The complicated relationship that existed between the United States and its Soviet advisory, Joseph Stalin, was one that changed with almost every shift in the global climate of the 1930s and 1940s. From defending the eastern front from Adolf Hitler’s advances in World War II to the negotiating table of the Paris Peace Conference, few leaders from history have had a more divisive legacy in our nation’s past than Stalin, himself. The dictator that most historians accredit with killing more than 20 million people is the same leader whose forces altered the course of war with his unwavering defense of the Russian city of Stalingrad. By 1947, however, with the ushering in of the Cold War, it was undeniable that Joseph Stalin was the primary communist opponent that the United States government had to concern itself with. Therefore, upon his death in 1953, U.S. foreign policy makers waited with baited breath on who his successor would be and what this would mean for the American people.

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