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Totalitarian Ideology AQA His1N N C Gardner MA PGCE

History Stalin Totalitarian Ideology 2015 AQA

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Page 1: History Stalin Totalitarian Ideology 2015 AQA

Totalitarian IdeologyAQA His1N

N C Gardner MA PGCE

Page 2: History Stalin Totalitarian Ideology 2015 AQA
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Psychological need: there was a psychological need for a single leader to follow and worship.

The Tsars of Russia had been worshipped as fathers of the nation, with icons in homes – Stalin now acted in place of the Tsar.

Stalin created a Cult of Lenin after Lenin’s death in January 1924. To millions of peasants, whose religious instincts were repressed under the revolution, the Lenin Mausoleum soon became a place of pilgrimage.

Cult of Stalin

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Lenin Mausoleum, Moscow

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Stalin was personally responsible for the creation of the cult – he defied Lenin, who had also filled the psychological role as leader, and then used the Lenin legacy to make himself the ‘Lenin of Today’.

Just as original Christianity, as it was spreading into pagan countries, absorbed elements of pagan beliefs and rites and blended them with its own ideas, so now Marxism, the product of western European thought, was absorbing elements of the Byzantine tradition, so deeply ingrained in Russia.

Stalin’s creation: the cult of Lenin

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Soviet victory parade, Moscow 1945: captured Nazi battle standards thrown at the feet of Stalin

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Gigantic busts and portraits at every corner, speeches on artistic and scientific subjects glorified Stalin.

Cities and streets named in honour of Lenin and Stalin (Leningrad and Stalingrad) helped create the cult.

Propaganda spread the cult

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Statue of Lenin

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The abstract ideas of Marxism could exist, in their purity, in the brains of intellectual revolutionaries, especially those who had lived as exiles in western Europe before the revolution.

Now, after the doctrine had really been transplanted to Russia and come to dominate the outlook of a great nation, it could assimilate itself to that nation’s spiritual climate, to its traditions, customs, and habits.

Marxism as a secular religion

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Stalin supported every contention of his with a quotation from Lenin, sometimes out of context, in the same way that medieval scholars had sought sanction for their speculations in the holy writ of the Bible.

Lenin had also sometimes backed his arguments with all too frequent references to Marx. Stalin might as well have said: “Give me a quotation from Lenin and I will move the earth.”

Stalin codified Leninism

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The collected works of Lenin

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As the cult of Stalin grew it became more difficult to resist as people wished to follow their neighbours and take part in mass activities.

People genuinely wished to thank Stalin for material improvements in their lives, such as the end of rationing in 1935, extended education and the removal of ‘enemies of the people’ in the purges of the 1930s.

The psychology of adulation

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Adulation of Stalin

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There was an element of fear in existence in the Soviet Union in the 1930s due to the purges, show trials and NKVD arrests that meant that some people would feel pressured into supporting the cult of Stalin.

Element of fear

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Under Stalin’s dictatorship the revolutionary elements inherited from Lenin combined with Russian traditions.

Like Cromwell as Lord Protector or Napoleon as Emperor of the French, Stalin became the guardian and the trustee of the revolution. He consolidated its gains and extended them. He ‘built socialism’; and even his opponents, while denouncing his autocracy, admitted that most of his economic reforms were indeed essential for socialism.

Blending of Communism with Russian traditions

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Moscow Metro built in the 1930s

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Stalin’s technique of power revealed his distrustful attitude towards society, his pessimistic approach to it. Socialism was to be built by coercion rather than persuasion.

Stalin had the last word in the Politbureau. He did not even preside over its sessions. Usually he listened silently to the arguments and resolved most of the arguments by sarcasm, a half-jovial, meaningful threat, or a brusque gesture of impatience.

Stalin’s technique of power

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Stalin’s desire to take total control of the Soviet state led to the purges of the party, the armed forces and the general population.

Individuals who posed a potential challenge to his rule, such as Trotsky, faced assassination.

Stalin’s desire for total control

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Assassination of Leon Trotsky, August 20th, 1940 in Mexico

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Stalin’s main motive for the purges of Lenin’s Old Guard including Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, was to destroy the men who represented the potentiality of alternative government.

From the outset Stalin identified any attempt at creating an alternative government, and even the thought of this, with counter-revolution.

To destroy all alternatives

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The destruction of all political centres from which an attempt at counter-revolution might, in certain circumstances, have been made, was the direct and undeniable consequence of the trials.

To combat counter-revolution

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The NKVD sought to justify the powers they received in 1934 by finding conspiracies.

Gulags were responsible for 10 – 15% of the Soviet GNP by 1939 and therefore the economy relied on purging, and ‘enemies’ like Bukharin had been destroyed to win Stalin’s patronage.

Purges also driven by other forces

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Soviet gulag: forced labour

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It was essential that the Soviet Union was united because of the threat of war presented by international capitalism in the 1920s and the aggressive Nazi dictatorship from 1933 which was distinctly anti-communist.

Stalin’s need for a united country

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The prospect of a single-handed fight between the Soviet Union and Germany seemed grim in the 1930s. In the First World War the strength of the German military machine sufficed to deal a shattering blow to Russia and to sap Tsardom.

The shadow of the last Tsar must have been on Stalin’s mind as he viewed Hitler’s preparations for war.

Prospects of war

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German army parade, 1939

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How successful was Stalin’s regime in crushing diversity in the Soviet Union in the 1930s?

Political opposition and alternative ideologies were crushed. Opponents of Stalin’s collectivisation were expelled from the Communist Party.

Sergei Kirov defended comrades and called for a reduction in the speed of collectivisation and was assassinated in 1934, and the Congress that supported Kirov was purged.

AQA Exam question, June 2011

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Sergei Kirov, Politburo member and head of the Leningrad party (1886 – 1934)

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As General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Stalin used his control over appointments to build a personal following in the Party apparatus.

Stalin appointed individual Party secretaries and gave them security of tenure. In return, they voted for him at Party Congresses. Stalin used this power to remove political rivals in the course of his rise to power.

Stalin’s position as General Secretary.

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However, with the opening of the historical archives since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, new evidence suggests that Party officials pursued agendas defined by their institutional interests and not solely by the will of Stalin.

Recent documents portray a Stalin nagged with doubts that central directives were being fulfilled. In this, his immediate subordinates were not the problem, but the greater mass of the Party and state bureaucracy responding to impossible demands with foot-dragging and deception.

New historical evidence; opening of the Soviet archives after 1991

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Stalin provided security of tenure to many Party secretaries. The gravest threat to their power in the first decade of Soviet power came from political infighting in local organisations.

Stalin won the support of secretaries by attacking intra-party democracy and reinforcing their power within their organisations.

Support of Party secretaries for Stalin

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Many Party secretaries voted for Stalin at Party Congresses. They helped him defeat his rivals in the Politburo because they had a common interest in it, not because they felt personally beholden to Stalin.

In the early 1930s, their interests began to diverge with the crisis of the First Five-Year Plan, punishing grain collections, famine, and the emergence of the ‘command-administrative system’.

Many Party secretaries voted for Stalin at Party Congresses

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The Party secretaries had helped Stalin to power, but they may have begun to worry if they had made the right choice. There was nothing they could do about it though.

In attacking intra-Party democracy, they contributed to a situation in which it was impossible to question the ‘Central Committee line’. Since discussion and criticism of central policy was impossible, footdragging and subversion were the logical response.

Stalin as General Secretary

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The 1930s was the time when Stalin achieved an extreme centralisation of decision-making functions in the top Party bodies and ultimately in his own hands.

The Politburo became less and less a collective organ of decision-making. Its formal procedures and routines fell into disuse and its meetings became less and less frequent. Informal, ad hoc subgroups of top leaders made the decisions.

Centralisation of decision-making, 1930s

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In 1934 all aspects of internal state security were co-ordinated in the NKVD (secret police). The time of the Great Terror began, but the purges meant not expulsion from the Party, as in the 1920s, but imprisonment, exile or death, with or without a trial.

Of the 1,996 delegates attending the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, 1,108 would perish in the Great Terror. At this time the Soviet Union was recovering from the catastrophe of collectivisation.

The Great Terror and the purges, 1934 - 41

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Life in the Soviet gulag

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Interrogation in the gulag: ‘the swan drive’

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“A long piece of rough towelling was inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine breaking – and without water and food for two days …”

Solzhenitsyn’s description of ‘the swan drive’

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The results of Soviet Communism: mass famine

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The history of Communism brings us back to this: the scarcity or absence of food

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The democratic world: New York dinner party, 1930s

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Trotsky in 1904 was in dispute with Lenin and commented:

“Lenin’s methods lead to this: the party organisation at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the central committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally a single ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee.”

Totalitarianism: logical outcome of Bolshevism

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The Tsarist political heritage was important for the consolidation of Stalin’s dictatorship.

By the nineteenth century Russia was ruled through an autocratic, centralised, bureaucratic system. Stalin was following on from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

Thus the Tsarist political heritage eased Stalin’s elaboration of a repressive and despotic regime.

Stalin’s totalitarianism: the legacy of Tsarism

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Peter the Great, Tsar of All the Russia's, 1682 - 1725

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Marxism-Leninism’s pretensions to ‘scientific’ knowledge of history’s ‘laws’ rendered the party infallible (a secular religion), an institution qualitatively different from and superior to all other political parties and ideologies; past, present and future.

Marxism-Leninism: the ideology of totalitarianism

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Some believe that Stalin may have been clinically insane.

Stories of Stalin’s insanity stem from an examination carried out by the famous neuropathologist Vladimir Bekhterev in December 1927. He reportedly told his colleagues that Stalin suffered from paranoia.

Stalin may have been clinically insane

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For Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the historian Robert Conquest, Stalin really was ‘the Lenin of today’, but far more brutal, unscrupulous and cunning than the dead leader.

Driven on by morbid suspicion, lust for power and a monstrous ideology Stalin consciously planned and directed the entire purge process. He sanctioned Kirov’s murder in 1934 to rid himself of Politburo ‘moderates’ and used the excuse of Kirov’s murder to start the Great Terror.

Stalin: ‘the Lenin of today’

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Trotsky observed in 1936:

“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption …When there are enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there are few goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line.

When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy.”

Stalin’s bureaucratic rule

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According to Trotsky totalitarianism arose in the context of domestic backwardness and the international situation after the Great War.

It did not arise from Marxist-Leninist ideology or the party form.

If the bureaucrats – personified by Stalin – owed their ascendancy to the belated European revolution and the Russian proletariat’s numerical weakness and cultural poverty, material deprivation caused the bureaucratic state to metamorphose into a police state.

Trotsky’s explanation of totalitarianism

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Leon Trotsky (1879 – 1940), leader of the October Revolution, founder of the Red Army, Marxist revolutionary and theorist

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Under Stalin’s dictatorship (1928 – 1953), material scarcity remained.

Neither the bureaucracy or the police could solve the country’s social and economic problems in an egalitarian fashion. Socialism, the USSR’s legitimating ideology, stood in opposition to the state form (Stalin’s dictatorship).

Stalin’s state: material scarcity

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In George Orwell’s ‘1984’ novel, the one-party dictatorship have regular, daily ‘Two Minutes Hate’ sessions against people that the state describes as ‘scapegoats’ and ‘saboteurs’.

So also Stalin’s Russia: Stalin resorted to a ‘frame-up system’ (the show trials), and a medieval witch-hunt for ‘enemies of the people’ caricatured as ‘Trotskyists’ (real or imaginary).

Scapegoats: Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate

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Stalin’s dictatorship abolished the distinction between public and private life, and this also disorganised social groupings that may have menaced the regime.

Once again, Orwell’s ‘1984’ illustrates this aspect of Stalin’s Russia perfectly in the secret love affair between Winston Smith and Julia which is destroyed by the one-party state. Love between human beings is a threat to any dictatorship since a totalitarian regime only wants one form of loyalty and love – love for the Motherland/Fatherland/Stalin/Hitler.

Control over private life

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Terror included a psychological dimension. Since Stalin and the bureaucrats were alienated from society, paranoia and distrust pervaded the government.

Stalin feared rivals in the apparatus, likewise the officials feared Stalin but each needed the other because both feared the masses.

Terror, purging and paranoia thus became permanent and necessary adjuncts of state power in the USSR.

State terror: a psychological dimension

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Issac Deutscher, biographer of Trotsky, stated in ‘Stalin: A Political Biography’ that Stalin functioned in a country of social and economic backwardness. Deutscher also characterised terror as ‘rational’, speculating that Stalin launched a pre-emptive strike against Old Bolsheviks, party officials and the army high command to counter the threat of a coup d'état should war break out with Germany.

Issac Deutscher, biographer of Trotsky and Stalin.

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Deutscher writes in his biography that Stalin was probably thinking of 1917 when he started the Great Terror and show trials. In 1917 government disunity and the army’s political unreliability were major factors in tsarism’s collapse.

By staffing the party-state with inexperienced cadres and officers completely dependent on himself, Stalin may have been attempting to strengthen the regime.

Stalin probably thinking of 1917

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Issac Deutscher (1907 – 67), Polish writer, biographer of Trotsky and Stalin

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Deutscher writes that although Stalin was boundlessly cruel and probably insane, he played a positive historical role because he was a great ‘moderniser’, dragging the USSR into the twentieth century.

“Russia had been belated in her historical development. In England serfdom had disappeared by the end of the fourteenth century. Stalin’s parents were still serfs.

Stalin as a ‘moderniser’

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“By the standards of British history, the fourteenth and twentieth centuries have, in a sense, met …in Stalin. The historian cannot be seriously surprised if he finds in him some traits usually associated with tyrants of earlier centuries.” (Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 1972)

Stalin as ‘moderniser’

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The Soviet dissident historian, Roy Medvedev, pointed to social and economic factors inherited from the ancien regime (Tsarist Russia) which shaped the politics of the 1930s.

Medvedev lays far greater stress on personality than other Marxist historians: “The first and most important was Stalin’s measureless ambition. This incessant though carefully hidden lust for power appeared in Stalin much earlier than 1937 (the height of the show trials). Even though he had great power, it was not enough – he wanted absolute power and unlimited submission to his will.”

Stalin’s measureless ambition

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Stalin first took revenge upon Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were accused of conniving in Kirov’s death. Kirov had been murdered on 1st December 1934. They agreed to accept moral and political responsibility for their former minor adherent in return for an assurance that they would receive a light sentence.

On Stalin’s orders Zinoviev and Kamenev were consigned to ten and five years of imprisonment respectively. Stalin’s prisons were not rest homes. In addition over 30,000 deportations of members of social groups regarded as hostile to communism took place; exile was to bleak Siberian locations.

Stalin’s revenge: Zinoviev and Kamenev

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According to official records, 681,692 persons were executed in 1937 – 38. The impact of the Great Terror was deep and wide and was not limited to specific political, administrative, military, cultural, religious and national groups.

Even a harmless old Russian peasant woman muttering dissatisfaction with conditions or her young worker-son complaining about housing standards would be dispatched to the horrors of the gulag.

The Great Terror: executions

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By 1939 the total number of prisoners in the forced-labour system was 2.9 million. In each camp there were gangs of convicted thieves who were allowed by the authorities to bully the ‘politicals’. The trading of sexual favours was rife.

Many inmates would kill or maim a weaker fellow victim just to rob him of his shoes.

Stalin continued to expand the scope of the terror.

Soviet gulag prisoners: 2.9 million by 1939

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No institution in the Soviet state failed to incur Stalin’s suspicion. Even Red Army generals were executed. Stalin’s aim was to ensure that the armed forces were incapable of promoting policies in any way different from his own, and Marshal Tukhachevski, head of the Red Army, laid himself open to trouble by arguing for a more adventurous military strategy for the USSR.

Red Army leaders executed

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Marshal Tukhachevski (1893 – 1937), outstanding general during the Civil War (1918 – 21), chief of staff of the Red Army (1925 – 28), executed 11th June 1937

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Stalin’s very success in prosecuting the Great Terror brought about a crisis. The original purpose had been to reconstruct the state so as to secure authority and impose Stalin’s policies. However, in carrying out the purges, the executions and imprisonments, Stalin came close to demolishing the state itself.

The blood-purge of the armed forces disrupted the USSR’s defences in a period of intense international tension.

The crisis of the Great Terror

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The arrest of the economic administrators in the people’s commissariats impeded industrial output.

The destruction of cadres in party, trade unions and local government undermined administrative co-ordination.

This extreme destabilization endangered Stalin himself. For if the Soviet state fell apart, Stalin’s career would be at an end.

The crisis of the Soviet state

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Stalin had started the carnage of 1937 – 38 because of real hostility to his policies, real threats to his authority, a real underlying menace to the compound of the Soviet order. Yet his reaction was hysterically out of proportion to the menace he faced.

However, Stalin was in his element amidst chaos and violence, and had learned how to create an environment of uncertainty wherein only he could remain a fixed, dominant point of influence.

The crisis of the Great Terror

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008), Soviet writer

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Stalin believed in the rapid trainability of functionaries and experts, and this gave him equanimity when butchering an entire administrative stratum.

No one coming into frequent contact with him in the late 1930s had a chance to become disloyal: he had them killed before such thoughts could enter their heads. He was unflustered about murder.

Stalin’s paranoia

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By the late 1930s Stalin was identifying himself with the great despots of history. He was fascinated by Genghis Khan, and underlined the following adage attributed to him: ‘The deaths of the vanquished are necessary for the tranquillity of the victors.’

Other rulers who attracted him included the previous tsars, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

Stalin was fascinated by Genghis Khan

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Genghis Khan, Mongolian emperor, conqueror of Central Asia and China in the 13th century

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Stalin continued to admire Lenin even though Lenin on his death-bed wished to sack him from the General Secretaryship.

Lenin’s ideas on violence, dictatorship, terror, centralism, hierarchy and leadership were integral to Stalin’s thinking.

Lenin had bequeathed to Stalin the system of terror – the Cheka (secret police), the forced-labour camps, the one-party state, the prohibition of free and popular elections, the ban on internal party dissent.

Stalin continued to admire Lenin

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It is hard to imagine Lenin carrying out a terror upon his own party.

Nor was he likely to have insisted on the physical and psychological degradation of those arrested by the political police.

Lenin would have been horrified by the scale and methods of the Great Terror.

How Lenin differed from Stalin

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The Soviet regime had always been desperately insecure. Except for a brief moment in the October Revolution and perhaps in the Civil War, the Bolsheviks could never be sure of a popular mandate.

The frail peace of the New Economic Policy (NEP) 1921 – 28 was accompanied by a belief that matters were balanced on a knife edge. Anxiety increased once the risky adventures of collectivisation and forced industrialisation commenced.

The Old Bolsheviks

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A New Economic Policy marketplace, 1921

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Foreign powers (Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the United States) remained hostile to the new communist state. The Civil War had not been forgotten.

Émigrés in a dozen European capitals conspired against the regime. Peasants rose against the government. Nationalist sentiment had not been suddenly extinguished.

Enemies of the Soviet state remained

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The state was a central and ubiquitous presence.

It was the formal distributor of goods and the near-monopolistic producer of them, so that even the black market traded in state goods.

All urban citizens worked for the state. There were virtually no other alternative employers.

The Stalinist state

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The state was a tireless regulator of life, issuing and demanding an endless stream of documents and permits without which the simplest operations of daily life were impossible.

As everybody including the leaders admitted, the Soviet bureaucracy, recently greatly expanded under Stalin to cope with its new range of tasks and thus full of inexperienced and unqualified officials, was slow, cumbersome, inefficient, and corrupt.

The Stalinist state

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Law and legal process were held in low regard, and the actions of officialdom were marked by arbitrariness and favouritism.

Citizens felt themselves at the mercy of officials and the regime; they speculated endlessly about the people “up there” and what new surprises they might have in store for the population, but felt powerless to influence them.

The Stalinist state

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Moscow State University, founded 1755

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1 Communist Party rule 2 Marxist-Leninist ideology 3 Rampant bureaucracy 4 Leader cults 5 State control over production and

distribution 6 Social engineering 7 Affirmative action on behalf of

workers 8 Stigmatization of “class enemies”

Features of Stalinism

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9 Police surveillance

10 State terror

11 Various informal, personalistic arrangements whereby people at every level sought to protect themselves and obtain scarce goods

Features of Stalinism

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NKVD officers

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Collectivisation and the First Five-Year Plan (1929 – 32) marked the start of Stalin’s revolution: the transformation of the Soviet Union into an industrial great power.

The outcome of the First World War resulted in the dominance of the world economy by the United States. By 1918, only two global powers remained, the British Empire and the United States. If the Soviet Union wished to gain independence from the American-dominated world economic system, it had to industrialise quickly within ten years.

Stalin’s revolution

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With the devastation and geo-political shift of the First World War, the age of European power came to an end. The European powers were no longer the world’s overlord. The empires of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans had come to an end. France, also, ceased to be a great power of the first rank.

Trotsky warned of a ‘Balkanised Europe' under the domination of the new super-power, the United States, just as the countries of south-eastern Europe had once been under the domination of Britain and France.

Stalin’s aim: to compete with the capitalist powers

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Hitler warned in 1928, the ‘threatened global hegemony of the North American continent’ would reduce all the states of Europe to the status of Switzerland or Holland.

The United States was a power unlike any other, a novel kind of ‘super-state’. It was precisely the looming potential after 1918, the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan to such radical action.

All of them saw themselves as radical insurgents against an oppressive and powerful world order dominated by the United States and the British Empire.

Stalin’s aim: to compete with the capitalist powers

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National power in the early twentieth century was measured in the currency of battleships. The rations of geostrategic power were fixed at the Washington Naval Conference in 1922 in the ratio of 10:10:6:3:3. At the head stood Britain and the United States, accorded equal status as the only truly global powers.

Japan was granted third place as a one-ocean power confined to the Pacific. France and Italy were relegated to the east Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Germany and Russia were not even considered as conference participants.

The new global order after the Great War, 1919 onwards

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The purpose for Stalin and his First Five-Year Plan (1929 – 32) was rapid economic development using state planning and laying the foundations for socialism by rooting out private enterprise.

The Plan involved massive investment in heavy industry, skimping in the area of consumer goods, and substantial involuntary sacrifice of living standards by the general population to pay for it all.

Rapid economic development

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From the start of the Five-Year plan in 1929, Soviet borders were closed to people and goods from the world market, and the country declared its intention of achieving “economic autarchy.” In the short term, this move had the beneficial effect of cutting the Soviet Union off from the Great Depression.

In the long term, however, it set the stage for a retreat into suspicious, parochial isolation that was reminiscent of Muscovite Russia in the sixteenth century.

Soviet borders closed to the world market

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Increased suspicion of foreign enemies was matched by a sharp rise in hostility to “class enemies” at home: kulaks (rich peasants), priests, members of the pre-revolutionary nobility, former capitalists. In the Communist view all these groups were natural opponents of the Soviet state.

“class enemies”

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A cultural revolution took place against members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, known as “bourgeois specialists.”

During the New Economic Policy, Lenin had insisted on the state’s need for the specialists’ expertise, even though recommending that they be supervised closely by Communists.

Cultural revolution against “bourgeois specialists”

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From spring 1928, groups of engineers were charged with “wrecking” (intentionally damaging the Soviet economy) and treasonous contacts with foreign capitalists and intelligence services.

Stalin announced the urgent need for the Soviet Union to acquire its own “workers’ and peasants’ intelligentsia” to replace the “bourgeois intelligentsia” inherited from the Tsarist regime.

Cultural revolution against “bourgeois specialists”

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Moscow State University

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Stalin initiated a major program for sending workers, peasants, and young Communists to higher education, particularly engineering school, so that they could prepare for leadership in the new society.

The beneficiaries of the program achieved rapid promotion during the Great Purges and constituted a long-lasting political elite – the “Brezhnev generation” – whose tenure in power lasted until the 1980s.

Higher education for workers

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Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet General Secretary 1964 - 1982

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Following the Five-Year Plans and the Soviet victory in the Second World War against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union became part of the established order within the international system.

Marxism-Leninism served to legitimate an established order, an established social and political system, the dictatorship of Stalin and his successors.

Communism as an established order

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Despite the predications of Marx and Engels, the state in the Soviet Union was very far from withering away under Stalin and his successors.

The official Soviet account said that the state did not disappear until the achievement of full communism. Socialism was only a stage in the development towards communism and the state was necessary to protect the gains already made and ensure the continued development towards communism.

A strong, all-pervasive state

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Page 129: History Stalin Totalitarian Ideology 2015 AQA

Under Stalin, the Communist Party became the supreme force in the Soviet Union. The annual anniversary parades in Red Square to mark the October Revolution personified this.

Attempts to question the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party brought about the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the introduction of marital law in Poland in 1981.

The Communist Party: the supreme force in the Soviet Union

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The first generation of communists, Lenin’s colleagues, were intellectuals of middle-class background who joined the Party when adult.

The second generation, those of the 1930s and 1940s, were more men of peasant background who joined the Party early in life. They had little higher education and specialised in coercive political organisation.

In the post-Stalin period after 1953, the Party came to be dominated by men with a very high degree of technical education, specialists in administration and business management.

Personnel of the Communist Party

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Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet General Secretary 1985 – 91, the man who ended the Cold War

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Life in Russia, later the Soviet Union, from the First World War and Russian Civil War, was unpredictable. Huge numbers of people were uprooted geographically and socially, losing touch with family and friends, working in occupations different from the ones that had seemed marked out for them.

The October Revolution opened doors for advancement for some people, closed them for others. Stalin’s revolution in the 1930s shattered routines and expectations.

Arbitrary bureaucracy and dislocation of life under Stalin’s dictatorship, 1929 - 53

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Despite its promises of future abundance and massive propaganda of its current achievements, the Stalinist regime did little to improve the life of its people in the 1930s.

The NKVD’s soundings of public opinion, the Stalinist regime was relatively though not desperately unpopular in Russian towns. In Russian villages its unpopularity was much greater due to collectivisation and famine.

Little improvement in quality of life

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Overall, as the NKVD regularly reported and official statements repeated, the ordinary “little man” in Soviet towns, who thought only of his own and his family’s welfare, was “dissatisfied with Soviet power,” though in a fatalistic and passive manner.

The post-NEP situation was compared unfavourably with NEP, and Stalin – despite the officially fostered Stalin cult – was compared unfavourably with Lenin, sometimes because he was more repressive but more often because he let the people go hungry.

“Dissatisfied with Soviet power”