The making of a dictatorship: Stalin's Russia

After Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, Josef Stalin became leader of the Soviet Union and constructed a system that was either a socialist workers’ paradise or a cruel, totalitarian dictatorship. This course examines Stalin’s rise to power and then what he did with that power. It assesses the attempts to build socialism in the 1930s, the Great Patriotic War and its consequences in the 1940s, and the system Stalin left behind after he died in the 1950s.