- Collectivization: Stalin sees as essential for rapid industrialization.
- For (supposedly): feed cities, yield surplus workers, surplus for export = capital, NEP: delivering only 2 million tons of grain for export (1927), more efficient
- Concentrating peasants, collectives, OGPU = greater Party control
- Constructing socialist economy
- 120million people involved
- State controlled collective farms established
- Kulak class: policy of liquidation, Dec 1929 (applied to any peasant resisting collectivization)
- 1930 forced collectivization: 14million collectivized households
- Active resistance: OGPU (resistors: shot, deported or arrested) *quelled
- With industrialization, jobs increase, urban pop. increase: Communist Party success
- Resistance: slaughtering livestock (1/2 USSR cattle and horses, 65% of sheep lost) lengthy recovery
- ‘Dizzy with Success’: Stalin claims brutality of Collectivization was out of central control
- End to compulsion: voluntary
- Concessions: small private plots, animals
- However, pressure to collectivize was steadily reapplied
- 1935: 90% USSR rural land collectivized
- However, most peasants living conditions had not changed
- had no significantly increased agricultural productivity: grain harvest fell early/mid 1930’s
- No incentive for peasantry: seemed like return to serfdom
- State procurements rose: peasants yielded 39% in 1933
- 1933-34 famine: preventable if regime hadn’t continued to export vast quantities of grain through terrible famine (5mill died in Ukraine alone)
- Food rationing 1929-1935
- Disaster: no incentive for peasants, large imports, famine
=> Five-Year Plans
- catch up with industrialized West; modernize Soviet industry to prevent invasion of hostile capitalist powers (Stalin)
- NEP: doubted by party officials, ideologically ‘wrong’,
- Trotsky had originally been pro dissolving NEP. 1928: Party favored a more socialist economic policy
- 1st 1928-32; 2nd 1933-37; 3rd 1938-41
- Gosplan: 1927 proposed ambitious Five-Year Plan. Emphasis on heavy industry
- NEP ended; factory private ownership outlawed
- State: total control over urban workforce; internal passports
- Workforce: peasants forced of land; women recruited
- Urban population 27-57 million (1928-41)
- Money: exported grain buys western machinery; taxes raised; living standards depressed
- Factories; isolated locations in fear of invasion; rich in mineral resources: Magnitogorsk, etc
- Propaganda and bonus pay employed to inspire work rate and productivity: Stakhanov
- Failure to meet target: Gulag
- Successful in expanding output, official Soviet figures grossly inflated: but 7-14% growth
- Developed industry allowed USSR to outlast and outbuild Germany in war of attrition: Five-Year Plans were a major cause of Nazi Germany’s defeat
- Major redistribution of population
- Increase in literacy rates (education=educated workforce)
- Plans: not completed; affected by purges; disrupted by war
- Targets quantitative not qualitative: produce poor
- International prestige => Moscow Metro, Belomor Canal: little value
- Fear of punishment affects workload and quality
- Living standards fell; wages fell; overcrowding in towns; little consumer goods
- caught up with west?
=> Nature of Soviet State and Cult of Personality
Background
- closing of Constituent Assembly Jan 1918 = initiation of single party rule
- outlawed other parties; expelled members; Secret Police (Cheka) => OGPU =>
NKVD.
- Monopolization of State institutions by Communist Party: Sovnarkom (Lenin and ministers) Oct 1917.
- 1919 Politburo: initially only Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Kamanev, Zinoviev (more power then Sovnarkom)
- Stalin: unequalled power in party
- Politburo > Central Committee > Party Congress
- 1921 Split in Party: Workers Opposition (for trade unions) and Democratic Centralists (democracy)
- Lenin 10th Party Congress banned factionalism (survive Kronstadt Rebellion, etc). Ban never lifted (silence rivals)
- Set up USSR: federation of 4 Republics, and 16 autonomous republics (*less governing power than the republics)
- Union Government in Moscow controlled important matters: e.g. economic and foreign policy
- Soviet State under Stalin
- Power in Party => Lenin: Sovnarkom, Stalin: Politburo (increased Party control over State institutions + personal power)
- Towards ruthless dictatorship: NKVD enlarged; prison camps expanded
- 1936-77 “Stalin Constitution”
- USSR Democratic on paper: increased no. of republics (11) but Moscow still with ultimate power
- Supreme Soviet legislative body created. “Democratic”: secret ballot elections; 18+ years vote. However: one candidate for each region; no choice.
- Supreme Soviet: Soviet of the Union and Soviet of the Nationalities: only met few times each year; no power; merely gave approval
- Public relations exercise: “Democratic”
- introduced during height of Purges and Show Trials
=> Extent of Stalin’s power
- Stalin’s control over Party
- All rivals eliminated: purges, show trials
- dominated all committees: Politburo and Orgburo
- run Party => run government => run country
- What was extent of his power?
Traditional View
- Creator of efficient dictatorship
- Lenin destroying old political system allowed for Stalin to create a more totalitarian system and greater personal power (Stalin) than either Mussolini or Hitler
Revisionist Views
- Extent of efficiency
- “dizzy with success”
=> Cult of Personality
- 50th birthday 1929: Party newspaper, Pravda, thousands of greeting for Stalin
- Lenin’s devoted disciple
- Artists, writers expected to promote image of his genius: distort history
=> Purges – impact on society
- had occurred before 1930: less
- 1921: first purge, 25% Party expelled
- 1936-39: unprecedented purge of Party
- Gulags
- Kirov, Leningrad Communist Party boss: murdered Dec 1934
- Stalin’s involvement? Pretext to the Terror?
- NKVD given extensive powers to deal with terrorists: investigations by completed within 10 days and that there be no lawyers at terrorist trials.
- 1934-35 fall in arrests (positives in five-year plans)
1936
- first major: Kamanev, Zinoviev and 14 other leading “old Bolsheviks” convicted of treason and executed => accused of Kirov’s murder
- Confessions
- Sept. NKVD boss Yagoda arrested, replaced by Yezhov: Great Purge/Yezhovschina
1937
- 353,000 executed
- August: Politburo legalized torture
- Second major show trial: “the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre” tried for conspiring with Nazi Germany => 17 leading Communists tried and executed
- April-May leading Generals arrested
- By end of 1938 two thirds of Red Army’s senior officers had been arrested and shot.
1938
- Third major show trial: 18, including Bukharin and Rykov
1939
- Yezkov arrested and replaced by Beria: end of mass arrests
- Millions remained in Gulags
- 1940: Trotsky murdered in Mexico by Stalinist agent
- Why did they happen (diff. interpretations)
- “opponents”
- impose authority and suppressing opposition to policies
- War scares created a climate of fear and suspicion
- “dizzy with success”
=> Impact of the Purges
- 2.8 million party members in 1934, about 1million expelled by 1939
- 8-9million arrests; 3million in Gulags
- Red Army’s leadership purged and therefore inexperienced at start of war with Germany 1941: fatal
- Arrests of engineers, managers: undermined Second and Third Five-Year Plans
=> Foreign relations
- Background to Stalin’s Foreign Policy
- Little foreign support after Bolshevik victory 1917
- Hitler: anti-communist
- tried to secure USSR with allies in West
- How did Stalin try to make the USSR more secure
- 1934: joined League of Nations
- 1935: signed treaties w France & Czechoslovakia – promising support
- Comintern
- 1936-39: gave military aid to Republicans in Spain (but Franco won Civil War)
- After 1938 Munich Conference (Stalin not invited) Sudetenland handed over to Germany (part of Czechoslovakia) Stalin concluded Non-Aggression Pact w Germany
=> Nazi Soviet Pact
- Time for rearmament program
- Hopeful: Germany in long & exhausting war w France & Britain
- Extend USSR territory & influence over Eastern Europe
- Secretly divide Poland
- Germany gave USSR help to conquer Bessarabia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia & Finland
- September 1939: Germany invaded Poland, USSR invades eastern Poland – Poland surrendered end of October. Britain & France declare war on Germany September
- Winter 1939-40: Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania occupied by Red Army: USSR demanded land in Finland => war. USSR expelled from League of Nations
- June 1941: Germany invades USSR => Operation Barbarossa
- had tried desperately to maintain peace: arms to Germany, ignored intelligence reports of immanent invasion
- 1938/39: armed clashes between Japan & USSR in Outer Mongolia
- April 1941: Japanese sign Non-Aggression Pact w Russia
- Stalin avoids war on two fronts
