THE HOUSE THAT STALIN BUILT

Kievan Rus

• First great civilization of the Eastern Slavs.

• Centred on Kiev and Novgorod on trade routes between Scandinavia and Black Sea – Constantinople.

• Grand Prince Vladimir imposes Orthodox Christianity in 988: religion, alphabet.

• Rus becomes part of the Eastern sphere.

What is Russia?

• Approximately 1240 Mongols conquer Rus, rule for 200 years.

• Western area (now Ukraine) largely absorbed into Polish kingdom.

• Beginning in around 1320 Moscow becomes the centre of a new state: Muscovy.

• 1556 Ivan IV takes Kazan, headquarters of Mongols.

Ivan IV (“The Terrible” 1533-1554)

The dynamic of expansion

• Muscovy grows to absorb the surrounding lands.

• Late 16th century reaches across Siberia to the Pacific.

• 17th century absorbs eastern part of Ukraine from Poland.

The Russian Empire

• Peter I decides to bring Russia into European sphere.

• moves capital to St Petersburg in 1703.

• Builds a strong navy and military.

• Fights Swedes and Turks.

Peter I (1682-1725)Battle of Poltava against Sweden (1709)

Growing the Empire

• Catherine II (1762-1796) continues Peter’s program of expansion.

• Expands to the south to absorb Crimea.

• Division of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria.

•

The power structure of the Russian State

The Tsar The Boyars (chiefs of bureaucracy)

The intelligentsia (middle class, small layer)

The Narod (Common People)

The Origin of the Soviet Union

• First World War: Russia fights against Germany and Austria.

• Russia becomes exhausted, the last Emperor Nicholas II abdicates.

• Lenin’s Bolshevik party overthrows the provisional government on 25th October / 7th November 1917.

Vladimir Lenin (1917-1924)

What was Bolshevism?

• 1903 Lenin splits the Socialist movement: instead of working through parliamentary means (menshevism or Social Democracy), he advocates a dictatorship of the proletariat.

• The Russian revolution was the first proletarian revolution. The Bolshevik party renamed Communist.

• Lenin unleashes terror in the name of class warfare.• In 1921, with the Civil War over, Lenin announces

the New Economic Plan, allows small business to thrive.

The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s call to revolution

Let’s march ! Let’s fly ! Let’s sail ! Let’s roll !

Checking the list of all creation. That thing is necessary –

Fine, keep it. Unnecessary ?

To the devil ! A black cross.

We’ll destroy you, old romantic world !

In place of faith in our soul we have electricity and steam.

In place of misery, pocket the riches of all worlds !

The old men ? Kill them. And use the skulls for ashtrays!

The Soviet Empire?

• USSR occupies most of territory of the former Russian Empire.

• Exceptions: Finland, Poland, Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) which become independent in 1918 (and were reabsorbed after 1945).

• 1924 Lenin dies, Georgian Bolshevik Josef Stalin consolidates power.

Josef Stalin (1924-1953)

JOSEPH STALIN: BIOGRAPHY

- born Dec. 21, 1879, Georgia, Russian Empire- expelled from the seminary for revolutionary activities in 1899 - served in minor party posts and was appointed to the first Bolshevik

Central Committee in 1912 - served as commissar for nationalities and for state control in the

Bolshevik government (1917–23). - overcame his rivals and took control of Soviet politics after Lenin's

death (1924) - radically altered the economic and social structures leading to millions

of deaths and the rise of Soviet Union as a world super power.

What was Stalinism?

• 1920s saw rise of Fascism in Germany, Italy: war inevitable to defend the only communist country

• Socialism in one country meant building a powerful industrial state

• 1928 First Five-Year Plan to raise production.• Millions arrested, used as slave labour in construction• Electrification of the country: dams and canals

Collectivization of Agriculture

• Decision to sell grain abroad to purchase industrial equipment

• Peasants forced into collectives, contributing their own livestock, land, equipment

• Industrialization of agriculture: tractors and combines

• Partly class war against peasants

“Holodomor”

• In 1933 the crops fail, Soviets confiscate grain

• Millions die of starvation in the villages, especially in Ukraine

• Was it genocide by Russians against Ukrainians?

Collectivization

Theory: • increased output possible due to concentration,

mechanization

Doubtful results: • eradication of peasants’ motivation • Millions of people are starved to death when

land and food is confiscated• Soviet agriculture permanently disabled

Industrialization

Introduction of ambitious 5-year plans:• Successful development of heavy industry.• Tractors, trucks, planes, Moscow metro • Soviet Union becomes a sophisticated industrial

power • Massive exploitation of prisoners’ work. Labour

camps. • Stalin’s utopian projects: White (Belomor) Sea Canal

THE NEW SOVIET MAN

• Socialist state requires the support of a man of a new social and psychological type:

• devoted to the ultimate goal of building communism, an ideal society on earth

• capable of shifting from words to deeds• represents the mass• In post-Soviet Russia despised as “homo sovieticus”

Voloshyn, Reconstruction of Dnieper Hydro Plant, 1947

Gulags: Labour camps

0

500,000

1,000,000

1,500,000

2,000,000

2,500,000

3,000,000

1945 1948 1951 1953

Camps ColoniesTotal

Official police data. Reported to Stalin by Minister Kruglov. Source: Ahlberg 1992

PURGES: THE GREAT TERROR

Elimination of political rivals: • murder of Kirov (1934) • show trials of fellow Bolsheviks• the Great Terror (peak in 1937) • Millions arrested, shipped to Siberia, worked to death

in the GULAG camps

Why the Terror?

• Stalin falsified history to eliminate Trotsky from the history books

• Wrote his own History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union exaggerating his own role

• Feared a coup d’état and his own replacement by Trotsky, in exile in various countries

• Trotsky finally murdered in Mexico City by a Soviet agent in 1940

Why the Terror? The external situation

• Poland: invaded Soviet Russia in 1920, reached Kiev before being driven back to the gates of Warsaw; in 1930 plotted a second invasion with Japan; in 1939 negotiated with Hitler, broke off negotiations in April

• Japan defeated Russia in 1903-5; had designs on Siberia; invaded Mongolia in 1939

• Germany had controlled large chunk of Ukraine in 1918; Hitler hated Bolshevism, fought proxy war with USSR in Spain (1936)

The most important victory of the war? Khalkin Gol

• August 23-30, 1939• Soviet forces under General Zhukov surround and

annihilate Japanese force in Mongolia. • Japan signs treaty with USSR, turns to the Pacific• Stalin gains time for war with Germany, does not

have to fight on two fronts• USSR declares war on Japan August 8, 1945,

occupies Kuril Islands

The Prelude to WarMolotov-Ribbentrop pact 23 August 1939.

Germany and USSR:

secret protocols divide

Eastern Europe into

“spheres of interest.”

USSR granted Eastern

Poland, Estonia, Latvia,

Lithuania, Finland and

Bessarabia (Moldavia).

Execution of Polish Officers

• Some 20,000 Polish officers surrendered to Soviets

• In 1940 Stalin gives the order for them to be eliminated

• Why? – they pose a risk in case of invasion; they represent a hostile force

• Falsification of history: Soviets claim they were murdered by the Germans

THE SECOND WORLD WAR(THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR)

• June 22, 1941 Germany invades USSR.

• Defence of Moscow and Leningrad

• July 1942 - February 1943 the Battle of Stalingrad

• “Generals win battles, economies win wars.”

Spoils of war

• Victory and the division of Europe

• Growth of Stalin’s popularity at home. Soviet Union becomes a a world superpower.

• In 1945 USSR is superpower.

• Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukrainian-speaking part of Poland, Moldavia (part of Romania) all absorbed into USSR.

• Part of German East Prussia around Königsberg (Kaliningrad) becomes Soviet.

• “Soviet bloc” of occupied countries is formed:

East Germany (GDR), Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.

“Personality Cult”

• Stalin as an Icon• People cried when he died • Religious-style indoctrination • Forged history• Stalin=Motherland• Denounced by Nikita Khrushchev on 25

February1956 at 20th Communist Party congress.• Most popular leader in Russia today

Question

• Was Stalin inevitable, i.e., would another leader (for example, Leon Trotsky) have acted in the same way?