In this lecture we'll be doing some
background information on the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. The death of
Vladimir Lenin in 1924 left something of a power vacuum in the Soviet Union. Lenin was only 53 years old when he died and he hadn't really prepared for a successor. Although a series of strokes left him increasingly debilitated the last two
years of his life the two main competitors for leadership of the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin were Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Stalin was born
Yosef Djugasvilli, and he was ethnically a Georgian from the Caucasus region. At one point he was convicted of bank robbery. He was arrested and exiled at least seven
times and kept escaping and returning back to the Russian cities in the West part of the country. He took on the name at some point of Stalin, which translates
into "Man of Steel." Trotsky on the other hand was much more of a theorist as
opposed to Stalin who was much more of a street-level organizer and something of
a thug. Trotsky was a doctrinaire Marxist and he called for worldwide revolution
against capitalism, whereas Stalin was pushing for what he called socialism in
one country (Soviet Union). Stalin had a distinct advantage despite the fact that Trotsky
was probably intellectually far superior to him, and that was that he had the
ability to put his supporters in top jobs, and through personnel decisions
really kept Trotsky isolated in the Communist Party. Finally push came to
shove and Stalin was able to first force Leon Trotsky out of the country and he
was later murdered in Mexico by an agent of Stalin in 1937. After regaining full control of the
party Stalin put together the first of what he called five year plans and
pushing Soviet Union more towards a command econom. The goal was to build
heavy industry to improve transportation and raise farm output the government
from this point forward controlled all economic activity. Interestingly this
was quite a change from the policies enacted by Lenin last few years of his
life Lenin had undertaken what he called the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) which was essentially a return to forms of capitalism lemon believed the Soviet
Union was not ready for a full communist revolution and that it had to go through
fully advanced capitalism to get to communism. Stalin on the other hand
disagreed with that policy. In this idea of the command economy government's own all businesses & they distribute all resources. They would dictate from the top-down how much of a given product a factory would produce or how much crops a particular
farming concern would produce. Very often these quotas were far beyond reality and
almost into the realm of fantasy and yet magically bureaucrats managed to meet
those quotas at least on paper. But there was quite a bit of corruption and
fudging of numbers going along with them. Yet despite the inefficiencies of the
Soviet economic system and the widespread corruption industrial
production did increase by approximately twenty-five percent in the period of
1932 to 1937 which far surpassed the shrinking economies in the West which
was going through the Great Depression at the time. The downside of this of
course though is to pay for these unrealistic quotas and to boost
industrial production consumer goods had to be cut back on so
there were severe shortages of food clothing and housing in this time period. One of the most important ways that
Stalin was able to boost industrial production is through the
collectivization of agriculture. Stalin needed farmers to produce more grain to
feed urban workers and he needed more grain to sell abroad to raise foreign
cash reserves. Stalin was also somewhat paranoid of small farmers and peasants
who he believed to be inherently conservative and thus a threat to the
regime. Collectives were large farms that were owned and operated by peasants as a group. The government provided tractors and fertilizer and seed peasants learned
modern farming methods they were allowed to keep houses and personal belongings
but they were forced to turn over quotas in terms of the amount of grain or
whatever it is they were producing on their farm. Animals and implements were
turned over to the collectives, which again operated almost as an arm of the
state. The state set prices and controlled supplies. Peasants quickly became upset
by this especially with the low crop prices that the government dictated. In
many cases they would burn crops or kill animals and destroy tools rather than
turn this over to the government. There was a term that emerged as as a
pejorative or as a slur against independent minded farmers which was
kulak. And Stalin thought kulaks were behind the resistance he believed
that this greed had to be dealt with so in 1929 he undertook what he called the
"liquidation of the kulaks." The Soviets confiscated their land sent them to labor camps but
yet peasants continued to hold back grain and Soviets had to send operatives out
into the countryside to seize the grain to meet the urban needs. Due to this
kulak policy and a poor 1932 harvest along with a drought in this
harvesting season it was mass famine in the period of 1932-33. Perhaps as many as eight million peasants died in the Ukraine as a result
of these failed policies. One of the ways Stalin was able to maintain powers
through the use of police terror they monitored telephone lines read mail
installed systems of informants neighbors denouncing neighbors family
members denouncing family members and the government actively encouraged
citizens to denounce other citizens censorship again was a principal means
by which control was maintained. In the Soviet Union under Stalin there was no
room for individual creativity. Soviets controlled newspapers motion pictures
theater radio and all sources of information. One of the strangest periods
of Soviet history occurs in 1936-38 in what is known as the Great Purge. Stalin
increasingly paranoid began to believe there was this vast threat to overthrow
the regime. Evidence doesn't appear to back this up I think this was largely
the creation of Stalin's paranoid mind. Political rivals military leaders
intellectuals were all rounded up there were up to two million arrested and we
believe up to 1 million were executed. Via Stalin's own handwriting we can directly link at least forty four thousand deaths where he signed off on forms ordering
the death of people believed to be believed to be threats to the regime
it's in terms of these show trials they these were trials of a couple of leading
so-called ringleaders our Western journalists were brought in to try to
give this some legitimacy and at the time some Western news agencies did believe these were fair trials in hindsight of course we know
now that they were shams that people were tortured beaten or threatened in
order to get them to confess publicly. One of the downsides though to the Great
Purge is that almost all of the top military leaders of the Soviet Union
were jailed or executed just at the time when Hitler was beginning to build up
the German military so this left the Soviet Union at the start of the Second
World War in dire straits with a lack of talented and experienced military
leadership in terms of religion the Russian Orthodox Church was the main
target of persecution. The Soviets attempted to sort of eliminate religion
and replace it with communist ideology. This was not very effective in the long
term in the short term it seemed to drive religion underground but the
religious character of the Russian people is such that it was never really
extinguished. Roman Catholics also were persecuted as well as Jews to a lesser
extent Muslims. The Soviets seemed to have less animosity at least during the
Stalinist era with sort of some of the borderland peoples who were in the the
outline republics of the Muslim faith, and this in part was due to the fact
that they needed to be the Soviets that is needed to be a bit more accommodating in order to pacify these peoples. The Soviets instituted instituted a state
prison system known as the GULAG a system the acronym stands for the chief
administration of corrective labor camps and colonies there were both prison
camps labor camps as well as colonies colonies were places that were sort of
lower risk but permanently exiled individuals would be
sent in order to start over. But they couldn't leave those colonies they had
to stay most of these were the colonies that is were in under populated
areas of Siberia and eastern Russia. The labor camps themselves could be all over
the Soviet Union. On the next slide we'll see a map of the gulag system here you
have statistics you can see that during the during the Second World War. The
number of prisoners significantly dropped and that's due to the the common sense reason that Stalin simply needed more on Soviet citizens to fight in the
military. Here's the map showing where the various labor camps and prison camps were located. It essentially devolved into a form of slave labor during in
Soviet Union this officially this system was dissolved in 1960 under Nikita
Khrushchev, although vestiges of this system remained until the fall of the
Soviet Union.