THE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953 — the study guide
The complete revision document of the atlas: every chapter’s narrative, causes, turning point, consequences, discussion question with a full answer, and one verified interesting fact. Print it, annotate it, argue with it.
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CHAPTER 1 · 1924–1929 · 1928
The Succession
Stalin’s rise depended first on surviving a warning from Lenin himself, and the way the leaders handled it shows how the party already worked. In December 1922 and January 1923, partly paralysed by strokes, Lenin dictated notes later called his Testament. He wrote that Stalin had concentrated “unlimited authority” in his hands, and in a postscript of 4 January 1923 he called him “too rude” and proposed removing him as General Secretary, the head of the party’s administrative office, much like a chief of staff. The quarrel behind the postscript was the Georgian Affair, marked on the map at Tiflis, where Stalin and his ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze had bullied Georgian communists into a federation with Armenia and Azerbaijan. When the notes were read to delegation leaders at the Thirteenth Congress, the party’s national gathering, in May 1924, Zinoviev and Kamenev argued that Stalin should stay, because they needed him against Trotsky. The men best placed to stop Stalin chose to shield him, and the text stayed unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1956.
The Secretariat, the office that managed the party’s personnel, mattered because the party was changing underneath its leaders. The “Lenin Enrolment” of 1924 brought in more than 200,000 new members, mostly young workers who owed their careers to the officials who promoted them. Stalin’s apparatus placed reliable secretaries in the provinces, and those secretaries picked the delegates to congresses. This system of appointments, later called the nomenklatura (a list of posts that only the centre could fill), worked like a patronage network, where loyalty is repaid with jobs. Stalin also had the more comforting message: Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” said socialism could survive only if revolution spread to Europe, while “socialism in one country” told a tired party it could build a strong state alone. At the Fourteenth Congress in December 1925 the Leningrad delegation of Zinoviev and Kamenev was overwhelmingly outvoted, and Sergei Kirov was sent to take over their city, which showed that the votes had been assembled before the debate began.
The last stage turned a contest for leadership into a contest over the peasants. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev united as the United Opposition in 1926, but their supporters were sacked and expelled, and in November 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party. On 17 January 1928 agents of the OGPU, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB, carried Trotsky to a train for Alma-Ata, and in February 1929 he was deported to Turkey, as the blue arrows show. By then grain deliveries to the state had collapsed, and on his Siberian tour Stalin seized grain by force, close to what the Left, the faction of Trotsky and Zinoviev, had demanded. Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky wanted to keep the New Economic Policy (NEP), Lenin’s 1921 compromise that let peasants sell their grain on the market. They were branded the “Right deviation” and removed in 1929–30. Stalin defeated the Left by defending NEP and the Right by abandoning it, which shows that he used policy as a weapon, though historians still argue how far he also believed in it.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The party had no rules for succession. Lenin led through personal authority, and the party had no office of leader and no procedure for choosing one. Power sat in committees: the Politburo, which made policy, and the Orgburo and Secretariat, which managed people. When Lenin fell ill in 1922, his colleagues ruled collectively and competed in the dark, so whoever controlled the committees could turn a collective leadership into a personal one before anyone noticed the change.
The General Secretary controlled appointments. Stalin became General Secretary in April 1922, a post his colleagues saw as administrative. Through it he oversaw the assignment of thousands of officials and the admission of new members, including the Lenin Enrolment of 1924. Provincial secretaries who owed him their posts sent loyal delegates to congresses, which gave Stalin a reliable majority long before he had a reputation. The job looked dull precisely because its power lay in routine.
His rivals feared Trotsky more than Stalin. Bolsheviks read their revolution through the French one, where the revolution had ended with a general, Napoleon Bonaparte, seizing power. Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army, looked like the obvious Bonaparte, so Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin each allied with Stalin to block him. They mistook a quiet organiser for a safe one, and each discovered too late that the man they had shielded was turning the machine against them in turn.
NEP’s grain problem made policy a weapon. The question of how fast to industrialise, and who should pay for it, divided the party throughout the 1920s. The Left wanted to squeeze the peasants to fund factories; the Right wanted to keep the market and grow slowly. Because the grain crisis of 1927–28 forced a choice, Stalin could adopt whichever position isolated his current opponent, first defending NEP against the Left and then dismantling it against the Right.
THE TURN
Alma-Ata, January 1928. The train that carried Trotsky to Alma-Ata on 17 January 1928 marks the moment the succession was settled, because the last leader with an independent following was now 3,000 kilometres from Moscow and outside the party. The same month Stalin left for Siberia and began taking grain by force, adopting the method the defeated Left had urged. The two journeys together explain the turn: once Stalin had no rival on the left, he could take over its programme and use it to destroy the Right, and the struggle for Lenin’s succession became a revolution against the peasants.
WHAT IT CHANGED
A leader without rivals launched the Great Turn. With Trotsky gone and Bukharin defeated, Stalin could impose forced collectivisation and breakneck industrialisation without a faction able to stop him. The policies of 1929–33 were his choices, made possible by the victory of 1927–29, and the Politburo that approved them was now filled with his allies, such as Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. No one left in the leadership could argue for slower change without being called a “Rightist”, so the succession had settled how fast the country would be changed as well as who would rule it.
Defeated rivals became future defendants. Every leader Stalin beat in the 1920s was later destroyed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in August 1936 after the first Moscow show trial, Bukharin and Rykov in March 1938, and Tomsky shot himself in 1936 before he could be arrested. Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940 by an NKVD agent. The succession struggle supplied the cast of the Great Terror, whose show trials accused the old oppositionists of plotting with foreign powers since the 1920s.
Loyalty replaced debate inside the party. The defeat of open factions ended the party’s tradition of public argument, which the ban on factions in 1921 had already weakened. Opposition now meant expulsion, and later arrest, so officials learned to read the leader’s wishes before he stated them. That habit of anticipating Stalin, like the one Ian Kershaw, writing about Hitler’s Germany, called “working towards the Führer”, made the later cult and the Terror easier to organise.
“Socialism in one country” justified the plans. The slogan that helped Stalin win also defined what came next: if the Soviet Union had to build socialism alone and surrounded by enemies, it had to industrialise at any cost. The Five-Year Plans were presented as the practical form of the idea, with defence as their deepest purpose, and every sacrifice they demanded could be justified by the danger of a war the country might have to fight alone.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Did Stalin win the succession mainly through his own skill, or because his rivals made it easy for him?
The evidence supports both, but the decisive factor was the combination of Stalin’s control of appointments with his rivals’ misjudgements. His skill is plain: he grasped earlier than anyone that the Secretariat could produce majorities, he chose allies with care, and his “socialism in one country” spoke to a party tired of waiting for world revolution. Yet his opponents repeatedly helped him. Zinoviev and Kamenev saved him from Lenin’s Testament in 1924, Trotsky refused to fight in the open while he still had support in the army and among students, and Bukharin underestimated Stalin until 1928. Historians weigh these differently: Deutscher and Daniels stress the machine, Kotkin stresses Stalin’s intelligence and conviction, and Fitzpatrick stresses support from below. A reasonable judgement is that skill exploited opportunity, because none of the rivals combined the votes, the timing and the message that Stalin did. The transferable lesson is that in systems without rules for succession, power often passes to whoever controls the routine administration that everyone else ignores.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Trotsky’s first exile was far from silent. According to his biographers Isaac Deutscher and Pierre Broué, between April and October 1928 Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov sent about 800 political letters and 550 telegrams from Alma-Ata and received around 1,000 letters. Many came from oppositionists in exile across Siberia and Central Asia. The OGPU read much of this correspondence, which helped convince Stalin that a Trotsky inside the Soviet Union, however remote, still led a network. His solution was to deport Trotsky abroad in February 1929, which removed him from the country but left him free to write, and his Bulletin of the Opposition, published abroad from 1929, kept up a running attack on Stalin’s policies for the next decade.
CHAPTER 2 · 1929–1933 · 1930
The Great Turn: Collectivisation
Stalin turned against the New Economic Policy (NEP), Lenin’s 1921 compromise that let peasants sell their grain on a free market, because it left the state dependent on peasants who could choose whether to sell. The grain crisis of 1927–28 convinced him that the market could not feed rapid industrialisation, and his speech of 27 December 1929 announced the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”, meaning the better-off peasants whom the party saw as rural capitalists. The Politburo, the party’s small ruling committee that worked like a cabinet, set the method. Its resolution of 30 January 1930 divided kulaks into three categories: “counter-revolutionary activists” for the camps or execution, wealthier families for deportation to remote regions, and the rest for resettlement on poor land nearby. Local officials, given quotas and little time, branded anyone who resisted as a kulak, including poor peasants who spoke up. The category was political as much as economic, which meant that it could be stretched to fit whoever stood in the way.
Collectivisation was carried out as a campaign, and its speed made it violent. About 27,000 urban workers, the “Twenty-Five Thousanders”, were sent to run the new farms, much as a company sends trusted managers to take over a firm it has bought. They worked alongside party brigades and troops of the OGPU, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB. Peasants answered in two ways: they slaughtered animals that would otherwise have been taken, so the number of horses and cattle roughly halved by 1933, and they revolted. On the map the dashed outlines mark the main regions of unrest in 1930, from right-bank Ukraine and the Kuban to the Volga, the Black Earth region and southern Kazakhstan. Women often led the protests, called babi bunty (“women’s riots”), because the authorities were slower to shoot them. Revolts in Ukraine’s border districts around Tulchyn alarmed Moscow most, and on 2 March 1930 Stalin’s article “Dizzy with Success” blamed local officials for “excesses”. Millions of peasants left the farms within weeks, showing how little of the collectivisation had been voluntary.
The retreat was a tactic, and the state found slower but surer weapons. From the autumn of 1930 it used taxes, delivery quotas and the threat of deportation to push peasants back in, and the share of collectivised households rose to about three-fifths by 1932 and over nine-tenths by 1937. The deportation arrows on the map show where the “kulaks” went: to “special settlements”, guarded exile villages that families had to build for themselves, in the forests around Kotlas, the Urals, Narym in Siberia and the Karaganda steppe, where many died in the first winters. Some showcase farms such as Gigant on the Salsk steppe received tractors, while most villages depended on the new machine-tractor stations, state depots that rented out tractors much as a hire company does, together with political supervisors. The state now took far more grain than before, even as harvests fell. The policy succeeded as a means of control and failed as a means of feeding people, and that gap led directly to the famines of 1932–33.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The grain crisis convinced Stalin the market had failed. State grain purchases fell sharply in the winter of 1927–28 because fixed prices were low and goods to buy were scarce, so peasants held back grain or fed it to livestock. Stalin read this as a kulak “grain strike” and concluded that the state could never industrialise while peasants decided when to sell. The emergency seizures of 1928–29 worked in the short run but reduced sowing, which made a permanent system of compulsory delivery look necessary.
Industrialisation needed grain, labour and foreign currency. The First Five-Year Plan, approved in 1929 and then raised, required food for millions of new urban workers and grain exports to pay for foreign machines. Collective farms promised to deliver both cheaply and on schedule, because the state would fix each farm’s quota before the harvest. They would also release labour, since larger farms using tractors needed fewer hands, and the surplus peasants could be sent to build Magnitogorsk and the other new cities.
Bolshevik ideology distrusted the peasant smallholder. Marxists saw private farming as the soil in which capitalism regrew, and Lenin had warned that small-scale production generated capitalism “daily, hourly”. For many party members, collective farming was the socialist future of the village and NEP only a pause, a retreat that Lenin himself had called temporary. The war scare of 1927 added urgency, because a country at war could not depend on peasants who might hoard grain or side with an invader.
Victory over the Right removed every brake. The defeat of the Right silenced the last voices for caution. By 1929 Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, who had warned that coercion would wreck the alliance of workers and peasants, had been defeated and silenced. No one in the Politburo could argue for slower change without being accused of “Right deviation”, so targets were raised again and again in a competition to show loyalty. The pace of 1929–30 reflected that political climate as much as any economic plan.
THE TURN
Tulchyn and “Dizzy with Success”, March 1930. The revolts of February and March 1930, worst in the Ukrainian border districts around Tulchyn, are the hinge of collectivisation because they forced the only retreat Stalin made. His article of 2 March blamed local zealots, and peasants left the collective farms in their millions. Yet the retreat taught the regime a lesson that outlasted it: open force provoked revolt, while taxes, quotas and selective deportation worked more surely. When collectivisation resumed in the autumn, it used those quieter weapons, and by 1932 the state could take the harvest without a single decisive battle.
WHAT IT CHANGED
The famines of 1930–33. Compulsory delivery quotas fixed in Moscow took grain regardless of how much had been harvested, and the slaughter of livestock removed the peasants’ reserve. When harvests fell in 1931 and 1932 and the quotas stayed high, villages in Ukraine, the Kuban, the Volga and above all Kazakhstan were left without food. A policy designed to secure grain had removed the margin that kept villages alive.
The special settlements and the Gulag. The 1.8 million deported “kulaks” became the first great forced-labour population of the Stalin era, settled in camps of barracks and dugouts under OGPU control. Their labour cut timber in the north and dug mines in the Urals, which taught the police that deportees and prisoners could be used to open up remote regions. The special settlements became the prototype for the Gulag.
A rural economy that never recovered. Livestock numbers did not return to their 1928 level until the 1950s, and grain yields stayed low for decades. Collective farmers, paid little and late, worked hardest on their own plots, so the kolkhoz system produced a permanent gap between the state’s fields and the peasants’ gardens. The weakness of Soviet agriculture would trouble every leader from Stalin to Gorbachev.
Peasants into workers. Millions of villagers fled collectivisation by moving to the towns and building sites, swelling the industrial workforce faster than the planners had expected. Between 1926 and 1939 the urban population more than doubled. The internal passports introduced in December 1932 tried to control the flow, which made the right to live in a city a privilege the state could grant or withhold.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Was collectivisation above all an economic policy or a political one?
The best answer is that Stalin treated the economic problem as a political one, and the evidence weighs towards control as the decisive motive. The economic case was real: the grain crisis of 1927–28 threatened the food supply of the towns and the export earnings that paid for foreign machinery. Yet economists from Barsov to Allen find that collectivisation probably delivered little net surplus to industry, because it destroyed livestock and lowered yields, and a market-based alternative might have grown as fast. The political gains, by contrast, were immediate and lasting. The state now controlled the harvest regardless of what peasants wanted, the independent farmer who could withhold grain disappeared, and the countryside was policed by party officials, machine-tractor stations and the threat of deportation. Ideology linked the two motives, since Bolsheviks believed private farming bred capitalism. The transferable insight is that authoritarian regimes often choose the policy that maximises control over the one that maximises output, and then present the result as economic necessity.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The men sent to run the new collective farms were often townspeople who had never farmed. In late 1929 the party called for 25,000 experienced industrial workers to volunteer for the countryside; about 70,000 applied, and roughly 27,000 were sent, most of them from the factories of Leningrad, Moscow and Ukraine. Lynne Viola, who studied them in The Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987), found that many were genuine enthusiasts who believed they were bringing modern methods to backward villages, and that peasants frequently treated them as occupiers. Several hundred were attacked, and some were killed, during the revolts of 1930.
CHAPTER 3 · 1930–1933 · 1933
The Famines
The famines grew from a system that took grain first and asked about consumption afterwards. Collective farms, the pooled village farms created in 1929–33, had to meet delivery quotas fixed in Moscow, amounts owed to the state much like a tax paid in grain. In 1930–32 the state took about twice as much as peasants had sold to it under the New Economic Policy, Lenin’s market compromise of the 1920s that let peasants sell their surplus much as farmers anywhere sell to the highest bidder. When the harvest of 1932 fell short, Stalin’s closest colleagues, Vyacheslav Molotov in Ukraine and Lazar Kaganovich in the North Caucasus, led commissions that searched farms and seized hidden grain, often with the seed for the next sowing. The Law of 7 August 1932 made the theft of collective-farm property, even a pocketful of ears from a field, punishable by death or ten years in a camp, so hungry peasants who gleaned were prosecuted. Because the quota mattered more than the people meeting it, a poor harvest became a famine.
Kazakhstan’s catastrophe came earlier and had a different cause, which the largest hatched area on the map reflects. Most Kazakhs lived as nomadic herders, moving with their animals between seasonal pastures, and the party regarded nomadism as backward. From 1929 officials requisitioned, or took by order, livestock for the towns, forced herders onto collective farms that had no grazing, housing or wells, and punished those who resisted. The herds that supported Kazakh life collapsed by about nine-tenths between 1929 and 1933. Between 1.5 and 2.3 million people died, perhaps 38 to 42 per cent of all Kazakhs, and over a million fled. The arrows show refugees heading for Xinjiang in China and for the oases of Uzbekistan, which turned Kazakhs into a minority in their own republic for half a century.
In Ukraine and the Kuban, decisions taken in Moscow and Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, between November 1932 and January 1933 made the famine far deadlier. Villages that fell behind were put on “blacklists” that cut them off from all manufactured goods and imposed fines in meat and potatoes. In the Kuban, whole settlements of Cossacks, descendants of the frontier soldier-farmers of the tsarist empire, were deported to the north, among them Poltavskaya. A decree of 14 December 1932 linked the grain failures to Ukrainian nationalism and ended the policy of promoting Ukrainian language and culture in the Kuban. The directive of 22 January 1933 ordered the police to stop peasants fleeing Ukraine and the North Caucasus, and by mid-February tens of thousands had been arrested and many sent back to their villages to die. Exports continued at a reduced level, and relief came late, in spring 1933, when the dying had already peaked. The map’s hatching marks where these choices fell, from the Dnieper to the Volga, and the death rates were highest precisely where the state pressed hardest.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Quotas set in Moscow ignored the harvest. Delivery quotas were fixed by the centre and treated as a test of loyalty, so local officials who reported shortfalls risked being accused of sabotage. The state’s grain take roughly doubled after collectivisation, while the harvest fell in 1931 and 1932 because of disorganised farms, exhausted horses, poor weather and peasants with no reason to work. A system that took its quota first turned every shortfall into hunger in the villages.
Collectivisation had destroyed the peasants’ reserves. Collectivisation had already stripped the villages of their reserves, since in 1929–31 peasants slaughtered or lost about half their livestock, and the most productive farmers had been deported as kulaks. Families that once kept a cow or a store of grain against bad years now had neither. When the collective farm failed, there was no private reserve left to fall back on, which is why a bad harvest killed on a scale earlier shortfalls had not.
The party treated nomadism as backwardness. Soviet planners saw nomadic herding as a primitive way of life to be replaced by settled farming and industry. In Kazakhstan, settlement campaigns and livestock requisitions began in 1929 without the wells, fodder, housing or tools that settled life needed. Planners also wanted the steppe’s meat and grain for the towns, so requisition quotas for livestock rose as the herds shrank. Officials competing to show progress drove herders onto farms that could not support them, and the herds that sustained Kazakh society were eaten, confiscated or died.
Stalin read hunger as political resistance. Stalin interpreted falling deliveries in Ukraine and the Kuban as sabotage organised by kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists, and in August 1932 he wrote to Kaganovich that “we may lose Ukraine”. Seeing a political threat, he answered with political weapons: blacklists, deportations, purges of local officials and the sealing of borders. That interpretation turned a food crisis in the Union’s main grain region into a campaign against its people, in which hunger itself was treated as evidence of guilt.
THE TURN
Kharkiv, November 1932 – January 1933. The decisions taken in the Ukrainian capital and in Moscow over these three months are the hinge of the Holodomor, because they turned a famine that was already killing into a trap. The blacklists of 18 November 1932, the decree of 14 December tying grain failures to Ukrainian nationalism, and the directive of 22 January 1933 sealing Ukraine and the Kuban came just as reserves ran out. Deaths peaked in the spring of 1933, in the villages these measures had cut off. Whether one reads the measures as genocide or as ruthless policy, they explain why Ukraine and the Kuban suffered more than any region except Kazakhstan.
WHAT IT CHANGED
A demographic wound that shaped two nations. Ukraine lost millions of people, overwhelmingly in the countryside, and Kazakhstan lost perhaps two-fifths of its Kazakh population. Russian and Ukrainian settlers later moved into emptied villages, and Kazakhs did not again form a majority of Kazakhstan’s population until after independence. The 1937 census that exposed the losses was suppressed and its statisticians arrested, so the regime punished the people who recorded the losses it had caused.
Silence, then memory. The famine was denied officially until the late 1980s; mentioning it could bring arrest. In the diaspora, survivors kept its memory alive, and after 1991 Ukraine made it central to national history, with a memorial museum in Kyiv and a day of remembrance in November. The struggle over its meaning remains a live question in Ukrainian and Russian politics, because the famine has become part of each state’s account of the other.
The collective farm survived. The regime adjusted collectivisation and kept it. From 1933 fixed delivery quotas, set per hectare sown, replaced arbitrary requisitions, private plots were allowed, and grain stocks were rebuilt as a reserve against the next bad harvest. Peasants learned that the state would take what it wanted first, and the kolkhoz bargain settled into place. The famines thus secured the system that had caused them.
A pattern for treating nations as suspects. The decree of December 1932 was the first time the leadership publicly linked a national culture to sabotage. The same logic, that a whole people could be disloyal, returned in the national operations of the Terror in 1937–38 and the deportations of whole peoples during the war. Suspicion of a nation, once written into a decree, became a habit of government.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Should the famine in Ukraine be judged as genocide, or as a famine caused by policy without the intent to destroy a nation?
Both readings rest on the same documents, so the judgement depends largely on what counts as intent. The case for genocide is strongest for November 1932 to the spring of 1933, when blacklists, the decree of 14 December linking grain to Ukrainian nationalism, the sealing of borders and the arrest of Ukrainian intellectuals fell specifically on Ukraine and the Kuban. The case against stresses that the same quotas and seizures hit the Volga, Siberia and, proportionally worst of all, Kazakhstan, and that Stalin’s correspondence is preoccupied with grain and with resistance, which he blamed on nationalists because he suspected them. The UN Genocide Convention requires intent to destroy a group “as such”, which is hard to prove from documents written in the language of grain targets; Lemkin’s broader idea of genocide as the destruction of a nation’s social and cultural life fits more easily. A strong answer states which definition it uses, separates causation, which is not in doubt, from intent, which is, and recognises that the dead were the victims of deliberate choices in either reading.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The famine was reported in the West while it was happening, and largely disbelieved. In March 1933 the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones walked through villages in Ukraine and told a press conference in Berlin that he had seen mass hunger. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting from Moscow, answered with an article headlined “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving”, and other correspondents in Moscow supported him. In 2003 the Pulitzer board reviewed Duranty’s prize and decided not to revoke it, while judging that his prize-winning reporting fell seriously short of today’s standards. Jones was killed in Inner Mongolia in 1935.
CHAPTER 4 · 1928–1941 · 1935
The Five-Year Plans
Planning by command, in which the targets of Gosplan, the State Planning Commission, were orders to every factory, meant that speed mattered more than cost, and that choice shaped everything the plans produced. In 1929 the leadership adopted the most ambitious draft of the First Five-Year Plan, the list of output targets for 1928–32, set like a company’s five-year budget but enforced as law, called the “optimal variant”. It then raised the draft further, so that the target for pig iron, the crude iron from which steel is made, of 10 million tonnes for 1932 was pushed to 17 million; actual output that year was about 6 million. Managers who missed targets risked prosecution, especially after the Shakhty trial of 1928 accused mining engineers of “wrecking”, the deliberate sabotage of production, so they hoarded materials, inflated their reports and drove workers harder. The plan was declared fulfilled in four years and three months, in January 1933, because heavy industry had grown fast even when most targets had been missed. Success was defined as growth in the priority sectors, which is why the regime could celebrate while consumers went short.
The map shows how the plans moved industry east, away from the borders. Magnitogorsk, built in the southern Urals on the model of the steelworks at Gary, Indiana, lit its first blast furnace in early 1932; Kuznetsk in western Siberia followed months later. Trains carried iron ore east from Magnitogorsk and coal west from the Kuznetsk basin, the two arrows of the Urals–Kuznetsk Combine, a shuttle of about 2,000 kilometres each way. The Turksib railway, finished in 1930, linked Siberian grain to Central Asian cotton. Foreign firms, many of them American, designed plants such as the Stalingrad tractor works and the Gorky car factory, and the Dnieper hydroelectric dam opened in 1932 with American engineers. Building in the remote east was costly, yet it put industry beyond the reach of invaders, which helped decide the war a decade later.
Workers paid for the plans through falling living standards and rising pressure, and the regime answered with both rewards and coercion. Real wages, pay measured by what it could buy, dropped steeply between 1928 and 1932 as food went to export and rationing returned. Labour turnover was enormous, so managers bid for workers with bonuses and housing. The state answered with labour books in 1938, records of each worker’s employment that tied him to his job much like a work permit held by the employer, and with harsh discipline laws in 1940. In August 1935 the miner Alexei Stakhanov cut 102 tonnes of coal in a shift at Kadiyivka, about fourteen times the norm, the output each miner was expected to reach, much like a sales target. The “Stakhanovite” movement that followed rewarded record-breakers with pay and prestige while raising everyone else’s norms. Meanwhile the economy run by the political police grew, as prisoners dug canals, mined gold and built railways. The plans made the Soviet Union an industrial power, but they did so by treating labour, free and unfree, as a resource to be spent.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Fear of war drove the pace. Bolsheviks expected the capitalist powers to attack the first socialist state, and the war scare of 1927 made that fear urgent. Heavy industry meant tanks, aircraft and artillery, so the plans favoured steel and machinery over consumer goods, and defence plants received the scarcest materials first. Stalin’s February 1931 warning that the country had ten years to catch up proved almost exactly right, and he used the deadline to justify every sacrifice the plans demanded.
Ideology demanded a socialist economy. Marxists believed a socialist society required large-scale industry and an industrial working class, and NEP had left the economy dominated by peasants and small traders. Planning seemed the rational alternative to the market’s booms and slumps, a view many Western observers shared during the Great Depression after 1929, when Western unemployment soared while Soviet factories were hiring. The plans therefore promised a new kind of society as well as more output.
Collectivisation released grain and labour. Control of the harvest let the state feed the growing towns and export grain to pay for foreign machinery, even during the famine. Grain exports reached about 5 million tonnes in 1931, paying for imported machine tools. It also pushed millions of peasants into industry, either as migrants fleeing the farms or as deported “kulaks” sent to building sites such as Magnitogorsk. The two revolutions of 1929 were designed to work together, and each depended on the other’s violence.
Political competition inflated the targets. After the defeat of the Right, no one could safely argue that targets were unrealistic. Planners and managers raised them to show loyalty, as when the pig-iron target for 1932 was pushed from 10 to 17 million tonnes, and the slogan “there are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm” made caution sound like cowardice. The result was a planning system in which ambition was rewarded and realism was punished, which built in waste and the falsification of reports.
THE TURN
Magnitogorsk, February 1932. The first blast furnace at Magnitogorsk, lit in the winter of 1932 on a site that had been empty steppe three years earlier, is the hinge of the plans because it proved that the regime could build a heavy industrial base in the east. With Kuznetsk it formed a second metallurgical centre beyond the reach of any European army. In 1941, when German forces overran the old industrial regions of Ukraine, the Urals and Siberia produced much of the steel for Soviet tanks, so the most expensive decision of the plans also became their most important.
WHAT IT CHANGED
The industrial base for victory in 1941–45. The plants built in the Urals and Siberia, and the experience of moving and building whole factories, made the evacuation of 1941 possible and supplied the Red Army through the war. Historians who are harsh on Stalinism still count this as the plans’ decisive result, though they debate whether a less brutal path could have reached the same point. The cost of building in the east was repaid in 1941, when the west was lost.
A society of new workers and new managers. Millions of peasants became urban workers, and a generation of young people from working-class and peasant families was trained as engineers and managers, the so-called vydvizhentsy (“promoted ones”). They owed their rise to the regime and formed the core of its support. Two of them, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, ran the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, so the generation the plans promoted governed the country until the 1980s.
Shortage as a way of life. Priority for heavy industry left consumer goods, housing and food permanently scarce. Queues, rationing until 1935, overcrowded communal apartments and a thriving black market became normal, and the best goods went to closed shops for officials. The shortage economy, in which people relied on connections to obtain goods, lasted until the end of the Soviet Union and shaped how ordinary people dealt with the state.
Scapegoats for every failure. Because the plans could not fail officially, failures were blamed on “wreckers”: engineers in the Shakhty trial of 1928 and the Industrial Party trial of 1930, and later managers and officials during the Terror. Accidents, shortages and missed targets became evidence of sabotage, which linked the economy directly to the arrests of 1936–38, when industrial managers were among the most heavily purged groups.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
To what extent were the Five-Year Plans a success?
The answer depends on which goal is used to measure them. If the goal was heavy industry and military power, the plans largely succeeded: steel, coal and electricity output multiplied, a second industrial base rose in the Urals and Siberia, and during the war the Soviet Union out-produced Germany in tanks and aircraft. Even sceptical recalculations by Bergson and Jasny show unusually fast growth. If the goal was a better life for workers and peasants, the record is far worse. Real wages fell sharply in the early 1930s, famine killed between about 5.5 and 8.7 million people, consumer goods stayed scarce, and much of the new industry depended on forced labour. The plans were also wasteful, with unfinished projects, falsified reports and poor quality. Historians such as Robert Allen argue that the growth came largely from moving peasants into industry, which a less violent policy might also have achieved. A balanced judgement is that the plans succeeded in Stalin’s own terms while failing the promise of socialism to raise living standards, a pattern seen in many states that industrialise by command.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Some of the best evidence about Magnitogorsk comes from an American. John Scott, who left the University of Wisconsin in 1931, went to the Urals in 1932 to work as a welder and rigger, married a Russian teacher there and stayed until 1938. His memoir Behind the Urals (1942) describes temperatures of minus 40 degrees, workers sleeping in tents and barracks, and constant accidents, alongside genuine enthusiasm among young builders. The historian Stephen Kotkin later used Scott’s account, together with the city’s archives, for Magnetic Mountain (1995), where he argued that Stalinism was a whole civilisation that people learned to live inside, speaking its language as they did so.
CHAPTER 5 · 1930–1953 · 1936
The Gulag
The Gulag, the network of forced-labour camps run by the political police, grew from a decision to make prisoners pay for their own punishment and open up the empire’s empty regions. On 27 June 1929 the Politburo, the party’s small ruling committee that worked like a cabinet, decided to transfer all prisoners serving three years or more to camps run by the OGPU, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB. The government decree that followed in July ordered new camps in remote areas “for the purpose of colonising these regions and exploiting their natural resources”. The model was Solovki, where prisoners were fed according to the work they did, so the weak received less food and grew weaker. The deported “kulaks”, the better-off peasants branded rural capitalists during collectivisation, gave the police in 1930–31 a second labour force in the special settlements, guarded villages of exile. Once punishment had been made into an economic resource, the police had a reason to want more prisoners, which helps explain why arrests and labour plans were later linked.
The camps’ geography followed the resources the plans needed, and the map shows how far that pulled prisoners from home. Dalstroi, a police-run company founded in November 1931, ruled the Kolyma basin as a territory of its own, much like the owner of a giant company town. It shipped prisoners from Vladivostok to the port of Magadan to mine gold in permafrost, and the poet Osip Mandelstam died in the Vladivostok transit camp in December 1938. In the Arctic, prisoners opened the coalfield of Vorkuta and the nickel mines of Norilsk, building railways and cities that still stand. In Kazakhstan, Karlag farmed the steppe. Prisoners included political offenders sentenced under Article 58 for “counter-revolutionary” crimes, but most were ordinary people convicted of petty theft, absence from work or leaving a job, so the Gulag touched almost every family.
Life in the camps was organised to extract labour and to break solidarity, and the records allow its cost to be measured. Rations depended on meeting work norms, the daily output each prisoner had to reach. Prisoners worked twelve hours or more in extreme cold, and criminal convicts were often allowed to dominate political prisoners. Mortality soared in the famine years of 1933 and in the war, when about a quarter of camp prisoners died in 1942 alone. Camp officials also released many prisoners who were close to death, which lowered the recorded figures, so historians treat the archive’s total of about 1.5 to 1.8 million deaths as a minimum. The Gulag kept growing until Stalin’s death, peaking at about 2.5 million prisoners in camps and colonies in the early 1950s. Only his death allowed the camps on the map to be emptied, because no one beneath him had dared to propose it.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Punishment was redefined as productive labour. Bolsheviks believed that labour could reform criminals and that a socialist state should not pay to keep idle prisoners. The Solovki camp, opened in 1923 in a former monastery on the White Sea, showed the police how to make prisoners work for their food. The resolution of June 1929 turned this into national policy: long-term prisoners would be sent to remote camps to work, which made punishment and economic planning parts of one system.
The plans needed labour in empty places. The gold, coal, nickel and timber that industrialisation required lay in the Arctic, Siberia and the Far East, where few free workers would live. Prisoners and deportees could be sent there by order, kept there by guards and paid almost nothing. The Gulag therefore grew alongside the Five-Year Plans, and by 1940 its prisoners mined most of the Union’s gold, so its map of camps is largely a map of the resources the plans demanded.
Collectivisation produced a forced-labour population. The deportation of about 1.8 million “kulaks” in 1930–31 created the first mass population of forced labourers outside the prisons. The OGPU had to house, feed and employ them in special settlements, which taught it to manage people in their hundreds of thousands. The experience, and the infrastructure of barracks, transit points and convoys, was then extended to convicted prisoners, so the methods of dekulakisation became the methods of the camps.
New laws turned everyday life into crime. The Law of 7 August 1932 on socialist property, the internal passport rules of 1932 and later the labour laws of 1940 made petty theft, unauthorised travel and lateness into crimes with long sentences. Most Gulag prisoners were convicted under such laws, and only a minority as political enemies, so the legal system fed the camps continuously, in quiet years as well as during the Terror, and the camp population kept rising between campaigns.
THE TURN
The White Sea Canal, 1931–1933. The White Sea–Baltic Canal is the hinge of the Gulag’s history because it was the first great project built entirely by prisoners and was presented as proof that forced labour worked. Some 227 kilometres were dug in twenty months, mostly by hand; officially about 12,000 prisoners died, and other estimates are higher. Stalin sailed along it in July 1933, and a book by thirty-six writers, edited by Maxim Gorky, celebrated the “reforging” of criminals. The canal was too shallow for most ships, yet the regime took from it the lesson that the police could build anything quickly, and gave the NKVD ever larger projects.
WHAT IT CHANGED
A police empire with its own territory. Dalstroi governed the Kolyma region directly from 1931 to 1953, with the NKVD acting as government, employer and jailer at once. The dark hatching on the map marks that territory. Other camp complexes in Vorkuta, Norilsk and Karaganda built whole cities, and the NKVD became one of the Union’s largest economic ministries. Its power over land and people outlasted the Terror and ended only after Stalin died.
A channel that the Terror could fill. Because the camps were organised to absorb and use prisoners, the mass arrests of 1937–38 could send hundreds of thousands to Kolyma, the north and Kazakhstan within months. The Gulag population nearly doubled in those years, and in Kolyma the new arrivals were driven to meet gold plans through the Arctic winter of 1938, when deaths there rose steeply. The existing system of convoys, transit camps and work sites made the Terror’s scale possible, and the Terror in turn gave the camps their largest workforce yet.
Forced labour built the wartime and postwar economy. Forced labour stayed part of the economy through the war and after it. In 1941–45 prisoners produced munitions, built railways and mined coal, while about a million were released into the Red Army. After 1945 the Gulag grew to its largest size with new waves of prisoners: returning soldiers, people from annexed lands and those convicted under harsh new theft laws. The camps grew fastest in peacetime, which shows that they served the regime’s routine as well as its emergencies.
A memory that still divides. Survivors returned after 1953 to a society that did not want to hear them, and the camps were acknowledged only partially under Khrushchev. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962, then banned again. Memory of the Gulag remains contested in Russia, where the organisation Memorial, which documented it, was dissolved by court order in 2021.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Was the Gulag primarily an economic institution or an instrument of political terror?
The Gulag was both, and the most persuasive answer explains how each purpose strengthened the other. The economic evidence is strong: the 1929 resolution created the camps to colonise remote regions, the NKVD ran major construction projects and produced most of the country’s gold, and camps were placed where the plans needed resources. Yet political purposes were never absent. The camps held millions convicted under laws designed to discipline the population, the Terror of 1937–38 filled them regardless of economic need, and their living conditions killed people at rates no rational employer would accept. Steven Barnes adds that the regime saw labour as a test of who could be redeemed. Historians such as Khlevniuk show that forced labour was inefficient, which suggests that economic justifications helped the regime explain a system whose deeper purpose was control. A good judgement therefore treats the Gulag as a political institution that was given an economic job, and recognises that this combination is what allowed it to grow so large.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Some of the engineers who built Soviet aviation and space flight worked as prisoners. The aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev was arrested in 1937 and designed the Tu-2 bomber inside a prison design bureau in Moscow, one of the special camps for scientists that prisoners called sharashki. Sergei Korolev, later chief designer of the rocket that launched Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, was arrested in 1938, spent months at a Kolyma gold mine in 1939, and was then moved to Tupolev’s bureau. Both were released during the war, and their imprisonment was not publicly acknowledged in the Soviet Union for decades.
CHAPTER 6 · 1936–1938 · 1937
The Great Terror
The Great Terror, the mass arrests and shootings of 1937–38, grew out of a murder, a fear and a decision to settle accounts. On 1 December 1934 Sergei Kirov, the party leader in Leningrad, was shot by a disgruntled party member, Leonid Nikolaev. Stalin used the killing to pass a decree allowing quick trials without defence and to blame former oppositionists. Whether he arranged the murder is still debated; most historians who have worked in the archives, such as Matthew Lenoe, find no evidence that he did. The first great show trial, a public trial performed to a script, in August 1936 convicted Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen others of organising Kirov’s murder for Trotsky, and all were shot. In September Stalin replaced Genrikh Yagoda as head of the NKVD, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB, with Nikolai Yezhov, complaining that the police were “four years behind” in unmasking enemies. The pretext created in 1934 became the template for everything that followed.
The purge, the expulsion and arrest of members branded disloyal, then spread to every institution of the state. A second show trial in January 1937 and a third in March 1938, which condemned Bukharin and Rykov, accused Lenin’s former comrades of spying and sabotage. In June 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other senior commanders were shot, and in 1937–38 about 35,000 officers were discharged, many of them arrested, as the purge spread through the army. Of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee, the party’s governing body of senior figures, much like a company’s board of directors, elected at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934, 98 were arrested and shot. Factory managers, engineers, scientists, writers and officials were seized in turn, and their posts went to younger men promoted from below. The elite that had built the system was largely destroyed by it, leaving power concentrated in Stalin alone.
The deadliest part of the Terror was hidden from public view and fell on ordinary people. NKVD Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 set every region a “limit” for shootings and another for camp sentences, starting at about 76,000 shootings and 186,500 camp sentences. Because regional chiefs were judged by results, they asked for more. National operations targeted Poles, Germans, Latvians, Finns, Greeks and others as presumed spies; the Polish operation alone sentenced about 140,000 people and shot about 111,000. Sentences were passed by troikas, the three-person panels, in minutes and carried out at night in prison cellars and forests. The markers on the map show some of the burial sites found after 1988, at Levashovo near Leningrad, Bykivnia near Kyiv, Kurapaty near Minsk, Vinnytsia and Sandarmokh in Karelia. The arrow traces the prisoners moved from Solovki to be shot in Karelia. Quotas turned killing into a target to be met.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The Kirov murder supplied a pretext. The killing of Kirov in December 1934 gave Stalin the claim that opposition led to assassination. The emergency decree passed that day allowed trials in ten days without defence lawyers and immediate execution. Stalin travelled to Leningrad himself to take charge of the investigation. Former oppositionists in Leningrad were arrested, and in 1936 the trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev rewrote the murder as a Trotskyist plot, linking every past dissent to terrorism.
Fear of war and a “fifth column”. Stalin faced two hostile powers from 1933, Nazi Germany in the west and Japan in the east, and the Spanish Civil War suggested that hidden enemies could decide a war. Stalin feared that kulaks, former oppositionists, priests and minorities with links abroad would side with an invader. The mass operations and national operations of 1937–38 targeted exactly these groups, which suggests a pre-emptive purge before the expected war, aimed at people who had done nothing yet.
The old elite still remembered alternatives. Many senior communists had known Lenin and had supported Trotsky, Zinoviev or Bukharin in the 1920s, and some had privately criticised collectivisation and the famine. Martemian Ryutin’s 1932 platform called Stalin the “evil genius” of the revolution. At the Seventeenth Congress in 1934 Stalin may have received a number of votes against him in the secret ballot for the Central Committee, according to later testimony that historians dispute. Destroying this generation removed anyone who could imagine the party without him.
A police state measured success by arrests. The NKVD had grown through collectivisation and the camps into a vast bureaucracy whose officers were rewarded for uncovering plots. Quotas turned repression into a plan to be fulfilled and overfulfilled, and regional chiefs who reported few enemies risked being seen as enemies themselves. Yezhov’s NKVD also arrested and shot many of its own officers, so fear drove the police as hard as ambition did. Once launched, the operations generated their own momentum through confessions that named new accomplices.
THE TURN
The Lubyanka, 30 July 1937. Order No. 00447, signed by Yezhov in the NKVD headquarters on the Lubyanka and approved by the Politburo the next day, is the hinge of the Terror because it changed a purge of the elite into mass killing of ordinary people. Before it, arrests had concentrated on party members, officials and former oppositionists. After it, quotas sent hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, believers and former kulaks before troikas, and the national operations that followed added whole minorities. Most of the Terror’s victims died under orders issued after this date, which is why it marks the shift from political purge to social cleansing.
WHAT IT CHANGED
A personal dictatorship without rivals. The Terror left no one in the leadership by 1939 who had known Stalin as an equal or could challenge him. The Politburo met less often, decisions were taken by Stalin and small groups he chose, and his surviving colleagues, Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov among them, depended on his favour. The cult of the late 1930s celebrated a leader who now had no one left to contradict him.
A weakened army on the eve of war. The purge of the officer corps removed experienced commanders just before the war with Finland in 1939–40, where the Red Army performed badly, and before the German invasion of 1941. Historians debate how much the purge contributed to the disasters of 1941, since many discharged officers were reinstated and other failures mattered, but it damaged initiative and trust throughout the army.
A new generation in power. The Terror opened posts for young officials, engineers and managers trained in the 1930s, the vydvizhentsy. Men such as Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Andrei Gromyko rose rapidly into posts left empty by the arrested; Brezhnev went from factory engineer in 1935 to secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional party committee in 1939. This generation, loyal to Stalin and marked by fear, would govern the Soviet Union until the 1980s.
Fear in everyday life. The arrests reached families in every town and many villages, and children of “enemies of the people” were stigmatised or sent to orphanages, while wives were sent to special camps. People learned to avoid strangers, guard their words and burn letters. That habit of silence protected the regime long after the mass operations ended, and it is one reason the Terror was discussed openly only after 1956.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Was the Great Terror the result of Stalin’s personal decisions or of pressures within the Soviet system?
The archives make Stalin’s central role clear, but they also show why the Terror took the scale it did. Stalin initiated the show trials, approved Order No. 00447 and the national operations, signed lists sentencing tens of thousands, and ended the mass operations in November 1938, which demonstrates that he could start and stop the killing. Yet he did not carry it out alone. Regional chiefs asked for higher quotas, NKVD officers competed to uncover plots, and denunciations from neighbours and colleagues drew in new victims, as Getty and Goldman show. A strong answer weighs these levels together. It might conclude that the Terror was Stalin’s decision in origin, purpose and timing, linked to his fear of a fifth column before war, while the system’s incentives and fears explain its extraordinary reach. The transferable insight is that mass repression in a modern state needs both a decision from the top and many people below who see reasons to take part.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The constitution the Terror ignored was drafted partly by its victims. The “Stalin Constitution”, adopted on 5 December 1936 and hailed by Stalin as the most democratic in the world, was prepared by a commission whose drafting groups included Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek. Its Article 127 promised that no one could be arrested except by decision of a court or with a prosecutor’s sanction. Within weeks Radek was a defendant in the second Moscow show trial, and fifteen months later Bukharin stood in the dock of the third, so the authors of its guarantees became examples of how little they meant.
CHAPTER 7 · 1937–1944 · 1944
Nations and Deportations
The shift from promoting nations to deporting them began on the borders, where nationality and foreign policy met. Soviet planners worried that minorities with homelands abroad, such as Poles, Germans, Finns and Koreans, could serve an enemy in war. In 1936 tens of thousands of Poles and Germans were moved from Ukraine’s western border zone to Kazakhstan. In August 1937 a decree ordered the removal of all Koreans from the Far East, where Japan threatened from Manchuria, and in September and October about 172,000 people were loaded onto trains for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as the longest arrow on the map shows. The “national operations” of the Great Terror, the mass arrests and shootings of 1937–38, targeted minorities suspected of spying for a foreign state, and the Polish operation alone shot about 111,000 people. A whole people could now be treated as guilty by association, and that logic drove every deportation that followed.
The Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939, the non-aggression treaty whose secret protocol divided Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin, brought new territories and new deportations, and on this 1944 map those lands lie inside the tan zone the Germans still held. The Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, entered eastern Poland on 17 September 1939, the Baltic states were occupied in June 1940 and annexed in August after staged elections, and Romania was forced to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. To secure these lands, the NKVD, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB, deported Polish settlers, officials and their families in four waves in 1940–41. On the night of 14 June 1941 it deported more than 40,000 people from the Baltic republics, most of them women, children and the elderly. In the spring of 1940 the NKVD also shot about 22,000 captured Polish officers and officials at Katyn and other sites, a crime the Road to War atlas marks. Annexation was presented as liberation, but it arrived with mass removals of anyone who might resist.
The war turned suspicion into collective punishment. In August 1941, as German armies advanced, a decree accused the Volga Germans of hiding saboteurs and abolished their republic; about 440,000 were deported from the Volga, and by 1942 some 900,000 Soviet Germans had been moved east. After the Red Army retook the North Caucasus and Crimea in 1943–44, the NKVD deported the Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Crimean Tatars, accusing whole peoples of collaboration that only some individuals had committed. Operation Lentil moved about 496,000 Chechens and Ingush in a week from 23 February 1944, and about 191,000 Crimean Tatars followed in May. The deportees lived as “special settlers”, confined to their assigned villages much as prisoners on parole are confined to a district, and the hatched homelands on the map were renamed and resettled. Punishing a nation for the acts of some of its members turned citizenship itself into a matter of ancestry.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Fear of foreign enemies on the borders. The Soviet Union faced Japan in Manchuria from 1931 and Nazi Germany in the west from 1933, and in 1936 the two powers signed the Anti-Comintern Pact against communism. Planners assumed that minorities with kin across the border, Koreans near Japanese-ruled Korea and Poles and Germans near Poland, would side with an invader. Clearing border zones of suspect nationalities seemed a reasonable security measure to leaders who already saw enemies everywhere, and it became the first step towards deporting whole peoples.
The habit of classifying people by nationality. Soviet policy had registered every citizen’s nationality since the 1920s, and from 1932 it was written into internal passports on a line of its own; children of mixed marriages had to choose one parent’s nationality at sixteen. The state therefore knew who was Korean, German or Chechen, which made deporting a whole people an administrative task the NKVD could organise in days. The categories created to promote national cultures became tools for removing nations.
The Nazi–Soviet Pact brought hostile new lands. The Pact of August 1939 gave the Soviet Union eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia, populations that had not lived under Soviet rule and included officers, officials, landowners and priests, as well as the settlers Poland had placed on the land after 1921. The NKVD treated these groups as anti-Soviet by definition. Deporting them in 1940–41 was meant to secure the new borders before the war that both Stalin and Hitler expected.
War made collective punishment seem justified. The German invasion of 1941 and the occupation of the North Caucasus and Crimea in 1942–43 gave Stalin’s suspicion a pretext. Real cases of collaboration were generalised to whole peoples, and wartime urgency silenced objections. The NKVD, experienced in mass deportations, could move hundreds of thousands of people in days, as Operation Lentil in February 1944 showed. No court examined anyone’s individual guilt, because guilt had been assigned to the nation as a whole.
THE TURN
The Korean deportation, September 1937. The removal of about 172,000 Koreans from the Far East in the autumn of 1937 is the hinge of the turn from promoting nations to deporting them. It was the first time the Soviet state deported an entire nationality, including party members and Red Army soldiers, purely for who they were. Earlier deportations had targeted classes, such as kulaks, or border residents. The Korean operation established the method later used against the Volga Germans, Chechens and Crimean Tatars: a decree naming a people, an NKVD timetable, sealed trains and special settlements in Central Asia. Once a nation could be deported, any nation could be.
WHAT IT CHANGED
Homelands abolished and resettled. The Volga German, Kalmyk and Chechen-Ingush republics and the Karachay region were abolished and their territory divided among neighbours, and the Crimean republic was downgraded to a province in 1945. Russian and Ukrainian settlers moved into emptied villages, and place names were changed, as the pale hatching on the map recalls. Because their land had been divided among neighbours, the borders of these homelands are still disputed in the Caucasus.
Life as special settlers. Deported peoples lived under a special-settlement regime that forbade them to leave their villages without permission, required regular registration and, from 1948, threatened twenty years of hard labour for escape. Their children could not study at universities in many fields, and their national schools and newspapers disappeared. Restrictions were lifted only from 1955–56, so a generation of children grew up as suspects in their own country.
Rehabilitation, partial and late. Rehabilitation came late and unequally for the deported peoples. In 1957 the Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Karachays and Balkars were allowed to return and their autonomies were restored. The Volga Germans were cleared of collective guilt in 1964 but never regained their republic, and the Crimean Tatars were allowed home only in 1989. The unequal treatment shaped relations between these peoples and the Soviet and post-Soviet states for decades.
A model for postwar repression. The methods tested on whole peoples were used again after 1945 against the populations of the annexed borderlands. The NKVD and its successor deported about 76,000 people from western Ukraine in October 1947 and about 95,000 from the Baltic states in March 1949 to deprive armed resistance of support. These operations broke the armed resistance by removing the villages that fed it.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Why did a state that promoted national cultures in the 1920s deport whole nations in the 1940s?
The contradiction is smaller than it looks, because both policies rested on the same assumption that nationality was a fixed, recorded identity that the state should manage. In the 1920s the regime believed that promoting national languages and officials would bind minorities to socialism. From the early 1930s, as war with Japan and Germany loomed, the same records identified diaspora nationalities as potential fifth columns, and the Terror’s national operations of 1937–38 treated them as enemies. The war then provided both opportunity and pretext, as real collaboration by some individuals was used to condemn whole peoples. Historians weigh these factors differently: Terry Martin stresses the logic of the nationalities system, Naimark stresses Stalin’s willingness to destroy peoples, and others emphasise wartime security panic. A strong answer shows how a policy of classification made a policy of deportation possible. The transferable lesson is that states which sort citizens by ethnicity create tools that can be turned against them when fear rises.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Some of the deported Koreans carried their culture with them and kept it alive in exile. The Korean theatre founded in Vladivostok in 1932 was moved with its actors to Kzyl-Orda in Kazakhstan in 1937, and it still performs in Almaty today as the State Korean Theatre of Musical Comedy, one of the oldest Korean-language theatres anywhere outside Korea. The Korean newspaper Lenin Kichi (“Lenin’s Banner”) was also published in Kazakhstan for decades. The descendants of the deportees, who call themselves Koryo-saram, number several hundred thousand across Central Asia and Russia.
CHAPTER 8 · 1929–1953 · 1939
Propaganda and the Cult
The cult was manufactured deliberately, and its starting point is precise. For Stalin’s fiftieth birthday on 21 December 1929, Pravda (“Truth”), the party’s daily newspaper, printed page after page of tributes from his colleagues, at the very moment the forced collectivisation of the Great Turn began. From then on, his image was linked to the “revolution from above”, the transformation of the country by state command: speeches ended with ovations, letters thanked him personally, and his name was attached to cities, factories, collective farms and the Union’s highest peak. Stalingrad had been named in 1925, and in the 1930s Stalino, Stalinabad, Stalinsk and Stalinogorsk followed, as the markers show. Stalin corrected drafts of his own praise and sometimes toned it down, presenting himself as a modest servant of the party. The cult worked because it attached a human face to an abstract and often frightening state.
Propaganda reached into art, education and history, and in each field it combined revolutionary language with older traditions. The First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 adopted socialist realism, the rule that art must show life as the party said it was becoming. Writers were reminded that Stalin had called them “engineers of human souls” in 1932, meaning that literature should shape people as engineers shape machines. In the mid-1930s schools returned to textbooks, exams and discipline, and history lessons restored Russian heroes such as Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great, whom Sergei Eisenstein’s film of 1938 and new textbooks presented as forerunners of Soviet patriotism. The Short Course of 1938, the official party history edited by Stalin, became compulsory reading for every party member, with tens of millions of copies printed by 1953. It inflated Stalin’s role in the civil war, including at Tsaritsyn, later renamed Stalingrad, and turned the leaders purged, or expelled and arrested, in 1936–38 into traitors from the start. The past was rewritten so that it pointed only towards Stalin.
How far people believed the propaganda is hard to measure, and historians use diaries, letters and police reports on popular mood to test it. Diaries studied by Jochen Hellbeck show young people trying sincerely to remake themselves as good Soviet citizens. NKVD reports studied by Sarah Davies record jokes, rumours and complaints, such as peasants who called the collective farms a second serfdom. Many people believed in the goals while doubting the methods, and learned what Stephen Kotkin calls “speaking Bolshevik”, using the official language to make claims and protect themselves. Children were offered heroes like Pavlik Morozov, said to have denounced his own father, and the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol, the communist youth organisations, enrolled millions. The cult needed everyone’s public participation, whatever they privately believed, and that demand turned each citizen into a performer of loyalty.
WHY IT HAPPENED
A leader without rivals needed a public image. Stalin had defeated every rival by 1929, yet he lacked Lenin’s authority and Trotsky’s fame. The cult gave him a legitimacy based on wisdom and success, linking him to Lenin and to every achievement of the plans. His colleagues, who had known him as one leader among several, competed to praise him, because public devotion became a test of their own loyalty. Without it, the sacrifices of collectivisation and industrialisation would have been demanded by a committee; with it, they were demanded by the leader of the revolution.
A poorly educated society needed simple messages. Millions of new workers and peasants had little schooling, and the regime set out to reach them through posters, radio, film and slogans. A single heroic leader was easier to understand than Marxist theory, and images of Stalin among workers, children and soldiers carried the message without words. Literacy campaigns, which raised literacy sharply in the 1930s, also gave propaganda a larger reading audience, and wired radio loudspeakers in squares and workplaces reached those who still could not read.
Russian traditions of the ruler as father. Many peasants had grown up with the image of the tsar as a distant father whose officials were to blame for injustice. The cult reused that pattern: Stalin was kind and wise, and local officials were blamed for “excesses”, as in the article “Dizzy with Success” of 1930. Plamper and others argue that this continuity helped the cult take root among people who disliked the regime’s policies but could still hope the leader would correct them.
The Terror required a new history. Each show trial turned former heroes into traitors, which made existing histories and textbooks obsolete overnight. Libraries removed books by and about the condemned, and owners inked out their faces in photographs. The regime needed a single authoritative account that explained the purges and placed Stalin at the centre of the revolution. The Short Course of 1938, written to Stalin’s instructions and corrected by him, supplied it and became the basis of all teaching.
THE TURN
Pravda, 21 December 1929. The birthday issue of Pravda in December 1929 marks the turn because it launched the public cult at exactly the moment Stalin began the revolution from above. Until then he had presented himself as one member of a collective leadership; afterwards, the newspapers attributed policy and success to him personally, and every colleague competed to praise him. Linking the cult to the Great Turn meant that support for the plans became loyalty to Stalin, so that criticism of collectivisation or industrialisation could be treated as an attack on the leader himself.
WHAT IT CHANGED
Loyalty to one man became loyalty to the state. Because propaganda presented every achievement as Stalin’s, any doubt about policy became a political crime under Article 58 on “anti-Soviet agitation”. Telling a joke about Stalin could bring a camp sentence, and thousands were convicted for such remarks. The cult therefore reinforced the Terror and the Gulag, which punished what it forbade, and made silence the safest form of loyalty.
Russian patriotism mobilised for war. The return to Russian heroes prepared the population for a national war. In 1941 Stalin invoked Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Suvorov and Kutuzov, and wartime propaganda appealed to the motherland as much as to socialism. Soldiers went into battle with the cry “For the Motherland, for Stalin!”, which joined the two loyalties in one slogan, and the war completed the turn from revolutionary to patriotic legitimacy.
The cult reached its peak after victory. For his seventieth birthday in December 1949, gifts from around the world filled a Moscow museum and his portrait was lit in the night sky above the city. The cult spread to the new satellite states of Eastern Europe, where cities and streets were renamed for him too, so the cult became one of the exports of Soviet power, imposed along with it.
Its demolition shook the system. When Khrushchev denounced the “cult of personality” in 1956, he attacked the image on which the regime had built its legitimacy for a generation. Cities were renamed again, statues removed and Stalin’s body taken out of the Lenin Mausoleum in 1961. The shock to believers, and the protests it set off in Georgia and Eastern Europe, showed how much legitimacy had rested on one face.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Did most Soviet citizens believe the propaganda of the Stalin era?
The evidence suggests that belief varied by age, place and experience, and that public participation mattered more to the regime than private conviction. Diaries studied by Hellbeck show sincere efforts, especially among the young and the newly educated, to become good Soviet citizens, and many workers who rose through the plans had reasons to believe in a system that promoted them. Police reports studied by Sarah Davies record widespread jokes, complaints and rumours, particularly among peasants who had lived through collectivisation and famine. Kotkin’s idea of “speaking Bolshevik” suggests that many people adopted the official language without full belief, using it to advance and protect themselves. These sources have limits: police looked for dissent, and diarists feared discovery. A careful answer therefore avoids a single verdict and distinguishes belief in socialist goals, which was common, from belief in specific claims, which was weaker. The broader insight is that authoritarian propaganda often succeeds by making public conformity normal, whatever people think in private.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Photographs were edited to follow the purges, and the most famous example involves Nikolai Yezhov, the police chief who ran the Terror. In 1937 he was photographed walking beside Stalin along the bank of the new Moscow–Volga Canal. After Yezhov was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940, the image was retouched so that Stalin walked alone beside the water, Yezhov replaced by the canal behind him. The British designer David King collected hundreds of such altered images, from removed faces to painted-over figures, and published them in The Commissar Vanishes (1997), which shows how thoroughly the visual record was revised.
CHAPTER 9 · 1930–1953 · 1940
Daily Life, Women and Family
The movement from village to town remade Soviet society within a decade, and the map’s arrows show its main channels. Peasants fleeing collectivisation, the forced merger of their farms into state-run collectives, and famine, and others recruited by factories, poured into Moscow, the Donbas mines, Magnitogorsk and the new industrial towns. Housing could not keep up: families lived in one room of a kommunalka, a communal apartment in which several families shared a kitchen and toilet, much like a permanent house-share with strangers, while builders at Magnitogorsk lived in tents, barracks and earth dugouts. Food was rationed from 1929 to 1935, with better rations for industrial workers and officials, and the privileged shopped in “closed” stores open only to them. The internal passport system of 1932, an identity document that worked like a residence permit, tried to control who could live in the cities. For many new arrivals, urban life was hard but still better than the collective farm they had left.
The plans also created real social mobility, which explains why many people supported the regime despite its hardships. Literacy rose sharply, and the number of students in higher education multiplied, as the state trained a new technical class drawn from workers and peasants, the vydvizhentsy or “promoted ones”, first-generation graduates fast-tracked into management. A worker’s son could become a factory director in ten years, especially after the Great Terror, the mass arrests and shootings of 1937–38, emptied senior posts. From 1935, when rationing ended, the regime promised that “life has become better”, and parks, the Moscow Metro, cinemas and holiday resorts offered new pleasures to some. Yet pay differences between workers widened sharply. Managers and Stakhanovites, record-breaking workers rewarded as models for others much like an employee of the month, earned many times more than unskilled workers. The labour law of June 1940 made leaving a job or arriving more than twenty minutes late a crime. The new society offered advancement in exchange for discipline, and the exchange was enforced by the courts.
Women gained new roles while carrying old burdens, and the law of June 1936 shows the regime choosing the family over individual freedom. The share of women among industrial workers rose from under a third in 1929 to about two-fifths by 1940, and in Ivanovo’s textile mills women made up most of the workforce. Women became engineers, doctors, pilots and tractor drivers, celebrated in propaganda. At home, though, they did almost all the housework, and shortages turned shopping into hours of queuing. Worried about a falling birth rate, the state in 1936 banned abortion, raised divorce fees and rewarded mothers of large families. Births rose briefly, then fell as illegal abortions spread. The state’s claim to direct women’s lives reached furthest at the margins. In Uzbekistan the hujum (“assault”) of 1927 pressed women to unveil in public, and from 1937 the wives of arrested men were sent to camps such as ALZhIR, the Akmolinsk camp for wives of “traitors to the motherland”. Stalinism gave women more public roles and less private choice.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Industrialisation needed millions of new workers. The Five-Year Plans created jobs faster than towns could absorb people, and the industrial workforce more than doubled between 1928 and 1932. Collectivisation and famine pushed peasants out of the villages at the same time. The result was a mass migration that overwhelmed housing, transport and food supply, and shaped urban life for a generation, since new towns such as Magnitogorsk were built faster than homes for the people who worked in them.
The state needed a new technical elite. The regime distrusted the engineers and specialists trained before 1917, many of whom were tried as “wreckers” in 1928–31. It set out to train its own technical class from workers and peasants, expanding schools and institutes and promoting the young. The Terror then removed many of the first generation of Soviet managers, which opened still more posts to the newly trained and made rapid promotion a normal expectation for the young.
A falling birth rate worried the leadership. Famine, upheaval and easy divorce and abortion had lowered the birth rate, and a state preparing for war wanted soldiers and workers. Stalin and his colleagues saw a strong family as the basis of a strong state. The decree of June 1936 banned abortion except on medical grounds, made divorce costlier and offered payments to mothers of large families. A public discussion of the draft drew many letters opposing the ban, which the final law ignored, so consultation served as display.
Shortage shaped every choice. Because heavy industry came first, consumer goods, housing and food were always scarce. Daily life became a search for goods through queues, closed shops, markets and personal connections. The state rationed what it could not provide and rewarded those it valued most with better rations, housing and holidays, which turned access to goods into a form of political control and made personal connections, called blat, essential to getting anything done.
THE TURN
Ivanovo and the law of June 1936. The decree of 27 June 1936 is the hinge of the Great Retreat because it showed the state reversing the revolution’s promise of personal freedom in family life. Abortion, legal since 1920, was banned, divorce became expensive, and motherhood was rewarded as a duty. In textile cities such as Ivanovo, where most workers were women, the law fell on women already working full shifts and queuing for food. Births rose in 1937 and then fell again as illegal abortions spread, which suggests women resisted quietly. The law marked the moment when the regime defined women’s equality as the right and duty to work, while taking away women’s choice over whether to bear children.
WHAT IT CHANGED
A society of new cities and new classes. Stalin’s revolution created an urban society: by 1939 one Soviet citizen in three lived in a town, against one in five in 1926, and a new educated class of engineers, managers and specialists had risen from workers and peasants. This group became the backbone of the Soviet state and its most loyal supporters, and some, like Brezhnev, governed it until the 1980s.
Women’s double burden became permanent. Women stayed in the workforce in large numbers through the war, when they replaced men in factories and fields, and afterwards. The expectation that they would also run the household did not change, and shortages kept housework exhausting. Soviet sociologists in the 1960s measured the double burden, and it remained a feature of Soviet life until 1991, so equality at work never became equality at home.
Harsh labour laws fed the Gulag. The labour laws of 1938–40 and the theft laws of 1947 sent millions of ordinary workers to prison or corrective labour, often for minor offences. Absence or theft could mean years in a camp. These laws explain why most Gulag prisoners were not political prisoners, and why the camps kept growing after the Terror ended: the law itself produced prisoners.
Expectations the regime could not meet. The promise that “life has become better” raised hopes that housing, food and goods could not satisfy. After the war, veterans and workers expected rewards for victory, and the gap between promise and reality fuelled the grumbling recorded in police reports. Khrushchev’s housing programme of the late 1950s, the famous five-storey blocks, was a response to this backlog, an admission that the promise of 1935 had gone unmet for twenty years.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
To what extent did Stalin’s policies improve the lives of Soviet women?
The answer depends on which women, and which part of their lives, are measured. In the public sphere the gains were real: millions of women entered industry, education and the professions, female literacy rose sharply, and by 1940 women made up about two-fifths of industrial workers, with some becoming engineers, doctors and pilots. In the private sphere the picture is darker. Women carried a double burden of paid work and housework in a society of shortages; the 1936 decree removed the right to abortion and made divorce harder; and the wives of arrested men were themselves imprisoned in camps such as ALZhIR. Peasant women on collective farms and women of the deported nations gained little. Historians weigh this differently: Goldman stresses the state’s use of the family to cut its own costs, while Hoffmann sees a modernising mobilisation that used traditional forms. A balanced answer concludes that Stalinism expanded women’s opportunities as workers while restricting their choices as individuals. The transferable insight is that legal equality and real freedom can move in opposite directions under the same regime.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The census of January 1937, which Stalin personally reviewed, asked every adult a question that the regime soon regretted: “Are you a believer?” After nearly a decade of church closures and campaigns by the League of the Militant Godless, about 57 per cent of respondents aged 16 and over answered yes. Among peasant women the share was far higher. The figure was one reason the census was declared defective and suppressed. The religion question was never asked again in a Soviet census, and the results became known only after the archives opened in the early 1990s.
CHAPTER 10 · 1941–1945 · 1942
Stalin at War
The disaster of June 1941 grew partly from Stalin’s own decisions, and his recovery shows how the system worked under pressure. He had trusted the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the 1939 non-aggression treaty with Hitler, dismissed intelligence warnings as British provocations and forbidden actions that might provoke Hitler, so the Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, was caught unprepared along a new and unfortified border. In the first week German forces took Minsk, and witnesses describe Stalin withdrawing to his dacha, his country house outside Moscow. His colleagues came to him there on 30 June to propose a State Defence Committee, known as the GKO, a small war cabinet with power over every institution, with Stalin at its head. On 3 July he spoke to the country by radio, addressing listeners as “brothers and sisters”. Order No. 270 of August 1941 branded soldiers who surrendered as traitors and made their families liable to arrest. The state that had terrorised its people now asked them to save it, and combined that appeal with threats.
The evacuation of industry was the home front’s greatest feat, and the arrows on the map show its routes. A Council for Evacuation, created two days after the invasion, organised the dismantling of factories in Ukraine, Belarus, Leningrad and Moscow and their shipment east by rail, often under bombing. About 1,500 large enterprises were moved in July–November 1941 to the Urals, the Volga, western Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, together with millions of workers. Chelyabinsk received the Kirov works from Leningrad and the Kharkiv diesel plant and became “Tankograd”. Factories restarted in unheated sheds before walls and roofs were finished. The industrial base built in the Urals under the Five-Year Plans, the binding industrial targets set from 1928 much like a company’s five-year budget, made this possible, so the plans’ most costly choice became the war’s decisive asset.
Stalin’s war leadership combined ruthlessness with a growing willingness to delegate, and both shaped the outcome. When Rostov fell in July 1942, opening the way to the Caucasus, he issued Order No. 227, which created penal battalions, units of punished soldiers sent to the most dangerous sectors, and blocking detachments, rear units ordered to stop retreating troops by force. From late 1942 he relied more on professional commanders such as Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky, and the counter-offensive at Stalingrad, told in The War Room, turned the war. To rally the people he appealed to Russian history and faith: officers’ ranks and shoulder boards returned, and in September 1943 he allowed the Orthodox Church to elect a patriarch, its head, for the first time since 1925. By the time Stalin met Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in February 1945, the conference of the “Big Three” allied leaders, the Red Army’s advance had given him control of Eastern Europe. Victory cost 26 to 27 million Soviet lives, and the regime would present that sacrifice as proof that Stalin’s harsh methods had saved the country.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Stalin misjudged Hitler’s intentions. Stalin believed Germany would not attack while fighting Britain and treated warnings from his spies, from Churchill and from his own border commanders as provocations. He forbade measures that might give Hitler a pretext, so frontier units were not on alert on 22 June 1941, and much of the air force was destroyed on the ground that day. The Terror had also removed experienced officers and made subordinates afraid to contradict him, which helped turn a surprise into a catastrophe.
The industrial base of the 1930s. The Urals and Siberian plants built under the Five-Year Plans gave the Soviet Union an industrial heartland beyond the reach of German armies. The experience of building factories from nothing in the 1930s, and a planning system used to ordering resources around, made the evacuation of 1941 possible. Without Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk the losses in Ukraine, which had produced much of the Union’s coal, iron and steel, might have been fatal.
A system built for mobilisation. A state that controlled every factory, farm and newspaper could redirect the whole economy to war faster than a market economy. Rationing, labour conscription and the transfer of millions of workers were familiar tools from the 1930s. The same centralisation that produced waste in peacetime allowed the regime to concentrate on tanks, aircraft and shells once survival was at stake, so that by 1942 more than half of national output went to the war.
German brutality strengthened Soviet resistance. Nazi policy treated Soviet citizens as racial inferiors: prisoners of war were starved, villages burned, Jews murdered and civilians deported for labour. Some people in the newly annexed lands and among deported or persecuted groups first welcomed the Germans, but occupation soon taught most that the alternative to Stalin was worse. Resistance and partisan warfare grew as German rule hardened, so Nazi rule itself became one of the strongest arguments for defending Stalin’s state.
THE TURN
Kuibyshev and Moscow, October 1941. The decision of mid-October 1941 is the home front’s hinge because it settled whether the regime would survive its worst crisis. On 15 October the GKO ordered the government, foreign embassies and much of the bureaucracy to Kuibyshev on the Volga, and on 16 October panic swept Moscow as officials fled. Stalin chose to stay in the capital. A state of siege was declared on 19 October, and on 7 November troops paraded through Red Square straight to the front. His presence steadied the capital and the army at the moment when collapse seemed possible, and it became central to his wartime image.
WHAT IT CHANGED
Victory as the regime’s new legitimacy. The war became the strongest justification for Stalinism after 1945: collectivisation, the plans and even the purges were presented as harsh but necessary preparations for victory. Stalin’s toast of May 1945 to the Russian people as the leading nation of the Union set the tone. Memory of the war, and of sacrifice, remained central to Soviet and post-Soviet identity, and let the regime answer criticism of the 1930s by pointing to 1945.
An empire in Eastern Europe. The Red Army’s advance to Berlin left Soviet forces occupying Poland, eastern Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, and agreements at Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945 recognised Soviet interests there. Within three years communist governments loyal to Moscow ruled most of the region. The grey-tan satellites on the postwar map are the war’s political result, a buffer of dependent states between the Union and Germany.
Returning prisoners and new suspicions. Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans, forced labourers and those who had lived under occupation returned to a state that suspected them of disloyalty. More than four million repatriated people were screened by the NKVD in filtration camps, and many were sent to the Gulag or to labour battalions. The war thus refilled the camps it had emptied, and suspicion of anyone who had seen the West lasted until Stalin’s death.
A demographic wound and a ruined west. The loss of 26 to 27 million people, mostly young men, left a population with millions more women than men and a lower birth rate for decades. Germany’s retreat left 1,710 towns and some 70,000 villages destroyed, by Soviet count, and the famine of 1946–47 struck regions already exhausted by war. Reconstruction therefore dominated Stalin’s last years, and its costs fell again on the villages and the camps.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
How far was Stalin’s leadership responsible for the Soviet victory in 1945?
Stalin’s role cuts both ways, and the evidence suggests that his system mattered more than his personal decisions. His errors in 1941, ignoring warnings and forbidding retreats, contributed to catastrophic early losses, and the purges of 1937–38 had weakened the officer corps. Yet he stayed in Moscow in October 1941, learned to rely on able commanders like Zhukov after 1942, coordinated the war economy through the GKO and managed the alliance with Britain and the United States skilfully. Beyond Stalin himself, the industrial base built in the 1930s, the ability to evacuate and convert industry, the endurance of soldiers and workers, and Lend-Lease supplies all made victory possible, as did the brutality of German occupation that turned people against the invader. Historians such as Overy and Roberts credit Stalin with more than Khrushchev allowed, while Khlevniuk stresses the costs of his centralisation. A balanced answer argues that Stalin’s regime was well suited to total war and that Stalin both endangered and helped secure its victory. The broader lesson is that wartime success can legitimise a dictatorship regardless of the price its people paid.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Even Lenin’s body was evacuated in the war. In July 1941, as German armies advanced, it was secretly taken from the Mausoleum on Red Square and sent by special train to Tyumen in western Siberia, more than 2,000 kilometres east. There it was kept under guard in the building of the local agricultural technical college, together with the scientists who maintained it. The Mausoleum was disguised with camouflage, and parades in Red Square, including that of 7 November 1941, passed an empty tomb. The body returned to Moscow in 1945.
CHAPTER 11 · 1945–1953 · 1949
High Stalinism
At home the regime put reconstruction before relief, and the famine of 1946–47 shows the cost. A drought in 1946 hit Ukraine, Moldavia and the Volga, yet the state kept high procurement quotas, the grain each farm had to deliver, held large grain reserves and kept exporting grain to Eastern Europe. Estimates of the dead run from under 1 million to about 2 million, many of them in Moldavia, annexed only in 1940. New laws of June 1947 punished theft of state property with up to 25 years in camps, and the Gulag, the forced-labour camp system, reached its peak of about 2.5 million prisoners. The state rebuilt Ukraine’s mines and the Dnieper dam within a few years, while millions still lived in dugouts, which shows what the regime valued.
Stalin’s last years saw a series of campaigns against ideas and against people. In August 1946 a party resolution condemned the Leningrad journals Zvezda and Leningrad and drove the poet Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko out of literary life. It opened the Zhdanovshchina, a campaign named after the party secretary Andrei Zhdanov to force writers and artists back to the party line, much as a censor vets every script. Composers such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev were attacked in 1948 for “formalism”, the party’s charge against art it judged too experimental for ordinary people, and the agronomist Trofim Lysenko had genetics banned the same year. From 1949 a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” targeted Jewish intellectuals, and members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were shot in 1952. The Leningrad Affair of 1949–50, a purge of leaders who had risen in wartime Leningrad, ended in the execution of the party secretary Aleksei Kuznetsov, the chief planner Nikolai Voznesensky and others. The Doctors’ Plot, a fabricated charge announced on 13 January 1953 that Kremlin doctors had murdered Soviet leaders, suggested worse to come. Because each campaign named a new enemy within just as the Cold War hardened, a regime more secure than ever behaved as if it were under siege.
Abroad, Stalin built an empire of satellite states, nominally independent countries run from Moscow, and its edges are where his power met its limits. Communist parties backed by the Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, took power in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary between 1945 and 1948, and in Czechoslovakia by a coup in February 1948. The Cominform, a bureau of European communist parties founded in 1947, worked as Moscow’s channel of command to them. Yugoslavia, expelled in June 1948 when Tito resisted Soviet direction, survived as the first communist state to defy Moscow. Stalin’s blockade of West Berlin in 1948–49 failed and helped create NATO, the Western defensive alliance, and a West German state. Resistance continued in the borderlands: the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought on until the early 1950s, and the Baltic “forest brothers”, guerrillas who lived in the woods, like wartime resistance fighters, lost about 20,000 men in Lithuania alone. Operation Priboi in March 1949 deported about 95,000 people from the Baltic states, as the arrows show, which broke the partisans by removing their support.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Victory confirmed Stalin’s methods. The war appeared to prove that the collective farms, the plans and the purges had made the country strong enough to survive. Stalin had no reason to change a system that had won, and every reason to restore the controls that had loosened during the fighting, when peasants had expanded private plots and soldiers had seen how Europeans lived. The regime now treated such contacts as a source of dangerous comparisons.
The Cold War revived the fear of enemies. The breakdown of the wartime alliance in 1946–47, the Marshall Plan and the American atomic monopoly convinced Stalin that the capitalist powers were again preparing for war. Churchill’s Fulton speech of March 1946 and the Truman Doctrine of 1947 confirmed this reading for Stalin. Contacts with the West became suspect, and anyone with foreign connections, from returning prisoners of war to Jewish intellectuals with relatives abroad, could be treated as a potential spy.
Reconstruction demanded sacrifice. The war had destroyed much of the western Soviet Union, and the Fourth Five-Year Plan of 1946–50 gave priority to steel, coal, electricity and arms, including the atomic bomb. Food, housing and consumer goods again came last. The famine of 1946–47 and the harsh labour and theft laws followed from the decision to rebuild heavy industry first, so the population again paid for the state’s priorities as it had in the 1930s.
The new borderlands rejected Soviet rule. The lands annexed in 1939–40 had lived under Soviet rule for less than two years before the German invasion and resented the deportations of 1940–41. After 1944 armed nationalist movements, forced collectivisation and the arrival of Russian-speaking officials and settlers made them the most rebellious regions of the Union, and the regime treated them as zones of counter-insurgency long after the war had ended elsewhere. Deportation became its main weapon there.
THE TURN
Tito’s expulsion, 28 June 1948. The expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform is the hinge of High Stalinism because it was the first successful defiance of Stalin from within the communist world. Tito had his own army, his own revolution and popular support, and he survived Soviet threats and economic blockade. Stalin’s response showed what the empire had become: show trials of alleged Titoists in Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, including those of László Rajk in 1949 and Rudolf Slánský in 1952, and tighter Soviet control over the satellites. The break proved that Soviet power rested on the Red Army, which would matter again in Hungary in 1956.
WHAT IT CHANGED
An empire held by force. The satellite states of Eastern Europe remained under Soviet control until 1989, but the methods used to install them, rigged elections, purges and Soviet advisers in their security services, left them without popular legitimacy, and their leaders knew it. Revolts in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 followed, because what force had installed only force could keep.
The Gulag at its height. Postwar theft laws, repatriated prisoners of war, insurgents from the borderlands and new waves of arrests drove the camp population to about 2.5 million by 1950–53, with another 2.7 million special settlers. The camps had become too large and too costly, and after Stalin’s death their own officials and his successors moved quickly to shrink them, which shows that even the regime saw the camps as a burden.
A frightened leadership waiting for change. Stalin’s heirs, Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin, had all seen colleagues destroyed and feared being next. The Doctors’ Plot and the purge of Molotov and Mikoyan in 1952 suggested a new round of terror. When Stalin died in March 1953, his colleagues acted within weeks to release the doctors and reduce the camps, which shows how much they had wanted change.
Nuclear power and a frozen society. The atomic bomb of 1949 made the Soviet Union a superpower and justified the secrecy and mobilisation of the late Stalin years. The same years froze culture and science, as Lysenko’s rejection of genetics damaged Soviet biology and agriculture for a generation. The postwar settlement left a powerful state and a constrained society, a combination that shaped the next forty years.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Was High Stalinism a continuation of the terror of the 1930s, or a different kind of dictatorship?
The evidence supports a qualified view: the system kept the tools of the 1930s but used them differently. Mass repression continued, since the Gulag reached its largest size, theft laws imprisoned millions and deportations broke resistance in the borderlands. Famine was again allowed to kill in 1946–47. Yet there was no repeat of 1937–38: elite violence was targeted at specific groups, such as the Leningrad leaders and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and Gorlizki and Khlevniuk show that ordinary government became more routine and bureaucratic. Stalin’s personal power was, if anything, greater, and the cult reached its peak in 1949, but he governed through fear of possible purges more than through mass killing at the top. The Doctors’ Plot suggests he might have launched a new terror had he lived longer, though historians disagree on how far it would have gone. A good answer distinguishes repression of society, which remained massive, from terror within the elite, which was threatened more than practised. The transferable lesson is that dictatorships often stabilise by keeping fear in reserve, using it against a few to discipline the many.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The first Soviet atomic bomb, tested on 29 August 1949 at the Semipalatinsk site in Kazakhstan, was a close copy of the American “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Its design had been passed to Soviet intelligence by the physicist Klaus Fuchs, who worked at Los Alamos, and the project’s scientific director, Igor Kurchatov, chose to build a proven copy first to avoid any risk of failure while Beria watched. A Soviet design followed in 1951. Western intelligence had expected a Soviet bomb no earlier than the early 1950s, so the test shocked Washington and helped push the United States towards the hydrogen bomb.
EPILOGUE · 1953–1956 · 1956
Death and Judgement
Stalin’s death exposed how his colleagues had experienced his rule. On 1 March 1953 he suffered a stroke at his dacha, or country house, at Kuntsevo outside Moscow and lay for hours before doctors were called, because his guards feared to disturb him; he died on 5 March. His successors, Georgy Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov and Nikolai Bulganin, at once formed a collective leadership, rule by a committee of supposed equals, and moved quickly. The amnesty of 27 March freed about 1.2 million prisoners, mostly those with short sentences, and on 4 April the Doctors’ Plot, the charge that Kremlin doctors had murdered Soviet leaders, was declared a fabrication. In June the others arrested Beria, fearing that his control of the police made him a new Stalin, and he was shot in December. The speed of these changes shows that Stalin’s heirs had wanted reform for years and had not dared to propose it.
Prisoners pushed the change further, and the strikes marked on the map show the last crisis of the Gulag, the system of forced-labour camps. Political prisoners, many of them former soldiers and partisans from the western borderlands, had been concentrated after 1948 in “special camps”, strict-regime camps for political prisoners, and they were younger, better organised and less afraid than the prisoners of the 1930s. When the amnesty excluded them, strikes broke out at Norilsk in May 1953 and Vorkuta in July, and in May 1954 prisoners at Kengir in Kazakhstan held their camp for forty days before tanks stormed it on 26 June. The strikers asked for reviews of their sentences, shorter working days and the right to write home. The camps’ population fell from about 2.5 million in 1953 to under a million by the late 1950s, and commissions began to free political prisoners. The system that had seemed permanent was shown to depend on the will of one man.
The Secret Speech of 25 February 1956 tried to save the system by blaming its founder. Speaking for four hours, Khrushchev read Lenin’s Testament aloud, described the torture of loyal communists and the deportations of whole peoples, and mocked Stalin’s wartime leadership. He dated the crimes from 1934, which left the forced collectivisation of farming, the famines and the defeat of the oppositions outside the charge and protected the party and the men who had served Stalin, including himself. The speech was soon read in party meetings across the Union and leaked abroad; in Tbilisi, students protesting in Stalin’s defence were fired on in March 1956. In Poland and Hungary it encouraged demands for reform, and on 4 November Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution, as the last arrow shows. De-Stalinisation, the dismantling of Stalin’s cult and his worst methods, ended where it threatened Soviet power, which reveals the limits of a judgement passed by Stalin’s own heirs.
WHY IT HAPPENED
The system depended on one man. Stalin had concentrated power so completely that his death removed the force holding the system’s extremes in place. His colleagues had approved and carried out his policies, but they had also feared him and privately doubted many of them. Once he was gone, no one had the authority or the wish to continue mass terror, and a collective leadership replaced personal rule within days, because none of his heirs could claim his authority.
The Gulag had become too large and too costly. The camp system had grown so large that it cost more than it produced: by 1953 the camps held about 2.5 million prisoners and the special settlements about 2.7 million more. Gulag officials and economic ministers knew that forced labour was unproductive and expensive to guard, and Beria himself proposed cutting it. Releasing prisoners and ending giant projects such as the Arctic railway from Salekhard to Igarka saved money as well as easing fear.
Prisoners and borderlands had stopped being afraid. Many of the political prisoners of the 1950s were former soldiers and partisans who had fought and were used to organising. Concentrated in special camps, they formed networks across national lines and refused to work when the amnesty passed them by. Their strikes forced the authorities to choose between massacres and reforms; Kengir was crushed by tanks in June 1954, but elsewhere the leadership mostly chose reforms, which showed that the camps could no longer be run by fear alone.
Stalin’s heirs needed a new legitimacy. Khrushchev and his colleagues had to explain why the system they ran had killed so many loyal communists. Blaming Stalin personally, and dating the crimes from 1934, allowed them to condemn the Terror while keeping the party, collectivisation and the planned economy. The Secret Speech also helped Khrushchev against rivals such as Molotov and Malenkov, who were more closely tied to the worst years, so condemning Stalin served Khrushchev’s own climb as well as the party’s need for a new start.
THE TURN
The Secret Speech, 25 February 1956. Khrushchev’s speech is the hinge of the epilogue because it turned Stalin from infallible leader into official criminal within the communist world, and because its limits defined everything that followed. By naming the torture of loyal communists and the deportation of nations, it made rehabilitation and the return of prisoners official policy. By leaving out collectivisation and the famines and blaming one man, it protected the system and its leaders. Its effects outran its intentions, reaching Polish and Hungarian streets within months, and Soviet tanks then marked the boundary that the party would not let de-Stalinisation cross.
WHAT IT CHANGED
The return of the prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were released between 1954 and 1960, and many were formally rehabilitated, often after death. Their return, which the historian Stephen F. Cohen called “the victims return”, brought survivors face to face with the colleagues and neighbours who had denounced them. Literature such as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) briefly allowed the camps to be described in print.
Restored homelands, for some. The homelands were restored only in part. In 1957 the Chechen-Ingush, Kalmyk, Karachay and Balkar autonomies were restored and their peoples allowed to return. The Volga Germans were cleared of collective guilt in 1964 but never regained their republic, and the Crimean Tatars, whose homeland the 1956 map still hatches, could return only in 1989, which shows how long the state took to admit it had wronged whole nations.
Revolt and repression in the bloc. The speech encouraged reformers in Eastern Europe. In Poland, protests in June 1956 led to the return of Władysław Gomułka without Soviet invasion, but in Hungary a revolution in October was crushed by Soviet forces on 4 November, with about 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers killed. The crisis showed that de-Stalinisation in the bloc could change leaders but could never be allowed to take a country out of the Soviet alliance.
An unfinished reckoning. Stalin’s body was removed from the Mausoleum in 1961, and cities named after him were renamed, Stalingrad becoming Volgograd. Yet the reckoning stopped short of the system itself, and under Brezhnev criticism was muted again. Only in the late 1980s did the full history of the famines, the Terror and the camps become public, and debate over Stalin’s legacy continues in the states that emerged in 1991.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Was Stalinism the creation of one man, or of the Soviet system and society?
The archives make it impossible to remove Stalin from the centre. He launched collectivisation, approved the famine measures, ordered the Terror and its quotas, signed execution lists and decided the deportations of nations, and his death ended mass terror within weeks. Yet one man could not run a state of 170 million people. The party Lenin built, with its ban on factions and its secret police, gave Stalin his tools, and Marxist-Leninist ideology gave him a language in which class enemies and saboteurs had to be destroyed. Millions of officials, police, activists and neighbours carried out policies, sometimes from conviction, sometimes from fear or ambition. Social historians show that society also shaped Stalinism, through resistance that forced retreats and support that sustained the regime. A strong answer gives Stalin decisive responsibility for the regime’s choices while explaining the structures and people that turned those choices into reality. The transferable insight is that dictatorships are personal in their decisions and collective in their execution, which is why their crimes outlive the dictator in the institutions and memories they leave.
AN INTERESTING FACT
Stalin did not stay long beside Lenin. After his death his embalmed body was placed in the Mausoleum on Red Square, renamed the Lenin–Stalin Mausoleum. In October 1961, at the Twenty-Second Party Congress, an elderly Bolshevik named Dora Lazurkina, who had spent years in the camps, told the delegates that Lenin had appeared to her in a dream and said he did not like lying next to Stalin. The congress voted to remove the body, and on the night of 31 October it was taken out and buried beside the Kremlin wall under a layer of concrete, while the name on the Mausoleum reverted to Lenin alone.