P2 - Authoritarian States, Stalin

Notes on historical viewpoints an dotehr stuff if needed

Stephen Cohen

“No-one was guilty so no-one was safe. Everyone was innocent, so everyone was vulnerable”

Lenin’s propagnda messages

Lenin capitalised on anti-war sentiment using slogans like “Peace, Land and Bread,” and All Power to the Soviets.”

Stalin ideology

“Socialism in One Country”

Marco Rubio

Sees the October Revolution as an illegitimate coup that led to decades of totalitarian rule. He argues that Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not seek democracy but rather imposed a one-party dictatorship under the guise of revolution.

Intensionalist

Historians such as Robert Conquest

Stalin had a lot of control over arrests and executions and so the NKVD were only following his orders. Stalin's paranoid personality was one factor that could explain his desire for so much killing. However, he also had plenty of motives for carrying out the Terror including the need to get rid of all opposition and to control the population through terror.

Sturcturalist

Sheila Fitzpatrick

a lot more complicated, and he couldn’t have actually controlled everything.

Structuralist historians argue that the Terror gained a momentum of its own; the different factions of the NKVD competed to fulfil quotas and in addition ordinary people played a key role in denunciations. The chaos of the Soviet state in the 1930s following collectivisation and rapid industrialisation meant that the purges spiraled out of control.