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{{Infobox Premier| name = Joseph Stalin იოსებ სტალინიИосиф Сталин| image = Stalin.PNG|250px| nationality =
Georgians| order = General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union| term_start = April 3
1922 [1953| birth_date = ,
Georgia (country), Russian Empire, [Russian SFSR,
USSR| party = [Communist Party of the Soviet Union| vicepresident =| order2 = Premier of the Soviet Union| term_start2=
May 6 1941 [1953| successor2 = [Georgy Malenkov-->
Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (,
Ioseb Besarionis Dze Jughashvili; ,
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) ( Although there is an inconsistency among published sources about Stalin's year and date of birth, Iosif Dzhugashvili is found in the records of the Uspensky Church in Gori, Georgia, Georgia (country) as born on
December 18 (Julian calendar: December 6) 1878. This birth date is maintained in his School Leaving Certificate, his extensive tsarist Russia police file, a police arrest record from 18 April 1902 which gave his age as 23 years, and all other surviving pre-revolution documents. Stalin himself listed
December 18 1878 in a curriculum vitae as late as 1921, in his own handwriting. However, after his coming to power in 1922, the date was changed to
December 21 1879 (December 9, Julian Calendar), and that was the day his birthday was celebrated in the
Soviet Union. Russian playwright Edvard Radzinsky argues in his book
Stalin that he changed the year to 1879 to have a nation-wide birthday celebration of his 50th birthday. He could not do it in 1928 because his rule was not absolute enough. – March 5
1953), better known by his adopted name,
Joseph Stalin (alternatively transliterated
Josef Stalin), was
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953. Although Stalin's formal position originally had little significant influence, his office being nominally but one of several Central Committee Secretariats, Stalin's increasing control of the Party from 1928 onwards led to his becoming the
de facto party leader and the
dictator of his countryBullock, p. 548, "both dictators".
Ulam, p. xiv, "the dictator not only deprived".
Davies, Harris, p.108, "Stalin as dictator".
Mawdsley, p. 1, "effectively a dictator".
Overy, p. 17, "and, later, as dictator", in full control of the Soviet Union and its people. His crash programs of
Industrialization in the USSR and Collectivisation in the USSR in the 1930s and his campaigns of
Great Purge cost the lives of millions of people.
Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Union played a decisive role in the defeat of Nazi Germany in the
World War II (1939-45) and went on to achieve the status of
superpower, expanding its territory to a size similar to that of the former
Russian empire.
Introduction
Born
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили) but calling himself Joseph Stalin, which meant "Man of Steel", Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922. Following the death of
Vladimir Lenin in
1924, he prevailed in a power struggle over
Leon Trotsky, who was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union.
In the 1930s Stalin initiated a
Purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which has become known as the Great Purge, an unprecedented campaign of political repression, persecution and executions that reached its peak in 1937.
Stalin's rule had long-lasting effects on the features that characterized the Soviet state from the era of his rule to its collapse in 1991. Stalin claimed his policies were based on
Marxism-Leninism. Now his political and economic system is referred to as Stalinism. Maoists, anti-revisionists and some others say he was actually the last legitimate Socialist leader in the Soviet Union's history.
Stalin replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the
1920s with Five Year Plan (USSR)s in 1928 and collective farming at roughly the same time. The Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly peasant society to a major world industrial power by the end of the 1930s.Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Knopf, 2004 (ISBN 1-4000-4230-5).
Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941–1945, ISBN 0-14-027169-4.Richard Overy,
The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, ISBN 0-393-02030-4.
Confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities under his orders contributed to a famine between 1932 and
1934, especially in the key agricultural regions of the Soviet Union, Ukraine (
see Holodomor),
Kazakhstan and North Caucasus that resulted in millions of deaths. Many peasants resisted collectivization and grain confiscations, but were repressed, most notably well-off peasants deemed "
kulaks".
Bearing the brunt of the Nazis' attacks (around 75% of the Wehrmacht's forces), the Soviet Union under Stalin made the largest and most decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II (known in the USSR as the
Great Patriotic War,
1941–1945). After the war, Stalin established the USSR as one of the two major superpowers in the world, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following his death in 1953.
Stalin's rule, reinforced by a
cult of personality, fought real and alleged opponents mainly through the security apparatus, such as the NKVD. Millions of people were killed through famines, executions, deportations, and in the
Gulag. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's eventual successor, denounced Stalin's rule and the cult of personality in
1956, initiating the process of "
History of the Soviet Union (1953–1985)" which later became part of the Sino-Soviet Split.
Childhood and early years
Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in
Gori, Georgia,
Georgia (country),
Russian Empire to Vissarion Jughashvili and
Ekaterina Geladze. In 1913, he adopted the name Stalin, which is derived from the Russian
stal’ () for "steel". His mother was born a
Serfdom. The other three Dzhugashvili children died young; "Soso" (the Georgian pet name for Joseph), was effectively the only child. Stalin's father Vissarion was a cobbler, who opened his own shop, but quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis. (Archer 11)
Rarely seeing his family and drinking heavily, Vissarion often beat his wife and small son. One of Stalin's friends from childhood wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry.Hoober 15
Another of his childhood friends, Ioseb Iremashvili, felt that the beatings by Stalin's father gave him the hatred of authority. He also said that anyone with power over others reminded Stalin of his father's cruelty.
At about seven years of age Stalin fell ill with
Variola#Famous victims and his face was badly scarred by the disease. He later had photographs retouched to make his pockmarks less apparent.
In 1897, Stalin's father left to live in Tbilisi, leaving the family without support. Rumors said he died in a drunken bar fight; however, others said they had seen him in Georgia as late as 1931. At the age of eight, "Soso" began his education at the Gori Church School.
Joseph and most of his classmates at Gori were Georgian and spoke mostly Georgian. However, at school they were forced to use Russian. Their Russian teachers mocked Joseph and his classmates when they were speaking Russian because of their Georgian accents. His peers were mostly the sons of affluent priests, officials, and merchants.
He graduated first in his class and at the age of 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the Seminary of Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia). Although his mother wanted him to be a priest (even after he had become leader of the Soviet Union), he attended seminary not because of any religious vocation, but because of the lack of locally available university education. In addition to the scholarship, Stalin was paid a small
stipend for singing in the choir.
Stalin's involvement with the socialism movement (or, to be more exact, the branch of it that later became the communist movement) began at the seminary. During these school years, Stalin joined a Georgian Social-Democratic organization, and began propagating Marxism. Stalin quit the seminary in 1899 just before his final examinations; official biographies preferred to state that he was expelled.See Service's biography below He was expelled by
Georgy Dolganev (hieromonk Hermogen), the seminary rector. Biography of Dolganev He then worked for a decade with the political underground in the
Caucasus, experiencing repeated arrests and exile to Siberia between 1902 and 1917.
Stalin adhered to
Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of professional revolutionaries. Stalin and Lenin attended the Fifth Congress of the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London in 1907. This congress consolidated the supremacy of Lenin's
Bolshevik Party and debated strategy for communist revolution in Russia. Stalin never referred to his stay in London.
In the period after the
Revolution of 1905 Stalin led "fighting squads" in bank robberies to raise funds for the Bolshevik Party. His practical experience made him useful to the party, and gained him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912.
, and
Mikhail Kalinin meeting in 1919. All three of them were "
Old Bolsheviks"; members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917.
His only significant contribution to the development of the Marxist theory at this time was a treatise, written while he was briefly in exile in Vienna,
Marxism and the National Question. It presents an orthodox Marxist position (c.f. Lenin's
On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination). This treatise may have contributed to his appointment as
People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution.
In 1901, the Georgian clergyman M. Kelendzheridze wrote an educational book on language arts, including one of Stalin’s poems, signed by 'Soselo'. In 1907 the same editor published “A Georgian Chrestomathy, or collection of the best examples of Georgian literature” including a poem of Stalin’s dedicated to Rafael Eristavi.Volume 1, page 43 His poetry can still be seen in the
Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori in Gori .
Marriages and family
Stalin's first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died in 1907, only four years after their marriage. At her funeral, Stalin allegedly said that any warm feelings he had for people died with her, for only she could melt his 'stony heart'. They had a son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, with whom Stalin did not get along in later years.
Yakov shot himself because of Stalin's harshness toward him, but survived. After this, Stalin said "He can't even shoot straight". Yakov served in the Red Army during World War II and was captured by the Germans. They offered to exchange him for Field Marshal
Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered after Stalingrad, but Stalin turned the offer down, allegedly saying "a lieutenant is not worth a general"; others say he responded "I have no son". Yakov is said to have later committed suicide while imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp by running into an electric fence. The last days of Lieutenant Jakov Stalin Colin Simpson and John Shirley, Sunday Times 24th January 1980
Stalin had a son,
Vasily Dzhugashvili, and a daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, with his second wife
Nadezhda Alliluyeva-Stalina. She died in 1932, officially of illness. She may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly political".
Koba the Dread, p. 133, ISBN 0-7868-6876-7;
Stalin: The Man and His Era, p. 354, ISBN 0-8070-7001-7, in a footnote he quotes the press announcement as speaking of her "sudden death"; he also cites pp. 103–105 of his daughter's book,
Twenty Letters to a Friend, the Russian edition, New York, 1967.
Vasiliy rose through the ranks of the Soviet
air force, officially dying of alcoholism in 1962; however, this is still in question. He distinguished himself in World War II as a capable airman. Svetlana emigrated to the
United States in 1967.
In his book
The Wolf of the Kremlin Stuart Kahan claimed that Stalin was secretly married to a third wife named Rosa Kaganovich, allegedly the sister of
Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician. However, the claim is unproven and many have disputed it, including the Kaganovich family, who deny that "Rosa" and Stalin ever met, and even state that Kaganovich's sister wasn't named Rosa. Kahan also claimed that both Lazar and Rosa were responsible for the death of Stalin (by poisoning), however this (as well as most of the remainder of Kahan's assertions) were dismissed as fabrication by the
Statement of the Kaganovich Family.
In March 2001 Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson living in
Novokuznetsk. Yuri Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage, but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet. The Soviet dissident writer,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had mentioned a son being born to Stalin and his
common-law wife Lida in 1918, during Stalin's exile in northern Siberia.
Rise to power
See also: Stalin in the Russian Civil War
In 1913 Stalin was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the
Prague Party Conference . In 1917 he was editor of
Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were in exile . Following the February Revolution Stalin and the editorial board took a position in favor of supporting Alexander Kerensky's provisional government and, it is alleged, went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown.
In April 1917, Stalin was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest vote total in the party and was subsequently elected to the Politburo of the Central Committee (May 1917); he held this position for the remainder of his life.
According to many accounts, Stalin only played a minor role in the
Russian Revolution of 1917 of
November 7 . Adam Ulam and others have argued that each man in the Central Committee had a specific job to which he was assigned.
The following summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in Pravda,
November 6, 1918:
Note: Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book
The October Revolution issued in 1934, it was not included in
Stalin's Works released in 1949 .
Later, in 1924, Stalin himself created a myth around a so-called "Party Centre" which "directed" all practical work pertaining to the uprising, consisting of himself, Yakov Sverdlov, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, Moisei Uritsky, and
Andrei Bubnov . No evidence was ever shown for the activity of this "centre", which would, in any case, have been subordinate to the Military Revolutionary Council, headed by Trotsky .
During the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War Stalin was a political commissar in the Red Army at various Front (military). Stalin's first government position was as
People's Commissar of Nationalities Affairs (1917–1923).
He was also People's Commissar of the
Workers and Peasants Inspection (1919–1922), a member of the
Revolutionary Military Council of the republic (1920–1923) and a member of the
Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (from 1917).
Stalin played a decisive role in engineering the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia following which he adopted particularly hardline, centralist policies towards
Georgian SSR, which included severe repression of all opposition within the local Communist party (e.g.,
Georgian Affair of 1922), not to mention any manifestations of anti-Sovietism (August Uprising of 1924).Knight, Ami W. (1991), Beria and the Cult of Stalin: Rewriting Transcaucasian Party History.
Soviet Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 749-763. It was in the Georgian affairs that Stalin first began to play his own hand.Shanin, Teodor (July 1989), Ethnicity in the Soviet Union: Analytical Perceptions and Political Strategies.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 409-424.
Campaign against the left and right opposition
On April 3,
1922, Stalin was made
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a post that he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country. It has been claimed that he initially attempted to decline accepting the post, but was refused. This position was seen to be a minor one within the party (Stalin was sometimes referred to as "Comrade Card-Index" by fellow party members) but, when coupled with leadership over the Orgburo, actually had potential as a power base as it allowed Stalin to fill the party with his allies.After
Vladimir Lenin's
death in January 1924, Stalin, Lev Borisovich Kamenev, and Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev together governed the party, placing themselves ideology between Leon Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and
Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin (on the right). During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building "
Socialism in One Country", in contrast to Trotsky's theory of
Permanent Revolution.
In the struggle for leadership one thing was evident: whoever ended up ruling the party had to be considered very loyal to Lenin. Stalin organized Lenin's funeral and made a speech professing undying loyalty to Lenin, in almost religious terms .
For more about Stalin's relationship with Lenin, a post Soviet extract of Lenin's sister.{{citeweb] in which he pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of Stalin and Trotsky and the other main players, and suggested that he be succeeded by a small group of people .
An important feature of Stalin’s rise to power is the way that he manipulated his opponents and played them off against each other . Stalin formed a "
troika" of himself, Zinoviev, and Kamenev against Trotsky. When Trotsky had been eliminated, Stalin then joined Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev, emphasising their vote against the insurrection in 1917 . Zinoviev and Kamenev then turned to Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya; they formed the "United Opposition" in July 1926.
In 1927 during the 15th Party Congress Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and
Kamenev lost his seat on the Central Committee. Stalin soon turned against the "Right Opposition", represented by his erstwhile allies,
Bukharin and
Rykov .
Stalin gained popular appeal from his presentation as a 'man of the people' from the poorer classes . The Russian people were tired from the world war and the civil war, and Stalin's policy of concentrating in building "Socialism in One Country" was seen as an optimistic antidote to war .
Stalin took great advantage of the ban on factionalism which meant that no group could openly go against the policies of the leader of the party because that meant creation of an opposition . By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plan (USSR)s) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year Trotsky was exiled because of his opposition. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivization and industrialization, Stalin can be said to have exercised control over the party and the country.
However, as the popularity of other leaders such as Sergei Kirov and the so-called
Ryutin Affair were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute power until the
Great Purge of 1936–1938.
Soviet secret service and intelligence
Stalin vastly increased the scope and power of the state's secret police and intelligence agencies. Under his guiding hand, Soviet intelligence forces began to set up intelligence networks in most of the major nations of the world, including Germany (the famous
Red Orchestra spy ring), Great Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Stalin saw no difference between espionage, communist political propaganda actions, and state-sanctioned violence , and he began to integrate all of these activities within the NKVD. Stalin made considerable use of the
Comintern movement in order to infiltrate agents and to ensure that foreign Communist parties remained pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin .
One of the best early examples of Stalin's ability to integrate secret police and foreign espionage came in 1940, when he gave approval to the secret police to have Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico. Soviet Readers Finally Told Moscow Had Trotsky Slain. Published in the
New York Times on January 5, 1989. Accessed October 4
2007.
Stalin and changes in Soviet society
Industrialization
The
Russian Civil War and wartime communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism.
Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.
With seed capital unavailable because of international reaction to Communist policies, little international trade, and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization both by restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the kulaks.
In 1933 workers' real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. Common and political prisoners in
labor camps were forced to do unpaid labor, and communists and Komsomol members were frequently "mobilized" for various construction projects. The Soviet Union used foreign experts, e.g. British engineer Stephen Adams, to instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.
In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While it is generally agreed that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate of growth is disputed. What is not disputed is that these gains were accomplished at the cost of millions of lives.
Official Soviet estimates stated the annual rate of growth at 13.9%; Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that Soviet growth became temporarily much higher after Stalin's death.
According to Robert Lewis the Five-Year Plan substantially helped to modernize the previously backward Soviet economy. New products were developed, and the scale and efficiency of existing production greatly increased. Some innovations were based on indigenous technical developments, others on imported foreign technology.Robert Lewis.
The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Harrison, RW Davies, S.G Wheatcroft, p. 188
Collectivization
Stalin's regime moved to force
Collective farming of agriculture. This was intended to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, and to make tax collection more efficient. Collectivization meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and
wiktionary:alienate from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced violent reaction among the peasantry.
In the first years of collectivization it was estimated that industrial production would rise by 200% and and agricultural production by 50%, but these estimates were not met. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks proper made up only 4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the slightly better-off peasants who took the brunt of violence from the State Political Directorate and the Komsomol. These peasants were about 60% of the population). Those officially defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into
Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.
The two-stage progress of collectivization—interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, " Dizzy with success" (
Pravda,
March 2,
1930), and " Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" (
Pravda,
April 3, 1930)—is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.
Many historians assert that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely responsible for major
famines.
The 1932-1933 famine in
Ukraine and the
Kuban regions has been termed the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор).'s notebook) According to
Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop was no worse than that of 1931 … it was not a crop failure but the excessive demands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have alleviated the famine, while continuing to export grain; he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away, and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response.Alan Bullock, p. 269
Other historians hold that it was largely the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine, with the successful harvest of 1933 ending the famine.
Famine affected other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people. The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, had caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.)
Soviet and other historians have argued that the rapid collectivization of agriculture was necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians;
Alec Nove claims that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than because of, its collectivized agriculture.
Science
Main articles: Science and technology in the Soviet Union, Suppressed research in the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism
Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control by Stalin and his government, along with art and literature. There was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic—the most notable examples being the "bourgeois pseudosciences" genetics and
cybernetics.
In the late 40's, some areas of physics, especially quantum mechanics but also special and general relativity, were also criticized on grounds of "
idealism". Soviet physicists, such as K. V. Nikolskij and D. Blokhintzev, developed a version of the
Ensemble Interpretation, which was seen as more adhering to the principles of
dialectical materialism.Oliver Freire Jr.
Marxism and the Quantum Controversy: Responding to Max Jammer's QuestionPéter Szegedi
Cold War and Interpretations in Quantum Mechanics However, although initially planned,Ethan Pollock,
Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton University Press, 2006; introduction available online at this process did not go as far as defining an "ideologically correct" version of physics and purging those scientists who refused to conform to it, because this was recognized as potentially too harmful to the Soviet atomic bomb project.
Linguistics was the only area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that
Japhetic theory (linguistics) and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, read a letter by Arnold Chikobava criticizing the theory. He "summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently."Montefiore. p.638, Phoenix, Reprinted paperback. In this way he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work discussing linguistics in a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions."Joseph V. Stalin (1950-06-20). "Concerning Marxism in Linguistics",
Pravda. Available online as
Marxism and Problems of Linguistics including other articles and letters published (also in
Pravda) soon after February 8 and July 4, 1950.
Although no great theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics; his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics.
Scientific research was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to
labor camps (including Lev Davidovich Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939) or executed (e.g. Lev Shubnikov, shot in 1937). They were persecuted for their
dissident views, not for their research. Nevertheless, much progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and technology. It laid the ground for the famous achievements of Soviet science in the 1950s, such as the development of the BESM-1 computer in 1953 and the launching of
Sputnik in 1957.
Indeed, many politicians in the United States expressed a fear, after the "Sputnik crisis," that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet Union in science and in public education.
Social services
Under the Soviet government people benefited from some social liberalization. Girls were given an adequate, equal education and women had equal rights in employment , improving lives for women and families. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which significantly increased the lifespan and quality of life of the typical Soviet citizen. Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people universal access to healthcare and education, effectively creating the first generation free from the fear of
typhus, cholera, and
malaria . The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record low numbers, increasing life spans by decades .
Soviet women under Stalin were the first generation of women able to give birth in the safety of a hospital, with access to prenatal care . Education improved. Millions benefitted from mass literacy campaigns in the 1930s, and from workers training schemesActon, Edward,
Russia, The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy, Longmann Group Ltd (1995) ISBN 0-582-08922-0. Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract . Transport links were improved and many new
railways built. Workers who exceeded their quotas,
Stakhanovites, received many incentives for their work Acton, Edward,
Russia, The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy, Longmann Group Ltd (1995) ISBN 0-582-08922-0; they could afford to buy the goods that were mass-produced by the rapidly expanding Soviet economy.
The increase in demand due to industrialization and the decrease in the workforce due to World War II and repressions generated a major expansion in job opportunities for the survivors, especially for women Acton, Edward,
Russia, The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy, Longmann Group Ltd (1995) ISBN 0-582-08922-0.
Culture
Although born in Georgia, Stalin became a Russian nationalist and significantly promoted Russian history, language, and Russian national heroes, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s. He held the Russians up as the elder brothers of the non-Russian minorities.Russia. (2007). In
Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved July 14, 2007, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: .
During Stalin's reign the official and long-lived style of
Socialist Realism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama and literature. Previously fashionable "revolutionary" expressionism, abstract art, and Russian avant-garde experimentation were discouraged or denounced as "
formalism". Careers were made and broken, some more than once. Famous figures were repressed, and many persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them Isaac Babel,
Vsevolod Meyerhold) and "non-conformists" (for example,
Osip Mandelstam).
A minority, both representing the "Soviet man" (e.g.
Arkady Gaidar) and remnants of the older pre-revolutionary Russia (e.g. Konstantin Stanislavski), thrived. A number of
émigrés returned to the Soviet Union, among them Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi in 1925,
Aleksandr Kuprin in 1936, and Alexander Vertinsky in 1943.
Poet Anna Akhmatova was subjected to several cycles of suppression and rehabilitation, but was never herself arrested. Her first husband, poet
Nikolai Gumilev, was shot in 1921, and her son, historian
Lev Gumilev, spent two decades in a gulag.
The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general, and in specific instances, has been the subject of discussion. His name was as constantly invoked during his reign in discussions of culture as in just about everything else; in several famous cases his opinion was final.
Stalin's occasional beneficence showed itself in strange ways. For example,
Mikhail Bulgakov was driven to poverty and despair; yet, after a personal appeal to Stalin, he was allowed to continue working. His play,
The Days of the Turbines, with its sympathetic treatment of an anti-Bolshevik family caught up in the Civil War, was finally staged, apparently also on Stalin's intervention, and began a decades-long uninterrupted run at the Moscow Arts Theater.
Some insights into Stalin's political and esthetics thinking might perhaps be gleaned by reading his favorite novel,
Pharaoh (novel), by the Polish writer
Bolesław Prus, a historical novel on mechanisms of political power. Similarities have been pointed out between this novel and
Sergei Eisenstein's film,
Ivan the Terrible (film), produced under Stalin's tutelage.
In architecture, a Stalinist architecture (basically, updated
neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by the
Seven Sisters (Moscow) of Moscow) replaced the Constructivist architecture of the 1920s.
Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect on the many indigenous cultures within the Soviet Union. The politics of the
Korenization and forced development of "Cultures National by Form, Socialist by their substance" was arguably beneficial to later generations of indigenous cultures in allowing them to integrate more easily into Russian society.
The attempted unification of cultures in Stalin's later period was very harmful. Political repressions and purges were even more devastating to indigenous cultures than on urban ones as the cultural elites were smaller. The traditional lives of many peoples in the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian provinces was upset and large populations were displaced and scattered in order to prevent nationalist uprisings.
The Moskva Hotel in Moscow was said to have been built with mismatched side wings because Stalin had mistakenly signed off both of the proposals submitted, and the architects had been too afraid to clarify the matter. (The hotel had actually been built by two independent teams of architects with differing ideas.)
Religion
Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937-38.
Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev:
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (Yale University Press, 2002), pg 165Richard Pipes:
Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles, 2001), pg. 66 During World War II, however, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, after the
NKVD had recruited the new metropolitan, the first after the revolution, as a secret agent. Thousands of parishes were reactivated, until a further round of suppression in Nikita Khrushchev's time.
The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. An Act of Canonical Communion was signed on the May 17,
2007, followed immediately by a full restoration of communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, however there remain some issues not fully healed to the present day.
Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union#Religious persecution.
Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.
Purges and deportations
The purges
{| border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="2" style="float; margin: 5px; width:30%; border: solid 1px #bbb;" align="right"||||-| colspan="3" align="left" |
Left: Lavrenty Beria January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "enemy of the people" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities."
Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (support).
Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin.|}
Stalin, as head of the
Politburo, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a
Great Purge of the party, justified as an attempt to expel 'opportunists' and 'counter-revolutionary infiltrators'. Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag
labor camps, to execution after trials held by
NKVD troikas.
The Purges commenced after the assassination of
Sergei Kirov, the popular leader of the party in Leningrad. Kirov was very close to Stalin and his assassination sent chills through the Bolshevik party. Publicly Stalin merely reacted to this assassination by tightening security by seeking out alleged spies and counter-revolutionaries, but in effect he was removing those who might have threatened Stalin's leadership. This process then transformed itself into extensive purges.
There are two different versions for the background of Kirov's murder. According to the first Stalin, fearing that he might be next in line to be assassinated, decided to initiate purges instead of passively wait. According to the second version Stalin saw Kirov as a dangerous competitor for top-spot in the Soviet Union and decided to kill Kirov himself.
In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about Kirov's growing popularity. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 negative votes, the highest of any candidate. Kirov was a close friend with Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and together they formed a moderate bloc to Stalin in the Politburo., In NKVD's
dungeon Later in 1934, Stalin asked Kirov to work for him in Moscow. One theory suggests that Stalin did this in order to keep a closer eye on Kirov, this despite of the supposed fact that Stalin entirely controlled the NKVD. Kirov refused, however, and according to the same theory he became a competitor in Stalin's eyes.
On
December 1, 1934, Kirov was killed by Leonid Nikolaev (also seen spelt Nikolayev) in the
Smolny Institute Leningrad. Kirov had arrived at the Smolny to work in his office, and, apparently leaving his bodyguard downstairs, headed to the upper floors, where the officials had their rooms. Nikolayev emerged from a bathroom and followed Kirov towards his office, shooting him in the back of the neck. Officially Stalin claimed that Nikolayev was part of a larger conspiracy led by Leon Trotsky against the Soviet government. This resulted in the arrest and execution of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and fourteen others in 1936. The death of Kirov ignited the great purge where supporters of Trotsky and other suspected enemies of the state were arrested. It has been speculated that Stalin was the man who ordered the murder of Kirov, and that the shooting was carried out with the help of the NKVD. However, although most historians believe that this second version of why and how Kirov was killed is more likely, it has so far not been unambiguously proven as right and it is still disputed by some.
Several trials known as the
Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. There were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the
Trial of the Twenty One (including Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin) in March 1938.
Most notably in the case of alleged Nazi collaborator Tukhachevsky, many military leaders were convicted of treason. The shakeup in command may have cost the Soviet Union dearly during the German invasion of
22 June,
1941, and its aftermath.
The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin. Alexander Solzhenitsyn alleges that Stalin drew inspiration from Lenin's regime with the presence of labor camps and the executions of political opponents that occurred during the Russian Civil War. Trotsky's August 1940 assassination in
Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937, eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. Only three members of the "
Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's
Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee) now remained—Stalin himself, "the all-Union Chieftain" (всесоюзный староста)
Mikhail Kalinin, and
Premier of the Soviet Union Vyacheslav Molotov.
{], the young man strolling with Stalin to his left, was shot in 1940. He was edited out from a photo by Soviet censors . Such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin's reign.|}
No segment of society was left untouched during the purges.
Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited "anti-Soviet activities", was applied in the broadest manner. Initially, the execution lists for the enemies of the people were confirmed by the Politburo.
Over time the procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. People would inform on others arbitrarily, to attempt to redeem themselves, or to gain small retributions. The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "
Enemy of the People," starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet
Osip Mandelstam and one of the key memoirists of the Purges, recalls being shouted at by Akhmatova: "Don't you understand? They are arresting people for
nothing now?" The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a
NKVD troika.
Towards the end of the purge, the Politburo relieved NKVD head
Nikolai Yezhov, from his position for overzealousness. He was subsequently executed. Some historians such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest postulate that Stalin had Yezhov and his predecessor,
Genrikh Yagoda, removed in order to def
{{Infobox Premier| name = Joseph Stalin იოსებ სტალინიИосиф Сталин| image = Stalin.PNG|250px| nationality =
Georgians| order =
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union| term_start = April 3 1922 [1953| birth_date = , Georgia (country),
Russian Empire, [Russian SFSR, USSR| party = [Communist Party of the Soviet Union| vicepresident =| order2 =
Premier of the Soviet Union| term_start2=May 6
1941 [1953| successor2 = [Georgy Malenkov-->
Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (,
Ioseb Besarionis Dze Jughashvili; ,
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) ( Although there is an inconsistency among published sources about Stalin's year and date of birth, Iosif Dzhugashvili is found in the records of the Uspensky Church in Gori, Georgia,
Georgia (country) as born on December 18 (Julian calendar:
December 6) 1878. This birth date is maintained in his School Leaving Certificate, his extensive tsarist Russia police file, a police arrest record from 18 April 1902 which gave his age as 23 years, and all other surviving pre-revolution documents. Stalin himself listed
December 18 1878 in a curriculum vitae as late as 1921, in his own handwriting. However, after his coming to power in
1922, the date was changed to December 21
1879 (
December 9, Julian Calendar), and that was the day his birthday was celebrated in the Soviet Union. Russian playwright
Edvard Radzinsky argues in his book
Stalin that he changed the year to 1879 to have a nation-wide birthday celebration of his 50th birthday. He could not do it in 1928 because his rule was not absolute enough. – March 5 1953), better known by his adopted name,
Joseph Stalin (alternatively transliterated
Josef Stalin), was
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953. Although Stalin's formal position originally had little significant influence, his office being nominally but one of several Central Committee Secretariats, Stalin's increasing control of the Party from 1928 onwards led to his becoming the
de facto party leader and the dictator of his countryBullock, p. 548, "both dictators".
Ulam, p. xiv, "the dictator not only deprived".
Davies, Harris, p.108, "Stalin as dictator".
Mawdsley, p. 1, "effectively a dictator".
Overy, p. 17, "and, later, as dictator", in full control of the Soviet Union and its people. His crash programs of Industrialization in the USSR and Collectivisation in the USSR in the 1930s and his campaigns of Great Purge cost the lives of millions of people.
Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Union played a decisive role in the defeat of Nazi Germany in the
World War II (1939-45) and went on to achieve the status of
superpower, expanding its territory to a size similar to that of the former Russian empire.
Introduction
Born
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили) but calling himself Joseph Stalin, which meant "Man of Steel", Stalin became
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922. Following the death of
Vladimir Lenin in
1924, he prevailed in a power struggle over Leon Trotsky, who was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union.
In the 1930s Stalin initiated a
Purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which has become known as the
Great Purge, an unprecedented campaign of political repression, persecution and executions that reached its peak in 1937.
Stalin's rule had long-lasting effects on the features that characterized the Soviet state from the era of his rule to its collapse in 1991. Stalin claimed his policies were based on
Marxism-Leninism. Now his political and economic system is referred to as Stalinism. Maoists, anti-revisionists and some others say he was actually the last legitimate Socialist leader in the Soviet Union's history.
Stalin replaced the
New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with
Five Year Plan (USSR)s in 1928 and collective farming at roughly the same time. The Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly peasant society to a major world industrial power by the end of the 1930s.Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Knopf, 2004 (ISBN 1-4000-4230-5).
Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941–1945, ISBN 0-14-027169-4.Richard Overy,
The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, ISBN 0-393-02030-4.
Confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities under his orders contributed to a famine between 1932 and 1934, especially in the key agricultural regions of the Soviet Union, Ukraine (
see Holodomor),
Kazakhstan and North Caucasus that resulted in millions of deaths. Many peasants resisted collectivization and grain confiscations, but were repressed, most notably well-off peasants deemed "
kulaks".
Bearing the brunt of the Nazis' attacks (around 75% of the
Wehrmacht's forces), the Soviet Union under Stalin made the largest and most decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany during
World War II (known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War,
1941–1945). After the war, Stalin established the USSR as one of the two major
superpowers in the world, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following his death in 1953.
Stalin's rule, reinforced by a
cult of personality, fought real and alleged opponents mainly through the security apparatus, such as the
NKVD. Millions of people were killed through famines, executions, deportations, and in the Gulag.
Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's eventual successor, denounced Stalin's rule and the cult of personality in 1956, initiating the process of "
History of the Soviet Union (1953–1985)" which later became part of the
Sino-Soviet Split.
Childhood and early years
Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in
Gori, Georgia, Georgia (country), Russian Empire to
Vissarion Jughashvili and Ekaterina Geladze. In 1913, he adopted the name Stalin, which is derived from the Russian
stal’ () for "steel". His mother was born a
Serfdom. The other three Dzhugashvili children died young; "Soso" (the Georgian pet name for Joseph), was effectively the only child. Stalin's father Vissarion was a cobbler, who opened his own shop, but quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis. (Archer 11)
Rarely seeing his family and drinking heavily, Vissarion often beat his wife and small son. One of Stalin's friends from childhood wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry.Hoober 15
Another of his childhood friends,
Ioseb Iremashvili, felt that the beatings by Stalin's father gave him the hatred of authority. He also said that anyone with power over others reminded Stalin of his father's cruelty.
At about seven years of age Stalin fell ill with Variola#Famous victims and his face was badly scarred by the disease. He later had photographs retouched to make his pockmarks less apparent.
In 1897, Stalin's father left to live in
Tbilisi, leaving the family without support. Rumors said he died in a drunken bar fight; however, others said they had seen him in Georgia as late as 1931. At the age of eight, "Soso" began his education at the Gori Church School.
Joseph and most of his classmates at Gori were Georgian and spoke mostly Georgian. However, at school they were forced to use Russian. Their Russian teachers mocked Joseph and his classmates when they were speaking Russian because of their Georgian accents. His peers were mostly the sons of affluent priests, officials, and merchants.
He graduated first in his class and at the age of 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the Seminary of Tiflis (
Tbilisi, Georgia). Although his mother wanted him to be a priest (even after he had become leader of the Soviet Union), he attended seminary not because of any religious vocation, but because of the lack of locally available university education. In addition to the scholarship, Stalin was paid a small
stipend for singing in the choir.
Stalin's involvement with the socialism movement (or, to be more exact, the branch of it that later became the communist movement) began at the seminary. During these school years, Stalin joined a Georgian Social-Democratic organization, and began propagating Marxism. Stalin quit the seminary in 1899 just before his final examinations; official biographies preferred to state that he was expelled.See Service's biography below He was expelled by
Georgy Dolganev (hieromonk Hermogen), the seminary rector. Biography of Dolganev He then worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus, experiencing repeated arrests and exile to
Siberia between 1902 and 1917.
Stalin adhered to
Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of professional revolutionaries. Stalin and
Lenin attended the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in
London in 1907. This congress consolidated the supremacy of Lenin's
Bolshevik Party and debated strategy for communist revolution in Russia. Stalin never referred to his stay in London.
In the period after the
Revolution of 1905 Stalin led "fighting squads" in bank robberies to raise funds for the Bolshevik Party. His practical experience made him useful to the party, and gained him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912.
, and Mikhail Kalinin meeting in 1919. All three of them were "Old Bolsheviks"; members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917.
His only significant contribution to the development of the Marxist theory at this time was a treatise, written while he was briefly in exile in Vienna,
Marxism and the National Question. It presents an
orthodox Marxist position (c.f. Lenin's
On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination). This treatise may have contributed to his appointment as People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution.
In 1901, the Georgian clergyman M. Kelendzheridze wrote an educational book on language arts, including one of Stalin’s poems, signed by 'Soselo'. In 1907 the same editor published “A Georgian Chrestomathy, or collection of the best examples of Georgian literature” including a poem of Stalin’s dedicated to Rafael Eristavi.Volume 1, page 43 His poetry can still be seen in the
Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori in Gori .
Marriages and family
Stalin's first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died in 1907, only four years after their marriage. At her funeral, Stalin allegedly said that any warm feelings he had for people died with her, for only she could melt his 'stony heart'. They had a son,
Yakov Dzhugashvili, with whom Stalin did not get along in later years.
Yakov shot himself because of Stalin's harshness toward him, but survived. After this, Stalin said "He can't even shoot straight". Yakov served in the Red Army during World War II and was captured by the Germans. They offered to exchange him for Field Marshal
Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered after Stalingrad, but Stalin turned the offer down, allegedly saying "a lieutenant is not worth a general"; others say he responded "I have no son". Yakov is said to have later committed suicide while imprisoned in
Sachsenhausen concentration camp by running into an electric fence. The last days of Lieutenant Jakov Stalin Colin Simpson and John Shirley, Sunday Times 24th January 1980
Stalin had a son, Vasily Dzhugashvili, and a daughter,
Svetlana Alliluyeva, with his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva-Stalina. She died in 1932, officially of illness. She may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly political".
Koba the Dread, p. 133, ISBN 0-7868-6876-7;
Stalin: The Man and His Era, p. 354, ISBN 0-8070-7001-7, in a footnote he quotes the press announcement as speaking of her "sudden death"; he also cites pp. 103–105 of his daughter's book,
Twenty Letters to a Friend, the Russian edition, New York, 1967.
Vasiliy rose through the ranks of the Soviet
air force, officially dying of
alcoholism in 1962; however, this is still in question. He distinguished himself in World War II as a capable airman. Svetlana emigrated to the United States in 1967.
In his book
The Wolf of the Kremlin Stuart Kahan claimed that Stalin was secretly married to a third wife named Rosa Kaganovich, allegedly the sister of
Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician. However, the claim is unproven and many have disputed it, including the Kaganovich family, who deny that "Rosa" and Stalin ever met, and even state that Kaganovich's sister wasn't named Rosa. Kahan also claimed that both Lazar and Rosa were responsible for the death of Stalin (by poisoning), however this (as well as most of the remainder of Kahan's assertions) were dismissed as fabrication by the
Statement of the Kaganovich Family.
In March 2001 Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson living in
Novokuznetsk. Yuri Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage, but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet. The Soviet dissident writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had mentioned a son being born to Stalin and his common-law wife Lida in 1918, during Stalin's exile in northern Siberia.
Rise to power
See also: Stalin in the Russian Civil War
In 1913 Stalin was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the Prague Party Conference . In 1917 he was editor of
Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were in exile . Following the
February Revolution Stalin and the editorial board took a position in favor of supporting
Alexander Kerensky's provisional government and, it is alleged, went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown.
In April 1917, Stalin was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest vote total in the party and was subsequently elected to the Politburo of the Central Committee (May 1917); he held this position for the remainder of his life.
According to many accounts, Stalin only played a minor role in the Russian Revolution of 1917 of November 7 . Adam Ulam and others have argued that each man in the Central Committee had a specific job to which he was assigned.
The following summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in Pravda, November 6, 1918:
Note: Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book
The October Revolution issued in 1934, it was not included in
Stalin's Works released in 1949 .
Later, in 1924, Stalin himself created a myth around a so-called "Party Centre" which "directed" all practical work pertaining to the uprising, consisting of himself,
Yakov Sverdlov,
Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky,
Moisei Uritsky, and
Andrei Bubnov . No evidence was ever shown for the activity of this "centre", which would, in any case, have been subordinate to the Military Revolutionary Council, headed by Trotsky .
During the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War Stalin was a political commissar in the
Red Army at various
Front (military). Stalin's first government position was as
People's Commissar of Nationalities Affairs (1917–1923).
He was also People's Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspection (1919–1922), a member of the
Revolutionary Military Council of the republic (1920–1923) and a member of the
Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (from 1917).
Stalin played a decisive role in engineering the 1921
Red Army invasion of Georgia following which he adopted particularly hardline, centralist policies towards Georgian SSR, which included severe repression of all opposition within the local Communist party (e.g.,
Georgian Affair of 1922), not to mention any manifestations of
anti-Sovietism (
August Uprising of 1924).Knight, Ami W. (1991), Beria and the Cult of Stalin: Rewriting Transcaucasian Party History.
Soviet Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 749-763. It was in the Georgian affairs that Stalin first began to play his own hand.Shanin, Teodor (July 1989), Ethnicity in the Soviet Union: Analytical Perceptions and Political Strategies.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 409-424.
Campaign against the left and right opposition
On April 3, 1922, Stalin was made
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a post that he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country. It has been claimed that he initially attempted to decline accepting the post, but was refused. This position was seen to be a minor one within the party (Stalin was sometimes referred to as "Comrade Card-Index" by fellow party members) but, when coupled with leadership over the
Orgburo, actually had potential as a power base as it allowed Stalin to fill the party with his allies.After
Vladimir Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin,
Lev Borisovich Kamenev, and Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev together governed the party, placing themselves
ideology between
Leon Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and
Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin (on the right). During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building "Socialism in One Country", in contrast to Trotsky's theory of
Permanent Revolution.
In the struggle for leadership one thing was evident: whoever ended up ruling the party had to be considered very loyal to Lenin. Stalin organized Lenin's funeral and made a speech professing undying loyalty to Lenin, in almost religious terms .
For more about Stalin's relationship with Lenin, a post Soviet extract of Lenin's sister.{{citeweb] in which he pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of Stalin and Trotsky and the other main players, and suggested that he be succeeded by a small group of people .
An important feature of Stalin’s rise to power is the way that he manipulated his opponents and played them off against each other . Stalin formed a "
troika" of himself, Zinoviev, and Kamenev against Trotsky. When Trotsky had been eliminated, Stalin then joined Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev, emphasising their vote against the insurrection in 1917 . Zinoviev and Kamenev then turned to Lenin's widow,
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya; they formed the "United Opposition" in July 1926.
In 1927 during the 15th Party Congress Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and
Kamenev lost his seat on the Central Committee. Stalin soon turned against the "Right Opposition", represented by his erstwhile allies, Bukharin and Rykov .
Stalin gained popular appeal from his presentation as a 'man of the people' from the poorer classes . The Russian people were tired from the world war and the civil war, and Stalin's policy of concentrating in building "Socialism in One Country" was seen as an optimistic antidote to war .
Stalin took great advantage of the ban on factionalism which meant that no group could openly go against the policies of the leader of the party because that meant creation of an opposition . By 1928 (the first year of the
Five-Year Plan (USSR)s) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year Trotsky was exiled because of his opposition. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivization and industrialization, Stalin can be said to have exercised control over the party and the country.
However, as the popularity of other leaders such as
Sergei Kirov and the so-called Ryutin Affair were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute power until the
Great Purge of 1936–1938.
Soviet secret service and intelligence
Stalin vastly increased the scope and power of the state's secret police and intelligence agencies. Under his guiding hand, Soviet intelligence forces began to set up intelligence networks in most of the major nations of the world, including Germany (the famous
Red Orchestra spy ring), Great Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Stalin saw no difference between espionage, communist political propaganda actions, and state-sanctioned violence , and he began to integrate all of these activities within the
NKVD. Stalin made considerable use of the Comintern movement in order to infiltrate agents and to ensure that foreign Communist parties remained pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin .
One of the best early examples of Stalin's ability to integrate secret police and foreign espionage came in 1940, when he gave approval to the secret police to have
Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico. Soviet Readers Finally Told Moscow Had Trotsky Slain. Published in the
New York Times on
January 5,
1989. Accessed October 4 2007.
Stalin and changes in Soviet society
Industrialization
The Russian Civil War and
wartime communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism.
Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.
With seed capital unavailable because of international reaction to Communist policies, little international trade, and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization both by restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the kulaks.
In 1933 workers' real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. Common and political prisoners in
labor camps were forced to do unpaid labor, and communists and
Komsomol members were frequently "mobilized" for various construction projects. The Soviet Union used foreign experts, e.g. British engineer Stephen Adams, to instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.
In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While it is generally agreed that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate of growth is disputed. What is not disputed is that these gains were accomplished at the cost of millions of lives.
Official Soviet estimates stated the annual rate of growth at 13.9%; Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that Soviet growth became temporarily much higher after Stalin's death.
According to Robert Lewis the Five-Year Plan substantially helped to modernize the previously backward Soviet economy. New products were developed, and the scale and efficiency of existing production greatly increased. Some innovations were based on indigenous technical developments, others on imported foreign technology.Robert Lewis.
The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Harrison, RW Davies, S.G Wheatcroft, p. 188
Collectivization
Stalin's regime moved to force Collective farming of agriculture. This was intended to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, and to make tax collection more efficient. Collectivization meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and
wiktionary:alienate from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced violent reaction among the peasantry.
In the first years of collectivization it was estimated that industrial production would rise by 200% and and agricultural production by 50%, but these estimates were not met. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks proper made up only 4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the slightly better-off peasants who took the brunt of violence from the
State Political Directorate and the Komsomol. These peasants were about 60% of the population). Those officially defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag
labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.
The two-stage progress of collectivization—interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, " Dizzy with success" (
Pravda,
March 2,
1930), and " Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" (
Pravda,
April 3,
1930)—is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.
Many historians assert that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely responsible for major famines.
The 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine and the Kuban regions has been termed the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор).'s notebook) According to Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop was no worse than that of 1931 … it was not a crop failure but the excessive demands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have alleviated the famine, while continuing to export grain; he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away, and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response.Alan Bullock, p. 269
Other historians hold that it was largely the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine, with the successful harvest of 1933 ending the famine.
Famine affected other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people. The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, had caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.)
Soviet and other historians have argued that the rapid collectivization of agriculture was necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians; Alec Nove claims that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than because of, its collectivized agriculture.
Science
Main articles: Science and technology in the Soviet Union, Suppressed research in the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism
Science in the
Soviet Union was under strict ideological control by Stalin and his government, along with art and literature. There was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic—the most notable examples being the "
bourgeois pseudosciences"
genetics and cybernetics.
In the late 40's, some areas of physics, especially quantum mechanics but also special and general relativity, were also criticized on grounds of "idealism". Soviet physicists, such as K. V. Nikolskij and D. Blokhintzev, developed a version of the Ensemble Interpretation, which was seen as more adhering to the principles of
dialectical materialism.Oliver Freire Jr.
Marxism and the Quantum Controversy: Responding to Max Jammer's QuestionPéter Szegedi
Cold War and Interpretations in Quantum Mechanics However, although initially planned,Ethan Pollock,
Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton University Press, 2006; introduction available online at this process did not go as far as defining an "ideologically correct" version of physics and purging those scientists who refused to conform to it, because this was recognized as potentially too harmful to the
Soviet atomic bomb project.
Linguistics was the only area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that
Japhetic theory (linguistics) and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, read a letter by
Arnold Chikobava criticizing the theory. He "summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently."Montefiore. p.638, Phoenix, Reprinted paperback. In this way he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work discussing linguistics in a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions."Joseph V. Stalin (1950-06-20). "Concerning Marxism in Linguistics",
Pravda. Available online as
Marxism and Problems of Linguistics including other articles and letters published (also in
Pravda) soon after February 8 and July 4, 1950.
Although no great theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics; his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics.
Scientific research was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to labor camps (including Lev Davidovich Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939) or executed (e.g.
Lev Shubnikov, shot in 1937). They were persecuted for their
dissident views, not for their research. Nevertheless, much progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and technology. It laid the ground for the famous achievements of Soviet science in the 1950s, such as the development of the BESM-1 computer in 1953 and the launching of Sputnik in 1957.
Indeed, many politicians in the
United States expressed a fear, after the "Sputnik crisis," that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet Union in science and in public education.
Social services
Under the Soviet government people benefited from some social liberalization. Girls were given an adequate, equal education and women had equal rights in employment , improving lives for women and families. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which significantly increased the lifespan and quality of life of the typical Soviet citizen. Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people universal access to healthcare and education, effectively creating the first generation free from the fear of
typhus, cholera, and
malaria . The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record low numbers, increasing life spans by decades .
Soviet women under Stalin were the first generation of women able to give birth in the safety of a hospital, with access to prenatal care . Education improved. Millions benefitted from mass literacy campaigns in the 1930s, and from workers training schemesActon, Edward,
Russia, The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy, Longmann Group Ltd (1995) ISBN 0-582-08922-0. Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract .
Transport links were improved and many new
railways built. Workers who exceeded their quotas,
Stakhanovites, received many incentives for their work Acton, Edward,
Russia, The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy, Longmann Group Ltd (1995) ISBN 0-582-08922-0; they could afford to buy the goods that were mass-produced by the rapidly expanding Soviet economy.
The increase in demand due to industrialization and the decrease in the workforce due to World War II and repressions generated a major expansion in job opportunities for the survivors, especially for women Acton, Edward,
Russia, The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy, Longmann Group Ltd (1995) ISBN 0-582-08922-0.
Culture
Although born in Georgia, Stalin became a Russian nationalist and significantly promoted Russian history, language, and Russian national heroes, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s. He held the Russians up as the elder brothers of the non-Russian minorities.Russia. (2007). In
Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved July 14, 2007, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: .
During Stalin's reign the official and long-lived style of
Socialist Realism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama and literature. Previously fashionable "revolutionary" expressionism, abstract art, and Russian avant-garde experimentation were discouraged or denounced as "formalism". Careers were made and broken, some more than once. Famous figures were repressed, and many persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them
Isaac Babel,
Vsevolod Meyerhold) and "non-conformists" (for example,
Osip Mandelstam).
A minority, both representing the "Soviet man" (e.g. Arkady Gaidar) and remnants of the older pre-revolutionary Russia (e.g.
Konstantin Stanislavski), thrived. A number of
émigrés returned to the Soviet Union, among them
Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi in 1925,
Aleksandr Kuprin in 1936, and Alexander Vertinsky in 1943.
Poet Anna Akhmatova was subjected to several cycles of suppression and rehabilitation, but was never herself arrested. Her first husband, poet
Nikolai Gumilev, was shot in 1921, and her son, historian
Lev Gumilev, spent two decades in a
gulag.
The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general, and in specific instances, has been the subject of discussion. His name was as constantly invoked during his reign in discussions of culture as in just about everything else; in several famous cases his opinion was final.
Stalin's occasional beneficence showed itself in strange ways. For example,
Mikhail Bulgakov was driven to poverty and despair; yet, after a personal appeal to Stalin, he was allowed to continue working. His play,
The Days of the Turbines, with its sympathetic treatment of an anti-Bolshevik family caught up in the Civil War, was finally staged, apparently also on Stalin's intervention, and began a decades-long uninterrupted run at the Moscow Arts Theater.
Some insights into Stalin's political and esthetics thinking might perhaps be gleaned by reading his favorite novel,
Pharaoh (novel), by the Polish
writer Bolesław Prus, a historical novel on mechanisms of political power. Similarities have been pointed out between this novel and Sergei Eisenstein's film,
Ivan the Terrible (film), produced under Stalin's tutelage.
In
architecture, a
Stalinist architecture (basically, updated neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by the
Seven Sisters (Moscow) of Moscow) replaced the
Constructivist architecture of the 1920s.
Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect on the many indigenous cultures within the Soviet Union. The politics of the
Korenization and forced development of "Cultures National by Form, Socialist by their substance" was arguably beneficial to later generations of indigenous cultures in allowing them to integrate more easily into Russian society.
The attempted unification of cultures in Stalin's later period was very harmful. Political repressions and purges were even more devastating to indigenous cultures than on urban ones as the cultural elites were smaller. The traditional lives of many peoples in the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian provinces was upset and large populations were displaced and scattered in order to prevent nationalist uprisings.
The Moskva Hotel in Moscow was said to have been built with mismatched side wings because Stalin had mistakenly signed off both of the proposals submitted, and the architects had been too afraid to clarify the matter. (The hotel had actually been built by two independent teams of architects with differing ideas.)
Religion
Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937-38.Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev:
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (Yale University Press, 2002), pg 165Richard Pipes:
Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles, 2001), pg. 66 During World War II, however, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, after the
NKVD had recruited the new metropolitan, the first after the revolution, as a secret agent. Thousands of parishes were reactivated, until a further round of suppression in
Nikita Khrushchev's time.
The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. An Act of Canonical Communion was signed on the
May 17,
2007, followed immediately by a full restoration of communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, however there remain some issues not fully healed to the present day.
Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects Forced settlements in the Soviet Union#Religious persecution.
Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church,
Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.
Purges and deportations
The purges
{| border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="2" style="float; margin: 5px; width:30%; border: solid 1px #bbb;" align="right"||||-| colspan="3" align="left" |
Left: Lavrenty Beria January 1940 letter to Stalin, asking permission to execute 346 "
enemy of the people" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities."
Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (support).
Right: The Politburo's decision is signed by Secretary Stalin.|}
Stalin, as head of the
Politburo, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party, justified as an attempt to expel 'opportunists' and 'counter-revolutionary infiltrators'. Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the
Gulag labor camps, to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.
The Purges commenced after the assassination of
Sergei Kirov, the popular leader of the party in Leningrad. Kirov was very close to Stalin and his assassination sent chills through the Bolshevik party. Publicly Stalin merely reacted to this assassination by tightening security by seeking out alleged spies and counter-revolutionaries, but in effect he was removing those who might have threatened Stalin's leadership. This process then transformed itself into extensive purges.
There are two different versions for the background of Kirov's murder. According to the first Stalin, fearing that he might be next in line to be assassinated, decided to initiate purges instead of passively wait. According to the second version Stalin saw Kirov as a dangerous competitor for top-spot in the Soviet Union and decided to kill Kirov himself.
In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about Kirov's growing popularity. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 negative votes, the highest of any candidate. Kirov was a close friend with Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and together they formed a moderate bloc to Stalin in the Politburo., In NKVD's dungeon Later in 1934, Stalin asked Kirov to work for him in Moscow. One theory suggests that Stalin did this in order to keep a closer eye on Kirov, this despite of the supposed fact that Stalin entirely controlled the NKVD. Kirov refused, however, and according to the same theory he became a competitor in Stalin's eyes.
On
December 1, 1934, Kirov was killed by Leonid Nikolaev (also seen spelt Nikolayev) in the Smolny Institute Leningrad. Kirov had arrived at the Smolny to work in his office, and, apparently leaving his bodyguard downstairs, headed to the upper floors, where the officials had their rooms. Nikolayev emerged from a bathroom and followed Kirov towards his office, shooting him in the back of the neck. Officially Stalin claimed that Nikolayev was part of a larger conspiracy led by Leon Trotsky against the Soviet government. This resulted in the arrest and execution of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and fourteen others in 1936. The death of Kirov ignited the great purge where supporters of Trotsky and other suspected enemies of the state were arrested. It has been speculated that Stalin was the man who ordered the murder of Kirov, and that the shooting was carried out with the help of the NKVD. However, although most historians believe that this second version of why and how Kirov was killed is more likely, it has so far not been unambiguously proven as right and it is still disputed by some.
Several trials known as the
Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. There were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of
Red Army generals, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the
Trial of the Twenty One (including
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin) in March 1938.
Most notably in the case of alleged Nazi collaborator Tukhachevsky, many military leaders were convicted of treason. The shakeup in command may have cost the Soviet Union dearly during the German invasion of 22 June,
1941, and its aftermath.
The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led
Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin. Alexander Solzhenitsyn alleges that Stalin drew inspiration from Lenin's regime with the presence of labor camps and the executions of political opponents that occurred during the Russian Civil War. Trotsky's August 1940 assassination in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937, eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. Only three members of the "
Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's
Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee) now remained—Stalin himself, "the all-Union Chieftain" (всесоюзный староста)
Mikhail Kalinin, and
Premier of the Soviet Union Vyacheslav Molotov.
{], the young man strolling with Stalin to his left, was shot in 1940. He was edited out from a photo by Soviet censors . Such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin's reign.|}
No segment of society was left untouched during the purges.
Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited "anti-Soviet activities", was applied in the broadest manner. Initially, the execution lists for the
enemies of the people were confirmed by the Politburo.
Over time the procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. People would inform on others arbitrarily, to attempt to redeem themselves, or to gain small retributions. The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "
Enemy of the People," starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet
Osip Mandelstam and one of the key memoirists of the Purges, recalls being shouted at by Akhmatova: "Don't you understand? They are arresting people for
nothing now?" The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a NKVD troika.
Towards the end of the purge, the Politburo relieved NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov, from his position for overzealousness. He was subsequently executed. Some historians such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest postulate that Stalin had Yezhov and his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda, removed in order to def
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Joseph Stalin - Wikiquote
edit] Sourced. We think that powerful and lifeful movement is impossible without differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery.
