Execution of Pastor Paul Hamberg

Date: November 1, 1937 • Location: Zardob, Azerbaijan

Stalinists execute Pastor Paul Hamberg and seven members of Azerbaijan's Lutheran community.

Stalinism is the totalitarian means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by General Secretary of The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin and in Soviet satellite states between 1944 and 1953. Stalinism included the creation of a one man totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, forced collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Stalinism deemed the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin's ideology to begin to wane in the USSR.