While the Soviet Union began World War II allied with Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers, it shifted to the side of the Allies after being attacked by Germany in June of 1941. It invaded Poland on 17 September 1939 and it fought a peripheral war with Finland from November 1939 to March 1940. The bulk of Soviet fighting took place on the Eastern Front—including a continued war with Finland—but it also invaded Iran (August 1941) in cooperation with the British and late in the war attacked Japan (August 1945).Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. In the years following Lenin's death in 1924, he rose to become the authoritarian leader of the Soviet Union.In August 1939, at Stalin's direction, the Soviet Union entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, containing a secret protocol, dividing the whole of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Thereafter, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded their apportioned sections of Poland. The Soviet Union later invaded Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and part of Romania, along with an attempted invasion of Finland. Stalin and Hitler later traded proposals for a Soviet entry into the Axis Pact.In June 1941, Germany began an invasion of the Soviet Union, before which Stalin had ignored reports of a German invasion. Stalin was confident that the total Allied war machine would eventually stop Germany, and the Soviets stopped the Wehrmacht some 30 kilometers from Moscow. Over the next four years, the Soviet Union repulsed German offensives, such as at the Battle of Stalingrad and Battle of Kursk, and pressed forward to victory in large Soviet offensives such as the Vistula-Oder Offensive. Stalin began to listen to his generals more after Kursk.Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt in Tehran Conference and began to discuss a two-front war against Germany and future of Europe after the war. Berlin finally fell in April 1945, but Stalin was never fully convinced his nemesis Hitler had committed suicide. Fending off the German invasion and pressing to victory in the East required a tremendous sacrifice by the Soviet Union, which suffered the highest military casualties in the war, losing approximately 20 million men.Stalin became personally involved with questionable tactics employed during the war, including the Katyn massacre, Order No. 270, Order No. 227 and NKVD prisoner massacres. Controversy also surrounds rapes and looting in Soviet-held territory, along with large numbers of deaths of POWs held by the Soviets, and the Soviets' abusive treatment of their own soldiers who had been held in German POW camps.
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