Stalin 1929-1941

Stalin 1929-1941

Daniel W. Blackmon

IB HL History

Coral Gables Senior High

Grains Collection Crisis

• The harvest of 1927 was average, but collections were well below normal, which resulted in virtually no grain exports, which in turn was the means by which industrialization was to be paid for.


• Stalin’s response was to demand the resumption of forcible requisitions.


• Most of the grain seized came from the middle peasants, or the vast majority of all peasants. From the peasants’ point of view, this was a return to War Communism, and they responded as before, by refusing to sow any more than they needed themselves.


• By early 1929, food rationing had to be introduced . Seizures led to sharply increased tension in the countryside, and the murder of procurement officers.


• Stalin blamed the problem on political opposition rather than an economic problem

• Stalin blamed the “kulaks” (Tucker 82-83)


• At this time, there were only 3.9% of all peasants who could be reasonably classified as a Kulak (this is by Soviet definitions, and computations by Soviet historians) This compares to 15% prior to 1917.


• A kulak was anyone who farmed from between 25 to forty sown acres.

• 62.7% of all peasants (up from 20% prior to 1917) were middle peasants, farming 5 to 25 sown acres. (Bullock 208)


• “Stalin now advanced the proposition, henceforth central to his ideology, that class war must intensify with progress toward socialism.” (Tucker 83)


• Stalin postulated that increased progress towards socialism would lead to increased resistance, which would aggravates the class-struggle--IE. Provide the justification for the continuous acceleration of repressive measures.

First Five Year Plan (1 FYP)

• Stalin now pushed through the first Five Year Plan, which called for accelerated industrialization.

Stalin’s Motivation

• Speech of February 4, 1931

• “It is sometimes asked whether it is possible to slow down the tempo somewhat, to put a check on the movement.


• “No, comrades, it is not possible. The tempo must not be reduced! On the contrary, we must increase it . . . .


• We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do so, or we shall go under.”


• He was opposed by Bukharin, but had the support on this issue by a number of individuals who became important: Sergei Kirov, Vyacheslev Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, and Anastas Mikoyan


The plan called for 17.5% of sown areas should be collective.

The plan would be accelerated, and would call for 230% increase in capital goods production in 4 years. (Bullock 213-4)


• Stalin reimposes forced grain requisitions. Stalin blamed the “kulaks” for the grain crisis. A kulak was anyone who farmed from between 25 to forty sown acres, that is, a so-called “rich peasant.”


• (By Soviet figures, only 3.9% classified under this definition. In actuality, a kulak was anyone Stalin said was a kulak.

1 FYP

• Target figures for the 1 FYP were set arbitrarily, and then revised upwards. A decision was also made to achieve the Five Year Plan goals in four years.

1 FYP

Index Numbers 1930-1 1927-8= 100

Original Plan Amended Plan

Coal 155 202.5

Oil 166 266

1 FYP

Index Numbers 1930-1 1927-8= 100

Original Plan Amended Plan

Machinery 198.1 482.1

Agricultural Machinery

222.8 552.6

Electro-Tech. 235.8 590.5

Basic Chemicals 252.3 390.0

1 FYP

Millions of tons

1927-28 1932-3 (optimal)

1932 (revised)

1932 (actual)

Coal 35.0 75.0 95-105 64.0

Oil 11.7 21.7 40-55 21.4

Iron ore 6.7 20.2 24-32 12.1

Pig Iron 3.2 10.0 15-16 6.2

Shakhty Show Trials

• Stalin ordered the fabrication of a case against 53 industrial technicians, accusing them of conspiracy--in cahoots with Polish, German, and French agents and provocateurs--to wreck the coal industry. Torture was used to obtain confessions.

Shakhty Show Trials

• A public “show trial” was conducted. A show trial was a means of propaganda as well as a quasi-legal device to execute alleged enemies of the state. Western rules of evidence were often ignored, and the verdict and sentence were decided in advance. The prosecutor was the despicable Andrei Vyshinski

Shakhty Show Trials

The point of the Shakhty Show Trial was that the threat was not only external (remember the war scare going on? Cf. Above) but internal as well. This required greater control at home. (Tucker 78-9)

Shakhty Show Trials

• Stalin declared, “ ‘We have internal enemies. We have external enemies. This, comrades, must not be forgotten for a single moment.’ “ (Bullock 210)

The Right Deviation is Purged

• The Central Committee Plenum of 1929 censured Bukharin and Tomsky, and stripped them of their offices with Pravda, the Comintern, and the trade unions.


“Right deviation” was declared to be the chief danger to the state, and Bukharin and Tomsky both endorsed this statement.


– Late in 1929, the Plenum required Bukharin and Tomsky to confess their error. Bukharin was then expelled from the Politburo.

Collectivization and “Elimination of the Kulaks as a Class”

• Vyacheslav Molotov and Kaganovich supervised collectivization. An army of thugs descended upon the villages.

Collectivization

% collectivized

1930 1931 1933

Peasant households

23.6 52.7 61.5

Crop area 33.6 67.8 77.6

Collectivization

% collectivized

1933 1934 1935

Peasant households

64.4 71.4 83.2

Crop area 83.1 87.4 94.1


• Peasants responded as they had under War Communism: they reduced their crop acreage, hid their food, and slaughtered their own livestock rather than let the government take it away. A severe food shortage and livestock shortage resulted.


By their own figures (always highly suspect) 63,000 families were executed or exiled, 150,000 families deported, and 396,000-852,000 households allowed to remain outside the collectives (that is, on land that could not be cultivated.) (McCauley 25)


• If a household is estimated at 5 members, this is between 3,045,000 and 4,625,000 persons condemned to death by execution, deportation to labour camps, or slow starvation.

Collectivization

• “In 1929-1932 the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin’s leadership . . . struck a double blow at the peasantry of the USSR as a whole: dekulakization and collectivization.

Collectivization

• “Dekulakizaton meant the killing, or deportation to the Arctic with their families, of millions of peasants, in principle the better-off, in practice the most influential and the most recalcitrant to the Party’s plans.

Collectivization

• “Collectivization meant the effective abolition of private property in land, and the concentration of the remaining peasantry in ‘collective’ farms under Party control.” (Conquest 3-4)

Collectivization

• Description by Sholokov, The Soil Upturned, 1934 of peasant response:

Collectivization

• “Stock was slaughtered every night in Gremyachy Log. Hardly had dusk fallen when the muffled, short bleats of sheep, the death-squeels of pigs, or the lowing of calves could be heard.

Collectivization

• “Both those who had joined the kolkhoz and individual farmers killed their stock. . . . . ‘Kill it, it’s not ours anymore . . . . ‘ ‘Kill, they’ll take it for meat anyway. . . . ‘ ‘Kill, you won’t get meat in the kolkhoz’ crept the insidious rumors

Collectivization

• “And they killed. They ate till they could eat no more. Young and old suffered from stomach ache. At dinner time, tables groaned under boiled and roasted meat.” (qtd in Nove 164)

Collectivization

• “Livestock losses were disastrous everywhere.” (Nove 165)

Collectivization

• “They would threaten people with guns, as if they were under a spell, calling small children ‘kulak bastards,’ screaming ‘bloodsuckers!’ . . .

Collectivization

• “They had sold themselves on the idea that the so-called ‘kulaks’ were pariahs, untouchables, vermin. They would not sit down at a ‘parasite’s’ table; the ‘kulak’ child was loathsome, the young ‘kulak’ girl was lower than a louse.

Collectivization

• “They looked on the so-called ‘kulaks’ as cattle, swine, loathsome, repulsive; they had no souls; they stank; they all had venereal diseases; they were enemies of the people and they exploited the labour of others . . . .

Collectivization

• “There was no pity for them. The were not human beings. . . . . “– Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing,

fictional account published in New York in 1972.

Collectivization

• “In 1932, faced with mas pillage of ‘socialist’ property by the demoralized and often hungry peasantry, the following draconian legislation was adopted, as an amendment to Article 58 of the Criminal Code”

Collectivization

• “pilfering on the railways and of kolkhoz property (including the harvest in the fields, stocks, animals, etc.) was to be punished by

Collectivization

• “ ‘the maximum means of social defense, shooting, or, in the case of extenuating circumstances, deprivation of freedom [I.e. prison or camp] for not less than ten years, with confiscation of all property.’

Collectivization

• “Even Stalin did not do such things without reason. The fact that such laws were passed in peacetime shows that he, at least, knew he was at war. His letter to Sholokhov [who had written protesting the policy]

Collectivization

• “shows what he thought . . . . ‘But . . . The honorable cultivators of your region, and not only your region, committed sabotage and were quite willing to leave the workers and the Red Army without grain.

Collectivization

• “ ‘The fact that the sabotage was silent and apparently gentle (no blood was spilt) does not change the fact that the honorable cultivators in reality were making a “silent” war against Soviet power. War by starvation, my dear Sholokhov.’” (qtd in Nove 166)

Collectivization

• The government was successful at increasing the average food intake of urban dwellers, but at the cost of deliberately reducing the peasantry’s food

Dossier No. 24260, 1938

• Name: Sidorov• .Profession: Cooperative employee• .Possessions at time of arrest: 1

wooden house, 8 meters by 8, covered in sheet metal, with partially covered courtyard 20 meters by 7; 1 cow, 4 sheep, 2 pigs, chickens.

Dossier No. 24260, 1938

• Property in 1929: identical plus 1 horse• .Property in 1917: 1 wooden house, 8

meters by 8, covered in sheet metal, with partially covered courtyard 30 meters by 20; 2 barns, 2 hangars, 2 horses, 2 cows, 7 sheep,

• .Social origin: I consider myself the son of an ordinary peasant.

Dossier No. 24260, 1938

• An excerpt from the charges drawn up:

• Sidorov, hostile to the Soviet regime in general and to the Party in particular, was given to systematically spreding anti-Soviet propaganda, saying

Dossier No. 24260, 1938

• ‘Stalin and his gang won’t give up power. Stalin has killed a whole mass of people, but he doesn’t want to go. The Bolsheviks will hold onto power and go on arresting honest people, and you can’t even talk about that, or you’ll end up in a camp for 25 years.’

Dossier No. 24260, 1938

• An excerpt from the protocol of the troika’s [court] decision, 16 July 1938

Dossier No. 24260, 1938

• V. K. Sidorov affair. Ex-shopkeeper, previously kept a shop with his father. Accused of spreading counterrevolutionary ideas among kolkhoz workers, characterized by defeatist statements together with threats against Communists, criticism of Party policies and of the government.

Dossier No. 24260, 1938

• Verdict: SHOOT Sidorov Vassily Klementovich; confiscate all his goods.

• Sentence carried out on 3 August 1938

Dossier No. 24260, 1938

Collectivization

• In Petrakovskaya cattle died for the lack of fodder, people ate bread made from nettles, biscuits made from one weed, porridge made from another. And not only in Petrakovskaya

Collectivization

• A year of hunger moved through the country, nineteen hundred and thirty-three. In Volkhrovo . . . , in the little park by the station, dekulakized peasants expelled fro the Ukraine lay down and died.

Collectivization

• You got used to seeing corpses there in the morning; a wagon would pull up and the hospital stable hand, Abram, would pile in the bodies.

Collectivization

• Not all died; many wandered through the dusty mean little streets, dragging bloodless blue legs, swollen from dropsy, feeling out each passer-by with doglike begging eyes.

Collectivization

• In Vokhrovo they got nothing; the residents themselves, to get bread on their ration cards, queued up the night before the store opened.”– Vladimyr Tendryakov, from his novel,

Death (published 1968)

Collectivization

• Alec Nove, the leading Western historian of the economic history of the Soviet Union, generally agrees with Robert Conquest that the famine of 1932-3 cost 6,000,000 lives.

Collectivization

• Not only was this famine entirely man-made in its causes, but its very existence remained a state secret until the 1960’s

Stalin’s 50th Birthday: 1929

• The celebration of Stalin’s 50th birthday began the Stalin Cult

• Gen. Dimitri Volkogonov learned from secret archives that Stalin ordered the falsification of the records in order to celebrate his 50th several years later than he should have.

“Dizzy With Success”

• March 2, 1930

• Faced with a catastrophic situation in the countryside, Stalin eases the pressure while blaming the disaster on local officials–all of whom had been obeying his orders.

Specialist Baiting

• “Specialist baiting” led to the arrest of thousands of engineers, especially those who did not belong to the party.

Specialist Baiting

• All economic failures–such as the break down of equipment due to lack of proper maintenance as a result of hopelessly fantastic production quotas– were blamed on the specialists, who were accused of sabotage and espionage, and treated accordingly.

Specialist Baiting

• Shooting those who are technically proficient is not a good way to improve conditions.

Specialist Baiting

• “It may seem paradoxical that at ta time when their skills were desperately needed, ‘bourgeois’ and foreign engineers were being held behind bars.

Specialist Baiting

• “However, there is a rationale behind the arrests: the leadership was desperately anxious to break down all resistance to central directives.

Specialist Baiting

• “The ‘bourgeois’ engineers could see that the orders were not feasible and said so. Moscow wanted engineers who would do the impossible.” (27)

Physicist Alexander Weissberg,

• “The head of the laboratory for crystallography, Obremov, is under arrest, and so is the head of the low temperature laboratory, Shubnikov.


• “The head of the second low temperature laboratory, Ruhemann, has been deported. The head of the laboratory for atom-splitting, Leipunsky, is under arrest, and so are the head of the Röntgen department, Gorsky,


• “the head of the department for theoretical physics, Landau, and the head of the experimental low-temperature station, myself. As far as I know, Slutski, the head of the ultra-short-wave department, is hte only one still at work. . . . .


• “I supervised the building of our low-temperature experimental station, but before it could be put into operation, I was arrested. My successor was Komarov. He has also been arrested. Who is to carry on?”

The Great Hunger 1932

• Famine in Ukraine, north Caucasus, Kazakhstan.

• Robert Conquest estimates the death toll from dekulakization and the famine together at 14,500,000 persons. (Conquest Harvest 301)

Peasants as Slaves of the State

• Reintroduction of an internal passport system

• The purpose was to restrict peasants from moving about the country.

1 FYP

• Although Soviet figures for industrial gains are suspect, there is no doubt that industrial output rose by an impressive amount.

• Many of the new complexes were built east of the Urals.

1 FYP

• A social consequence of the rapid increase in industrial workers was the overtaxing of housing and services in the cities.

1 FYP

• Another consequence is the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce.

• Medicine and teaching became female jobs.

• Unskilled labor was largely female.

Second Five Year Plan (1933-37)

• Some of the pressure was taken off the peasants, but taxes and compulsory deliveries remained very high; failure to pay those levels resulted in confiscation of all goods and belongings. (McCauley 30)


• Economic targets were a bit more realistic.


• Each household on the kolkhoz was allowed a private plot, and the produce sold in town markets or within the kolkhoz. Middlemen, however, were forbidden. Increasingly, much of the food produced in the USSR was produced on the private plots.


• “The kolkhoz was defined as a voluntary cooperative working land provided by the state rent-free in perpetuity. . . . In practice, the kolkhoz enjoyed little autonomy since its goals were set by the party and the government.


• “The mechanical work was done under contract by machine tractor stations [at prices set by the government] . . . . The farms paid for such services in kind. Unlike state farms or sovkhozes, collective farms did not offer members a guaranteed wage before 1966.


• “If the farm did well, the profits were shared out at the end of the year. If results were poor, little or nothing was paid out. [Since the government controlled key expenses such as the cost of tractors, rarely did the kolkhoz do well.]


• “Hence it was possible for a kolkhoznik to work assiduously and receive little or no reward for his labours. Not surprisingly, he quickly came to realize that the private plot was his staff of life and that his cow was especially valuable.


• “He therefore devoted his energies to his private plot and merely went through the motions on the collective farm.” (McCauley 31)


• An increased share of the budget went to defense rather than consumer goods (from a real level of 12% in 1933 to 16.5% in 1937. (30)


• Real wages grew, but were the same level in 1937 as in 1928, which was only slightly better than 1913. (31)

The Stakhanovite Movement

• The Stakhanovite Movement was a campaign to improve the productivity of Soviet workers.


• Alexei Stakhanov was a Ukrainian coal miner, who, under ideal conditions, mined 102 tons of coal in 5 hours and 45 minutes.


• That amounted to the work norms of 14 men.


• Stakhanov was declared to be a “worker-hero” and made the subject of a major propaganda campaign to encourage others to emulate him.


• In the long run, the movement was more disruptive than anything else, since it pressured managers to over fulfill quotas, regardless of consequences.


• The movement also pointed out, indirectly, just how poor Soviet productivity in fact was

Hints of the Coming Purge

• 800,000 members of the Communist Party expelled (McCauley Stalinism 35)

Congress of VictorsJanuary 1934

• A celebration of the achievements of the 1 FYP

• Stalin was displeased by the number of votes he received for the Politburo.

Congress of VictorsJanuary 1934

• Eventually, Stalin executed 1,108 of 1,966 delegates, and 98 of 139 members of the Central Committee present.

A Second Hint of the Purge

• First half of 1934, an additonal 340,000 members of the Communist Party expelled (McCauley Stalinism 35)

“Capitalist Encirclement”

• Capitalistic encirclement means that there is one country, the Soviet Union, which has established the socialist order, and that apart from this there are many countries--bourgeois countries--


• --bourgeois countries--which continue to lead the capitalistic way of life and which surround the Soviet Union, awaiting the chance to attack it and destroy it, or in any case to undermine its might and weaken it . . . .


• Is it not clear that as long as the capitalistic encirclement exists, we will have wreckers, spies, diversionists and murderers sent into our interior by agents of foreign states?


• . . . On the contrary, the more we move forward, the more success we have, then the more wrathful become the remnants of the beaten exploiter classes, the more quickly they turn to sharper forms of struggle,


• the more mischief they do the Soviet state, the more they grasp at the most desperate means of struggle, as the last resort of the doomed . . . .”

The Great Purge

• Begins in December 1934

• Murder of Sergei Kirov, beginning of the Great Purge.

The Great Purge

• Stalin feared that Kirov, who was prominent and popular, could challenge him for leadership. There is no evidence that Kirov actually planned any thing of the sort.

The Great Purge

• Stalin had him assassinated, then arranged for the assassin to confess that Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had put him up to it (before having the man shot) and then used the murder as an excuse to hunt down internal enemies of the state.

The Great Purge

• The number of people purged is hotly debated. Kenez estimates 1,000,000 were executed and 10,000,000 deported to forced labor. (108)

The Great Purge

• “Even if we accept the lowest reasonable number suggested by scholars who have studied the evidence, we cannot but form the picture of one of the most criminal regimes that ever existed on the face of the earth.” (108)

The Great Purge

• First Great Show Trial

• August 1936

• Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others sentenced to death.

• Before being executed, they confess to ludicrous crimes.

The Yezhovschina

• September 1936

• G. Yagoda, a hardened and brutal revolutionary killer, head of the NKVD, is executed and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, a dwarf who is far more vicious and conscienceless.

The Yezhovschina

• The terrible period known as the Yezhovschina begins.

Second Great Show Trial:

• Purge of the Red Army begins

• January 1937

• Stalin shot:

Purge of the Red Army

• 3 of 5 Marshalls, • (beginning with Marshall

Tuchachevsky, one of the finest military minds in the world.)


• all 11 Deputy Commissars for Defense,

• 75 of 80 members of the Military Soviet, all commanders of his military districts,


• 13 of 15 army commanders, • 57 of 85 of the corps

commanders, • 110 of 195 division

commanders, • 220 of 406 brigade

commanders


• 20-40 % of officers below brigade level. (Calvocoressi 189, Clark 34, Keegan Second World War 175)


• The first to go was Tuchachevsky, chief architect of the Red Army. Most of the generals who conducted the court martial were also shot.


• Tuchachevsky’s confession as a German spy is stained with blood.


• .The effect of the Purge on the combat readiness of the Red Army is catastrophic. One effect of the Purge is to encourage Hitler to invade the Soviet Union.

Third Great Show Trial

• March 1938

• Bukharin, Rykov and 13 others sentenced to death.

• They too, must confess to outrageous crimes.

Rise of Beria

• December 1938

• Yezhov disappears, and is replaced as head of the NKVD by Lavrenti Beria, a man who enjoyed torturing people and raping adolescent girls.

Beginning of Stalin’s Cultural Revolution

• All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) enforced the Party line among writers. Stalin wrote that “nothing should be published that was contrary to the official point of view.” (McCauley Stalinism 34)

Stalin’s Cultural Revolution1934 August

• Congress of Writers adopts the principles of “socialist realism”

Stalin’s Cultural Revolution

• Socialist realism was art that served the state. Socialist realism, in Kenez’ words, lacks all ambiguity–truth cannot be multi-layered.


• Socialist realism cannot flourish where there is any alternative to it. It applied to all the arts. Censorship not only became proscriptive but also prescriptive. (Kenez 124-125)


• Socialist realism is incompatible with artistic genius and creativity.


• Dmitri Shostakovich found it hard to get his work published or performed.

• Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova could not get their work published.

• Josip Mandelshtam died in a labour camp.(124=125)

Josip Mandelshtam

• This poem cost Josip Mandelshtam his life:

Josip Mandelshtam

• “We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

• Ten steps away no one hears our speeches.

Josip Mandelshtam

• All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,

• The murderer and peasant slayer.

Josip Mandelshtam

• His fingers are fat as grubs

• And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

Josip Mandelshtam

• His cockroach whiskers leer

• And his boot tops gleam.

Josip Mandelshtam

• Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders–

• fawning half-men for him to play with.

Josip Mandelshtam

• They whinny, purr or whine

• As he prates and points his finger,

Josip Mandelshtam

• One by one forging his laws, to be flung

• Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

Josip Mandelshtam

• And every killing is a treat

• For the broad-chested Ossete.


• In biology, T. D. Lysenko, a quack who rejected genetics, became one of the most influential Soviet scientists because his science was “Marxist” rather than bourgeois.


• Genetics and relativity were rejected as bourgeois (at least until the invention of the atom bomb)


• June 1936

• Antiabortion law and new family code.


• A census revealed that the USSR was about 15,000,000 people short of what it should have had.

• Stalin ordered the census director shot, and a new census (amazingly) “found” the people.


• A census revealed that the USSR was about 15,000,000 people short of what it should have had. Stalin ordered the census director shot, and a new census found the people.

• Stalin wishes to encourage the population to reproduce.


• Stalin wishes to encourage the population to reproduce.


• The education system which eventually emerged was an excellent one, particularly in the pure sciences, although not as strong in the social sciences.

Third Five Year Plan1938-1941

• Heavy industry was emphasized even more, and defense spending rose to 18% of GDP.


• Forced labour, organized by the NKVD, grew as a proportion of the workforce. Western estimates range from 3.5 million to 15 million. (32)

The Gulag

The Gulag

• Gen. A. V. Gorbatov, from Years Off My Life

• “Work in the goldfield was pretty killing, particularly so considering the bad food we were given.

The Gulag

• The ‘enemies of the people,’ as a rule, were detailed for the heaviest jobs, the lighter work being given to the ‘trusties’ or common criminals . . . [I]t was they who appointed foremen, cooks, orderlies, and tent seniors.

The Gulag

• Naturally enough the small amounts of fat released for the pot chiefly found their way into the bellies of the ‘trusties.’ There were three types of rations: one for those who had not fulfilled their quota, another for those who had, and a third for those who had exceeded their quota.

The Gulag

• The latter automatically included the ‘trusties.’ They did little enough work, but the tally clerks were of their persuasion and so they swindled, putting to their own and their mates’ credit the work that we had done. As a result the criminals fed well and the politicals went hungry.”

The Gulag

• V. Laschkin

• “The whole system in the camps Ivan Denisovich passed through was calculated to choke and kill without mercy every feeling for justice and legality in man,

The Gulag

• “demonstrating in general and in detail such impunity of despotism that any sort of noble or rebellious impulse was powerless before it.

The Gulag

• “The camp administration did not allow the prisoners to forget for a single moment that they had no rights at all . . . . “


• The free labour market is declared ended. No one could change jobs without permission. Skilled workers could be sent anywhere the state chose. (32)


• (32) Social benefits were cut. Crimes such as absenteeism (being 20 minutes late) was a criminal offense. (32-3


• In other words, the entire working population was, to one degree or another, the slave of the state.


• Karl Marx’ workers’ paradise has been achieved, right????

Nicolas Werth, “A State Against Its People

• “A provisional balance sheet of statistics on the terror might run as follows:


• •6 million dead as a result of the famine of 1932-33, a catastrophe that can be blamed largely on the policy of enforced collectivization and the predatory tactics of the central government in seizing the harvests of the kolkhozy.


• •720,000 executions, 680,000 of which were carried out in 1937-38, usually after some sort of travesty of justice by a special GPU or NKVD court.


• 720,000 executions, 680,000 of which were carried out in 1937-38, usually after some sort of travesty of justice by a special GPU or NKVD court.


• 300,000 known deaths in the camps from 1934 to 1940. By extrapolating these figures back to 1930-1933 (years for which very few records are available),


• we can estimate that some 400,000 died during the decade, not counting the incalculable number of those who died between the moment of their arrest and thir registration as prisoners in one of the camps.


• •600,000 registered deaths among the refugees, deportees, and the ‘specially displaced.’


• •Approximately 2,200,000 deported, forcibly moved, or exiled as ‘specially displaced.’


• •A cumulative figure of 7 million people who entered the camps and Gulag colonies from 1934 to 1941 (information for the years 1930-1933 remains imprecise).


• we can estimate that some 400,000 died during the decade, not counting the incalculable number of those who died between the moment of their arrest and thir registration as prisoners in one of the camps.


• •600,000 registered deaths among the refugees, deportees, and the ‘specially displaced.’

• Approximately 2,200,000 deported, forcibly moved, or exiled as ‘specially displaced.’


•A cumulative figure of 7 million people who entered the camps and Gulag colonies from 1934 to 1941 (information for the years 1930-1933 remains imprecise).

Stalin’s Overtures to Hitler

• May 1939

• Molotov replaces Litvinov as Foreign Minister.


Litvinov was not only well-educated, cosmopolitan, and very anti-Nazi, he was also a Jew.


• Replacing him with Molotov, a tough-minded true believer who obeys Stalin slavishly can negotiate with Hitler where Litvinov could not.


• Molotov said nothing when Stalin sent his Jewish wife to the Gulag, and he continued paying his Party dues even after Khruschchev expelled him from the Party and exiled him

Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact

• August 23, 1939

• Publically, they pledge mutual neutrality in the event of war. There are economic clauses as well that were extremely favorable to Germany.

Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact

• The secret protocols divided Poland between them and established spheres of influence, with the Soviet’s sphere including Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and the Balkans.

Stalin Creates a Buffer Zone

• Sept. 17, 1939

• Red Army invades Poland.

• The new border pushes the point where Germany and the Soviet Union meet to the west–farther away from the Soviet heartland.


• Soviets annexe western Ukraine and Belorussia


• Nov. 30, 1939

• Russo-Finnish War begins Stalin’s purpose is to push the Finnish border away from Leningrad by annexing the Karelian Isthmus plus naval bases in the Baltic.


• Karelia is culturally very important to the Finns, and they refuse to give Karelia


• March 1940

• Russo-Finnish War ends. Despite heroic resistance which shattered the Soviet first offensive, the Finns cannot hold out against overwhelming odds. Stalin imposes its terms.

Murder of Polish officers at Katyn

• April 1940

• At least 4,000 of them were executed in the Katyn Forest and buried in a mass grave. His purpose was to decapitate Polish leadeship.

Stalin 1929-1941

Documents

Transcript of Stalin 1929-1941