What were the Main Features of the Stalinist System
What were the Main Features of the Stalinist System?
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was born Ioseb Jughashvilli on the 21st of December 1879, in the town of Gori, Georgia. His father was a cobbler and he and Stalin's mother were both ex-serfs. At eight years old Stalin began his education at Gori church school. Stalin was ridiculed for his low social standing, but he learnt to overcome this by intimidating his peers by exploiting their weakness' and to avoid physical confrontation he scorned his tormentors as using violence as a substitute for brains. He began to assert leadership over his peers knowing that no one would challenge him. To overcome his disadvantages and to command respect Stalin strove to be the best at everything he did and he graduated first in his class. At age fourteen he attended Tiflis theological Seminary, although his mother wanted him to become a priest he attended the seminary not out of religious vocation but because it was one of the few educational opportunities open to him. Stalin became involved with the socialist movement while still at the seminary, he was expelled in 1899 for the next decade he worked with the political underground in the Caucasus and was exiled to Siberia several times. He gained a place on Lenin's Bolshevik party's central committee in 1912 and in 1913 adopted the name Stalin. During the civil war Stalin was political commissar of the Red army and after became peoples commissar of nationalities affairs. In April 1922 Stalin became general secretary of the communist party. Lenin's death in 1924 created a power vacuum and subsequently a power struggle. The main feature of the Stalinist system were the one party system, extreme authoritarianism, the cult of Stalin, the use of terror to achieve his goals and mass purges. This essay intends to show that the Stalinist system was a tyrannical authoritarian regime built on the use of terror and Stalin's cult of personality and the terrible consequences this had. It will also assess any aspects of continuity between the Stalinist system and the system under Lenin and attempt to establish whether the Stalinist system was entirely new or whether it was Leninism taken to extremes.
The communist party dominated the Soviet system almost from its conception until the fall of communism in the 1990's.It was the cornerstone and mainspring of the soviet regime. The communist party was virtually indistinguishable from the government and it was the only political party under Stalin that was tolerated. The monopoly on power of the communist party under Stalin was nothing new however. It was created under the Bolsheviks after the October revolution. Lenin and much of the Bolshevik party saw no need to share power. There was potential for a multiparty system between the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and the Srs, but as Nove says "unfortunately Lenin and of his followers at the time did not yet understand the importance of the multiparty system."1 It was the civil war that brought intolerance of others opinions. The international and domestic crisis that followed the civil war threatened the Bolshevik grasp of power and "no party ever having won a civil war is inclined to voluntarily give up power."2 The absence of democratic tradition in Russia also helped play a part in the one party system, the political culture had only a few months experience of solving problems in a democratic manner. The Bolsheviks pursuit of a single party system was a consequence of the civil war, and it was this single party system that Stalin came to control after Lenin's death. The role the party endeavoured to play since its creation was
"the militant, tried vanguard of the soviet people, uniting on a voluntary basis the advanced, most socially conscious part of the working class, collective farm peasantry, and intelligentsia of the USSR... It is the highest form of socio-political organization, the leading and guiding force of Soviet society."3
The party was organized in theory along the lines of intra-party democracy, which give the freedom to criticise and question any leader regardless of position. After the consolidation of Stalin's power this was not possible and the party became an instrument of Stalin.
Stalin's appointment as general secretary in 1922 had enabled him to emerge as virtual dictator by 1928. This in part was due to Stalin's talent for manipulation but also in the potential he saw in the role of general secretary, a post that was considered unglamorous and unwanted and earned Stalin the nickname of "Comrade card index by other party members." 4 Power had become concentrated in the hands of the Bolsheviks during the civil war but the organs of government still had to rely on the expertise of the office holders of the old regime. The party began to develop it own parallel bureaucracy in which cadres gradually dominated administration and policy. The body that dominated this emerging party bureaucracy was the party Secretariat, whoever dominated the secretariat wielded enormous power and influence. Stalin as General Secretary was able to issue administrative directives, organize agendas, make appointments, recommend promotions and dismissals, distribute personnel, and shuffle the cadres as he wished. Stalin used this position to build up a huge power base. Before his death Lenin left what became known as his Testament warning of the concentration of power that Stalin held and recommended he be removed. Lenin's warnings were ignored and Stalin was confirmed in office by a congress he had filled. This was an early sign of Stalin's authoritarian nature.
"By the time Lenin died, therefore, Stalin had built up a formidable power base within the party apparatus from which he could with relative ease and on plausible pretexts conveniently isolate or neutralize those who stood in his way."5
Stalin also used the party rules against factionalism following the 1921 resolution on party unity to his advantage, Stalin, Zinoviez and Kamenev came together out of fears of Bonapartism in other words that Trotsky would become dictator. By the time they realised the threat was Stalin there was little they could do. Their subsequent alliance with Trotsky was ...
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"By the time Lenin died, therefore, Stalin had built up a formidable power base within the party apparatus from which he could with relative ease and on plausible pretexts conveniently isolate or neutralize those who stood in his way."5
Stalin also used the party rules against factionalism following the 1921 resolution on party unity to his advantage, Stalin, Zinoviez and Kamenev came together out of fears of Bonapartism in other words that Trotsky would become dictator. By the time they realised the threat was Stalin there was little they could do. Their subsequent alliance with Trotsky was easily labelled as factionalist. They were expelled from the party in 1927. Stalin had shown himself to be the cleverer politician and had out manoeuvred his rivals particularly Trotsky. Another indication of Stalin's increasing authoritarianism was the reduced independence and power of the party. Its institutions began to meet less and less,
"Congresses had been annual events in the 1920's. The fourteenth met in 1927, the fifteenth in 1927, the sixteenth in 1930, the seventeenth in 1934, the eighteenth in 1939 and the nineteenth in 1952."6
The politburo and the central committee also stopped meeting regularly. Once Stalin had purged the secret police he no longer depended on any single institution and could freely manoeuvre between the institutions of power. After the Purges Stalin had succeeded in converting the party into an instrument of him and his clique. The party members were more powerful than any other group but they were still subject to Stalin's supreme power. He became known as Vozhad which means leader and this was openly proclaimed showing Stalin's power.
"All the basic institutions of the totalitarian system had been shaken; however by the same token they were less capable of independent stands, more reliable instruments of the remaining elite, and therefore more totalitarian, than before."7
It is not clear whether Stalin sought more power for himself but what is clear is that the end result of his policies was that he possessed supreme authority over the Soviet system.
The cult of Stalin is often used as an example of where a leader attempts to elevate himself to a god like position within society. Stalin created a cult of personality to surround both himself and Lenin. After Lenin's death his body was embalmed and placed on display in a mausoleum in Red square. Stalin used Lenin's death to proclaim himself as Lenin's one true disciple. In the minds of the people his name was indissolubly linked to Lenin's. Stalin knew how popular Lenin was and so rewrote history to make his relations with Lenin seem more hospitable. The first signs of the emerging cult of Stalin was at his 50th birthday celebrations in 1929. Stalin became the focus of massive adoration and worship. Numerous places were renamed after Stalin for example Tsaritisin became Stalingrad in 1922. It is unlikely that Stalin initiated this, he was far to cautious in character. "the local communist notables sought to flatter him, in the way that medieval burghers sought the protection of some feudal lord."8 Stalin was a strong and vivid personality who knew how to charm people. In 1937 he managed to charm Lion Feuchtwanger who was renound as a tough and experienced observer. The cult of Stalin had enormous effect of the arts. The cult had the biggest effect on literature, which lapsed into temporary dullness, writers quoted Stalin in works on many subjects ranging from ancient history to romance novels. Stalin encouraged the fanning of his cult but was careful at the same time to make himself appear to be the executor of the will of the party. Stalin was able to do this because he understood the psychology of his people and was especially able to appeal to the young.
"He knew how to evoke that blend of idealism, romantic craving and brutality which is often typical of the young... he appealed to their need for action and enthusiasm."9
The seventeenth Congress of the communist party in 1934 is an excellent example of the adoration and praise that Stalin received for his services even from within the party. There are hundreds of pages of records of the proceedings at the congress which are littered with worshipful references to Stalin.
"Stalin was subject during it to excessive praise. But even the word praise is insufficient: Stalin was extolled, worshipped."10
Stalin was hailed as a genius and hero of the working classes, which continued to be the view of many people right up until Khrushchev's policy of de-Stalinization.
Few figureheads can claim to have instilled the same level of fear into their people as Stalin. However it was not Stalin that instigated the use of fear. Fear had been used as a instrument of control under Lenin. The Cheka were the first secret police force and they earned themselves a fearsome reputation especially after the first Cheka order of February 1918, calling for soviets to shoot on sight all "counter revolutionaries". "Lenin accepted as the lesser evil that there should be an institution which was above the law, that it should be given vast powers and that violence and arbitrariness should be the privileged methods by which the political system was defended."11 Such a reign of terror developed that many local communist authorities complained. Stalin however took this to the extreme and under him terror, fear and intimidation became standard methods of achieving his aims. The clearest example of this is collectivisation. Collectivisation was a virtual civil war of the regime against the peasantry. Stalin's policy of de-kulakisation is an example of the use of force to create fear. Kulaks were wealthy peasants and as such were most likely to resist collectivisation. In the summer of 1929 Stalin ordered party workers to "liquidate Kulaks as a class." In 1930 it was decreed that one third of Kulaks were to be sent to concentration camps, one third were to be deported from region of residence and one third given the worst land. This was not followed and what ensued was Chaos, pillage and murder. Although Kulaks were classed as wealthy peasants any peasant that resisted socialism was classed as one. Any peasant that resisted collectivisation was deported to the far north and in many cases whole villages very surrounded and attacked. The first five year plan saw the emergence of a new weapon in Stalin's arsenal of fear, the show trial. In 1928 fifty-five engineers and workers from the mining town of Shakhty were arrested on charges of wrecking for foreign countries. They were tried publicly and defendants were forced to confess, usually through the interrogation techniques of the OGPU. Eleven of the defendants received death sentences and the rest got long prison sentences. "The Shatky affair set a precedent and a pattern for future demonstrative denunciations and show trials."12 The accusations were unfounded and the secret police most likely fabricated the charges. Stalin's aim was to intimidate the specialists trained in pre-revolutionary days into doing what he demanded. People were encouraged to denounce anyone even family who might be enemies of the people, the fact that it seemed as if anyone could be arrested had a powerful effect. The show trials was combined with propaganda espousing Stalin's theory of the intensification of class struggle, he reasoned that as soviet socialism grew stronger the harder its enemies would work to hinder and destroy it, but this was only a pretext designed to keep up the "enemy image"13 which Stalin used to his advantage to coerce people into conformity,
"for the soviet people it meant almost half a century of fear, suspicion, ignorance of their past and the outside world, and a fatalistic submissiveness to the totalitarian system."14
The most horrific consequence of the tyrannical Stalinist system and the terror it inflicted was the mass purges that were perpetrated during Stalin's reign. Although the arrest and execution or deportation of "enemies of the people" was a constant feature of the Stalinist system terror reached its peak in 1937. From 1937 to 1939 the numbers of people arrested reached astonishing levels. People from all backgrounds and professions were affected, no one was safe. On the 1st of December 1934 Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad. Why Kirov was killed is not entirely certain although it is probable that it was authorised by Stalin and because he was many peoples choice to replace Stalin. Stalin issued a decree on judicial procedures for dealing with terrorism, they were called the Kirov decrees and allowed the police to arrest, try in secret and execute people immediately. Within days a hundred people had been shot for complicity with Kirov's assassin. Thousands more were arrested including Zinoviev and Kamenev. Simultaneously Stalin started to purge the party itself. After the assassination of Kirov Stalin was no free to arrest party members at will, it also meant that Stalin could no bypass the party which was now under his authority. In 1936 Yezhov replaced Yagoda as head of the NKVD and over the next two years Stalin launched what became known as the Great Terror. Show trials characterised this period of terror. The first was in 1936, Zinoviez and Kamenev and other old Bolsheviks were accused of plotting to murder party members and were shot. In January 1937 the so called Anti soviet Trotskyite centre were tried, this included Bukharin, Rykov, Ravkovsky, Yagoda and all members of Lenin's politburo. In June there was a trial of military leaders. Victims included 70% of party central committee elected in 1934, 90% of central trade union committees, 65% of the armies upper command, three out of five Marshals, thirteen out of fifteen Generals and 62 out of 85 corps commanders. Below the party elite 200,000 party members died between 1936 and 1939. Propaganda during these years helped to create a general paranoia which created a flurry of denunciations. The purges spread to include friends and relatives of those arrested at first as well as members of the scientific and intellectual community. The secret police had orders to arrest a percentage of the population and in order to fill quotas countless arbitrary victims were arrested. Estimates on how many died vary greatly but one suggests eight million people were arrested in 1937-38 of which one million were executed and two million died in prison camps with about seven million in camps at the end of 1938.15 December 1938 signalled the end of the mass purge, Yezhov was replaced by Beria. Yezhov was later arrested and shot in the purge of the secret police. Yezhov was scapegoat by Stalin for the excesses of the purges which he named Yezhovschina. However in reality Yezhov was just the implementer of Stalin's directives. The last death sentence of the purges to be carried out was that on the head of Trotsky, who was killed in Mexico in 1940. "Stalin apparently decided that the disruption caused by the purges was beginning to outweigh any advantage he might gain from them."16 the worst of the purges were over, although the legal and institutional machinery stayed in place and was used sporadically for the rest of the Stalinist period.
Much speculation and analysis has been devoted to the reasons for the mass purges. Isaac Deutscher acknowledges that the charges were false but points to Stalin's reasoning on these matters as a cause. He says the charges
"were based on a perverted psychological truth... [Stalin's] reasoning probably developed along the following lines: they may want to overthrow me in a crisis- I shall charge them with already having made the attempt."17 This goes some way to explaining the purge of the party, but what of the innocent citizens arrested, there are two possible explanations of this, the first is that Stalin had some sort of mad blood lust or the second as put forward by Treadgold and Ellison and that is that
"that Stalin realized that under totalitarianism anyone is potentially disloyal, and that therefore the regime would be secure only if everyone was sufficiently terrorized to become incapable of acting independently."18
It seems more likely that Stalin was acted to secure his totalitarian regime believing this served the interests of the revolution and that only he could interpret these interests rather acting act of pure cruelty.
In conclusion Stalin's regime was a tyranny which me managed to create by manipulating and outmanoeuvring his opponents to gain a position of power. He built on Lenin's legacy to develop a cult of personality which brought him praise and devotion from the masses. He ruthlessly employed the apparatus of the secret police to instil fear and terror in people in order to coerce them into submissiveness and ideological conformity. He purged the party and the nation of all possible enemies, real and perceived to him and the system he had created. He was relentless in pursuit of his goals and was determined to achieve them through any means necessary. He superseded the party and succeeded in transforming it into a instrument of his iron will. The party had supreme authority but Stalin's authority over the party was supreme. In creating an extreme authoritarian system millions perished and countless lives were ruined. The Stalinist system however built on many features of the regime under Lenin, the single party system, the use of force, authoritarianism and to a certain extent the cult of personality, but the difference lies in the application of these features, Stalin took these to an extreme. It is difficult to believe that Lenin would have instigated the mass purges particularly of party members or that he would have built up a cult of personality that overshadowed the party and encouraged such sycophantic god like worship that became the main features of the Stalinist system. Whether Stalin madly craved power or applied some sort of perverted logic in his determination to achieve the goal of socialism in one country it is certain that his legacy will continue be felt long after his strangle hold over the soviet system had eneded.
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4 Wood, Alan, Stalin and Stalinism, London, Routledge, 1990, P39.
5 Tredgold, Donald and Ellison, Herbert, Twentieth Century Russia (9th ED), Colorado, Westview, 2000, P214.
6 Christian, David, Imperial and Soviet Russia, London, Macmillian, 1997, P305
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MARK SUTCLIFFE