yguards who ran the household. He kept away, almost pathologically, from the public, and he was frequently the object of the intrigues of some of the more unscrupulous of the leaders, such as Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police, who used this terrifying instrument for his own ends. Stalin in World War II When the German armies attacked the USSR in June 1941, Stalin, after suffering a brief nervous collapse, personally took command of the Soviet armed forces. With the help of a small defense committee (war cabinet), he made all major military, political, and diplomatic decisions throughout the war. He pursued victory with increasing skill, determination, and courage, by staying on in the Kremlin when Hitler's armies stood at the gates of Moscow, ordering a fantastic shifting of industrial plants from European Russia to the east, arranging for lend-lease from the Western powers, selecting more and more first-rate military commanders, and developing increasingly effective military strategy, including the remarkable counteroffensives at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. He undergirded the strength and morale of his people by fostering their traditional religious and patriotic sentiments, and conducting adroitly the complicated diplomacy from the Teheran conference to Potsdam. Of course, victory could not have been achieved without the patriotism and fortitude of the Russian people, the quality and skill of the Soviet military professionals, the efforts of the USSR's allies, and the enormous political and military miscalculations of Hitler. Stalin's Last Years In 1945, at the end of the war, there was a general expectation that in the USSR, which had shown itself to be one of the world's truly great powers, the despotic system of rule and institutional rigidities would disappear or at the least be tempered. Instead, Stalin and his men restored almost completely the pre-war system, molded the occupied countries of eastern Europe in the Sta...
