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IN CONTEXT

IDEOLOGY

State socialism

FOCUS

Collectivization

BEFORE

1566 In Russia, Ivan the Terrible’s efforts to create a centralized state result in peasants fleeing and a drop in food production.

1793–94 The Jacobins institute the Reign of Terror in France.

AFTER

1956 Nikita Krushchev reveals that Stalin executed thousands of loyal communists during the purges.

1962 Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, telling of life in a Russian labor camp, becomes a worldwide bestseller.

1989 Mikhail Gorbachev introduces glasnost (openness), saying, “I detest lies.”

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks set about creating a new socialist system through nationalization, taking privately held assets or enterprises into government ownership. Lenin’s successor as leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, accelerated this process in 1929, and over five years the economy was rapidly industrialized and collectivized by edict from the government. In the name of modernizing the Soviet Union’s agricultural system, Stalin amalgamated farms under state control as “socialist state property.” The class of relatively wealthy farmers known as kulaks were compelled to give up their land and join collective farms. Stalin’s police confiscated food and took it to the towns, and the peasants retaliated by burning their crops and killing their animals. A disastrous famine ensued, and in the area of Ukraine known as the “breadbasket” because of its rich farmland, five million people starved, or were shot or deported. By 1934, seven million kulaks had been “eliminated.” Those who survived were now living on state farms run by government officials.

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Revolution from above

Stalin reasoned that collectivization was an essential form of class war, forming part of a “revolution from above.” This simple conflation gave him the justification he needed to move away from Lenin’s policy of using persuasion to organize the peasants into cooperatives. Stalin began by “restricting the tendencies of the kulaks,” then moved on to “ousting” them from the countryside, and finally “eliminating” them as an entire class. Lenin had warned that as long as the Soviet Union remained surrounded by capitalist countries, the class struggle would need to continue. Stalin quoted this often as collectivization advanced. He complained that the individual peasant economy “generated capitalism,” and that as long as it did, capitalism would remain a feature of the Soviet economy.

  Stalin framed the mass-murder of millions of individuals as the “liquidation” of a class, to be carried out by “depriving them of the productive sources of existence.” However, when the destruction of private farming was complete, he sustained the terror, claiming that the old “kulak mentality” was lingering, and continued to threaten the communist state.

  As the terror of Stalin’s regime spread, it was not only the kulaks who would suffer persecution. Opponents of Stalin’s rule, real and imagined, were killed, including every single surviving member of Lenin’s politburo. Lenin’s revolution was transformed into Stalin’s dictatorship, and the Bolshevik party, which Lenin had seen as a “vanguard party,” inspiring the masses, became a hulking, institutionalized state party that performed the role of the instrument of terror in Stalin’s regime. Stalin had begun his persecution with the kulaks, but by the middle of the 1930s, few were safe from the state terror machine.

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During the collectivization of farming, propaganda posters urged farmers to till every available acre. However, the forced collectivization led to a disastrous drop in production.

JOSEPH STALIN

Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in the village of Gori, Georgia. He was educated at the local church school, and later expelled from Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he had become a Marxist. As a young man, he was a noted poet.

  Stalin’s political career took off in 1907 when he attended the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in London with Lenin. Active in the political underground, he was exiled to Siberia several times, and in 1913, he adopted the name Stalin from the Russian word stal (“steel”). By the revolution of 1917, he had become a leading figure in the Bolshevik party. Stalin’s ruthless actions in the subsequent civil war were an early warning of the terrors that would come when he succeeded Lenin as the leader of the Soviet Union. He had a troubled private life, and both his first son and second wife committed suicide.

Key works

1924 The Principles of Leninism

1938 Dialectical and Historical Materialism

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