Stalinism

Part of a series on
Stalinism
show Concepts Aggravation of class struggle under socialism Anti-revisionism Collectivization Cult of personality Great Break Marxism–Leninism Popular front Self-criticism Socialism in one country Soviet socialist patriotism
show People Joseph Stalin Bolesław Bierut Mátyás Rákosi Walter Ulbricht Valko Chervenkov Enver Hoxha Kim Il-sung Nicolae Ceauşescu
show Theoretical works Foundations of Leninism The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Dialectical and Historical Materialism Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR Fundamentals of Marxism–Leninism
show History Soviet Union 1927–1953 Great Break Collectivisation in the Soviet Union Industrialisation in the Soviet Union Great Purge Spanish Civil War Great Patriotic War Greek Civil War Cold War Eastern Bloc Chinese Revolution First Indochina War Korean War Doctors' plot
show Parties All-Union Communist Party Bolsheviks Albanian Party of Labour Communist Party of New Zealand Communist Party of Vietnam Communist Party of Romania Communist Party of the Russian Federation National Bolshevik Party The Other Russia Stalin Bloc — For the USSR
show Related topics Anti-Stalinist left De-Stalinization Rise of Joseph Stalin Stalin and antisemitism Stalin era Stalin Society Stalinist architecture Neo-Stalinism Great Purge Hoxhaism Maoism National Bolshevism National communism Patriotism Red fascism Sino-Albanian split Sino–Soviet split Soviet–Albanian split Tito–Stalin split Totalitarianism
Communism portal  Socialism portal  Politics portal
v t

Part of a series on
Marxism–Leninism
show Concepts Administrative-command system Anti-fascism Anti-imperialism Anti-revisionism Central planning Soviet-type economic planning Collective leadership Collectivization Commanding heights of the economy Democratic centralism Dialectical logic Dialectical materialism Foco Intensification of the class struggle under socialism Labour aristocracy Marxist–Leninist atheism One-party state Partiinost' People's democracy Popular front Proletarian internationalism Protracted people's war Self-criticism Social fascism Socialism in one country Socialist patriotism Soviet Yugoslav State Socialist Theory of the productive forces Third Period Vanguardism Wars of national liberation
show Variants Castroism Guevarism Ho Chi Minh Thought Hoxhaism Husakism Juche Kadarism Khrushchevism Maoism Socialism with Chinese characteristics Stalinism Titoism
show People Joseph Stalin Mao Zedong Ernst Thälmann Khorloogiin Choibalsan Ehmetjan Qasim José Díaz Maurice Thorez Palmiro Togliatti Ho Chi Minh Võ Nguyên Giáp Earl Browder Nikita Khrushchev Walter Ulbricht Josip Broz Tito Mátyás Rákosi Lazar Kaganovich Georgi Dimitrov Bolesław Bierut Valko Chervenkov Klement Gottwald Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej Enver Hoxha Kaysone Phomvihane Khalid Bakdash Leonid Brezhnev Deng Xiaoping Pol Pot Nikos Zachariadis Che Guevara Fidel Castro Agostinho Neto Mengistu Haile Mariam Kim Il-sung Chin Peng Hardial Bains Sanzō Nosaka Nicolae Ceaușescu Gustáv Husák János Kádár Erich Honecker Władysław Gomułka Samora Machel Thomas Sankara Mathieu Kérékou Siad Barre Nur Muhammad Taraki Alfonso Cano Rohana Wijeweera Gus Hall Harpal Brar Gennady Zyuganov Xi Jinping
show Theoretical works Foundations of Leninism Dialectical and Historical Materialism The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR A Critique of Soviet Economics Fundamentals of Marxism–Leninism Guerrilla Warfare Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung President Ho Chi Minh's Testament The Governance of China
show History Soviet Union 1927–1953 1953–1964 1964–1982 1982–1991 Great Break Collectivization in the Soviet Union Industrialization in the Soviet Union Great Purge Spanish Civil War World War II Great Patriotic War Greek Civil War Cold War Eastern Bloc Chinese Revolution China 1949–1976 1976–1989 1989–2002 2002–present Korean War Cuban Revolution aftermath De-Stalinization Warsaw Pact Non-Aligned Movement Vietnam War Sino-Soviet split Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Great Leap Forward Portuguese Colonial War Black Power movement Nicaraguan Revolution Cultural Revolution Prague Spring Naxalite insurgency Revolutions of 1989
show By country Afghanistan Albania Angola Benin Bulgaria Cambodia China Congo Cuba Czechoslovakia Czechia Slovakia East Germany Ethiopia Granada Hungary Laos Mongolia Mozambique North Korea Poland Romania Somalia South Yemen Soviet Union Armenia Azerbaijan Byelarus Estonia Georgia Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Latvia Lithuania Moldova Russia Tajikistan Turkmenistan Ukraine Uzbekistan Vietnam Yugoslavia Bosnia and Herzegovina Croatia Macedonia Montenegro Serbia Slovenia
show Organizations Comecon Comintern Chinese Communist Party Communist Party of Cuba Communist Party of India Communist Party of Kampuchea Communist Party of the Russian Federation Communist Party of the Soviet Union Communist Party of Vietnam French Communist Party Indochinese Communist Party Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party Lao People's Revolutionary Party Nepal Communist Party Party of Labour of Albania Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Sandinista National Liberation Front Workers' Party of Korea
show Related topics Bolshevism Leninism Marxism–Leninism–Maoism Trotskyism
show See also All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Anti-communism Mass killings Cold War Crimes against humanity under communist regimes Mass killings Criticism of communist party rule Cult of personality Marxist schools of thought National Bolshevism New class Post-communism Red fascism Red Scare Second Second World State capitalism State socialism State ideology of China State ideology of the Soviet Union Third-Worldism Totalitarianism
Communism portal  Politics portal  Socialism portal
v t

Stalinism is the means of governing and policies which were implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of the class struggle under socialism, a cult of personality,^[1][2] and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time.^[3]

Stalin's regime forcibly purged society of what it saw as threats to itself and its brand of communism (so-called "enemies of the people"), which included political dissidents, non-Soviet nationalists, the bourgeoisie, better-off peasants ("kulaks"),^[4] and those of the working class who demonstrated "counter-revolutionary" sympathies.^[5] This resulted in mass repression of such people as well as their families, including mass arrests, show trials, executions, and imprisonment in forced labor and concentration camps known as gulags.^[6] The most notable examples of this were the Great Purge and the Dekulakization campaign. Stalinism was also marked by mass religious persecution,^[7][8] and ethnic cleansing through forced deportations.^[9] Some historians such as Robert Service have blamed Stalinist policies, particularly the collectivization policies, for causing famines such as the Holodomor.^[7] Other historians and scholars disagree on the role of Stalinism.^[10]

Officially designed to accelerate development towards communism, the need for industrialization in the Soviet Union was emphasized because the Soviet Union had previously fallen behind economically compared to Western countries, and that socialist society needed industry to face the challenges posed by internal and external enemies of communism.^[11]:70–71 Rapid industrialization was accompanied by mass collectivization of agriculture and by rapid urbanization, the latter of which converted many small villages into industrial cities.^[11]:70–79 To accelerate the development of industrialization, Stalin imported materials, ideas, expertise, and workers from western Europe and the United States,^[12] pragmatically setting up joint-venture contracts with major American private enterprises such as the Ford Motor Company, which, under state supervision, assisted in developing the basis of the industry of the Soviet economy from the late 1920s to the 1930s.^[13] After the American private enterprises had completed their tasks, Soviet state enterprises took over.^[13]

History[]

Stalinism is used to describe the period during which Joseph Stalin was leader of the Soviet Union while serving as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to his death on 5 March 1953.^[14]

Etymology[]

Joseph Stalin, after which Stalinism is named, referring to his doctrines and policies implemented (1927–1953)

The term Stalinism came into prominence during the mid-1930s when Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician and associate of Stalin, reportedly declared: "Let's replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism!"^[15] Stalin dismissed this as excessively praiseful and contributing to a cult of personality.^[15]

Stalinist policies[]

Modified photo intended to show Vladimir Lenin with Stalin in the early 1920s^[16][17]

Members of the Communist Party of China celebrating Stalin's birthday in 1949

While some historians view Stalinism as a reflection of the ideologies of Leninism and Marxism, some argue that it stands separate from the socialist ideals it stemmed from. After a political struggle that culminated in the defeat of the Bukharinists (the "Party's Right Tendency"), Stalinism was free to shape policy without opposition, ushering forth an era of harsh authoritarianism that worked toward rapid industrialization regardless of the cost.^[18]

From 1917 to 1924, though often appearing united, Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky had discernible ideological differences. In his dispute with Trotsky, Stalin de-emphasized the role of workers in advanced capitalist countries (e.g. he considered the American working-class "bourgeoisified" labor aristocracy). Stalin also polemicized against Trotsky on the role of peasants as in China, whereas Trotsky's position was in favor of urban insurrection over peasant-based guerrilla warfare.^{[dubious – discuss][citation needed]}

All other October Revolution 1917 Bolshevik leaders regarded their revolution more or less just as the beginning, with Russia as the springboard on the road towards the World Wide Revolution. Stalin would eventually introduce the idea of socialism in one country by the autumn of 1924, a theory not only standing in sharp contrast to Trotsky's permanent revolution but to all earlier socialistic theses just as well. The revolution, however, did not spread outside of Russia as Lenin had assumed it soon would. Not even within other former territories of the Russian Empire―such as Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia―had the revolution been a success. On the contrary, all of these countries had returned to capitalist bourgeois rule.^[19]

Despite this, by the autumn of 1924, Stalin's notion of socialism in Soviet Russia was initially considered next to blasphemy in the ears of other Politburo members, including Zinoviev and Kamenev to the intellectual left; Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky to the pragmatic right; and the powerful Trotsky, who belonged to no side but his own. None would even think of Stalin's concept as a potential addition to communist ideology. Stalin's socialism in one country doctrine could not be imposed until he, himself, had become close to being the autocratic ruler of the Soviet Union around 1929. Bukharin and the Right Opposition expressed their support for imposing Stalin's ideas, as Trotsky had been exiled, whereas Zinoviev and Kamenev had been thrown out of the party.^[20]

Proletarian state[]

Traditional communist thought holds that the state will gradually "wither away", as the implementation of socialism reduces class distinction. However, Stalin argued that the proletarian state (as opposed to the bourgeois state) must become stronger before it can wither away. In Stalin's view, counter-revolutionary elements will attempt to derail the transition to full communism, and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them. For this reason, Communist regimes influenced by Stalin have been widely described as totalitarian.^[21]

Sheng Shicai, a Chinese warlord with Communist leanings, invited Soviet intervention and allowed Stalinist rule to be extended to the Xinjiang province in the 1930s. In 1937, Sheng conducted a purge similar to the Great Purge, imprisoning, torturing, and killing about 100,000 people, many of whom were Uyghurs.^[22][23]

Class-based violence[]

Stalin blamed the kulaks as the inciters of reactionary violence against the people during the implementation of agricultural collectivisation.^[24] In response, the state under Stalin's leadership initiated a violent campaign against the kulaks. This kind of campaign would later be known as classicide,^[25] though several international legislatures have passed resolutions declaring the campaign a genocide.^[26] However, some historians dispute that these actions constitute genocide.^[27][28][29]

Purges and executions[]

Left: Lavrenty Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the Communist Party and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities"
Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (support)
Right: the Politburo's decision is signed by Stalin

As head of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that claimed to expel "opportunists" and "counter-revolutionary infiltrators."^[30][31] Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, though more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.^[30][32][33]

In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party head Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes (the fewest of any candidate) while Stalin received at least over a hundred negative votes.^[34][i] After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev.^[35] From thereon, the investigations and trials expanded.^[36] Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts" that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys or appeals, followed by a sentence to be executed "quickly."^[37]

Thereafter, several trials, known as the Moscow Trials, were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as a counter-revolutionary crime, was applied in the broadest manner.^[38] Many alleged anti-Soviet pretexts were used to brand individuals as "enemies of the people", starting the cycle of public persecution, often proceeding to interrogation, torture, and deportation, if not death. The Russian word troika thereby gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD troika—with sentencing carried out within 24 hours.^[37] Stalin's hand-picked executioner Vasili Blokhin was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period.^[39]

Many military leaders were convicted of treason, and a large-scale purge of Red Army officers followed.^[ii] The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin.^[41] In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937—this eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership.^[42] With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenin's original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.^{[citation needed]}

Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities) such as Poles, ethnic Germans, and Koreans. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed.^{[43][page needed]} Many Americans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union during the worst of the Great Depression were executed, while others were sent to prison camps or gulags.^[44][45] Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed into a story about just two key characters, i.e. Lenin and Stalin.^{[citation needed]}

In light of revelations from Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and 328,612 in 1938) were executed in the course of the terror,^[46] with the great mass of victims merely "ordinary" Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, and beggars.^[47][48]:4 Many of the executed were interred in mass graves, with some of the major killing and burial sites being Bykivnia, Kurapaty, and Butovo.^[49]

"Wall of sorrow" at the first exhibition of the victims of Stalinism in Moscow, 19 November 1988

Some Western experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete or unreliable.^{[50][51][52][53][54]} Conversely, historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, who spent a good portion of his academic career researching the archives, contends that, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives for historical research, "our understanding of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been extremely poor" and that some specialists who wish to maintain earlier high estimates of the Stalinist death toll are "finding it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open and when there are plenty of irrefutable data" and instead "hang on to their old Sovietological methods with round-about calculations based on odd statements from emigres and other informants who are supposed to have superior knowledge."^[55][56]

Stalin personally signed 357 proscription lists in 1937 and 1938 that condemned to execute some 40,000 people, about 90% of whom are confirmed to have been shot.^[57] At the time, while reviewing one such list, he reportedly muttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one."^[58] In addition, Stalin dispatched a contingent of NKVD operatives to Mongolia, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika, and unleashed a bloody purge in which tens of thousands were executed as "Japanese spies", as Mongolian ruler Khorloogiin Choibalsan closely followed Stalin's lead.^[48]:2

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet leadership sent NKVD squads into other countries to murder defectors and other opponents of the Soviet regime. Victims of such plots included Yevhen Konovalets, Ignace Poretsky, Rudolf Klement, Alexander Kutepov, Evgeny Miller, Leon Trotsky, and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) leadership in Catalonia (e.g. Andréu Nin Pérez).^[59]

Deportations[]

Shortly before, during, and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a broad-scale series of deportations that profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule, and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations. Individual circumstances of those spending time in German-occupied territories were not examined. After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus, the entire population of five of the small highland peoples and the Crimean Tatars—more than a million people in total—were deported without notice or any opportunity to take their possessions.^[60]

As a result of Stalin's lack of trust in the loyalty of particular ethnicities, ethnic groups such as the Soviet Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and many Poles, were forcibly moved out of strategic areas and relocated to places in the central Soviet Union, especially Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of deportees may have died en route.^[61] It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million^[61][62] were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates, up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.^[63]

According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the gulags from 1929 to 1953, with a further 7 to 8 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including entire nationalities in several cases).^[64] The emergent scholarly consensus is that from 1930 to 1953, around 1.5 to 1.7 million perished in the gulag system.^[65][66][67]

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninism and reversed most of them, although it was not until 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhetians, and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations has played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic states, Tatarstan and Chechnya even today.^{[citation needed]}

Economic policy[]

Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933

At the start of the 1930s, Stalin launched a wave of radical economic policies that completely overhauled the industrial and agricultural face of the Soviet Union. This came to be known as the Great Turn as Russia turned away from the near-capitalist New Economic Policy (NEP) and instead adopted a command economy. The NEP had been implemented by Lenin in order to ensure the survival of the socialist state following seven years of war (World War I, 1914–1917, and the subsequent Civil War, 1917–1921) and had rebuilt Soviet production to its 1913 levels. However, Russia still lagged far behind the West, and the NEP was felt by Stalin and the majority of the Communist Party, not only to be compromising communist ideals but also not delivering sufficient economic performance as well as not creating the envisaged socialist society. It was felt necessary to increase the pace of industrialization in order to catch up with the West.^{[citation needed]}

Fredric Jameson has said that "Stalinism was…a success and fulfilled its historic mission, socially as well as economically" given that it "modernized the Soviet Union, transforming a peasant society into an industrial state with a literate population and a remarkable scientific superstructure."^[68] Robert Conquest disputed such a conclusion, noting that "Russia had already been fourth to fifth among industrial economies before World War I" and that Russian industrial advances could have been achieved without collectivization, famine, or terror. According to Conquest, the industrial successes were far less than claimed, and the Soviet-style industrialization was "an anti-innovative dead-end."^[69] Stephen Kotkin said those who argue collectivization was necessary are "dead wrong", arguing that such "only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology and its repudiation of capitalism. And economically, collectivization failed to deliver." Kotkin further claimed that it decreased harvests instead of increasing them.^[70]

According to several Western historians,^[71] Stalinist agricultural policies were a key factor in causing the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, which the Ukrainian government now calls the Holodomor, recognizing it as an act of genocide. Some scholars dispute the intentionality of the famine.^[72][73]

Relationship to Leninism[]

Stalin considered the political and economic system under his rule to be Marxism–Leninism, which he considered the only legitimate successor of Marxism and Leninism. The historiography of Stalin is diverse, with many different aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the regimes Stalin and Lenin proposed. Some historians, such as Richard Pipes, consider Stalinism as the natural consequence of Leninism, that Stalin "faithfully implemented Lenin's domestic and foreign policy programs."^[74] Robert Service notes that "institutionally and ideologically Lenin laid the foundations for a Stalin [...] but the passage from Leninism to the worse terrors of Stalinism was not smooth and inevitable."^[75] Likewise, historian and Stalin biographer Edvard Radzinsky believes that Stalin was a real follower of Lenin, exactly as he claimed himself.^[76] Another Stalin biographer, Stephen Kotkin, wrote that "his violence was not the product of his subconscious but of the Bolshevik engagement with Marxist–Leninist ideology."^[77]

Dmitri Volkogonov, who wrote biographies of both Lenin and Stalin, explained that during the 1960s through 1980s an official patriotic Soviet de-Stalinized view of the Lenin–Stalin relationship (i.e. during the Khrushchev Thaw and later) was that the overly-autocratic Stalin had distorted the Leninism of the wise dedushka Lenin. However, Volkogonov also lamented that this view eventually dissolved for those like him who had the scales fall from their eyes in the years immediately before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After researching the biographies in the Soviet archives, he came to the same conclusion as Radzinsky and Kotkin, i.e. that Lenin had built a culture of violent autocratic totalitarianism, of which Stalinism was a logical extension. He lamented that, while Stalin had long since fallen in the estimation of many Soviet minds (the many who agreed with de-Stalinization), "Lenin was the last bastion" in Volkogonov's mind to fall and the fall was the most painful, given the secular apotheosis of Lenin that all Soviet children grew up with.^{[citation needed]}

Proponents of continuity cite a variety of contributory factors, in that it was Lenin, rather than Stalin, whose civil war measures introduced the Red Terror with its hostage-taking and internment camps; that it was Lenin who developed the infamous Article 58 and who established the autocratic system within the Communist Party.^[78] They also note that Lenin put a ban on factions within the Russian Communist Party and introduced the one-party state in 1921—a move that enabled Stalin to get rid of his rivals easily after Lenin's death and cite Felix Dzerzhinsky, who, during the Bolshevik struggle against opponents in the Russian Civil War, exclaimed: "We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly stated."^[79]

Opponents of this view include revisionist historians and a number of post-Cold War and otherwise dissident Soviet historians including Roy Medvedev, who argues that although "one could list the various measures carried out by Stalin that were actually a continuation of anti-democratic trends and measures implemented under Lenin…in so many ways, Stalin acted, not in line with Lenin's clear instructions, but in defiance of them."^[80] In doing so, some historians have tried to distance Stalinism from Leninism in order to undermine the totalitarian view that the negative facets of Stalin were inherent in communism from the start.^[81] Critics of this kind include anti-Stalinist communists such as Leon Trotsky, who pointed out that Lenin attempted to persuade the Communist Party to remove Stalin from his post as its General Secretary. Lenin's Testament, the document which contained this order, was suppressed after Lenin's death. In his biography of Trotsky, British historian Isaac Deutscher says that, on being faced with the evidence, "only the blind and the deaf could be unaware of the contrast between Stalinism and Leninism."^[82]

A similar analysis is present in more recent works such as those of , who argues that "[Stalinism was] not a natural flow-on of earlier developments; [it formed a] sharp break resulting from conscious decisions by leading political actors."^[83] However, Gill notes that "difficulties with the use of the term reflect problems with the concept of Stalinism itself. The major difficulty is a lack of agreement about what should constitute Stalinism."^[84] Revisionist historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick have criticized the focus upon the upper levels of society and the use of Cold War concepts such as totalitarianism which have obscured the reality of the system.^[85]

Legacy[]

Stalin statue in front of the Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori

Pierre du Bois argues that the cult was elaborately constructed to legitimize his rule. Many deliberate distortions and falsehoods were used.^[86] The Kremlin refused access to archival records that might reveal the truth, and key documents were destroyed. Photographs were altered, and documents were invented.^[87] People who knew Stalin were forced to provide "official" accounts to meet the ideological demands of the cult, especially as Stalin himself presented it in 1938 in Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which became the official history.^[88] Historian David L. Hoffmann sums up the consensus of scholars: "The Stalin cult was a central element of Stalinism, and as such, it was one of the most salient features of Soviet rule. [...] Many scholars of Stalinism cite the cult as integral to Stalin's power or as evidence of Stalin's megalomania."^[89]

However, after Stalin's death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev repudiated his policies and condemned Stalin's cult of personality in his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 as well as instituting de-Stalinization and relative liberalization (within the same political framework). Consequently, some of the world's communist parties who previously adhered to Stalinism abandoned it, and to a greater or lesser degree adopted the positions of Khrushchev. Others such as the Chinese Communist Party chose to split from the Soviet Union, resulting in the Sino-Soviet split. The ousting of Khrushchev in 1964 by his former party-state allies has been described as a Stalinist restoration by some, epitomized by the Brezhnev Doctrine and the apparatchik/nomenklatura "stability of cadres", lasting until the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union.^{[citation needed]}

Maoism and Hoxhaism[]

Mao Zedong famously declared that Stalin was 70% good, 30% bad. Maoists criticized Stalin chiefly regarding his view that bourgeois influence within the Soviet Union was primarily a result of external forces, to the almost complete exclusion of internal forces, and his view that class contradictions ended after the basic construction of socialism. However, they praised Stalin for leading the Soviet Union and the international proletariat, defeating fascism in Germany and his anti-revisionism.^[90]

British prime minister Winston Churchill, United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin, the Big Three Allied leaders during World War II at the Yalta Conference in February 1945

Taking the side of the Chinese Communist Party in the Sino-Soviet split, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania remained committed at least theoretically to its own brand of Stalinism (Hoxhaism) for decades thereafter under the leadership of Enver Hoxha. Despite their initial cooperation against "revisionism", Hoxha denounced Mao as a revisionist, along with almost every other self-identified communist organization in the world, resulting in the Sino-Albanian split. This had the effect of isolating Albania from the rest of the world as Hoxha was hostile to both the pro-American and pro-Soviet spheres of influence as well as the Non-Aligned Movement under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, whom Hoxha had also denounced.^{[citation needed]}

Trotskyism[]

Trotskyists argue that the Stalinist Soviet Union was neither socialist nor communist, but rather a bureaucratized degenerated workers' state—that is, a non-capitalist state in which exploitation is controlled by a ruling caste which, although not owning the means of production and not constituting a social class in its own right, accrued benefits and privileges at the expense of the working class. Trotsky believed that the Bolshevik Revolution needed to be spread all over the globe's working class, the proletarians for world revolution. However, after the failure of the revolution in Germany, Stalin reasoned that industrializing and consolidating Bolshevism in Russia would best serve the proletariat in the long run. The dispute did not end until Trotsky's assassination in his Mexican villa by Stalinist assassin Ramón Mercader in 1940.^[91]

Max Shachtman, one of the principal Trotskyist theorists in the United States at the time, argued that the Soviet Union had evolved from a degenerated worker's state to a new mode of production which he called bureaucratic collectivism, whereby orthodox Trotskyists considered the Soviet Union an ally gone astray. Shachtman and his followers thus argued for the formation of a Third Camp opposed equally to both the Soviet and capitalist blocs. By the mid-20th century, Shachtman and many of his associates such as Social Democrats, USA identified as social democrats rather than Trotskyists, while some ultimately abandoned socialism altogether and embraced neoconservatism. In the United Kingdom, Tony Cliff independently developed a critique of state capitalism that resembled Shachtman's in some respects, but it retained a commitment to revolutionary communism.^[92]

Other interpretations[]

Gulag Museum in Moscow, founded in 2001 by historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko

Some historians and writers such as German Dietrich Schwanitz^[93] draw parallels between Stalinism and the economic policy of Tsar Peter the Great, although Schwanitz in particular views Stalin as "a monstrous reincarnation" of him. Both men wanted Russia to leave the western European states far behind in terms of development. Both largely succeeded, turning Russia into Europe's leading power.^{[citation needed]} Others^[who?] compare Stalin with Ivan the Terrible because of his policies of oprichnina and restriction of the liberties of common people.^{[citation needed]}

Stalinism has been considered by some reviewers as a form of "red fascism".^[94] Although fascist regimes were ideologically opposed to the Soviet Union, some of them positively regarded Stalinism as evolving Bolshevism into a form of fascism. Benito Mussolini himself positively reviewed Stalinism as having transformed Soviet Bolshevism into a Slavic fascism.^[95]

British historian Michael Ellman has written that mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil", noting that throughout Russian history, famines and droughts have been a common occurrence, including the Russian famine of 1921–22 (which occurred before Stalin came to power). He also notes that famines were widespread throughout the world in the 19th and 20th centuries in countries such as India, Ireland, Russia and China. Ellman compared the behavior of the Stalinist regime vis-à-vis the Holodomor to that of the British government (towards Ireland and India) and the G8 in contemporary times, arguing that the G8 "are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and that the "behaviour [of Stalin] was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries".^[96]

Memorial to the victims of political repression in the USSR, in St. Petersburg, made of a boulder from the Solovetsky Islands

David L. Hoffmann raised the issue of whether Stalinist practices of state violence derived from socialist ideology. Placing Stalinism in an international context, Hoffman argued that many forms of state interventionism used by the Stalinist government, including social cataloguing, surveillance and concentration camps, predated the Soviet regime and originated outside of Russia. Hoffman further argued that technologies of social intervention developed in conjunction with the work of 19th-century European reformers and were greatly expanded during World War I, when state actors in all the combatant countries dramatically increased efforts to mobilize and control their populations. According to Hoffman, the Soviet state was born at this moment of total war and institutionalized practices of state intervention as permanent features of governance.^[97]

In writing The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America, anti-communist and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argued that the use of the term Stalinism is an excuse to hide the inevitable effects of communism as a whole on human liberties. He wrote that the concept of Stalinism was developed after 1956 by Western intellectuals so as to be able to keep alive the communist ideal. However, the term Stalinism was in use as early as 1937 when Leon Trotsky wrote his pamphlet Stalinism and Bolshevism.^[98]

Writing two The Guardian articles in 2002 and 2006, British journalist Seumas Milne said that the impact of the post-Cold War narrative that Stalin and Hitler were twin evils, therefore communism is as monstrous as Nazism, "has been to relativize the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure."^[99][100]

Public opinion[]

In modern Russia, public opinion of Stalin and the former Soviet Union has increased in recent years.^[101] According to a 2015 Levada Center poll, 34% of respondents (up from 28% in 2007) say that leading the Soviet people to victory in World War II was such a great achievement that it outweighed his mistakes.^[102] A 2019 Levada Center poll showed that support for Stalin, who is seen by many Russians as the victor in the Great Patriotic War,^[103] reached a record high in the post-Soviet era, with 51% regarding Stalin as a positive figure, and 70% saying his reign was good for the country.^[104]

Lev Gudkov, a sociologist at the Levada Center, said that "Vladimir Putin's Russia of 2012 needs symbols of authority and national strength, however controversial they may be, to validate the newly authoritarian political order. Stalin, a despotic leader responsible for mass bloodshed but also still identified with wartime victory and national unity, fits this need for symbols that reinforce the current political ideology."^[105]

Some positive sentiment can also be found elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. A 2012 survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment found 38% of Armenians concurring that their county "will always have need of a leader like Stalin".^[105][106] A 2013 survey by Tbilisi University found 45% of Georgians expressing "a positive attitude" to Stalin.^[107]

See also[]

References[]

Citations[]

Notes[]

Sources[]

• Applebaum, Anne (2003). Gulag: A History. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-7679-0056-0.
• Boobbyer, Phillip (2000). The Stalin Era. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-18298-0.
• Brackman, Roman (2001). The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life. Frank Cass Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7146-5050-0.
• Bullock, Alan (1962). Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-013564-0.
• Conquest, Robert (1991). Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York: Penguin Random House.
• Davies, Sarah (1997). Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52-156676-6.
• Davies, Sarah; Harris, James, eds. (2005). Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-13-944663-1.
• Davies, Sarah; Harris, James, eds. (2014). Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-30-018281-1.
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila (1996). Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-510459-2.
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila (2000). Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-505001-1.
• Gellately, Robert (2007). Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf. ISBN 978-1-4000-4005-6.
• Getty, J. Arch (1987). Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52-133570-6.
• Getty, J. Arch (1993). Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52-144670-9.
• Getty, J. Arch (2013). Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-30-016929-4.
• Gill, Graeme J. (1998). Stalinism. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-17764-5. Retrieved October 1, 2010.
• Kotkin, Stephen (2014). Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928. New York: Penguin Random House.
• Kotkin, Stephen (2017). Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941. New York: Penguin Random House.
• Montefiore, Simon Sebag (2004). Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Knopf. ISBN 978-1-4000-4230-2.
• Overy, Richard J. (2004). The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-02030-4.
• Tucker, Robert C. (1992). Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-30869-3.

Further reading[]

Books

• Bullock, Alan. 1998. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (2nd ed.). Fontana Press.
• Campeanu, Pavel. 2016. Origins of Stalinism: From Leninist Revolution to Stalinist Society. Routledge.
• Conquest, Robert. 2008. The Great Terror: A Reassessment (40th anniversary ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Deutscher, Isaac. 1967. Stalin: A Political Biography (2nd edition). Oxford House.
• Dobrenko, Evgeny. 2020. Late Stalinism (Yale University Press, 2020).
• Edele, Mark, ed. 2020. Debates on Stalinism: An introduction (Manchester University Press, 2020).
• Figes, Orlando. 2008. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. Picador.
• Groys, Boris. 2014. The total art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, aesthetic dictatorship, and beyond. Verso Books.
• Hasselmann, Anne E. 2021. "Memory Makers of the Great Patriotic War: Curator Agency and Visitor Participation in Soviet War Museums during Stalinism." Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 13.1 (2021): 13-32.
• Hoffmann, David L. 2008. Stalinism: The Essential Readings. John Wiley & Sons.
• Hoffmann, David L. 2018. The Stalinist Era. Cambridge University Press.
• Kotkin, Stephen. 1997. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a civilization. University of California Press.
• McCauley, Martin. 2019 Stalin and Stalinism (Routledge, 2019).
• Ree, Erik Van. 2002. The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, A Study in Twentieth-century Revolutionary Patriotism. RoutledgeCurzon.
• Ryan, James, and Susan Grant, eds. 2020. Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).
• Sharlet, Robert. 2017. Stalinism and Soviet legal culture (Routledge, 2017).
• Tismăneanu, Vladimir. 2003. Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism. University of California Press.
• Tucker, Robert C., ed. 2017. Stalinism: essays in historical interpretation. Routledge.
• Valiakhmetov, Albert, et al. 2018. "History And Historians In The Era Of Stalinism: A Review Of Modern Russian Historiography." National Academy of Managerial Staff of Culture and Arts Herald 1 (2018). online

• Velikanova, Olga. 2018. Mass Political Culture Under Stalinism: Popular Discussion of the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Springer, 2018).
• Wood, Alan. 2004. Stalin and Stalinism (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Scholarly articles

• Alexander, Kuzminykh. 2019. "The internal affairs agencies of the Soviet State in the period of Stalinism in the context of Russian historiography." Historia provinciae–the journal of regional history 3.1 (2019). online
• Barnett, Vincent. 2006. Understanding Stalinism: The 'Orwellian Discrepancy' and the 'Rational Choice Dictator'. Europe-Asia Studies, 58(3), 457–466.
• Edele, Mark. 2020. "New perspectives on Stalinism?: A conclusion." in Debates on Stalinism (Manchester University Press, 2020) pp. 270-281.
• Gill, Graeme. 2019. "Stalinism and Executive Power: Formal and Informal Contours of Stalinism." Europe-Asia Studies 71.6 (2019): 994-1012.
• Kamp, Marianne, and Russell Zanca. 2017. "Recollections of collectivization in Uzbekistan: Stalinism and local activism." Central Asian Survey 36.1 (2017): 55-72. online
• Kuzio, Taras. 2017. "Stalinism and Russian and Ukrainian national identities." Communist and Post-Communist Studies 50.4 (2017): 289-302.
• Lewin, Moshe. 2017. "The social background of Stalinism." in Stalinism (Routledge, 2017. 111-136).
• Mishler, Paul C. 2018. "Is the Term 'Stalinism' Valid and Useful for Marxist Analysis?." Science & Society 82.4 (2018): 555-567.
• Musiał, Filip. 2019. "Stalinism in Poland." The Person and the Challenges: Journal of Theology, Education, Canon Law and Social Studies Inspired by Pope John Paul II 9.2 (2019): 9-23. online

• Nelson, Todd H. 2015. "History as ideology: The portrayal of Stalinism and the Great Patriotic War in contemporary Russian high school textbooks." Post-Soviet Affairs, 31(1), 37–65.
• Nikiforov, S. A., et al. "Cultural revolution of Stalinism in its regional context." International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Technology 9.11 (2018): 1229-1241' impact on schooling
• Wheatcroft, Stephen G. "Soviet statistics under Stalinism: Reliability and distortions in grain and population statistics." Europe-Asia Studies 71.6 (2019): 1013-1035.
• Winkler, Martina. 2017. "Children, Childhood, and Stalinism." Kritika 18(3), 628–637.
• Zawadzka, Anna. 2019. "Stalinism the Polish Way." Studia Litteraria et Historica 8 (2019): 1-6. online
• Zysiak, Agata. 2019. "Stalinism and Revolution in Universities. Democratization of Higher Education from Above, 1947–1956." Studia Litteraria et Historica 8 (2019): 1-17. online

Primary sources

• Stalin, Joseph. [1924] 1975. Foundations of Leninism. Foreign Languages Press.
• Stalin, Joseph (1951). Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. Foreign Languages Press.

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Stalinism.

• "Stalin Reference Archive". Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 11 May 2005.
• "Joseph Stalin". Spartacus Educational.
• "Joseph Stalin". BBC.
• Pedro Campos. "Basic Economic Precepts of Stalinist Socialism". Havana Times. 21 June 2010.