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Joseph Stalin is a name synonymous with mass murder, terror and war. He
was, as the head of the Soviet Russian Empire, the man ultimately responsible for the
reforms and strings of arrests and ‘repressions’ that swept across this enormous
landmass throughout the 1930s. Stalin himself had come from very humble
beginnings but managed to draw himself up to become the pre-eminent leader of the
unique amalgamation of theories that was the Soviet Union. His aim, above and
beyond all else, was to create a utopian Socialist state with the end goal of
Communism that would sweep across the world. He hoped to convert the capitalist
west, in time, but for the meantime work past the hostilities that threatened the
international peace. International peace, however, was a world removed from the
domestic realities of Russia. In his attempts to achieve his goals Stalin embarked on
the spectacular failure that has come to be known as Collectivisation. In order to
secure the fate of his agrarian empire he oversaw the mass slaughter that was the
Great Terror, incorporating the vicious purges of the military on top of the decimation
of the land’s peoples. By 1939 Stalin had completed these courses and despite the
means of his attack, there is no denying that in the Stalin years from 1930 until 1939
Russia grew industrially to become a world power. In the final year of the decade, the
man of steel sat teetering on the brink of war as the Second World War looked set to
eclipse the continent. Despite the shock sudden arrival of the enemy at the gates Stalin
was able to rally his country and his troops to the ultimate defeat of Hitler’s armies.
Though his methods leave something to be desired in the way of humanitarianism and
he may not have achieved exactly what he had set out to do, Stalin was ultimately
successful in making Russia far greater than it had ever been before.
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Stalin came to power, in all intents and purposes, on his election to General
Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee in April of 19221. The death of
his mentor but greatest rival, Vladimir Lenin, two years later solidified his position
and effectively put him in charge of the whole of the Soviet Union. His overriding
goal for being in power was to install ‘Socialism in one country’ and to make Russia
the example of the perfect society for the rest of the world2. The tenets of socialism
were to eliminate class boundaries and make life and access to resources equal for all.
The first thing Stalin aimed to do was bring the economy back on track from Lenin’s
time. The New Economic Policy (NEP) that had been brought in to stabilise the
country had been a success and profits had soared though it had been a concession to
the capitalist way of life and now was seen as the appropriate time to get back to the
Socialist way3.
The Great Depression in America in the late 1920s was the sign Stalin needed
that proved capitalism was doomed to fail and he believed it would precipitate a chain
of revolutions abroad in favour of communism4. He now launched his campaign of
industrialisation, required if the Soviet Union was to become anything more than
Western Europe’s poor cousin. The goals brought in were unheard of as
“It was necessary to build up a large number of new industries, industries unheard
of in tsarist Russia. It was necessary to create a defence industry, nonexistent in
old Russia. It was necessary to build plants for the production of modern
agricultural machinery, such as the old countryside had never heard of.” 5
1
Allan Wood, Stalin and Stalinism (London: Routledge Publishers, 1993), x.
Daniel Kubat, “Soviet Theory of Classes,” Social Forces 40, no.1 (Oct.,1961), 5.
3
Ibid.
4
Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966),
404-405.
5
Lawrence Louis Sharkey, Joseph Stalin: A Short Biography, (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1942), 47.
2
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This meant an overhaul of the peasantry, a continuance of the project started by Lenin
but on a much larger scale. Russia’s population was overwhelmingly rural, about 80%,
with less than 20% residing in the large towns and cities6. The people themselves
were Stalin’s greatest resource and not to utilise them would have been folly. These
were families that had been working the land for centuries and surely with just a few
amendments their productivity could be increased. The solution to this problem was
Industrialisation and Collectivisation, a joint process which would result in the death
of millions as Stalin and his party leaned harder and harder on the peasants to provide
impossible amounts of produce as they starved to death in the process.
The concepts of Industrialisation and Collectivisation ran hand in hand with
each other. Industrialisation was the process by which ten million young people were
herded into the cities to work at the new industrial plants to work on fulfilling the
promises of the First Five Year Plan7. These plants’ production goals were mostly
geared toward helping the military or defence forces but also went towards more
domestic ends such as road-building and equipment for bread factories and laundries8.
The planning behind this rapid growth was inefficient and as a result obscene
amounts of money were invested in construction projects that were never completed9.
Under the momentum of Industrialisation, “the last remaining vestiges of small-time
capitalism were abolished…private enterprises were rationalized, and a crash
programme of heavy industrial development was forced through with all the
Lewis Lord, “A Reign of Rural Terror, a World Away,” U.S. News & World Report 134, iss.23 (June
30, 2003), 4.
7
Wood, 32.
8
Lars T. Lik, V. Naumov & Oleg V. Khlovniuk, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, (London: Yale University
Press, 1995), 209.
9
Ibid., 187.
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aggressive intensity and militant enthusiasm of a military campaign.”10 The campaign,
however stilted, was deemed to be a huge success as the First Five Year Plan was
declared to be completed in merely four years in 1933 at a January Party Plenum11.
“The Party had provided a tractor industry, electric power, coal, steel and oil
production. Cities had been built where none stood before.”12 The Second Five Year
Plan was also ahead of schedule as it was announced as complete in 193713.
The First Five Year Plan has been described as less of a plan so much as a
wish list so that for the leaders of the country its deemed completion must have been
a extremely jubilant time14. The claims that came from the government at this time
were certainly exaggerated and in a number of cases undoubtedly fabricated so that
putting a numerical figure on the advancements made is nigh on impossible15. What
is known, however, is that this period and this ambitious plan did bring about a huge
industrial growth in Russia. At a time when America was experiencing a slump that
saw its output fall by almost a half, Russian representatives were claiming a two-fold
increase in local industrial production16. Industrialisation worsened the effects of the
Collectivisation scheme as the revenue gained from grain exports went to the
purchase of industrial equipment as the people starved17. Stalin himself claimed in
1931 that Russia was 100 years behind their western counterparts and that their goal
was to “make good this distance in ten.”18
10
Wood., 33.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson,
2003), 106.
12
Ibid.,
13
Wood, xi.
14
Martin Amis, Koba the Dread, (London: Jonothan Cape Publishing, 2002), 123.
15
Wood, 34.
16
Lord, 4.
17
Wood, 34.
18
Ibid., 33.
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The great tragedy of the early 1930s, however, was the results of
Collectivisation. This was a scheme whereby peasants were forced into collective
farms where labour and resources were to be pooled to increase profits and grain
production. The internecine project was officially embarked on in 1929 and by March
of 1930 these farms constituted 58% of all peasant households19. Part of the impetus
behind the scheme was that in the early 1930s paper money depreciated and massive
grain exports were needed to make up for the scarcity of hard currency20. Martin
Amis describes Collectivisation as “the opening and defining stage of Stalin’s
untrammelled power,” as he pushed the peasants beyond physical and material
capability21. He hoped that it would finance industrialisation which would, in turn,
provide means to build up a strong military22. Increasingly harsh quotas were put in
place that the peasants had to fill even though this meant that no-one had enough to
eat. The stringent rules surrounding Collectivisation meant that no grain at all was
allowed to be held back from fulfilling these quotas and the punishment for holding
onto even a few husks was often death. The resulting famine from 1932 to 1933
killed millions of people; “the people who grew the grain were dying at a rate of
25,000 a day.”23 The problem was compounded by the fact that, as grain production
dropped through lack of workers to take part in the harvest, the demanded quotas
increased.
The second horrifying aspect of Collectivisation was the concerted campaign
against kulaks. A kulak was originally a prosperous farmer or landowner but the term
soon expanded to encompass anyone who seemed to be making a living despite the
19
Lik et al., 187.
Ibid., 203.
21
Amis, 120.
22
Ibid., 123.
23
Lord, 4.
20
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odds. Even ‘looking troublesome’ was enough to deserve imprisonment in the hellish
gulags or death24. People were encouraged to inform on their friends and neighbours
for hoarding grain or resisting Collectivisation in any way. To not inform could lead
to scrutiny being directed at you and your family and becoming a spy was the only
way one could attempt to escape being persecuted. To speak of the famine was
criminal and brought on grave consequences as the official line was that the peasants
had plenty to eat25 and in the Ukraine, where the famine hit hardest, “a military
cordon was thrown around the entire republic to prevent news of the mass starvation
reaching the outside world26. NKVD brigades scoured the countryside for anyone
who wasn’t acting as the ideal socialist and giving their all to the state. It wasn’t
enough to survive the famine, surviving dekulakisation was responsible for almost the
same amount of deaths with estimates approximating famine deaths at 8 million and
dekulakisation being responsible for a further 6.5 million27. In 1934, at the 17th Party
Congress, ‘The Congress of Victors’, the party celebrated its recent ‘triumphs’ in the
fields of agriculture and industry and the liquidation of the kulaks28. The worst of
Collectivisation had now indeed passed. What was yet to come, however, was more
concerted brutality than could ever be dreamed up.
The Great Terror began officially in 1936 but its roots can be seen in the
assassination of Party organiser Sergei Kirov in late 193429. Though Stalin’s
fingerprints are widely believed to be one the murder plans, it has never been proven
and he used this occasion to his own benefit to accuse enemies of being involved and
24
Lord, 4.
Ibid.
26
Wood, 32.
27
Lord, 4.
28
Wood, 36.
29
Ibid.
25
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to begin the infamous Purges that eliminated all possible foes30. One explanation for
Stalin’s backlash was that he had felt the weight of the failure of Collectivisation on
his shoulders acutely. He had truly believed that it would work and when his ‘second
October’ never materialised, the failure was “the elephant in the Kremlin” and it was
his face at the fore of those to blame31. Two of the first people targeted in the Purges
were former Politburo members Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1935. This led to the first
of the show trials, in 1936, where prisoners were led up to confess to a scripted list of
crimes, had no evidence and no defence, and were summarily executed32. The same
fate awaited others who had once been respected Party members and in 1938
Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda, “who had once ruled Russia alongside Stalin”33 were
also purged34. These purges were Stalin’s means of eliminating anyone who he saw as
a threat or anyone by whom he felt he had been slighted. No one was safe from the
accusing gaze of Yezhov, the Party Commissar General and purge organiser35;
Vyshinsky, the state prosecutor36; or indeed from Stalin himself as those in his
innermost circle were usually the most likely to eventually be attacked. Once it had
been decided that a comrade had shown any sign of being anti-party, it was only a
party of time before they were hauled before one of these sham trials and their
inevitable sentence literally executed.
These trials were far from the most common practice, though, most people
were just arrested and taken away with little fuss by the NKVD either to the gulags,
30
Wood, 36.
Amis, 170.
32
Wood, 37.
33
Montefiore, 193.
34
Wood., 37.
35
Montefiore, 209.
36
Wood, 37.
31
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Stalin’s chain of concentration camps, described as “Auschwitz without the ovens”37
to await a likely execution or were just shot where they were found. The Great Terror
was an NKVD operation where anyone associated in any way with the central show
trial characters were arrested. Relatives, colleagues, suspected associates and
acquaintances were top of the arrest priority list38. Once arrested, their ordeal had only
just begun as they were tortured mercilessly to give confessions that many did not
have it in them to give. No avenue of defence was viable, however as “the concepts of
guilt by association, guilt by category, guilt by occupation, guilt by admission, and
guilt by silence were introduced as a means of widening the murderous trawl”39. The
Red Army was one of the organisations worst hit as all of its tops brass; generals and
commanding officers; were purged in 1938, right before the outbreak of war40. The
terror brought about a revival of Marxist theory as class lines were attempted to be
wiped out. The aim of the Terror “was to ‘finish off once and for all’ all enemies and
those impossible to educate in socialism, so as to accelerate the erasing of class
barriers and therefore the bringing of paradise to the masses.”41 Trotskyites were
particularly targeted42 and religion was persecuted as were many Baltic nationalities43.
There were often no given reasons for a person being targeted for execution. NKVD
officers were merely given nameless quotas of thousands of people to shoot and all
but the least enthusiastic far exceeded their given numbers44. Until 1939 when the
purges were declared over Stalin and Molotov were handed lists of death sentences
with names pages long to sign each day45 and did so with hardly a glance, though
37
Wood, 39.
Ibid., 38.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.
41
Montefiore, 203.
42
Ibid., 178.
43
Amis, 184.
44
Montefiore, 203.
45
Amis, 129.
38
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some had notations next to them, with the very rare pardon but mostly further
condemnation.
In the field of foreign policy, Stalin tried to keep peace on all fronts but when
this turned out to be impossible, played a dangerous game of double face. Though in
his short years in power, Lenin had held four international congresses, Stalin held
only three in his 25 years46, signifying that domestic issues were more important. He
wanted no one else’s land but neither would he concede any Russian territory. Stalin
seemed to stay blithely ignorant to the dangers of Nazism despite Hitler’s loud and
blatant calls. Even when Hitler seized power, Stalin hoped for a pact which would
lead to a decline in Hitler’s influence and Communism’s triumphant return47. In 1937
the aims of the party were laid out thus:
“To continue the policy of peace and of strengthening business relations with all
countries; To be cautious and not allow one country to be drawn into conflict by
warmongers; To strengthen the might of our Red Army and Red Navy to the
utmost.”48
Stalin saw himself as competing with Lenin’s memory and wanted to ensure a “better
Brest-Litovsk”49, the treaty imposed at the end of the First World War. He eventually
reached out a hand to the West, hoping for the Popular Front concept to become a
reality. He was, however effectively shot down when the British and French Prime
Ministers, Chamberlain and Daladier, helped Germany to partition Czechoslovakia50.
In 1939 Stalin signed a pact of non-aggression with Hitler which assured the safety of
46
Deutscher, 396.
Ibid., 407.
48
Sharkey, 71.
49
Philip S. Gillette, “Motivational- Ideational Analysis of Stalin’s Foreign Policy,” Slavic Review 36,
no.4 (Dec., 1977), 592.
50
Deutscher, 426.
47
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each others territories51. Though inevitably this pact was eventually broken it did buy
Stalin two years of peace from Germany into the Second World War and two more
years to strengthen his armies. When Hitler’s forces did attack invade in Operation
Barbarossa of 1941, they were eventually repelled52. To this day Stalin is credited
with the defeat though there are some who would argue that if only he had kept his
eyes that bit more open, the invasion would not have advanced so far as it did. In
another vein the question also remains that had Stalin been more wary and his stance
less ambivalent, would Hitler have dared attack this superpower at all53?
Stalin’s years between 1930 and 1939 are difficult to evaluate in terms of his
successes. To be sure, industry made great leaps in both the First and Second Five
Year Plans. But the human cost of life was too great. Collectivisation failed abysmally
throughout its lifespan and again resulted in the death of millions. Stalin succeeded in
his aims to eliminate his enemies during the Purges and the Great Terror in the later
1930s but in doing so weakened the state, weakened his army badly and decimated his
people. On the international front he was somewhat scatterbrained for a few years but
managed to keep the Western powers on side and trade in a piece of paper for a few
years of relative peace. Stalin is still widely regarded in Russia today as the man
responsible for Hitler’s defeat and for the pulling of the Soviet Union and its industry
into the 21st century54. His policies were controversial to say the least; inhumane to
put it lightly, but in the end he got what he wanted. His country was turned into a
superpower, albeit on the corpses of his countrymen, but a world industrial
heavyweight it did become. He wiped out all those closest to him as well as millions
51
Amis, 194.
Wood, 40.
53
Ibid.
54
Cathy Young, “Stalin’s Resurgence in Russia,” Boston Globe (Feb 27, 2006), A.11.
52
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of unseen faces but then went mostly unchallenged for the rest of his rule. Though his
regime did not ‘work’ for the millions of people arrested, deported and killed and
likely there was a better way he could have achieved his ends, Joseph Stalin
succeeded in achieving most of his aims by 1939 and had laid the groundwork for the
success of imminent challenges. His failures were eventually written off as failed
experiments and he left the decade of the 1930s arguably as much in power over his
empire as any tsar, emperor, or king ever was.
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