The Rise of Stalinism
In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) led the transformation of the USSR from a rural society into an industrial power. Stalin ended Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which had allowed individuals to profit from trade and agriculture, and in 1929 laid out the first of several bold five-year plans for industrializing the country. Without an end to economic backwardness, Stalin warned, “the advanced countries . . . will crush us.” He thus established economic planning—that is, government direction of the economy used on both sides in World War I and increasingly implemented around the world. Between 1928 and 1940, the number of Soviet workers in industry, construction, and transport grew from 4.6 million to 12.6 million and factory output soared. Stalin’s first five-year plan helped make the USSR a leading industrial nation.
A new bureaucratic elite implemented the plans, and despite limited rights to change jobs or even move from place to place, skilled workers benefited from the privileges that went along with their new industrial role. Communist officials received additional rewards such as country homes, good food, and luxurious vacations. New or unskilled workers enjoyed no such benefits, however. Newcomers from the countryside were herded into barracks or tents and subjected to dangerous factory conditions. Despite the hardships, many took pride in their new skills. “We mastered this profession—completely new to us—with great pleasure,” a female lathe operator recalled. More often workers fresh from the countryside lacked the technical skills necessary to accomplish goals of the five-year plans, so official lying about productivity became part of the economic system. The attempt to turn an illiterate peasant society into an advanced industrial economy in a single decade brought intense suffering, but people tolerated hardship to achieve a communist society.
Stalin demanded more grain from peasants both to feed the urban workforce and to provide exports whose sale abroad would finance industrialization. Some peasants resisted government demands by withholding produce from the market, prompting Stalin to demand a “liquidation of the kulaks.” The word kulak, which literally means “fist,” was a negative term for prosperous peasants, but in practice it applied to anyone who opposed Stalin’s plans to end independent farming. Party workers began searching villages, seizing grain, and forcing villagers to identify the kulaks among them. One Russian remembered believing the kulaks were “bloodsuckers, cattle, swine, loathsome, repulsive: they had no souls; they stank.” Denounced as “enemies of the state,” whole families were robbed of their possessions, left to starve, or even murdered outright. Confiscated kulak land formed the basis for the new collective farms, or kolkhoz, where the remaining peasants were forced to share facilities. Traditional peasant life was brought to a violent end.
Failure across the economy followed. Factory workers, farmers, and party officials alike were too inexperienced with advanced industrialization to meet quotas. The experiment with collectivization, combined with the murder of farmers, resulted in a drop in the grain harvest from 83 million tons in 1930 to 67 million in 1934. Soviet citizens starved. Blaming failure on “wreckers” deliberately plotting against communism, Stalin instituted purges—that is, state violence in the form of widespread arrests, imprisonments in labor camps, and executions—to rid society of these “villains.”
The purges touched all segments of society, beginning with engineers who were condemned for causing low productivity. Beginning in 1936, the government next charged prominent Bolshevik leaders with conspiring to overthrow Soviet rule. In a series of “show trials”—trials based on trumped-up charges, fabricated evidence, and coerced confessions—Bolshevik leaders were tortured and forced to confess in court. Most of those found guilty were shot. Some of the top leaders accepted their fate, seeing the purges as good for the future of socialism. Just before his execution, one Bolshevik loyalist and former editor of the party newspaper Pravda wrote to Stalin praising the “great and bold political idea behind the general purge.”
The spirit of purge swept through society: one woman poet described the scene in towns and cities: “Great concert and lecture halls were turned into public confessionals. . . . Beating their breasts, the ‘guilty’ would lament that they had ‘shown political short-sightedness’ and ‘lack of vigilance’ . . . and were full of ‘rotten liberalism.’” In 1937 and 1938, military leaders were arrested and executed without public trials; some ranks were entirely wiped out. Although the massacre of military leaders appeared suicidal at a time when Hitler threatened war, thousands of high military posts became open to new talent. Stalin would not have to worry about an officer corps wedded to old ideas, as had happened in World War I. Simultaneously, the government expanded the system of prison camps, founded under Lenin, into an extensive network stretching several thousand miles from Moscow to Siberia. In the Gulag—an acronym for the government department that ran the camps—some one million died annually as a result of the insufficient food, inadequate housing, and twelve- to sixteen-hour days of crushing physical labor. Regular beatings and murders of prisoners rounded out Gulag life, which became another aspect of totalitarian violence.
In the 1930s, toleration in Soviet social life ended. The birthrate in the USSR, like that in the rest of Europe, declined rapidly. The Soviet Union needed to replace the millions of people lost since 1914. To meet this need, Stalin restricted access to birth-control information and abortion. Lavish wedding ceremonies came back into fashion, divorces became difficult to obtain, and the state made homosexuality a crime. Whereas Bolsheviks had once attacked the family as a capitalist institution, propaganda now referred to the family as a “school for socialism.” At the same time, women in rural areas made gains in literacy and received improved health care. Positions in the lower ranks of the party opened to women as the purges continued, and more women were accepted into the professions.
Avant-garde experimentation in the arts also ended under Stalin. He called artists and writers “engineers of the soul” and, thus recognizing their influence, controlled their output through the Union of Soviet Writers. The union not only assigned housing, office space, equipment, and secretarial help but also determined the types of books authors could write. In return, the “comrade artist” adhered to the official style of “socialist realism,” derived from the focus on the common worker as hero. Although some writers and artists went underground, others found ways to adjust their talents to the state’s demands. The composer Sergei Prokofiev, for example, composed scores both for the delightful Peter and the Wolf and for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, a work that flatteringly compared Stalin to the medieval rulers of the Russian people. Aided by adaptable artists, workers, and bureaucrats, Stalin stood triumphant as the 1930s drew to a close. He was, as two different workers put it, “our beloved Leader” and “a god on earth.”