How did Stalin and the Communist Party build a totalitarian order in the Soviet Union?

image
Soviet Collectivization PosterSoviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered a nationwide forced collectivization campaign from 1929 to 1933. Following communist theory, the government created large-scale collective farms by seizing land and forcing peasants to work on it. In this idealized 1932 poster, farmers are encouraged to complete the five-year plan of collectivization, while Stalin looks on approvingly. The outcome instead was a disaster. Millions of people died in the resulting human-created famine. (Deutsches Plakat Museum, Essen, Germany/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library)

JJOSEPH STALIN (1879–1953) cautiously consolidated his power and eliminated his enemies in the mid-1920s. Then in 1928 he launched the first five-year plan — a “revolution from above,”2 as he so aptly termed it, to transform Soviet society along socialist lines. Stalin and the Communist Party used constant propaganda, enormous sacrifice, and unlimited violence and state control to establish a dynamic, modern totalitarian state in the 1930s.