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Spent a lot of today thinking about 'dictators' in the 21st Century. Normally when you approach a compare and contrast question in writing about modern dictators, you would choose to compare Stalin and Hitler or Stalin and Mao. Rarely would you choose to compare Roosevelt and Stalin. However, it is precisely because people rarely do it, that I chose to do it. I wanted to find out something new and exciting that had not been discovered before and this Extended Essay question provided me with just the right topic to do so. My topic is: Compare and contrast the rise to and consolidation of power of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin from 1933-1953. To begin this investigation, I will define Roosevelt’s rise to power as the period preceding his victory at the 1932 presidential elections, and his consolidation of power as the period between 1933 and 1945, his presidential years. On the other hand, I will define Stalin’s rise to power as the period between 1924 and 1934, the years between Lenin’s death and Stalin’s execution of his political opponents, and his consolidation of power as the period between 1934 and 1953, the years between the beginning of Stalin’s dictatorship as the last major leader and his death in office. I will not be limiting Stalin’s consolidation of power solely to his years as chairman of the Soviet Union (1941-1953) as he had already achieved dictatorship by then and no longer had any need to appeal to the people. At the beginning of my investigation, my thesis was that Stalin and Roosevelt were not as different as people asserted them to be. After comparing them together, I discovered that my original thesis was true where Stalin and Roosevelt did share more similarities than what most people would accredit them for.
