Stalin won the leadership because he was a clever politician and he planned his bid for power carefully. He made great offers to associate himself with Lenin wherever possible and got off to an excellent start al Lenin´s funeral. He was also extremelyclever using his power within the Communist Party. He took many boring, but important jobs, in the government. He used these positions to put his own supporters into important posts and even to transfer supporters of his opponents to remote postings. He was also absolutey ruthless in picking off his rivals one by one.
It was not possible to make the huge changes which Stalin was carrying out without making enemies. However, one of Stalin´s aims was to control his people to such an extent that they would be afraid even to think of opposing him. During Stalin´s time in power terror appeared. The worst thing that happened were the Purges, began un 1934 when Kirov, the leader of the Leningrad Communist Partym was murdered. Stalin used this as an excuse to “purge” opponents in the Party. In great “show trails” loyal Bolsheviks conffesed to being traitors to the State. It was not only leading figures who were purged. In 1940, Trotsky, in exile in Mexico, was murdered by Stalin’s agents. After the trials Stalin turned his attention to the army, particularly the officers, aproximately 25.0000 officers were removed, including the Supreme Commander of the Red Army.
As the purges were extended, university lecturers and teachers, miners and engineers, factory managers and ordinary workers, all disappeared. Arrests would take place in the middle of the night and victims were rarely told what they were accused of. The were also physically and psicologically tortured so the would confese everything. By 1937 an estimated 18 million people had bee transported to labour camps and 10 million died. The Army purges were nearly fatal to the USSR. When Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941, one of the key problems of the Red Army was a lack of good quality, experienced officers. Stalin had also succedeed any sense of independent thiking. Everyone who was spared knew that their lives depended on thinking exactly as Stalin did.
Once in power, Stalin was determined to modernise the USSR because he took over a country i which almost all the industry was concentrated in just a few cities and whose workers were unskilled and poorly educated, and many regions of the USSR were in the same backward state as they had been a hundred years earlier. So he introduced the Five-Year Plans to solve these problems.
There is much that could be and was criticised in the Five-Year Plans. Certainly, there was a great deal of inefficiency, duplication of effort and waste, although the evidence shows that the soviets did learn from their mistakes in the second and third Five-Year Plans. There was also an enornous human cost, but the fact remains that by 1937 the USSR was a modern state and it was these that saved it from defeate when Hitler invaded in 1941. The Five-Year Plans were used for propaganad purposes. Stalin wanted the Soviet Union to be a Beacon of Socialism and his publicity machine used the successes of industrialization to further that objective.
T The workers, who were constantly bombarded with propaganda, posters, slogans, and radio broadasts. They all had strict targets to meet and were fined if they did not meet them. The first Five-Year Plan revealed a shortage of workers, so from 1913 the government concentrated on drafting more women into industry. It set up thousands of new creches and day care centers so that mothers could work.
By the late 1930’s, may Soviet workers had improved their conditions by aquiring well-paid skilled jobs and earning bonusses for meeting targets. Unemployment was almost non-existent. Education became free and Stalin invested huge sums in training schemes based in colleges and in the work place.
But life was very harsh under Stalin. Factory discipline was strict and punishments were hard. Lateness or absences were punished by sacking that often meant losing your flat or house as well. To scape the hard work and discipline some workers tried to move to other jobs, so the secret police introduced internal passports which prevented free movement of workers inside the USSR.
On the great enginereenig projects many of the workers were prissioners who had been sentenced to hard labour for being political opponents, or suspected opponents, of Stalin, for being Kulaks (rich peasants) or Jews. Many other prissoners were simply unfortunate workers who had had accidents or made mistakes in their work but had been found guilty of “sabotage”.
