Yet the workers who actually built huge factories and electric power plants could see with their own eyes that the Soviet Union was industrializing, and, as a consequence, catching up with other capitalist powers.
Workers and non-workers were told that the conditions in the capitalist countries were alarming, and that this was the era of the great depression.
What the Soviet citizens didn’t know, of course, was that in the Soviet Union prison camps were overloaded with people who were there for no particular reason (stealing, murder.. etc.) but only because their name was on a list.
As a matter of fact, newspapers published photographs and articles about the Hunger Marches in London and Food Lines in New York.
Another relevant factor to consider is religion; even though Stalin grew up in the Georgian Orthodox Faith, he was an atheist. He followed Lenin’s idea that religion needed to be removed and substituted with the ideal communist society. His anti-religious propaganda seemed to work, for most of the people.
By 1930s it had become dangerous to be seen praying or associated in some way with religion, and that meant the end of thought and beliefs’ liberty.
Stalin mentioned in many of his speeches the futility of religion; as a matter of fact he would have given importance to the Pope only if he had decided to attack.
That said, people should have seen him as a monster who took away from them all the rights to express their own personality and opinions; instead still nowadays if you go in Russia you can still note that some people admire his work, and still have his portrait in their houses.
He was able to dispossess people of their own essence and make it look like a charitable act.
He was also able to understand perfectly the psychology of his citizens, demonstrating that he could obtain their appeasement with the strict order to which he always gave a reasonable motivation.
This is one of the reasons why we know that he was a good orator.
We can finally deduct that, Stalin was “kept alive” by the people because of the cult of personality he created in 25 years (from 1928 to 1953).
What really makes me understand the power Stalin had was the fact that no matter what he said, people would still support him.
As an example of this, he once said, "death solves all problems, no man, no problem."
He applied this principle to individuals as well as to whole categories or "classes." In Stalin’s last years, the habit of killing turned out to be completely reasonless, a way of exorcising spirits that haunted his paranoid psyche; and still people would have his face hanged on the wall of their houses as a sign of complete devotion to him and to his regime.
Stalin was able to create a world-known power from the ashes that Lenin left, the USSR became something to be afraid of, due to its cruelty, but also to envy by other countries because of the unity and faith of the Russian people, reunited under one big ideal.
This brought Stalin to eternal remembrance.
“Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.”
- Joseph Stalin (Around 1923) this proves that he was conscious about his actions, that is brainwashing.
“To lower the tempo [of industrialisation] means falling behind and those who fall behind get beaten. But we don’t want to get beaten ... The history of the old Russia consisted, amongst other things, in her being beaten continuously for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish bays ... She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons, she was beaten by all of them because of her backwardness, agricultural backwardness .. We are fifty or a thousand years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.“
Stalin, writing in Pravda, 5 February 1931
In, 1894, Stalin received a scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary in the Georgian capital. Instead of devoting his time to the studies he involved himself into the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. He joined a secret revolutionary organization called, “Messame Dassy”. They were demanding an independent Georgia from the clutches of Russian Monarch.
When he was referred that the Pope thought that Stalin should have stopped repressing Catholics, Stalin famously said, The Pope? How many divisions has he got?
Stalin in response to Pierre Laval in 1935