Everything about Josef Stalin totally explained
Joseph Stalin (born as
Iosif Vissarionovich Jugashvili , see Introduction) (
December 18,
1878 –
March 5,
1953) (; ) was
General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union's
Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. During that time he established the regime now known as
Stalinism. As one of several Central Committee Secretariats, Stalin's formal position was originally limited in scope, but he gradually consolidated power and became the
de facto party leader and
dictator of the
Soviet Union.
Stalin launched a
command economy in the Soviet Union, forced rapid
industrialization of the largely rural country and
collectivization of its agriculture. While the Soviet Union transformed from an agrarian economy to a major industrial powerhouse in a short span of time, millions of people died from hardships and
famine that occurred as a result of the severe economic upheaval and party policies. At the end of 1930s, Stalin launched the
Great Purge, a major campaign of
political repression. During the continued repressions in the country under Stalin millions of people who were a threat to the Soviet politics or suspected of being such a threat were
executed or exiled to
Gulag labor camps in remote areas of
Siberia or
Central Asia. A number of
ethnic groups in Russia were
forcibly resettled for political reasons.
During Stalin's rule, the Soviet Union played a major role in the defeat of
Nazi Germany in the
Second World War (1939–1945). Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Union went on to achieve recognition as one of just two
superpowers in the post-war era, a status that lasted for nearly four decades after his death until the
dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Introduction
Born
Ioseb Vissarionovich Jugashvili (;, ) (–
March 5 1953), better known by his assumed name, Josef Stalin (;
stalin meaning "made of steel") became
General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922. Following the death of
Vladimir Lenin in 1924, he prevailed in a power struggle over
Leon Trotsky, who was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union.
In the 1930s Stalin initiated a
Purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which has become known as the
Great Purge, an unprecedented campaign of political repression, persecution and executions that reached its peak in 1937.
Stalin's rule had long-lasting effects on the features that characterized the Soviet state from the era of his rule to its collapse in 1991. Stalin claimed his policies were based on
Marxism-Leninism. Now his political and economic system is referred to as
Stalinism.
Maoists,
anti-revisionists and some others say he was actually the last legitimate Socialist leader in the Soviet Union's history.
Stalin replaced the
New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with
Five-Year Plans in 1928 and
collective farming at roughly the same time. The Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly peasant society to a major world industrial power by the end of the 1930s.
Confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities under his orders contributed to a famine between 1932 and 1934, especially in the key agricultural regions of the Soviet Union,
Ukraine (
see Holodomor),
Kazakhstan and
North Caucasus that resulted in millions of deaths. Many peasants resisted collectivization and grain confiscations, but were repressed, most notably well-off peasants deemed "
kulaks".
Bearing the brunt of the Nazis' attacks (around 75% of the
Wehrmacht's forces), the Soviet Union under Stalin made the largest and most decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany during
World War II (known in the USSR as the
Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945). After the war, Stalin established the USSR as one of the two major
superpowers in the world, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following his death in 1953.
Stalin's rule, reinforced by a
cult of personality, fought real and alleged opponents mainly through the security apparatus, such as the
NKVD. Millions of people were killed through
famines,
executions,
deportations, and in the
Gulag.
Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's eventual successor, denounced Stalin's rule and the cult of personality in 1956, initiating the process of "
de-Stalinization" which later became part of the
Sino-Soviet Split.
Childhood and education, 1878–1899
Josef Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in
Gori,
Georgia to
Vissarion "Beso" Dzhugashvili and
Ekaterina "Keke" Geladze (he adopted the name Stalin, which is derived from the Russian
stal’ for "steel", in 1913). Stalin's mother Keke was born a
serf. His father Beso was a
cobbler who owned his own shop. He was their third child; their two previous sons died in infancy. The second and third toes of his left foot were webbed.
Initially, the Dzhugashvilis' lives were prosperous and happy, but Stalin's father became an alcoholic, which gradually led to his business failing and him becoming violently abusive to his wife and child. As their financial situation grew worse, Stalin's family moved homes frequently; at least nine times in Stalin's first ten years of life.
The town where Stalin grew up was a violent and lawless place. It had only a small police force and a culture of violence that included gang-warfare, organized street brawls and wrestling tournaments (some of these were traditions inherited from Georgia's war-torn past). Shortly after leaving school, he discovered the writings of
Vladimir Lenin and decided to become a revolutionary.
Early years as a Marxist revolutionary, 1899–1917
After abandoning his priestly education, Stalin took a job as a weatherman at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory. Although the pay was relatively low (20 roubles a month), his workload was light, giving him plenty of time for revolutionary activities. He would organise strikes, lead demonstrations and give speeches. He soon caught the attention of the Tsar's secret police, the
Okhrana. During this time he met and charmed Simon Ter-Petrossian - aka "
Kamo", as Stalin would soon nickname him - a violent sociopath whom he bred to be his long-time henchman and enforcer.
On the night of March 21 1901 the Okhrana arrested a number of Party leaders in Tiflis, but Stalin spotted their agents waiting in ambush at the Observatory and avoided capture. He went underground, becoming a full-time revolutionary. In November, Stalin fled to Batumi and got work at an oil refinery owned by the Rothschild family. Organizing the workers there, Stalin was almost certainly involved in a 1902 fire at the refinery designed to trick the management into giving the workers a bonus for putting out the fire. However, the manager suspected arson and refused to pay. This lead to a series of strikes, all organized by Stalin, which in turn led to arrests and clashes with the Cossacks in the streets. In one attempt to break their comrades out of prison, thirteen strikers were killed when Cossacks intervened. Stalin distributed incendiary pamphlets portraying the dead as martyrs. On April 5, 1902, the authorities finally arrested Stalin at one of his secret meetings. At his trial, Stalin was acquitted of leading the riots due to lack of evidence, but was kept in custody whilst the authorities investigated his activities in Tiflis. In 1903, the authorities decided to exile Stalin to Siberia for three years. This Congress consolidated the supremacy of Lenin's Bolshevik faction and debated strategy for communist revolution in Russia. Here, Stalin first met
Leon Trotsky in person; Stalin immediately came to hate him, calling him "pretty but useless".
Suspected Tsarist connections
Stalin has been suspected in the past and in the present of being a Tsarist double-agent during his revolutionary years. Some of this suspicion stems from his ability to evade Tsarists efforts to capture him. His 1909 efforts to root out traitors caused much strife within the party; some accused him of doing this deliberately on the orders of the Okhrana. The Menshevik
Razhden Arsenidze said that Stalin was betraying comrades he didn't like to the Okhrana, but there's no proof of this. His ability to anticipate Okhrana actions may have come from moles within the organization. Another historian, Simon Sebag Montefiore, found that in all surviving Okhrana records Stalin is described as a revolutionary and never a spy.
Rise to power, 1917–1927
» See also: Stalin in the Russian Civil WarFebruary Revolution in February 1917 (the first phase of the
Russian Revolution of 1917), Stalin was released from prison in March 1917. He moved to
Petrograd (formerly and currently Saint Petersburg) and, together with
Lev Kamenev and
Matvei Muranov, ousted
Vyacheslav Molotov and
Alexander Shlyapnikov as editors of
Pravda, the official Bolshevik newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were still in exile. Stalin and the new editorial board took a position in favor of supporting
Alexander Kerensky's
provisional government (Molotov and Shlyapnikov had wanted to overthrow it) and went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown. However, after Lenin prevailed at the April Party conference, Stalin and the rest of the
Pravda staff came on board with Lenin's view and called for overthrowing the provisional government. At this April 1917 Party conference, Stalin was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest vote total in the party and was subsequently elected to the
Politburo of the Central Committee (May 1917); he held this position for the remainder of his life.
According to many accounts, Stalin only played a minor role in the
October Revolution of
November 7, 1917. Adam Ulam and others have argued that each man in the Central Committee had a specific job to which he was assigned.
The following summary of
Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in
Pravda,
November 6,
1918:
All practical work in connection with the organisation of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organised.
Note: Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book
The October Revolution issued in 1934, it wasn't included in
Stalin's Works released in 1949.
Later, in 1924, Stalin himself created a myth around a so-called "Party Centre" which "directed" all practical work pertaining to the uprising, consisting of himself,
Sverdlov,
Dzerzhinsky,
Uritsky, and
Bubnov. No evidence was ever shown for the activity of this "centre", which would, in any case, have been subordinate to the Military Revolutionary Council, headed by Trotsky.
During the
Russian Civil War and
Polish-Soviet War Stalin was a
political commissar in the
Red Army at various
fronts. Stalin's first government position was as
People's Commissar of Nationalities Affairs (1917–1923). In that position he traveled to
Finland in late 1917, and promised the socialists there that the Soviet Union would aid
their revolution. However, this aid was never given and the revolution in Finland was defeated.
He was also People's Commissar of the
Workers and Peasants Inspection (1919–1922), a member of the
Revolutionary Military Council of the republic (1920–1923) and a member of the
Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (from 1917).
Stalin played a decisive role in engineering the 1921
Red Army invasion of Georgia following which he adopted particularly hardline, centralist policies towards
Soviet Georgia, which included severe repression of all opposition within the local Communist party (for example, the
Georgian Affair of 1922), not to mention any manifestations of
anti-Sovietism (the
August Uprising of 1924). It was in the Georgian affairs that Stalin first began to play his own hand.
Campaign against the left and right opposition
On
April 3,
1922, Stalin was made
general secretary of the
Central Committee of the
All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), a post that he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country. It has been claimed that he initially attempted to decline accepting the post, but was refused. This position was seen to be a minor one within the party (Stalin was sometimes referred to as "Comrade Card-Index" by fellow party members) but, when combined with personal leadership over the
Orgburo and with an ally (Kaganovich) heading the organizational
Registration and Distribution Department of the Central Committee, actually had potential as a power base as it allowed Stalin to fill the party with his allies.
After
Lenin's
death in January 1924, Stalin,
Kamenev, and
Zinoviev together governed the party, placing themselves
ideologically between
Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and
Bukharin (on the right). During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building "
Socialism in One Country", in contrast to Trotsky's theory of
Permanent Revolution.
In the struggle for leadership after Lenin's death one thing was evident; whoever ended up ruling the party had to demonstrate fealty to the memory of Lenin. Stalin did so by organizing the late leader's funeral, after which he made a speech professing an undying loyalty to Lenin that was almost religious in nature.
Stalin's actual relationship with Lenin, which was far more complex than Stalin's speeches alluded, has been illuminated by a number of sources that were made available after the fall of the Soviet Union, including some from Lenin's sister.
Stalin first worked to undermine Trotsky, who was sick at the time, possibly by misleading him about the date of the funeral. Consequently, Trotsky, who was Lenin’s associate throughout the early days of the Soviet regime, lost considerable political support. Stalin made great deal of the fact that Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks just before the revolution, and publicized Trotsky's pre-revolutionary disagreements with Lenin. Another event that helped Stalin's rise was the fact that Trotsky came out against publication of
Lenin's Testament in which he pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of Stalin and Trotsky and the other main players, and suggested that he be succeeded by a small group of people.
An important feature of Stalin’s rise to power is the way that he manipulated his opponents and played them off against each other. Stalin formed a "
troika" of himself, Zinoviev, and Kamenev against Trotsky. When Trotsky had been eliminated, Stalin then joined Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev, emphasising their vote against the insurrection in 1917. Zinoviev and Kamenev then turned to Lenin's widow,
Krupskaya; they formed the "
United Opposition" in July 1926.
In 1927 during the 15th Party Congress Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and
Kamenev lost his seat on the Central Committee. Stalin soon turned against the "
Right Opposition", represented by his erstwhile allies,
Bukharin and
Rykov.
Stalin gained popular appeal from his presentation as a 'man of the people' from the poorer classes. The Russian people were tired from the world war and the civil war, and Stalin's policy of concentrating in building "Socialism in One Country" was seen as an optimistic antidote to war.
Stalin took great advantage of the ban on factionalism which meant that no group could openly go against the policies of the leader of the party because that meant creation of an opposition. By 1928 (the first year of the
Five-Year Plans) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year Trotsky was exiled because of his opposition. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivization and industrialization, Stalin can be said to have exercised control over the party and the country.
However, as the popularity of other leaders such as
Sergei Kirov and the so-called
Ryutin Affair were to demonstrate, Stalin didn't achieve absolute power until the
Great Purge of 1936–1938.
Soviet secret service and intelligence
Stalin vastly increased the scope and power of the state's secret police and intelligence agencies. Under his guiding hand, Soviet intelligence forces began to set up intelligence networks in most of the major nations of the world, including Germany (the famous
Rote Kappelle spy ring), Great Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Stalin saw no difference between espionage, communist political propaganda actions, and state-sanctioned violence, and he began to integrate all of these activities within the
NKVD. Stalin made considerable use of the
Communist International movement in order to infiltrate agents and to ensure that foreign Communist parties remained pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin.
One of the best examples of Stalin's ability to integrate secret police and foreign espionage came in 1940, when he gave approval to the secret police to have
Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico.
Stalin and changes in Soviet society, 1927–1939
Industrialization
See also: Industrialisation of the Soviet Union
The
Russian Civil War and
wartime communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the
New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism.
Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.
With seed capital unavailable because of international reaction to Communist policies, little
international trade, and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization both by restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the kulaks.
In 1933 workers' real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. Common and political prisoners in
labor camps were forced to do unpaid labor, and communists and
Komsomol members were frequently "mobilized" for various construction projects. The Soviet Union used foreign experts, for example British engineer Stephen Adams, to instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.
In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While it's generally agreed that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate of growth is disputed. It isn't disputed, however, that these gains were accomplished at the cost of millions of lives.
Official Soviet estimates stated the annual rate of growth at 13.9%; Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that Soviet growth became temporarily much higher after Stalin's death.
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According to Robert Lewis the Five-Year Plan substantially helped to modernize the previously backward Soviet economy. New products were developed, and the scale and efficiency of existing production greatly increased. Some innovations were based on indigenous technical developments, others on imported foreign technology.
Collectivization
Stalin's regime moved to force
collectivization of agriculture. This was intended to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, and to make tax collection more efficient. Collectivization meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced violent reaction among the peasantry.
In the first years of collectivization it was estimated that industrial production would rise by 200% and agricultural production by 50%, but these estimates were not met. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on
kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks proper made up only 4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the slightly better-off peasants who took the brunt of violence from the
OGPU and the Komsomol. These peasants were about 60% of the population). Those officially defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into
Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.
The two-stage progress of collectivization—interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, "
Dizzy with success" (
Pravda,
March 2,
1930), and "
Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" (
Pravda,
April 3,
1930)—is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.
Many historians assert that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely responsible for major
famines.
The 1932–1933 famine in
Ukraine and the
Kuban regions has been termed the
Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор). According to
Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop was no worse than that of 1931 … it wasn't a crop failure but the excessive demands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have alleviated the famine, while continuing to export grain; he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away, and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response.
Other historians hold that it was largely the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine, with the successful harvest of 1933 ending the famine.
Famine affected other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people. The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, had caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.)
Soviet and other historians have argued that the rapid collectivization of agriculture was necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians;
Alec Nove claims that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than because of, its collectivized agriculture.
Science
» Main articles: Science and technology in the Soviet Union, Suppressed research in the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism
Science in the
Soviet Union was under strict ideological control by Stalin and his government, along with art and literature. There was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free
Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic—the most notable examples being the "
bourgeois pseudosciences"
genetics and
cybernetics.
In the late 40's, some areas of physics, especially quantum mechanics but also special and general relativity, were also criticized on grounds of "
idealism". Soviet physicists, such as K. V. Nikolskij and D. Blokhintzev, developed a version of the
statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was seen as more adhering to the principles of
dialectical materialism. However, although initially planned, this process didn't go as far as defining an "ideologically correct" version of physics and purging those scientists who refused to conform to it, because this was recognized as potentially too harmful to the
Soviet nuclear program.
Linguistics was the only area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was
Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that
language is a class construction and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, read a letter by
Arnold Chikobava criticizing the theory. He "summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently." In this way he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work discussing linguistics is a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions."
Although no great theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics; his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics.
Scientific research was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to
labor camps (including
Lev Landau, later a
Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939) or executed (for example
Lev Shubnikov, shot in 1937). They were persecuted for their
dissident views, not for their research. Nevertheless, much progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and technology. It laid the ground for the famous achievements of Soviet science in the 1950s, such as the development of the
BESM-1 computer in 1953 and the launching of
Sputnik in 1957.
Indeed, many politicians in the
United States expressed a fear, after the "
Sputnik crisis," that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet Union in science and in public education.
Social services
Under the Soviet government people benefited from some social liberalization. Girls were given an adequate, equal education and women had equal rights in employment, improving lives for women and families. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which significantly increased the lifespan and quality of life of the typical Soviet citizen. Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract.
During Stalin's reign the official and long-lived style of
Socialist Realism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama and literature. Previously fashionable "revolutionary"
expressionism,
abstract art, and
avant-garde experimentation were discouraged or denounced as "
formalism". Careers were made and broken, some more than once. Famous figures were repressed, and many persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them
Isaac Babel,
Vsevolod Meyerhold) and "non-conformists" (for example,
Osip Mandelstam).
A minority, both representing the "Soviet man" (for example
Arkady Gaidar) and remnants of the older pre-revolutionary Russia (for example
Konstantin Stanislavski), thrived. A number of
émigrés returned to the Soviet Union, among them
Alexei Tolstoi in 1925,
Alexander Kuprin in 1936, and
Alexander Vertinsky in 1943.
Poet
Anna Akhmatova was subjected to several cycles of suppression and rehabilitation, but was never herself arrested. Her first husband, poet
Nikolai Gumilev, was shot in 1921, and her son, historian
Lev Gumilev, spent two decades in a
gulag.
The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general, and in specific instances, has been the subject of discussion. His name was as constantly invoked during his reign in discussions of culture as in just about everything else; in several famous cases his opinion was final.
Stalin's occasional beneficence showed itself in strange ways. For example,
Mikhail Bulgakov was driven to poverty and despair; yet, after a personal appeal to Stalin, he was allowed to continue working. His play,
The Days of the Turbines, with its sympathetic treatment of an anti-Bolshevik family caught up in the Civil War, was finally staged, apparently also on Stalin's intervention, and began a decades-long uninterrupted run at the Moscow Arts Theater.
Some insights into Stalin's political and
esthetic thinking might perhaps be gleaned by reading his favorite novel,
Pharaoh, by the Polish
writer Bolesław Prus, a historical novel on mechanisms of political power. Similarities have been pointed out between this novel and
Sergei Eisenstein's film,
Ivan the Terrible, produced under Stalin's tutelage.
In
architecture, a
Stalinist Empire Style (basically, updated
neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by the
Seven Sisters of Moscow) replaced the
constructivism of the 1920s.
Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect on the many indigenous cultures within the Soviet Union. The politics of the
Korenization and forced development of "Cultures National by Form, Socialist by their substance" was arguably beneficial to later generations of indigenous cultures in allowing them to integrate more easily into Russian society.
The attempted unification of cultures in Stalin's later period was very harmful. Political repressions and purges were even more devastating to indigenous cultures than on urban ones as the cultural elites were smaller. The traditional lives of many peoples in the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian provinces was upset and large populations were displaced and scattered in order to prevent nationalist uprisings.
The
Hotel Moskva (Moscow) in Moscow was said to have been built with mismatched side wings because Stalin had mistakenly signed off both of the proposals submitted, and the architects had been too afraid to clarify the matter. (The hotel had actually been built by two independent teams of architects with differing ideas.)
Religion
Stalin's role in the fortunes of the
Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937–1938. During
World War II, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, after the
NKVD had recruited the new
metropolitan, the first after the revolution, as a secret agent. Thousands of parishes were reactivated until a further round of suppression in
Khrushchev's time.
The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the
Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. An Act of Canonical Communion was signed on
May 17,
2007, followed immediately by a full restoration of communion with the Moscow Patriarchate; there remain some issues not fully healed to the present day.
Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects
were outlawed and persecuted.
Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church,
Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.
Purges and deportations
The purges
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|
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Left: Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities."
Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (support).
Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin. |
Stalin, as head of the
Politburo, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a
Great Purge of the party, justified as an attempt to expel 'opportunists' and 'counter-revolutionary infiltrators'. Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the
Gulag labor camps, to execution after trials held by
NKVD troikas.
The purges commenced after the assassination of
Sergei Kirov, the popular leader of the party in Leningrad. Kirov was very close to Stalin and his assassination sent chills through the Bolshevik party. Publicly Stalin merely reacted to this assassination by tightening security by seeking out alleged spies and counter-revolutionaries, but in effect he was removing those who might have threatened his leadership. This process then transformed itself into extensive purges.
There are two different views on the background of Kirov's murder. According to the first, Stalin wasn't involved but, fearing that he might be next in line to be assassinated, reacted by deciding to initiate purges instead of passively wait. According to the second, Stalin saw Kirov as a dangerous potential competitor for the top spot in Soviet leadership, and ordered Kirov's killing himself.
In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about Kirov's growing popularity. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 negative votes, the highest of any candidate. Kirov was a close friend with
Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and together they formed a moderate bloc in the Politburo. Later in 1934, Stalin asked Kirov to work for him in Moscow. One theory suggests that Stalin did this in order to keep a closer eye on Kirov, this despite the supposed fact that Stalin entirely controlled the NKVD. Kirov refused, however, and according to the same theory he became a competitor in Stalin's eyes.
On
December 1,
1934, Kirov was killed by Leonid Nikolaev (also seen spelled as Nikolayev) in the
Smolny Institute Leningrad. Kirov had arrived at the Smolny to work in his office, and, apparently leaving his bodyguard downstairs, headed to the upper floors, where the officials had their rooms. Nikolayev emerged from a bathroom and followed Kirov towards his office, shooting him in the back of the neck. Officially Stalin claimed that Nikolayev was part of a larger conspiracy led by Leon Trotsky against the Soviet government. This resulted in the arrest and execution of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and fourteen others in 1936. The death of Kirov ignited the great purge where supporters of Trotsky and other suspected enemies of the state were arrested. It has been speculated that Stalin was the man who ordered the murder of Kirov, and that the shooting was carried out with the help of the NKVD. However, although most historians believe that this second version of why and how Kirov was killed is more likely, it has so far not been unambiguously proven correct and it's still disputed by some.
Several trials known as the
Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. There were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of
Red Army generals, including Marshal
Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the
Trial of the Twenty One (including
Bukharin) in March 1938.
Most notably in the case of alleged Nazi collaborator Tukhachevsky, many military leaders were convicted of treason. The shakeup in command may have cost the Soviet Union dearly during the German invasion of
22 June,
1941, and its aftermath.
The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led
Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin.
Solzhenitsyn alleges that Stalin drew inspiration from Lenin's regime with the presence of labor camps and the executions of political opponents that occurred during the Russian Civil War. Trotsky's August 1940 assassination in
Mexico, where he'd lived in exile since January 1937, eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. Only three members of the "
Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's
Politburo) now remained—Stalin himself, "the all-Union Chieftain" (всесоюзный староста)
Mikhail Kalinin, and
Chairman of Sovnarkom Vyacheslav Molotov.
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| Nikolai Yezhov, the young man strolling with Stalin to his left in this photo from the 1930s, was shot in 1940. Following his death, he was edited out of the photo by Soviet censors (External Link). Such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin's reign. |
No segment of society was left untouched during the purges.
Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited "anti-Soviet activities", was applied in the broadest manner. Initially, the execution lists for the
enemies of the people were confirmed by the Politburo.
Over time the procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. People would inform on others arbitrarily, to attempt to redeem themselves, or to gain small retributions. The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "
enemy of the people," starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet
Osip Mandelstam and one of the key memoirists of the purges, recalls being shouted at by Akhmatova: "Don't you understand? They are arresting people for
nothing now?" The Russian word
troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a
committee of three subordinated to NKVD.
Towards the end of the purge, the Politburo relieved NKVD head
Nikolai Yezhov, from his position for overzealousness. He was subsequently executed. Some historians such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest postulate that Stalin had Yezhov and his predecessor,
Genrikh Yagoda, removed in order to deflect blame from himself.
In parallel with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by
NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed to a story about just two key characters:
Lenin and
Stalin.
In light of revelations from the Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people were executed in the course of the terror, with the great mass of victims being ordinary peasants and workers.
It is worth noting that 2007 tours of Stalin's Museum in Gori, Georgia reference the purges only in passing. "Sure, during the process of collectivization, some mistakes were made" is the official line at the museum. No other references to mortalities are made during the tour, and when asked about actual fatalities, the estimate of 25,000 is given.
Ukrainian famine
The Holodomor famine is sometimes referred to as the Ukrainian
Genocide, implying that the Holodomor was engineered by the Soviet government, specifically targeting the Ukrainian people to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a political factor and social entity. While historians continue to disagree whether the policies that led to Holodomor fall under the
legal definition of genocide, twenty six countries have officially recognized the Holodomor as such. On 28 November 2006 the Ukrainian Parliament approved a bill, according to which the Soviet-era forced famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Deportations
Shortly before, during and immediately after
World War II, Stalin conducted a series of
deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to
Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations, rightly or wrongly. Historian
Allan Bullock explains:
Many no doubt had collaborated with the occupying forces … but many had done so not out of disloyalty but from the instinct to survive when abandoned to their fate by the retreating Soviet armies. The individual circumstances were of no interest to Stalin … After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus was over … the entire population of five of the small highland peoples of the North Caucasus, as well as the Crimean Tatars — more than a million souls — (were deported) without notice or any opportunity to take their possessions. There were certainly collaborators among these peoples, but most of those had fled with the Germans. The majority of those left were old folk, women, and children; their men were away fighting at the front, where the Chechens and Ingushes alone produced thirty-six Heroes of the Soviet Union.
During Stalin's rule the following ethnic groups were deported completely or partially:
Ukrainians,
Poles,
Koreans,
Volga Germans,
Crimean Tatars,
Kalmyks,
Chechens,
Ingush,
Balkars,
Karachays,
Meskhetian Turks,
Finns,
Bulgarians,
Greeks,
Latvians,
Lithuanians,
Estonians, and
Jews. Large numbers of
Kulaks, regardless of their nationality, were resettled to
Siberia and
Central Asia. Deportations took place in appalling conditions, often by cattle truck, and hundreds of thousands of deportees died en route. Those who survived were forced to work without pay in the labour camps. Many of the deportees died of hunger or other conditions.
In February 1956,
Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of
Leninist principles, and reversed most of them, although it wasn't until as late as 1991 that the Tatars,
Meskhs and Volga Germans were allowed to return
en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic States,
Tatarstan and
Chechnya, even today.
Number of victims
Early researchers attempting to tally the number of people killed under Stalin's regime were forced to rely largely upon anecdotal evidence. Their estimates ranged from a low of 3 million to as high as 60 million. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 however, evidence from the Soviet archives finally became available. The archives record that about 800,000 prisoners were executed (for either political or criminal offences) under Stalin, while about 1.7 million died in the
GULAG and some 389,000 perished during kulak
forced resettlement — a total of about 3 million victims.
Debate continues, however, since some historians believe the archival figures to be unreliable. For example, some argue that the many suspects tortured to death while in "investigative custody" were likely not counted amongst the executed.
Also, there are certain categories of victim which it's generally agreed were carelessly recorded by the Soviets — such as the victims of ethnic deportations, or of German population transfer in the aftermath of WWII.
Thus while some archival researchers have estimated the number of victims of Stalin's repressions to be no more than about 4 million in total, others believe the number to be considerably higher. Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million (out of 7.5 million deported); and
POWs and German civilians, 1 million — a total of about 9 million victims of repression.
Some historians have also included the 6 to 8 million victims of the 1932–1933 famine as victims of repression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks or simply an
unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization. (See also:
Droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR).
Regardless, it appears that a minimum of around 10 million surplus deaths (4 million by repression and 6 million from famine) are attributable to the regime, with a number of recent books suggesting a likely total of around 20 million. Adding 6–8 million famine victims to Erlikman's estimates above, for example, would yield a total of between 15 and 17 million victims. Pioneering researcher
Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million. Others, however, continue to maintain that their earlier much higher estimates are correct.
World War II, 1939–1945
After the failure of Soviet and Franco-British talks on a mutual defense pact in Moscow, Stalin began to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Hitler's
Nazi Germany. There is a version that in his
speech on
August 19,
1939, Stalin prepared his comrades for the great turn in Soviet policy, the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with
Nazi Germany. According to a controversial Russian author living in the UK,
Viktor Suvorov, Stalin expressed in the speech an expectation that the war would be the best opportunity to weaken both the Western nations and Nazi Germany, and make Germany suitable for "Sovietization". Whether this speech was ever delivered to the public and what its content was is still debated.
Officially a non-aggression treaty only, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had a secret annex according to which
Central Europe was divided into the two powers' respective spheres of influence. The USSR was promised an eastern part of
Poland, primarily populated with Ukrainians and Belarusians in case of its dissolution, as long as
Lithuania,
Latvia,
Estonia and
Finland were recognized as parts of the Soviet sphere of influence. Another clause of the treaty was that
Bessarabia, then part of Romania, was to be joined to the Moldovan ASSR, and become the Moldovan SSR under control of Moscow.
On
September 1,
1939, the German invasion of
Poland started
World War II. Stalin decided to intervene, and on
September 17 the
Red Army entered eastern Poland and occupied the territory assigned to it by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
In November 1939, Stalin sent troops over the Finnish border, provoking a
war of aggression, and probably intended to annex Finland into the Soviet Union, as he'd already done in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. But the
Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland proved to be far more difficult than Stalin and the Red Army were prepared for, and the Soviets sustained surprisingly high casualties. By some estimates, the Soviet Union lost as many as 391,800 lives in this four-month war against Finland alone, or more than the United States suffered in all of World War II against Germany and Japan (1941–1945). The Soviets finally agreed on an
interim peace in March, 1940, but only succeeded in annexing the eastern region of Karelia (10% of Finnish territory), a classic example of a
Pyrrhic victory. Finland remains an independent country to the present day, but the Red Armies' serious problems had been revealed to the rest of the world, including Germany.
On March 5, 1940, the Soviet leadership approved an order of execution for more than 25,700 Polish "nationalist, educators and counterrevolutionary" activists in the parts of the Ukraine and Belarus republics that had been annexed from Poland. This event has become known as the
Katyn Massacre.
In June 1941,
Hitler broke the pact and invaded the
Soviet Union in
Operation Barbarossa, thus beginning the
Great Patriotic War. Although expecting war with Germany, Stalin may not have expected an invasion to come so soon—and the Soviet Union was relatively unprepared for this invasion. An alternative theory suggested by
Viktor Suvorov claims that Stalin had made aggressive preparations from the late 1930s on and was about to invade Germany in summer 1941. Thus, he believes Hitler only managed to forestall Stalin and the German invasion was in essence a
pre-emptive strike. This theory was supported by
Igor Bunich,
Mikhail Meltyukhov (see
Stalin's Missed Chance) and
Edvard Radzinsky (see
Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives). Most Western historians reject this thesis, though.
In the diary of
General Fedor von Boch, it's also mentioned that the
Abwehr fully expected a Soviet attack against German forces in Poland no later than 1942. Such speculations are difficult to substantiate, however, as information on the Soviet Army from 1939 to 1941 remains classified, but it's known that the Soviets had received some warnings of the German invasion through their foreign intelligence agents, such as
Richard Sorge.
Even though Stalin received intelligence warnings of a German attack, he sought to avoid any obvious defensive preparation which might further provoke the Germans, in the hope of buying time to modernize and strengthen his military forces. In the initial hours after the German attack commenced, Stalin hesitated, wanting to ensure that the German attack was sanctioned by Hitler, rather than the unauthorized action of a rogue general. Many others were simply deported east.
Hitler's experts had expected eight weeks of war, and early indications appeared to support their predictions. However, the invading German forces were eventually driven back in December 1941 near
Moscow.
Stalin met in several
conferences with Churchill and/or Roosevelt in Moscow,
Tehran,
Yalta, and
Potsdam to plan
military strategy (Truman taking the place of the deceased Roosevelt).
In these conferences, his first appearances on the world stage, Stalin proved to be a formidable negotiator.
Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary noted:
"Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all. Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I'd to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated."
His shortcomings as strategist are frequently noted regarding massive Soviet loss of life and early Soviet defeats. An example of it's the summer offensive of 1942, which led to even more losses by the Red Army and recapture of initiative by the Germans. Stalin eventually recognized his lack of know-how and relied on his professional generals to conduct the war.
Yet Stalin did rapidly move Soviet industrial production east of the
Volga River, far from
Luftwaffe-reach, to sustain the
Red Army's war machine with astonishing success. Additionally, Stalin was well aware that other European armies had utterly disintegrated when faced with Nazi military efficacy and responded effectively by subjecting his army to galvanizing terror and unrevolutionary, nationalist appeals to patriotism. He also appealed to the
Russian Orthodox church and images of national Russian heroes. On
November 6,
1941, Stalin addressed the whole nation of the Soviet Union for the second time (the first time was earlier that year on
July 2).
According to Stalin's
Order No. 227 of
July 27,
1942, any commander or commissar of a regiment, battalion or army, who allowed retreat without permission from above was subject to military tribunal. The Soviet soldiers who surrendered were declared traitors; however most of those who survived the brutality of German captivity were mobilized again as they were freed. Between 5% and 10% of them were sent to
Gulag (As "traitors of Homeland". Soviet Criminal Code, §58, clause 1B: criminal conviction — 10 or later 25 years of labor camp plus 5 years without "citizen rights").
In the war's opening stages, the retreating Red Army also sought to deny resources to the enemy through a scorched earth policy of destroying the infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize them. This, along with abuse by German troops, caused starvation and suffering among the civilian population that were left behind.
According to recent figures, of an estimated four million POWs taken by the Russians, including Germans,
Japanese,
Hungarians,
Romanians and others, some 580,000 never returned, presumably victims of privation or the Gulags, compared with 3.5 million Soviet POW that died in German camps out of the 5.6 million taken.
Returning Soviet soldiers who had surrendered were viewed with suspicion and some were killed. According to historian
Alan Bullock:
The huge number of Russian troops taken prisoner in the first eighteen months of the war convinced Stalin that many of them must have been traitors who had deserted at the first opportunity. Any soldier who had been a prisoner was henceforth suspect … All such, whether generals, officers, or ordinary soldiers, were sent to special concentration camps where the NKVD investigated them … Twenty percent were sentenced to death or twenty-five years in camps; only 15 to 20 percent were allowed to return to their homes. The remainder were condemned to shorter sentences (five to ten years), to exile in Siberia, and forced labor — or were killed or died on the way home.
Post-war era, 1945–1953
Domestically, Stalin was seen as a great wartime leader who had led the Soviets to victory against the Nazis. His early cooperation with Hitlerism was forgotten. That cooperation included helping the German Army violate the
Versailles Treaty limitations with training in the Soviet Union, the notorious Molotov-von Ribbentrop treaty which partitioned Poland (giving the Soviet Union what is now Belarus), and granted the Soviet Union a free hand in Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, and Soviet trade with Hitler to counteract the expected French and British trade blockades.
By the end of the 1940s, Russian patriotism increased due to successful propaganda efforts. For instance, some inventions and scientific discoveries were claimed by Russian propaganda. Examples include the
boiler, reclaimed by father and son
Cherepanovs; the
electric bulb, by
Yablochkov and
Lodygin; the
radio, by
Popov; and the airplane, by
Mozhaysky. Stalin's internal repressive policies continued (including in newly acquired territories), but never reached the extremes of the 1930s, in part because the smarter party functionaries had learned caution.
Internationally, Stalin viewed Soviet consolidation of power as a necessary step to protect the USSR by surrounding it with countries with friendly governments like the variety seen in Finland, to act as a
cordon sanitaire (buffer) against possible invaders, while the "West" sought a similar buffer against communist expansion. These competing policies led to an admirable stability, where successful Soviet aggression would depend on enthusiastic cooperation by the satellite nations.
He had hoped that the American withdrawal and
demobilization would lead to increased communist influence, especially in Europe. Each side might view the other's defensive actions as destabilizing provocations and these
security dilemmas frayed relations between the Soviet Union and its former World War II western allies and led to a prolonged period of tension and distrust between East and West known as the
Cold War (see also
Iron curtain).
The
Red Army ended
World War II occupying much of the territory that had been formerly held by the Axis countries:
In
Asia, the Red Army had overrun
Manchuria in the last month of the war and then also occupied
Korea above the
38th parallel north.
Mao Zedong's
Communist Party of China, though receptive to minimal Soviet support, defeated the pro-Western and heavily American-assisted
Chinese Nationalist Party in the
Chinese Civil War.
The Communists controlled mainland China while the Nationalists held a
rump state on the island of
Formosa (now
Taiwan). The Soviet Union soon after recognized Mao's
People's Republic of China, which it regarded as a new ally. The People's Republic claimed Taiwan, though it had never held authority there.
Diplomatic relations reached a high point with the signing of the 1950
Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. Both countries provided military support to a new friendly state in
North Korea. After various border conflicts, war broke out with U.S.-allied
South Korea in 1950, starting the
Korean War.
In
Europe, there were
Soviet occupation zones in Germany and Austria. Hungary and Poland were under practical military occupation. From 1946–1948 coalition governments comprising communists were elected in
Poland,
Czechoslovakia,
Hungary,
Romania and
Bulgaria and homegrown communist movements rose to power in
Yugoslavia and
Albania.
These nations became known as the "Communist Bloc." Britain and the United States supported the anti-communists in the
Greek Civil War and suspected the Soviets of supporting the Greek communists although Stalin refrained from getting involved in Greece, dismissing the movement as premature.
Albania remained an ally of the Soviet Union, but Yugoslavia broke with the USSR in 1948.
Greece,
Italy and
France received enormous support from the population, which were at the very least friendly towards Moscow.
Both
Superpowers viewed
Germany as key. In retaliation to the Western formation of
Trizonia, Stalin determined to take action.
Armed with intelligence from the British agent
Donald Duart Maclean and other British and American espionage agents, Stalin was well aware that the United States hadn't proceeded with mass production of atomic weapons, indeed, hadn't even assembled any after the last was used at Nagasaki. Large numbers would have been needed to destroy Soviet or Communist land forces either in Europe or the Far East. He therefore ordered a blockade of
West Berlin, which was under British, French, and U.S. occupation, to test the Western powers.
The
Berlin Blockade failed due to the unexpected massive aerial resupply campaign carried out by the Western powers known as the
Berlin Airlift. In 1949, Stalin conceded defeat and ended the blockade. After
West Germany was formed by the union of the three Western occupation zones, the Soviets declared
East Germany a separate country in 1949, ruled by the communists.
Stalin originally supported the creation of Israel in 1948. The USSR was one of the first nations to recognize the new country.
Golda Meir came to Moscow as the first Israeli Ambassador to the USSR that year. But he later changed his mind and came out against Israel.
Contrary to America's policy which restrained armament (limited equipment was provided for infantry and police forces) to South Korea, Stalin also extensively armed
Kim Il Sung's North Korean army and air forces with military equipment (to include T-34/85 tanks) and "advisors" far in excess of that required for defensive purposes) in order to facilitate Kim's (a former Soviet Officer) aim to conquer the rest of the Korean peninsula. Soviet pilots flew Soviet aircraft from Chinese bases against United Nations aircraft defending South Korea. Post cold war research in Soviet Archives reveal that the Korean War was begun by Kim Il-sung with the express permission of Stalin, though this is widely disputed by North Korea.
In Stalin's last year of life, one of his last major foreign policy initiatives was the 1952
Stalin Note for
German reunification and
Superpower disengagement from
Central Europe, but Britain, France, and the United States viewed this with suspicion and rejected the offer.
Stalin as theorist
Stalin made few contributions to Communist (or, more specifically, Marxist-Leninist) theory. The contributions he made were accepted and upheld by all Soviet political scientists during his rule.
Among Stalin's contributions were his "Marxism and the National Question", a work praised by Lenin; his "Trotskyism or Leninism", which was a factor in the "liquidation of Trotskyism as an ideological trend" within the CPSU(B).
Stalin's Collected Works (in 13 volumes) was released in 1949. A subsequent 16 volume American Edition appeared, in which one volume consisted of the book "History of the CPSU(B) Short Course", although when released in 1938 this book was credited to a commission of the Central Committee.
In 1933, Stalin put forward the theory of
aggravation of the class struggle along with the development of socialism, arguing that the further the country would move forward, the more acute forms of struggle will be used by the doomed remnants of exploiter classes in their last desperate efforts — and that, therefore, political repression was necessary.
In 1936, Stalin announced that the society of the Soviet Union consisted of two non-antagonistic classes: workers and
kolkhoz peasantry. These corresponded to the two different forms of property over the
means of production that existed in the Soviet Union: state property (for the workers) and collective property (for the peasantry). In addition to these, Stalin distinguished the stratum of
intelligentsia. The concept of "non-antagonistic classes" was entirely new to Leninist theory.
Stalin and his supporters have highlighted the notion that
socialism can be built and consolidated by a country as underdeveloped as Russia during the 1920s. Indeed this might be the only means in which it could be built in a hostile environment.
Death
On
March 1,
1953, after an all-night dinner in his residence in Krylatskoye some 15 km west of Moscow centre with interior minister
Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers
Georgy Malenkov,
Nikolai Bulganin and
Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin didn't emerge from his room, having probably suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body.
Although his guards thought that it was odd for him not to rise at his usual time, they were under orders not to disturb him. He was discovered lying on the floor of his room only at about 10pm in the evening. Lavrentiy Beria was informed and arrived a few hours afterwards, and the doctors arrived only in the early morning of March, 2nd. Stalin died four days later, on
March 5,
1953, at the age of 74, and was embalmed on
March 9. His daughter Svetlana recalls the scene as she stood by his death bed: "He suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse upon all of us. The next moment after a final effort the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh." Officially, the cause of death was listed as a
cerebral hemorrhage. His body was preserved in
Lenin's Mausoleum until
October 31,
1961, when his body was removed from the Mausoleum and buried next to the Kremlin walls as part of the process of
de-Stalinization.
It has been suggested that Stalin was assassinated. The ex-Communist exile
Avtorkhanov argued this point as early as 1975. The political memoirs of
Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claimed that Beria had boasted to Molotov that he poisoned Stalin: "I took him out."
Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after the stroke, gone about "spewing hatred against [Stalin] and mocking him", and then, when Stalin showed signs of consciousness, dropped to his knees and kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria immediately stood and spat.
In 2003, a joint group of Russian and American historians announced their view that Stalin ingested
warfarin, a powerful rat poison that inhibits coagulation of the blood and so predisposes the victim to hemorrhagic stroke (cerebral hemorrhage). Since it's flavorless, warfarin is a plausible weapon of murder. The facts surrounding Stalin's death will probably never be known with certainty.
His demise arrived at a convenient time for Beria and others, who feared being swept away in yet another purge. It is believed that Stalin felt Beria's power was too great and threatened his own. Whether or not Beria or another usurper was directly responsible for his death, it's true that the
Politburo didn't summon medical attention for Stalin for more than a day after he was found.
N.B. Radzinsky in
Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents From Russia's Secret Archives notes, that while Stalin was preparing Beria's downfall, Beria first had Stalin's head of security killed and this allowed Beria to interfere with the bodyguard arrangements for "the Boss". The head of security on that night gave the guards the unprecedented order, allegedly from the Boss, that they were not required that night and they could go to bed. Next morning there was no activity from the Boss's room.
This was extremely convenient since the purge — which had already started against the Jewish doctors, was scheduled to start reaching up the current Politburo members including Beria and Khrushchev, not to mention the already deposed Molotov.
According to Radzinsky, this was also the resumption of the Terror, in order to ensure absolute obedience of the nation in anticipation of a planned apocalypse. Apparently Stalin intended to use his lead in the development of a hydrogen bomb to his advantage, by engineering a conflict with the west. This, he thought, could be achieved by building on the show trials of "the Jewish doctors", and embracing an anti-semitic expulsion of "the Jews" to Siberia.
Marriages and family
Stalin's first wife,
Ekaterina Svanidze, died in 1907, only four years after their marriage. At her funeral, Stalin allegedly said that any warm feelings he'd for people died with her, for only she could melt his 'stony heart'. They had a son together,
Yakov Dzhugashvili, with whom Stalin didn't get along in later years.
His son finally shot himself because of Stalin's harshness toward him, but survived. After this, Stalin said "He can't even shoot straight". Yakov served in the Red Army during World War II and was captured by the Germans. They offered to exchange him for Field Marshal
Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered after Stalingrad, but Stalin turned the offer down, allegedly saying "A lieutenant isn't worth a general"; others credit him with saying "I have no son," to this offer. Afterwards, Yakov is said to have committed suicide, running into an electric fence in
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was being held.
Stalin had a son,
Vasiliy, and a daughter,
Svetlana, with his second wife
Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She died in 1932, officially of illness. She may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly political". According to
A&E Biography, there's also a belief among some Russians that Stalin himself murdered his wife after the quarrel, which apparently took place at a dinner in which Stalin tauntingly flicked cigarettes across the table at her. Historians also claim that her death ultimately "severed his [Stalin's] link from reality."
Vasiliy rose through the ranks of the Soviet
air force, officially dying of
alcoholism in 1962; however, this is still in question. He distinguished himself in World War II as a capable airman. Svetlana emigrated to the
United States in 1967.
In his book
The Wolf of the Kremlin Stuart Kahan claimed that Stalin was secretly married to a third wife named Rosa Kaganovich, allegedly the sister of
Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician. However, the claim is unproven and many have disputed it, including the Kaganovich family, who deny that "Rosa" and Stalin ever met, and even state that Kaganovich's sister wasn't named Rosa. Kahan also claimed that both Lazar and Rosa were responsible for the death of Stalin (by poisoning), however this (as well as most of the remainder of Kahan's assertions) were dismissed as fabrication by the
Statement of the Kaganovich Family.
In March 2001 Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson living in
Novokuznetsk. Yuri Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage, but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet. The Soviet dissident writer,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had mentioned a son being born to Stalin and his
common-law wife Lida in 1918, during Stalin's exile in northern
Siberia.
Religious beliefs
Stalin's beliefs are complicated and sometimes contradictory. As the historians
Vladislav Zubok and
Constantine Pleshakov noted, he received his education at
Theological Seminary at Tiflis (
Tbilisi), where his mother sent him to become a priest, but he became a closet atheist. Zubok and Pleshakov further noted, "Many would later note, however, that his works were influenced by a distinctly
Biblical style" and "his atheism remained rooted in some vague idea of a God of nature." In fact Professor of Religion
Hector Avalos noted, "Stalin, in fact, had a complex relationship with religious institutions in the Soviet Union."
Historian
Edvard Radzinsky used recently discovered secret archives and noted a story that changed Stalin's attitude toward religion. The story in which Ilya, Metropolitan of the Lebanon Mountains, claimed to receive a sign from heaven that "The churches and monasteries must be reopened throughout the country. Priests must be brought back from imprisonment, Leningrad must not be surrendered, but the sacred icon of Our Lady of Kazan should be carried around the city boundary, taken on to Moscow, where a service should be held, and thence to Stalingrad [Tsaritsyn]."
In recent years, support of Stalin has resurged. Millions of Russians, exasperated with the downfall of the economy and political instability after the breakup of the Soviet Union, want Stalin back. A recent controversial poll revealed that over thirty-five percent of Russians would vote for Stalin if he were still alive. This is seen by some as a return of Stalin's cult. In
Krasnoyarsk, it has been decided to rebuild a communist-era memorial complex dedicated to Josef Stalin. Also, a new statue of Stalin is to be erected in
Moscow, “returning his once-ubiquitous image to the streets after an absence of four decades, a top city official said yesterday”, as reported by
The Scotsman.
Policies and accomplishments
Under Stalin's rule the Soviet Union was transformed from an agricultural nation into a global superpower, although at the cost of millions of lives. The USSR's industrialization was successful in that the country was able to defend against and eventually defeat the Axis invasion in
World War II, though at an enormous cost in human life; and in 1957, four years after Stalin's death, to put into orbit the first ever artificial satellite,
Sputnik 1.
However, libertarian historian
Robert Conquest and other Westerners claim that the USSR was bound for industrialization, and that its speed along this course wasn't necessarily improved by Bolshevik influence. It has also been argued that Stalin was partially responsible for the initial military disasters and enormous human casualties during WWII, because Stalin eliminated many military officers during the purges, and especially the most senior ones, and rejected the massive amounts of intelligence warning of the German attack.
While Stalin's social and economic policies laid the foundations for the USSR's emergence as a superpower, the harshness with which he conducted Soviet affairs was subsequently repudiated by his successors in the Communist Party leadership, notably in the denunciation of Stalinism by
Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956. In his "Secret Speech",
On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, delivered to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist
