Joseph Stalin Came To Power Dbq

An authoritarian dictator is a person in power who has total control of the citizens of a country. My dictators are Joseph Stalin and Mao zedong. Stalin ruled Russia and Mao ruled china. Mao's political party was the Chinese communist party. Stalin's political party was the communist party of the soviet union. Stalin came into power by using Lenin, who was the previous ruler of Russia. Stalin photoshopped an image to make them appear closer to make it seem like he was Lenin's successor. Mao came into power by using the Chinese revolution. The strategies that are the most effective at helping dictators gain and maintain power are propaganda, persecution, and industrialization.

Stalin and Mao both maintained their power by using propaganda to

Persecution is when you treat someone unfairly because of their religious beliefs. In a speech given by Stalin he said, “The party cannot be neutral towards the clergy (priests) who poison the minds of the workers because we have persecuted the clergy” (Doc 9). In other words, Stalin believes that if people believe in different religions then they won't believe in him and he is afraid of losing his power so he got rid of religion so everyone will only believe in him.In addition, a photograph taken in 1964 shows a buddhist leader being criticized by the red guard (Doc 13). In other words the photo shows Mao telling the red guard to judge and bully people who are religious because he is afraid of not having total control. Therefore this connects to my claim because it shows how Stalin and Mao used religious persecution as a way to maintain their power. In summary, Stalin and Mao used religious persecution as a way of maintaining power to get people to only believe in them and not go against them in any way that could threaten their

Persecution can also help maintain power because authoritarian dictators use it as a way of getting people to only believe in them. Industrialization is also a way authoritarian dictators use to gain power because it makes them seem like they're doing great things for their country but in reality they're just doing it as a way of gaining more power for themselves. We should care about Thailand because if we fall into an authoritarian dictatorship it will be hard to get out of it. This matters in the world today because even if some countries are democracies there are still people who want to be able to control the country with their personal beliefs. We can use this knowledge to prevent the rise of dictators because we now know different ways dictators did gain their power so we can look into people who want to get into positions of power and see what their intentions are and see if their are any correlations between them and other previous In summary, propaganda, persecution, and industrialization are ways dictators use to gain and maintain power because with it they can get people to trust