O Stalinism is defined by historians as a totalitarian regime that existed in the Soviet Union,between 1927 and 1953, and was built by the country's leader Joseph Stalin. This government carried out profound changes in the USSR and carried out a relentless persecution of its opponents.
THE collectivization of lands Soviets, the industrialization of the country, a persecution of opponents through the purges and the fierce resistance against the Nazis during World War II were landmark events during that period. The crimes committed during Stalinism were not denounced until after Stalin's death.
Accessalso: Katyn Massacre: the massacre carried out by the Soviets in Poland in 1940
Characteristics of Stalinism
The consensus of historians is that Stalinism was a regimetotalitarian. Some of featuresbasics of this government are:
- Economy controlled entirely by the State;
- Discretionary government, based solely on the leader's wishes;
- Cult of Stalin's personality;
- Creation of a large political propaganda apparatus;
- Creation of a terror regime that imposed persecution on the regime's opponents;
- Persecution of religion;
- Militarization of society;
- Bureaucratization of the public service;
- Imposition of censorship etc.
![The leader cult was a strong feature of Stalinism and all public offices had an image of Stalin.[1]](/f/3b3c981d09e2bd264e313b5d57cb0f44.jpg)
contest for power
Historians consider that Stalin became effective ruler of the Soviet Union from 1927 onwards. The power struggle started when the health of Lenin started to deteriorate, between 1922 and 1923, due to a stroke. At that time, four postulants were vying for the position of the new secretary general of the Soviet Union: Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky.
At this moment, Stalin already had a privileged position within the party., but he was not Lenin's favorite. Historian William P. Husband claims that, before he died, Lenin was worried about the possibility of Stalin being his successor because he was too rude|1|. After four years of power struggle, Stalin secured himself in power by securing the expulsion of his opponents from the party.
Once established as an undisputed figure in power, Stalin began to make the changes he wanted to make.. Its focus was on ending social classes, turning against the rich, industrializing the Soviet Union, planning the economy, and silencing its opponents. Then came Stalinism.
See too: Totalitarianism - political regime based on total control of life, nationalism and militarism
Stalinist economy
The Stalinist economy was an economy fullyplanned, that is, it was concentrated in the hands of the State. Stalin intervened directly in agriculture, carrying out profound changes in this area and invested massively in industrializing it, demanding a great effort from the population in both cases.
Five-Year Plan
When Stalin came to power in 1927, Soviet industry was still fragile, so Stalin imposed a plan that called for a great effort by the entire country to promote a industrializationin accelerated scale. The Soviet Union's industrialization plan became known as the Five-Year Plan, a plan that set goals the country was supposed to achieve every five years.
The first five-year plan was released in 1929 and replaced the New Economic Policy, the old Soviet economic plan. Stalin abolished initiatives to open up the Soviet economy to private capital, he turned against more social classes. rich, increased taxes on private companies and began to demand a great effort from workers to promote the industrialization.
The Five-Year Plan prioritized the development of areas related to heavy industry, such as metallurgy and steel, in addition to giving great attention to the extraction of fossil fuels and to electricity production. The Soviet state started to demand that extremely demanding goals were achieved and this required an enormous effort from the workers.
Historian Eric Hobsbawm defines that the demands made by the Stalinist government required “blood, effort, tears and sweat” from the Soviet population|2|. The great effort for industrialization, in turn, generated millions of new jobs and the number of proletarians in the Soviet Union, the group that most supported the regime, increased.
Despite the tough demands, the results, however, were impressive, and industrial production in the Soviet Union increased considerably. The success of the five-year plans was so great that, within a few years, the Soviet Union had been transformed into a great industrial power. The industrial power and the degree of demand of the Soviet workers during Stalinism were noticed mainly in the war years.
Accessalso: Sutinik 1 - the Soviet program that launched the first satellite into space
land collectivization
The collectivization of land was another major effort undertaken by the Stalinist state in the field of agriculture. The way agricultural production took place was revolutionized and the rich peasant classes that existed in the Soviet interior were attacked. The collectivization of the land was made by force, and resistance to this process was dealt with brutally.
The collectivization of land was imposed with the first Five-Year Plan, in 1929, and can be defined, basically, as a process of land expropriation, abolishing private property in the countryside and transforming everything into state property. The function of the peasants was to adhere to the lands taken by the State and reach the established production goals.
The lands taken were turned into collective farms and everything that existed on them, such as tools, seeds and livestock, belonged to the State. The land grab generated resistance, especially from wealthy peasants, known as kulaks. This opposition to the collectivization process was so great that only in Ukraine were registered almost 1 million contrary acts, only in the year of 1930 |3|.
Stalin's action against the kulaks it was simple: the desire was to end this class. The more they resisted, the harder the state action became, and the measures taken by the state against this class were to put them to work in lower lands, transfer them to places far from their homes or send them to forced labor camps, if resist.
Historian Timothy Snyder claims that, in total, about 1.7 million kulaks were deported to concentration camps|4|, and Lewis Siegelbaum states that around 3 million people have gone through a process of deskulakization|5|. Something important to be addressed is that, from the point of view of the Stalinist government, any peasant who resisted collectivization was considered a kulak.
The collectivization was, however, disastrous. The stipulated targets were so high that often peasants had their seeds taken by the state. In addition, collective farms turned out to be largely not as productive as expected. The obvious result of this was the hunger.
Historians debate whether the famine caused by collectivization was deliberate or not, and historian Timothy Snyder suggests that, at least in the Ukrainian case, the hunger was deliberate. The aim of this was to weaken the population in order to end any kind of opposition to Stalinist policies.
The result of great hunger that hit the Soviet Union was terrible, and Timothy Snyder points out that, by 1933, about 5.5 million of people there were starved and approximately half of these deaths happened in Ukraine alone|6|. This famine that led to the death of millions of Ukrainians became known as Holodomor.
Accessalso: History of Moscow: foundation and trajectory of Russia's greatest city
great terror
The Great Terror is the phase of Stalinism that stretched from 1936 to 1939 and is also known as great purge. But it is important to stress that the Stalinist purges did not happen exclusively in that period, they happened during all the years of Stalinism, but they were bigger in that mentioned period.
The purges carried out under Stalinism were actions worthy of the “autocrat of ferocity, cruelty and exceptional unscrupulousness” that was Stalin in Eric Hobsbawm's definition|7|. The purges promoted during Stalinism had as their main objective eliminate non-Marxist elements, to eliminate ethnic minorities that resisted the power of Moscow and eliminate the opposition within the party.
Purges took place against the intelligentsia, the intellectual elites who occupied positions of command but who were not of the proletarian class. There were also purges in places like Ukraine against the Polish minority, there were purges in the countryside, within the party, in the Soviet army, etc.
These purges could result in people being sent to the gulags, forced labor camps that were built in remote locations in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Others, however, were quickly performed by NKVD, the Soviet secret police. The balance of executions during all the years of Stalinism exceeded the millions, but during the Great Terror this number was 681.692, according to Timothy Snyder|8|, and 685.660, according to Lewis Siegelbaum|9|.
Historians discuss the Stalin's motivations by having promoted this gigantic amount of purges, and two axes point to two reasons: to destroy any kind of opposition to your regime, whether it was motivated by economic, political, ethnic, ideological issues, etc., or to end bureaucratization within the state Soviet.
Eric Hobsbawm suggests that, during the years of Stalinism, the government was responsible for the direct death of 10 to 20 million people and presents data that the Soviet population in 1937 was 16.7 million smaller than predicted by the government, which suggests that until this year, the number of deaths caused by the government may have been approximately That.
Second World War
THE Second World War it was a special chapter in the history of Stalinism. Rarely in history has the world witnessed such a massive mobilization in defense of a land against a common enemy. The Soviets call World War II the great patriotic war and, in the conflict against the Germans, the Soviets showed their power of resistance and Stalin showed why he called himself the "made of iron". He had the nerves to take all the pressure of the war, but also required a huge sacrifice from the Soviets.
War between Germans and Soviets was imminent, despite the existence of a non-aggression agreement between the two countries. Stalin imagined that the attack would come in mid-1942 and, as a result, ignored several warnings about German plans to invade Soviet territory as early as 1941. Historian Antony Beevor claims that Stalin ignored, probably, more than 100 warnings that the German attack was imminent as early as 1941|10|.
![Soviet newspaper reporting the beginning of the war between Germany and the USSR.[2]](/f/553bc26f8ef6f3c3b35e770234b8ba6b.jpg)
The Germans, in turn, encouraged by the achievements made between 1939 and 1941, made a great effort to launch the attack against the Soviets in June 1941. The idea was to conquer the USSR within 12 weeks. The attack was organized in Operation Barbarossa and mobilized more than 3 million soldiers, as well as armor, artillery and war aviation.
The Soviets were caught unprepared, and so the Germans continually advanced into Soviet territory in the summer of 1941. By mid-December, the German attack had lost strength and resistancesoviet began to match the strength of the German attacks. At the instigation of Stalin, the Soviets transferred thousands of industries from the Soviet west to the Urals, and millions of Soviets were summoned from the most inhospitable regions possible.
With growing industrial capacity, thanks to the mobilization of women to work in factories, and a gigantic volume of soldiers used, the Soviets – at a very high cost – expelled the Germans from their territories. At its height, the Soviets kept more than 11 million soldiers in the front, and the cost of the war charged the Soviets about 25 million lives among soldiers and civilians.
In April 1945, however, the Soviets entered berlin to overthrow Nazism and, after weeks of battle, conquered the German capital and put an end to Nazism. The Soviet effort won the war and only that society brutalized after years of Stalinism and decades of deprivation would be able to withstand the demands of Stalin and the war.
Accessalso: Kursk Battle: One of the Most Important Battles of World War II
Stalin's death
![Stalin died on March 5, 1953, the victim of a stroke.[3]](/f/ba47992d40931dc1d15c35829bb45f31.jpg)
Stalinism was a regime built in accordance with Stalin's wishes and goals. When the Soviet dictator died, some of the features of that regime remained in effect in the Soviet Union, others, however, were abandoned when Stalin's crimes were denounced and his personality cult had end.
Stalin's last years of life were marked by great personality cult, since the victory in the war brought great popularity to the leader. Even in the last years of Stalinism, the purges continued and, after World War II, one of the groups that began to suffer from persecution were the Jews.
Stalin died on March 5 of a stroke. The leader's death moved the USSR, and his funeral was attended by thousands of people. The leader who took over the USSR after Stalin's death was NikitaKhrushchev, the person responsible for denouncing the crimes committed by Stalinism.
Grades
|1| HUSBAND, William B. The New Economic Policy (NPE) and the revolutionary experience. The construction of Stalinism. In.: FREEZE, Gregory L. (org.). Russian history. Lisbon: Editions 70, 2017, p. 335.
|2| HOBSBAWM, Eric. Age of Extremes: The Brief 20th Century 1914-1991. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995, p. 371.
|3| SNYDER, Timothy. Lands of Blood: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Record: Rio de Janeiro, 2012, p. 57.
|4| Idem, p. 53.
|5| SIEGELBAUM, Lewis. The construction of Stalinism. In.: FREEZE, Gregory L. (org.). Russian history. Lisbon: Editions 70, 2017, p. 371.
|6| SNYDER, Timothy. Lands of Blood: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Record: Rio de Janeiro, 2012, p. 83-84.
|7| HOBSBAWM, Eric. Age of Extremes: The Brief 20th Century 1914-1991. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995, p. 371.
|8| SNYDER, Timothy. Lands of Blood: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Record: Rio de Janeiro, 2012, p. 143.
|9| SIEGELBAUM, Lewis. The construction of Stalinism. In.: FREEZE, Gregory L. (org.). Russian history. Lisbon: Editions 70, 2017, p. 389.
|10| BEEVOR, Antony. The Second World War. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2015, p. 216.
Image credits
[1] Tanya Kalian/Shutterstock
[2] Oleg Golovnev/Shutterstock
[3] chrisdorney/Shutterstock
By Daniel Neves Silva
History teacher
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiag/governo-stalin.htm