... socialist movement while still at the seminary, he was expelled in 1899 for the next decade he worked with the political underground in the Caucasus and was exiled to Siberia several times. He gained a place on Lenin's Bolshevik party's central committee in 1912 and in 1913 adopted the name Stalin. During the civil war Stalin was political commissar of the Red army and after became peoples commissar of nationalities affairs. In April 1922 Stalin became general secretary of the communist party. Lenin's death in 1924 created a power vacuum and subsequently a power struggle. The main feature of the Stalinist system were the one party system, extreme authoritarianism, the cult of Stalin, the use of terror to achieve his goals and mass purges. This essay intends to show that the Stalinist system was a tyrannical authoritarian regime built on the use of terror and Stalin's cult of personality and ...

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