Show 3091 Stalins Rise to Power. Part 1 and 2. Segment 1-  Uncommon Knowledge: Part 1. Stephen Kotkin on Stalin’s Rise to Power. To watch part 1 of this interview visit- https://youtu.be/3MzPzfEVjNE HooverInstitution Part 1: Stalin was born in a small town in Georgia in which he was educated to become a priest. After succeeding in school and becoming a devout follower of the faith, Stalin left the priesthood and became a communist revolutionary. World War I and the revolutions of 1917 set the stage for Stalin and the Communists to take power in Russia.   Segment 2-   Uncommon Knowledge: Part 2: Stephen Kotkin discusses Stalin’s consolidation of power. To watch part 2 of this interview visit- https://youtu.be/eZ9KCG0KO4U HooverInstitution As part 2 begins Lenin is dead and Stalin is trying to consolidate power. Although various people were vying for the position, Stalin had already  effectively taken over Lenin’s job. Lenin’s last will and testament says bad things about all his successors, with Trotsky coming out the best, yet does nothing to dislodge Stalin from power. Stalin continues, through hard work and cunning, to gather power but also because people believed that he stood for the principles of the revolution.   Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (Stalin #1) by Stephen Kotkin  A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world It has the quality of myth: A poor cobbler’s son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a revolutionary and finds a leadership role within a small group of marginal zealots. When the old world is unexpectedly brought down in a total war, the band seizes control of the country, and the new regime it founds as the vanguard of a new world order is ruthlessly dominated from within by the former seminarian until he stands as the absolute ruler of a vast and terrible state apparatus, with dominion over Eurasia. But the largest country in the world is also a poor and backward one, far behind the great capitalist countries in industrial and military power, encircled on all sides. Shortly after seizing total power, Stalin conceives of the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted: the root-and-branch uprooting and collectivization of agriculture and industry across the entire Soviet Union. To stand up to the capitalists he will force into being an industrialized, militarized, collectivized great power is an act of will. Millions will die, and many more will suffer, but Stalin will push through to the end against all resistance and doubts. Where did such power come from? We think we know the story well. Remarkably, Stephen Kotkin’s epic new biography shows us how much we still have to learn. The product of a decade of scrupulous and intrepid research, Stalin contains a host of astonishing revelations. Kotkin gives an intimate first-ever view of the Bolshevik regime’s inner geography, bringing to the fore materials from Soviet military intelligence and the secret police. He details Stalin’s invention of a fabricated trial and mass executions as early as 1918, the technique he would later impose across the whole country. The book places Stalin’s momentous decision for collectivization more deeply than ever in the tragic history of imperial Russia. Above all, Kotkin offers a convincing portrait and explanation of Stalin’s monstrous power and of Russian power in the world. Stalin restores a sense of surprise to the way we think about the former Soviet Union, revolution, dictatorship, the twentieth century, and indeed the art of history itself.   Visit Uncommon Knowledge for many more selections. Highly Recommended by ACU. http://www.hoover.org/publications/uncommon-knowledge   For a great archive of Hoover Institution YouTube videos visit- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzWwWbbKHg4aodl0S35R6XA