Chapter 27.2

Stalins purges

A system of forced-labour camps was first inaugurated by a Soviet decree of April 15, 1919, and underwent a series of administrative and organizational changes in the 1920s, ending with the founding of Gulag in 1930 under the control of the secret police, OGPU (later, the NKVD and the KGB). The Gulag had a total inmate population of about 100,000 in the late 1920s, when it underwent an enormous expansion coinciding with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's collectivization of agriculture. By 1936 the Gulag held a total of 5,000,000 prisoners, a number that was probably equaled or exceeded every subsequent year until Stalin died in 1953. Besides rich or resistant peasants arrested during collectivization, persons sent to the Gulag included purged Communist Party members and military officers, German and other Axis prisoners of war (during World War II), members of ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty, Soviet soldiers and other citizens who had been taken prisoner or used as slave labourers by the Germans during the war, suspected saboteurs and traitors, dissident intellectuals, ordinary criminals, and many utterly innocent people who were hapless victims of Stalin's purges Inmates filled the Gulag in three major waves: in 1929-32, the years of the collectivization of Soviet agriculture; in 1936-38, at the height of Stalin's purges; and in the years immediately following World War II. Solzhenitsyn claimed that between 1928 and 1953 "some forty to fifty million people served long sentences in the Archipelago." Figures supposedly compiled by the Gulag administration itself (and released by Soviet historians in 1989) show that a total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947. The true figures remain unknown. At its height the Gulag consisted of many hundreds of camps, with the average camp holding 2,000-10,000 prisoners. Most of these camps were "corrective labour colonies" in which prisoners felled timber, laboured on general construction projects (such as the building of canals and railroads), or worked in mines. Most prisoners laboured under the threat of starvation or execution if they refused. It is estimated that the combination of very long working hours, harsh climatic and other working conditions, inadequate food, and summary executions killed off at least 10 percent of the Gulag's total prisoner population each year. Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 range from 15 to 30 million.

Stalin 5 year plan

Five-Year Plans, Method of planning economic growth over limited periods, through the use of quotas, used first in the Soviet Union and later in other socialist states. In the Soviet Union, the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), implemented by Joseph Stalin, concentrated on developing heavy industry and collectivizing agriculture, at the cost of a drastic fall in consumer goods. The second plan (1933-37) continued the objectives of the first. Collectivization led to terrible famines, especially in the Ukraine, that caused the deaths of millions. The third (1938-42) emphasized the production of armaments. The fourth (1946-53) again stressed heavy industry and military buildup, angering the Western powers. In China, the first Five-Year Plan (1953-57) stressed rapid industrial development, with Soviet assistance; it proved highly successful. Shortly after the second plan began in 1958, the Great Leap Forward was announced; its goals conflicted with the five-year plan, leading to failure and the withdrawal of Soviet aid in 1960

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin, Russian in full Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, original name (Georgian) Ioseb Dzhugashvili (born Dec. 18 [Dec. 6, Old Style], 1879, Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire [see Researcher's Note]—died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.), secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-53) and premier of the Soviet state (1941-53), who for a quarter of a century dictatorially ruled the Soviet Union and transformed it into a major world power. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin industrialized the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivized its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941-45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Chief architect of Soviet totalitarianism and a skilled but phenomenally ruthless organizer, he destroyed the remnants of individual freedom and failed to promote individual prosperity, yet he created a mighty military-industrial complex and led the Soviet Union into the nuclear age. Stalin's biography was long obscured by a mendacious Soviet-propagated "legend" exaggerating his prowess as a heroic Bolshevik boy-conspirator and faithful follower of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. In his prime, Stalin was hailed as a universal genius, as a "shining sun," or "the staff of life," and also as a "great teacher and friend" (especially of those communities he most savagely persecuted); once he was even publicly invoked as "Our Father" by a metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church. Achieving wide visual promotion through busts, statues, and icons of himself, the dictator became the object of a fanatical cult that, in private, he probably regarded with cynicism.

New Economic Policy (NEP

New Economic Policy (NEP), the economic policy of the government of the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1928, representing a temporary retreat from its previous policy of extreme centralization and doctrinaire socialism. The policy of War Communism, in effect since 1918, had by 1921 brought the national economy to the point of total breakdown. The Kronshtadt Rebellion of March 1921 convinced the Communist Party and its leader, Vladimir Lenin, of the need to retreat from socialist policies in order to maintain the party's hold on power. Accordingly, the 10th Party Congress in March 1921 introduced the measures of the New Economic Policy. These measures included the return of most agriculture, retail trade, and small-scale light industry to private ownership and management while the state retained control of heavy industry, transport, banking, and foreign trade. Money was reintroduced into the economy in 1922 (it had been abolished under War Communism). The peasantry were allowed to own and cultivate their own land, while paying taxes to the state. The New Economic Policy reintroduced a measure of stability to the economy and allowed the Soviet people to recover from years of war, civil war, and governmental mismanagement. The small businessmen and managers who flourished in this period became known as NEP men. But the NEP was viewed by the Soviet government as merely a temporary expedient to allow the economy to recover while the Communists solidified their hold on power. By 1925 Nikolay Bukharin had become the foremost supporter of the NEP, while Leon Trotsky was opposed to it and Joseph Stalin was noncommittal. The NEP was dogged by the government's chronic inability to procure enough grain supplies from the peasantry to feed its urban work force. In 1928-29 these grain shortages prompted Joseph Stalin, by then the country's paramount leader, to forcibly eliminate the private ownership of farmland and to collectivize agriculture under the state's control, thus ensuring the procurement of adequate food supplies for the cities in the future. This abrupt policy change, which was accompanied by the destruction of several million of the country's most prosperous private farmers, marked the end of the NEP. It was followed by the reimposition of state control over all industry and commerce in the country by 1931.

Collectivization (of agriculture)

collectivization, policy adopted by the Soviet government, pursued most intensively between 1929 and 1933, to transform traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union and to reduce the economic power of the kulaks (prosperous peasants). Under collectivization the peasantry were forced to give up their individual farms and join large collective farms (kolkhozy). The process was ultimately undertaken in conjunction with the campaign to industrialize the Soviet Union rapidly. But before the drive began, long and bitter debates over the nature and pace of collectivization went on among the Soviet leaders (especially between Stalin and Trotsky, 1925-27, and between Stalin and Nikolay Bukharin, 1927-29). Some Soviet leaders considered collective farms a socialist form of land tenure and therefore desirable; but they advocated a gradual transition to them in order to avoid disrupting the agricultural productivity necessary to stimulate industrial growth. Other leaders favoured rapid industrialization and, consequently, wanted immediate, forced collectivization; they argued not only that the large kolkhozy could use heavy machinery more efficiently and produce larger crops than could numerous small, individual farms but that they could be controlled more effectively by the state. As a result, they could be forced to sell a large proportion of their output to the state at low government prices, thereby enabling the state to acquire the capital necessary for the development of heavy industry. A decision was made by the 15th Congress of the Communist Party (December 1927) to undertake collectivization at a gradual pace, allowing the peasantry to join kolkhozy voluntarily. But in November 1928 the Central Committee (and in April 1929 the 16th Party Conference) approved plans that increased the goals and called for 20 percent of the nation's farmland to be collectivized by 1933. Between October 1929 and January 1930 the proportion of peasant households forced into kolkhozy rose from about 4 percent to 21 percent, although the government's main efforts in the countryside were concentrated on extracting grain from the kulaks. Intensive collectivization began during the winter of 1929-30. Stalin called upon the party to "liquidate the kulaks as a class" (Dec. 27, 1929), and the Central Committee resolved that an "enormous majority" of the peasant households should be collectivized by 1933. Harsh measures—including land confiscations, arrests, and deportations to prison camps—were inflicted upon all peasants who resisted collectivization. By March 1930 more than one-half of the peasantry (a larger proportion in the agriculturally rich southwestern region of the Soviet Union) had been forced to join collective farms. But the peasants objected violently to abandoning their private farms. In many cases, before joining the kolkhozy they slaughtered their livestock and destroyed their equipment. The losses, as well as the animosity toward the Soviet regime, became so great that Stalin decided to slow down the collectivization process. On March 2, 1930, he published an article, "Dizzy from Success," in which he shifted the blame to local officials, whom he characterized as overzealous in their duties. Immediately, many peasants left the kolkhozy. In March 1930 approximately 58 percent of the peasant households had been enrolled in kolkhozy; by June only about 24 percent remained. In the southwestern "black earth" region the figure dropped from 82 percent in March to 18 percent in May. In the fall of 1930 the drive was renewed at a slower pace, but with equal determination. The application of various administrative pressures—including punitive measures—resulted in the recollectivization of one-half of the peasants by 1931. By 1936 the government had collectivized almost all the peasantry. But in the process millions of those who had offered resistance had been deported to prison camps and removed from productive activity in agriculture. Furthermore, the absence of heavy agricultural machinery and of the horses and cattle that the peasants had killed seriously handicapped the new collective farms. Output fell, but the government, nevertheless, extracted the large amounts of agricultural products it needed to acquire the capital for industrial investment; this caused a major famine in the countryside (1932-33) and the deaths of millions of peasants. Despite these great costs, the forced collectivization achieved the final establishment of Soviet power in the countryside. Through collectivization agriculture was integrated with the rest of the state-controlled economy, and the state was supplied with the capital it required to transform the Soviet Union into a major industrial power

Kulak

kulak, (Russian: "fist"), in Russian and Soviet history, a wealthy or prosperous peasant, generally characterized as one who owned a relatively large farm and several head of cattle and horses and who was financially capable of employing hired labour and leasing land. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, the kulaks were major figures in the peasant villages. They often lent money, provided mortgages, and played central roles in the villages' social and administrative affairs. During the War Communism period (1918-21), the Soviet government undermined the kulaks' position by organizing committees of poor peasants to administer the villages and to supervise the requisitioning of grain from the richer peasants. But the introduction in 1921 of the New Economic Policy favoured the kulaks. Although the Soviet government considered the kulaks to be capitalists and, therefore, enemies of socialism, it adopted various incentives to encourage peasants to increase agricultural production and enrich themselves. The most successful peasants (less than 4 percent) became kulaks and assumed traditional roles in the village social structure, often rivaling the authority of the new Soviet officials in village affairs. In 1927 the Soviet government began to shift its peasant policy by increasing the kulaks' taxes and restricting their right to lease land; in 1929 it began a drive for rapid collectivization of agriculture. The kulaks vigorously opposed the efforts to force the peasants to give up their small privately owned farms and join large cooperative agricultural establishments. At the end of 1929 a campaign to "liquidate the kulaks as a class" ("dekulakization") was launched by the government. By 1934, when approximately 75 percent of the farms in the Soviet Union had been collectivized, most kulaks—as well as millions of other peasants who had opposed collectivization—had been deported to remote regions of the Soviet Union or arrested and their land and property confiscated.