Josef Stalin

The rise of Stalinist Russia

The Rise of Stalin

• Stalin was born in 1879. He had a domineering mother and an abusive, alcoholic father.

• He grew up poor. He married twice (his second wife committed suicide and left a note blaming him).

The Rise of Stalin

• He had three children (first son taken hostage by Germans in WWII and Stalin refused offer of exchange. Daughter defected to West after his death).

• He was stocky with short brown hair. He had a large mustache to cover his scarred face (from smallpox when an infant).

• His left arm was a couple inches shorter than his right arm.

• He was one mean hombre.

The Rise of Stalin

• When Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, he expected the workers revolution to happen in Britain or Germany since they were the most highly industrialized nations.

• The revolution did not happen in either country but in Russia and China.

The Rise of Stalin• Russia and China did not have the large

proletariat of working class members that Marx envisioned…instead both are largely agricultural (so the proletariat were peasants instead of factory workers).

• Marx believed that industrialization was needed to have a true and lasting revolution. Lenin’s adaptation of Marx’s ideas is known as Marxist Leninism. This was put into practice by Stalin.

The Rise of Stalin• Marx also predicted that under Communism, the

state would eventually wither away.• Under Stalin, the opposite occurred as the Soviet

Union became a totalitarian state controlled by a powerful authoritarian dictator and a complex bureaucracy.

The Rise of Stalin• Lenin (then Stalin), adapted the idea of the

vanguard of the proletariat.

• Lenin’s (then Stalin’s) version of the vanguard was a tight knit group of professional revolutionaries, not intellectuals.

• Russia would then heavily industrialize for the benefit of workers.

The Rise of Stalin

• The vanguard was known as the Politburo.

• In 1922, Lenin appointed Stalin to the post of Secretary General of the Communist Party…repayment for Stalin’s loyalty, hard work, and devotion to administrative duties.

• Before Lenin died of a stroke in 1924, Stalin had begun organizing and consolidating his personal political power.

The Rise of Stalin

• Lenin realized Stalin was more concerned with accumulating power than the Revolution, so before Lenin died, he expressed concerns about how Stalin would use his power.

The Rise of Stalin

• Lenin considered him a political liability and called for his removal as Secretary General.

• But Lenin died, and a power struggle ensued between the Left Wing of the Communist Party’s vanguard (Leon Trotsky), and the Right Wing (Stalin).

The Rise of Stalin

• Even though Trotsky was Lenin’s hand-picked successor, Stalin was better organized and had widespread support.

Trotsky• Trotsky, representing what

was known as the Left, wanted Russia to rapidly industrialize (knowing all the problems that would come with it).

• He also wanted to export the revolution because he believed Russia could not survive the Communist experiment alone.

Stalin• Stalin, representing

what was known as the Right, wanted to focus internally and make Russia industrialize at a slower, more planned pace.

• Stalin eventually won and Trotsky fled to Mexico in exile.

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• Stalin had little interest in theoretical Marxism and he had a relentless obsession with acquiring and maintaining power.

Stalin• Starting in 1927, Stalin created the Marxist/Leninist “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It was an autocratic totalitarian state which tried to control every aspect of its citizen’s lives.

• No dissent was permitted. The penalty was death or exile at hard labor in a Siberian gulag (prison).

• Watching over the ‘enemy of the people.’

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• The Communist Party tried to strengthen its hold on the minds of the people by destroying their religious faith.

• Atheism was the official state policy.• Churches and synagogues were seized by

the State.• Russian Orthodox and Catholic priests

were killed or sent to die in the gulags.• Teaching Hebrew and Islam were banned.

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• The Soviets under Stalin replaced established religion with their own ideology.

• Stalin’s aim was to create a new kind of society and a new human personality to inhabit that society: socialist man and socialist woman—Homo Sovieticus.

• Once everything was owned/controlled by the state, Stalin believed this new kind of human personality would emerge.

Stalin• Like religion, Communism had its “sacred”

texts—the writings of Marx and Lenin.

• It had its shrines—the tomb of Lenin and statues of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

• Religious icons/paintings were replaced with portraits of Stalin.

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Stalin• Under Lenin, Soviet homelands like the Ukraine or

Uzbek had relative autonomy.• They had their own languages, cultures, traditions.

• In the late 1920’s, Stalin started a policy of Russification, where the Soviet Union’s national culture was to be more Russian.

• He appointed Russians to all high-ranking positions within non-Russian SSRs.

• Russian became the required language to be used in schools and businesses.

Stalin• Starting in 1928, Stalin used the power of the State

to collectivize agriculture (he took all land away from the peasants and organized it into State-run farms called collectives.)

• The State would provide the tractors, fertilizers, and seed. The peasants would work the land and learn modern farming methods.

Stalin• The peasants could

keep their houses and personal belongings, but all farm animals and tools had to be turned over to the collective (owned by the State).

• The State set all prices and controlled access to farm supplies.

Stalin• Collectivization was intended to do three

things:

1). Free up labor from the farms for the industrialization he wanted to create.

2). Be more efficient since less labor would create more food.

3). Be more efficient since less capital was needed to run large collectives and the capital ($$) saved could be spent on industrialization.

Stalin• Stalin believed that in order to pay for

Russia’s unprecedented economic growth, the State needed to squeeze the peasantry by forcing them to turn over their land to the State.

• These large, State-run farms were the opposite of the small individual farms of the West.

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• Peasants were pressured to join a collective.

• Many peasants didn’t want to give their land to the State or sell their crops at the State’s low prices.

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• Furious at this dissent, Stalin blamed the kulaks (wealthier land owning peasants).

• Stalin staged open war on the kulaks and stole their land in the name of the State (he declared his intention to “liquidate the kulaks as a class.”)

• Communist Party officials were sent to the countryside with orders to KILL any peasant who refused.

Stalin• Millions refused. They were executed, sent to

gulags, or they starved to death (because they destroyed their crops and animals rather than turn them over to the State).

• The majority were forced to submit.

• Collectives created an atmosphere of factory-like discipline and rigid management planning.

• Agricultural production suffered because there was a lack of peasant motivation.

The “Terror Famine”• Stalin’s cruelty was

most evident in the Ukraine, where collectivization was the most difficult.

• Ukrainians had a fierce sense of nationalism and independence, ideals Stalin was determined to crush.

The “Terror Famine”

• For the Ukrainians, Stalin created farm quotas impossible to reach.

• He insisted that Ukrainian farmers were hoarding food so he sent thousands of party loyalists to the region to spy on the peasants.

• Anyone found “hoarding” grain was shot. In less than six months, 60,000 people were convicted.

The “Terror Famine”

• Party officers stood on watchtowers as peasants harvested grain, looking for “thieves.”

• “Snipping” became a serious crime, punishable by 10 years hard labor.

The “Terror Famine”

• Since all food had to be turned over to the State, Ukrainian peasants ate soup made of dandelions and ran to railroad tracks at the sound of a train (begging travelers for scraps/crusts of bread).

The “Terror Famine”• Between 1932-1934, it is believed over 8

million Ukrainians starved to death.

• In 1933 alone, 5 million Ukrainian peasants died of starvation.

• Anyone that looked “healthy” became a target of the State (surely they must be hoarding food!)

The “Terror Famine”

• Corpses appeared everywhere, on the streets, in the fields, in homes.

• Millions tried to flee, but they were refused passage on trains.

• Peasants were arrested who tried to leave on foot.

• Stalin’s denial of the famine in the Ukraine became known as the “Great Lie.”

The “Terror Famine”

The “Terror Famine”

• People that were buried often ended up in mass communal graves in secluded places. No headstones, grave markers, or crosses were allowed. It was as if they never existed.

• Soviet papers never mentioned the mass death…they only had praise for the collectivization “miracle.”

• Some resistance along the way? Well that is merely the price of a revolution.

The “Terror Famine”

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• Through it all, Stalin sat with a poker face as if his collectivization program was coming off exactly as planned.

• Stalin reported that Russian harvests were doing exceedingly well and that reports of famine in the Ukraine were fiction, the “kind that makes people laugh.”

• Even if you knew this to be a lie, you kept your mouth shut.

• No one ever dared contradict the “Great Genius Leader.”

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• Neighbors. Friends. Even your closest loved ones. In Stalin's Russia, everyone was an informer.

• When two teenage boys were found stabbed to death in a forest in western Ukraine, investigators decided that they had been killed by their own families, because one of the youngsters had denounced his father (a kulak) to Stalin's Soviet authorities.

• The boys were hailed as martyrs to the “people’s cause” because they had chosen loyalty to the State over the bourgeoisie notion of duty to your family.

Stalin• The teenagers were "Pioneers", members of the

Soviet youth movement, a perversion of the Boy Scouts, which trained its members to believe that to inform against the “people's enemies” represented a high ideal, that to betray one's own family was the highest good of all.

Stalin• At the father’s trial, he cried out to another son in

the witness box: "It's me, your father!" The son said coldly to the judge: "Yes, he used to be my father, but I no longer consider him my father. I am not acting as a son, but as a Pioneer."

• Soviet authorities held a show trial of the family, following which his grandfather, grandmother, cousin and godfather were all sent to the firing squad.

• Stalin trumpeted this story as a modern tale of morality…duty to the State was more important than duty to your family…or life itself.

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• A propaganda poster of the “Pioneers.”

Stalin• If Stalin’s agricultural plan was less than totally

successful, his industrial plan was the opposite.• Stalin developed a series of five-year plans that

industrialized and modernized the Soviet Union.• The Soviet Union industrialized without foreign

investment or foreign advice.• Stalin’s initial focus was on heavy industry (not

consumer products).

Stalin• While the West was

stuck in the Great Depression, Stalin’s first two five-year plans (which went from 1928 until 1937) caused Soviet output in machinery and metals to rise 14 fold.

• The USSR had become the world’s third largest industrial power behind ? and ?

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• The Soviet Union did not experience the Great Depression and Russia’s long history of backwardness seemed to be over.

• The Soviet “experiment” seemed to be working.

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• This put a lot of pressure on Western Democracies who seemed unable to cope with the widening depression.

• More and more people thought Communism had merit after all.

• Many left the West (and their personal freedoms) for the economic security the Soviet Union seemed to provide.

• But there was a very dark side…

Stalin• Along with forced industrialization and

collectivization, Stalin maintained terroristic police powers.

• In December 1934 one of Stalin’s closest collaborators was assassinated (many believe on Stalin’s own orders).

• This showed that even within the Communist Party, there were those strongly against Stalin.

• What followed was the “Terror” as he purged the party of “Trotskyist suspects.”

Stalin• To justify oppression and savagery, the State

needed enemies.

• If they did not exist, they had to be invented, through a system of informers.

• Every apartment block, every village, every collective, every factory had its corps of official informers who, to justify their existence and often to survive themselves, needed a steady flow of denunciations.

• The victims often had no clue what "crime" they had committed.

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• Most were merely shipped to the gulag, where they slaved until hunger, disease or execution ended their sufferings.

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• So mad had Stalin's world become that some people signed confessions which amounted to their own death warrants even without torture.

• They were conditioned to believe that the Party must know best.

• If the Party said we were "enemies of the people”, then we must be.

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• Opponents and imagined opponents were executed as “criminals against the people.”

• Beginning in 1936, Stalin launched a series of “show trials” where party officials and everyday people were tortured until they confessed to all sorts of crimes against the State.

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• The internal, secret police, the MVD (from the Ministry of Internal Affairs – the precursor to the KGB) created and perpetuated an atmosphere of terror in Soviet society.

• The ruling Politburo became a rubber stamp for Stalin, agreeing to whatever he wanted (probably out of fear).

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• It is estimated that over 10 million Russians were arrested in the late 1930’s; several million were executed immediately or died in the gulags.

• In 1937-38, Stalin purged high ranking Communist leaders (known as the “Old Bolsheviks” since many were part of the November 1917 Revolution).

The “Old Bolsheviks”

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• Stalin’s portrait appeared everywhere, statues were erected, banners bearing heroic images of Stalin and Lenin were in every town square.

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Stalin• History books were re-

written and Stalin had photos doctored (so that he appeared with Lenin and that Lenin had made Stalin his chosen successor).

• “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell

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• Soviet life under Stalin was one of constant propaganda and indoctrination.

• Party members constantly lectured to workers in factories and peasants in the field.

• Newspapers, films, and radio broadcasted endless Soviet achievements and capitalist evil.

• All culture was “Sovietized.”

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• Stalin required all artists and writers/poets to create in a style called “socialist realism” which showed Soviet life in a positive light.

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• Stalin ordered the intellectual elite to become “engineers of human souls.”

• Russian nationalism was to be glorified while Western capitalism was the greatest of evils.

• Despite the Soviet Union’s low standard of living, the planned economy provided full employment (much to the envy of the West).

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• The state moved to wipe out illiteracy.• Qualified students received free tuition to state

universities.• State medical care, old-age pensions, and

accident-illness insurance was put into effect.• Women achieved almost complete economic

and social equality and they were encouraged to enter medicine, engineering, the sciences, and sports.

Stalin• Side notes: Great Britain officially recognized

Soviet Russia in 1924. Japan in 1925.• The U.S. not until 1933 (under FDR).• The USSR joined the League of Nations in

1934 (which it had earlier denounced).• Starting in 1934, as a reaction to the rise of

Nazi Germany, Stalin wanted to industrialize more quickly, especially in military hardware.

• In 1935, Russia saw the growing threat of Fascism and announced it would support the democracies (even if they were bourgeois!).

Stalin• Twice, Time Magazine

named Stalin “Man of the Year” (1939 + 1942).

• "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.“

• “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.”— Josef Stalin

• It has been estimated that nearly 50 million people died because of the “Great Genius Leader.”