Learning Period 5;

Section 4

"Stalin and his Single Party State"

MUST HAVE's

Single Party State Joseph Stalin Leon Trotsky anti-Semitic
Siberia KULAKS GULAG KGB
5-Year Plans Agricultural Collectivization (no link) Famine in Ukraine (no link) Cult of Personality

BACKGROUND INFORMATION:

Short Clip for a Preview of Special on Joseph Stalin

          In the last section we discussed Adolph Hitler.  Hitler created both a Single Party State (this means where entity is in total power and control of a country) and he was also known for being cold-hearted and having concentration camps.  This final section of Learning Period 5 deals with another man who shares many of the qualities as Hitler.  This man had his own Single Party State  where if anyone said anything bad about the government, it was considered treason and often punishable by death.  He was a also a cold hearted man.  In fact, his name translated to English means, "man of steel."  This was not the name he was born with; he changed it because he liked to think his body was as tough as steel to withstand torture and had the will of steel to make necessary sacrifices for the communist revolution.  Like Hitler, this man was beaten horribly by his father growing up and latched on to the love and support of his mother.  For the mothers of both men, most of their other children born in the family died as children.  These two men became the center of their mothers' worlds.  Both men also contemplated priesthood as a profession at one time.   And maybe most significantly, both men also had his own concentration camps.  In Russia, these camps were called, "GULAGS."  The man name we are studying here is Stalin -- Joseph Stalin.  The country he was in control of was the USSR, also known as communist Russia.  It is ironic that both men ruled during the same time period, they both had so much in common, and they were also the worst enemies in the world.  But they had a strange fascination with each other.  After making an agreement not to go to war with one another in 1939, the armies of Adolph Hitler's Germany and Joseph Stalin's communist Russia (USSR) locked horns in some of the worst bloodbaths during World War 2...

          Understanding where Stalin came from and the environment in which he rose to power in is vitally important to really "getting" Stalin and his Single Party State.

           Therefore we are going to do things a little backwards for this section.  Typically, at the end of each section, there is a Reading Selection that helps to reinforce and provide additional information on the topic studied.  This time, however, you need to do the Reading Selection first.  The Reading Selection consists of the Background Information from two previous lectures that we have done.  The first lecture is on the Rise of Communism and the second is on the Russian Revolution.  Be sure to actually re-read those sections using the links below.  It will be a good review for you and get our minds back onto Russia so that we make all the connections necessary for understanding the rule of Stalin.  Once we have context for what was happening in the USSR (communist Russia), we can place Stalin accurately in history.  Stalin replaced VI Lenin as the leader of the communist party in Russia, which also meant ruler of the USSR, (communist Russia).  The name of Stalin's position was "General Secretary of the Communist Party."  This sounded much better than dictator, or ruler ... but that is really what he was.

Reading Selections:

The Rise of Socialism and Communism

The Russian Revolution

 

Stalin's Childhood:              

                    Stalin was born in a place called Georgia.  Not the state of Georgia in the United States, but Georgia as in an area that was part of the Russian Empire back when there was a Czar (Tsar).  His family nickname was "Sosa."  His father was an illiterate drunk who brutishly beat both young Joseph and his mother.  During a particularly bad beating episode endured by his mother, Joseph threw a knife at his father’s head and barely missed.  His father ultimately was stabbed to death in a bar fight later in time. Joseph, being his mother’s only child who survived past being an infant poured everything she had into his life.  She was determined to do anything he needed and worked several jobs to provide for him and make sure he was educated.  Her aspirations were for him to be a priest.  This was odd, because Joseph was a bully who, during his childhood, picked on and intimidated smaller children and psychologically manipulated and “tricked” larger children.  It is said that after years of being beaten by his father, Joseph developed a strange fascination with the idea of pain and showed no compassion or love for animals or other humans except for his mother. 

                  Joseph nicknamed himself “Koba” after the Georgian storybook hero who was a clever and strong ‘freedom fighter.’  Koba the character fought hard against seemingly difficult adversaries and he sought revenge against those who had done him and his comrades wrong.  Joseph admired these qualities as he hated the Russian government that he grew up under the Czar / Tsar and despised the existing social system which he saw as being rotten. Eventually, at age 18, Joseph was expelled from seminary for not showing up for his exit exams.  He had been reprimanded many times for having illicit reading materials about history, logic and revolutionary materials in his room.  Joseph had come to denounce God and believed in the ideas of Charles Darwin.  Upon his expulsion, Joseph dedicated his entire life to the revolutionary cause.

                        Physically, Stalin was short and cold looking.  A bout of smallpox left his face pockmarked and a blood infection disabled his left arm which in adulthood was 2 inches shorter than his other arm.  He often wore black boots with extra heels to raise him up 2-3 inches.  In 1908 Stalin's first wife died, and in contrast to his normal unemotional self, he said, “this creature softened my stony heart.  She is dead and with her my last warm feelings for all human beings have died.”  We will see how this is true as we go...

Stalin's Rise to Power:

            Leading up to the Russian Revolution, Stalin was thrown in jail several times.  He worked hard for the revolution, and once the revolution took hold and the Czar (Tsar) abdicated the thrown, Stalin began working his way up the ladder within the new communist government (following the October 1917 Revolution).  Stalin had many different positions and was able to build a large cadre of support within the communist party.  When Lenin, the father of the Communist Revolution in Russia and founder of the USSR was on his deathbed, Stalin had worked his way up to be in a position to try and take power.  The two main men competing for the power were Stalin and his rival Leon Trotsky. 

          Trotsky and Stalin were very different.  Trotsky was a brilliant speaker, and was very well traveled and very well educated.  Stalin was neither.  Trotsky had a brilliant military mind, unlike Stalin.  In fact, during the Russian Civil War, Trotsky even took the command Stalin had of a regiment away from him and pulled him off of the battlefield because he made so many bad decisions.  Stalin would never, ever forget this embarrassing incident.  Trotsky and Stalin varied in other ways too.  Trotsky thought there should be freedoms with the new communist Russia (USSR).  He thought that to make revolution appealing to the rest of the world, they had to look at the USSR and say, "yes we want that too."  Stalin thought this was a silly idea and said that the people should have no freedom and that a strong hand brought the best discipline from the people (remember how he was raised).  Stalin was not worried about the revolution catching on in other countries.  Remember, communism was not meant for a country full of peasants like Russia.  Trotsky knew this and wanted to spread the revolution rapidly to places where communism belonged so that the whole world would be communist.  Stalin made the excuse that communism should be secure and stable in the USSR (communist Russia) first, and then they could spread.  Really what Stalin was saying is that he wanted to make sure his power was secure and the USSR could stand up to its enemies, and then he could simply take over other countries and impose communism on them (which he did).  Another difference between the two is that Trotsky was Jewish.  Like many other communists, Stalin was anti-Semitic (this means he did not like Jewish people).  Stalin thought that it was the Jewish people who desired world domination.  While this a difference between Trotsky and Stalin, it is another similarity of Stalin and Hitler!!!  Trotsky eventually wound up in exile in Mexico where an agent of Stalin murdered him by driving an pickaxe through his head.            

          Eventually Lenin died.  He tried to warn others of Stalin being given too much power in a letter known as "Lenin's Last Testament."  In this, Lenin refers to Stalin as an "arrogant bastard."  But Stalin is able to deflect what was written and tightened up his political support.  He had two main allies in taking power, and as soon as he did not need these men anymore, he declared that they were enemies of the USSR and had them executed.  Stalin continued to make alliances with people and then once he used them and they did not serve his purposes anymore, they would either go missing or be executed.  Does this remind you of the reality TV show, Survivor???  Stalin was very paranoid.  He was so paranoid that he began something known as the Great Purges during the 1930's.

The Great Purges:

          To purge means to "clean out' or to cleanse.  Stalin did not trust anyone and developed a clever system to make sure that anyone who had gained too much power of influence within the communist party was quickly dealt with.  This began the Great Purges of the 1930's.  As you will read when you do your "must haves," the Great Purges were a time when Stalin cleaned out the communist party.  So many people were purged (killed or forced into a GULAG) that the entire original revolutionaries in the USSR were gone except for Stalin himself.  This helped to make everyone left very loyal to Stalin -- but they were very inexperienced.   This inexperience hurt the USSR (communist Russia) greatly during World War 2.  The Great Purges killed anywhere between 1.5 and 7 million people ~ no one is really sure.  BUT - that is a lot of people.  The Great Purges were carried out by the NKVD.  These were the secret police of the USSR.  The NKVD would eventually be replaced by the KGB (ask your parents if they know about the KGB - if they know nothing else about the USSR, I bet they know what the KGB was!!!!).

          One of the ways that Stalin purged people was through "Show Trials."  These were staged trials, in public where people would have fake charges against them and there would be a court preceding where no matter what, the person would be found guilty.  Often times the person was tortured ahead of time to make sure they admitted to the crimes -- which they never committed. 

Stalin Part 1

There would then be public executions to make sure that everyone in the country saw what happened to people who posed a threat to the USSR.  Another way that people were punished were in the GULAG.

The GULAG:

          The word GULAG should always be capitalized when you see it, or use it.  It is actually an acronym for a really long Russian name.  Its translation into English essentially means "camps administration."  At the height of the USSR, there were 476 separate camps within the GULAG.  Think of GULAG as the system of camps throughout the USSR.  These were concentration camps.  In these camps, the prisoners were forced to work in horrible conditions.  The camps began before Stalin, but he increased the number of the concentration camps, and he changed the purpose of them.  The camps became a centerpiece of Soviet industrialization.  The prisoners in these camps built canals, bridges, accounted for almost all of the timber, coal and gold production in the country.  The concentration camps were often in places that were inhabitable and freezing cold in an area known as Siberia.  These camps even had prisoners who designed and built all types of weapons ~ bullets, airplanes, artillery and uniforms for the soldiers.  Each GULAG took on its own type of civilization.  Its own slang, culture, customs and laws.  Although people were released from the GULAGS, many people met their death there as well.

Collectivization and the 5-Year Plans:

          Stalin knew that part of his power was going to be determined by the ability to industrialize the USSR.  Without that, the USSR stood no chance against Western countries, or potential enemies like Germany.  Remember, this was a land of peasants.  Peasants grow a small number of crops for themselves and to sell.  One of the largest group of peasants in the USSR were known as Kulaks.  The Kulaks would come to despise Stalin, and he would send millions to their deaths by starvation and execution.

Stalin Part 2

          Stalin knew that unless he created a system where millions of peasant farmers could move to the cities to work in factories and to process the goods being produced in the GULAG, then industrialization could never happen.  But in order for all the peasant farmers to be able to move into cities to work in factories, Stalin had to develop a plan to provide enough food for them.  This plan was Agricultural Collectivization.  Stalin's plan was to take all the land away from the peasants and make it under government control.  The peasants then were supposed to work these massive farms and give the majority of the crops to the government to either sell or to feed the soldiers and factory workers.  The peasants got last shot of the food produced.  Sometimes they did not even get any food.  They were left to starve instead.  There were more than enough peasants to replace them.  On some of the farms where the peasants were left to starve, soldiers would surround the farm so that no one could escape.  The government did not want anyone finding out what was really taking place and how horrible things were for the peasants.  The government was doing propaganda in the cities saying how everyone should be thankful to the farmers for doing such a good job providing enough food for everyone.  No one really knew what was going on.  It was murderous....

          Stalin's plans for industrialization were called the 5-Year Plans.  These plans set goals for how much the country would need to produce each set of 5 years to be competitive with the Western countries.

      "In November 1927, Joseph Stalin launched his "revolution from above" by setting two extraordinary goals for Soviet domestic policy: rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. His aims were to erase all traces of the capitalism that had entered under the New Economic Policy and to transform the Soviet Union as quickly as possible, without regard to cost, into an industrialized and completely socialist state.

      Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, adopted by the party in 1928, called for rapid industrialization of the economy, with an emphasis on heavy industry. It set goals that were unrealistic-- a 250 percent increase in overall industrial development and a 330 percent expansion in heavy industry alone. All industry and services were nationalized, managers were given predetermined output quotas by central planners, and trade unions were converted into mechanisms for increasing worker productivity. Many new industrial centers were developed, particularly in the Ural Mountains, and thousands of new plants were built throughout the country. But because Stalin insisted on unrealistic production targets, serious problems soon arose. With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred.

       The First Five-Year Plan also called for transforming Soviet agriculture from predominantly individual farms into a system of large state collective farms. The Communist regime believed that collectivization would improve agricultural productivity and would produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Collectivization was further expected to free many peasants for industrial work in the cities and to enable the party to extend its political dominance over the remaining peasantry.

       Stalin focused particular hostility on the wealthier peasants, or kulaks. About one million kulak households (some five million people) were deported and never heard from again. Forced collectivization of the remaining peasants, which was often fiercely resisted, resulted in a disastrous disruption of agricultural productivity and a catastrophic famine in 1932-33. Although the First Five-Year Plan called for the collectivization of only twenty percent of peasant households, by 1940 approximately ninety-seven percent of all peasant households had been collectivized and private ownership of property almost entirely eliminated. Forced collectivization helped achieve Stalin's goal of rapid industrialization, but the human costs were incalculable" (US Library of Congress).

Famine in Ukraine: 

            "The dreadful famine that engulfed Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932-1933 was the result of Joseph Stalin's policy of forced collectivization. The heaviest losses occurred in Ukraine, which had been the most productive agricultural area of the Soviet Union. Stalin was determined to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Thus, the famine was accompanied by a devastating purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian Communist party itself. The famine broke the peasants' will to resist collectivization and left Ukraine politically, socially, and psychologically traumatized.

            The policy of all-out collectivization instituted by Stalin in 1929 to finance industrialization had a disastrous effect on agricultural productivity. Nevertheless, in 1932 Stalin raised Ukraine's grain procurement quotas by forty-four percent. This meant that there would not be enough grain to feed the peasants, since Soviet law required that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the members of the farm until the government's quota was met. Stalin's decision and the methods used to implement it condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation. Party officials, with the aid of regular troops and secret police units, waged a merciless war of attrition against peasants who refused to give up their grain. Even indispensable seed grain was forcibly confiscated from peasant households. Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective farm could be, and often was, executed or deported. Those who did not appear to be starving were often suspected of hoarding grain. Peasants were prevented from leaving their villages by the NKVD and a system of internal passports.

          The death toll from the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million. According to a Soviet author, "Before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings." Yet one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine stated in 1933 that the famine was a great success. It showed the peasants "who is the master here. It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay" (US Library of Congress).

Conclusion:

          Hopefully you have seen that Stalin was indeed a calculating and cold-hearted man.  He killed millions of his own people, just to ensure that he would remain in power.  Under Stalin, the government of the USSR (communist Russia) grew at a rapid rate.  This is strange though.  Remember that a key to communism is that there should be NO government.  Everyone should just work for the common good of mankind.  Instead of decreasing the size of government, Stalin and those who followed him increased the size of government.  And Stalin pushed for the rapid industrialization of the country so that it could defend itself as needed, or take others over.  He worried nothing of the true revolution and the writings of Karl Marx.  The communists in Russia have proven that in modern times, communism may be more of a nice idea than it is an actual practice.  But why wasn't there another revolution?  Why did the people put up with what Stalin was doing?  Part of the answer is that people did not dare to do anything wrong and end up being hung or sent to the GULAG.  Another reason is the Cult of Personality.  Dictators like Stalin, and Hitler are able to create themselves as near God-like images to the people.  The propaganda surrounding them is so great and meant to create a fantasy of greatness surrounding them that many people were swept up and actually loved and adored Stalin.  Like brainwashing.

          In the book, Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote that "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."  This is very true of Stalin and the USSR.  All citizens of the USSR should have been equal.  But they were not.  They were not even close to being equal.  The conditions for the Kulaks working in the fields was not the same as the factory workers working in the cities and they were not the same as the communist party officials who always had plenty of cigars, meat, vodka, cars and housing.  In order for true communism to have developed in the USSR, men like Stalin and his comrades would have had the courage to lose their power.  Yet, as we see throughout the career of Stalin -- most everything he does do is in contrast to giving up his power.  All of the murder, torture and plans are constructed to preserve his power...

 

     Last week when we worked with Hitler, we looked at the political spectrum.  Hitler was on the far right as a "Fascist."  Stalin is on the far left as a "Communist."  Throughout this lecture, we referred to how Hitler and Stalin had so much in common.  It is interesting, because according to the political spectrum, they are on opposite ends from each other.  But, being such opposites almost makes them the same.  It is almost like the edges of the political spectrum wrap around to the same place....

           

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