Anyone who was lucky to survive being “cleansed” by Stalin was forced into accepting and believing that the way he ruled Russia was the right way. Their lives depended upon it. So even though the purges seriously weakened Russia, especially the army and navy, Stalin made any citizens left believe he was right, because they were too frightened to believe anything else.
This was the main factor of the purges helping Stalin keep control on Russia. The unpredictability that lead to so many people fearing him. This stopped people opposing him, and by removing senior party members he was getting rid of any rivals that may threaten his region as Russian leader. In a way, it also gained him a little trust, as he was shown as the truthful Communist, who was loyal to his country, and wanted the best for it.
Propaganda And The Cult Of Personality.
During the purges, Stalin had many innocent people killed or removed from society to be put in gulags. This was an evil and ruthlessly unfair way to remove any enemies, and made it easy for people to take a dislike to him, and maybe publicly criticise him. This could have put him out of power. To avoid this, Stalin used intelligent propaganda to convince the Russian people that what he was doing was for the good of the Russia.
There was a lot of hardship and poverty in Russia at this time, and Stalin was making workers work much longer hours than they had in the past. He used propaganda posters to encourage workers to work harder, and convince them that they were working to build a better, more able, Russia. In 1935, a man named Andrew Stakhanov famously dug 102 tonnes of coal in one shift. This was 14 times the average amount, and although he had two helpers to help with his shift, Stalin used him as a propaganda example of a great worker and encouraged other workers to work just as hard, if not harder.
He used posters especially well. In every picture, Stalin was shown in one way or another. Even on posters showing the strength of the army, Stalin would be in the picture standing next to the soldiers in an army uniform. He was never in the army, but it sent out the message that he would fight for his country. This made him admirable, and showed he was patriotic and proud of his country.
Children were used in his propaganda to make him look like a caring father figure. One leaflet showed Stalin holding a young girl named Gelya Markizova. Stalin killed both her parents, but he still used this picture in his propaganda campaign.
Newspapers were also a form of propaganda Stalin used. The main Russian newsagent TAS stocked only one newspaper, called Pravda. What was printed in this newspaper was controlled by Stalin, and was designed to make him look better. So the purges were rarely mentioned, except in cases when the person being “cleansed” was a famous person, like significant party members such as Kamenev or Zinoviev.
The show trials themselves, in which Kamenev and Zinoviev confessed, were in their own way propaganda, as they were controlled by Stalin, and most were based on complete lies to make Stalin look like a better leader. Medias like cinema and radio also spread propaganda about Stalin's great leadership and personality qualities.
Most of this propaganda links with the Cult of Personality. The Cult of Personality generally refers in derogatory terms to the excessive adulation of a single living leader. Stalin used this a lot in his propaganda. He made Russian people believe that without him, Russia would be nothing. This is how the cult of personality helped him control Russia, because he brainwashed Russian citizens into believing that Russia would collapse if he were not in power.
Stalin also circulated many posters of him and Lenin together. Lenin was seen as the father of the Revolution and (along with Trotsky) was the reason the Bolsheviks came to power after the 1917 Revolution. Stalin made himself look as if he was as important to Russia’s history as Lenin was, and many pictures showed them as friends, even though they rarely met. He also removed Trotsky from any photographs. Stalin had school textbooks rewritten, to show him and Lenin as the heroes of Russia, and made him look like he had a bigger part in the Revolution and civil war than was actually true. This meant that young children would learn history the way Stalin wanted them to, and therefore would look up to him as a great leader.
He also defied himself. Many buildings would have his face plastered on the walls. This showed that his influence was everywhere, and that there was no escape from his power. His face would look down on the workers, like the way a God would.
Many statues were built of him, and placed all around Russia. Some showed him in normal workers clothes to reinforce that he was a “dictator of the people”. Books were written about how much he has done for Russia, and films were made about his dedication to his country, and what an inspiration he was.
All these factors brainwashed citizens of Russia into believing that Stalin was all that his propaganda made him out to be – a father figure, an inspiration, a significant part of Russian history, and most of all a great leader. As these images would be everywhere, it would be hard to get away from them, and their influence. Combine this with the purges stopping people criticising Stalin, and soon many Russian’s believed all the hype. They thought Stalin deserved to control Russia, as he was going to make it great.
Economic Policies.
The Russian public was not the only people who believed that Russia was to become great under Stalin’s rule. Stalin himself believed it too. He thought that Russia needed modernising, and this was his biggest priority.
Stalin’s main aim was to build up the army to defend Russia. Russia had been invaded fifty times in 100 years, whereas smaller countries like Britain had only been invaded once. This was because of the strength of the British army and navy. Stalin wanted Russia to have that kind of strength too, so set about building a powerful army. This was the purpose of his economic policies.
Stalin wanted results and he wanted them quickly. He began a Command Economy, which meant he was the one controlling all the production made in the country. He decided how much coal, steel, iron, oil, and electricity was produced, and gave strict deadlines.
A state-planning agency called GOSPLAN organised the Five Year Plans, to help industrialize Russia, and these were all focused on the heavy industry. Russia had many natural resources, but these were in remote places of the country, so they built industrial cities nearby the mineral region, called Magnitogorsk and Sverdlovsk. Many huge dams were constructed to provide hydroelectric power, and many quarries and mines were also made.
There were three Five Year Plans. The first ran from 1928-1932, and was focused on building up heavy industry like coal, steel, railways, electricity and machinery. The second was between 1933 and 1937, and concentrated on improvements in transport and in the production of machinery. The third was only four years long, (1938-1941) as it was halted when Germany invaded Russia, and the plan was to transfer more resources into defence-related industries.
Stalin made ambitious targets for each region, state, factory, section, and individual in Russia to achieve. These were usually near impossible to meet, and resulted in heavy penalties and many factory managers and workers being murdered or sent to gulags by Stalin’s Secret Police.
Targets were incredibly high. Coal production, for example, in Russia, before the first five Year Plan, was 35.4 million tons. Stalin set the target for the first Five Year Plan at 68 million tons. To his disappointment though, only 64.3 million tons were produced. The next Five Year Plan’s expectation was even higher at 152.5 million tons, more than twice of what was expected in the previous Five Year Plan. Again, the Russian workers failed to meet their target, only managing 128 million tons. This was a similar case with electricity, iron, steel and oil, with Russia only twice meeting and exceeding their targets set in the first Five Year Plan.
Even though Russia did not meet the expectations of Stalin, their achievements were staggering. In some production lines, they were producing 4 times more product then they were before the Five Year Plans.
It is hard to accurately analyse how successful the Five Year plans were, as Stalin used his propaganda (like Andrew Stakhanov) to exaggerate the amazing progress Russia was achieving. However, it was dangerous industrialising Russia so quickly as safety was less of a priority. 10,000 workers were killed, while building one of the enormous dams Stalin had ordered. The man himself again used this as propaganda, praising the workers because they died trying to rebuild Russia.
Still there were huge advances in industrialisation, and the second Five Year Plan actually achieved its targets ahead of schedule. This was an incredible achievement for Russia. The industrialisation unemployment in Russia decreased. Lots of jobs were created in the new factories. Nearly everyone was employed.
The main factor that stopped the Five Year Plans from putting Stalin out of power came during WWII. Stalin had built up this huge Soviet army, with weapons and tanks, and they defeated Germany during WWII. This would never have happened before the industrialisation, and if the army had been defeated by Germany, Stalin would have failed, and all Russia’s hard work would have been for nothing. This would not have helped Stalin at all, but as the army were successful, the Russians saw him as an even greater leader, as he had led them to victory.
In order to industrialise Russia, Stalin had to provide the towns and workers with food. He thought this was vital, because the population of the industrial centres was growing rapidly. Since the Russian peasants were unwilling to sell extra grain because they wanted higher prices, Stalin found a solution for ensuring a good food supply – his economic Policy of Collectivisation. The idea of this was that in selected areas peasants had to join their small farms together and form larger farms, and had to provide a fixed amount of food to the government, which was to be given to people working in the cities producing materials. Like the ambitious targets in the Five Year Plans, if targets were not met, harsh punishments were issued. These new farms, called “collectives”, were sometimes as big as a village, with some even including schools and hospitals.
Stalin had a difficult time convincing the peasants about collectivisation. Obviously small farmers liked this idea of joining large collective farms, as they had only little to lose. However, the richer peasants, known as kulaks rejected it Stalin’s idea. Collectivisation became a war of words, which soon turned into violence. Soon after, the countryside was in chaos. Kulaks burnt their crops and killed their animals, in protest to show that they refused to hand them over to Stalin and his government. Stalin was angry and had most of them shot. It is estimated that over 6 million Kulaks endured this fate
There was great famine during this period. Stalin had 90% of the grain produced sold to the state for a low price and the profits were shared out. The peasants only got to keep 10% of the grain produced, which shared between all of them was inadequate. If any one was known to be hiding any grain, they were either shot or arrested and became known as 'enemies of the people'. Around 10 million others died of starvation.
Despite the famine, Stalin did not ease off. By 1934 there were no kulaks left, and by 1941 almost all agricultural land was organised under the collective system. Industrial workers were well fed, and Stalin was also receiving vital equipment to defend Russia, from other countries in exchange for grain.
In conclusion, at least 20 million peasants either died or were killed due to Collectivisation. There was such extreme hardship and terrible poverty for almost the entire population of peasants. However, Stalin held onto his control by “cleansing” all the people who complained about it, like he did during the purges. And because, in the end, Russia was successful over Germany in WWII, this showed that although collectivisation had been tough, it had gotten results. This helped Stalin keep his hold on Russia, when it could have slipped through his fingers.
Stalin’s Secret Police.
Stalin’s secret police were the backbone to all his tactics to stay in power and control Russia. They helped with the purges, propaganda, and his economic policies. They were feared just as much as he was at times, as it was usually them who carried out Stalin’s commands.
The purges, and economic policies are linked to the Secret Police, as they were Stalin's instruments for carrying out his rise to dictatorship. The Secret Police or NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) had hundreds of thousands of people murdered and millions imprisoned. Because of the need for propaganda, Stalin wanted to make sure there was no one who could threaten his leadership, by criticising him. So when the Secret Police did not arrest enough people, Stalin had the head of the NKVD, Yagoda, murdered and replaced, by a man named Yezhov. He in turn was arrested and executed, after Stalin called the end to the purges, in 1938.
The show trials during the purges were also run by the Secret Police. As they were both widely publicised and everyone was scared of the Secret Police, and the show trials. Anyone suspected criticising Stalin were removed from society, by the Secret Police, either to be executed or sent to gulags.
Conclusion.
In my final conclusion, Stalin was able to control Russia for so long because all four of these factors were in place. Without one of them, he would have probably lost his leadership much earlier. The Secret Police helped with the propaganda, economic policies, and the purges. If Stalin had not had them, then he would not have been able to carry out the harsh penalties and punishments he had for people who spoke against him, or did not meet his targets set for them.
The purges were a horrific, but clever way to remove his enemies and rivals, and promote himself as a better, trustworthier leader. By removing all his senior Communist party members he made people believe that he was the natural leader of Russia, as he was one of the very few who were not “traitors to the state”.
Propaganda was essential to hide Stalin’s brutality. If he had not had it in place, people would have seen right through his false exterior, and into his cold-blooded tactics to make him remain powerful. It also helped brainwash people into thinking he was something much better than he really was, like the senior Communist members being put on show trials did.
The economic policies were a risky strategy. If they had failed, then there would have been chaos in Russia. Stalin knew that Russia needed defending, so he set up the Five Year Plans and Collectivisation to do this, but his targets were immensely high. Propaganda again played a part in this, as posters would remind citizens that they were building a better and safer Russia. This was how Stalin managed to control Russia for nearly three decades.
