The Soviet Union Under Joseph Stalin
Background
- Death of Vladimir Lenin (1924): Power vacuum in Soviet Union
- Main Competitors for Leadership: Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky
Joseph Stalin
- Born Yosef Djugasvilli, ethnically Georgian
- Criminal past: convicted of bank robbery, multiple arrests and escapes
- Adopted name "Stalin" meaning "Man of Steel"
- Street-level organizer, viewed as a thug
Leon Trotsky
- Doctrinaire Marxist: called for worldwide revolution against capitalism
- Intellectually superior but politically isolated
- Forced out of the country by Stalin, murdered in Mexico in 1937
Stalin's Control and Policies
Five-Year Plans
- Objective: Build heavy industry, improve transportation, increase farm output
- Led to command economy: government-controlled economic activity
- Quotas often unrealistic, leading to corruption and inefficiencies
- Industrial production increased by 25% (1932-1937) despite global Great Depression
- Consumer goods cut back: severe shortages of food, clothing, housing
Collectivization of Agriculture
- Purpose: Boost grain production, sell abroad for foreign cash reserves
- Collectives: large farms owned and operated by peasants as a group
- Government provided machinery and set quotas
- Resistance from peasants, leading to crops burned, animals killed
- Term "kulak" used for defiant farmers
- 1929: "Liquidation of the kulaks" - land confiscated, sent to labor camps
- Resulted in mass famine (1932-33), up to 8 million deaths
Mechanisms of Control
Police Terror
- Monitoring of telephone lines, mail, informants encouraged
- Neighbors and family members denounced each other
Censorship
- No room for individual creativity
- Soviets controlled newspapers, motion pictures, theater, radio, information
The Great Purge (1936-38)
- Stalin’s paranoia led to mass arrests and executions
- Political rivals, intellectuals, military leaders targeted
- Estimated 2 million arrested, 1 million executed
- Show trials used to legitimize executions
- Purge weakened Soviet military
Persecution of Religion
- Main target: Russian Orthodox Church
- Efforts to replace religion with communist ideology
- Religion driven underground, never extinguished
- Roman Catholics and Jews also persecuted, Muslims to a lesser extent
GULAG System
- State prison system: corrective labor camps and colonies
- Prison camps and labor camps all over the Soviet Union
- Number of prisoners dropped during WWII due to need for soldiers
- Map showing locations: form of slave labor
- Officially dissolved in 1960 under Khrushchev, remnants existed until fall of Soviet Unio