ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Stalin's life and his personal role in some events, is not the place for a general evaluation. In his Report to the Seventeenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee, one of the most important speeches of his career, Stalin had a twofold message to get across. In particular, Stalin emphasized the widening participation of workers and of women in the new order of things: Perhaps it will not be amiss to point out that the proportion of workers among the students in our higher educational institutions is 51.4 per cent of the total, and that of labouring peasants 16.5 per cent. The detention system of the Soviet state, known as the gulag from the Russian acronym of the 'Main Camp Administration' was a vast and, like most of its siblings, highly inefficient bureaucratic apparatus.
