Stalin

Stalin: a totalitarian dictatorship

• Stalin defeated Trotsky after Lenin’s death (1924-1927)
• Stalin’s economic program  Quick industrialisation of a backward
country to construct “Socialism in one country” and transform the
USSR in a world power
• The state took over all the sectors of the Soviet economy
• The government passed five-year plans to conduct a centralised
economy
• Collectivization of agriculture  terrible social consequences
because peasants’ refusal to give up their new acquired lands
• Results:
• Quick industrialisation based upon heavy industry (iron and steel,
coal, armament)
• Utter failure in farming
• Cruel repression and terrible death toll

• Industrialisation took place at a terrible
social cost
• From the very beginning, Stalin set up
a dictatorship based upon terror
• Anticommunists
• Trostkyists
• Farmers against collectivisation…
• All sort of opponents within the
Communist Party

• Unlike Hitler, Stalin’s repression was carried out massively within
his own party (SUCP)
• Power in the USSR was completely centralised  SUCP 
Secretary General (Stalin)
• “Great Purges” or “Moscow Trials” started in 1934 after Sergei
Kirov’s assassination
• The world was astonished when a great part of the Bolshevik
leaders went into trial, accused of being counter-
revolutionaries
• After being drugged and tortured they confess that they
have been plotting against the USSR for years (“show
trials”)
• In 1939 70% of the SUCP had been purged  90% of the
Red Army generals were shot or sent to the Gulag
(concentration camps)

• Not only the SUCP was persecuted
• Soviet society as a whole suffered the consequences of Stalin’s
dictatorship
• The Checka, GPU, NKVD, KGB (Soviet subsequent secret political
police) repressed Soviet people
• The year 1937 became was the apex of Stalinist repression
• Over the purges of 1937 and 1938:
• 1.700.000 civilians were arrested
• More than two million were purged from their jobs
• About 700.000 were executed
• Millions of Soviet citizens were sent during Stalin’s
dictatorships to the Gulag (Soviet concentration camps system

• As a result of the repression, more and more power was
concentrated in Stalin’s hands
• Stalin’s “cult of personality” was established in the USSR
• Even in a more acute way that in the Duce or the Fuhrer,
the figure of Stalin was constantly praised by the Soviet
propaganda

Stalin: a society shaped by terror
• Soviet society was shaped by the urgent drive for
industrializing the USSR
• Farmers went through all the hardships caused by
collectivization
• Urban workers toiled 8 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Subbotnik or “Communist Saturdays”: days
of volunteer work that became obligatory later

• The Constitution of 1936 proclaimed that the USSR was
classless society… reality was altogether different
• SUCP bureaucracy (about 14 million people) made up a
new upper class with different privileges:
• Higher salaries (4 to 20 times the average salary)
• Food extra rations
• Better accommodation…
• All the members of the Communist bureaucracy were
subjected to Stalin’s will
• 1930s purges reminded everybody of this.

• After some social changes after the revolution, Stalin
forced the Soviet to return to the traditional values of
hierarchy and authority (teachers, parents, army
commanders…)
• The achievement of different women’s rights (divorce,
legal abortion - Decree on Women’s Healthcare-) and
the difficult social conditions over the civil war reduce
the Soviet birth rate  Stalin imposed again the
traditional family model (restrictions to divorce, abortion
illegal…)
• Internationalism was substituted by Russian nationalism

Stalin

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