The Treaty of Versailles (1919) was a peace treaty that officially ended World War I between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany. It was signed exactly 5 years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, one of the events that triggered the start of the war. Although the armistice signed on November 11, 1918 put an end to the actual fighting, it took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude a peace treaty.
Initially, 70 delegates of 26 nations participated in the negotiations. Having been defeated, Germany, Austria, and Hungary were excluded from the negotiations. Russia was also excluded because it had negotiated a separate peace with Germany in 1917, in which Germany gained a large fraction of Russia's land and resources.
After a number of notable successes and some early failures in the 1920s, the League ultimately proved incapable of preventing aggression by the Axis Powers in the 1930s. The onset of the Second World War suggested that the League had failed in its primary purpose — to avoid any future world war. The United Nations replaced it after the end of the war and inherited a number of agencies and organizations founded by the League.
Joseph Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. His crash programs of industrialization and collectivization in the 1930s and his campaigns of political repression cost the lives of millions of people. However it helped industrialize the Soviet Union making it a Great power by 1931. Only six years later, the Soviet Union had become the second largest industrial nation in the world.
Bearing the brunt of the Nazis' attacks (around 75% of the Wehrmacht's forces), the Soviet Union under Stalin made the largest and most decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II (known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945).
Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been allied against Nazi Germany, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of World War II. Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every region of the world, as the U.S. sought the "containment" of communism and forged numerous alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
2007-12-07 09:01:34
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answer #1
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answered by Spots^..^B4myeyes 6
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I'm guessing you're referring to Stalin in WW II (Pre-D-Day Invasion)? Stalin was more than slightly upset that instead of attacking head on (into France), The Brit.s and the U.S. opted to go into North Africa, Italy and southern France. He'd been promised an invasion causing a two front land war for several years and very little was happening. Millions of Russians were dying and other than a Lend Lease Agreement, he was getting very little support. Churchill was cool to the idea of an invasion into France. The English were still feeling the pain of great loss of life in WW I -- some 200,000 died in the first hour of the first Battle of the Somme. To revisit familiar names was too much to ask. There was also the ghost of Gallipoli hanging over his head (another beach assault in WW I that went horribly wrong) -- it's was all Chruchill's. Add to that, the Americans (and Canadians) were fresh, untested and full of ideas. Stalin was at war and struggling to survive -- we'll not mention that he'd caused a great deal of his own troubles by bargaining with Hitler on the division of Poland before Hitler turned on him. Stalin was impatient and did not trust those who speak English.
2007-12-07 09:11:43
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answer #2
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answered by Doc 7
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All under the same illuminati directives pushing us towards a New World Order.
2007-12-07 09:35:59
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answer #3
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answered by Anonymous
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