Questions for StalinBIG PICTURE(Paper 2 style Qs)

• For what reasons and by what methods was Stalin able to rise to power?

• How did the ideology of Trotsky & Lenin’s revolution differ from the reality of Stalin’s Russia (1924-1953)?

Unit specific Qs(Helpful in document analysis)

• How did Stalin view the USSR?

• Was Stalin revered by the Russian people?

• Did Stalin have total control over the Russian people?

• To what extent was Stalin a Marxist?

• To what extent was Stalin a Leninist?

Everyday Stalinism – week of 21st

• Key Factors in Stalin’s SPS Totalitarian domination of the USSR– Forced Collectivization– Rapid Industrialization (5 Year Plans)– Cult of Personality– Use of Terror (Purges, Show Trials)

Soviet Communism or “Stalinism”, was

more of a totalitarian and military state

combined with elements of communism

Stalin’s 5 Year Plans

• Five-Year Plans for the National Economy of the USSR: (1928-1991)– Begun by Stalin– Rapid economic

development nationwide• Some took longer than 5

years, others failed, 13 in total

– Major focus on heavy industry

• First Plan, 1928–1933• Second Plan, 1933–1937• Third Plan, 1938–1941• Fourth and Fifth Plan, 1945–

1955• Sixth Plan, 1956–1960• Seventh Plan, 1959–1965• Eighth Plan, 1966–1970• Ninth Plan, 1971–1975• Tenth Plan, 1976–1981• Eleventh Plan, 1981–1985• Twelfth Plan, 1986–1990• Thirteenth Plan, 1991

5 year plan in 5 minutes

Stalin’s 5 Year Plans • 1928-1991– Rapid economic

development• Some took longer than 5

years, others failed, 13 in total

– Major focus on heavy industry

Shock Worker Movement: 1929+

• Udarniki

• Workers who fulfilled obligations over and above their planned quotas

• Non-economic incentives– Competitions

• End of 1929 = 29% Industrial workers participated

• "false shock work"

Portrait of [Shockworker] Nikita Izotov (1934)http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1929udarnik&Year=1929

Stakhonovites: 1936+• Aug 31, 1935• Aleksei Stakhanov

– 35 yr old miner – Hewed 102 tons of coal during

his six-hour shift • 14x his quota

– Hailed by Pravda as a world record

• Stakhanovite movement– superceded that of shock

worker– model for success

• "recordmania"

Leonid Kotliarov: Portrait of Stakhanov (1938)

Comparative Growth: Industrial Production Average Annual Growth (%)

12.3%

5.5%

1.9%

4.7% 4.4%

2.5%

U.S.S.R U.S.A. Britain Germany France0%

2%

4%

6%

8%

10%

12%

14%

Percent Growth

1928/40

1948/651869/99 1760/99

1801/41

1870/

1913

1860/

1930

Plan is law, fulfillment is duty,

over-fulfillment is honor!

The Victory of the Five Year Plan is a Strike Against Capitalism

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/about/press/sovietposters.html

"Increased production of machine tools," a section from the Second Five Year Plan, 1934.

http://www.thepolisblog.org/2010/01/urbanism-under-stalin.html

To live in a civilized way means to work with high productivity (1932)

The development of transport is one of the main tasks of the five-year plan. (1929)

Transport worker, having equipped yourself with technical knowledge, struggle for the reconstruction of transport. (1931)

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO (1891-1956)Russian photographer

Black and white photograph of a "propaganda" graveyard. The sign reads "Grave of the Lazy" and the tombstones show a last name and percentages indicating the dead prisoners failed to fulfill their work norms and died as a result.

Gulag authorities tied the fulfillment of work norms to the possibility of survival in the camps and clear there was the possibility of death in the camps if they failed to do what was expected of them.

Proposed increase in urban and rural USSR crèches (Nurseries/day care centers) for

1937

Let us have more day nurseries ! Successors are growing (1930)

http://www.communisme-bolchevisme.net/images_urss_soviet_posters.htm

• Join the pre-school movement• Build a new life

• Organize kindergartens and playgrounds• Educate a new Communist generation

USSR, 1930

'Growth in capacity of city nurseries', chart by the Izostat Institute,

from The struggle for five years in four (1932)http://isotyperevisited.org/2010/09/isotype-revisited.html

"Increased public spending on health and physical education," a section from the Second Five Year Plan, 1934.

http://www.thepolisblog.org/2010/01/urbanism-under-stalin.html

Same years but different weathers”, red bar on the thermometer is “Soviet Industry rate”, black one is “American Industry rate”, there has began an economic crisis and dislocation in the USA

Our Nobles (1935)Greetings to the best shock workers--heroes of socialist labor.

This poster was mass printed for the bulletin boards of factories, which would place the portraits of their own local shock workers in the empty spaces.

Source: Department of State, Report on War Aid Furnished by the United States to the U.S.S.R. (November 28, 1945), 26

From Nicholas Mikhailov and Nathalie Rothstein. Land of the Soviets: A Handbook of the USSR. (Moscow: 1939)

Stalin Speech to Conference of Industrial Managers February 5, 1931 as reported in Pravda and cited in Service (2004) p. 272

To slacken the tempos would be to fall behind. And the backward get beaten. We don’t want to be beaten. The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khan. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Beaten in military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness for agricultural backwardness. It was profitable to beat her.

We have fallen behind the advanced countries by 50 to 100 years. We must close that gap in ten years. Either we do this or be crushed. This is what are obligation before the workers and peasants of the USSR dictate to us

On the Five Year PlansFrom Robert Service. Stalin: A Biography (2004) p 318-319.

By 1935 steel output was double the amount for 1932. The Second Five Year Plan , like the first was recurrently altered as it was being implemented. Inevitable was an increase in the armaments budget after Hitler became German chancellor in Germany. The progress continued into 1936 and beyond. Gross industrial output in 1937, the final year of the second Five Year Plan, had increased by 3/5ths over 1932. Even agriculture had began to recover from the traumas of collectivization and output arose by about half in the same period

The First Five-Year Plan and the Geography of Soviet Defence Industry David R. Stone, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 57, No. 7 (Nov., 2005), pp. 1047-1063http://www.jstor.org/stable/30043970

SOVIET AND WESTERN SCHOLARS ALIKE have generally hailed the successes of Soviet industrialisation in building up new industrial centres in the geographically secure heart of the Soviet Union during the pre-war five-year plans. Newly available archival sources, particularly on defence industry during the first five-year plan, suggest however a more nuanced picture of the geography of Soviet industrial development. Soviet policy makers understood and feared the danger of the Soviet Union's concentration of industrial plant so close to its western border, but their efforts to deal with this were undermined by an excessively optimistic understanding of how much of their territory was under threat. At the same time, bureaucratic inertia, powerful lobbies in existing industrial centres, and the added expense of industrial investment in remote regions all combined to maintain the existing pattern of Soviet industrial production: overwhelmingly concentrated in western regions, in traditional industrial centres