Stalin and the
U.S.S.R.

War Communism
• Campaign to extract “surplus” wheat
• Campaign against “Kulaks”
• Results –
– Grain decline from 78 million tons (1913) to 48 million (1920)
– Kronsdat Naval Base mutiny 1921
– Famine kills 5 million plus
– Helps success of Civil War

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Post Civil War challenges
• Famine
• Reluctance of peasants to collectivize
• Industrial backwardness

Lenin’s Policies
•New Economic Policy
•Comintern

Joseph Stalin 1879-1953
• Djugashvili
• Head of communist party secretariat

Leon Trotsky

Stalin’s Ascension
• How did Stalin achieve power?
– General Secretary of Party
– Party “nomenclature”
– Isolates Trotsky
– Isolates Kamenev and Zinoviev

Competing Visions
• Trotsky
• Communist
International
(Comintern)
• Stalin
• “Socialism in One
Country”

Lenin’s concerns:
• “Stalin is too rude, and his fault… becomes unbearable in the office of
General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint it to another man.”

“Socialism in One
Country”
• What would Stalin need to do to strengthen the
Soviet Union?

Collectivization
• End of New Economic
Policy 1928
• …join a kolkhoz or face deportation or death...

Results
• Destruction of animals / crops
• Targetting kulaks / others
• 14 million dead 28 - 32
• Ukrainian famine 1933

Industrialization: The 5 year plans
• “We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in 10 years…or we shall be crushed”

• What would be the most important goals for industrial development?
• How could the Soviet
Union achieve them?

Propaganda

Aleksei Stakhanov

Gulags

Degree of Success of 5 year plans / collectivization
Take notes on plans
• Write a paragraph expressing an opinion
TWE the policies were successful /15 Due: