For the Soviet Union, the formative period in establishing communism encompassed the years of Joseph Stalin’s rule (1929–1953). Born in Georgia in 1878, rather than in Russia itself, the young Stalin grew up with a brutal and abusive father and trained for the priesthood as a young man, but slowly gravitated toward the emerging revolutionary movement of the time. He subsequently joined the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, though he played only a modest role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin rose to the dominant position in the Communist Party amid a long and bitter struggle among the Bolsheviks. By 1929, he had consolidated his authority, and he exercised enormous personal power until his death in 1953.

To Stalin and the Soviet leadership, the 1930s was a time of “building socialism.” Undertaking that gigantic task meant upheaval on an enormous scale, offering undreamed-of opportunities for some and disruption and trauma beyond imagination for others. The sources that follow allow us to see something of the Stalinist vision for the country as well as to gain some insight into the lives of ordinary people as they experienced what historians have come to call simply “Stalinism.”