Stalin's Authoritarian Leadership: Two Styles Of Leadership

A characteristic of a person who tends to help facilitate people to achieve a certain task describes leadership. By motivating and directing individuals, a leader tends to have a major affect on a group of individuals. Leaders can be harsh and commanding, but they also can be accepting and encouraging. However, both styles of leadership have a major affect on the group of individuals and the nations they rule either positive or negative. For instance, an authoritarian leadership style is when one person rules an entire nation alone and decides what is good or bad for the country without any input from other executives. Authoritarian rulers tend to be harsh and commanding to the people because they are ruling an entire nation but there is only

One impact of Stalin’s autocratic style was his ability to use violence and to create fear within the people to show everyone that he will do anything to rule as long as he can. For instance, Stalin created a young savage military group known as the Red Army. The purpose of the Red Army was to patrol neighborhoods and to see if anyone was planning against Stalin. If they were the individuals were shot dead and executed. They, however, also fought wars with the other western countries. Furthermore, “The Red Army was successful in perpetuating a brutal totalitarian system at home and in Eastern Europe” (“Red Army” 1). Clearly, Stalin became obsessed with power and wanted to rule as long as he could; anyone who tried to overthrow him was shot dead immediately because he did not want a revolution to happen and cause another civil war. Additionally, Stalin achieved that by creating the Red Army he could kill anyone who even thinks about overthrowing him and the government. By creating the Red Army, Stalin was able to become a brutal dictator that ruled for so long, and he was also able to completely suppress the people so he can carry on the communist ideology. The concept of the Soviet Gulag was another effect of Stalin’s leadership style. It was consisted of systems of labor camps, to which millions of people during Stalin’s reign were exiled to. “Approximately, 50 million people from all over the Soviet Union perished in the gulag during Stalin’s reign, succumbing to starvation, exposure, execution, and mistreatment. Anyone who Stalin considered to be a threat or potentially subversive was sent to Siberia” (Catherwood 1). Clearly, Stalin wanted to achieve his goals of making the Soviet Union to slowly become a superpower. In process of achieving his goal, Stalin eliminated anyone that he considered might be a threat to him. Furthermore, Stalin