stalinism in russia

8/6/2019 Stalinism in Russia

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Stalinism in RussiaProgress through Terror 4/14/2011 3:13:00 PM

I. As Lenin is dying, and even before he died, there were ideological debatesA. There were ideological divisions that emerged in the Bolshevik, aka Communist, Party

1. Lenin as a person was very confident in his beliefs and intellect, and he refused toallow Bolshevik figures to publically to disagree with the Bolshevik Party, but withinthe party he encouraged people to debate.

a. They debated thingssuch as: the direction in which Russia should go, whatthat would mean to the Communists, etc.

b. But at the end of the day, Lenin decides how things would go and everyonehad be on the same page as him and publically that was what they wouldannounce.And if you criticized what they (he) decided, youd be in trouble.

c. This is a very typical organization model (even Marlborough does itWagnerlistens to us but she decides the final policy and everyone else agrees andgoes along with it). If you created a faction against what was decided, itwould undermine the method or goal. well see that Stalin operatesdifferently

B. First of all, there was the debate over internationalism.1. Internationalists believe that it is important to spread the revolution to other

countries and those other countries will have revolutions, and the fact that those

other countries have revolutions will ensure support for the revolution in Russia andkeep it going

2. ORshould Russia concentrate on solidifying communist power at home, and notreally worry about other countries?

a. They wanted to know if it was possible to build socialism in one countryC. Second of all, they also debated what their economic prioritiesshould be: whether they

should focus more on consumer goods (because people need stuff to live) or heavy/rapidindustrialization (i.e. big factories for steal and coal that will be helpful in production ofweapons, tanks, etc.)

D. Third, they also wanted to see what kind ofsociety they could build (socialexperimentation) because many people who were sympathetic to Bolshevikssaw this as anopportunity to fundamentally remake the culture and society of Russia, not just its economy

and politicalsystem1. That meant family relations and marriage:free loveWas marriage based on this

idea of an economic contract? What should the role of women be? Should womenwork? Should they be at home? Should they have the choice of their own mates?Should marriage exist at all, or should people be free to take any lover that they want?Should people just live together in big, communal groups and then all the childrenwould be raised together and you could go from partner to partner depending on yourfancy (that was called free love)

a. There were some people that thought free love should be howsocietyoperates

2. There were many who were very big supporters ofwomens rightsone of the bigthings in Communism is equality between the sexes

a. It generally didnt play out that way in reality, but the ideology certainlysupported it

3. Also, many artists were big fans of the Bolsheviks and they believed they could usetheir art, which was often very abstract, as a way to help propagandize and further theideals of the revolution, so that through their abstract art, there were also helping toremake society into one that was not so tradition bound, so tied to the past, so tied toinequalities (gender, economic, etc.)

4. It was kind of utopian. Some people wanted that kind of life and society, and othersthought it was crazy.

^all going on before Lenin dies, and then Lenin died


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II. Stalins Rise to PowerA. There wasspeculation as to whether Lenin had been poisoned or not, but he just died.B. When Lenin unexpectedly died in 1924, there was a power vacuum with two main contenders

to succeed him as the leader of the Communist Party:Leon Trotsky(the leader of the RedArmy during the Civil War) and Joseph Stalin (who became the secretary of the CommunistParty). Each of the two men had distinct strengths and weaknesses.

1. Trotsky (the brains) was definitely Lenins favorite. He was a geniusbrilliantwriter and theoretician and a great practical organizer from the army, and he was anardent internationalist, which is how he made his name as a theoretician

a. Most people thought that Trotsky was Lenins heir, but there was a Georgiannamed Joseph Stalin who disagreed

2. Stalin (the organizer ) was from Georgia, so he was not Russian, and he hadoriginally trained to be a priest in his early life and attended seminary, but he realizedearly on that he wouldnt become a good priest and wanted to be communist, which isatheist, and he goes up through the ranks. He was opposite from Trotsky and wantedSocialism in One Country

C. But by 1928, Stalin emerged as the undisputed leader of the Communist Party.1. One of the ways that Stalin got power was that he quickly realized that no one wanted

to be General Secretary of the Party. It was not prestigious or appealing, but he

recognized that it had the possibility to accrue power because, what Stalin would do isthat is help people get jobs they want, and then people would who him a favor

a. Duties of the job: collect dues, keep roll, figure out who was working at whatjob and move people around

b. Hes getting power by having people owe him stuff, and he cashes in on thosefavors when he decides to challenge Trotsky for rulership of the party (hedidnt have a lot of wealth, but he had people who owed him favors)

i. Sometimes the favors he did for people were sketchy and involvedblack mail, and then he would say that if they didnt repay the favor,he would expose them (he was very good at understanding thehuman psychemaybe because he wasso craycray)

D. Stalin had a major inferiority complex and thought he was a lot lesssmart and strongcompared to Trotsky, and he wasnt in that classical way. He was a schemer, but he was not

an intellect, and he felt that in the Bolshevik Party, you had to be really booksmart.1. He was also really paranoid thought people didnt like him and that everyone was out

to get him, so when he was finally able to challenge Trotsky for leadership of theparty, he actually chased Trotsky out of the country and forced him into exile underthreat of death

2. And then, Stalin couldnt leave it alone because he wasstill paranoid enough thatTrotsky, in exile, was writing nasty things about him and he mightone day rise up as athreat of his power, so he had the secret police (Lenin recreated the secret police)hunt Trotsky down, who was first in New York where he wrote a bunch of stuff, andthen went to Mexico, where he became really good friends with people like DiegoRivera and Frieda Colluck

a. So Stalinssecret police was dispatched to Mexico and they murdered him bystabbing him through the eye with an ice pickimportant to remember that Stalin came to power with a major inferiority complex as were looking at

Stalin policiesIII.StalinsFive-Year plans

A. Once Stalin has kicked Trotsky out of the country (took him a couple years), he decided thatthe way to continue Russias economic development was to organize Russias economicplanning into a series of five-year plans

B. The ultimate overall goal was to very rapidly transform Russia from an agricultural/agrariancountry to a leading industrial power


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1. Stalin believed that Russia wasso far behind other countries, who were very hostile toRussia because they were Communist, it was absolutely necessary to turn Russia intoan industrialized economy.

2. This wasideologically consistent with communism because the idea was that if youfollowed Marxs path of empirical development,the best way to create a trulycommunist society is if you go from capitalism, which required a highly industrialized

society, and then from the highly industrialized capitalist society you can move to asocialist society, which isstill kind of industrialized, and then communist

a. But he thought it was possible to, instead of wait for an organic revolution,make one happen by eliminating private property. He didnt want to wait forthe conflict between workers and factory owners, but rather get rid of privateproperty altogether and jumpstart the creation of a socialist state becauseCommunists dont believe in private property.

b. This would also have the benefit of ensuring that the country would produceenough of the materials that were necessary incase it came under attack, so ifit needed to it could meet military threats

C. The secondary goal was to solidify the Communist partys hold on power within Russia, andwithin the Communist Party itself to solidify Stalins own power (he was a megalomaniac)

D. Stalin argued that it was imperative for the state to take complete control over all aspects ofthe economy and set veryspecific five-year targets for growth in all sectors of economy. Inorder to do that, they created a state-planning agencyit was an actual department ofstate

1. This was calledGosplan, which is the central state planning agency (Gos meansstate), and you can even visit the old Gosplan building today in Moscow

2. Gosplans job was to literally determine where everysingle item was going to comefrom (down to each pencil or paperclip produced), determine exactly where the rawmaterials for the production of a single item from a single, particularly factory wasgoing to come from in what quantity, what workersspecifically were going to work onthat item, in what way, where those items were going to be shipped out to and whenand how and where they would be sold, etc. it was literally to direct production andsale of everything in the economy.

3. Unfortunately, in practice, the Gosplan wasnt very effective because there wereperverse incentives build into the way the Gosplan functioned.

a. Managers are told that they have to make a certain number of an item. But ifmanagers didnt reach that quota, there would be punitive punishments (i.e.getting shot, sent to Siberia, etc.). So they wanted to work as efficiently aspossible. They were veryspecific in what they made: they made one type, andthat was all.

i. If it wasshoes, it would be the left shoe, in one style, one color, in onesize

4. And since Gosplan decided what people were wanted, many consumer goods weresimply never available in the Soviet Union (i.e. toilet paper because the governmentdidnt think was important, tampons, etc.)

a. One of the nicest gifts you could give in the Soviet Union was not flowers orwine, but imported tampons because most people who worked in Gosplan

were men and didnt care about tampons

or other feminine itemsIV. First Five-Year Plan (1929)

A. This was the most infamous of the five-year plans, although the five-year planning processcontinued long after Stalins death and became the model of the Soviet economy. There was acertain degree of economic prosperity, and this method of central state planning was verytypical ofsocialist/communist regimes (i.e. Cuba)

B. Goal: to develop a heavy industrial sector and not produce consumer goodsC. [long version] This first five-year plan, which was the most ambitious and most controversial

of Stalins five-year plans, had a goal to develop a heavy industrial sector to industrializeRussia as quick as possible. It had an ideological component to it, in that Stalin and the


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Communist Party believed it was only possible, according Marxist philosophy, to achieve afully Socialist and then Communist country is one that is fully industrialized and not agrarian,because you have to go threwstages of history. The second element to this was the practicalissue: he wanted to make sure the country would be able to fight off potential invaders orthreats, which was very much present in their mind, in part because in during the civil warthere had actually been a lot of outside invaders, and because there were countries that were

pretty hostile to Soviet UnionMethod:

D. In order to do this, you invest heavily in industry and factories to make things that arentreally designed to be consumer goods (i.e. steel), and you need to have enough people to workin those factories, so many peasants were forced off their land and sent to work in factorieswhether they wanted to or not

1. Many of these peasants were very poorly trained and didnt really know what theywere doing, so this was a problem and led to a lot of low quality output

2. The government also built enormous concrete housing blocks that peasants wouldlive in. They were called communal apartments, which were cramped and liketenements. Families, if they were lucky, would have one room, but sometimes itwould be just a curtain to separate two families. There were communal bathroomsand a communal kitchen. It was a very quintessential Soviet experience and you

shared, etc., but people didnt like itE. In order to make sure that there was enough food to feed all the peasants now in factories,

Stalin collectivized agriculture, which was meant to increase efficiency through massproduction and mechanized agriculture.

1. Collectivization ofagriculture means that you end those private plots of landthat peasants were farming and you take all the land and put it in one giant farm andeveryone works that land communally. This model was designed to take advantage ofthe advances in agricultural technologythe mechanization of agriculture (itwouldnt have made sense of an individual farmer to have big ol machinery)

2. This move of peasants from small to enormous plots of land was kind of a way ofindustrializing agriculture, which was ideologically consistent with what they weredoing more generally.

3. Moreover, Stalin believed, as did Lenin, that the peasants were not necessarily thenatural political allies of Communists (they had voted for the SRs, or therevolutionaries/party of thee peasants, in the election!they werent necessarily bigfans of Communism)

a. Lenin and Stalin were both worried that they would put up resistance, whichis one of the reasons Lenin put in re-introduced some limited privateenterprise and gave them their own private land to farm; but Stalin did awaywith all that.

4. Instead, Stalin moved peasants into big, collective farms because he wanted to breakthe will and potential for rebelling on the part of the peasants and bring them up well.

a. He tried to bring the peasantry into line ideologically; to get them in thatcommunal, communist mindset

5. Basically, the peasants could be said to have paid for industrialization because theywere forced to work in big farm

sin pretty brutal condition

sand the food that theymade wassimply taken and given to the factory workers and the army to feed them.

So they werent making more profit or anything, they were just working because theywere forced to

a. [short] The peasantry were paid for industrialization, forced to work onlarge collective farms and the output taken by the state to feed the army andworkers

F. In second piece of this is that some areas, in particular Ukraine, which had become part of theSoviet Union and joined back with Russia, the peasants were particularly hostile to theCommunist Party, so Stalin decided to break the Ukrainian peasants will.


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1. He basically created a forced famine in Ukraine. He took all the food, seeds, and all ofthe things the peasants would need to make own food and he made it so that theycouldnt get access to any more. As a result, millions of people died in the early 1930s.

2. He did this because he hated them and he was worried that they would rebel and hewas determined to crush them.

V. Effects of the 1stFive-Year PlanA. The results of it were mixed1. On the one hand, the industrialization part was enormouslysuccessful. The goals for

output that had been set were met in four years instead of fivea. Ironically, one of the ways in which they did this was to encourage workers to

compete against each other and they would get prizes, so if you producedmore than your neighbor, you might get a better apartment or more food(thissort of competition was capitalist, though, so it seems to go against thecommunist ethos)

b. There were certain workers who were renown and made heroes of the SovietUnion for really exceeding a normal human beings outputs, calledStakhanovitesthey were the people who were really productive and theywere held up assuperior beings everyone should try to be like

c. By 1939, after the end of the second five-year plan, Russia ranked third afterUS and Germany in total industrial output

i. This is important because this is the beginning of WWII, so theSoviet Union is able to compete this time! (It does other things thatmake it not so able to compete, but at least in terms of industrialoutput, its ready) That means they can build guns and tanks andairplanes and canons

2. However, the living standards for most people plummeted. There was no attentionpaid to consumer goods.

a. People were living in nasty communal apartments.b. The peasantssuffered the most.

3. There was a particular group of peasants that Stalin particular disliked: the kulaksa. The kulaks were not liked by Stalin. He saw them has bourgeoisie capitalist,

and he knew that they were the most hostile to communist. The kulaks were

liquidated as a classthat meant that they were literally just put in a lineand shot

b. That meant that the peasants that were left were the poor ones that werententrepreneurial, etc. and they werent very equipped to succeedoverallagricultural production plummeted again

c. Stalin belatedly realized that getting rid of the kulaks was not a good idea, sohe called a called to collectivization in 1931 for a little while. He called theprogram dizzy with success, but it was really that there were so littlesuccess they couldnt keep doing it

B. However, when looked at from the standpoint of western Europe and the US, particularlybecause Stalin wasso good at propaganda and manipulating peoples image of what wasgoing on in Soviet Union, the Communist regime there looked pretty good

1.

Everyone was

guaranteed a job, you had less

of a gap between rich and poor, itseemed to be a government that ruled for the benefit of the workers2. Stalin invited delegations of people from America and Europe and they would have a

very planned tour and see these very happy peasants who were a sort of plump andpraised everything about Stalin, and then these guys would go back to their respectivecountries (America, Britain, France, etc.) and they would comment on how great theSoviet Union is doing

3. This is also the time when the American Communist Party is at its height.A lotpeople in America were sympathetic to communism because things looked so bleak inthe west because of the Great Depression, and this looked like the way out. The bad


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things eventually leaked out, but for a time the Soviet Union seemed like analternative to all the chaos and such, so this is a big reason why a lot of people wereattracted to Communism at this time: Stalin seemed to present an alternative to thedevastation and economic/political chaos that was going on in western Europe andthe U.S.

VI. The PurgesA. by1934, the end of the Five Year Plan, there were grumblings within the Communist Partyabout Stalin and the direction in which he took the Soviet Union

1. There were new leaders that would come up, despite Stalins pretty iron-clad controlof the partysince he was the General Secretary, saying theyshould do thingsdifferently

a. The most vocal of these critics was Bukharin, who said that collectivizationhurt the peasants, the economic output is bad, and the declining livingsituation is demoralizing the population, so maybe the Soviet Union needs totake a less harsh route. Well get to the same place, but in a different way.

B. Stalin was enormously threatened by Bukharin, and to that he was threatened by anyone whothreatened his power, but to understand that need to know things about his personality:

1. Stalin was extremely paranoid. He was a megalomaniac, but at the same timeincredibly insecure

2. He interpreted any questioning of his actions or his thoughts or anything were seenby him as a condemnation of them, and he then thought that you were his enemy andhad to be gotten rid of.

3. Because he wassuch an insecure megalomaniac, he wanted to take credit foreverything good that ever happened in the entirety of world history and claimedcredit for every invention in the Soviet Unionhe claimed to have invented electricity

4. He wanted to be seen as the big brother or caretaker for all childreneveryone had tovenerate and worship Stalin

a. All of the holidays were around glorifying Stalin (there was even oneespecially for releasing balloons with Stalins face on it all over the Russiancountryside and everyone got the day off to watch the balloons)

5. Stalin was incredibly ruthless and was willing to get rid of anyone that was a threat tohisauthority, so between 1935-1938, he purged or got rid of anyone who might be

perceived as a threat to his authority. And those threats, as time went on, becameever more tenuous.

a. At first, he went after people or groups that he thought might have leaders orlead something to challenge him, but then he managed to get rid of all sortsof other people. Any person who might have some degree of expertise as anintellectual or as a manager, because many of the policies were simplyridiculous and those people were in a position to understand that he wasbeing ridiculous

C. Between 1935 and 1938, Stalin purged Bukharin, and he said anyone with any bit ofexpertise was a threatthose people were in a position to understand that he was beingridiculous and that his policies were basically counter-productive

1. He did things like liquidated the entire senior army officer core2.

He al

so got rid of

scienti

sts

who were working onscientific idea

sthat didnt

seem torun with ideas he was trying to promote

3. He got rid of engineers and factory managers, and anyone who didnt meet thefactory quota was killed

4. And often, the charges against these people were just dumb. The technique: Therewas a knock late at night and the secret police would take you down to the secretpolice dungeon and would torture you until you confessed to a slew of crimes that youdidnt commit (i.e. that you were an enemy of the Soviet state, that you had beenplotting to kill Stalin, to destroy all the machinery, that you were an enemyspy of the


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west, etc.). Theysaid if you didnt confess to these crimes, they would terrorize yourfamily

a. Theysaid they would rape and kill wives and daughters, etc., and most peoplecould deal with the psychological stressso they caved and were put on trials

b. In these fake trials, they had stand up in court to confess to ridiculous crimesand then they were taken out back and shot, or sent to hard-labor exile in

Siberia.5. the problem with doing all this(getting rid of best military and scientific minds)

means your country is going to fall aparta. the country is bereft and loses its innovation, its technology, its ability to

compete militarily; there is a repression of new ideas because if you put newideas out there you can be persecuted for it, so there is a climate ofideological conformity and no one is willing to venture anything new

b. People were encouraged to inform on their neighbors as being spies, so noone knew who to trust.

c. Moreover, Russia was basicallyshooting himself in the foot when gettingready for WWII because it got rid of the best scientific minds to innovate intechnology, and the military leaders who would be in a position to draw upthe battle plans to help Russia

d. this was an enormously counter-productive policy, but it was possible onlybecause of Stalins outside personality and crazy paranoia

D. However, some historians, while continuing to recognize how grim the purges were,acknowledged that purges also created new outlets for social mobility for other people inRussian society. These were people who were peasants or factory workers who wanted to jointhe Communist Partyand hadnt been able to because the ranks of the Communist Party werelimited in number.

1. Now these guys could move into jobs as factory managers or military officersthingsthat they were precluded from before.

2. So there was a social mobility for the lower classes created by the purges3. This was obviously a controversial theory, though, because saying theres anything

positive from Stalins purges was radicalVII.Stalinist Societywhat was it like to live under Stalin?

A. Political scientists Hannah Arendt popularized totalitarianism to describe Soviet society(also used this term to describe life under Hitler)

1. In a totalitarian society, the implication is that the control of the state over theindividual is total; everyone is forced to, at least officially, believe the same thing andthere is a complete ideological conformity

a. Science and scholarship (writing, learnig, research) are all dictated by theoverrunning ideology, so if there is a certain scientific idea that doesnt seemto fit in with Marxist ideology, you cancel it.

b. Its not about the scientific method and the integrity of ideas, its all aboutmaking the ideas conform to some overarching ideology, which often createdsome bizarre scientific theories.

c. In order to be able to go to school or get a job, you had to always publicallysay that you were

supported by the government and you had to take long andrigorous tests on Marxist philosophy and there wasstrict media

censorship2. Ironically, in many totalitarian societies, there is a veneer, on top, of representative

democracy.All of these places (Hitlers Germany, Stalins Russia) had bodies thatwere like parliaments, but those bodies had no real independent decision makingaccord. Instead, they were a rubber stamp organizations, agreeing to whateverStalin told them.

3. Stalin, like Hitler, created a Cult ofPersonalityeverything was about celebratingStalin as a person


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a. The idea of the day of Stalins balloons also went to all aspects of Sovietsociety: everything was about the glorification of Stalin as a person, and it didcreate this hysteria of enormous love and affection for Stalin

b. When Stalin died in 1953, the lines to see his body went on for weeks becausepeople had the sense that he was like superman or God

B. One of the ways that this cult was propagated was through art. In the early part of the Sovietearly in the 1920s, there was a lot of avant-garde experimentation in art. There had been amove to abstraction in art, but Stalin didnt like that and he wanted to return to moretraditional values

1. He supported a style of art called Socialist Realism, and the idea of it was to glorifythe party and glorify the state; it was designed to generate support

2. Also, all social experimentation endedStalin believed that he could use the familyand education as a way to encourage political loyalty and stability.

a. He thought that the idea of free love and women and children being raisedcommunally was bad; he wanted it to go back to a traditional nuclearfamilyto encourage loyalty and respect for authority

b. respect for the father was like a micro-chasm of respect to Stalin, who waslike the big father.

3. His goal was to create loyal, hard-working, obedient citizens4. Education was also used in this way.

a. Mass literacy was encouragedi. Remember, in the 19th century, there had been a push to try to get

peasants to have basic literacy, and the purpose of that was to try tocreate loyal citizenspeople who were patriotic and wanted to workhard (not too different from what Stalin wanted)

b. Stalin took that further and tried to make sure that everyone could read, butthey were reading propaganda

5. Eventually, belatedly, after WWII, Stalin realized that it was necessary to give peoplea break from this relentless heavy industrialization and you need to give people abreak and that he needed to create more consumer goods, so later five-year plansincluded that. But overall this was an incredibly traumatic and relentless era to livethrough


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