What type of government did Josef Stalin run?

Answer 1

Extreme totalitarian Communism. Stalin was a madman, a genocidal dictator who was very similar to Adolf Hitler in his beliefs. He was coming from an extremist Left standpoint, whereas Hitler was coming from an extreme Right- but in the end, when they both get to that level of paranoid control and mass extermination of anyone they believe to be enemies of the state, the two amount to the same thing.

Stalin wanted total control of every single aspect of people's lives, down to their very thoughts, feelings and emotions. He saw threats to his rule everywhere and punished anybody he saw as an enemy of the people by execution, or by sending them to forced labour camps in Siberia called gulags which few survived because of the terrible conditions there. He took Communism to an extreme that it was never meant to go to and forbade anything that he thought was a threat to his regime. In George Orwell's novel '1984', the character of Big Brother was meant to be modelled on Stalin. Nobody was supposed to have an individual identity, just to be a mass of robots who functioned like termites to keep the State running- to what benefit nobody knows, just the mad mind of Stalin himself. He only went to war with Hitler because the Nazi's invaded the USSR in 1941, prior to that they had a 'non-aggression pact' which Hitler broke. Subsequent Soviet leaders were left to pick up the pieces and try to rehabilitate the credibility of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, both Nikita Kruschev and Mikhail Gorbachev rehabilitating people who had been 'erased from history' by Stalin, but in the eyes of the USA, Communism equalled, and still does equal, Stalinism. He destroyed Communist Government as a credible alternative to Capitalism, and is said to have murdered even more people than the Nazi's did.

Answer 2

Josef Stalin was president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was a Communist Dictatorship.

Answer 3

It was known as a totalitarian state.