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> From Time Magazine's 1943 Man of the Year:
The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian…was the man of 1942….
Had German legions swept past steel-stubborn Stalingrad and liquidated Russia’s power of attack, Hitler would have been…undisputed master of Europe, looking for other continents to conquer. He could have diverted 250 victorious divisions to new conquests in Asia and Africa. But Joseph Stalin stopped him. Stalin had done it before—in 1941—when he started with all of Russian intact. But Stalin’s achievement in 1942 was far greater. All that Hitler could give he took—for a second time….
The 1942 accomplishments of…Churchill and Roosevelt pale by comparison with what Joseph Stalin did in 1942.
At the beginning of the year Stalin was in an unenviable spot….Gone was roughly one-third of Russia’s industrial capacity….Gone was nearly half of Russia’s best farmland.
With all this gone,….Stalin still had the magnificent will to resist of the Russian people….[but] the strongest will to resist can eventually crack under continued defeat….
With these reduced resources, Stalin tackled his problem, trying to pick able leaders for his Army, trying to improve its resistance, trying to maintain the morale of his underfed people….
Only Stalin knows how he managed to make 1942 a better year for Russia than 1941. But he did. Sevastopol was lost, the Don basin was nearly lost, the Germans reached the Caucuses. But Stalingrad was held. The Russian people held. The Russian Army came back with four offensives that had the Germans in serious trouble at year’s end.
Russia was displaying greater strength than at any point in the war. The general who had won that overall battle was the man who runs Russia.
Joseph Stalin…worked 16 to 18 hours a day. Before him he kept a huge globe showing the course of campaigns over territory he himself defended in the civil wars of 1917-20. This time he again defended it, and mostly by will power. There were new streaks of grey in his hair and new etchings of fatigue in his granite face….But there was no break in his hold on Russia and there was long-neglected recognition of abilities by nations outside the Soviet borders….
For his armies Stalin coined the slogan "Umeraite No Ne Otstupaite" (Die, But Do Not Retreat). It had been shown at Moscow that a strongly fortified city can be held as a strong point against attack by mechanized forces. Stalin chose to make Stalingrad another such point….Stalin was organizing the winter offensive which burst into the Don basin with the fury of the snowstorms that accompanied it….
Stalin…called to his people to sacrifice collectively to preserve the things they had built collectively….Production norms were increased, apartments went unheated, electricity was turned off four days a week. At year’s end, the Russian children had no new toys for the New Year’s celebration….But there was rejoicing. [Russia] had been saved for the second time in two years….
On the 25th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin, in his big state speech of the year, reviewed the past and for the future struck the note of statesmanship.
The Past. The Revolution that was begun in 1917 by a handful of leather-coated working men and pallid intellectuals waving the red flag, by 1942 had congealed into a party government that has remained in power longer than any other major party in the world. It began under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, on Marxist principles of a moneyless economy which challenged the right to accumulate wealth by private initiative….
Stalin faced the fundamental problems of providing enough food for the people and improving their lot, through 20th-Century industrial methods. He collectivized the farms and he built Russia into one of the four great industrial powers on earth. How well he succeeded was evident in Russia’s world-surprising strength in World War II. Stalin’s methods were tough, but they paid off….As Allies fighting the common enemy, the Russians have fought the best fight so far.
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