1.
Joseph Stalin
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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and he managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenins criticisms and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were arrested and shot after being convicted of treason in show trials. Stalins invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact, as it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence agreed with the Axis, Germany ended the pact when Hitler launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow, after defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies. The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States, Communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were established in most countries freed from German occupation by the Red Army, which later constituted the Eastern Bloc. Stalin also had relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea. On February 9,1946, Stalin delivered a public speech in which he explained the fundamental incompatibility of communism and capitalism. He stressed that the system needed war for raw materials. The Second World War was but the latest in a chain of conflicts which could be broken only when the economy made the transformation into communism. Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War, Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant. However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed, the exact number of deaths caused by Stalins regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions. Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the Russian-language version of his birth name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Ioseb was born on 18 December 1878 in the town of Gori, Georgia and his father was Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, while his mother was Ekaterine Keke Geladze, a housemaid. As a child, Ioseb was plagued with health issues
2.
Great Purge
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The Great Purge or the Great Terror was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina, after Nikolai Yezhov and it has been estimated between 600,000 and 3 million people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge. In the Western world, Robert Conquests 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase, Conquests title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The term repression was used to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the leadership of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party, most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society, intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as too rich for a peasant, a series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being fifth column communities. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas. Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of political crimes, they were quickly executed by shooting. Many died at the labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis, one secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van. The campaigns were carried out according to the line, and often by direct orders. The threat of war heightened Stalins perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the source of an uprising in case of invasion. He began to plan for the elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical fifth column of wreckers, terrorists. The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people, but from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. Stalins opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption and these tendencies may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate Stalins suspicions and he enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism. In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and this required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious old guard of revolutionaries
3.
Gulag
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The Gulag was the government agency that administered and controlled the Soviet forced-labor camp system during Joseph Stalins rule from the 1930s up until the 1950s. The term is commonly used to reference any forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union. The camps housed a range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. Large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas, the Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The agencys full name was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and it was administered first by the State Political Administration, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s, the author likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands and as an eyewitness he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. Natalya Reshetovskaya, the wife of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said in her memoirs that The Gulag Archipelago was based on folklore as opposed to objective facts. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates and 423 labor colonies in the USSR, todays major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners. About 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953, according to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953. According with other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of more than 465,000 were political prisoners. The institutional analysis of the Soviet concentration system is complicated by the distinction between GULAG and GUPVI. In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG and its major function was the organization of foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union. The top management of GUPVI came from the GULAG system, the major noted distinction from GULAG was the absence of convicted criminals in the GUPVI camps. Otherwise the conditions in both systems were similar, hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, and high mortality rate. According with the estimates, in total, during the period of the existence of GUPVI there were over 500 POW camps. According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934–53. Some independent estimates are as low as 1.6 million deaths during the period from 1929 to 1953. Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time
4.
Holodomor
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The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed an officially estimated 7 million to 10 million people. It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, during the Holodomor millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. Early estimates of the toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. Recent research has since narrowed the estimates to between 2.4 and 7.5 million, the exact number of deaths is hard to determine, due to a lack of records, but the number increases significantly when the deaths in heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban are included. Older estimates are often cited in political commentary. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement, the word Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means death by hunger, or to kill by hunger, to starve to death. Sometimes the expression is translated into English as murder by hunger or starvation, Holodomor is a compound of the Ukrainian words holod meaning hunger and mor meaning plague. The expression moryty holodom means to inflict death by hunger, the Ukrainian verb moryty means to poison somebody, drive to exhaustion or to torment somebody. The perfective form of the verb moryty is zamoryty – kill or drive to death by hunger, the word was used in print as early as 1978 by Ukrainian immigrant organisations in the United States and Canada. However, in the Soviet Union – of which Ukraine was a constituent republic – references to the famine were controlled, historians could speak only of food difficulties, and the use of the very word golod/holod was forbidden. Discussion of the Holodomor became more open as part of Glasnost in the late 1980s, the term may have first appeared in print in the Soviet Union on 18 July 1988, in his article on the topic. Holodomor is now an entry in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language, the term is described as artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a countrys population. The famine had been predicted as far back as 1930 by academics and advisers to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic government, between 1926 and 1939, the Ukrainian population increased by 6. 6%, whereas Russia and Belarus grew by 16. 9% and 11. 7%, respectively. From the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities were able to procure only 4.3 million tons as compared with 7.2 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in town were cut back, and in the winter of 1932–33. The urban workers were supplied by a system, but rations were gradually cut, and by the spring of 1933. The first reports of malnutrition and deaths from starvation emerged from two urban areas of the city of Uman, reported in January 1933 by Vinnytsia and Kiev oblasts
5.
Iron Curtain
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The Iron Curtain was the name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. A term symbolizing the efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the West, on the east side of the Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the Soviet Union. The most notable border was marked by the Berlin Wall and its Checkpoint Charlie, the events that demolished the Iron Curtain started in discontent in Poland, and continued in Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Romania became the only communist state in Europe to overthrow its government with violence. The use of the iron curtain as a metaphor for strict separation goes back at least as far as the early 19th century. It originally referred to fireproof curtains in theaters, various usages of the term iron curtain pre-date Churchills use of the phrase. The term iron curtain has since been used metaphorically in two different senses - firstly to denote the end of an era and secondly to denote a closed geopolitical border. The source of these metaphors can refer to either the safety curtain deployed in theatres or to roller shutters used to secure commercial premises. The first metaphorical usage of iron curtain, in the sense of an end of an era, perhaps should be attributed to British author Arthur Machen, who used the term in his 1895 novel The Three Impostors. The door clanged behind me with the noise of thunder, and I felt that an iron curtain had fallen on the passage of my life. Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians used the term Iron Curtain in the context of World War I to describe the situation between Belgium and Germany in 1914. The passage runs, With clanging, creaking, and squeaking, time to put on your fur coats and go home. We looked around, but the fur coats and homes were missing, chesterton used the phrase in a 1924 essay in The Illustrated London News. Chesterton, while defending Distributism, refers to that iron curtain of industrialism that has cut us off not only from our neighbours condition, how, a moment before the iron curtain was wrung down on it, did the German political stage appear. All German theatres had to install an iron curtain as a precaution to prevent the possibility of fire spreading from the stage to the rest of the theatre. Such fires were common because the decor often was very flammable. In case of fire, a wall would separate the stage from the theatre. Douglas Reed used this metaphor in his book Disgrace Abounding, The bitter strife had only hidden by the iron safety-curtain of the Kings dictatorship
6.
Katyn massacre
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The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish nationals carried out by the NKVD in April and May 1940. Though the killings took place at different locations, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest. The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000, the victims were executed in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons, and elsewhere. The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943. When the London-based Polish government-in-exile asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross, in November 2010, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for having personally ordered the massacre. At least 111,091 people were executed during the Polish Operation of the NKVD, on 1 September 1939, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany began. Consequently, Britain and France, obligated by the Anglo-Polish military alliance and Franco-Polish alliance to attack Germany in the case of such an invasion, demanded that Germany withdraw. On 3 September 1939, after Germany failed to comply, Britain, France, and most countries of the British Empire declared war on Germany and they took minimal military action during what became known as the Phony War. The Soviet invasion of Poland began on 17 September in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army advanced quickly and met little resistance, as Polish forces facing them were under orders not to engage the Soviets. About 250,000 to 454,700 Polish soldiers and policemen were captured and interned by the Soviet authorities, some were freed or escaped quickly, but 125,000 were imprisoned in camps run by the NKVD. Of these,42,400 soldiers, mostly of Ukrainian and White Russian ethnicity serving in the Polish army, who lived in the territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, were released in October. The 43,000 soldiers born in western Poland, then under German control, were transferred to the Germans, in turn, Soviet repressions of Polish citizens occurred as well over this period. Since Polands conscription system required every nonexempt university graduate to become a reserve officer. According to estimates by the Institute of National Remembrance, roughly 320,000 Polish citizens were deported to the Soviet Union, IPN estimates the number of Polish citizens who died under Soviet rule during World War II at 150,000. Of the group of 12,000 Poles sent to Dalstroy camp in 1940-1941, mostly POWs, only 583 men survived, according to Tadeusz Piotrowski, during the war and after 1944,570,387 Polish citizens had been subjected to some form of Soviet political repression. As early as 19 September, the head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria, ordered the police to create the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War. The largest camps were located at Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobelsk, other camps were at Jukhnovo, Yuzhe, rail station Tyotkino, Kozelshchyna, Oranki, Vologda, and Gryazovets. Kozelsk and Starobelsk were used mainly for officers, while Ostashkov was used mainly for Polish Scouting, gendarmes, police officers
7.
Vyacheslav Molotov
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Molotov served as Chairman of the Council of Peoples Commissars from 1930 to 1941, and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1939 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1956. He served as First Deputy Premier from 1942 to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev, Molotov retired in 1961 after several years of obscurity. He was aware of the Katyn massacre committed by the Soviet authorities during this period, after World War II, Molotov was involved in negotiations with the Western allies, in which he became noted for his diplomatic skills. He retained his place as a leading Soviet diplomat and politician until March 1949, Molotovs relationship with Stalin deteriorated further, with Stalin criticising Molotov in a speech to the 19th Party Congress. However, after Stalins death in 1953, Molotov was staunchly opposed to Khrushchevs de-Stalinisation policy, Molotov defended Stalins policies and legacy until his death in 1986, and harshly criticised Stalins successors, especially Khrushchev. Molotov was born Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skryabin in the village of Kukarka, Yaransk Uyezd, Vyatka Governorate, contrary to a commonly repeated error, he was not related to the composer Alexander Scriabin. Throughout his teen years, he was described as shy and quiet and he was educated at a secondary school in Kazan, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, soon gravitating toward that organisations radical Bolshevik faction, headed by V. I. Skryabin took the pseudonym Molotov, derived from the Russian word молот molot for his political work owing to the names vaguely industrial ring and he was arrested in 1909 and spent two years in exile in Vologda. In 1911 he enrolled at St Petersburg Polytechnic, Molotov joined the editorial staff of a new underground Bolshevik newspaper called Pravda, meeting Joseph Stalin for the first time in association with the project. This first association between the two future Soviet leaders proved to be brief, however, and did not lead to a close political association. Molotov worked as a professional revolutionary for the next several years, writing for the party press. He moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1914 at the time of the outbreak of World War I and it was in Moscow the following year that Molotov was again arrested for his party activity, this time being deported to Irkutsk in eastern Siberia. In 1916 he escaped from his Siberian exile and returned to the city, now called Petrograd by the Tsarist regime. Molotov became a member of the Bolshevik Partys committee in Petrograd in 1916, when the February Revolution occurred in 1917, he was one of the few Bolsheviks of any standing in the capital. Under his direction Pravda took to the left to oppose the Provisional Government formed after the revolution, when Joseph Stalin returned to the capital, he reversed Molotovs line, but when the party leader Lenin arrived, he overruled Stalin. Despite this, Molotov became a protégé of and close adherent to Stalin, Molotov became a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee which planned the October Revolution, which effectively brought the Bolsheviks to power. In 1918, Molotov was sent to Ukraine to take part in the war then breaking out. Since he was not a man, he took no part in the fighting
8.
Battle of Stalingrad
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Marked by fierce close quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians by air raids, it is often regarded as one of the single largest and bloodiest battles in the history of warfare. German forces never regained the initiative in the East and withdrew a vast military force from the West to replace their losses, the German offensive to capture Stalingrad began in August 1942, using the German 6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army. The attack was supported by intensive Luftwaffe bombing that reduced much of the city to rubble, the fighting degenerated into house-to-house fighting, and both sides poured reinforcements into the city. By mid-November 1942, the Germans had pushed the Soviet defenders back at great cost into narrow zones along the west bank of the Volga River. On 19 November 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, the Axis forces on the flanks were overrun and the 6th Army was cut off and surrounded in the Stalingrad area. Adolf Hitler ordered that the stay in Stalingrad and make no attempt to break out, instead, attempts were made to supply the army by air. Heavy fighting continued for two months. By the beginning of February 1943, the Axis forces in Stalingrad had exhausted their ammunition, the remaining units of the 6th Army surrendered. The battle lasted five months, one week, and three days, elsewhere, the war had been progressing well, the U-boat offensive in the Atlantic had been very successful and Rommel had just captured Tobruk. In the east, they had stabilized their front in a running from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. There were a number of salients, but these were not particularly threatening, neither Army Group North nor Army Group South had been particularly hard pressed over the winter. Stalin was expecting the main thrust of the German summer attacks to be directed against Moscow again, with the initial operations being very successful, the Germans decided that their summer campaign in 1942 would be directed at the southern parts of the Soviet Union. The initial objectives in the region around Stalingrad were the destruction of the capacity of the city. The river was a key route from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea to central Russia and its capture would disrupt commercial river traffic. The Germans cut the pipeline from the oilfields when they captured Rostov on 23 July, the capture of Stalingrad would make the delivery of Lend Lease supplies via the Persian Corridor much more difficult. On 23 July 1942, Hitler personally rewrote the operational objectives for the 1942 campaign, both sides began to attach propaganda value to the city based on it bearing the name of the leader of the Soviet Union. The expansion of objectives was a significant factor in Germanys failure at Stalingrad, caused by German overconfidence, the Soviets realized that they were under tremendous constraints of time and resources and ordered that anyone strong enough to hold a rifle be sent to fight. If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny then I must finish this war, Army Group South was selected for a sprint forward through the southern Russian steppes into the Caucasus to capture the vital Soviet oil fields there
9.
Stalinist architecture
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Stalinist architecture is associated with the socialist realism school of art and architecture. As part of the Soviet policy of rationalization of the country, each was divided into districts, with allotments based on the citys geography. Projects would be designed for whole districts, visibly transforming a citys architectural image, the interaction of the state with the architects would prove to be one of the features of this time. The same building could be declared a formalist blasphemy and then receive the greatest praise the next year, as happened to Ivan Zholtovsky, the Vysotki or Stalinskie Vysotki, high-rises are a group of skyscrapers in Moscow designed in the Stalinist style. The English-language nickname for them is the Seven Sisters and they were built officially from 1947 to 1953 in an elaborate combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles and the technology used in building American skyscrapers. In terms of methods, most of the structures, underneath the wet-stucco walls, are simple brick masonry. Exceptions were Andrei Burovs medium-sized concrete block houses and large buildings like the Seven Sisters which necessitated the use of concrete. The masonry naturally dictated narrow windows, thus leaving a large area to be decorated. Fireproof terra cotta finishes were introduced during the early 1950s, though this was used outside of Moscow. Most of the roofing was traditional wooden trusses covered with metallic sheets, about 1948, construction technology improved – at least in Moscow – as faster and cheaper processes become available. Houses also became safer by eliminating wooden ceilings and partitions, ideologically they belong to mass housing, an intermediate phase before Khrushchevs standardized buildings known as Khrushchyovka. Stalinist architecture does not equate to everything built during Stalin’s era and it relied on labor-intensive and time-consuming masonry, and could not be scaled to the needs of mass construction. This inefficiency largely ended Stalinist architecture and resulted in construction methods which began while Stalin was still alive. Although Stalin rejected Constructivism, completion of constructivist buildings extended through the 1930s, industrial construction, endorsed by Albert Kahn and later supervised by Victor Vesnin, was influenced by modernist ideas. It was not as important to Stalins urban plans, so most industrial buildings are not part of the Stalinist category, even the first stage of the Moscow Metro, completed during 1935, was not scrutinized by Stalin, and so included substantial constructivist influence. Before 1917, the Russian architectural scene was divided between Russky Modern, and Neoclassical Revival and these people would eventually become Stalinisms architectural elders and produce the best examples of the period. Another school that began after the Revolution is now known as Constructivism, some of the Constructivists were young professionals who had established themselves before 1917, while others had just completed their professional education or didnt have any. They associated themselves with groups of artists, compensating for lack of experience with public exposure
10.
Tehran Conference
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The Tehran Conference was a strategy meeting of Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill from 28 November to 1 December 1943. It was held in the Soviet Unions embassy in Tehran, Iran and it was the first of the World War II conferences of the Big Three Allied leaders. It closely followed the Cairo Conference which had taken place on 22–26 November 1943, although the three leaders arrived with differing objectives, the main outcome of the Tehran Conference was the Western Allies commitment to open a second front against Nazi Germany. The conference also addressed the Allies relations with Turkey and Iran, operations in Yugoslavia and against Japan, a separate protocol signed at the conference pledged the Big Three to recognize Irans independence. As soon as the German-Soviet war broke out in June 1941, Churchill offered assistance to the Soviets, and an agreement to this effect was signed on 12 July 1941. Delegations had traveled between London and Moscow to arrange the implementation of this support and when the United States joined the war in December 1941, a Combined Chiefs of Staff committee was created to coordinate British and American operations as well as their support to the Soviet Union. There was the question of opening a second front to alleviate the German pressure on the Soviet Red Army on the Eastern Front, the question of mutual assistance. Also, neither the United States nor Britain were prepared to give Stalin a free hand in Eastern Europe and, lastly, communications regarding these matters between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin took place by telegrams and via emissaries—but it was evident that direct negotiations were urgently needed. Stalin was reluctant to leave Moscow and was unwilling to risk journeys by air, while Roosevelt was physically disabled, in order to arrange this urgently needed meeting, Roosevelt tried to persuade Stalin to travel to Cairo. Stalin turned down this offer and also offers to meet in Baghdad or Basra, the conference was to convene at 16,00 on 28 November 1943. Stalin arrived well before, followed by Roosevelt, brought in his wheelchair from his accommodation adjacent to the venue, Roosevelt, who had traveled 7,000 miles to attend and whose health was already deteriorating, was met by Stalin. This was the first time that they had met, Churchill, walking with his general staff from their accommodations nearby, arrived half an hour later. The U. S. and Great Britain wanted to secure the cooperation of the Soviet Union in defeating Germany, Stalin pressed for a revision of Poland’s eastern border with the Soviet Union to match the line set by British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon in 1920. In order to compensate Poland for the loss of territory. This decision was not formally ratified, however, until the Potsdam Conference of 1945, the leaders then turned to the conditions under which the Western Allies would open a new front by invading northern France, as Stalin had pressed them to do since 1941. It was agreed Overlord would occur by May 1944, Stalin agreed to support it by launching a concurrent major offensive on Germanys eastern front to divert German forces from northern France, Iran and Turkey were discussed in detail. In addition, the Soviet Union was required to support to Turkey if that country entered the war. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed that it would also be most desirable if Turkey entered on the Allies side before the year was out, despite accepting the above arrangements, Stalin dominated the conference
