Paper 2: Stalin's aims and results of policies

New Economic Policy

New Economic Policy

• 1921-28

• state still controls the banks, foreign trade and large-scale industry

• greater autonomy to small industry and loans and credit

• eventually allowed for the new rouble

• oct 1923: industrial prices were 276% of 1913 prices

First Five Year Plan

• gosplan established 1921

• adopted in 1928 and approved at the 16th party Congress

• production of energy and construction materials

• unrealistic goals were set and revised upwards, exceeding practical possibility

  • 62% steel target met

  • 59% iron

  • 73.5% consumer goods

• managers were under pressure to meet targets so lied and when found out were executed for capitalist plots → this led to severe worker and manager deficits

second five year plan

• 1933-37

• annual increase of 14% of production goals with a focus on metallurgical resources and rail transportation

• ultimately failed despite some gains in textiles and opening of new bakeries, food-processing, and meat-packing

• significant gains (1934-6) in machinery and metal works, coal production and rail transport prior to a slow down in 1937

• overall more successful that the first plan but still ultimately a failure

third five year plan

• 1938 - WWII

• officially adopted in 1939

• targets to achieve growth of 92% for industrial output

• 58% steel

• 129% machinery

• many targets were revised down on account of labour shortages, metallurgy shortfalls

• 1938-41 living standards decreased despite wage increase as a result of larger rise in free-market prices which roughly doubled between 1937-1940

• by 1940 series of decrees issued in June and October → average work day lengthened to 8 hrs and week lengthened to 6 days

• a worker was considered absent if late by 20 mins twice

• workplace laws stayed in place until 1956

improvement projects

• Dnieprostroi Dam

• Moscow Metro

• Moscow-Volga and Volga-Don Canals

• projects relied heavily on forced labour however labourers often worked enthusiastically under terrible conditions because they believed in a socialist project and their children’s future

effects of the five year plans

• 1939: world’s third largest industrial output

• coal production increased by 350%

• iron and steel by 400%

• by 1940: industrial goods production had a 260% increase from 1928

• urban workforce had grown to 32% of the population

• GNP increased by 12% between 1928 → 1937

collectivisation

• 1929: 25 mil peasants had been collectivised

• 1930: stalin dismantled the village mir system and introduced kolkhoz administration headed by an appointed chair

• dizzy with success article in Pravda and temporary relent on the programme

• collectivised households fell from 50% to 25%

• 1932: livestock numbers were less that half those of 1928

• 1933: put to 40% the country’s livestock had been slaughtered

• bulk of the country’s food still grown on private peasant land

Alexei Stakhanov

• industrial hero supposedly mining 14x his quota

• Stakhanovite movement

youth programs

• 9 and under: Little Octobrists - wore star pins with Lenin’s portraits

• 9-14: All-Union Lenin Pioneer Organisation

• 14-28: Komsomol

religion

• opiate of the masses

• unofficial policy of “state atheism”

• Church properties were transferred to local soviets and had to be rented to hold services

• church salaries, nor pensions would be paid by the state and religious teachings were removed from school

• stalin targeted church officials during collectivisation

• he fashioned himself as a substitute for religious worship

• 1924: hundreds of bishops and thousands of priests had been executed, imprisoned or sent into exile

education

• 1st October 1918: all schools renamed Uniform Labour School under the authority of Narkompros

• Anatoly Lunacharsky and Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin's wife)

• she improved libraries, making them widely accessible

• during 30s core curriculum established → reading, writing, geography, maths, and science

• people were encouraged to go as far up the education ladder as possible

• 1941: 60% undergrads are women

• 1913 → 1939: 40% → 90% men were literate

• 1939: compulsory for children to have at least 7years formal schooling

family life

• lenin made divorce easier and abortion legal

• stalin made it harder and illegal again in 1936

• did provide crèches and canteen facilities to enable women to go back to work after childbirth

the arts

• 1920s artists had a lot of freedom to explore genres such as futurism and modernism, lenin rightly believed he had to be culturally flexible and to use cultural to help restore order

• however Stalin viewed art only as a form of propaganda and artists had to conform to “Socialist Realism” glorifying the work of the five year plans and stalin

Film

• Lenin considered film an essential part of bolshevik propaganda especially in the countryside with high rates of illiteracy

• 1920s near half of all movie-goers were aged 11-15

• Sergei Eisenstein developed montage and type as film techniques

• he also developed the ‘idea of mass spectacle’ using physical theatre and montage techniques tied to modernism and the red army’s programme of physical culture

• Meyerhold (owned a theatre school) was arrested, tortured and killed in 1940 following the Purges

Shostakovich

• worked as a silent movie accompanist in Leningrad

• stalin launched an anti-shostakovich campaign in 1936 and he was attacked in Pravda in February

• his income dropped 75%

• fourth symphony was delayed from mid 30’s to 1961

• successfully rehabilitated himself in 1937 with his fifth symphony

Literary culture

• Gorky established a writer’s refuge and and publishing house called World Literature

• smenovekhism emerged in the 1920s → left wing believed Russia needed the Bolsheviks as they were the only ones capable of keeping russia fee and independent from external aggression

• but the right were whites hyping to transform the bolshevik dictatorship into an aggressive nationalist one

• constructivism → transform social life through design of practical objects

  • Stepanova and Tatlin designed uniforms and workers’ clothes

  • Lissitzky designed simple furniture that could be massed produced for communal housing

proletkult

• working class intelligentsia → intention of breaking free from the control and domination of bourgeoisie to develop their now culture

• Bogdanov assumed leadership

• the movement peaked in 1920 with over 400,000 members in 300 branches

the cultural revolution

1929-1954

• advance socialism by attacking opponents and consolidate the stalin state

• Shakhty trial of 55 people a morning complex in Donbass region accused of sabotage and treason

• Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) established in 1928 made life impossible for non-proletariate writers to function outside of RAPP

• independent voices in arts such as satirists were first to come under attack during the 1930s Purges and Terror

• 1928 party conference on Cinema attacked avant-garde directors as formalists

• regime abandoned establishing a new form of culture and instead reinvented Russian classics

effects of Stalin’s attacks on the arts

• narrow concept of socialist realism

• restrictions on the content and form of art

• made false linkages about social relationship between artist and the society artists could no longer ‘discover realtiy’ independently

• 1936-7: 10/19 plays taken off major theatres, 56 plays removed and banned, 10 theatres in Moscow and 10 in Leningrad closed down

cultural production in and after WWII

• church was re-embraced and communism downplayed in the great national crusade

• decided shift away from emphasis on trans-national cultural world → any comparison with the outside world that made the USSR look bad were challenged → led by Andrei Zhdanov

• many writers and artists came under attack and were accused of being formalistic and anti-national (Shostakovich and Prokofiev)

Censorship

• political, subject and form censorship

• informal patronage networks were established to bind the artist to the party → added legitimacy to the image of Stalin as a father-figure in his cult of personality

policies and women

• support for the emancipation of women

• 1914 → 1917: women's participation in the workforce increased from 26% → 43%

• the family code of 1918 gave women equal status → by the end of the civil war divorce and abortion were legalised and equal rights and pay were mandated

• Zhenotdel established (but shut down by Stalin)

• communal dining rooms, laundries, and childcare centres

Lyudmila Pavlichenko

• madame death

• 309 confirmed German kills

• 800,000 soviet women in red army combat roles

women’s roles in society

• 10-15% of the total party

• 65,000 joined the Red army = 2% of the total

• few assumed leadership roles

• many pushed out the work place to make way for veterans

Zhenotdel

• local, regional, and national meetings

• Alexandra Kollontai served as head for 1920-22 but was removed by the party as she criticised its policies with which she disagreed

• Alexandra Artiukhina critiqued the patriarchy and gender norms

• 1926-7 620,000 women attended conferences

• it was brought under the Agitprop in 1930

Sexual liberation

• opinion was divided by age more than gender → older bolsheviks including Lenin and Kollontai took a more traditional view

• so it was up to the younger generations to make sexual emancipation a communist cause

women and five year plans

• 1940: women constituted 39% of the total work force

• 1939: 56% secondary school students and 50% of post secondary students were women

• soviet statistics claim: 62% of physicians 42% economists, 36% faculty at higher institutions by the late 1930s

  • teaching and medicine became almost wholly the ‘preserve of women’

• ¼ manual labourers were women

• women did better and were payed better in typically male-dominated industries because of soviet priority on heavy industry

• women joined the kolkhoz as individuals and many became tractor drivers

  • Praskovia Angelina became the soviet poster women for the women’s tractor movement

  • despite this women only constituted 6.8% of drivers in 1937

new soviet women

• homemaker established a conservative orgnanisation that donated to hospitals and child centres as well as being involved in many beautification projects

• many were encouraged to move to Siberia’s far east and assist in building socialism by helping with infrastructure projects etc.

the great retreat

• women earned medals for giving birth to 10+ kids

• abortion made illegal in 1936

• irresponsible fathers were stigmatised

• focus on marriage and families

women and the war

• 1943: women made up 8% of the regular army

• 120,000 joined regular combat units

• 1,885 women graduated sniper training school

  • Maria Polvanova and Natalia Kovshova earned the Order of the Red Star for over 300 kills each

• women were up to 80% of Leningrad factory workers

• Family Law of 1944 made divorce a lengthier process and introduced a tax on married people without children

national minorities

• lenin’s approach was typical of marxism that he favoured class over nationality and was advancing the demand for self-determination of colonial of dependent peoples as early as 1927

• with the war the question of nationality became more significant and lenin began to be more flexible

• some groups had gained temporary freedom until 1921 when forced back into a new kind of Russian empire

• despite initial policies that encouraged some autonomy and local cultural development for all national groups, these rights were overturned in the 1920s

Ukraine

• the bolsheviks felt they needed Ukraine because of its strategic geographical location and wheat and coal

• hence federalism → autonomy over linguistic and cultural issues

• bolsheviks used initially education and modernisation to force assimilation but when this failed they used overt coercin

• this was carrie out similarly in other states such as Georgia

stalin’s approach to national minorities

• lenin hoped states would freely elect to remain in the Soviet Union and wanted them to have independence and local control

• Stalin was the opposite → he wanted centralised control and rule from Moscow

• series of ‘waves’ after 1929

  • connotations of ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ peoples

  • first major actions was soviet work to “cleanse” the borderlands of 500,000 “traitorous” poles and germans

  • similarly the Holodomor in Ukraine 1932-33 killing 7.5 mil people

  • Russian and Ukrainian outsiders were bough tin to serve in senior posts in minority groups to further severe cultural patterns

national minorities in wartime and post-war

• once the war arrived over 1 mil people from 7 nationalities including Volga germans were deported en masse to Siberia as perceived threats

• during the war controls were loosened which reawakens nationalist feelings

• July 1945-6: 400,000 Ukrainians and ruthenes were deported

minorities post war

• jews became Stalin’s regime targets

• 1948 speech by Alexander Fadeyev “rootless cosmopolitans”

• first target was chairman of Jewish Anti-Facist Committee established in 1941 on Stalin’s orders

• 1948 Solomon Mikhoels was assassinated and the JAFC abolished

• November it was decided all jews had to resettle in Siberia

homosexuality

• it was decriminalised with the abolishing of the Tsar’s Legal Code but this only applied to Russian SSR and Ukrainian SSR

• Dr Grigorii Batkis (director of Social Hygiene Institute in Moscow) held progressive vies on homosexuality

• delegates were sent to German Institute for Sexual Research and attended conferences until 1930

• Stalin recriminalised it in 1933 with 5 years hard labour punishment

Stalinist State

• nomenklatura system established early on

• stalinist elite were devoted to Stalin not ideology

• ideology provided a vision, a long term goal that could be used to justify almost any policy initiative, no matter the cost

• social revolution via mass mobilisation through propaganda and education as well as policies and programs that resonated with the masses

• state controlled resources to force people to cooperate

subjecting society to terror as a strategy of control

• awareness becomes conditioned reality for almost everyone living in it

• in addition to mass murders, gulags, political prisoners, there were mechanisms of political and social control eg. functioning informers

• Stalin would eliminate categories instead instead of people