The Soviet State under Stalin

Was Stalinist Russia totalitarian?

Totalitarian state v totalitarian basis of Stalinist Russia

• Political power is in the hands of a single ruling party, and no other parties or independent political activity is allowed

  • There was only one legal political party, and after the Civil War, all effective opposition ended

  • The ban on factionalism prevented opposition within the party

  • Stalin had destroyed remaining party opposition by 1929

• The party has an ideology which in effect acts as a kind of religion, holding the nation together

  • Ideology provided justification for Stalin’s actions and often served to motivate individuals

  • The party also wanted ideology to supplant religion

• The party is led by a single, charismatic dictator who, through state propaganda, is presented as the personification of the nation

  • Although some doubt Stalin’s charisma, the development of a cult of personality presented Stalin as the nation’s strong, reliable leader in troubled times, personifying the Soviet state

• The party has control of all institutions in the state, be they economic, social, cultural

  • The party had come to dominate institutions in all areas of life ranging from the Young Communist League (Komsomol) and the armed forces by 1930s

  • Participation in activities was vetted and attended by party officials

• The party controls public opinion and all means of media communication, the arts and education, giving it the power to rewrite the past

  • The party had controlled all media and education, ensuring it presented the party line and correct ways of thinking

  • Socialist realism was the only acceptable style for the arts and the media promoted the cult of personality

  • Stalin even rewrote the past and edited photos

• The party intrudes on all aspects of an individual’s life, including work, social, political and personal life, seeking to control an individual’s thinking

  • The state determined where one worked, lived and studied

  • The demands of collectivisation and industrialisation increased this control with the introduction of labour books and internal passports

• The state will use the full apparatus of state terror to impose its will and maintain its control over individuals

  • Collectivisation was achieved through state terror

  • The purges and the terror in the late 1930s showed the willingness of Stalin to hurl the full weight of the state terror apparatus against enemies of the state

Despite these points, an argument could be presented to weaken the view that Stalinist Russia was a totalitarian state

• The Soviet Union was a vast unwieldy state that stretched from Eastern Europe to the Far East, the Arctic and the borders of India

  • In the 1930s, transport remained limited and unreliable, so it was difficult to ensure that decisions made in Moscow were carried out in every ethnic enclave

• Stalin blamed the excesses of the collectivisation program on the excessive zeal of some GPU committees, suggesting that he was not in control

  • Party organisations far from Moscow had a tendency to act independently

Theda Skocpol

Sheila Fitzpatrick

• “Soviet citizens were at all levels of society were subjected to intense secret police surveillance and were constantly subject to possible arrest for real or imagined infractions, often followed by long, indeed indeterminate sentences to forced-labour camps”

• “Soviet people behaved in a most “un-1984” manner, describing the Russian people as occasional risk-takers who played the dangerous game of denouncing their bossess, telling anti-Soviet jokes and making obscene gestures at official sacred images in public spaces”

The 1920s apparent prosperity and stability of the country hid some fundamental problems

• By 1927, the country was facing an economic crisis due to the scissors crisis

  • The price of industrial goods was increasing, due to inefficient production and lack of development, while the price of agricultural goods was falling, meaning less grain on the market

• Industrial growth was slowing, suggesting that NEP was not producing the capital needed for the industry to expand

  • One solution was to increase taxes and reduce grain prices, which would further result in food shortages that had begun in 1927

  • The other was to lower taxes and increase the price of grain, preventing food shortages but leading to less capital being available for industrialisation

The lack of capital was the issue for socialism to develop, needing a foundation of abundance, meaning that Russia needed to modernise and industrialise alone

• There are three key elements required for industrialisation: labour, resources, and capital

  • While Russia had the first two, it lacked the capital
    
    Why was this?

• Foreign capital was unlikely, as Western nations would not invest in a socialist economy, and the Bolshevik repudiation of pre-war loans

• Recycled profits from Russian capitalist enterprises were limited

• As a predominantly agricultural society, capital for industrial development needed to come from the peasant sector, but peasants were reducing their grain output

  • The 1927 war scare made industrialisation an urgent priority

What was Stalin’s issues to economic issues in the 1920s?

Collectivisation of agriculture, forcing peasants onto large collective farms which would use modern technology to increase grain production, which would be sold internationally to provide capital for industrialisation

• Collectivisation → increases use of technology → increased output → overseas sales → capital is acquired → industrialisation

What were the political gains to be made from collectivisation of argiculture

• Removal of right-wing opponents

• Full political control of the countryside

• Destroy the kulaks as a class

Kulaks were divided into three main groups, however definitions became loose, and soon many ordinary peasants were condemned

• Active counter-revolutionaries to be shot or sent to camps

• Other wealthy kulaks to be sent to Siberia

• Less powerful kulaks were allowed to stay in their district, but outside the collective

A committee in each village was formed, comprising the local party secretary, the President of the Committee of the Soviets and the local chief of the GPU

What did the process of dekulakisation resemble and look like?

• The countryside began to resemble a bloody civil war as party officials used brute force, and peasants replied in an equal manner

• Peasants did anything rather than give away possessions - kill animals, burn crops and gorge on food

The process of dekulakisation was particularly cruel and brutal in the Ukraine, the “bread basket” of the USSR

• Stalin allowed a man-made famine to occur, Holodomor, by allowing no grain in the starvation areas

• The motive here was not just economic, but also destroyed the Ukrainian national opposition

By 1937, the process of collectivisation was almost complete

Was it a disaster or success

It was simultaneously both

Collectivisation was an absolute disaster

• The livestock population and grain harvest plummeted between 1929 and 1934 

  • Horses 55%, cattle 40%, sheep 66% and pigs 53%

• The violence, deportations and famines associated with the process led to the deaths of five to ten million people

Stalin would consider the policy a success

Politically:

• The Communist Party was in complete control of the countryside with the end of private ownership, with no chance of a rival political force

• Peasants were dependent on the state as its employees, holding a monopoly over farm technology

• Ukrainian nationalism was destroyed

Socially:

• Dekulakisation destroyed the previous rural social structure and weakened the influence of religion, one of Stalin’s targets

• Peasants lost their independence and were under the control of their state masters

Economically:

• Grain procurements from the harvest reached 32% in 1934, from 15% in 1928

• Grain exports went from 0.029 million tonnes in 1929 to 4.76 million tonnes in 1930 to 5.05 million tonnes in 1931

• The exports needed to acquire capital for industrialisation had been acquired

David Christian (collectivisation)

• “Although in the short run the kolhozy (collectives) had failed as farms, they had succeeded as fiscal devices - as extractors of resources…Collectivisation (had secured for) the Soviet government the sort of power over the countryside that the tsarist government had at its height”

In the 1920s, the Soviet economy was almost a century behind major European powers, predominantly agricultural and small cottage industries

• Within a decade, the Soviet Union became the second industrial power in the world, with the largest air force in 1940
  
  How was this possible?

Through the implementation of Five Year Plans

What were the Five Year Plans

• The state took total control of the entire economy

  • Central planning allowed for both long-term and short-term targets set for an industry, region or individual enterprise

• The plans had the force of law

  • Failure to reach these targets was a criminal offence, accusing people of sabotage and treason

  • Those who exceeded targets were lauded in the press and received bonuses

• The central planning of society was a “top down process”

  • The party established overall targets, leaving it up to Commissariats of various industries to work out the details

  • Commissariats would work through regional administrators

  • Regional administrators would establish plans and targets for the enterprise

While this system may suggest logic and planning, central planning, especially for the first Five-Year Plan, was extremely chaotic

• Lack of coordination between different sectors of the economy and party officials at all levels frequently interfered with production

• Managers and officials were appointed/dismissed for political rather than economic reasons

What was the emphasis of the first Five Year Plan

•  heavy industry, which was the basis of western economic strength: core, iron ore, steel, oil and transport

  • Major industrial areas were established from nothing such as Magnitogorsk in the Urals Mountains and in western Siberia

  • Traditional industry areas such as the Donetsk were further developed

What prestige projects were developed during the first Five Year Plan

• Dnieper Dam, Moscow-Volga Canal and the Moscow underground railway system

How did the Five Year Plans impact ordinary Russians

Ordinary Russians were offered many opportunities for wider education, training courses and bonuses

• Workers were constantly changing jobs in search of higher wages as skilled labourers

However, labour discipline was harsh with tough punishments for lateness, absenteeism, poor quality work, leaving a job without permission or damaging equipment

• By the late 1930s, an internal passport system controlled workers’ movements

• Each worker had a labour book containing work history, qualifications and a record or mistakes

• Living standards plummeted alongside consumer industries, housing and food production

The government also used the hundreds of thousands of kulaks and prisoners to work as forced labour for massive projects such as

• The Baltic-White Sea Canal was one such project, which ultimately failed as it was too shallow for ships to use

Despite all these issues, the five-year plans were impressive

How many were there, how long did they go for, and what did they achieve

First Plan 1928-1932	Concentrated on heavy industry 1500 enterprises started Decline in consumer industries and smaller enterprises Skills shortages and lack of labour stability The Great Depression affected grain prices Much investment had to go into collectivisation
Second Plan 1933-1937	Heavy industry still preferred, but transport given higher priority 4500 new enterprises Expansion of the chemical industry Consumer industries slightly improved Targets were more reasonable as the excessive excitement of the First Plan had been overcome
Third Plan 1938-1941	Did not go to full-term because of German invasion Emphasis on heavy industry and armaments Consumer industries suffering Factories ran short of supplies and could not meet targets due to military priorities Coincided with the Purges and the Terror, depriving factories of the specialist and industrial personnel needed to meet targets

Can we get an accurate understanding of the results of collectivisation or five year plans

Impossible to verify statistics during this period as managers exaggerated their achievements to avoid punishment and the party for propaganda reasons

While the USSR in the 1930s might appear negative, with brutal collectivisation, brainwashing and terrror, many Russians

• approached these challenges with idealism as Stalin was leading the nation towards the future

  • The young wanted to play their part in history as their parents had in the revolution and civil war

  • Patriotism motivated individuals, as Russia was building socialism while the west was stuck in depression

  • Propaganda inspired people with language, “socialist offensive” and “mobilising the nation”

    • The Stakhanovite movement encouraged idealistic sacrifice by promoting the efforts of workers

  • Industrialisation attracted foreign workers

Economic transformation under Stalin

Lionel Kochan

Helene Carrere d’Encausse

Alec Nove

• “Technical institutes, colleges and universities, factory schools, all were pressed into service to provide new cadres of skilled workers”

• “The whole society had been thrown into an inexorable whirlpool, so that at the end of the ordeal no one remained where he had been some years earlier. Every individual had been displaced, uprooted from his environment, projected into the new world”

• “The simplest thing to do was to avoid responsibility, to seek approval from one’s superiors for any act, to obey mechanically any order received, regardless of local conditions”

What was Stalin’s multifaceted role in the Soviet state in the 1930s

• Dominated the Communist Party through control of the bureaucracy, with terror and purges in the 1930s, removing any form of independence

  • Everyone in the party owed their positions to the “great helmsman”

• Became the embodiment of the nation, and a “cult of personality” was developed around Stalin

• All aspects of society came under Stalinist control, including women, the arts, and history

• Stalin had ultimate control over the secret police and justice systems

• The Soviet Union transformed into a modern industrialised society under his rule

However, the system developed in the 1930s, called Stalinism, comprised more than Stalin

McCauley:

• “Without willing cohorts in all aspects of human endeavour, Stalinism would not have flowered. It was his ability to inspire, respond to and ensnare a whole generation that makes Stalin a consummate political actor”

Purging the party had been a regular feature of party life since the Bolsheviks had taken power in November 1917 under Lenin, with the aim of

To remove people from the party who were corrupt or inefficient; careerists, who did not genuinely believe in the principles of socialism but in personal advancement

• These purges were non-life-threatening, often being demoted, suspended or expelled from the party (which were non-permanent)

• Those purged could appeal to the Central Control Commission in Moscow alongside the party Central Committee, who were connected through the General Secretary

  • Stalin unofficially conducted these early purges

Throughout the 1920s, there were several purges, followed by a surge in party membership

Three major milestones of political transformation

• By the late 1920s, Stalin was using purges to remove his political opponents in the power struggle

• In 1928, the first show trial occurred

• In 1933, a major party purge occurred, with 20% of party members being expelled, Zinoviev and Kamenev among them, during the pressures of economic transformation

During 1934, there was a gradual easing of pressure inside the Soviet Union, as targets were eased during the Second Five-Year Plan, alongside concessions for peasants

What did this look like?

• The 1934 harvest was plentiful enough to end rationing, prisoners were released, and old Bolsheviks were readmitted

Helene D’Encausse (Political transformation)

• “The noose seemed to slacken, and the Soviet citizens could allow themselves to believe that with the end of the First Five-Year Plan, the most difficult stage of the development of the USSR had also come to an end”

This period of relative peace ended with the  murder of Sergei Kirov on 1 December 1934

How was he assassinated?

• The alleged assassin was a communist named Nikolayev, Kirov having an affair with his wife and reneged on giving him his promised job

• However, in Khruschev’s De-Stalinisation speech, he declared that Kirov was murdered by Stalin with the NKVD

  • Stalin saw Kirov as a dangerous rival, who was becoming a party favourite, and as the stresses of the First Five-Year Plan worsened, Stalin’s position was not secure

  • Kirov’s death allowed Stalin to unleash a new wave of purges against rivals

In March 1935, the Kirov Decrees were announced, caused

• The minimum age of the death penalty was lowered to twelve

• Parasites and anyone who knew one was to be executed

  • Stalin demanded “collective responsibility” and called on people to look out for “enemies of the people”

  • Thousands of people were denounced to the NKVD for irrelevant reasons

Table of Show Trials

Date:	The Accused:	Alleged Crimes:	The Trial:	Results:
January 1935	Zinoviev Kamenev Various others	Establishing an opposition group in Moscow	Show trial with no evidence and outrageous allegations	Zinoviev got 10 years Kamenev got 5 years Others lesser
August 1936	Zinoviev Kamenev Various others	Kirov’s murder Planning Stalin’s murder Creating a terrorist centre	Referred to as a terrorist counter-revolutionary Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc Trotsky always remained in the background	All confessed All were shot
January 1937	The Trial of the Seventeen Various others	Plotting with Trotsky Economic sabotage Conspiring with Germany and Japan	Brings a foreign threat to intimidate as the international situation deteriorates	All confessed 13 were shot
Mid 1937	Red Army leaders Civil War heroes like Tukhachevsky	Plotting with Germany for the overthrow of Stalin	Tried in camera No post-war evidence from German documents supports accusations	All were shot Full-scale purge of the army
March 1938	Bukharin Rykov Yagoda (ex-NKVD chief)	Economic sabotage Conspiring with foreign powers Planning to murder Stalin Planning to murder Lenin	Referred to as the bloc of anti-Soviet rightists and Trotskyites Yagoda’s presence meant that even the secret police were not safe	All confessed All were shot

In September 1936, Yagoda was replaced as head of the NKVD by Nikolai Yezhov, who would last three years before he was shot

What was Yezhov’s impact on terror machinery?

• Very short and known as the “bloodthirsty dwarf”, he was a man devoid of principle and inclined to sadistic pleasures

• The terror from 1937 to 1938 carries his name, Yezhovschina

  • Local NKVD officers were given quotas to fill, with a fixed percentage of the arrested to be executed, while the remainder were given an additional 10 years

  • The terror spread to all aspects of Soviet society

    • Even Stalin’s close confidant, Commissar of Heavy Industry Ordzhonikidze, had a disagreement with Stalin in 1937 and was given the option of suicide, a funeral or execution

    • Foreign communists in Russia also became targets

    • Trotsky was murdered by a secret agent in Mexico in 1940

  • Media campaigns exhorted people to seek out potential spies and saboteurs

  • The terror covered the nation in fear, but also atomised society

Other wide-ranging effects of the purges

• The terror, combined with the impact of the economic changes, led to a massive loss of life

  • Robert Conquest suggest figures in the millions

  • The Second Five-Year plan expected the population to be 180 million in 1937; it was 164 million

• The terror had transformed the communist party

  • Most of the victims had been old party members of the Bolsheviks

  • It was now a young party, whose members could only recall Stalin’s leadership and owed their careers to him

• The nature of the secret police had changed

  • The CHEKA was formed in 1917 to protect the revolution from counter-revolutionaries during the civil war period

  • By 1922, it had transformed into a permanent organisation, the GPU, under the party’s control

  • By the late 1930s, the situation had reversed, the NKVD controlling the party, with Stalin above it all

• Non-Russian groups throughout the Soviet Union suffered enormously

  • Removed the leadership of non-Russian groups in the country, following policies of Russification, including in Georgia

• The armed forces were affected in a catastrophic manner

  • The terror decapitated the army

    • All 8 marshals

    • ⅗ marshals

    • 14/16 Army Commanders

    • 60/67 Corps Commanders

    • 136/199 Divisional Commanders

    • 35,000 Officer Corps (half)

    • 11 Deputy Commissars of Defence

    • 75/80 members of the Supreme Military Council

While the terror developed a momentum of its own, the ultimate responsibility remains with Stalin, despite many Russians believing in his obliviousness

What were the factors behind the terror?

• The party wanted to blame Stalin due to his paranoia and perverted personality, as a way for the party and system to avoid culpability

• Western writers blame communist ideology

• Deutscher suggests it was Stalin’s fear of an imminent attack from Nazi Germany, removing opposition to have a totally unified nation

(Political transformation)

Theda Skocpol

Helene Carrere d’Encausse

• “Stalin’s drive to establish and maintain his own personal dictatorship… provides the most straightforward explanation for these arrests and murders of thousands of Party and non-Party leaders”

• “On the contrary, the mutual distrust, the fear of being compromised, had isolated every individual. This social atomisation was a decisive help to Stalin’s power, which was able from then on to grow unhindered”

Stalinism had what impact on social and cultural change in the USSR

Enormous

Women under Lenin and the Bolsheviks

• From the November Revolution, Lenin and the Bolshevik party supported the efforts of Alexandra Kollontai, Commissar of Social Welfare, for equal rights of women

• Women made significant gains in the early years of the Bolsheviks

  • January 1918 women were given civil, legal and electoral equality

  • Marriage and divorce were made equal, and abortion legalised

  • Women were allowed to fight in the Civil War, and in 1920, a Bolshevik Women’s Section was established, the Zhenotdel, under Kollontai and Krupskaya

• Although women were given wider education and work responsibilities during the economic transformation of the 1930s, Russia did not achieve equality overnight

  • Russia had a history of male chauvinism, and women were still expected to do the housework

  • Men took advantage of sexual freedom with ‘postcard’ divorces, and millions of children grew up without parental homes

    • Kollontai died a disappointed woman, as her revolution of women never eventuated

Women under Stalin

• Stalin reverted to more conservative values due to mass political, economic and now social upheaval

  • The birth rate was decreasing, while juvenile crime increased as Soviet cities were overrun with homeless children

  • This official approach was known as the ‘great retreat’, introduced under the Family Code of 1936

    • Abortion was illegal unless necessary for the health of the mother

    • Divorces became more expensive and time-consuming with divorce-meetings

    • Government provided a higher proportion of benefits for every child birthed

    • Homosexuality and prostitution was criminalised, and pro-family/children laws frowned on illegitimacy

  • The terror policies of the 1930s also influenced domestic issues

    • The NKVD became involved in juvenile crime in the 1930s, and the death penalty was lowered to 12

    • Attempts to place homeless children in orphanages and parents were fined if their children committed violent crimes

Education under Stalin

• The late 1920s witnessed the ‘cultural revolution’, as young people were encouraged to become critical of bourgeois society and discover proletarian values

  • This also questioned the value and authority of schools and teachers, who were branded as bourgeois specialists

  • Young members of the Komsomol became actively involved in achieving this vision, teaching peasants how to read and write

• By the early 1930s, Stalin called the end to the cultural revolution, as Russia’s schools were in chaos and citizens in need of discipline and education

  • Teaching became more conservative and conventional, following a tight curriculum, and reintroducing homework, uniforms and exams

  • Universities began rewarding academic success over proletarianism, and respect for teachers was reinstalled

• During the cultural revolution, history teachers were persecuted as their emphasis on tsars was irrelevant in a socialist nation

  • By the mid-1930s, Stalin decreed history should be taught with reference to previous tsars, such as Ivan the Terrible

  • There was also a rewriting of revolutionary history

    • John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and Trotsky’s accounts were banned

    • In 1938, A Shestakov’s A Short History of the USSR was made compulsory in all schools

      • Positioned Stalin as a central figure and removed Trotsky

Culture and the arts under Stalin

• During the 1920s, Russia experienced a significant period of cultural activity

  • Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet cinema rivalled Hollywood

  • Karl Meyerhold led the theatre

  • Boris Pasternak’s significance in literature

  • Alexander Rodchenko’s art

• However, Stalin demanded that artistic endeavour be mobilised to promote the efforts of Socialist Realism

  • Art should assist in the social construction of the time and in accordance with the party values, didactic not expressionist

  • Socialist realism developed Stalin’s cult of personality alongside other heroes

    • Stakhanovite miners, industrious peasants, etc

  • Art was no longer about introspective questioning, but celebrating the glorious present and a golden future

Other social changes under Stalin

• Economic changes in the 1930s led to large-scale urbanisation, and living conditions remained dire due to a lack of sewerage, roads and housing

  • Although life was difficult, diversions for the new elite consisted of bourgeois delights while the masses enjoyed cinema, sports, parks

• Young people were ‘encouraged’ to join the Komsomol, providing diversions such as sports as a means of indoctrinating future generations

  • Juvenile delinquency was a significant problem, and some openly dissented by joining the Society for the rebirth of Russia

Why was Stalin’s cult of personality necessary

• The Russian/Soviet Union comprised of dozens of different ethnic groups who spoke over 100 different languages and a host of religious beliefs

  • In such a society, creating consensus was difficult

    • Before the revolution, this was achieved through the people’s veneration of the tsar as ‘the little father’

    • During the 1920s, the Lenin cult had been promoted, mainly for Stalin to outmaneuver his enemies

      • Stalin was promoted as Lenin’s disciple, and the city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad in his honour

    • During 1930s, Stalin’s cult of personality provided a unifying figure during significant times of upheaval

      • At his 50th birthday in 1929, he was called the ‘Lenin of Today’

How did Stalin’s cult of personality influence everyday life

• Posters and paintings of Stalin were in every home, school, shop, building and government office

• Newspaper editors vied to include the most quotes and references to Stalin and tried to imitate his style of writing

• Any public celebration, such as the October Revolution, would have massive portraits of Stalin be carried

• Stalin’s role in the past was steadily built over time at the expense of other Bolsheviks, namely Trotsky, who were edited out of photos

Stalin’s image varied depending on the audience and domestic situation

• Early images presented him as a humane figure who understood the people’s needs, pictured talking with the workers

• By the late 1930s, Stalin was presented as a man of wisdom, discussing with Lenin, instructing workers and a lone, superior leader

  • Appeared more detached and superior, inspiring rather than of the people, the ‘helmsman’ guiding the Soviet Union

Social Cultural Transformation

Grahame Gill

Martin McCauley

“From a background with little appreciation of literature, art and music, it is not surprising that this group had little time for these aspects of Russian culture”

“Excessive introspection, psychoanalysis, self-doubt and flights into the world of fantasy or the sub-conscious had no place in the new cultural milieu”