Stalin's socialism is the name of the socio-political system that was formed and existed during the reign of Joseph Stalin from the second half of the 1920s to 1953. During this period, the USSR experienced industrialization, collectivization, and several waves of terror. Socialism of the Stalin era is a classic totalitarian state with a command economy and a wide repressive apparatus.
New economy
The first thing about Stalinist socialism is the accelerated industrialization that was carried out in the USSR in the 1930s. Having come to power, the Bolsheviks received a country destroyed by the long-term Civil War and a severe economic crisis. Therefore, in order to stabilize the situation, the party headed by Lenin decided to make an ideological compromise and initiated the NEP. This name was given to the new economic policy, which implied the existence of free market enterprise.
NEP in the shortest possible time led to the restoration of the country. Meanwhile, Lenin died in 1924. Power for some time became collective. Eminent Bolsheviks, who were behind the organization of the October Revolution and the victory inCivil War. Gradually, Stalin eliminated all his competitors. At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, he established the sole totalitarian power. Having secured his exclusive right to lead a huge state, the General Secretary of the Central Committee began industrialization. It became the basis of what would soon be known as Stalinist socialism.
Five Year Plans
The industrialization plan consisted of several important points. Absorption of the entire economy by the public sector began. The national economy now had to live according to five-year plans. An "economy regime" was proclaimed. All the country's funds were thrown into the construction of new factories and plants.
Finally, Stalinist socialism meant industrialization itself - the creation of machine production in industry and other areas of the national economy. Its goal was to move away from agrarian vestiges in the economy. The country lacked experienced personnel, and the USSR itself was in international isolation. Therefore, the Politburo sought to ensure economic and technical independence from the West.
Forced industrialization was carried out at the expense of resources pumped out of the village, internal loans, cheap labor, prison labor and proletarian enthusiasm. The "saving regime" was reflected in everything - housing, food, wages. The state created a system of harsh exploitation of the population, limiting its consumption. In 1928-1935. food cards existed in the country. Forced industrialization was driven by ideology. Soviet power is allstill dreamed of a world revolution and hoped to take advantage of a short peaceful respite to create a new economy, without which the struggle against the imperialists would be impossible. Therefore, the years of industrialization in the USSR (1930s) ended not only with the appearance of a qualitatively different economy, but also with the strengthening of the country's defense capability.
Shock constructions
The first five-year plan fell on 1928-1932. New industrial facilities during this period appeared mainly in the field of energy, metallurgy and mechanical engineering. Separate plans were prepared for each industry and some especially important economic regions (for example, Kuzbass). The project of Dneprostroy became exemplary, within the framework of which a hydroelectric power station and a dam on the Dnieper were built.
Stalin's socialism gave the country a new coal and metallurgical center in the fields of deposits in Siberia and the Urals. Prior to that, most of the enterprises were located in the European part of the USSR. The first five-year plans changed things. Now the Soviet industry was distributed over the territory of the vast country in a more balanced way. The relocation of enterprises to the East was also dictated by the fears of the political leadership of a war with the collective West.
In Stalin's times, Dalstroy appeared, mining gold in the Far East (especially in Kolyma). The labor of Gulag prisoners was actively used in this region. It was these people who built many enterprises of the first five-year plans. They also dug the famous White Sea Canal, which united the European river basins of the USSR.
Agricultural change
Together with industrialization, collectivization is what belongs to Stalinist socialism in the very first place. The two processes ran in parallel and synchronously. Without one, there would be no other. Collectivization is the process of destroying private farms in the countryside and creating common collective farms, which were one of the main symbols of the new socialist system.
In the first Soviet decade, changes in the agricultural sector were almost not spurred on by the state. Collective farms existed together with the private farms of the kulaks, in fact, independent farmers of the Western type. These were enterprising peasants who earned average capital in the countryside. For the time being, Stalinist socialism did not restrict their activities.
In 1929, on the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution, the party secretary general published the famous article "The Year of the Great Break". In it, Stalin announced the beginning of a new economic stage of development in the countryside. In December, he publicly issued a call not to limit the kulaks, but to destroy them as a class. Immediately after these words, the so-called "solid collectivization" followed.
Dispossession of kulaks
To complete collectivization, the authorities used methods similar to military ones. Detachments of communist agitators were sent to the villages. If, after generally peaceful calls, the peasant did not go to the collective farm and did not leave his individual farm, he was repressed. Property was confiscated.
Fists were considered owners who usedhired laborers on their farms, who sold products, owned butter churns or windmills. In total, about 15-20% of the peasants who did not want to go to the collective farms were "processed". Many of them, along with their families, were sent to camps, prisons and exile. Such special settlers were deprived of civil rights.
Dizzy with Success
The long-term Stalinist model of socialism was characterized by indefatigable cruelty. Local party organs and newspapers urged the "active" not to be shy about inciting hatred towards class alien kulaks and other counter-revolutionaries. The middle peasants and their we althy neighbors often resisted repression. They killed sent communists and organizers of collectivization, fled to the cities, set fire to collective farms, and slaughtered their own livestock. A series of armed uprisings was spontaneous. It did not take on an organized character, and soon the state crushed resistance.
The village in the Soviet era was tormented not only by Stalin's socialism. The introduction of surplus appropriation during the Civil War, when agricultural producers were obliged to hand over part of their crops to the state, also hit farmers hard. The Bolsheviks from time to time alternated pressure and relaxation in their pressure on the countryside.
In the spring of 1930, Stalin, frightened by the armed resistance of the kulaks, wrote a conciliatory article "Dizzy with success." The pace of collectivization slowed down somewhat. A significant part of the peasants left the collective farms. However, in the fall, repression resumed. active phasecollectivization ended in 1932, and in 1937, about 93% of peasant farms consisted of collective farms.
Draining resources from the village
Many features of Stalinist socialism were an ugly product of totalitarianism and violence. The repression was justified by the construction of a new society and expectations of a brighter future. MTS - machine and tractor stations became one of the main symbols of the socialist economy in the countryside. They existed in 1928-1958. MTS provided the collective farms with new equipment.
For example, Stalingrad became the center of Soviet tractor building, whose factory was converted into a tank plant during the war years. Collective farms paid for state equipment with their own products. So, MTS effectively pumped out resources from the village. During the years of the first five-year plans, the USSR actively exported grain abroad. Trade did not stop even during periods of terrible famine in the collective farms. The proceeds from the sale of grain and other crops were spent by the state leadership on the continuation of forced industrialization and the construction of a new military-industrial complex.
The success of the mobilization economy at the same time led to a disaster in agriculture. The layer of the most enterprising, literate and active peasants was destroyed, while the new collective farm movement led to the degeneration of the peasantry. The resisting kulaks slaughtered 26 million heads of cattle (about 45%). It took another 30 years to restore the population. Even the new agricultural machinery did not allow to bring the crops even up toNEP times. The figures were achieved not by high-quality work, but by an increase in sown areas.
Merge state and party
In the mid-1930s, totalitarian socialism finally took shape in the USSR. Years of repressive politics have completely changed society. However, the apogee of repression fell just in the second half of the 1930s, and it ended largely due to the onset of the war with Germany.
An important feature of totalitarian power was the merging of party and government bodies - the party completely controlled legislative activities and the courts, and the party itself was held in a tight grip by just one person. In total, Stalin carried out several waves of internal purges. At different times, they concentrated on party or military personnel, but ordinary citizens also got it.
Purges in the party and army
Repressions were carried out with the help of the special services that changed their name several times (OGPU-NKVD-MGB). The state began to control all spheres of social activity and life, from sports and art to ideology. To create a "single line" Stalin consistently cracked down on all his opponents within the party. These were Bolsheviks of the older generation, who knew the general secretary as an illegal revolutionary. People like Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin ("Lenin's guard") - they all became victims of show trials, in which they were publicly recognized as traitors to the Motherland.
The peak of repressions against party cadres fell on 1937-1938. Then it happenedpurge in the Red Army. Its entire command staff was destroyed. Stalin was afraid of the military, considering them a threat to his sole power. Not only the senior, but also the middle command staff suffered. Qualified specialists who had experience of the Civil War have practically disappeared. All this had a negative impact on the army, which, just a few years later, had to enter its largest war.
Combating pests and enemies of the people
The first show trials that thundered throughout the country took place in the late 1920s. Such were the "Shakhty case" and the trial of the "Industrial Party". During this period, technical and engineering specialists were repressed. Joseph Stalin, whose years of rule were spent in a series of propaganda campaigns, was very fond of loud clichés and labels. With his filing, such terms and symbols of the era as "pests", "enemies of the people", "cosmopolitans" appeared.
The turning point for the repressions was 1934. Before that, the state terrorized the population, and now it has taken on iconic party members. In that year, the 17th Congress was held, which became known as the “Congress of the Executed”. There was a vote for a new general secretary. Stalin was re-elected, but many did not support his candidacy. Everyone considered Sergei Kirov to be an important figure at the congress. A few months later, he was shot dead by an unbalanced party worker, Nikolayev, in Smolny. Stalin took advantage of the figure of the deceased Kirov, making it a sacred symbol. A campaign was launched against traitors and conspirators, who, as explainedpropaganda killed an important member of the party and were going to destroy it.
Loud political labels appeared: White Guards, Zinovievists, Trotskyists. Secret service agents "revealed" new secret organizations that tried to harm the country and the party. Anti-Soviet activity was also attributed to random people who, by coincidence, fell under the rink of a totalitarian machine. In the most terrible years of terror, the NKVD approved the standards for the number of those shot and convicted, which local authorities had to diligently comply with. The repressions were carried out under the slogans of the class struggle (the thesis was put forward that the more successful the construction of socialism was, the sharper the class struggle would become).
Stalin did not forget to carry out purges in the special services themselves, whose hands carried out numerous executions and trials. The NKVD survived several such campaigns. In the course of them, the most odious heads of this department, Yezhov and Yagoda, were killed. Also, the state did not take its eyes off the intelligentsia. These were writers, film and theater figures (Mandelstam, Babel, Meyerhold), and inventors, physicists and designers (Landau, Tupolev, Korolev).
Stalin's socialism ended with the death of the leader in 1953, followed by the Khrushchev thaw and Brezhnev's developed socialism. In the USSR, the assessment of those events varied depending on the situation. Khrushchev, who came to power at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, condemned Stalin's personality cult and his repressions. Under Brezhnev, the official ideology treated the figure of the leader more softly.
