evil
Reich. Opinions about Stalin are often black and white. Those who do not know
anything about the culture and the background immediately assume that he was a
complete evil, and rightfully so, he did slaughter millions of his own people. Those who
did live in the culture, particularly the now elder people that lived during the Soviet
Union times, surprisingly have a very good opinion of “The Man of Steel”.
Joseph Stalin was a mass murder. He slaughtered millions of his own people in
many ways, such as starvation, execution, or banishment to the Gulags. He should be
considered as one of the most evil men in History, along with Hitler and Moa Zedong.
His industrialization of the country from essentially the dark ages does not suffice for his
evil actions and terror. “The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes-as many as 20
million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag-has given him the lasting
distinction as a personification of evil in the twentieth century” ( Montefiore). With the
amount of murders and purges committed by Stalin, it is very reasonable to argue that
Stalin was an incredibly evil man.
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The evil purges were only one of the many horrific things that Stalin did during
his dictatorship. He imposed very strict quotas on farmers and took majority of their
crops. Whether they had enough food to feed their families, Stalin did not care. Police
would be sent to civilian houses to forcefully take their crops. Being the breadbasket of
Europe, Ukraine, was effected the most. Pyrih Ruslan, a researcher of the Ukrainian
crisis writes:
“In June of 1933, at the height of the Holodomor, 28,000 men, women
and children in Ukraine were dying each day. The land that was known
worldwide as the breadbasket of Europe was being ravaged by a man-
made famine of unprecedented scale. It was engineered by Stalin and his
hangmen to teach Ukraine’s independent farmers “a lesson they would not
