Chapter 2

The USSR under Joseph Stalin,

1924–53
Joseph Stalin emerged victorious from the power struggle that followed the death in
1924 of Lenin, the creator of the USSR. Having taken control by the late 1920s, Stalin,
over the next quarter century, used the most ruthless means to impose himself on all
aspects of Soviet life. He revolutionized the economy by enforced policies of
collectivization and industrialization, and destroyed political opposition with a series of
ferocious purges. Such was the extent of his authority that, by the time of his death in
1953, Soviet communism had become Stalinism. This chapter examines the following
key questions:
✪ What circumstances favoured the rise of Stalin?
✪ How did Stalin impose his authority on the Soviet Union?
✪ What impact did Stalinism have on the lives of the Soviet people?
✪ How far did Stalin achieve a totalitarian state?

1 Stalin’s rise to power, 1924–29

Key question: What circumstances favoured the rise of Stalin?

Why had The one-party state in the USSR

revolutionary Russia
Having taken power in the October Revolution in 1917, Lenin had led his
become a one-party
state by 1924? Bolshevik Party in laying the foundations of the world’s first Marxist state.
The Bolsheviks claimed that their triumph gave them an absolute right to
govern Russia. There was a powerful ideology underlying this assumption.
As Marxists, the Bolsheviks believed that they truly represented the will of
October Revolution The the Russian proletariat who now ruled, in accordance with the scientific laws
seizure by the Bolsheviks of of the dialectic.
power in October 1917
from the interim Provisional Bolshevik consolidation of power
Government that had led By the time of Lenin’s death in 1924, the Bolsheviks had overcome all the
Russia since the abdication of major challenges to their authority and had transformed Russia into the
the monarchy in February USSR. This involved their fighting and winning a desperate civil war,
1917.
successfully resisting a series of foreign interventions, and surviving a series
Bolshevik Party The of severe economic crises.
Russian Communist Party
which had taken power in The consolidation of Bolshevik power was a remarkable achievement, but it
1917. was gained only by using the most violent means. Lenin had allowed no

18
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

opposition to his government. Political enemies had been crushed and critics
within the party had been suppressed. Lenin’s years in power left the Soviet
Union with a tradition of authoritarian rule and terror. There were also Marxist Relating to the ideas
serious economic problems that had still to be solved if the USSR was to of Karl Marx, a German
survive as a nation. revolutionary, who had
advanced the notion that
Governmental structures human society developed
By 1924 the governmental structure of the Soviet Union had developed two historically as a continuous
series of class struggles
main features: the Council of Peoples’ Commissars, and the Secretariat. Both
between those who
these bodies and the various committees they established were staffed and possessed economic and
controlled by the Bolshevik (Communist) Party under Lenin. It has to be political power and those who
stressed that the vital characteristic of this governmental system was that the did not. He taught that the
Party ruled. This, in effect, meant Lenin ruled, since his moral authority and culmination of this dialectical
standing in the Party were so strong that he was unchallengeable. In process would be the crushing
practical terms, the key organization was the Politburo. By 1922, the Soviet victory of the proletariat over
Union was a one-party, Leninist state. Membership of that one party was the bourgeoisie.
essential for all who held government posts at whatever level. The dialectic The dynamic
force that drives history along
Democratic centralism a predestined path.
A central feature of Lenin’s control of the Communist Party was the principle of
Politburo An inner core of
‘democratic centralism’. This was the notion, as developed by Lenin, that true some twenty leading members
democracy in the Bolshevik Party lay in the obedience of the members to the of the Communist Party.
authority and instructions of the leaders. The justification for this was that while,
Democratic centralism
as representatives of the workers, all Bolsheviks were genuine revolutionaries,
The notion, first advanced by
only the leaders were sufficiently educated in the science of revolution to Lenin, that true democracy
understand what needed to be done. In practice, democratic centralism meant lies in party members’
the Bolsheviks doing what Lenin told them to do. It was the principle which obedience to enlightened
Stalin was to inherit and exploit in his own leadership of the Soviet Union. leadership.
Absolutism A
Authoritarian rule
governmental system in
Lenin created an authoritarian system which returned Russia to the which the levers of power
absolutism that it had known under the tsars. The basic apparatus of are exclusively in the hands
oppression for which Stalin later became notorious for using was in place at of a group or an individual.
Lenin’s death. The main features of Lenin’s authoritarian rule between 1917
Tsars The traditional
and 1924 were: absolute rulers of imperial
● The one-party state – all parties other than the Communist Party of the Russia.
Soviet Union (CPSU) were outlawed. CPSU Communist Party of
● The bureaucratic state – central power increased under Lenin and the the Soviet Union.
number of government departments and officials grew. Cheka The All-Russian
● The police state – the Cheka was the first of a series of secret police Extraordinary Commission
organizations in the Soviet Union whose task was to impose government for Combating Counter-
control over the people. Revolution, later known by
such acronyms as OGPU
and KGB.

19
 Source A

Map of the Republics of the USSR.

a
Se Estonia
ltic
Ba
Latvia
Lithuania
Byelorussia
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) N
Ukraine
Moldova
Bla
ck
Se
a
Georgia
Kazakhstan
n Sea

Armenia
Caspia

Azerbaijan Uzbekistan
Turkmenistan
Kyrgyzstan 0 1500 km
Tajikistan 750 mls

Study Source A. What

geographical evidence is ● The ban on factionalism – Lenin prohibited criticism of the leadership
there for judging Russia within the party, which was, in effect, a ban on free speech.
to have been the dominant ● The destruction of the trade unions – Leon Trotsky, Commissar for War
Republic in the USSR? under Lenin, destroyed the independence of the trade unions.
● The politicizing of the law – under Lenin the law was not a means of
protecting society but an extension of political control.
● The system of purges and show trials – outstanding examples of these
Factionalism Open were the public trials in 1922 of the Moscow clergy and of the SRs.
criticism within the CPSU of ● Concentration camps – at the time of Lenin’s death there were over 300
central orders. such camps. They held rebel peasants and ‘anti-Bolsheviks’.
Purges A system of terror ● Prohibition of public worship – the Orthodox Christian churches were
used by Lenin and Stalin in the looted and then closed; atheism was adopted as a replacement for
USSR and Mao in China for religious belief.
removing anyone regarded as ● Nationalization – Lenin’s government took over private companies and
a threat to their authority. banks.
Show trials Special public ● Imposed economic policies – faced with famine, Lenin had tried a series
court hearings, meant as of experiments ranging from fierce repression of the peasants under ‘War
propaganda exercises, in Communism’ (see page 24) to the more lenient approach of NEP. Lenin
which the accused were claimed that NEP was a temporary measure but it was still in operation at
paraded as enemies of the
his death.
people.
● Cultural revolution – the Bolsheviks claimed that in revolutionary Russia
SRs Socialist Revolutionaries, the people were now ready to be moulded into a new species: ‘Man can be
the largest of the made whatever we want him to be’. Culture was to be shaped by the
revolutionary parties in Russia
power of the state.
until outlawed by the
Bolsheviks after 1917.
● International isolation – Lenin had originally expected the Russian
revolution to be the prelude to a worldwide proletarian uprising. That was

20
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

the reason for creating the Comintern. When no such international rising
occurred, he had to adjust to a situation in which the Soviet Union
became an isolated Marxist, revolutionary state, beset by external enemies.

Stalin’s emergence as leading contender for What positions of

power influence did Stalin
hold by 1924?
In the uncertain political atmosphere that followed Lenin’s death in January
1924, a number of fortunate developments helped Stalin promote his claims.

Stalin’s positions
A critical factor was that Lenin had left no clear instructions as to what form NEP The New Economic
Policy, which permitted the
of government should be adopted after him. This meant that the power was
peasants to return to farming
there for the taking; it was in this regard that Stalin found himself for private profit.
particularly well placed. That he had worked closely with Lenin and had
held important administrative positions in the Party put him in a position of Comintern The Communist
International, formed in 1919
prominence that no rival could match. Here, the pragmatic way in which
in Moscow to organize
the Bolsheviks had first governed proved very important. Certain posts, worldwide revolution. The
which initially had not been considered especially significant, began to Comintern took a particular
provide their holders with a controlling influence. Stalin’s previous interest in China, believing
appointments to key posts in both government and Party now proved that it could impose itself on
crucial. These had been: the young CCP.

● People’s Commissar for Nationalities (1917): Stalin was in charge of Orgburo The Soviet
Organizational Bureau of the
the officials in the many regions and republics that made up the USSR.
Secretariat responsible for
Lenin judged that Stalin, as a Georgian, had a special understanding of turning the government’s
the national minorities. executive decisions and
● Liaison Officer between the Politburo and Orgburo (1919): Stalin was policies into practice.
in a unique position to monitor both the Party’s policy and the Party’s
Patronage Providing
personnel. government approval and
● Head of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (1919): Stalin oversaw support and extending
the work of all government departments. privileges to selected
● General Secretary of the Communist Party (1922): Stalin recorded and individuals and groups.
conveyed Party policy. This enabled him to build up dossiers on all the
members of the Party. Nothing of note happened that Stalin did not know
about.
Stalin became the indispensable link in the chain of command in the
Communist Party and the Soviet government. Above all, what these posts
gave him was the power of patronage. He used this authority to place his
own supporters in key positions. Since they then owed their place to him,
Stalin could count on their support in the voting in the various committees
which made up the organization of the Party and the government.
Such were the advantages held by Stalin during the Party in-fighting over the
succession to Lenin that no other contender came near to matching him in his
hold on the Party machine. Whatever the ability of the individuals or groups
who opposed him, he could always out-vote and out-manoeuvre them.

21
 Source B

The governmental structure in 1924.

How does Source B indicate
the influence Stalin had General Secretary (Stalin)
gained in the USSR by 1924? The Council of Peoples’
Comissars
A cabinet of ministers,
responsible for creating
government policies

The Secretariat
A form of civil service,
responsible for carrying out
those policies

Politburo
The inner
cabinet of the
Council of Council
Commissars, of
presided over by Lenin, Commissars
then Stalin, which took the
key decisions and to which
only selected leaders belonged

Central Committee
All Russian
Congress of Soviets
Party Congress CPSU

The Party The Government

The Lenin enrolment

Stalin had also gained considerably from recent changes in the structure of
the Communist Party. Between 1923 and 1925, the Party had set out to
increase the number of workers in its ranks. This was known as ‘the Lenin
enrolment’. It resulted in the membership of the CPSU rising from 340,000
in 1922 to 600,000 by 1925.
The new members were fully aware that the many privileges which came
with Party membership depended on their being loyal to those who had first
invited them into the Bolshevik ranks. In every case it was members of the
Secretariat, working directly under Stalin as General Secretary, who had
issued the invitations. The result was the expansion of the Party, which added
to Stalin’s growing power of patronage. It provided him with a reliable body
of votes in the various Party committees at local and central level.

How did Stalin exploit Stalin’s bid for power

the situation following
Lenin’s death?
Lenin’s funeral
Immediately after Lenin’s death, the Politburo publicly proclaimed their
intention to continue as a collective leadership, but behind the scenes the
competition for individual authority had already begun. In the manoeuvring,
Stalin gained an advantage by being the one to deliver the oration at Lenin’s
funeral. The sight of Stalin as leading mourner suggested a continuity

22
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

between him and Lenin, an impression heightened by the contents of his

speech in which, in the name of the Party, he dedicated himself to following
in the tradition of the departed leader (see Source C).
Source C

Excerpt from Stalin’s speech reported in Pravda, January 1924, quoted in

According to Stalin in
Stalin: A Biography by Robert Service, published by Macmillan, UK, 2004, Source C, what
p. 220. obligations had Lenin left
In leaving us, Comrade Lenin commanded us to keep the unity of our Party. We the Soviet Union?
swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, to honour thy command. In leaving us, Comrade
Lenin ordered us to maintain and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat.
We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, to exert our full strength in honouring thy
command. In leaving us, Comrade Lenin ordered us to strengthen with all our
might the union of workers and peasants. We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, to
honour thy command.

Since Stalin’s speech was the first crucial move to promote himself as Lenin’s
successor, it was to be expected that Leon Trotsky, his chief rival, would try to
counter it in some way. Trotsky was a prominent figure in the Party. He had
played a key role in the 1917 October Revolution and had been the brilliant
organizer of the Red Army, which had won the civil war against the Red Army The Bolshevik
Whites. Yet Trotsky was not even present at the funeral. His excuse was that defence forces; the title was
Stalin had given him the wrong date. Whatever the truth of this, Trotsky’s also adopted by the Chinese
behaviour hardly appeared to be that of a dedicated Leninist. Communist forces.
The Whites Tsarists and
Suppression of Lenin’s Testament anti-Bolsheviks.
Although Stalin had been totally loyal to Lenin, there had been times when
he had offended his leader. One such occasion occurred in 1922 when Lenin
learned from his wife, Krupskaya, that Stalin had verbally abused her during
a telephone conversation. In an angry response, Lenin added a severe
criticism of Stalin to a document he had been dictating. Later known as
Lenin’s Testament, this was a set of observations on the strengths and
weaknesses of the Party’s leading members. Lenin had been especially
critical of Stalin’s hunger for ‘boundless power’ and urged the comrades to
consider ways of removing him as Secretary, but this was not done. Lenin
was too ill during the last year of his life to be politically active. At his death
in January 1924, he had still not taken any formal steps to remove Stalin, and
the ‘Testament’ had not been made public.
If it were now to be published, Stalin would be gravely damaged by its
contents. However, here again fortune favoured him. Since the Testament
contained Lenin’s criticism not simply of Stalin, but of all the members of the
Politburo, they all had reason for suppressing it, which they formally did in
May 1924. Since Trotsky had been criticized in the Testament for his
‘excessive self-confidence’, he went along with the decision, but in doing so
he lost an opportunity to challenge Stalin. In fact it was Trotsky, not Stalin,
whom the Politburo regarded as the greater danger.

23
 What were Trotsky’s Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin
major disadvantages?
Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who had been leading players in the
1917 Revolution, joined Stalin in an unofficial triumvirate within the
Politburo. Their aim was to isolate Trotsky by exploiting his unpopularity with
large sections of the Party.
Triumvirate A ruling or
influential bloc of three Trotsky’s handicaps
persons. ● Trotsky was a Jew and very conscious of the fact that this constituted a
political handicap. Anti-Semitism was an ingrained feature of Russian
society and continued under communist rule. In 1917 he had declined
Lenin’s offer to be a commissar on the grounds that his appointment would
be an embarrassment to Lenin and the government; he said it would ‘give
enemies grounds for claiming that the country was ruled by a Jew’.
● His intellectualism, coupled with an aloof style and manner, gave him the
appearance of an outsider who was not fully committed to the CPSU. This
deprived him of a significant following in the Party.
● CPSU members tended to regard Trotsky as dangerously ambitious and
his rival Stalin as reliably self-effacing. This was because Trotsky was
flamboyant and brilliant, while his rival was unspectacular and
methodical.
● Trotsky had not become a Bolshevik until 1917, which raised doubts about
how committed he was to the Party.

The New Economic Policy (NEP)

Trotsky’s reputation was further damaged by the issue of the New Economic
Policy. Soon after taking power Lenin had implemented a policy known as
‘War Communism’. This was a series of harshly restrictive economic measures
intended to help the Bolsheviks win the civil war of 1918–20. These measures:
● brought agriculture and industry under central control
● used government requisition squads to seize grain stocks from the peasants
● prohibited farming for profit.
However, War Communism did not produce the expected results. The
interference with the peasants’ traditional ways caused disruption and
resentment. Hunger did not lessen; it intensified. Despite the government’s
terror tactics there were many instances of serious resistance. Always flexible
in his approach, Lenin decided on a U-turn. He judged that, if the peasants
could not be forced, they must be persuaded. At a Party Congress in 1921 he
told members that it made no sense for Bolsheviks to pretend that they
could pursue an economic policy which took no account of the real situation.
He then announced that War Communism was to be replaced with a New
Economic Policy, the main features of which were:
● central economic control to be relaxed
● grain requisitioning to be abandoned
● the peasants to be allowed to keep their food surpluses and sell them for
a profit.

24
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

NEP clearly marked a retreat from the principle of state control of the economy.
It restored a mixed economy in which certain features of capitalism existed
alongside socialism. It was this that troubled the members of the Party, including
Trotsky, who had welcomed the repressive measures of War Communism. To
their mind, squeezing the peasants was exactly what the Bolsheviks should be
doing since it advanced the revolution. It disturbed them that the peasants were
being cosseted and that capitalist ways were being tolerated.

Leftists and rightists

When introducing NEP in 1921, Lenin had admitted that it was a relaxing of
strict socialism, but had emphasized that it was a temporary measure.
However, at the time of his death in 1924 the question was already being
asked as to how long in fact NEP was meant to last. The Party members who
were unhappy with it saw its continuation as a betrayal of revolutionary
principles. A serious division had developed in the Party between leftists and Leftists Bolshevik Party
rightists. Initially the disagreement was simply about timing: how long was members who wanted NEP
the NEP to continue? However, in the power struggle of the 1920s these abandoned.
minor differences deepened into questions of political correctness and Party Rightists Bolshevik Party
loyalty. A rival’s attitude towards the NEP might be a weakness to be exploited. and CCP members who
argued for a slower, less
Stalin did precisely this. He used Trotsky’s attitude towards NEP as a way of violent development of
undermining him. Trotsky, in 1923, had openly declared that to continue with revolution and for the
NEP was to put the interests of the Nepmen above those of the Revolution continuation of the NEP.
and to undermine the gains made from War Communism. Stalin was quick Nepmen A derisive term for
to suggest to Party members that Trotsky was an unacceptably disruptive the profiteers who had
force. The interesting point here is that Stalin’s own view of NEP was far supposedly exploited the
from clear at this stage. He had loyally supported Lenin’s introduction of it in commercial freedoms
1921, but had given little indication as to whether, or how long, it should be allowed under NEP in order
retained after Lenin’s death. He preferred to keep his own views to himself to enrich themselves.
and play on the differences among party members. Industrialization The
process of creating a
The Left–Right division over modernization factory-based manufacturing
The ideological argument over NEP merged with another demanding economy.
question. How should the Soviet Union plan for the future? The USSR was a
Capitalist methods of
poor country. To modernize and overcome its poverty it would have to finance The system in which
industrialize. The quarrel in the Party was not whether the USSR should the owners of private capital
industrialize, but over how and at what speed. (money) increase their wealth
by making loans on which
The country was rich in natural resources, but these had yet to be effectively
they later receive interest.
exploited, and it certainly did not possess large amounts of capital. Nor could
it easily borrow any since the Bolsheviks after taking power had rejected
capitalist methods of finance and caused international outrage by refusing
to honour any of the debts incurred by the Tsarist state. Few countries after
1917 were willing to risk investing in revolutionary Russia.
The only usable resource, therefore, was the Soviet people themselves, 80 per
cent of whom were peasants. To achieve industrialization, it was necessary
that the peasants produce a food surplus which could then be sold abroad to

25
 raise capital for industrial investment. Both Left and Right agreed that this
was the only solution, but, whereas the Right were content to rely on
persuading the peasants to co-operate, the Left demanded that the
peasantry be forced to conform.
It was Trotsky who most clearly represented the view of the Left on this. He
wanted the peasants to be coerced. However, for him the industrialization
debate was secondary to the far more demanding question of the Soviet
Union’s role as the organizer of international revolution. His views on this
created a wide divergence between him and Stalin, expressed in terms of a
clash between the opposed notions of ‘Permanent Revolution’ and ‘Socialism
in One Country’.

Ideological conflict between Trotsky and Stalin

Trotsky was an international Marxist. His central political belief at this time
was in ‘Permanent Revolution’, a concept made up of three essential ideas:
● Revolution was not a single event but a permanent (continuous) process
in which risings took place from country to country.
● The events in Russia since 1917 were simply a first step towards a
worldwide revolution of the proletariat.
● The USSR could not survive alone in a hostile world. It needed to ‘export
revolution’. Unless there was international revolution, the Soviet Union
would not survive.
Stalin countered Trotsky’s notion of ‘Permanent Revolution’ with his own
concept of ‘Socialism in One Country’. He meant by this that the nation’s
first task was to consolidate Lenin’s Revolution by turning the USSR into a
modern state, capable of defending itself against its internal and external
enemies. The Soviet Union’s task, therefore, was to:
● overcome its present agricultural and industrial problems by its own
unaided efforts
● proceed to build a modern state, the equal of any nation in the world
● make the survival of the Soviet Union an absolute priority, even if this
meant suspending efforts to create international revolution.
Stalin used the contrast between his programme and Trotsky’s to portray his
rival as an enemy of the Soviet Union. He condemned Trotsky’s ideas as a
threat to the security of the USSR. Trotsky’s position was further weakened
by the fact that throughout the 1920s the Soviet Union had a constant fear of
invasion by the combined capitalist nations. Although this fear was ill-
founded, the tense atmosphere it created made Trotsky’s notion of the
USSR’s engaging in foreign revolutionary wars appear irresponsible.

Why was Stalin able to The defeat of Trotsky and the Left
overcome the challenge
from the Left?
Trotsky’s failure in the propaganda war of the 1920s meant that he was in no
position to persuade either the Politburo or the Central Committee to
support his proposals. Following a vote against him in the 1925 Party

26
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

Congress, Trotsky was removed from his position as Commissar for War.
Kamenev and Zinoviev, the respective Chairmen of the Moscow and
Leningrad Soviets, played a key part in this. They used their influence over Soviet Bolshevik/
the local Party organizations to ensure that it was a pro-Stalin, anti-Trotsky Communist-dominated
Congress that gathered. worker–soldier local councils.
In China, the term described
The New Opposition a communist community
dedicated to the practical
With Trotsky weakened, Stalin turned to the problem of how to deal with the
application of Marxist
two key figures he now saw as potential rivals, Kamenev and Zinoviev. In the
egalitarian principles.
event, they created a trap for themselves. In 1925, worried by the USSR’s
slow economic growth, the two men called for the NEP to be abandoned,
concessions to the peasants withdrawn, and industrialization enforced. Their
viewpoint formed the basis of what was termed the ‘New Opposition’, but
there was little to distinguish it from old Trotskyism. It was no surprise,
therefore, when Trotsky joined his former opponents in 1926 to form a
‘Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite’ opposition bloc.

Again, Stalin’s control of the Party machine proved decisive. The Party
Congress declined to be influenced by pressure from the ‘New Opposition’.
The Right Communists backed Stalin and outvoted the Left bloc. Kamenev
and Zinoviev were dismissed from their posts as Soviet chairmen, to be
replaced by two of Stalin’s staunchest allies: Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow
and Sergei Kirov in Leningrad. It was little surprise that, soon after, Trotsky
was expelled from both the Politburo and the Central Committee.

Bureaucratization
Trotsky attempted to fight back. The issue he chose was bureaucratization. He
defined this as the abandonment of genuine discussion within the Party and the
growth in power of the Secretariat, which was able to make decisions and
operate policies without reference to ordinary Party members. Trotsky called for
greater Party democracy to fight this growth. But his campaign was misjudged.
In trying to expose the growing bureaucracy in the Communist Party, Trotsky
overlooked the essential fact that Bolshevik rule since 1917 had always been
bureaucratic. Indeed, it was because the Soviet state functioned as a bureaucracy
that Party members received privileges in political and public life. Trotsky gained
little support from Party members who had a vested interest in maintaining the
Party’s bureaucratic ways. His censure of bureaucracy left Stalin unscathed.

Trotsky’s expulsion
Trotsky still did not admit defeat. In 1927, on the tenth anniversary of the
Bolshevik rising, he tried to rally support in a direct challenge to Stalin’s
authority. He was again heavily outvoted. His complete failure led to
Congress accepting Stalin’s proposal that Trotsky be expelled from the Party
altogether. An internal exile order against him in 1927 was followed two
years later by deportation from the USSR itself. That Trotsky was not
executed at this point suggests that Stalin did not yet regard himself as being
in full political control.

27
 Why were the Right The defeat of the Right opposition
unable to mount an
effective challenge to
Having defeated the Left, Stalin turned on the Right opposition whose major
Stalin? representatives were Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky and Nicholai Bukharin,
three men who had loyally served Stalin in his outflanking of Trotsky and the
Left. Politically, the Right were by no means as challenging to Stalin as the
Trotskyite bloc had been. What made Stalin move against them was that they
stood in the way of the industrial and agricultural schemes that he began to
implement in 1928. His attack on the Right was, therefore, an aspect of his
massive transformation of the Soviet economy.
It is uncertain when Stalin finally decided that the answer to the Soviet
Collectivization Depriving Union’s growth problem was collectivization and industrialization
the peasants of their land and (see pages 31–37). The likelihood is that it was probably another piece of
requiring them to live and opportunism; having defeated the Left politically, he felt free to adopt their
work in communes.
economic policies.
State procurements
Enforced collections of grain The attitude of the Right opposition
from the peasants. Bukharin and the Right argued that it would be less disruptive to let
Soviet industry develop its own momentum. The state should assist,
but it should not direct. Similarly, the peasants should not be oppressed
as this would make them resentful and less productive. The Right agreed
that it was from the land that the means of financing industrialization
would have to come, but they stressed that, by offering the peasants the
chance to become prosperous, far more grain would be produced for sale
abroad.
Bukharin declared in the Politburo and at the Party Congress in 1928 that
Stalin’s aggressive policy of state procurements was counter-productive. He
was prepared to state openly what everybody knew, but was afraid to admit:
that Stalin’s programme was little different to the one that Trotsky had
previously advocated.

Weakness of the Right opposition

The Right suffered from a number of weaknesses, which Stalin was
able to exploit. These related to their ideas, their organization and their
support.

Ideas
A notable skill that Stalin employed throughout his career after 1924 was
his ability to play upon the fears of his colleagues and compatriots. He
consistently claimed that the USSR was under threat from internal and
external enemies within and without. This seldom accorded with reality
but his constant exaggerations were believed by a Party which became
convinced that only through vigilance and ruthless treatment of enemies
could the regime be safeguarded from the reactionaries who wished to
overthrow it. Typical of Stalin’s statements was his listing of the USSR’s

28
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

internal enemies to show the danger in which the Revolution stood

(see Source D).
Source D

Excerpt from a speech by Stalin in 1933, quoted in Stalin: Triumph and

Tragedy, by Dmitri Volkogonov, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, UK, According to Source D,
who are the internal
1991, p. 211.
enemies of the Soviet
The remnants of the dying classes – industrialists and their servants, private state and what threat do
traders and their stooges, former nobles and priests, kulaks and their they pose?
henchman – they have all wormed their way into our factories, our institutions.
What have they brought with them? Of course, they have brought their hatred of
the Soviet regime, their feeling of hostility to the new forms of the economy, way
of life, culture.

Stalin used the fears for the Revolution felt by the Party to undermine the
Right. Scorning Bukharin for underestimating the difficulties the Soviet
Union faced, he asserted that the dangerous times required not concessions
to the peasants, but a tough policy towards them. In taking this line, Stalin
showed a shrewd understanding of the mentality of Party members. The
majority were far more likely to respond to the call for a return to a rigorous
policy on the land than they were to risk the Revolution itself by untimely
concessions to reactionary peasants.

Organization
The Right experienced the same difficulty that the Left had. How could they
impress their ideas upon the Party while Stalin remained master of the Party
machine? Bukharin and his colleagues wanted to remain faithful Party
members and it was this sense of loyalty that weakened them in their
attempts to oppose Stalin. Fearful of recreating the ‘factionalism’ condemned
by Lenin, they hoped that they could win the Party over by persuasion. Their
basic approach was conciliatory. All this played into Stalin’s hands. Since it
was largely his supporters who were responsible for drafting and distributing
Party information, it was not difficult for Stalin to belittle the Right as a weak
and irresponsible clique.

Lack of support
The Right’s only substantial support lay in the trade unions, whose Central
Council was chaired by Tomsky, and in the CPSU’s Moscow branch where
Nicolai Uglanov, an admirer and supporter of Bukharin, was the Party
Secretary. When Stalin realized that these might be a source of opposition,
he acted quickly and decisively. He sent Lazar Kaganovich, a ruthlessly
ambitious young Politburo member from Ukraine, to arrest the suspect trade
unionists. The Right were overwhelmed by this political assault. Molotov was
dispatched to Moscow where he enlisted the support of the pro-Stalin
members to terrify local Party officials into line.

29
 Collapse of the Right
By early 1929, the Right were beyond recovery. Tomsky was no longer
Premier Soviet Chairman of the national trade union leader; Rykov had been superseded as premier
the Council of Commissars. by Molotov; and Bukharin had lost his place in the Politburo. This trio of
Vozhd Russian for a supreme ‘Right Opportunists’ were allowed to remain in the Party but only after
leader, equivalent to the publicly admitting the error of their ways. Stalin’s triumph over both Left
Führer in German. and Right was complete. He was now in a position to exercise power as the
new Vozhd, having become, in effect, a communist tsar. The defeat of the
Right marks the end of any serious challenge to limit his power. From the
late 1920s to his death in 1953, Stalin would become increasingly dictatorial.

Assiduous Bolshevik Loyal follower of

worker Lenin

Stalin rewarded with key

placements in the
Communist Party

People’s Commissar Liaison Officer Head of Workers’ Secretary of the

for Nationalities between Politburo and Peasants’ Communist Party
(1917) and Orgburo (1919) Inspectorate (1919) (1922)

The Lenin enrolment

Further extension of power
Lenin’s prohibition of
factionalism
Suppression of Lenin’s
‘Democratic centralism’ Testament

Defeated Trotsky, isolating him

Trotsky
and condemning him for putting
expelled from
the USSR at risk by his advocacy
Party and exiled
of international communist revolution

Defeat of other Politburo rivals,

Summary diagram replacing them with supportive
associates
Stalin’s rise to power,
1924–29

30
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

2 Stalin’s establishment of
an authoritarian state
Key question: How did Stalin impose his authority on the Soviet Union?

Stalin’s imposition of a dictatorial control over the Soviet Union was

achieved by the manner in which he developed his domestic policies. These
are examined in this section under two headings: economic policy and the
purges.

Economic policy How did Stalin use

his economic policies
Stalin had decided by 1928 that the USSR could not survive unless it rapidly
to impose his
modernized its economy. To this end, he set about completely reshaping authority over the
Soviet agriculture and industry. The pretext for this had been provided in Soviet Union?
1926 by a critical resolution of the Party Congress: ‘To transform our country
from an agrarian into an industrial one, capable by its own efforts of
producing the necessary means’. Stalin planned to turn that resolution into
reality. There were three main aspects to this, which were:
● economic aims
● the collectivization of the peasantry
● industrialization.

Economic aims
Stalin’s economic policy had one essential aim, the modernization of the Modernization The
Soviet economy. This was to be achieved by two essential methods, movement of a nation from a
collectivization and industrialization. So socially disruptive was this rural, agricultural society to
programme, involving as it did the greatest land transfer in Russian history an urban, industrial one.
and the redirection of people’s lives, that it could be achieved only by Stalin’s
government taking complete control of the Soviet people.

Revolution from above

From 1928 onwards, the Soviet state took over the running of the nation’s
economy. In theory, 1917 had been a revolution from below. The Bolshevik-
led proletariat had begun the construction of a state in which the workers
ruled. Bukharin and the Right had used this notion to argue that, since the
USSR was now a proletarian society, the economy should be left to develop
at its own pace, without interference from the government. Stalin’s economic
programme ended such thinking. The state would now command the
economy from above. Stalin called this momentous decision ‘the second
revolution’ to indicate that it was as important a stage in Soviet history as the
original 1917 Revolution. This comparison was obviously intended to
enhance his own status as a revolutionary leader following in the footsteps
of Lenin.

31
 Modernization
Stalin believed that the survival of the Soviet Union depended on the nation’s
ability to turn itself into a modern industrial society within the shortest
possible time. He expressed this with particular force in 1931 (see Source E).
Source E

Excerpt from a speech by Stalin, February 1931, reported in Pravda,

According to Source E, what
quoted in Stalin: A Biography by Robert Service, published by Macmillan,
must the Soviet Union do to
avoid being crushed? UK, 2004, pp. 272–73.
It is sometimes asked whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo
somewhat, to put a check on the movement. No, comrades, it is not possible! The
tempo must not be reduced! To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind.
And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. We are
fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this
distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed. This is what our
obligations to the workers and peasants of the USSR dictate to us.

This passionate appeal to Russian history subordinated everything to the

driving need for national survival. Stalin used this appeal as the pretext for
the severity that accompanied collectivization and industrialization.

Collectivization
Stalin adopted collectivization for two reasons – to bring the peasants under
control and to raise capital. Stalin worked to a simple formula:
● The USSR needed industrial investment and manpower.
● The land could provide both.
● Surplus grain would be sold abroad to raise investment funds for industry.
● Surplus peasants would become factory workers.
As a revolutionary, Stalin had little sympathy for the peasants. Communist
theory taught that the days of the peasantry as a revolutionary social force
had passed. October 1917 had been the first stage in the triumph of the
industrial proletariat. Therefore, it was perfectly fitting that the peasantry
should bow to the demands of industrialization.
Collective farms Farms Stalin defined collectivization as ‘the setting up of collective farms in order
run as co-operatives in which to squeeze out all capitalist elements from the land’. The state would now
the peasants shared the own the land. The peasants would no longer farm the land for their own
labour and the wages. individual profit. The plan was to group between 50 and 100 peasant
holdings into one unit. It was believed that large farms would be more
efficient and would encourage the effective use of agricultural machinery.

The Kulaks
When introducing collectivization in 1928, Stalin claimed that it was
‘voluntary’, but in truth it was forced on a very reluctant peasantry. In a
major propaganda offensive, Stalin identified a class of ‘Kulaks’, rich peasants
who were holding back the workers’ revolution by hoarding their produce

32
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

and keeping food prices high, thus making themselves wealthy at the
expense of the workers and poorer peasants. They had to be broken as a
class; thus, ‘de-Kulakization’ became a state-enforced campaign.
The concept of a Kulak class was a Stalinist myth. The so-called Kulaks were
really only those hard-working peasants who had proved more efficient
farmers than their neighbours. In no sense did they constitute the class of
exploiting landowners described in Stalinist propaganda. Nonetheless, given
the tradition of landlord oppression going back to Tsarist times, the notion of
a Kulak class proved a very powerful one and provided the grounds for the
coercion of the peasantry as a whole – middle and poor peasants, as well as
Kulaks.
De-Kulakization
In some regions the poorer peasants undertook ‘de-Kulakization’ with
enthusiasm, since it provided them with an excuse to settle old scores and to
give vent to local jealousies. Land and property were seized from the
minority of better-off peasants, and they and their families were physically
attacked. Such treatment was often the prelude to arrest and deportation by
OGPU anti-Kulak squads. OGPU Succeeded the
Cheka as the Soviet state
The renewal of terror also served as a warning to the mass of the peasantry security force. In turn it
of the likely consequences of resisting the state reorganization of Soviet became the NKVD and then
agriculture. The destruction of the Kulaks was thus an integral part of the the KGB.
whole collectivization process. As a Soviet official later admitted: ‘most Party
officers thought that the whole point of de-Kulakization was its value as an
administrative measure, speeding up tempos of collectivization’.
Source F

An anti-Kulak demonstration on a collective farm in 1930. The banner

reads ‘Liquidate the Kulaks as a class’. Who was likely to have
organized the
demonstration shown in
Source F? Why would
peasants be willing to join
such a demonstration?

33
 Resistance to collectivization
In the period between December 1929 and March 1930, nearly a quarter of
the peasant farms in the USSR were collectivized. Yet peasants in their
millions resisted. What amounted to civil war broke out in the countryside.
The following details indicate the scale of the disturbances as recorded in
official figures:
● During 1929–30, there were 30,000 arson attacks.
● The number of organized rural mass disturbances increased from 172 for
the first half of 1929 to 229 for the second half.
However, peasant resistance, no matter how valiant and desperate, stood no
chance of stopping collectivization. By the end of the 1930s, virtually the
whole of the peasantry had been collectivized (see Source G).
Source G

Graph showing cumulative percentage of peasant holdings collectivized in

What does Source G suggest
the USSR, 1930–41.
about the resolution with
which Stalin pursued 100
collectivization?
90

80

70

60
Percentage

50

40

30

20

10

0
1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1941
Year

Source H

Annual food consumption (in kilograms per head).

Year Bread Potatoes Meat and lard Butter

1928 250.4 141.1 24.8 1.35
1932 214.6 125.0 11.2 0.7

34
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

Source I

Number of livestock (in millions).

What trends are evident
Year Horses Cattle Pigs Sheep and goats in the tables in Sources H
1928 33 70 26 146 and I? What are the
1932 15 34 9 42 possible explanations for
the trends shown?

The consequences of collectivization

● Collectivization created a massive social upheaval. Bewildered and
confused, the peasants became disorientated by the deliberate destruction
of their traditional way of life. The consequences were increasingly tragic.
The majority of peasants ate their seed corn and slaughtered their
livestock. There were no crops left to reap or animals to rear.
● Starvation, which in many parts of the Soviet Union persisted throughout
the 1930s, was at its worst in the years 1932–33, when a national famine
occurred. Estimates suggest that 6 to 8 million people died, with the
population of Ukraine and Kazakhstan suffering particularly severely.
● Desperate peasants moved to the towns in huge numbers. So great was
the migration that a system of internal passports had to be introduced in
an effort to control the flow.
● Despite overwhelming evidence of the tragedy that had overtaken the USSR,
there were only two oblique references to it in the state press. As well as
serving to protect the image of Stalin the great planner, this conspiracy of
silence effectively prevented the introduction of measures to ease the distress.
● Leaving aside questions of human suffering, the enforced migration under
Stalin had one positive economic result: it relieved the pressure on the
land and provided the workforce that enabled the industrialization
programme to be started.

Industrialization
Stalin described his industrialization plans for the USSR as an attempt to
establish a war economy. He declared that he was making war on the failings
of Russia’s past and on the class enemies within the nation. He also claimed
that he was preparing the USSR for war against its capitalist foes abroad.
This was not simply martial imagery; Stalin regarded iron, steel and oil as the
sinews of war. Their successful production would guarantee the strength and
readiness of the nation to face its enemies.
Soviet industrialization under Stalin took the form of a series of Five-Year
Plans (FYPs). Gosplan was required by Stalin to draw up a list of quotas of Gosplan The Soviet state
production ranging across the whole of Soviet industry. The process began in economic planning agency.
1928 and, except for the war years 1941–45, lasted until Stalin’s death in
1953. In all, there were five separate plans:
● First FYP: October 1928 to December 1932
● Second FYP: January 1933 to December 1937
● Third FYP: January 1938 to June 1941

35
 ● Fourth FYP: January 1946 to December 1950
● Fifth FYP: January 1951 to December 1955.

The First Five-Year Plan, 1928–32

The term ‘plan’ is misleading. The First FYP laid down what was to be
achieved, but did not say how it was to be done. It simply assumed the quotas
would be met. What the First FYP represented, therefore, was a set of targets
rather than a plan. As had happened with collectivization, local officials and
managers falsified their production figures to give the impression they had
met their targets when, in fact, they had fallen short. For this reason, precise
statistics for the First FYP are difficult to determine. A further complication is
that three quite distinct versions of the First FYP eventually appeared.
Impressed by the apparent progress of the Plan in its early stages, Stalin
encouraged the formulation of an ‘optimal’ plan which reassessed targets
upwards. These new quotas were hopelessly unrealistic and stood no chance
of being reached. Nonetheless, on the basis of the supposed achievements of
this ‘optimal’ plan, the figures were revised still higher. Western analysts
suggest the figures in Source J are the closest approximation to the real figures.
Source J

Industrial output in million tons of the First Five-Year Plan.

How is the difference
between the four categories Product 1927–28 First Plan 1929–31 Optimal 1932 Revised 1932 Actual
in Source J – First Plan,
Coal 35.0 75.0 95–105 64.0
Optimal, Revised and
Actual – to be explained? Oil 11.7 21.7 40–55 21.4
Iron ore 6.7 20.2 24–32 12.1
Pig iron 3.2 10.0 15–16 6.2

The importance of these figures should not be exaggerated. At the time it

was the grand design, not the detail, that mattered. The Plan was a huge
propaganda project which aimed at convincing the Soviet people that they
were personally engaged in a vast industrial enterprise. Nor was it all a
matter of state enforcement. Among the young especially, there was an
enthusiasm and a commitment that suggested that many Soviet citizens
believed they were genuinely building a new and better world.
To show how successful they were, officials often exaggerated the production
figures. Nevertheless, the First FYP was an extraordinary achievement
overall. Coal, iron, and generation of electricity all increased in huge
proportions. The production of steel and chemicals was less impressive,
while the output of finished textiles actually declined.

The Second and Third Five-Year Plans

Although the Second and Third FYPs were modelled on the pattern of
the First, the targets set for them were more realistic. Nevertheless, they
still revealed the same lack of co-ordination that had characterized the
First. Over-production occurred in some parts of the economy and

36
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

­ nder-production in others, which frequently led to whole branches of

u
industry being held up for lack of vital supplies. As a result there was
hoarding of resources and a lack of co-operation between the various parts
of the industrial system. Complaints about poor standards, carefully veiled so
as not to appear critical of Stalin and the Plan, were frequent. What successes
there were occurred again in heavy industry where the Second FYP began to
reap the benefit of the creation of large-scale plants under the First Plan.

Stalin’s industrial record

The four key products coal, steel, oil and electricity provided the basis for the
war economy which enabled the USSR not only to survive four years of
German occupation (1941–45) but eventually to win a great victory over
Germany in May 1945.
Source K

Industrial output during the first three Five-Year Plans.

What trends are
Product 1927 1930 1932 1935 1937 1940
discernible in Source K in
Coal (million tons) 35 60 64 100 128 150 regard to the production
Steel (million tons) 3 5 6 13 18 18 of coal, steel, oil and
Oil (million tons) 12 17 21 24 26 26 electricity?
Electricity (million kWh) 18 22 20 45 80 90

● Stalin’s industrial programme succeeded in the areas of heavy industry.

The building of large projects such as factories, bridges, refineries and
canals were impressive achievements.
● However, the Soviet economy itself remained unbalanced. Little attention
was given to light engineering, which the advanced industrial nations Light engineering Skilled,
were successfully developing. Stalin’s love of what he called ‘the Grand specialized activities such as
Projects of Communism’ meant too little attention was paid to producing precision tool-making.
quality goods that could then be profitably sold abroad.
● Stalin’s schemes failed to raise the living standards of the Soviet workers.
Indeed, such measures as direction of labour and the imposition of severe
penalties for slacking and absenteeism created harsher conditions for the
workforce. In 1941, when the German invasion effectively destroyed the
Third FYP, the living conditions of the Soviet industrial workers were
lower than in 1928.

The early purges How were the early

Having become the Vozhd of the Soviet Union by 1929, Stalin spent the rest of purges used to
suppress opposition?
his life consolidating and extending his authority. The purges were his
principal weapon for achieving this. They became the chief mechanism for
removing anyone he regarded as a threat to his authority. The Stalinist purges,
which began in 1932, were not unprecedented. Public show trials had been
held during the early stages of the First Five-Year Plan as a way of exposing
‘saboteurs’ who were accused of damaging the USSR’s industrial programme.

37
 At the beginning, Party purges were generally not as violent as they later
became. The usual procedure was to oblige members to hand in their party
Party card The official CPSU card for checking, at which point any suspect individuals would not have
warrant granting membership their cards returned to them. This amounted to expulsion since, without
and privileges to the holder. cards, members were denied access to all Party activities. Under such a
It was a prized possession in
system, it became progressively difficult to mount effective opposition.
the Soviet Union.
Despite this, efforts were made in the early 1930s to criticize Stalin, as the
Ryutin affair In 1932, the Ryutin affair in 1932 illustrates. Yet, although the Ryutinites had clearly
followers of M. N. Ryutin, a failed, their attempted challenge convinced Stalin that organized resistance
Right communist, published
to him was still possible.
an attack on Stalin, describing
him as ‘the evil genius who In analysing Stalin’s rule, historians generally accept that they are dealing
had brought the Revolution with behaviour that sometimes went beyond reason and logic. Stalin was
to the verge of destruction’. deeply suspicious by nature and suffered from increasing paranoia as he grew
The Ryutinites were put on
older, as the letter below from his daughter, Svetlana, attests (see Source L).
public trial and expelled from
the Party. Source L

Excerpt from Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Allilueva, 1967,

quoted in Stalin: A Biography by Robert Service, published by Macmillan,
According to Source L, how
UK, 2004, p. 285.
intensely did Stalin bear
grudges? If he cast out of his heart someone who had been known to him for a long
time and if in his soul he had already translated that person into the ranks of
‘enemies’, it was impossible to hold a conversation with him about that person.

Stalin’s methods of control

In the years 1933–34, as an accompaniment to the purges, Stalin centralized
all the major law enforcement agencies:
● the civilian police
Labour camps Prisons and ● labour camp commandants and guards
detention centres in which ● border and security guards.
the inmates are required to
perform heavy work. All these bodies were put under the authority of the NKVD, a body which
was directly answerable to Stalin.
NKVD The People’s
Commissariat of Internal The post-Kirov purges, 1934–36
Affairs, the Soviet secret In Leningrad on 1 December 1934, Kirov, the secretary of the Leningrad
police.
Soviet, was shot and killed in his office. It is possible Stalin was implicated.
Decree Against Terrorist What is certain is that the murder worked directly to his advantage. Kirov
Acts An order giving the had been a highly popular figure in the Party and had been elected to the
NKVD limitless powers in Politburo. He was known to be unhappy with the speed of Stalin’s
pursuing the enemies of the
industrialization drive and also with the growing number of purges. If
Soviet state and the
Communist Party. organized opposition to Stalin were to form within the Party, Kirov was the
most likely individual around whom dissatisfied members might have
rallied. That danger to Stalin had now been removed.
Stalin was quick to exploit the situation. Within two hours of learning of
Kirov’s murder he had signed a ‘Decree Against Terrorist Acts’. On the

38
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

pretext of hunting down the killers, a fresh purge of the Party was begun, led
by Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD. Three thousand suspected
conspirators were rounded up and then imprisoned or executed and tens of
thousands of other people were deported from Leningrad. Stalin then filled
the vacant positions with his own nominees:
● In 1935, Kirov’s key post as Party boss in Leningrad was filled by Andrei
Zhdanov, a dedicated Stalinist.
● The equivalent post in Moscow was taken by Nikita Khrushchev, another
ardent Stalin supporter.
● In recognition of his successful courtroom bullying of ‘oppositionists’
in the earlier purge trials, Andrei Vyshinsky was appointed State
Prosecutor.
● Stalin’s fellow Georgian, Lavrenti Beria, was entrusted with overseeing
state security in the national minority areas of the USSR.
● Stalin’s personal secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, was put in charge of
the Secretariat.
As a result of these placements, there remained no significant area of Soviet
bureaucracy which Stalin did not control.
The outstanding feature of the post-Kirov purge was the status of many of its
victims. Prominent among those arrested were Kamenev and Zinoviev. Their
arrest sent out a clear message: no Party members, whatever their status,
were safe. Arbitrary arrest and summary execution became the norm, as the
fate of the representatives at the Party Congress of 1934 suggests:
● Of the 1,996 delegates who attended, 1,108 were executed during the next
three years.
● In addition, out of the 139 Central Committee members elected at that
gathering, all but 41 of them were executed during the purges.
Historian Leonard Shapiro, in a celebrated study of the CPSU, described
these events as ‘Stalin’s victory over the Party’. From this point on, the Soviet
Communist Party was entirely under his control. It ceased, in effect, to have a
separate existence. Stalin had become the Party.

The Stalin Enrolment, 1931–34

Stalin’s successful purge was made easier by a recent shift in the make-up of
the Party, known as ‘the Stalin Enrolment’. Between 1931 and 1934, the CPSU
had recruited a higher proportion of skilled workers and industrial managers
than at any time since 1917. Stalin encouraged this as a means of tightening
the links between the Party and those actually operating the First Five-Year
Plan, but it also had the effect of bringing in a large number of members who
joined the Party primarily to advance their careers. Acutely aware that they
owed their privileged position directly to Stalin’s patronage, the new
members eagerly supported the elimination of the anti-Stalinist elements in
the Party – it improved their chances of promotion. The competition for good
jobs in the Soviet Union was invariably fierce and purges always left positions

39
 to be filled. As the chief dispenser of positions, Stalin knew that the self-
interest of these new Party members would keep them loyal to him.

Why was Stalin able ‘The Great Terror’, 1936–39

to extend the purges
It might be expected that the purges would stop once Stalin’s complete mastery
on such a huge scale?
over the Party had been established, but they did not; in fact, they increased in
intensity. Repeating his constant assertion that the Soviet Union was in a state
of siege, Stalin called for still greater vigilance against the enemies within who
were in league with the Soviet Union’s foreign enemies. Between 1936 and
1939, a progressive terrorizing of the Soviet Union occurred affecting the whole
population. Its scale merited the title, given to it by historians, of ‘the Great
Terror’, which took its most dramatic form in the public show trials of Stalin’s
former Bolshevik colleagues (see page 41). The one-time heroes of the 1917
Revolution were imprisoned or executed as enemies of the state.
The descriptions applied to the accused during the purges bore little relation
to political reality. ‘Right’, ‘Left’ and ‘Centre’ opposition blocs were identified
and the groupings invariably had the catch-all term ‘Trotskyite’ tagged on to
them, but such words were convenient prosecution labels rather than
definitions of a genuine political opposition. They were intended to isolate
those in the CPSU and the Soviet state whom Stalin wished to destroy.
Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ programme breaks down conveniently into three
sections, which are:
● the purge of the Party
● the purge of the armed services
● the purge of the people.

The purge of the Party

Stalin’s destruction of those in the Party he regarded as a major threat was
achieved by the holding of three major show trials:
● In 1936, Kamenev and Zinoviev and fourteen other leading Bolsheviks
were tried and executed.
● In 1937, seventeen Bolsheviks were denounced collectively as the ‘Anti-
Soviet Trotskyist Centre’, and were charged with spying for Germany. All
but three of them were executed.
● In 1938, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky and twenty others, branded ‘Trotskyite-
rightists’, were publicly tried on a variety of counts, including sabotage,
spying and conspiracy to murder Stalin: all were found guilty. Bukharin
and Rykov were executed; Tomsky committed suicide.
Remarkably, the great majority went to their death after confessing their guilt.
An obvious question arises. Why did they confess? After all, these men were
tough Bolsheviks. Physical and mental tortures, including threats to their
families, were used, but arguably more important was their sense of
demoralization at having been accused and disgraced by the Party to which
they had dedicated their lives. In a curious sense, their admission of guilt was a

40
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

last act of loyalty to the Party. In his final speech in court, Bukharin accepted the
infallibility of the Party and of Stalin, referring to him as ‘the hope of the world’.
Whatever their reasons, that the leading Bolsheviks did confess made it extremely
difficult for other victims to plead their own innocence. The psychological impact
of the public confessions of such figures as Kamenev and Zinoviev was profound.
It created an atmosphere in which innocent victims submitted in open court to
false charges, and went to their death begging the Party’s forgiveness.

The legality of the purges

Stalin’s insistence on a policy of show trials illustrated his astuteness. There is
little doubt that he had the power to conduct the purges without using legal
proceedings. However, by making the victims deliver humiliating confessions
in open court, Stalin was able to suggest the scale of the conspiracy against
him and thus to prove the need for the purges to continue.
Source M

This montage, composed by Trotsky’s supporters, illustrates the

Why did those who were
remarkable fact that of the original 1917 Central Committee of the purged by Stalin, shown in
Bolshevik Party only Stalin was still alive in 1940; the majority of the Source M, offer so little
other 23 members had, of course, been destroyed in the purges. resistance?

The purge of the armed forces

A particularly significant development in the purges occurred in 1937 when
the Soviet military came under threat. Stalin’s control of the Soviet Union
would not have been complete if the armed services had continued as an
independent force. It was essential that they be kept subservient. Stalin also

41
 had a lingering fear that the army, which had been Trotsky’s creation (see
page 23), might still have sympathy for their old leader. In May 1937,
Vyshinksy, Stalin’s chief prosecutor, announced that ‘a gigantic conspiracy’
had been uncovered in the Red Army. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who
had been one of the founders of that army, was arrested along with seven
other generals. On the pretext that speed was essential to prevent a military
coup, a trial was held immediately, this time in secret. Tukhachevsky was
charged with having spied for Germany and Japan.
The outcome was predetermined. In June 1937, after their ritual confession
and condemnation, Tukhachevsky and his fellow generals were shot. To
prevent any chance of a military reaction, a wholesale destruction of the Red
Army establishment was undertaken. During the following eighteen months:
War Commissars Soviet ● All eleven War Commissars were removed from office.
ministers responsible for ● Three of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union were dismissed.
military organization. ● Ninety-one of the 101-man Supreme Military Council were arrested, of
Marshals of the Soviet whom 80 were executed.
Union Highest ranking ● Fourteen of the sixteen army commanders, and nearly two-thirds of the
military officers. 280 divisional commanders were removed.
Gulag An extensive system ● Up to 35,000 commissioned officers were either imprisoned or shot.
of penal colonies spread ● The Soviet Union’s Navy did not escape: between 1937 and 1939 all the
across the USSR. serving admirals of the fleet were shot and thousands of naval officers
were sent to labour camps.
● The Soviet Union’s Air Force was similarly purged during that period: only
one of its senior commanders survived.
The result was that all three services were left seriously undermanned and
staffed by inexperienced or incompetent replacements. Given the defence
needs of the USSR, the deliberate crippling of the Soviet military is the
aspect of the purges that appears to be the most irrational.

The purge of the people

Stalin’s gaining of total dominance over Party, government and military did
not mean the end of the purges. The apparatus of terror was retained and the
search for enemies continued. Purges were used to achieve the goals of the
FYPs; charges of industrial sabotage were made against managers and
workers in the factories. The purges were also a way of forcing the regions
and nationalities into total subordination to Stalin. To accommodate the
great numbers of prisoners created by the purges, the Gulag, a network of
prison and labour camps, was established across the USSR.
The show trials that had taken place in Moscow and Leningrad, with their
catalogue of accusations, confessions and death sentences, were repeated in
all the republics of the USSR. For example, between 1937 and 1939 in Stalin’s
home state of Georgia:
● two state prime ministers were removed
● four-fifths of the regional Party secretaries were dismissed
● thousands of lesser officials lost their posts.
42
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

Source N

The Gulag, 1937–57. By 1941, as a result of the purges, there were an What does Source N
estimated 8 million prisoners in the Gulag. The average sentence was ten indicate about the extent
years, which, given the conditions in the camps, was equivalent to a death of Stalin’s repression?
sentence. As an example of state-organized repression, Stalin’s Gulag
stands alongside Hitler’s concentration camps (see page 76) and Mao
Zedong’s laogai (see page 136).

Places
Camps

Leningrad Arkhangelsk
Norillag Gorlag Dalstroi
Moscow Salekhard Igarka
Vyatlag Magadan
Perm
Siblag
Novosibirsk
Steplag
N Dzhezkazgan

Vladivostock

0 1000
Km

Mass repression
No area of Soviet life entirely escaped the purges. The constant fear that the
purges created conditioned the way the Soviet people lived their lives. Their
greatest impact was on the middle and lower ranks of Soviet society:
● One person in every eight of the population was arrested during Stalin’s purges.
● Almost every family in the USSR suffered the loss of at least one of its
members as a victim of the terror.
In the years 1937–38, mass repression was imposed. Known as the
‘Yezhovschina’, after its chief organizer, Nicolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD in
1937, this purge was typified by the practice in which NKVD squads entered
selected localities and removed hundreds of inhabitants for execution. The
number of victims to be arrested was specified in set quotas, as if they were
industrial production targets. There was no appeal against sentences and the
death warrant invariably required that the execution ‘be carried our immediately’.
The shootings took place in specially designated zones. One notorious example
of this was Butovo, a village outside Moscow, which became one of the NKVD’s
killing fields. Excavations have revealed mass graves there containing over 20,000
bodies dating back to the late 1930s and indicating that nightly, over many
months, victims had been taken to Butovo and shot in batches of a hundred.

43
 Insofar as the terrorizing of ordinary people had a specific purpose, it was to
frighten the USSR’s national minorities into abandoning any remaining
thoughts of challenging Moscow’s control and to force them into a full
acceptance of Stalin’s enforced industrialization programme.

Why did Stalin persist Later purges, 1941–53

with the purges in his
The purges did not end with the onset of the Great Fatherland War in 1941
later years?
or with the coming of peace in 1945. They had become an integral part of the
Stalinist system of government. After 1947, Stalin dispensed with the Central
Committee and the Politburo, thus removing even the semblance of a
restriction on his authority. In 1949, he initiated another Party purge, ‘the
The Great Fatherland Leningrad Affair’. Leading party and city officials were tried on charges of
War The term adopted in attempting to use Leningrad as an opposition base, and shot.
the Soviet Union to describe
the ferocious struggle that The Doctors’ Plot
began with the German Soviet Jews were the next section of the population to be selected for organized
invasion of the USSR in 1941 persecution. Anti-Semitism was a long-established aspect of Russian society and
and concluded with Soviet
it was a factor in the last purge Stalin contemplated. Early in 1953 it was officially
forces smashing their way
into Germany in 1945. announced that a ‘Doctors’ Plot’ had been uncovered in Moscow; it was asserted
that the Jewish-dominated medical centre had planned to murder Stalin and the
other Soviet leaders. Preparations began for a major assault on the Soviet medical
profession. What prevented those preparations being put into operation was the
death of Stalin in March 1953.

Why did the victims of Lack of resistance to the purges

the purges offer such
Robert Service, a celebrated biographer of Stalin, says of him: ‘Nowadays,
little resistance?
virtually all writers accept that he initiated the Great Terror.’ Stalin exploited
the Russian autocratic tradition that he inherited to rid himself of real or
imagined enemies. Yet Service, along with all the leading experts in the field,
is careful to acknowledge that, while Stalin was undoubtedly the architect of
the terror, the responsibility for implementing it goes beyond him:
● Stalinism was not as monolithic a system of government as has been
often assumed. The disorganized state of much of Soviet bureaucracy,
particularly at local level, allowed officials to use their own initiative in
applying the terror.
● How the purges were actually carried out largely depended on the local
party organization. Many officials welcomed the purges as an opportunity
to increase their local power.
● Revolutionary idealism was swamped by self-interest as Party members
saw the purges as a way of advancing themselves by filling the jobs
vacated by the victims. This relates to an argument advanced by some
historians that the purges came as much from below as from above. The
suggestion is that the purges were sustained in their ferocity by the lower
rank officials in government and Party who wanted to replace their
superiors, whom they regarded as a conservative elite.

44
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

● The purges were popular with those in the Soviet Union who believed
their country could survive only by being powerfully and ruthlessly led.
Such people judged that Stalin’s unrelenting methods were precisely what
the nation needed.
● The disruption of Soviet society, caused by upheavals of collectivization
and industrialization, destroyed social cohesion and so encouraged Party
and government officials to resort to the most extreme measures.

Replacement of NEP with

Five-Year Plans, 1928

Successful communist
End of state’s Expand working class and
Provide modern economy model in USSR would
dependence on therefore base support of
and therefore better defence make communism more
agriculture Communist Party
appealing elsewhere

Industrialized farming to
produce more for export, to
feed workers, to free Collectivization of Mass New cities
peasants for industrial work agriculture industrialization constructed

Elimination of Kulaks

Destruction of old economic Major construction

Resistance of heavy industry
and social system
and infrastructure

Peasant resistance leads Political resistance and failure to

to destruction of animals, reach industrial targets leads to
crops, tools purges

Opportunity for
Mass starvation of Severe rationing Purge of the people Stalin to eliminate
peasants in cities to enforce obedience old and new rivals
to Stalin and state

Kirov
assassination

Summary diagram
The Great Terror,
1936–39
Stalin’s establishment of an
authoritarian state

45
 3 Stalin’s domestic policies and
their impact, 1929–53
Key question: What impact did Stalinism have on the lives of the Soviet
people?

How was Soviet Arts and the media

culture manipulated
to strengthen Stalin’s Literature
power? In 1932, Stalin declared to a gathering of Soviet writers that they were
‘engineers of the human soul’. Their task was essentially a social not an
artistic one. They had to reshape the thinking and behaviour of the Soviet
people. The goal of the artist had to be social realism. It is not surprising,
Social realism therefore, that when the Soviet Union of Writers was formed in 1934 it
Representational work which declared that its first objective was to convince all its members of the need to
related directly to the lives of struggle for socialist realism in their works. This could be best achieved by
the people. conforming to a set of guidelines. Writers were to make sure that their work:
Soviet Union of Writers ● was acceptable to the Party in theme and presentation
The body which had
● was written in a style immediately understandable to the workers who
authority over all published
writers and had the right to would read it
ban any work of which it ● contained characters whom the readers could recognize as socialist role
disapproved. models or examples of class enemies.
These rules applied to creative writing in all its forms: novels, plays, poems
and film scripts. It was not easy for genuine writers to continue working
within these restrictions, but conformity was the price of acceptance, of
survival even. Surveillance, scrutiny and denunciations intensified
throughout the 1930s. In such an intimidating atmosphere, suicides became
common. Historian Robert Service notes in his biography of Stalin that ‘more
great intellectuals perished in the 1930s than survived’. In 1934, Osip
Mandelstam, a leading literary figure, recited a mocking poem about Stalin
at a private gathering of writers, which contained the lines ‘Around him,
fawning half-men for him to play with, as he prates and points a finger’. He
was informed on and died four years later in the Gulag. He once remarked,
‘Only in Russia is poetry taken seriously, so seriously men are killed for it.’
Stalin took a close personal interest in new artistic works. One word of
criticism from him was enough to destroy a writer. The atmosphere of
repression and the restrictions on genuine creativity had the effect of
elevating conformist mediocrities to positions of influence and power.
This was a common characteristic of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth
century.

46
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn

Among the most prominent of the writers persecuted under Stalin were
Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Pasternak’s works were
regarded by the authorities as implicitly critical of the Soviet system and
therefore unacceptable. His Dr Zhivago, a novel that later became greatly
admired in the West, was refused publication in the USSR during his
lifetime. Solzhenitsyn, a deeply spiritual man, was regarded by the
authorities as a subversive and spent many years in the Gulag for falling foul
of Stalin’s censors. His documentary novels, such as One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, which was published after Stalin’s
death, described the horrific conditions in the labour camps.

Theatre and film

The Union of Writers set the tone for all other organizations in the arts.
Film-making, opera and ballet, all had to respond to the Stalinist demand for
socialist realism. Abstract forms were frowned upon because they broke the
rules that works should be immediately accessible to the public. An idea of
the repression that operated can be gained from the following figures:
● In the years 1936–37, 68 films out of 150 had to be withdrawn mid-
production and another 30 taken out of circulation.
● In the same period, ten out of nineteen plays and ballets were ordered to
be withdrawn.
● In the 1937–38 theatre season, 60 plays were banned from performance
and 10 theatres closed in Moscow and another 10 in Leningrad.

Vsevolod Meyerhold
A prominent victim was the director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose concept of
total theatre had a major influence on European drama. Despite his wish to Total theatre An approach
bring theatre closer to the people, his appeal for artistic liberty – ‘The theatre which sought to break down
the barriers between actors
is a living creative thing. We must have freedom, yes, freedom’ – led to a
and audience by novel use of
campaign being mounted against him by Stalin’s sycophantic supporters. He lighting, sound and stage
was arrested in 1938. After a two-year imprisonment during which he was settings.
regularly beaten until he fainted, he was shot. His name was one on a list of
346 death sentences that Stalin signed on one day – 16 January 1940.

Sergei Eisenstein
Even the internationally-acclaimed director, Sergei Eisenstein, whose films
Battleship Potemkin and October, celebrating the revolutionary Russian
proletariat, had done so much to advance the communist cause, was heavily
censured. This was because a later work of his, Ivan the Terrible, was judged to
be an unflattering portrait of a great Russian leader and, therefore, by
implication, disrespectful of Stalin.

Painting and sculpture

Painters and sculptors were left in no doubt as to what was required of them.
Their duty to conform to socialist realism in their style and at the same time

47
 honour their great leader was captured in an article in the art magazine
Iskusstvo describing a prize painting of Stalin in 1948: ‘The image of Comrade
Stalin is the symbol of the Soviet people’s glory, calling for new heroic
exploits for the benefit of our great motherland.’
Source O

Posters from the 1930s, typical of the propaganda of the time, showing
In what ways do the posters
Stalin as the leader of his adoring people. Poster art was a very effective
in Source O illustrate the
artistic notion of socialist way for the Stalinist authorities to spread their propaganda.
realism?

‘Under the leadership of the great Stalin, forward to Communism!’

48
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

Music
Since music is an essentially abstract art form, it was more difficult to make
composers respond to Stalin’s notions of social realism. Nevertheless, it was
the art form which most interested Stalin, who regarded himself as an expert
in the field. He claimed to be able to recognize socialist music and to know
what type of song would inspire the people. He tried to impose his
judgement on the Soviet Union’s leading composer, Dmitri Shostakovich,
some of whose works were banned for being ‘bourgeois and formalistic’.
However, the Great Fatherland War gave Shostakovich the opportunity to
express his deep patriotism. His powerful orchestral works depicted in sound
the courageous struggle and final victory of the Soviet people. At the end of
the war, in return for being reinstated, he promised to bring his music closer
to ‘the folk art of the people’.

Stalin’s cult of personality How was propaganda

used to promote the
One of the strongest charges made against Stalin after his death was that he
idea of Stalin as an
had indulged in the cult of personality. He had certainly dominated every all-powerful leader?
aspect of Soviet life, becoming not simply a leader but the embodiment of
the nation itself. From the 1930s on, his picture appeared everywhere. Every
newspaper, book and film, no matter what its theme, carried a reference to
Stalin’s greatness. Biographies poured off the press, each one trying to outbid Cult of personality A
the other in its veneration of the leader. Every achievement of the USSR was consistent use of mass
credited to Stalin. Such was his all-pervasive presence that Soviet propaganda to promote the
communism became identified with him as a person. idea of the leader as an ideal,
heroic figure, elevated above
The cult of personality was not a spontaneous response of the people. It was ordinary people and politics.
imposed from above. The image of Stalin as hero and saviour of the Soviet
people was manufactured. It was a product of the Communist Party machine
which controlled all the main forms of information – newspapers, cinema
and radio, as Roy Medvedev, a Soviet historian who lived through Stalinism,
later explained (see Source P).
Source P

Excerpt from Let History Judge by Roy Medvedev, published by OUP, UK,
According to Source P,
1989, p. 588.
how did Stalin promote
Everywhere he put up monuments to himself – thousands upon thousands of the cult of personality?
factories and firms named [after] Stalin, and many cities: Stalinsk, Stalino,
Stalingrad … more than can be counted. When Stalin was encouraging the cult
of his personality he and his cohorts shamelessly falsified party history, twisting
and suppressing many facts and producing a flood of books, articles and
pamphlets filled with distortions.

The Stakhanovite movement

A fascinating example of distortion was the Stakhanovite movement. In August
1935, it was claimed that a coal miner, Alexei Stakhanov, had hewn fourteen

49
 times his required quota of coal in one shift. The story was wholly fabricated,
but the authorities exploited it so effectively that Stakhanov’s purported
achievement became an inspiring example of what heights could be reached by
selfless workers responding to the call of their great leader, Stalin.

Stalin in print
Stalin’s wisdom and brilliance was extolled daily in the official Soviet
newspapers. Hardly an article appeared in any journal that did not include
the obligatory reference to his greatness. Children learned from their earliest
moments to venerate Stalin as the provider of all good things. There were no
textbooks in any subject that did not laud the virtues of Stalin the master
builder of the Soviet nation and inspiration to his people.

Konsomol
A particularly useful instrument for the spread of Stalinist propaganda was
Konsomol The Soviet Konsomol, a youth movement which had begun in Lenin’s time but was
Communist Union of Youth. created as a formal body in 1926 under the direct control of the CPSU.
May Day Or ‘Labour Among its main features were the following:
Day’ – 1 May, traditionally ● It was open to those ages between 14 and 28, with a Young Pioneer
regarded as a special day for
honouring the workers and
movement for those under 14.
the achievements of ● It pledged itself totally to Stalin and the Party. (In this regard it paralleled
socialism. the Hitler Youth in Germany – see page 93.)
● Membership was not compulsory but its attraction for young people was
that it offered them the chance of eventual full membership of the CPSU.
● It grew from 2 million members in 1927 to 10 million in 1940.
Konsomol members were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the
Five-Year Plans, as they proved by going off in their thousands to help build
the new industrial cities. It was Konsomol which provided the flag-wavers
and the cheerleaders, and organized the huge gymnastic displays that
were the centrepieces of the massive parades on May Day and Stalin’s
birthday.

How did Stalin deal Treatment of national minorities

with the minority Although as a Georgian, Stalin belonged to one of the USSR’s minority
peoples within the
peoples, his concern was always with promoting the dominance of Russia
Soviet Union?
within the Soviet state. He feared that to allow minority rights would
encourage challenges to his central authority. One of his motives in
implementing the purges was to suppress any signs of national
independence by removing potential leaders of breakaway movements. A
basic method he employed to suppress possible opposition was to deport
whole peoples from their homeland to a distant region of the USSR.
Outstanding examples of this were:
● In 1940, the takeover of the Baltic states (Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia),
and of Bukovina and Bessarabia resulted in 2 million being deported, the
majority of whom died.

50
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

● In 1941, after the outbreak of war, Stalin, anxious to prevent the peoples of the
western region of the USSR from actively supporting the invading German
armies, ordered the deportation to Siberia of various national groups, including
Kalmyks, Ukrainians, Chechens, Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans; the
deportations led to the deaths of one-third of the 4 million involved.
● By 1945, some 20 million Soviet people had been uprooted.
Source Q

Map of Stalin’s deportations of minority peoples.

What does Source Q
1 Crimean Tatars 2 Volga 3 Kalmyks 4 Karachai 5 Moskhetians 6 Chechen-Ingush
Germans
indicate regarding the
extent of Stalin’s
deportation policies?

Barents
Sea
Baltic Sea

N
ER
Arctic Circle ST IA
EA IBER
S
1
2 Sea of
Black Okhotsk
Sea
4
5 3 SIBERIA
6 KAZAKHSTAN
Caspian
Sea
N
UZBEKISTAN

Minority nationalities
0 1000 General direction of the departures
km

Religion Why was religion

persecuted under
Religious persecution Stalin?
Stalin shared Lenin’s notion that religious faith had no place in a communist
society. Religion, with its other-worldly values, was seen as an affront to the
collective needs of the nation. In 1928, a campaign to close the churches was
begun. The Russian Orthodox Christian Church was the main target but all
religions and denominations were at risk. Clerics who refused to co-operate
were arrested; thousands in Moscow and Leningrad were sent into exile.
The suppression of religion in the urban areas proved a fairly straightforward Icons Paintings of Christ and
affair. It was a different story in the countryside. The destruction of the rural the saints; icons were one of
the great achievements of
churches and the confiscation of the relics and icons that most peasants had in
Russian culture.
their homes led to revolts in many areas. The authorities had failed to

51
 understand that what to their secular mind were merely superstitions were to
the peasants a precious part of their traditions. The result was widespread
resistance across the rural provinces of the USSR. The response of the authorities
was to declare that those who opposed the restrictions on religion were really
doing so in order to resist collectivization. This allowed the requisition squads to
brand the religious protesters as Kulaks and to seize their property.
Such was the bitterness these methods created that Stalin instructed his
officials to call a halt. But this was only temporary. In the late 1930s, as part
of the Great Terror, the assault on religion was renewed:
● 800 higher clergy and 4,000 ordinary priests were imprisoned, along with
many thousands of ordinary worshippers
● by 1940, only 500 churches were open for worship in the Soviet Union –
1 per cent of the figure for 1917.

Worship of Stalin
Despite the Soviet denunciation of religious faith, the authorities were not above
using the residually powerful religious sense of the Soviet people to promote
Stalin’s image. Traditional worship, with its veneration of the saints, its icons,
prayers and incantations translated easily into the new regime. Stalin became an
icon. This was literally true. His picture was carried on giant flags in the great
organized processions, such as those held on May Day and Stalin’s birthday. A
French visitor, present at one of these processions in Moscow’s Red Square, was
staggered by the sight of a flypast of planes all trailing huge portraits of Stalin.
‘My God!’ he exclaimed.‘Exactly, Monsieur’, said his Russian guide.

Impact of the war on religious persecution

The war against Germany and its allies, which began for the Soviet Union in
June 1941, brought a respite in the persecution of the churches. While official
policy was to denigrate religion, there were occasions when it proved highly
useful to the authorities. Wartime provided such an occasion. Stalin was
shrewd enough to enlist religion in fighting the Great Fatherland War. The
churches were re-opened, the clergy released and the people encouraged to
celebrate the uplifting Orthodox Church ceremonies. For the period of the
war, the Soviet authorities under Stalin played down politics and
emphasized nationalism. Talk of the proletarian struggle gave way to an
appeal to defend holy Russia against the godless invaders.
The Church leaders responded as Stalin had intended. The clergy turned
their services into patriotic gatherings, which expressed passionate defiance
of the Germans. They urged their congregations to rally behind their
great leader, Stalin, in a supreme war effort. The reward for the Church’s
co-operation was a lifting of the anti-religious persecution.

Post-war suppression
The improved Church-state relations continued after the war. By the time of
Stalin’s death in 1953, 25,000 churches had re-opened along with a number

52
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

of monasteries and seminaries. However, this did not represent any real
freedom for the Orthodox Church. The price for being allowed to exist
openly was its total subservience to the regime. In 1946, Stalin required that Seminaries Training
all the Christian denominations in the Soviet Union come under the colleges for priests.
authority of the Orthodox Church which was made responsible for ensuring
that organized religion did not become a source of political opposition. The
Church became, in effect, an arm of government.

Education What role did

education play in
Stalin believed that a first step in modernizing the USSR was to spread literacy.
consolidating Stalin’s
To this end, formal education was made a priority, with these key features: authority?
● ten years of compulsory schooling for all children aged five to fifteen
● core curriculum specified reading and writing, maths, science, history,
geography, Russian language and Marxist theory
● state-prescribed textbooks to be used
● homework to be a regular requirement
● state-organized tests and examinations
● school uniforms made compulsory
● fees to be charged for the last three years (ages fifteen to eighteen) of
non-compulsory secondary schooling.

Development of an elite
The emphasis on regulation was not accidental. The intention was to create a
disciplined generation of young people ready to join the workforce which was
engaged through the Five-Year Plans in constructing the new communist
society. The last feature, regarding the payment of fees, may appear to challenge
the notion of an egalitarian education system. The official justification for it was
that the Soviet Union needed a specially trained section of the community to
serve the people in expert ways; doctors and scientists were obvious examples.
Those who stayed on at school after the age of fifteen were obviously young
people of marked ability who would eventually enter university to become the
specialists of the future. This was undeniably a selection process, but the
argument was that it was selection by ability, not by class.
That was the official line. However, although there was an undoubted rise in
overall standards, the system also created an educated elite. Those who continued
their education after the age of fifteen were mainly the children of government
officials and Party members who could afford the fees. Private tuition and private
education became normal for them. As a consequence, as university education
expanded, it was Party members or their children who had the first claim on the
best places. As graduates, they then had access to the three key areas of Soviet
administration – industry, the civil service and the armed services. Nomenklatura The Soviet
‘establishment’ – privileged
The nomenklatura officials who ran the Party
The promotional process had an important political consequence. It enhanced and government.
Stalin’s power by creating a nomenklatura that had every motive for

53
 supporting him. The poet, Osip Mandelstam, described this precisely: ‘A thin
layer of privileged people gradually came into being with“packets”. Those who
had been granted a share of the cake eagerly did everything asked of them.’

How did the status of The status of women

women in the Soviet
Union change under Marriage
Stalin? In keeping with their Marxist rejection of marriage as a bourgeois institution,
Lenin’s Bolsheviks had made divorce easier and had attempted to liberate
women from the bondage of children and family. However, after only a brief
period of experiment, Lenin’s government had come to question its earlier
enthusiasm for sweeping change in this area. Stalin shared their doubts.
‘Packets’ Special benefits, Indeed, he was convinced the earlier Bolshevik social experiment had failed.
such as villas and cars. By the end of the 1930s, the Soviet divorce rate was the highest in Europe –
one divorce for every two marriages. This led him to embark on what has
been called ‘the great retreat’. Stalin began to stress the value of the family as
a stabilizing influence in society. He let it be known that he did not approve
of the sexual freedoms that had followed the 1917 Revolution. He argued
that a good communist was a socially responsible one: ‘a poor husband and
father, a poor wife and mother, cannot be good citizens’.
Stalin, aware of the social upheavals collectivization and industrialization
were causing, was trying to create some form of balance by emphasizing the
traditional social values attaching to the role of women as home-makers and
child-raisers. He was also greatly exercised by the number of orphaned
children living on the streets of the urban areas. Left to fend for themselves,
the children had formed themselves into feral gangs of scavengers and
violent thieves. Disorder of this kind further convinced Stalin of the need to
re-establish family structures.

Changes in social policy

His first major move came in June 1936 with a decree that reversed much of
earlier Bolshevik social policy:
● Unregistered marriages were no longer recognized.
● Divorce was made more difficult.
● The right to abortion was severely restricted.
● The family was declared to be the basis of Soviet society.
● Homosexuality was outlawed.
Conscious of both the falling birth rate and of how many people were dying
in the Great Fatherland War, the authorities introduced measures in July
1944 re-affirming the importance of the family in the USSR and giving
incentives to women to have large numbers of children:
● Restrictions on divorce were further tightened.
● Abortion was totally outlawed.
● Mothers with more than two children were declared to be ‘heroines of the
Soviet Union’.

54
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

● Heavier taxes were imposed on parents with fewer than two children.
● The right to inherit family property was re-established.

Women and equality

One group that certainly felt they had lost out were the female members of
the Party and the intelligentsia, who had welcomed the Russian Revolution Intelligentsia Persons of
as the beginning of female liberation. However, the strictures on sexual influence in the intellectual
freedom under Stalin, and the emphasis on family and motherhood, allowed world; for example,
little room for the notion of the independent female. academics and writers.
Neopatriarchal A new
Soviet propaganda spoke of the equality of women, but there was no great
form of male domination.
advance towards this in practical terms. A ‘Housewives’ Movement’ was
created in 1936 under Stalin’s patronage. Composed largely of the wives of
high-ranking industrialists and managers, it set itself the task of ‘civilizing’
the tastes and improving the conditions of the workers. However, the reality
was that few resources were allocated and little attention was paid to
organizations such as this. Stalin spoke continually of the nation being under
siege and of the need to build a war economy. This made any movement not
directly concerned with industrial production or defence seem largely
irrelevant. Most women’s organizations fell into this category.

Impact of war on women’s status

There were individual cases of women gaining in status and income in
Stalin’s time. However, these were in a small minority and were invariably
unmarried or childless women. Married women with children carried a
double burden. The great demand for labour that accompanied Stalin’s
industrialization drive required that women join the workforce. They now had
to fulfil two roles: as mothers raising the young and as workers contributing
to the modernization of the Soviet Union. This imposed great strains upon
them, markedly so during the war of 1941–45. The loss of men at the front
and the desperate need to keep the armaments factories running meant that
women became indispensable. In 1936 there had been 9 million women in
the industrial workforce. By 1945, the number had risen to 15 million.
Equally striking figures, such as those in Source R (page 56), show that
during the war over half a million women fought in the Soviet armed forces
and that, by 1945, half of all Soviet workers were female. Without their effort
the USSR could not have survived. Yet women received no comparable
reward. Despite their contribution to the Five-Year Plans and to the war
effort, women’s pay rates in real terms dropped between 1930 and 1945.
The clear conclusion is that, for all the Soviet talk of women’s progress under
Stalinism, the evidence suggests that they were increasingly exploited. It is
hard to dispute the conclusion of the distinguished scholar, Geoffrey
Hosking, that ‘the fruits of female emancipation became building blocks of
the Stalinist neopatriarchal social system’.

55
 Source R

Number of women in the Soviet industrial workforce.

Study Source R. What main
trend is observable regarding 15
women’s role in Soviet 14
industry? 13
12

Number of women (millions)

11
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
1928 1936 1940 1945
Year

Stakhanovite ‘Social realism’ in arts,

Konsomol Media
movement music, film, etc.

Stalin’s cult of State promotion of the

personality Russian language and ethnic
Russians
Literacy increases
Stalin’s
Education Minorities Nationalism suppressed
impact

Compulsory for ages

Deportations of non-Russian
five to fifteen
ethnic groups during Great
Women Religion Fatherland War
Nomenklatura class
develops from those
able to pay for extra
Churches closed and religious
education from ages
authorities arrested and exiled
fifteen to eighteen

Purge of religious imagery

Technically equal before law and churches in cities
Difficult to obtain divorce
but expected to be traditional
and encouraged to have
housewives and industrial workers Religion used to support
children to support state
at same time state during war

Summary diagram

Stalin’s domestic policies and their impact, 1929–53

56
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

4 Key debate
Key question: How far did Stalin achieve a totalitarian state?

There will probably never be total agreement as to what Stalinism actually

was, but the following list suggests some of the principal features of the
system which operated during the quarter of a century during which Stalin
had mastery over the USSR:
● Stalin ran the USSR by a bureaucratic system of government.
● He fulfilled the work begun by Lenin of turning revolutionary Russia into
a one-party state.
● Political and social control was maintained by a terror system whose main
instruments were regular purges and show trials directed against the
Party, the armed services and the people.
● Stalin created a command economy with agriculture and industry under
central direction.
● Stalin’s highly individual rule developed into a ‘cult of personality’ which
led to his becoming absolute in authority since he was regarded as the
embodiment of the Communist Party and the nation.
● He created a siege mentality in the USSR, insisting that even in peace
time the Soviet people had to be on permanent guard from enemies
within and hostile nations outside.
● He imposed his concept of ‘socialism in one country’, a policy which
subordinated everything to the interests of the Soviet Union as a nation.
● Stalin’s rule meant the suppression of any form of genuine democracy, since
he operated on the principle, laid down by Lenin, of democratic centralism
(see pages 19–20), which obliged members of the CPSU to accept uncritically
and obey all orders and instructions handed down by the Party leaders.
● The USSR recognized only one correct and acceptable ideology: Marxism-
Leninism-Stalinism. All other belief systems were prohibited.
● Strict censorship was imposed as a means of enforcing cultural conformity
in accordance with Stalin’s notion of socialist realism.

Character of the Soviet state What were the main

features of the Soviet
Such details present a strong argument for defining Stalin’s regime as
state under Stalin?
totalitarian. However, some historians are reluctant to use that particular
adjective to describe Stalin’s domination of the USSR. They suggest that he
was not all-powerful – no one individual in a nation can be – and that his
power depended on the willingness of thousands of underlings to carry out
his orders and policies. While not disputing the huge impact that Stalin had
upon his country, such writers point to other areas of significant
development that occurred which did not depend on Stalin. This school of
thought concentrates not so much on what Stalin did during the era he
dominated the USSR, but on the character of Soviet communism itself.

57
 The Communist Party Intrinsic violence of Soviet communism
of the Soviet Union Richard Overy draws attention to the violence that was intrinsic to Soviet
claimed its policies communism. He quotes Stalin’s assertion that violence was an ‘inevitable law
would lead to a more of the revolutionary movement’ and links it to Lenin’s declaration that the
equal society which task of Bolshevism was ‘the ruthless destruction of the enemy’. The Stalinist
was classless and
purges, therefore, were a logical historical progression.
without economic
competition. Why do Lack of a tradition of civil rights
people work to make a
In this connection, other scholars have laid weight on how undeveloped the
more equal society?
concepts of individual or civil rights were in Russia. Tsardom had been an
(Language, History,
Ethics, Human autocracy in which the first duty of the people had been to obey. The
Sciences, Emotion) Communists had not changed that. Indeed, they had re-emphasized the
necessity of obedience to central authority.

Self-interest of the nomenklatura

It was certainly true Stalin had no difficulty in finding eager subordinates to
organize the purges. The common characteristic of those who led Stalin’s
campaigns was their unswerving personal loyalty to him, a loyalty that
overcame any doubts they might have had regarding the nature of their
work. They formed the new class of officials that Stalin created to replace the
old Bolsheviks, whom he had decimated in the purges. One prominent
historian, M. Agursky, has stressed this development as the basic explanation
of why terror became so embedded in the Stalinist system. Dedicated to
Stalin on whom their positions depended, the nomenklatura enjoyed rights
and privileges denied to the rest of the population. Including their families,
they numbered around 600,000 (1.2 per cent of the population) by the late
1930s. Such persons once in post were unlikely to question Stalin’s orders.
The more potential rivals they exterminated the safer their jobs were.

Fear of Stalin
In a major study, Simon Sebag Montefiore has added an interesting slant by
illustrating the eagerness with which Stalin’s top ministers carried out his
campaigns of terror and persecution. Though they were terrified of him, they
did not simply obey him out of fear. People like Beria and Molotov derived
the same vindictive satisfaction from their work as their master. Like him,
they appeared to have no moral scruples.

Revolution from above

Yet the hard fact remains that, notwithstanding the attitudes of ordinary
Soviet people, of the nomenklatura, and of government ministers, it was
Stalin who gave the USSR its essential shape. Whatever the motives of those
who carried out Stalin’s policies, he was the great motivator. Little of
importance took place in the USSR of which he did not approve. That is why
some prominent historians, such as Robert Tucker, still speak of Stalinism as
‘revolution from above’, meaning that the changes that occurred under
Stalin were directed by him from the top down. This is one definition of
Stalin’s totalitarianism that is likely to stand.

58
 Chapter 2: The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53

judgement, imposed his authority. He was backed in

this by officials and administrators who were eager to fill
the positions that the purges made vacant.
In building his power, Stalin developed a ‘cult
The USSR under Joseph Stalin, 1924–53 of personality’. Soviet propaganda extolled him as
the supremely wise leader of the nation, whose
Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin proved
inspired understanding covered all areas of political,
victorious in a power struggle with both the Left and
economic and social life. Strength was given to this
the Right of the Soviet Communist Party. With the
image by Stalin’s successful guidance of his people
defeat of his main rival, Trotsky, in 1929, Stalin was free
through the Great Fatherland War against Germany
to shape the USSR according to his own design. Under
between 1941 and 1945. Victory in the war also
the slogan ‘Socialism in One Country’, he planned to
appeared to vindicate the harsh measures he had
modernize the USSR so that it would not be at the
previously adopted in enforcing industrialization at
mercy of its external enemies. To achieve this, he
breathless speed.
launched a ‘second revolution’: the Soviet economy
Stalin’s all-pervading influence extended into culture.
was to be revolutionized through collectivization and
It was at his insistence that all creative artists conform to
industrialization, policies which involved a huge social
his notion of ‘social realism’. He also made
upheaval.
improvement in education a priority, successfully
It was to quell the protests caused by the turmoil
encouraging the raising of literacy levels among the
that Stalin resorted to the purges, a system of
people. A social conservative by nature, Stalin was
oppression that lasted from the early 1930s until his
unhappy at some of the progressive developments that
death in 1953. The purges were used to remove all
had occurred since 1917. He insisted that the family
real and imagined opposition to him: the Communist
and the role of women as mothers and homemakers
Party, the armed services, and ordinary citizens were all
must remain central to Soviet society.
targeted as Stalin, driven as much by paranoia as rational

59
 Examination practice
Below are a number of different questions for you to practise. For guidance on how to answer exam-style
questions, see Chapter 10.

1 Explain Stalin’s rise to power by 1928.

2 Discuss the role of propaganda in maintaining Stalin as the Soviet Union’s leader.
3 Analyse the importance of ideology in Stalin’s rise and maintenance of power until his death.
4 To what extent were Stalin’s economic plans successful?
5 How did Stalin view the role of women in Soviet society?
6 What was the importance of the purges for Stalin?
7 How did Stalin’s rule impact upon religion and minority groups?
8 Discuss the impact of Stalin’s rule on the arts.
9 To what extent was Stalin successful in achieving his political and economic aims by 1941?
10 Analyse the impact of Stalin’s rule on peasants and industrial workers by 1941.

Activities
1 Create a timeline of Stalin’s rise to, and consolidation of, power (1917–53). You could expand this to
include visual images, biographies and historiography.
2 Consider the following points with reference to history and TOK in a class discussion:
a) Stalin’s rule destroyed the lives of many people, but this was acceptable since the majority of the
Soviet Union’s citizens benefited.
b) The goal of a totally equal society is a moral obligation for the world’s citizens.
c) Social and economic equality is unobtainable and should therefore not be attempted.
3 Research the views of Trotsky in regards to communism. Compare and contrast these views with
Stalin’s. Make a judgement as to which of these two visions of communism was:
a) more practical
b) more in line with Marxism
c) more likely to succeed.

60