Stalin’s grab for power was successfully completed by the spring of 1929, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were now called) removed the leaders of the Right (led by Bukharin) from their posts. From that point on, no one dared to criticize Stalin; in fact, when his own wife spoke out against the regime during the crisis of 1932-33, Stalin had her roughly silenced, and she committed suicide.

The crises of 1932-33 included several elements. In 1929, Stalin had ended NEP and introduced a new economic policy, called the 5 Year Plan. Under this plan, Stalin intended to industrialize the Soviet Union as well as collectivize farming. There had been resistance to the plan by many peasants, especially in the Ukraine, and Stalin responded by sending in the army to take grain and livestock from the peasantry by force. By the time 1933 ended, as many as 6 million peasants were dead, either from starvation or from being brutalized by the army. Stalin wavered about how to deal with the problems of collectivization, eventually deciding to purge the party of all of the members who disagreed with his plan.

The Purges

In 1934, he carried out what became known as The Great Purge, in which he arrested and executed virtually every leader of the Communist Party who was not his ally (and some who were). The purge started with the murder of the Leningrad Party chief, S. Kirov, in December 1934, an assassination which was, in all likelihood, sponsored by Stalin himself. Over the course of the next three years, Stalin purged the political and military leadership of the Soviet Union. All “enemies of the people” were liquidated or sent to the labor camps, called the gulags, in Siberia. By the end, all of the original Politburo members except Stalin and Trotsky were dead, and Trotsky would be assassinated in 1940. Robert Conquest, one of the leading historians on the purges, estimates that there were about 8 million purge victims in the camps by 1938 and another million in prisons. By the end of 1938, with the completion of the largest of the “show trials” (at which observers from the United States and Europe commented on the fairness of the trials, despite that fact that the outcomes had been determined before the trials even began), the purge ended. For all intents and purposes, Stalin had succeeded in creating an oprichnina, in which he played the role of Ivan IV.

The problems with a purge such as the one Stalin and his leadership undertook was that the number of people able to serve in the government was greatly diminished. It was estimated that over half of the urban population of the ten largest cities in the Soviet Union was on one police list or other as a potential enemy of the state. All decisions were made by the Politburo, which by 1938 was stocked exclusively with Stalin’s lieutenants. The Soviet Constitution of 1936 was the legal basis of the state, but it was largely ignored when needed. Stalin publicly announced to the Congress of Soviets in 1936 that the kulaks and capitalists had been eliminated, so only workers and peasants remained in the Soviet Union and as a result universal suffrage could be introduced. Of course, the only candidates were those who were approved by the party, but the system looked extremely fair to those looking in from the outside, so much so that people like George Bernard Shaw commented on the luck of the Soviet people to be living under such a system.

The USSR and Stalinism

The USSR, before the beginning of World War II, was a series of forcibly acquired republics. Transcaucasia had been split into three separate republics, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan were also admitted. In 1940, the Soviet army occupied the Baltics and incorporated the formerly autonomous republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine and Byelorussia were made separate republics in 1945, meaning that they could receive separate United Nations’ representation. The entire union, however, was dominated by the republic of Russia, which remained the largest and the most powerful, and that republic was dominated throughout the 1930s and 1940s by Stalin.

The reign of Stalin is one of the most brutal in Russian history. He had risen in the party as an organizer rather than as a theorist, and part of the problem was that he recognized (at least initially) that he was not the intellect that other members of the party, including Bukharin, was. Stalin’s jealousy, coupled with the fact that he was Georgian rather than Russian, certainly contributed to his paranoia and his actions against other members of the party. He spent his entire regime trying to make himself over as a theorist and a Russian, going so far as to publish ideological writings and creating a sense of national identity which was entirely Russian. The positives of his regime, including forcing the Soviet Union to industrialize, are far outweighed by the brutality of his regime, but he is remembered as a hero because of his actions during World War II, which will be the subject of the next lecture.