THE HOUSE THAT STALIN BUILT
The power structure of the Russian State
The “Tsar”
The Boyars (chiefs of bureaucracy)
The intelligentsia (middle class, small layer)
The Narod (Common People)
The Origin of the Soviet Union
• First World War: Russia fights against
Germany and Austria.
• Russia becomes exhausted, the last Emperor
Nicholas II abdicates.
• Lenin’s Bolshevik party overthrows the
provisional government on 25th October / 7th
November 1917.
Vladimir Lenin (1917-1924)
What was Bolshevism?
• 1903 Lenin splits the Socialist movement: instead of
working through parliamentary means (menshevism
or Social Democracy), he advocates a dictatorship of
the proletariat.
• The Russian revolution was the first proletarian
revolution. The Bolshevik party renamed Communist.
• Lenin unleashes terror in the name of class warfare.
• In 1921, with the Civil War over, Lenin announces
the New Economic Plan, allows small business to
thrive.
The Soviet Empire?
• USSR occupies most of territory of the former
Russian Empire.
• Exceptions: Finland, Poland, Baltic States
(Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) which become
independent in 1918 (and were reabsorbed
after 1945).
• 1924 Lenin dies, Georgian Bolshevik Josef
Stalin consolidates power.
Josef Stalin (1924-1953)
What was Stalinism?
• 1920s saw rise of Fascism in Germany, Italy: war
inevitable to defend the only communist country
• Socialism in one country meant building a powerful
industrial state
• 1928 First Five-Year Plan to raise production.
• Millions arrested, used as slave labour in construction
• Electrification of the country: dams and canals
Collectivization of Agriculture
• Decision to sell grain abroad to purchase
industrial equipment
• Peasants forced into collectives, contributing
their own livestock, land, equipment
• Industrialization of agriculture: tractors and
combines
• Partly class war against peasants
“Holodomor”
• In 1933 the crops fail,
Soviets confiscate grain
• Millions die of
starvation in the
villages, especially in
Ukraine
• Was it genocide by
Russians against
Ukrainians?
“Collectivization” of agriculture
Theory:
• increased output possible due to concentration,
mechanization
Doubtful results:
• eradication of peasants’ motivation
• Millions of people are starved to death when
land and food is confiscated
• Soviet agriculture permanently disabled
Industrialization
Introduction of ambitious 5-year plans:
• Successful development of heavy industry.
• Tractors, trucks, planes, Moscow metro
• Soviet Union becomes a sophisticated industrial
power
• Massive exploitation of prisoners’ work. Labour
camps.
• Stalin’s utopian projects: White (Belomor) Sea Canal
PURGES: THE GREAT TERROR
Elimination of political rivals:
• murder of Sergei Kirov (1934)
• show trials of fellow Bolsheviks
• the Great Terror (peak in 1937)
• Millions arrested, shipped to Siberia, worked to death
in the GULAG camps
Gulags: Labour camps
3,000,000
2,500,000
2,000,000
Camps
Colonies
Total
1,500,000
1,000,000
500,000
0
1945
1948
1951
1953
Official police data. Reported to Stalin by Minister Kruglov.
Source: Ahlberg 1992
Why the Terror?
• Stalin falsified history to eliminate Trotsky from the
history books
• Wrote his own History of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union exaggerating his own role
• Feared a coup d’état and his own replacement by
Trotsky, in exile in various countries
• Trotsky finally murdered in Mexico City by a Soviet
agent in 1940
Socialist Realism
• Term invented in 1932 to set Soviet policy on
literature as the central art-form.
• Promulgated at the first Congress of Union of
Soviet Writers (1934) by Zhdanov.
• Objective: to control literature and make it serve
Stalin’s objective of Socialism in one country.
• To replace ambiguous (hence dangerous)
avant-garde art forms with more traditional ones.
The Cultural Program
• Zhdanov’s assignment: develop model of
organization for all the arts.
• Use the creation of artists’ unions to reward
and control: dachas and royalties for the
compliant; poverty and eventual arrest for the
uncooperative.
• Literature model later applied to film, visual
arts, music, even architecture.
“Ever Higher”
(Serafima Riangina, 1934)
Voloshyn, Reconstruction of Dnieper Hydro Plant, 1947
The Worker and the Collective Farmer
(Рабочий и Колхозница) Vera Mukhina
Created for the 1937
International Exhibition in
Paris; re-erected in the
Exhibition of Economic
Achievements, Moscow;
Recently restored
“Stalin as an organizer of the October Revolution”
by Karp Trokhimenko
“Roses for Stalin”
Boris Vladimirsky
Socialist Realism: Meaning?
Formula worked out by Maxim Gorky:
•Literature must be realistic (i.e., believable).
•Appeal to the newly literate masses of
workers and peasants.
•“Party-minded” (Marxist-Leninist)
•Optimistic – apotheosis at end.
“Sotsrealism” in literature
• “Bildungsroman” – about the education
of an individual with whom the reader is
supposed to identify.
• “young positive hero”of correct class
background, i.e., son of worker,
• overcomes difficulties thanks to help of
older Bolshevik, perhaps party member,
• triumphs over difficulties at the end and
has his consciousness raised.
Socialist Realist FilmLiubov Orlova in film
Circus.
The Prelude to War
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact 23 August 1939.
Germany and USSR:
secret protocols divide
Eastern Europe into
“spheres of interest.”
USSR granted Eastern
Poland, Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Finland and
Bessarabia (Moldavia).
Execution of Polish Officers
• In 1939 some 20,000 Polish officers
surrendered to Soviets
• In 1940 Stalin gives the order for them to be
executed
• Why? – they pose a risk in case of invasion;
they represent a hostile force
• Falsification of history: Soviets claim they
were murdered by the Germans
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
(THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR)
• June 22, 1941 Germany
invades USSR.
• Defence of Moscow and
Leningrad
• July 1942 - February
1943 the Battle of
Stalingrad
• “Generals win battles,
economies win wars.”
Victory!
• In 1945 USSR is
superpower.
• Latvia, Lithuania,
Estonia, part of Poland,
Moldavia all absorbed
into USSR.
• German city
Königsberg
(Kaliningrad) becomes
Soviet.
The Cold War
• “Soviet bloc” of occupied
countries is formed:
East Germany (GDR),
Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Romania,
Bulgaria.
Winston Churchill’s Iron
Curtain speech (Fulton,
Missouri, 1946
“Personality Cult”
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Stalin as an Icon
Religious-style indoctrination
Forged history
Stalin = Motherland
People cried when he died
Denounced by Nikita Khrushchev on 25
February1956 at 20th Communist Party congress.
• Most popular leader in Russia today