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STALIN’S RUSSIA
INTRODUCTION
When, in 1961, the body of Josef Stalin was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square where it had lain beside that of Lenin since the dictator’s death eight years earlier and unceremoniously re-interred in a plain grave below the Kremlin wall, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote:
- “I appeal to our government,
- And I say to them:
- Double or triple the guard
- Beside his grave,
- So that he will not rise again,
- And with him - the past.”
Stalin had ruled the Soviet Union unchallenged for almost 30 years. It was said of him that he found Russia with the wooden plough and left it with the atomic bomb. How then had he earned such a fearsome reputation?
STALIN’S RISE TO POWER
Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin (“man of steel”) - the “wonderful Georgian”, as Lenin once called him - was one of the few senior Bolsheviks whose background was genuinely proletarian and who was not a cosmopolitan intellectual. He was Commissar for Nationalities in the first Soviet Government and consolidated his reputation for efficiency and practical administration as a roving trouble-shooter during the Civil War.
In 1922, Lenin appointed him as General Secretary of the Communist Party with a brief to discipline and curb dissident factions. At the time, this seemed a relatively unimportant post and his colleagues did not see him as a threat; but he used his new powers to place loyal supporters in key positions throughout the Party apparatus; and this control of the expanding Communist bureaucracy proved decisive in the power struggles after Lenin’s death in 1924.
Unlike his rivals, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, Stalin could always command obedient majorities at the annual Party Congresses where crucial votes were taken. His favour was the passport to career advancement; and in any case, many of the newer, less educated Party members saw him as an ordinary man like themselves, and shared his vision of a future in which Russians would build Socialism by their own efforts. His rivals consistently underestimated him. He was variously described as “a grey blur” (Sukhanov); “just a small town politician” (Kamenev); “the outstanding mediocrity of our party” (Trotsky). They realised too late, and to their cost, that they were dealing with one of the ablest and most ruthless politicians in history.
ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES IN THE 1920s
The power struggles within the Communist Party in the 1920s were intimately connected with a “Great Debate” about the future economic development of the USSR; and whoever had emerged victorious would have been faced with stark and painful choices.
All Communists agreed that for strategic, economic, and ideological reasons, the industrialisation drive begun under the last Tsars would have to be resumed as soon as possible. The arguments were therefore about means rather than ends.
The Left, under Preobrazhensky and Trotsky, advocated rapid industrialisation at the expense of the peasantry, with the emphasis on investment in heavy industry, and collective farming to maximise agricultural productivity and bring the peasants under firm Party control.
Follow this link to read Stalin’s attack on Trotsky’s theory of “Permanent Revolution”: (link missing)
1924: Trotskyism or Leninism?
The Right, under Bukharin, argued that any coercion of the peasantry would endanger the Soviet system by breaking the vital “link” (smychka) between town and country that had made the Revolution possible. They advocated a continuation and extension of NEP, with a gradual accumulation of investment capital as peasant prosperity increased.
In 1925, Stalin put forward his famous formula “Socialism in One Country”. By then, it was obvious that revolution was not going to spread to Western Europe in the foreseeable future and that the USSR would have to industrialise out of her own resources. Stalin tapped a rich vein of Russian nationalism by emphasising the need for security in a hostile capitalist world and attributing old Russia’s many defeats to economic backwardness. In February 1931, he said: “We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in 10 years. If we don’t do it, they’ll crush us!”
Go here for the full text of Stalin’s famous speech.
Temperamentally a man of the Left, Stalin could not openly espouse Left-wing economic policies while his arch-rival, Trotsky, held this position. (This link will take you to an attack on Trotsky by Stalin in 1924: October Revolution & Tactics of the Russian Communists) But by 1928, having ousted the so-called “United Opposition” of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, he felt confident enough to reveal his true colours. His criticism of his current allies, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky for “Right Deviationism” appealed to those Party members who felt that the NEP was creating an unjust and inequitable society with the emergence of kulaks, NEPMEN and other potentially anti-Socialist elements. Above all, the Bukharin option was too slow for men who believed they could overtake the advanced powers within a decade. In the words of the economist Shumilin: “Our task is not the study economics, but to change it. We are bound by no laws. There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm. The question of tempo is subject to decision by human beings.”
THE “REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE”
In 20 years, Stalin led the Soviet Union from peasant state to nuclear superpower. His “Revolution from Above” effected a social and economic transformation far more profound than the Revolution of 1917. We may deplore his methods and question their necessity and their long-term implications, but the achievement is undeniable, and entitles Stalin to a place - which he himself would have appreciated - alongside those other great modernising tyrants of Russian history, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.
For the texts of interviews which Stalin gave to the German author Emil Ludwig in 1931, and to an American, Colonel Robins, in 1933, go to:
INDUSTRIALIZATION
The First Five Year Plan was launched in 1929 in an atmosphere of euphoria, and officially backdated to 1928. The aim was to develop the heavy industries – coal, iron & steel, heavy engineering, HEP - but the Plan covered all aspects of economic life, and the production quotas, which it imposed, had the force of law. From time to time, Stalin intervened to increase tempos, and in January 1933, he declared that production targets had been over fulfilled 6 months ahead of schedule.
Although the statistics were greatly exaggerated for propaganda reasons, the achievements were undeniably impressive, and by 1939, the USSR had become the world’s third greatest industrial power. This was a source of pride to the enthusiastic young Communists at home and to “fellow-travellers” abroad who found much to admire in what the Webbs called “A New Civilization” (1935), especially at a time of economic depression in the West.
Industrial growth was achieved by terror and exploitation on an unprecedented scale. Many of the great showpieces of Soviet industrialisation like the Moscow Metro and the Belomor Canal were built by slave labour and cost many thousands of lives. Workers were subjected to harsh discipline, and the slightest infringement of rules were punished by imprisonment in the ever-growing complex of labour camps. “Show-trials” of “bourgeois specialists” and foreign technicians served to shift blame for blunders and shortcomings on to alleged “saboteurs and wreckers”.
COLLECTIVIZATION
Agriculture remained the Achilles’ Heel of the Soviet economy. The original draft of the Plan envisaged a relatively slow transition to collectivization as the peasants saw the advantages of the new system. The reality was catastrophe on a grand scale.
Since the mid-1920s, concern had been growing within the Soviet leadership about the falling level of grain procurements. This was partly because, after 1926, the State cut food prices in order to finance the initial stages of industrialisation. Stalin accused the richer peasants, or “kulaks”, of hoarding, and gave a foretaste of what was to come by taking an OGPU detachment to Western Siberia in January 1928 and confiscating grain stocks at gunpoint.
At the time, he had to back down in the face of opposition from moderates on the Politburo; but the final defeat of Bukharin and the “Right opposition” in 1929 gave Stalin the chance to implement the violent solution he had always favoured.
In November 1929, without warning, he ordered the Party to achieve 100% collectivization within 6 months. The kulaks - which in practice meant any peasant opposed to collectivization i.e. the vast majority - were to be “liquidated as a class”.
The process lasted throughout 1930 and 1931. OGPU and Red Army units were called in to support the collectivizers. Thousands of peasants were killed or deported to the Siberian labour camps. The peasants retaliated by burning crops and slaughtering livestock. The result was a terrible famine in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan in 1932-33. Stalin imposed a total news blackout and continued to export foodstuffs for foreign exchange. “Pilfering” of grain was made a capital offence. The famine broke the back of peasant resistance and by the mid-1930s, the process was more or less complete. By Stalin’s own admission, the death toll exceeded 10 million.
Collectivization was a political success in that the State now had the peasant masses under tight control for the first time and could procure grain without regard to market prices; but it was an economic disaster. The most efficient farmers had been murdered or deported, and productivity remained abysmally low as peasants concentrated on their small private plots rather than the collective fields. The livestock losses took years to make good. The slaughter of draught animals was particularly serious in view of the inadequate mechanisation.
A NEW SOCIETY
Some Western historians have used later, more reliable Soviet statistics, to demonstrate that, without the mayhem in agriculture, growth rates would have been even faster - but for the kind of society that Stalin was trying to create, collectivization was essential. There was a decisive shift of population from the countryside into the towns - and from the urban proletariat there emerged a new, upwardly mobile “technical intelligentsia”: engineers, managers, scientists, doctors – in effect, a “new ruling class”, which was grateful to Stalin for the opportunities now opening up.
Living standards in the 1930s were probably worse than before 1914. There was an acute housing shortage. Consumer goods were practically unobtainable for all but the privileged few. Yet in this closed, xenophobic society, there were no yardsticks of comparison; and when Stalin announced in 1936 that “life is becoming better, comrades; life is becoming more joyful!” - many Russians believed him, and looked forward to reaping the fruits of their recent endeavours.
THE GREAT PURGES
By 1934, there were signs of growing disquiet at Stalin’s leadership behind the scenes, with calls for more realistic production targets as the 2nd Five Year Plan was launched, and for the rehabilitation of former oppositionists like Bukharin. At the 17th Party Congress (“The Congress of Victors”), there was even an attempt to replace Stalin as General Secretary with Sergei Kirov, the popular Leningrad Party boss.
Perhaps encouraged by Hitler’s purge of opponents in June 1934, Stalin took steps to reform the secret police, now known as the NKVD, and to make them directly responsible to his personal secretariat. In December, Kirov was mysteriously assassinated in Leningrad. Stalin proclaimed the existence of a vast conspiracy to murder Soviet leaders and to undermine the regime. During 1935, thousands were arrested, and between 1936 and 1938, three great “show-trials” were held in Moscow at which Zinoviev, Kamenev, (The link will take you to a letter in which Stalin rebukes Molotov and Kaganovich for incorrect reporting of the Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial in Pravda), Bukharin and other once prominent figures confessed to an amazing range of crimes, including murder, conspiracy, economic sabotage, and espionage. They admitted to links with foreign intelligence services and with the exiled Trotsky. Their “guilt” having been paraded before the world, they were summarily executed or sent to labour camps from which few returned.
The Great Purges of 1936-8 are the most baffling aspect of Stalin’s career. Of course, they extended well beyond the Party and the Red Army until no one in any position of responsibility in whatever walk of life could feel safe from denunciation, arrest, and execution on some trumped-up charge of “anti-Soviet activity”. But the Party bore the brunt of the Terror, with well over a million members liquidated.
Stalin’s own paranoia is only part of the explanation. He and Molotov personally signed 40,000 death warrants, and he was responsible for some of the crueller refinements e.g. The use of torture during interrogations, and the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility to 12 so that children could be executed if their parents refused to confess. Although the Terror often seemed to be slipping out of control, Stalin was able to halt the process quite easily in the Autumn of 1936, when he dispensed with his principal henchman, NKVD Commissar Yezhov, the “bloodthirsty dwarf”.
After his downfall, Yezhov was obliterated from the records, as these pictures show
Stalin had many willing accomplices in the NKVD and the Party, and some revisionist historians see the Purges as a response by the leadership to pressure from grassroots activists. The brutalization of the Party had begun during collectivization, when the squeamish had been shouldered aside by the ruthless young “apparatchiks” for whom the end justified any means. The elimination of virtually the entire generation of Old Bolsheviks opened up many avenues of advancement, and those who came to the fore in the late 1930s were to rule the USSR for the next 40 years. The Purges were, in effect, a gigantic exercise in social engineering as Stalin created a “new ruling class” for his new society.
Stalin’s Russia is often described as a “totalitarian” state, and he probably came nearer to achieving the ideal of total State control than any ruler before or since. Distanced from the hurly-burly of everyday politics - and from the excesses of the Terror - by the bizarre “cult of personality”, which projected the tyrant’s image as a remote, omnipotent, menacing yet benevolent “Big Brother” figure, Stalin used the NKVD to cow both Party and society into docile submission.
THE WAR YEARS
To some extent the rigid controls of the 1930s were relaxed during the “Great Patriotic War”. Recovering from his initial shock at the German invasion in June 1941, Stalin acquired some of the attributes of a true national leader. He shrewdly stressed Russian patriotism rather than Communism as the mainspring of Soviet resistance, and indeed, the war helped to legitimise the Party’s rule. Unwilling to let himself be upstaged by successful generals like Zhukov and Koniev, Stalin awarded himself the rank of Marshal/Generalissimo and took credit for each new Soviet victory.
The European War ended in May 1945 with Soviet power firmly established in Central and Eastern Europe, but the USSR had suffered 26 million deaths, and large parts of the country were utterly devastated. After the appalling suffering, Russians looked forward to better times and a more liberal atmosphere. Nothing was further from Stalin’s thoughts. As the Cold War intensified, the old controls were rigorously reimposed, with the threat from the West as justification. Stalin sought to isolate the USSR from the outside world. Sporting and cultural links with the west were abruptly curtailed. Liberated POWs were sent straight to the GULAG, and several small nationalities, accused of collaborating with the invading Nazis, were deported en masse to Siberia.
STALIN’S FINAL YEARS
In the aftermath of war, economic reconstruction was the top priority for the Soviet leadership. The situation was in some ways comparable to that in 1921; but Stalin ruled out a new NEP and rejected Marshall Aid from the USA. Instead, there was a return to the harsh methods of the 1930s. The 4th 5 Year Plan (1946-50) brought rapid industrial recovery, although priority was still given to the old-fashioned heavy industries. Agriculture still lagged well behind expectations. The trend was now to merge the collectives into larger State Farms, but lack of machinery and fertilizers kept productivity low. Attempts to tax the private plots led to further production cutbacks.
The late 1940s saw a new clampdown on “cosmopolitanism” in the arts. This cultural witch-hunt was masterminded by Stalin’s current acolyte, A.A. Zhdanov, the Leningrad Party boss. Writers like Pasternak, composers like Shostakovich; filmmakers like Eisenstein incurred official disapproval. The wartime vogue for Russian nationalism gathered momentum. All significant inventions, from steam engines to radios and aeroplanes, were said to be the work of Russians. In science, too, Western ideas were officially denounced, and the crackpot agrobiologist T.D. Lysenko, whose theory of “vernalization” appealed to Stalin and who denied the existence of genes and chromosomes, was able to become virtual dictator of Soviet science. Many of those victimized were Jews, and Stalin’s latent anti-Semitism became increasingly overt.
Stalin himself became increasingly remote and secretive. Between 1947 and 1952, there were no meetings of the full Politburo or Central Committee. His behaviour became increasingly capricious and unpredictable. After Zhdanov’s death in 1948, the entire Leningrad Party hierarchy was liquidated on unspecified charges. By 1952, when Stalin announced some administrative reforms at the 19th Party Congress, the USSR was rife with rumours of a new Purge, with MVD chief Lavrenti Beria as the principal victim. In January 1953, a group of mainly Jewish doctors at the Kremlin were arrested, accused of poisoning Zhdanov and other former leaders. For many, it all seemed painfully reminiscent of the 1930s.
But then, early on 6th March came an announcement that Stalin had died of a stroke the previous evening. For a while, the vast empire over which he had ruled was plunged into profound grief, mingled perhaps with relief, and fear of the unknown future.
But although Stalin was dead, Stalinism lived on. As Yevtushenko warned in his poem:
- “Let them repeat over and over again:
- Be calm! But I dare not,
- As long as the heirs of Stalin
- Remain on the earth,
- I shall feel Stalin is still there
- In the mausoleum.”
FURTHER READING
- Conquest, R., The Great Terror. A Reassessment. (London, 1990)
- Conquest, R., The Harvest of Sorrow (London, 1986)
- Conquest, R., Stalin, Breaker of Nations (London, 1991)
- Corin, C, & Fiehn, T., Communist Russia under Lenin and Stalin (forthcoming)
- Fitzpatrick, S., The Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1982)
- Gill, G., Stalinism (London, 1988)
- Hingley, R., Joseph Stalin: Man and Legend (London, 1974)
- Hosking, G., A History of the Soviet Union (London, 1991)
- Lewis, J., & Whitehead, P., Stalin: A Time for Judgement (London, 1990)
- Mawdsley, E., The Stalin Years (Manchester, 1998)
- Nove, A., An Economic History of the USSR (London, 1976)
- Nove, A., Stalinism and After (London, 1975)
- Nove, A.(ed.), The Stalin Phenomenon (London, 1993)
- Overy, R., Russia’s War (London, 1998)
- Overy, R., The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (London, 2004)
- Service, R., A History of 20th Century Russia (London, 1997)
- Service, R.. Stalin, a Biography (London, 2004)
- Tucker, R., Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above 1928-1941 (New York, 1989)
- Volkogonov, D., Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (Moscow, 1989)
Comments
These notes are aimed at A Level history Unit 6.
Originally written by Helloimalex on TSR Forums.
