5. Josef Stalin contained his enemies through executions and imprisonment
Stalin managed to present himself as a man of the people even as his secret police forces repressed and murdered them by the hundreds of thousands. Famines which occurred under his rule, some of them created through his own policies, led to the death of millions. He executed thousands of Soviet army officers in purges in the years before the Second World War and sent millions to vanish in the Gulags. Just under 800,000 documented executions took place during the years of his rule in the Soviet Union. He also dispatched assassination teams to kill his enemies around the world. He endorsed the rapes committed by Soviet troops as they overran Eastern Europe in 1945, saying to a Yugoslav communist leader, “…and what is so awful in his [Soviet soldiers] having fun with a woman, after such horrors?” in reference to the campaign against the Germans.