The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · 1924–1929 · 1928

The Succession

Lenin had tried to warn his colleagues about Stalin. After strokes left him partly paralyzed, he dictated notes in December 1922 and January 1923 that became known as his Testament. He said Stalin had accumulated “unlimited authority” and, in a postscript dated 4 January 1923, called him “too rude” and proposed removing him as General Secretary. The dispute behind this warning was the Georgian Affair, marked at Tiflis: Stalin and his ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze had bullied Georgian communists into a federation with Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The warning reached the men who could act on it. At the Thirteenth Congress in May 1924, the notes were read to delegation leaders. Zinoviev and Kamenev wanted Stalin’s help against Trotsky and argued that he should remain in office. Their choice preserved the administrative position Lenin had regarded as dangerous. The Testament remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1956.

That office mattered because decisions about personnel reached all the way to the congress floor. Stalin’s apparatus installed provincial secretaries, who selected delegates; the congresses then elected the leadership. The “Lenin Enrolment” of 1924 added more than 200,000 members, mostly young workers whose careers depended on officials able to promote them. The system of posts reserved for appointment by the center later became known as the nomenklatura. It gave loyalty a practical reward and helped Stalin assemble majorities.

Appointments were not his only advantage. Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” held that socialism could survive only if revolution spread to Europe. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” offered the party a more immediate prospect: building a strong state at home. At the Fourteenth Congress in December 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev’s Leningrad delegation was overwhelmingly outvoted. Sergei Kirov was then sent to take over their city. The debate ended in a defeat for which much of the organizing had already been done.

The defeated leaders tried to combine their forces. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed the United Opposition in 1926, but their supporters were dismissed and expelled; Trotsky and Zinoviev themselves were expelled from the party in November 1927. On 17 January 1928 the OGPU, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB, carried Trotsky to a train for Alma-Ata. He was deported to Turkey in February 1929, as the blue arrows show.

A crisis in grain deliveries now brought a different alliance to an end. In Siberia Stalin used force to seize grain, moving toward a measure the defeated Left around Trotsky and Zinoviev had demanded. Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky wanted to retain NEP, under which peasants could sell grain on the market. Branded the “Right deviation”, they were removed in 1929–30. Stalin had used NEP against the Left and then abandoned it against the Right. This made policy a weapon in the struggle, although historians disagree about how far conviction also guided his choices.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The party had no rules for succession. Lenin’s personal authority held together a leadership with no office of party leader and no settled succession procedure. The Politburo made policy, while the Orgburo and Secretariat dealt with personnel. When illness removed Lenin from active leadership in 1922, his colleagues governed collectively and competed for influence. Control of committees could gradually convert that collective authority into personal power.

The General Secretary controlled appointments. In April 1922 Stalin became General Secretary, a job his colleagues regarded as administrative. It gave him oversight of thousands of assignments and admissions, including the 1924 Lenin Enrolment. Provincial secretaries who owed him their positions selected congress delegates. Through these routine decisions he could gather a majority before his rivals recognized how formidable he had become.

His rivals feared Trotsky more than Stalin. The Bolsheviks knew the French Revolution’s history: a general, Napoleon Bonaparte, had seized power after it. Trotsky, creator of the Red Army, seemed the obvious candidate for that role. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin each joined Stalin to block him. Their choice made sense in light of their fear, but it left the quiet organizer free to turn the apparatus against each of them.

NEP’s grain problem made policy a weapon. Industrialization raised two connected questions: how fast should it proceed, and who should pay? The Left wanted resources taken from peasants for factories; the Right preferred the market and slower growth. The grain crisis of 1927–28 forced a choice. Having defended NEP against the Left, Stalin abandoned it and isolated the Right.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A leader without rivals launched the Great Turn. Victory in 1927–29 left Stalin able to impose forced collectivization and rapid industrialization without an opposing faction to stop him. His choices for 1929–33 received the approval of a Politburo filled with allies, including Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. A leader who argued for slower change risked being called a “Rightist”. The succession had determined the pace of change as well as its author.

Defeated rivals became future defendants. The men defeated in the succession struggle later figured in the Great Terror. Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in August 1936 after the first Moscow show trial; Bukharin and Rykov were shot in March 1938. Tomsky killed himself in 1936 before arrest, and an NKVD agent murdered Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. The trials accused former oppositionists of plotting with foreign powers since the 1920s.

Loyalty replaced debate inside the party. Public argument had already been weakened by the 1921 ban on factions. Once the remaining open factions were defeated, opposition brought expulsion and later arrest. Officials learned to anticipate Stalin’s wishes. Ian Kershaw used the phrase “working towards the Führer” for a comparable habit in Hitler’s Germany; under Stalin, anticipation also made the cult and the Terror easier to organize.

“Socialism in one country” justified the plans. The slogan “socialism in one country” gave the later plans a rationale as well as helping Stalin win. If socialism had to be built in a Soviet Union surrounded by enemies, industrialization could be presented as essential to survival. The Five-Year Plans put that idea into practice, with defense as their deepest purpose. Their sacrifices could be justified by the prospect of fighting a war alone.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did Stalin win the succession mainly through his own skill, or because his rivals made it easy for him?

Stalin made effective use of opportunities his rivals gave him. He recognized the value of Secretariat appointments in producing majorities, chose allies carefully, and offered “socialism in one country” to a party tired of waiting for revolution abroad. Zinoviev and Kamenev protected him from Lenin’s Testament in 1924; Trotsky declined to fight openly while he still had support in the army and among students; Bukharin underestimated Stalin until 1928. Historians assign different weights to these advantages. Deutscher and Daniels emphasize the machine, Kotkin Stalin’s intelligence and conviction, and Fitzpatrick support from below. The strongest judgment combines control of appointments with his rivals’ misjudgments: none of them matched his votes, timing and message. Where succession has no settled rules, routine administration can become a route to power.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Alma-Ata was remote, but Trotsky continued to lead an opposition network from exile. His biographers Isaac Deutscher and Pierre Broué report that he and his son Lev Sedov sent about 800 political letters and 550 telegrams between April and October 1928. They received around 1,000 letters, many from oppositionists exiled across Siberia and Central Asia. The OGPU read much of this correspondence, helping convince Stalin that distance within the Soviet Union had not ended Trotsky’s influence. Deportation abroad in February 1929 removed him from the country but left him able to write. From 1929 his Bulletin of the Opposition, published abroad, continued attacking Stalin’s policies for the next decade.

CHAPTER 2 · 1929–1933 · 1930

The Great Turn: Collectivisation

The state’s need for grain lay at the center of the Great Turn. Under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced in 1921, peasants could sell on a free market and hold grain back when prices did not suit them. To Stalin, the grain crisis of 1927–28 showed that a government dependent on those decisions could not supply rapid industrialization. He sought a system in which the state could take grain without bargaining for it.

The attack on the better-off peasants began openly on 27 December 1929, when Stalin announced the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”. The party regarded these farmers as rural capitalists. On 30 January 1930 the Politburo, its small ruling committee, set out three categories: “counter-revolutionary activists” were to go to camps or face execution; wealthier families were to be deported to remote regions; and the rest were to be resettled on poor land nearby. Officials had quotas to meet and little time. Even a poor peasant who protested could be labeled a kulak. The category could identify an opponent as readily as an economic position.

The campaign required people to run farms suddenly assembled from village holdings. About 27,000 urban workers, the “Twenty-Five Thousanders”, were sent to take charge, alongside party brigades and troops of the OGPU, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB. Their arrival placed representatives of the party directly over village work.

Peasants responded both by resisting the takeover and by slaughtering animals they would otherwise have to surrender. By 1933 the numbers of horses and cattle had roughly halved. The map’s dashed outlines mark unrest in right-bank Ukraine, the Kuban, the Volga, the Black Earth region and southern Kazakhstan in 1930. Women often led protests known as babi bunty (“women’s riots”), partly because authorities were slower to shoot them.

Revolts around Tulchyn in the Ukrainian border districts particularly alarmed Moscow. With spring sowing at risk, Stalin published “Dizzy with Success” on 2 March 1930 and blamed local officials for “excesses”. Millions left the collective farms within weeks. Their departure showed how little of the earlier rush had depended on willing consent.

The state did not give up its objective. From autumn 1930 it used taxes, delivery quotas and the threat of deportation to bring peasants back. These pressures worked more slowly than the first campaign: about three-fifths of households were collectivized by 1932 and over nine-tenths by 1937.

The deportation arrows lead to guarded “special settlements” around Kotlas in the northern forests, in the Urals, at Narym in Siberia and on the Karaganda steppe. Families had to build these exile villages themselves, and many died in the first winters. Some showcase farms, such as Gigant on the Salsk steppe, received tractors. Most villages instead relied on machine-tractor stations, state depots that rented machinery and supplied political supervisors.

The new system let the state take much more grain even as harvests fell. It had acquired control over delivery, but taking grain did not ensure that enough remained for the people who grew it. That gap led directly to the famines of 1932–33.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The grain crisis convinced Stalin the market had failed. Low fixed prices and scarce goods gave peasants little incentive to sell; some held grain back or fed it to livestock. State purchases fell sharply in winter 1927–28. Stalin called this a kulak “grain strike” and concluded that industrialization could not depend on peasants choosing when to sell. Emergency seizures brought grain in 1928–29 but reduced sowing, making compulsory delivery appear a necessary permanent solution.

Industrialisation needed grain, labour and foreign currency. The First Five-Year Plan, approved in 1929 and subsequently raised, required food for millions of urban workers and grain exports to pay for foreign machinery. Officials expected collective farms to deliver both cheaply and on schedule under quotas fixed before harvest. They also expected tractors and larger farms to release workers for Magnitogorsk and other new cities.

Bolshevik ideology distrusted the peasant smallholder. For Marxists, private farming could generate capitalism again. Lenin had warned that small-scale production did so “daily, hourly”, and had called NEP a temporary retreat. Many party members therefore regarded collective farming as the socialist future of the village. The 1927 war scare added urgency: peasants might hoard grain or side with an invader when the state needed their cooperation.

Victory over the Right removed every brake. Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky warned that coercion would wreck the alliance between workers and peasants. Their defeat by 1929 removed the last voices urging caution. In the Politburo, a call for slower change risked the accusation of “Right deviation”, while officials raised targets repeatedly to demonstrate loyalty. This political climate helped determine the speed of the campaign in 1929–30.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The famines of 1930–33. Moscow’s compulsory quotas claimed grain regardless of the harvest, while slaughtered livestock could no longer serve as a reserve. Harvests fell in 1931 and 1932, but quotas remained high. Villages in Ukraine, the Kuban, the Volga and above all Kazakhstan were left without food. The system intended to secure grain had removed the margin on which their survival depended.

The special settlements and the Gulag. Some 1.8 million deported “kulaks” formed the Stalin era’s first great forced-labor population. Under OGPU control, they lived in barracks and dugouts, cut timber in the north and dug mines in the Urals. The settlements showed the police how deportees and prisoners could be used to open remote regions, and became a prototype for the Gulag.

A rural economy that never recovered. The damage outlasted the campaign. Livestock numbers did not recover their 1928 level until the 1950s, and grain yields remained low for decades. Collective farmers, paid little and late, put their strongest efforts into their own plots. The gap between state fields and village gardens persisted, and weak agriculture troubled leaders from Stalin to Gorbachev.

Peasants into workers. Millions escaped collectivization by leaving for towns and building sites, expanding the industrial workforce faster than planners expected. Between 1926 and 1939 the urban population more than doubled. The internal passports introduced in December 1932 sought to control movement, making city residence a privilege the state could grant or withhold.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was collectivisation above all an economic policy or a political one?

Stalin faced an economic problem: the grain crisis of 1927–28 threatened food for the towns and exports needed to buy foreign machinery. He chose to solve it by bringing the countryside under state control. Was that choice economically successful? Economists from Barsov to Allen find that collectivization probably supplied little net surplus to industry, because livestock was destroyed and yields fell; a market alternative might have produced growth as fast. The political gain was more immediate and lasting. Independent farmers could no longer withhold grain, and party officials, machine-tractor stations and the threat of deportation policed the countryside. Bolshevik belief that private farming bred capitalism joined the political and economic aims. The evidence weighs toward control as the decisive motive. It shows how an authoritarian regime can choose control over output and present that choice as economic necessity.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In late 1929 the party sought 25,000 experienced industrial workers for the countryside. About 70,000 applied and roughly 27,000 went, mostly from factories in Leningrad, Moscow and Ukraine. Many had never farmed. Lynne Viola studied these volunteers in The Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987). Many sincerely believed they were bringing modern methods to backward villages; peasants often saw them as occupiers. Several hundred were attacked and some killed in the revolts of 1930.

CHAPTER 3 · 1930–1933 · 1933

The Famines

Under Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the 1920s, peasants could sell their surplus much as farmers elsewhere sell to the highest bidder. Collectivization changed that bargain. The collective farms created in 1929–33 owed Moscow fixed deliveries, and the state took its share before the people who grew the grain could consume what remained. In 1930–32 it took about twice as much as peasants had sold under the earlier system.

A falling harvest therefore placed the villages in danger even before the state sent men to search them. In 1932 Stalin’s close colleagues Vyacheslav Molotov in Ukraine and Lazar Kaganovich in the North Caucasus led commissions that seized hidden grain, often taking seed needed for the next sowing. Hungry people could be punished for taking even a pocketful of ears from a field: the Law of 7 August 1932 made theft of collective-farm property punishable by death or ten years in a camp, and peasants who gleaned were prosecuted. The state continued to enforce its claim while the means of survival disappeared.

The largest hatched area shows a different disaster, which began earlier in Kazakhstan. Most Kazakhs were nomadic herders, moving animals between seasonal pastures. Party officials regarded this life as backward. From 1929 they requisitioned livestock for the towns, forced herders onto collective farms without adequate grazing, housing or wells, and punished resistance. Requisition meant taking animals by order; settlement deprived the remaining herds of the conditions that had sustained them. Between 1929 and 1933 their numbers collapsed by about nine-tenths.

The loss of the animals destroyed the herders’ livelihood. Between 1.5 and 2.3 million people died, perhaps 38 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs, and over a million fled. The arrows trace refugees toward Xinjiang in China and the oases of Uzbekistan. Death and flight left Kazakhs a minority in their own republic for half a century.

In Ukraine and the Kuban, the question was how the authorities responded once famine had begun. Between November 1932 and January 1933, decisions in Moscow and Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, made it much deadlier. Villages behind on deliveries were blacklisted: manufactured goods were withheld and fines imposed in meat and potatoes. Entire Cossack settlements in the Kuban, including Poltavskaya, were deported north. The Cossacks descended from the frontier soldier-farmers of the tsarist empire.

The leadership also treated the grain crisis as a national political danger. The decree of 14 December 1932 linked the failures to Ukrainian nationalism and ended promotion of Ukrainian language and culture in the Kuban. On 22 January 1933 a directive ordered police to stop peasants fleeing Ukraine and the North Caucasus. By mid-February tens of thousands had been arrested, and many were sent back to villages where they died. Grain exports continued at a reduced level; relief arrived in spring 1933, after deaths had peaked. The hatching runs from the Dnieper to the Volga, and death rates were highest precisely where the state pressed hardest.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Quotas set in Moscow ignored the harvest. A delivery target was also a test of loyalty. Moscow fixed quotas, and officials who reported a shortfall risked being accused of sabotage. After collectivization the state’s grain take roughly doubled, while harvests fell in 1931 and 1932 amid disorganized farms, exhausted horses, poor weather and peasants with little reason to work. Since the quota came first, the villages had to absorb the loss.

Collectivisation had destroyed the peasants’ reserves. A household facing a bad harvest once might have drawn on a cow or a store of grain. Collectivization removed much of that protection: in 1929–31 peasants slaughtered or lost about half their livestock, and the most productive farmers were deported as kulaks. When collective farms failed, families had little private reserve to fall back on. This helps explain why the shortage killed on a scale earlier shortfalls had not.

The party treated nomadism as backwardness. Soviet planners wanted settled farming and industry to replace what they regarded as primitive nomadic herding. From 1929 they pressed settlement and requisitioned livestock in Kazakhstan without providing the wells, fodder, housing or tools settled life required. They also wanted meat and grain for the towns, so livestock quotas rose as herds shrank. Officials competing to show progress drove herders onto farms unable to support them; their animals were eaten, confiscated or died.

Stalin read hunger as political resistance. Stalin saw falling deliveries in Ukraine and the Kuban as sabotage by kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists. In August 1932 he warned Kaganovich that “we may lose Ukraine”. That reading made the food crisis a political threat to be met with blacklists, deportations, purges of local officials and sealed borders. Hunger itself could be treated as evidence of resistance in the Union’s main grain region.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A demographic wound that shaped two nations. The losses changed the population of both republics. Millions died in Ukraine, overwhelmingly in the countryside, and Kazakhstan lost perhaps two-fifths of its Kazakh population. Russian and Ukrainian settlers later moved into emptied villages; Kazakhs did not again become a majority in Kazakhstan until after independence. The regime suppressed the 1937 census that revealed the losses and arrested the statisticians who recorded them.

Silence, then memory. For decades the state denied the famine, and mentioning it could bring arrest. Survivors in the diaspora preserved its memory until official denial ended in the late 1980s. After 1991 Ukraine made the famine central to national history, with a memorial museum in Kyiv and a November day of remembrance. Its meaning remains contested in Ukrainian and Russian politics, where it figures in each state’s account of the other.

The collective farm survived. The regime kept the collective farm while changing its rules. From 1933 fixed quotas per hectare sown replaced arbitrary requisitions, private plots were allowed, and grain stocks were rebuilt against another bad harvest. Peasants had learned that the state would take what it wanted first. The kolkhoz bargain settled into place: the famines secured the system that had caused them.

A pattern for treating nations as suspects. The December 1932 decree publicly linked a national culture to sabotage for the first time. Its underlying suspicion—that a whole people could be disloyal—returned in the Terror’s national operations of 1937–38 and the wartime deportations of entire peoples. What appeared in one decree became a recurring way of governing.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Should the famine in Ukraine be judged as genocide, or as a famine caused by policy without the intent to destroy a nation?

The strongest case for genocide focuses on the measures from November 1932 to spring 1933 that fell specifically on Ukraine and the Kuban: blacklists, the 14 December decree linking grain failures to Ukrainian nationalism, sealed borders and arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals. Those who reject that conclusion point out that quotas and seizures also struck the Volga, Siberia and, proportionally worst of all, Kazakhstan. Stalin’s correspondence concentrates on grain and resistance, which he blamed on nationalists whom he suspected. The UN Genocide Convention requires intent to destroy a group “as such”, difficult to prove from documents written in the language of grain targets; Lemkin’s broader idea of destroying a nation’s social and cultural life fits more readily. A strong answer identifies the definition it uses and distinguishes the agreed cause from disputed intent. On either reading, deliberate choices made the dead victims.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The famine reached Western news while it was happening, but reports were largely disbelieved. In March 1933 Welsh journalist Gareth Jones walked through Ukrainian villages and told a Berlin press conference he had seen mass hunger. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his Moscow reporting, replied with “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving”; other Moscow correspondents supported him. In 2003 the Pulitzer board declined to revoke the prize, while judging that his prize-winning reporting fell seriously short of today’s standards. Jones was killed in Inner Mongolia in 1935.

CHAPTER 4 · 1928–1941 · 1935

The Five-Year Plans

Gosplan’s First Five-Year Plan resembled a company’s budget in one respect: it assigned factories amounts to produce. But its targets had the force of law. In 1929 the leadership chose the most ambitious draft for 1928–32, called the “optimal variant”, and then raised its demands further. The overriding purpose was speed, even when the cost was high.

The target for pig iron—the crude iron used to make steel—shows what this meant in practice. For 1932 it rose from 10 million tonnes to 17 million; actual output was about 6 million. Managers faced punishment for missing orders, especially after mining engineers were accused of “wrecking”, or deliberate sabotage, at the Shakhty trial of 1928. They hoarded materials, inflated reports and pressed workers harder. In January 1933 the government nevertheless declared the plan fulfilled in four years and three months. Most targets had been missed, but heavy industry had grown quickly, and that growth was the achievement the regime chose to celebrate while consumers went short.

The map shows the new industrial centers in the east. Magnitogorsk, in the southern Urals, was modeled on the steelworks at Gary, Indiana; its first blast furnace was lit in early 1932. Kuznetsk in western Siberia followed months later. Each supplied something the other needed: trains carried Magnitogorsk iron ore east and Kuznetsk basin coal west. The arrows trace this Urals–Kuznetsk Combine, a shuttle of about 2,000 kilometres each way.

Other projects connected distant regions and drew on foreign expertise. Turksib, completed in 1930, linked Siberian grain to Central Asian cotton. Foreign firms, many American, designed the Stalingrad tractor works and Gorky car factory, while American engineers helped build the Dnieper hydroelectric dam, opened in 1932. The remote eastern sites were expensive to build, but their distance from the borders put industry beyond invaders’ reach. A decade later that location helped decide the war.

The plans changed workers’ daily lives as well as the landscape. As food went to export and rationing returned, real wages—the goods pay could buy—fell steeply between 1928 and 1932. Workers left jobs in such numbers that managers competed for them with bonuses and housing. The state used coercion too: labour books introduced in 1938 recorded employment and tied a worker to a job, much like a work permit held by an employer. Harsh discipline laws followed in 1940.

Rewards and pressure met in the Stakhanovite movement. In August 1935 the miner Alexei Stakhanov cut 102 tonnes of coal in one shift at Kadiyivka, about fourteen times the norm, the output expected of a miner much like a sales target. Record-breakers gained pay and prestige, but their records helped raise expectations for everyone else. Meanwhile prisoners in the political police’s expanding economy dug canals, mined gold and built railways. The industrial power created by the plans drew on both free and unfree labour, and treated both as resources to be spent.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Fear of war drove the pace. The Bolsheviks expected capitalist powers to attack the first socialist state, and the war scare of 1927 made preparation urgent. Steel and machinery could supply tanks, aircraft and artillery, so heavy industry took priority over consumer goods and defence plants received scarce materials first. Stalin’s February 1931 warning gave the country ten years to catch up and justified the sacrifices demanded; the deadline proved almost exactly right.

Ideology demanded a socialist economy. For Marxists, a socialist society required large-scale industry and an industrial working class. NEP had left the economy dominated by peasants and small traders. Planning promised both a different society and an alternative to the market’s booms and slumps. After 1929 many Western observers found this attractive: the Great Depression brought soaring unemployment in the West while Soviet factories were hiring.

Collectivisation released grain and labour. Industrial towns needed food, and foreign machinery had to be paid for. Control of the harvest gave the state grain for both purposes, even during famine; exports reached about 5 million tonnes in 1931 and paid for imported machine tools. Collectivization also sent millions of peasants into industry. Some fled the farms as migrants; deported “kulaks” were sent to sites such as Magnitogorsk. The two revolutions of 1929 were designed to work together, each depending on the other’s violence.

Political competition inflated the targets. After the Right’s defeat, a warning that a target was unrealistic could be dangerous. Raising it demonstrated loyalty: the 1932 pig-iron target went from 10 to 17 million tonnes. The slogan “there are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm” made caution sound like cowardice. Planners and managers had incentives to promise more than they could deliver, building waste and falsified reports into the system.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The industrial base for victory in 1941–45. When the western industrial regions were lost in 1941, factories in the Urals and Siberia supplied the Red Army through the war. The experience of building and moving whole plants also helped make the 1941 evacuation possible. Even historians severely critical of Stalinism regard the industrial base as the plans’ decisive result, though they debate whether a less brutal path could have reached the same end.

A society of new workers and new managers. Industrialization made millions of peasants into urban workers and opened careers to young people from peasant and working-class families. Trained as engineers and managers, these vydvizhentsy (“promoted ones”) owed their rise to the regime and formed the core of its support. Two members of the generation, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, ran the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s; the generation promoted by the plans governed into the 1980s.

Shortage as a way of life. Heavy industry received resources that could otherwise have supplied food, housing and consumer goods. Shortages became ordinary: people queued, lived in crowded communal apartments, used a thriving black market and faced rationing until 1935. Officials obtained the best goods from closed shops. Connections helped people find what they needed, and the shortage economy shaped their dealings with the state until the Soviet Union ended.

Scapegoats for every failure. If the plan could not officially fail, someone else had to explain missed targets, accidents and shortages. Engineers were accused of “wrecking” at the Shakhty trial of 1928 and the Industrial Party trial of 1930; managers and officials followed during the Terror. Economic failures became evidence of sabotage, linking production to the arrests of 1936–38, when industrial managers were among the most heavily purged groups.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

To what extent were the Five-Year Plans a success?

By Stalin’s priorities, the plans largely succeeded. Steel, coal and electricity output multiplied, a second industrial base rose in the Urals and Siberia, and the Soviet Union out-produced Germany in tanks and aircraft during the war. Even the skeptical recalculations of Bergson and Jasny show unusually fast growth. A judgment based on the lives of workers and peasants looks different: real wages fell sharply in the early 1930s, famine killed about 5.5 to 8.7 million people, consumer goods remained scarce and much new industry depended on forced labour. Unfinished projects, falsified reports and poor quality added waste. Robert Allen and other historians argue that growth came largely from moving peasants into industry, which a less violent policy might also have achieved. The plans succeeded on Stalin’s terms while failing socialism’s promise of higher living standards, a pattern seen in many states industrializing by command.

AN INTERESTING FACT

An American worker left one of the best accounts of Magnitogorsk. John Scott left the University of Wisconsin in 1931 and went to the Urals in 1932, working as a welder and rigger. He married a Russian teacher and stayed until 1938. His memoir Behind the Urals (1942) describes temperatures of minus 40 degrees, tents and barracks, and constant accidents, as well as genuine enthusiasm among young builders. Stephen Kotkin drew on Scott and the city’s archives in Magnetic Mountain (1995), arguing that Stalinism was a whole civilisation people learned to live inside and whose language they learned to speak.

CHAPTER 5 · 1930–1953 · 1936

The Gulag

In June 1929 the Soviet leadership joined two ambitions: punishing prisoners and exploiting distant resources. On 27 June the Politburo, the party’s small ruling committee, which worked like a cabinet, assigned prisoners serving three years or more to camps run by the OGPU, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB. A July decree called for camps in remote areas ‘for the purpose of colonising these regions and exploiting their natural resources’. The people sent there would work to sustain their own imprisonment and help open up the empire’s empty regions.

There was already a model on the Solovetsky islands. At Solovki, food depended on work: a prisoner too weak to meet the norm received less to eat and could become weaker still. Collectivisation supplied another population under police control. In 1930–31 deported ‘kulaks’, better-off peasants branded rural capitalists, were sent to guarded villages of exile called special settlements. Punishment and deportation had become sources of labour; the police now had a reason to seek workers among those they arrested, helping to explain later links between arrests and labour plans.

The journeys shown on the map followed the demands for resources. Dalstroi, a police-run company founded in November 1931, governed the Kolyma basin like the owner of an immense company town. From Vladivostok prisoners were shipped to Magadan and sent to mine gold in permafrost. The poet Osip Mandelstam died in the Vladivostok transit camp in December 1938. Farther north, prisoners opened Vorkuta’s coalfield and Norilsk’s nickel mines, building railways and cities that still stand. At Karlag, they farmed the Kazakh steppe.

Who was sent to do this work? Some were political prisoners convicted under Article 58 of ‘counter-revolutionary’ crimes. Most were ordinary people convicted of offences such as petty theft, absence from work or leaving a job. Laws reaching into everyday life brought the Gulag close to almost every family.

The camp’s demand for output governed daily survival. Prisoners worked twelve hours or more, often in extreme cold, and their rations depended on meeting daily work norms. Criminal convicts were often allowed to dominate political prisoners, further weakening solidarity. In the famine years of 1933 and during the war, mortality soared; in 1942 alone about a quarter of camp prisoners died.

The recorded death toll leaves out some of the people whose imprisonment killed them. Officials released many prisoners close to death, so deaths soon afterward fell outside camp records. Historians therefore treat the archive’s approximately 1.5 to 1.8 million deaths as a minimum. Camps and colonies continued to grow, reaching about 2.5 million prisoners in the early 1950s. Only Stalin’s death allowed the camps on the map to be emptied: no one beneath him had dared propose it.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Punishment was redefined as productive labour. Bolsheviks saw labour as a way to reform criminals and objected to the state paying to keep prisoners idle. At Solovki, opened in a former White Sea monastery in 1923, police tied food to prisoners’ work. The June 1929 resolution extended this approach nationally: long-term prisoners would work in remote camps. The punishment itself became a means of carrying out economic plans.

The plans needed labour in empty places. Industrialisation needed gold, coal, nickel and timber from the Arctic, Siberia and the Far East, where few free workers wanted to live. The state could order prisoners and deportees there, guard them and pay them almost nothing. Camps multiplied alongside the Five-Year Plans; by 1940 prisoners mined most of the Union’s gold. The camps’ distribution follows much of the geography of the resources the plans demanded.

Collectivisation produced a forced-labour population. In 1930–31 about 1.8 million ‘kulaks’ were deported, creating the first mass forced-labour population outside prisons. The OGPU had to house, feed and employ hundreds of thousands in special settlements. Barracks, transit points and convoys, together with the experience of managing this population, could later be used for convicted prisoners. Dekulakisation supplied methods and infrastructure for the camps.

New laws turned everyday life into crime. The Law of 7 August 1932 on socialist property, internal passport rules of 1932 and labour laws of 1940 made petty theft, unauthorised travel and lateness crimes carrying long sentences. Most Gulag prisoners were convicted under such laws; political enemies were a minority. Courts could consequently feed prisoners into the camps between campaigns as well as during the Terror, and the camp population kept rising in quieter years.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A police empire with its own territory. Dalstroi governed Kolyma from 1931 to 1953, in the territory marked by dark hatching. There the NKVD was government, employer and jailer at once. Camp complexes at Vorkuta, Norilsk and Karaganda built entire cities, and the NKVD became one of the Union’s largest economic ministries. Its authority over territory and people survived the Terror and lasted until after Stalin’s death.

A channel that the Terror could fill. The Terror of 1937–38 encountered a system already equipped to move and employ prisoners. Convoys, transit camps and work sites sent hundreds of thousands to Kolyma, the north and Kazakhstan within months; the Gulag population nearly doubled. In Kolyma, new arrivals were driven to meet gold plans through the Arctic winter of 1938, when deaths rose steeply. The camp network enabled arrests on this scale to be absorbed, while the Terror supplied its largest workforce yet.

Forced labour built the wartime and postwar economy. Prisoner labour remained useful to the state during war and peace. In 1941–45 prisoners made munitions, built railways and mined coal; about a million were released into the Red Army. After 1945 returning soldiers, people from annexed lands and prisoners convicted under harsh new theft laws enlarged the Gulag to its greatest size. Its fastest growth in peacetime shows how deeply forced labour had entered the regime’s routine.

A memory that still divides. After 1953 survivors returned to a society reluctant to hear their accounts. Khrushchev’s government acknowledged the camps only partially. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in 1962, then was banned again. The memory remains contested in Russia, where Memorial, which documented the Gulag, was dissolved by court order in 2021.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Gulag primarily an economic institution or an instrument of political terror?

The Gulag was a political institution given an economic job, and the two purposes helped it grow. The 1929 resolution sent prisoners to colonise remote regions; camps followed resources needed by the plans, and the NKVD built major projects and produced most Soviet gold. But laws disciplining everyday behaviour sent millions into the system, and the Terror of 1937–38 filled it regardless of labour needs. The conditions killed people at rates no rational employer would accept. Khlevniuk’s account of forced labour’s inefficiency suggests that economic arguments also justified a system whose deeper purpose was control. Steven Barnes adds another purpose: labour was treated as a test of who could be redeemed. None of these aims operated alone.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Soviet aviation designer Andrei Tupolev worked on the Tu-2 bomber while imprisoned in a Moscow design bureau. Arrested in 1937, he worked in one of the special camps for scientists that prisoners called sharashki. Sergei Korolev, arrested in 1938, spent months in a Kolyma gold mine in 1939 before being moved to Tupolev’s bureau. Korolev later became chief designer of the rocket that launched Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin. Both were released during the war; their imprisonment remained publicly unacknowledged in the Soviet Union for decades.

CHAPTER 6 · 1936–1938 · 1937

The Great Terror

Sergei Kirov, the party leader in Leningrad, was shot on 1 December 1934 by Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled party member. The murder gave Stalin an opportunity to act against former oppositionists. A decree allowed rapid trials without defence, and Stalin blamed his old opponents. Whether he arranged the killing remains disputed; most historians who have worked in the archives, including Matthew Lenoe, find no evidence that he did.

The accusation grew into a public account of conspiracy. In August 1936 the first great show trial, a courtroom performance following a script, convicted Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen others of organising Kirov’s murder for Trotsky. All were shot. The next month Stalin replaced Genrikh Yagoda as head of the NKVD, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB, with Nikolai Yezhov. He complained that the police were “four years behind” in unmasking enemies. The pretext supplied by Kirov’s murder had become a model for further accusations.

Two more show trials accused Lenin’s former comrades of spying and sabotage. The second took place in January 1937; the third, in March 1938, condemned Bukharin and Rykov. Meanwhile the purge, expelling and arresting members branded disloyal, reached institutions throughout the state. In June 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other senior commanders were shot. About 35,000 officers were discharged during 1937–38, many of them arrested.

The party’s own governing body suffered devastating losses. Of the 139 members and candidates elected to the Central Committee at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934, 98 were arrested and shot. This committee of senior figures resembled a company’s board of directors. Factory managers, engineers, scientists, writers and officials were also seized, and younger men rose from below into their posts. Much of the elite that had built the system was destroyed by it; power became concentrated in Stalin’s hands.

The deadliest operations were concealed from the public. Order No. 00447, issued by the NKVD on 30 July 1937, assigned each region a “limit” for shootings and another for camp sentences. The initial totals were about 76,000 shootings and 186,500 camp sentences. Regional chiefs were judged by their results and requested higher limits. A figure set on paper became a target that officials had reason to meet or exceed.

National operations treated Poles, Germans, Latvians, Finns, Greeks and others as presumed spies. The Polish operation alone sentenced about 140,000 people and shot about 111,000. Troikas—three-person panels acting as judge and jury—could pass sentences in minutes. Executions followed at night in prison cellars and forests.

Some burial sites found after 1988 are marked on the map: Levashovo near Leningrad, Bykivnia near Kyiv, Kurapaty near Minsk, Vinnytsia and Sandarmokh in Karelia. The arrow follows prisoners taken from Solovki to be shot in Karelia. The show trials offered a public spectacle; these places reveal the much wider killing conducted out of sight.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Kirov murder supplied a pretext. Stalin used Kirov’s murder in December 1934 to connect opposition with assassination. The emergency decree passed that day allowed trials within ten days, without defence lawyers, followed by immediate execution. Stalin went to Leningrad to direct the investigation, and former oppositionists there were arrested. By the 1936 trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev, the murder had become a supposed Trotskyist plot: past dissent was made to appear a form of terrorism.

Fear of war and a “fifth column”. Nazi Germany in the west and Japan in the east confronted Stalin with hostile powers from 1933. The Spanish Civil War suggested how enemies inside a country might help an invader. Stalin feared such disloyalty among kulaks, former oppositionists, priests and minorities with links abroad. Those groups became targets of the 1937–38 mass and national operations, suggesting a purge intended to forestall actions its victims had not yet taken.

The old elite still remembered alternatives. The older generation of senior communists had known Lenin and remembered choices other than Stalin. In the 1920s some had supported Trotsky, Zinoviev or Bukharin; some privately criticised collectivisation and the famine. Martemian Ryutin’s 1932 platform called Stalin the “evil genius” of the revolution. Later testimony suggests that Stalin may have received votes against him in the secret Central Committee ballot at the 1934 Seventeenth Congress, though historians dispute it. Destroying this generation removed people able to imagine the party without him.

A police state measured success by arrests. The NKVD expanded through collectivisation and the camps, and its officers were rewarded for uncovering plots. Regional chiefs received quotas to fulfil and exceed; finding too few enemies could itself make a chief suspect. Fear reinforced ambition, especially as Yezhov’s NKVD arrested and shot many of its own officers. Confessions naming new accomplices supplied further targets, giving the operations a momentum of their own.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A personal dictatorship without rivals. By 1939 no one in the leadership had known Stalin as an equal or could challenge him. The Politburo met less often; Stalin made decisions with small groups he selected. Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and other surviving colleagues depended on his favour. The late-1930s cult celebrated a leader who had removed those able to contradict him.

A weakened army on the eve of war. Experienced commanders were removed shortly before the Red Army’s poor performance against Finland in 1939–40 and Germany’s invasion in 1941. How much did the purge contribute to the disasters of 1941? Historians disagree: many discharged officers were reinstated, and other failures also mattered. The purge nevertheless damaged initiative and trust throughout the army.

A new generation in power. The arrests left posts open to young officials, engineers and managers trained in the 1930s, the vydvizhentsy. Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Andrei Gromyko rose rapidly into vacancies. Brezhnev was a factory engineer in 1935 and secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional party committee by 1939. Loyal to Stalin and marked by fear, this generation would govern the Soviet Union until the 1980s.

Fear in everyday life. The Terror entered family life in every town and many villages. Children of “enemies of the people” faced stigma or orphanages, and wives were sent to special camps. People guarded their words, avoided strangers and burned letters. These habits of silence protected the regime after the operations ended and help explain why the Terror was discussed openly only after 1956.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Great Terror the result of Stalin’s personal decisions or of pressures within the Soviet system?

Stalin’s decisions explain the Terror’s origin, purpose and timing. He initiated the show trials, approved Order No. 00447 and the national operations, signed lists sentencing tens of thousands and stopped the mass operations in November 1938. His fear of a fifth column before war helps explain the people selected as targets. The orders acquired their extraordinary reach through a system in which others had reasons to extend them. Regional chiefs sought higher quotas, NKVD officers competed to uncover plots, and denunciations by neighbours and colleagues brought in more victims, as Getty and Goldman show. Stalin could start and stop the killing, but he depended on people below him to carry it out. Mass repression in a modern state requires both a decision at the top and participants who see reasons to take part.

AN INTERESTING FACT

On 5 December 1936 the Soviet Union adopted the “Stalin Constitution”, which Stalin praised as the most democratic in the world. Article 127 promised that arrest required a court decision or a prosecutor’s sanction. Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek had served in drafting groups of the commission that prepared it. Within weeks Radek stood as a defendant at the second Moscow show trial; fifteen months later Bukharin appeared at the third. The treatment of two men who helped draft the guarantees showed how little those guarantees meant.

CHAPTER 7 · 1937–1944 · 1944

Nations and Deportations

Soviet leaders first acted against minorities along borders they feared they might have to defend. Poles, Germans, Finns and Koreans had homelands or connections beyond the Soviet Union, and planners imagined that they might help an invading power. In 1936 tens of thousands of Poles and Germans were moved from Ukraine’s western border zone to Kazakhstan. Their residence and ancestry made them suspect before any invasion had occurred.

Japan’s position in Manchuria made the Far East another focus of anxiety. An August 1937 decree ordered the removal of all Koreans there. During September and October, trains carried about 172,000 people to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, along the longest arrow on the map. At the same time, the Great Terror of 1937–38 brought mass arrests and shootings in “national operations” against minorities suspected of foreign espionage. The Polish operation alone shot about 111,000 people. The government was treating membership of a national group as evidence of a danger to the state.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 created a different problem for Soviet rulers. Its secret protocol divided Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin, and the Red Army entered eastern Poland on 17 September. Soviet forces occupied the Baltic states in June 1940; staged elections preceded their annexation in August. Romania was forced to surrender Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. On the map, these territories lie in the tan zone still held by Germany in 1944.

The government presented annexation as liberation, but it also sought to eliminate possible opposition to its new rule. In four waves during 1940–41 the NKVD deported Polish settlers, officials and their families. On the night of 14 June 1941 it removed more than 40,000 people from the Baltic republics, most of them women, children and elderly people. In spring 1940 the NKVD had also shot about 22,000 captured Polish officers and officials at Katyn and other sites, a crime marked in the Road to War atlas. Deportation and killing helped secure territories whose populations had not chosen Soviet rule.

Germany’s invasion brought a charge that could be applied to whole peoples: collaboration. In August 1941, as German armies advanced, a decree accused the Volga Germans of concealing saboteurs and abolished their republic. About 440,000 people were deported from the Volga, and by 1942 roughly 900,000 Soviet Germans had been moved east. After the Red Army retook the North Caucasus and Crimea in 1943–44, the NKVD removed the Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Crimean Tatars. Some individuals had collaborated; the state punished entire communities.

Operation Lentil began on 23 February 1944 and moved about 496,000 Chechens and Ingush in a week. About 191,000 Crimean Tatars followed in May. The deportees became “special settlers”, restricted to assigned villages rather as prisoners on parole may be restricted to a district. Their homelands, shown hatched, were renamed and resettled. Neither service nor family relationship protected them: ancestry determined who was sent away.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Fear of foreign enemies on the borders. Japan occupied Manchuria from 1931, Nazi Germany rose to power in 1933, and the two signed the Anti-Comintern Pact against communism in 1936. Soviet planners looked at Koreans near Japanese-ruled Korea and Poles and Germans near Poland and assumed that kinship across the border could turn them into allies of an invader. Leaders already alert to enemies could regard clearing the border as protection. That assumption opened the way to removing whole peoples.

The habit of classifying people by nationality. National registration made a policy of removal administratively possible. The state had recorded nationality since the 1920s; from 1932 it appeared on a separate line in internal passports. At sixteen, children of mixed marriages had to choose one parent’s nationality. Officials could therefore identify citizens as Korean, German or Chechen, and the NKVD could organize removals in days. Records made for a policy that supported national cultures could be put to another use.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact brought hostile new lands. After the August 1939 Pact, Soviet authorities governed eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia. Their populations had not previously lived under Soviet rule. Among them were officers, officials, landowners and priests, and settlers whom Poland had placed on the land after 1921. The NKVD treated these groups as anti-Soviet by definition and deported them in 1940–41 to secure the new borders before a war both Stalin and Hitler expected.

War made collective punishment seem justified. Germany invaded in 1941 and occupied the North Caucasus and Crimea in 1942–43. Cases of collaboration supplied a pretext for extending suspicion from individuals to entire peoples; wartime urgency silenced objections. The NKVD already had experience of mass removal, and Operation Lentil moved hundreds of thousands in days in February 1944. No court had to determine individual guilt when the state had assigned it to a whole nation.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Homelands abolished and resettled. The deportations changed the political map as well as the population. The Volga German, Kalmyk and Chechen-Ingush republics and the Karachay region were abolished, their land divided among neighbors. In 1945 the Crimean republic became a province. Russian and Ukrainian settlers entered emptied villages and place names were changed; pale hatching recalls these abolished homelands. In the Caucasus, the division of land has left their borders disputed to this day.

Life as special settlers. A journey east was followed by years of control. Special settlers had to register regularly and needed permission to leave their villages; from 1948 escape carried a threat of twenty years of hard labor. Their national schools and newspapers disappeared, and their children were barred from many university fields. Restrictions began to be lifted only in 1955–56, after a generation had grown up under suspicion in its own country.

Rehabilitation, partial and late. Rehabilitation did not restore every people to the same position. In 1957 Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Karachays and Balkars could return, and their autonomies were restored. Volga Germans were cleared of collective guilt in 1964 but never recovered their republic. Crimean Tatars were allowed home only in 1989. These differences shaped relations with Soviet and post-Soviet states for decades.

A model for postwar repression. The state used mass removal again after 1945 to deprive armed resistance in the annexed borderlands of support. The NKVD and its successor deported about 76,000 people from western Ukraine in October 1947 and about 95,000 from the Baltic states in March 1949. By removing the villages that fed the resistance, the operations broke it.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Why did a state that promoted national cultures in the 1920s deport whole nations in the 1940s?

The aims changed, but both policies depended on the state identifying and managing people by nationality. In the 1920s officials promoted national languages and local officials to win minorities to socialism. As war with Japan and Germany approached from the early 1930s, those same records helped identify diaspora nationalities as possible fifth columns. The national operations of the Terror in 1937–38 treated them as enemies. War gave the government both an opportunity and a pretext: collaboration by some individuals became a charge against whole peoples. Historians differ in emphasis. Terry Martin stresses the logic of the nationalities system, Naimark Stalin’s willingness to destroy peoples, and others wartime security panic. Classification did not have to lead to deportation, but it gave the state a means of selecting the people it chose to remove. Ethnic records created for one purpose can become instruments against those they describe when fear rises.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The deported Koreans carried institutions as well as memories into exile. A Korean theatre founded in Vladivostok in 1932 moved with its actors to Kzyl-Orda, Kazakhstan, in 1937. It still performs in Almaty as the State Korean Theatre of Musical Comedy, one of the oldest Korean-language theatres outside Korea. The newspaper Lenin Kichi (“Lenin’s Banner”) also appeared in Kazakhstan for decades. The deportees’ descendants call themselves Koryo-saram; several hundred thousand live across Central Asia and Russia.

CHAPTER 8 · 1929–1953 · 1939

Propaganda and the Cult

The celebration of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday gave his public image a decisive new prominence. On 21 December 1929 Pravda (“Truth”), the party’s daily newspaper, printed pages of tributes from his colleagues. The Great Turn was beginning at the same time. Forced collectivization formed part of a “revolution from above”, a transformation directed by the state, and the image of Stalin became attached to that transformation.

The association appeared in everyday public life. Speeches closed with ovations, letters thanked Stalin personally, and cities, factories, collective farms and the Union’s highest peak took his name. Stalingrad had been named in 1925; Stalino, Stalinabad, Stalinsk and Stalinogorsk followed during the 1930s, as the markers show. Stalin himself corrected drafts of praise and sometimes moderated them, presenting himself as a modest servant of the party. The image gave a human face to a state whose decisions could otherwise seem remote and frightening.

Artists and writers were expected to help shape the society the state wanted to create. The First Congress of Soviet Writers adopted socialist realism in 1934: art was to show life as the party said it was becoming. Stalin had called writers “engineers of human souls” in 1932, and they were reminded of his words. Literature, on this account, had work to do on its readers, as engineering did on its material.

The government also changed what children learned about their country. In the mid-1930s schools returned to textbooks, exams and discipline. New textbooks and Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film presented Russian heroes including Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great as forerunners of Soviet patriotism. Revolutionary teaching could thus draw strength from an older national past.

Party members encountered an equally purposeful account of the revolution itself. Stalin edited the Short Course, published in 1938 and compulsory for every member; by 1953 tens of millions of copies had been printed. It enlarged his role in the civil war, including at Tsaritsyn, later Stalingrad, and portrayed leaders purged—expelled and arrested—in 1936–38 as traitors from the beginning. Readers were given a past arranged around Stalin’s eventual leadership.

It is harder to know what readers and listeners made of these messages. Historians examine diaries, letters and police reports on popular mood, each offering a different glimpse. Jochen Hellbeck’s diaries show young people sincerely trying to remake themselves as good Soviet citizens. The NKVD reports studied by Sarah Davies contain jokes, rumors and complaints; some peasants called collective farms a second serfdom.

Commitment and criticism did not always belong to different people. Many believed in socialist goals while doubting the methods used to reach them. Stephen Kotkin calls one way of navigating Soviet life “speaking Bolshevik”: people used official language to make claims and protect themselves. Children encountered heroes such as Pavlik Morozov, said to have denounced his father, and millions joined the communist youth organizations, the Young Pioneers and Komsomol. Whether or not citizens accepted every claim, the cult required a public performance of loyalty.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A leader without rivals needed a public image. Stalin had defeated his rivals by 1929, but he did not command Lenin’s authority or Trotsky’s fame. The cult linked him to Lenin and presented the plans’ achievements as proof of his wisdom and success. Colleagues who had known him as one leader among several competed to praise him, and their public devotion became a test of loyalty. Collectivization and industrialization could be presented as the work of the revolution’s leader rather than the demands of a committee.

A poorly educated society needed simple messages. The regime needed to reach millions of new workers and peasants with little schooling. A portrait of Stalin among workers, children or soldiers could communicate a heroic figure without requiring a knowledge of Marxist theory. Posters, film, radio and slogans carried such messages widely. Literacy campaigns sharply raised literacy in the 1930s and enlarged the audience for print; wired loudspeakers in workplaces and squares reached people who still could not read.

Russian traditions of the ruler as father. Many peasants had grown up with an image of the tsar as a distant father, while officials bore blame for injustice. The cult offered a familiar division of responsibility: Stalin was wise and kind, and local officials committed “excesses”, as in his 1930 article “Dizzy with Success”. Plamper and others argue that the pattern gave people who disliked particular policies reason to hope that the leader would correct them.

The Terror required a new history. A show trial could turn yesterday’s hero into today’s traitor. Histories and textbooks became obsolete; libraries removed books by and about the condemned, and owners inked faces out of photographs. The government needed an authoritative account that explained the purges while putting Stalin at the center of the revolution. The Short Course of 1938, written to his instructions and corrected by him, supplied one and became the basis of all teaching.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Loyalty to one man became loyalty to the state. The cult made policy and leader difficult to separate: propaganda credited achievements to Stalin, so doubt about policy could be treated as “anti-Soviet agitation” under Article 58. A joke about him could bring a camp sentence, and thousands were convicted for such remarks. The Terror and Gulag enforced the limits around the image, making silence a safe form of loyalty.

Russian patriotism mobilised for war. The revived Russian past became a resource for wartime mobilization. In 1941 Stalin invoked Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Suvorov and Kutuzov; propaganda appealed to the motherland as well as socialism. Soldiers’ cry “For the Motherland, for Stalin!” joined country and leader. The war completed the turn from revolutionary toward patriotic legitimacy.

The cult reached its peak after victory. After victory the cult reached its peak. Stalin’s seventieth birthday in December 1949 brought gifts from around the world, enough to fill a Moscow museum, and his portrait was illuminated in the night sky above the city. Soviet power carried the cult into the new Eastern European satellite states, where cities and streets were also renamed for him.

Its demolition shook the system. Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of the “cult of personality” attacked an image on which the regime had relied for a generation. Statues were removed and cities renamed; in 1961 Stalin’s body was taken from the Lenin Mausoleum. The shock to believers and protests in Georgia and Eastern Europe revealed how much authority had been invested in one man’s image.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did most Soviet citizens believe the propaganda of the Stalin era?

There is no single reliable measure of what most citizens believed. The evidence varies with age, place and experience. Hellbeck’s diaries show sincere attempts, especially by young and newly educated people, to become good Soviet citizens. Workers promoted through the plans had reasons to believe in a system that had advanced them. Davies’s police reports preserve jokes, complaints and rumors, particularly among peasants who had experienced collectivization and famine. Kotkin’s “speaking Bolshevik” helps us see how a person could use official language to advance or stay safe without accepting it completely. Neither kind of source is transparent: police looked for dissent, while diarists feared discovery. Belief in socialist goals was common, while belief in particular claims was weaker. The regime required people to take part publicly regardless of private conviction. Propaganda could therefore make conformity a normal feature of public life even when it did not persuade everyone.

AN INTERESTING FACT

A photograph of Stalin beside the new Moscow–Volga Canal in 1937 originally included Nikolai Yezhov, the police chief who ran the Terror. After Yezhov was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940, retouchers removed him: Stalin appeared to walk alone, with canal water in the space his companion had occupied. The British designer David King collected hundreds of such altered images, including removed faces and painted-over figures, in The Commissar Vanishes (1997). They show how extensively the visual record was revised.

CHAPTER 9 · 1930–1953 · 1940

Daily Life, Women and Family

The new industrial towns needed workers, and the countryside supplied them. Some peasants fled collectivisation—the forced merger of farms into state-run collectives—and famine; factories recruited others. The arrows on the map trace routes to Moscow, the Donbas mines, Magnitogorsk and other industrial centres. In little more than a decade the movement changed the make-up of Soviet society.

The towns could offer employment more readily than housing. A family in a kommunalka had one room and shared a kitchen and toilet with other families, rather like a permanent house-share with strangers. At Magnitogorsk builders occupied tents, barracks and earth dugouts. Food rationing lasted from 1929 to 1935, with better allocations for industrial workers and officials; the privileged could also shop in “closed” stores. The internal passport introduced in 1932 functioned like a residence permit, allowing the state to control who lived in a city. For many migrants, these conditions were nevertheless preferable to the collective farm.

Education could make the move worthwhile in another way. The state expanded schooling and higher education, literacy rose sharply, and workers’ and peasants’ children entered a new technical class. The vydvizhentsy, the “promoted ones”, were first-generation graduates advanced rapidly into management. A worker’s son might become a factory director within ten years. The Great Terror of 1937–38 created more vacancies when mass arrests and shootings emptied senior posts. Such opportunities help explain support for a regime that also imposed considerable hardship.

After rationing ended in 1935, the government promised that “life has become better”. Some people enjoyed parks, the Moscow Metro, cinemas and holiday resorts. Their rewards were far from equal: managers and Stakhanovites—record-breaking workers celebrated as models, rather like employees of the month—earned many times an unskilled worker’s pay. The state also limited a worker’s freedom to leave. Under the June 1940 labour law, quitting a job or arriving more than twenty minutes late became a crime, and courts enforced the discipline on which industrial expansion depended.

Women experienced both the opportunities and the demands of this society. Their share of industrial workers grew from under a third in 1929 to about two-fifths by 1940; they formed most of the workforce in Ivanovo’s textile mills. Propaganda celebrated women as engineers, doctors, pilots and tractor drivers. Yet a woman returning from a shift still faced almost all the housework, while shortages could make obtaining food a matter of hours in a queue.

The government worried that the birth rate was falling and in June 1936 banned abortion, raised divorce fees and rewarded mothers of large families. Births rose briefly, then fell as illegal abortions spread. Other policies brought state power into women’s lives in different ways. Uzbekistan’s hujum (“assault”) of 1927 pressed women to unveil in public. From 1937 wives of arrested men were sent to camps including ALZhIR, the Akmolinsk camp for wives of “traitors to the motherland”. More women could enter public occupations while their private choices were restricted.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Industrialisation needed millions of new workers. The industrial workforce more than doubled between 1928 and 1932 as the Five-Year Plans created jobs. Collectivisation and famine simultaneously pushed peasants out of villages. Towns had to absorb the arrivals, but housing, transport and food supplies lagged behind. Magnitogorsk and other new towns grew faster than homes for their workers; the resulting shortages shaped urban life for a generation.

The state needed a new technical elite. The regime distrusted many specialists trained before 1917, putting engineers and others on trial as “wreckers” in 1928–31. It expanded schools and institutes to train a technical class from workers’ and peasants’ families. The Terror then removed many first-generation Soviet managers, opening further posts to their newly trained successors. For young people, rapid promotion became a normal expectation.

A falling birth rate worried the leadership. Famine, upheaval and easy divorce and abortion had lowered the birth rate. Preparing for war, Stalin and his colleagues wanted workers and soldiers and saw a strong family as the foundation of a strong state. Their June 1936 decree banned abortion except on medical grounds, increased divorce costs and paid mothers of large families. Many letters in the public discussion opposed the proposed ban, but the final law ignored them. Consultation displayed participation without altering the decision.

Shortage shaped every choice. Heavy industry took priority, leaving food, consumer goods and housing scarce. People searched through queues, markets, closed shops and personal connections for what they needed. The state rationed supplies and gave preferred groups better food, housing and holidays. Access to necessities became a means of political control, while connections called blat became essential to getting things done.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A society of new cities and new classes. The urban share of the population rose from one in five in 1926 to one in three by 1939. Workers’ and peasants’ families also supplied an educated class of engineers, managers and specialists. This class became a backbone of the Soviet state and among its most loyal supporters; some members, including Brezhnev, governed into the 1980s.

Women’s double burden became permanent. Women replaced men in factories and fields during the war, and many remained in paid work afterwards. The expectation that they would run households survived too, and shortages made that work exhausting. Soviet sociologists measured the double burden in the 1960s; it persisted until 1991. Equality at work had not produced equality at home.

Harsh labour laws fed the Gulag. Ordinary workers could receive prison or corrective labour under the labour laws of 1938–40 and the 1947 theft laws, often for minor offences. Absence or theft could mean years in a camp. Millions were sentenced under these laws, helping explain why most Gulag prisoners were not political prisoners and why the camps continued to grow after the Terror.

Expectations the regime could not meet. The promise that “life has become better” raised expectations that scarce housing, food and goods could not meet. After victory, veterans and workers expected rewards; police reports recorded their grumbling at the gap. Khrushchev’s late-1950s housing programme, with its famous five-storey blocks, addressed a backlog and acknowledged that the promise of 1935 had gone unmet for twenty years.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

To what extent did Stalin’s policies improve the lives of Soviet women?

The answer depends on whose life we consider and which changes we measure. Millions of women entered industry, education and professions, female literacy rose sharply, and women made up about two-fifths of industrial workers by 1940. Some became engineers, doctors and pilots. These opportunities mattered. Yet paid work was added to housework and queues amid shortages. The 1936 decree removed the right to abortion and made divorce harder; wives of arrested men could themselves be imprisoned at ALZhIR. Peasant women on collective farms and women of deported nations gained little. Goldman emphasizes the state’s use of the family to reduce its costs, while Hoffmann sees modernising mobilisation through traditional forms. Stalinism widened women’s opportunities as workers while restricting their choices as individuals: legal equality and real freedom could move in opposite directions.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The January 1937 census asked adults, “Are you a believer?” Stalin personally reviewed it. Despite nearly a decade of church closures and campaigns by the League of the Militant Godless, about 57 per cent of respondents aged 16 and over answered yes; among peasant women the share was far higher. The answer was one reason the census was declared defective and suppressed. No subsequent Soviet census repeated the religion question, and the results became known only after archives opened in the early 1990s.

CHAPTER 10 · 1941–1945 · 1942

Stalin at War

The German invasion of 22 June 1941 exposed a grave misjudgment. Stalin trusted the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the 1939 non-aggression treaty with Hitler, and dismissed intelligence warnings as British provocations. He forbade actions that might provoke Germany. The Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, was consequently unprepared along a new and unfortified border. German troops took Minsk in the first week.

Witnesses describe Stalin withdrawing to his dacha, his country house outside Moscow. On 30 June colleagues came to propose a State Defence Committee, or GKO, with Stalin at its head. This small war cabinet could direct every institution. On 3 July he addressed the population by radio as “brothers and sisters”. The appeal came with coercion: Order No. 270 in August branded soldiers who surrendered as traitors and made their families liable to arrest. A state that had terrorized its people now asked them to save it.

The government also had to save the means of producing weapons. Two days after the invasion it created a Council for Evacuation. Factories in Ukraine, Belarus, Leningrad and Moscow were dismantled and sent east by rail, often under bombing. The map’s arrows follow the routes. Between July and November 1941 about 1,500 large enterprises and millions of workers moved to the Urals, the Volga, western Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

Chelyabinsk received the Kirov works from Leningrad and the Kharkiv diesel plant and became “Tankograd”. Some factories began work in unheated sheds before their walls and roofs were finished. They could be re-established in part because the Five-Year Plans had built an industrial base in the Urals. The binding targets set from 1928, rather like a company’s five-year budget with the force of law, had demanded enormous sacrifices; the capacity they created now became a decisive wartime asset.

The leadership of the war combined harsh orders with increasing reliance on commanders. After Rostov fell in July 1942, opening the route to the Caucasus, Stalin issued Order No. 227. Penal battalions sent punished soldiers to dangerous sectors, while blocking detachments behind the lines were ordered to stop retreating troops by force. From late 1942 Stalin relied more on professional commanders including Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky. The Stalingrad counter-offensive, told in The War Room, turned the war.

Stalin also invoked Russian history and faith to rally the population. Officers’ ranks and shoulder boards returned, and in September 1943 the Orthodox Church was allowed to elect a patriarch, its head, for the first time since 1925. In February 1945 Stalin met Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, the conference of the “Big Three” allied leaders. The Red Army’s advance had by then given him control of Eastern Europe. Victory cost 26 to 27 million Soviet lives, and the regime presented the sacrifice as proof that Stalin’s harsh methods had saved the country.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Stalin misjudged Hitler’s intentions. Stalin expected Germany to avoid a war with the Soviet Union while still fighting Britain. He treated warnings from spies, Churchill and his own border commanders as provocations and forbade measures that might give Hitler a pretext. Frontier units were not on alert on 22 June 1941, and much of the air force was destroyed on the ground that day. The Terror had removed experienced officers and left subordinates afraid to contradict him, making it harder to challenge the judgment that helped turn surprise into catastrophe.

The industrial base of the 1930s. Factories built under the Five-Year Plans in the Urals and Siberia lay beyond German reach. Planners were accustomed to directing resources, and the experience of building factories from nothing in the 1930s helped make evacuation possible in 1941. Ukraine had supplied much of the Union’s coal, iron and steel. Without Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, losing that production might have been fatal.

A system built for mobilisation. The state controlled every factory, farm and newspaper and could redirect the economy to war faster than a market economy. Rationing, labour conscription and moving millions of workers were familiar practices from the 1930s. Centralization had produced waste in peacetime; now it allowed resources to be concentrated on tanks, aircraft and shells. By 1942 more than half of national output went to war.

German brutality strengthened Soviet resistance. Some people in newly annexed lands and among deported or persecuted groups initially welcomed the Germans. Nazi occupation soon showed most that the alternative to Stalin was worse. Policy treated Soviet citizens as racial inferiors: prisoners of war were starved, villages burned, Jews murdered and civilians deported for labour. As rule hardened, resistance and partisan warfare grew. German brutality became a powerful reason to defend Stalin’s state.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Victory as the regime’s new legitimacy. Victory gave the regime an answer to criticism of the 1930s. Collectivisation, the plans and even the purges could be presented as harsh but necessary preparation for survival. Stalin’s May 1945 toast to the Russian people as the Union’s leading nation set the tone. Memory of war and sacrifice remained central to Soviet and post-Soviet identity.

An empire in Eastern Europe. The Red Army reached Berlin with Soviet forces occupying Poland, eastern Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. The Tehran agreement of 1943 and Yalta agreement of 1945 recognized Soviet interests in the region. Within three years communist governments loyal to Moscow ruled most of it. The postwar map’s grey-tan satellites show a buffer of dependent states between the Soviet Union and Germany.

Returning prisoners and new suspicions. Captured soldiers, forced labourers and people who had lived under occupation returned to a state suspicious of their loyalty. The NKVD screened more than four million repatriated people in filtration camps; many went to the Gulag or labour battalions. The war refilled camps it had emptied, and suspicion of people who had seen the West lasted until Stalin’s death.

A demographic wound and a ruined west. The deaths of 26 to 27 million people, mostly young men, left millions more women than men and depressed the birth rate for decades. By Soviet count, the German retreat left 1,710 towns and some 70,000 villages destroyed. Famine struck already exhausted regions in 1946–47. Reconstruction dominated Stalin’s last years, and its costs again fell on villages and camps.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How far was Stalin’s leadership responsible for the Soviet victory in 1945?

Stalin’s decisions helped produce the danger that victory overcame. He ignored warnings and forbade retreats in 1941, contributing to catastrophic losses, while the purges of 1937–38 had weakened the officer corps. He also stayed in Moscow in October 1941, learned after 1942 to rely on commanders such as Zhukov, coordinated the war economy through the GKO and handled the alliance with Britain and the United States skilfully. Overy and Roberts credit him with more than Khrushchev allowed; Khlevniuk emphasizes the costs of centralization. The wider system mattered more than his personal decisions: industrial capacity built in the 1930s, evacuation and conversion, the endurance of workers and soldiers, and Lend-Lease all contributed. German brutality also turned people against the invader. Stalin’s regime was suited to total war, and its leader both endangered and helped secure victory. Wartime success could legitimize dictatorship regardless of the price its people paid.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Lenin’s body was among the things sent east. In July 1941, as German armies advanced, it was secretly removed from the Mausoleum on Red Square and carried by special train to Tyumen in western Siberia, more than 2,000 kilometres away. It remained under guard in the local agricultural technical college with the scientists who maintained it. The Mausoleum was camouflaged; parades in Red Square, including that of 7 November 1941, passed an empty tomb. The body returned to Moscow in 1945.

CHAPTER 11 · 1945–1953 · 1949

High Stalinism

The government faced a devastated country after the war. Its choices during the famine of 1946–47 show how reconstruction was to proceed. Drought struck Ukraine, Moldavia and the Volga in 1946, but farms still had to meet high procurement quotas: the grain they were obliged to deliver to the state. The government retained large reserves and continued exports to Eastern Europe while people went hungry. Estimates of the dead range from under 1 million to about 2 million, many in Moldavia, which the Soviet Union had annexed only in 1940.

Resources went first to rebuilding state power. Ukraine’s mines and the Dnieper dam were restored within a few years, even as millions lived in dugouts. In June 1947 new laws made theft of state property punishable by up to 25 years in camps. The Gulag, the forced-labor camp system, reached a peak of about 2.5 million prisoners. The contrast between restored industry and inadequate shelter tells us who bore the cost of the government’s priorities.

The government also demanded obedience in culture and science. A party resolution in August 1946 condemned the Leningrad journals Zvezda and Leningrad; the poet Anna Akhmatova and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko were driven out of literary life. This was the beginning of the Zhdanovshchina, named for party secretary Andrei Zhdanov, which required writers and artists to follow the party line. In 1948 composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev were accused of ‘formalism,’ the party’s charge against art it considered too experimental for ordinary people. The agronomist Trofim Lysenko had genetics banned that same year.

Other campaigns selected people as enemies. From 1949 the attack on “rootless cosmopolitans” targeted Jewish intellectuals; members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were shot in 1952. The Leningrad Affair of 1949–50 eliminated leaders who had risen during the war, among them party secretary Aleksei Kuznetsov and chief planner Nikolai Voznesensky. On 13 January 1953 the regime announced the Doctors’ Plot, falsely accusing Kremlin doctors of murdering Soviet leaders. As the Cold War hardened, the government repeatedly identified enemies within, although Soviet power had never been more secure.

Stalin’s authority extended across Eastern Europe, but it rested on institutions and force. With the backing of the Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, communist parties took power in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary between 1945 and 1948. A coup brought them to power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. The Cominform, founded in 1947 as a bureau of European communist parties, gave Moscow a means of directing these nominally independent satellites.

Yugoslavia showed that a communist government could resist that direction. Tito survived his expulsion in June 1948 and became the first communist ruler to defy Moscow successfully. Another attempt to exert pressure failed in Berlin: Stalin’s blockade of West Berlin in 1948–49 helped bring about NATO, the Western defensive alliance, and a West German state.

In the annexed borderlands, opposition continued as a guerrilla war. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought into the early 1950s; the Baltic ‘forest brothers,’ guerrillas who lived in the woods, lost about 20,000 men in Lithuania alone. The arrows show the routes of Operation Priboi, which deported about 95,000 people from the Baltic states in March 1949. Removing the people on whom the partisans depended helped break their resistance.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Victory confirmed Stalin’s methods. Victory seemed to Stalin to vindicate the system of collective farms, plans and purges under which the country had survived. War had nevertheless loosened some controls: peasants expanded private plots and soldiers saw how Europeans lived. The regime saw opportunities for dangerous comparisons in those experiences and moved to restore control.

The Cold War revived the fear of enemies. The wartime alliance broke down in 1946–47. Stalin read the Marshall Plan and the American atomic monopoly, Churchill’s Fulton speech of March 1946 and the Truman Doctrine of 1947 as signs that capitalist powers were preparing for war. Under that suspicion, foreign connections could become evidence against a person: returning prisoners of war and Jewish intellectuals with relatives abroad could be treated as potential spies.

Reconstruction demanded sacrifice. Much of the western Soviet Union had been devastated. The Fourth Five-Year Plan of 1946–50 directed reconstruction toward steel, coal, electricity and arms, including the atomic bomb. Food, housing and consumer goods came last. The famine of 1946–47 and harsh labor and theft laws followed these choices, making the population pay for state priorities as it had in the 1930s.

The new borderlands rejected Soviet rule. The borderlands annexed in 1939–40 had experienced Soviet rule for less than two years before the German invasion, including the resented deportations of 1940–41. After 1944 armed nationalist movements resisted renewed rule, forced collectivization and the arrival of Russian-speaking officials and settlers. The regime treated these rebellious regions as counterinsurgency zones long after war ended elsewhere, making deportation its main weapon.

WHAT IT CHANGED

An empire held by force. The Eastern European satellites remained under Soviet control until 1989. Rigged elections, purges and Soviet advisers in security services had installed governments whose leaders knew they lacked popular legitimacy. Revolts in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 exposed their continued dependence on force.

The Gulag at its height. Postwar theft laws and new arrests sent people to the camps alongside repatriated prisoners of war and borderland insurgents. By 1950–53 the camps held about 2.5 million people, with another 2.7 million special settlers. Their size and cost had become a burden even to the regime. After Stalin’s death, camp officials and his successors moved quickly to reduce them.

A frightened leadership waiting for change. Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin had watched colleagues fall and feared for themselves. The 1952 purge of Molotov and Mikoyan and the Doctors’ Plot raised the prospect of another terror. Within weeks of Stalin’s death in March 1953, his colleagues released the doctors and reduced the camps; the speed of their action shows how strongly they wanted change.

Nuclear power and a frozen society. The atomic bomb of 1949 made the Soviet Union a superpower and gave a reason for the secrecy and mobilization of late Stalinism. Yet the same period constrained culture and science. Lysenko’s rejection of genetics damaged Soviet biology and agriculture for a generation. A powerful state and a constrained society emerged together, shaping the next forty years.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was High Stalinism a continuation of the terror of the 1930s, or a different kind of dictatorship?

The answer depends on where we look. Society continued to experience massive repression: the Gulag reached its greatest size, theft laws imprisoned millions, deportations broke borderland resistance, and famine was again allowed to kill in 1946–47. At the top, violence targeted groups such as the Leningrad leaders and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee rather than repeating the mass killing of 1937–38. Gorlizki and Khlevniuk find that ordinary government became more routine and bureaucratic. Stalin’s personal power was, if anything, greater, and his cult peaked in 1949; the possibility of a purge helped keep the elite obedient. The Doctors’ Plot suggests another terror might have followed had he lived, although historians disagree about its possible extent. High Stalinism thus kept the earlier dictatorship’s tools while using fear and violence differently. It shows how a dictatorship can use attacks on a few, and the threat of more, to discipline many.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The bomb tested at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan on 29 August 1949 was the Soviet Union’s first atomic weapon. It closely copied the American “Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki. Klaus Fuchs, a physicist at Los Alamos, had passed its design to Soviet intelligence. Scientific director Igor Kurchatov chose to build the proven design first, avoiding any risk of failure while Beria watched; a Soviet design followed in 1951. Western intelligence had expected a Soviet bomb no earlier than the early 1950s. The test shocked Washington and helped push the United States toward the hydrogen bomb.

EPILOGUE · 1953–1956 · 1956

Death and Judgement

On 1 March 1953 Stalin suffered a stroke at Kuntsevo, his dacha, or country house, outside Moscow. His guards were afraid to disturb him. He lay for hours before doctors were called and died on 5 March. The response of his colleagues revealed how much they had feared the man they served.

Georgy Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov and Nikolai Bulganin formed a collective leadership, a committee of supposed equals. Within weeks they began reversing measures associated with Stalin’s last years. The amnesty of 27 March released about 1.2 million prisoners, mostly people serving short sentences. On 4 April the Doctors’ Plot, which accused Kremlin doctors of murdering Soviet leaders, was declared a fabrication. Beria’s own control of the police frightened the others; they arrested him in June and had him shot in December. Their speed suggests that they had wanted reforms for years but had not dared propose them to Stalin.

The amnesty did not include many political prisoners. Since 1948 they had been concentrated in strict-regime “special camps”; many were former soldiers and partisans from the western borderlands. Younger, better organized and less afraid than the prisoners of the 1930s, they were able to press demands of their own. Strikes broke out at Norilsk in May 1953 and Vorkuta in July. At Kengir in Kazakhstan prisoners took control in May 1954 and held the camp for forty days, until tanks stormed it on 26 June.

They asked for sentence reviews, shorter working days and the right to write home. These strikes, marked on the map, were the last crisis of the Gulag, the forced-labor camp system. Commissions began freeing political prisoners, while the camp population fell from about 2.5 million in 1953 to under a million by the late 1950s. A system that had seemed permanent proved heavily dependent on Stalin’s will.

Khrushchev’s Secret Speech on 25 February 1956 attempted a different kind of change: it condemned the founder while seeking to save the system. Speaking for four hours, he read Lenin’s Testament aloud, described the torture of loyal communists and the deportation of whole peoples, and mocked Stalin’s wartime leadership. He dated the crimes from 1934. That choice left forced collectivization, the famines and the defeat of the oppositions outside the indictment; it also protected the party and men, including Khrushchev, who had served Stalin.

The speech was read at party meetings across the Union and leaked abroad. Its reception was not uniform. In Tbilisi in March 1956, students demonstrating in Stalin’s defense were fired on. In Poland and Hungary it encouraged demands for reform, and on 4 November Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution, as the last arrow shows. De-Stalinization meant dismantling Stalin’s cult and his worst methods. His successors would not let it threaten Soviet power itself.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The system depended on one man. Stalin’s colleagues had approved and carried out his policies, even while fearing him and privately doubting many of them. His concentration of power held the system’s extremes in place. After his death none of the heirs could claim his authority, and none had the authority or wish to continue mass terror. Within days they replaced personal rule with a collective leadership.

The Gulag had become too large and too costly. The camps held about 2.5 million people in 1953, with another 2.7 million in special settlements. Forced labor was unproductive and expensive to guard; Gulag officials and economic ministers knew that the system cost more than it produced. Beria proposed reducing it. Releasing prisoners and abandoning huge projects such as the Arctic railway from Salekhard to Igarka promised savings as well as relief from fear.

Prisoners and borderlands had stopped being afraid. Many political prisoners had served as soldiers or partisans and knew how to organize. In the special camps they built networks across national lines. Excluded from the amnesty, they refused to work, leaving the authorities to choose between reform and massacre. Tanks crushed Kengir in June 1954, while elsewhere the leadership mostly chose reforms. The strikes showed the limits of governing the camps through fear alone.

Stalin’s heirs needed a new legitimacy. Khrushchev and his colleagues needed an explanation for the killing of so many loyal communists under their government. Dating the crimes from 1934 and blaming Stalin personally allowed them to condemn the Terror while retaining the party, collectivization and the planned economy. The Secret Speech also strengthened Khrushchev against rivals such as Molotov and Malenkov, more closely associated with the worst years. It served his political ascent as well as the party’s search for legitimacy.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The return of the prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were released between 1954 and 1960, and many were formally rehabilitated, often after death. Historian Stephen F. Cohen called this “the victims return”: survivors came home to colleagues and neighbors who had denounced them. For a time literature could describe the camps in print, including Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).

Restored homelands, for some. The state restored some homelands sooner than others. In 1957 it restored the Chechen-Ingush, Kalmyk, Karachay and Balkar autonomies and allowed those peoples to return. Volga Germans were cleared of collective guilt in 1964 but never regained their republic. Crimean Tatars, whose homeland is still hatched on the 1956 map, could return only in 1989. Recognition of the wrong done to entire nations came slowly and unevenly.

Revolt and repression in the bloc. Reform in the Soviet bloc met different limits in Poland and Hungary. Polish protests in June 1956 brought Władysław Gomułka back without a Soviet invasion. Hungary’s October revolution was crushed by Soviet forces on 4 November, killing about 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers. The speech had encouraged reformers, but the crisis showed that Moscow would allow changes of leadership without allowing a country to leave the Soviet alliance.

An unfinished reckoning. Stalin’s body left the Mausoleum in 1961, and cities bearing his name were renamed: Stalingrad became Volgograd. The reckoning did not reach the system itself. Under Brezhnev criticism was muted again, and only in the late 1980s did the full history of famine, Terror and the camps become public. The states that emerged in 1991 continue to debate his legacy.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was Stalinism the creation of one man, or of the Soviet system and society?

Stalin’s personal responsibility is central. Archives show him launching collectivization, approving famine measures, ordering the Terror and its quotas, signing execution lists and deciding the deportation of nations. Mass terror ended within weeks of his death. But a single man could not govern 170 million people or carry out those decisions alone. Lenin’s party supplied a ban on factions and a secret police; Marxist-Leninist ideology supplied a language in which class enemies and saboteurs had to be destroyed. Officials, police, activists and neighbors, millions of them, acted from conviction, fear or ambition. Social historians also show how resistance forced retreats and support sustained the regime. Stalin made decisive choices, while institutions and people turned them into action. The distinction helps explain why a dictatorship’s crimes can persist in institutions and memory after the dictator dies.

AN INTERESTING FACT

After Stalin died, his embalmed body was placed beside Lenin in the Red Square Mausoleum, renamed the Lenin–Stalin Mausoleum. At the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961, the elderly Bolshevik Dora Lazurkina, who had spent years in camps, told delegates that Lenin had appeared to her in a dream and disliked lying next to Stalin. The congress voted to remove him. On the night of 31 October his body was buried beside the Kremlin wall under a layer of concrete, and the Mausoleum again bore Lenin’s name alone.