History 309 – CONTEMPORARY EUROPE – October 5, 2005

STALINISM  (1879 – 1936)

Date	Event
1879	Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili born in Georgia.  Stalin is NOT a Russian.  His family is poor – mother is very religious, father is violent drunk.
1894	At 15, Djugashvili enters seminary to study for Orthodox priesthood.  Already, he’s not a very nice person.  Very short, with a bad arm, and a pock-marked face, young Djugashvili is argumentative, violent, and domineering.  He’s bright but does poorly in school.
1895	16 year old Djugashvili starts meeting with college student radicals in Tiflis, Georgia’s capital.  Why?  He seems attracted to the underground life – he likes action, violence, danger, intrigue, power.  He likes being called “KOBA,” the name of a Georgian folk hero.  He adopts the code name STALIN.
1895-1917	IN THE TERRORIST UNDERGROUND.  Stalin spends some 22 years undergound, hiding from the police, on the lookout for police spies & double-agents, planning protests, strikes, bombing, assassinations.  He belongs to the Russian Social Democratic Party, and quickly sides with the Bolshevik faction. Stalin is the archetypal terrorist.  Utterly ruthless, cunning, violent, suspicious to the point of paranoia, he is a brilliant manipulator.  Some in the Party think he’s nothing but a thug.  Lenin is impressed with him.  He becomes the Bolshevik leader in Tiflis, then in all the state of Georgia.  He’s elected to the Bolshevik faction leadership.  Lenin considers him something of an expert when it comes to ethnic minorities. All this occurs in a very tiny political party – there are no more than a few hundred Bolsheviks in the whole country. And while Lenin and others live in Europe, write articles, and debate politics, Stalin lives in Tiflis, in the terror underground. He’s caught several times, exiled to Siberia, but repeatedly escapes and returns to Georgia. He plays a minor role in the 1905 REVOLUTION.
1917	REVOLUTION. Stalin rushes to Petrograd, joins the Party leadership. But plays only a minor role in the Revolution.
1918-1922	CIVIL WAR.  In the Civil War, thought, Stalin is a ruthless Bolshevik commander.  He’s not much of a military strategist, and he’s often criticized for his clumsy handling of troops.  But he is utterly ruthless and has no problem ordering mass killings.  His very awfulness makes him a powerful weapon. Overshadowed, though, by TROTSKY who proves to be a brilliant military commander.
1922	Stalin becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party.  A “nothing job,” Stalin’s task was bookkeeping.  He was to keep the minutes of all the meetings, keep the personal records on Party members, keep track of who got promoted and who didn’t.  But Stalin turns this into a power base.  He systematically recruits people he likes – APPARATCHIKI – that is, “apparatus people,” who were auathoritarian, conformist, bureaucratic, opportunistic, and entirely happy to do violence to anyone.  They’ve been called “homicidal bureaucrats,” and little by little, Stalin fills the Party with them.  Over the next 5-6 years, Stalin has a whole network of “Stalinists” within the Party, people he’s carefully recruited and promoted.  No other Party leader has anything like this highly organized, aggressive, and violent faction
1922	Lenin suffers the first of several strokes.  Who will lead the Party?
1923	All the ambitious Party leaders scramble – secretly – to replace Lenin.  TROTSKY is the obvious leader, so most of the others join into an “anti-Trotsky” alliance.  Behind the scenes, Stalin leads the anti-Trotsky faction.  In his Last Testament, though, Lenin warns against Stalin; Stalin is “too crude” to lead the Party, Lenin warns.
1924	Lenin dies.  Huge, emotional funeral. His body is mummified.  The Party “Politibureau” agrees to rule as a committee.
1927	Trotsky seems entirely out of touch.  The “anti-Trotskites,” led by Stalin, emerge as the dominant force in the Party.  Stalin plays the role of Mr. Moderation.  Trotsky, Stalin argues, is “too radical,” “too violent.”  What’s needed is caution & cooperation.  Stalin comes across as the most “pragmatic,” and “moderate” Party leader. Trotsky will be expelled from the Party and exiled.  In 1941, Trotsky, in exile in Mexico, is murdered.
1928	Stalin announces the first FIVE YEAR PLAN.  NEP is dropped.  Now, entire economy from huge corporations to tiny retail stores, are to be controlled by the central government.  Crash industrialization.  Nation’s entire resources focused on building gigantic factories & mines.  Vast propaganda campaign: children named “Traktor,” and “Dynamo.”  Cult of model worker, “Stakanov,” develops – loves Stalin, works for nothing!
	COLLECTIVIZATION – a key part of the Five Year Plan.  All private farms are to be merged into huge state owned mega-farms (some, “Sovkhozs” are government rule; more commonly, they’re “Kolkhozs” or “cooperative farms,” which are indirectly state owned.  Catastrophe!  Farmers, especially in the Ukraine, violently resist.  Stalin calls on Party to wage war against the counter-revolutionaries!  Stalin blames “rich farmers” or KULAKS; and vows to “liquidate the kulaks!”  By the early 1930s, the farmers are broken – but in the process, maybe 5,000,000 die of starvation or are killed by the Communists.
1933	Germany: Hitler comes to power vowing to SAVE GERMANY FROM COMMUNISM!  Stalin’s siege mentality becomes nearly hysterical.
1934	Many Party leaders are horrified by collectivization.  Rumors fly that opposition to Stalin is growing. Stalin is especially worried by Sergei KIROV, Party leader in Leningrad. December: an assassin murders Kirov!
1935	GREAT TERROR BEGINS Stalin declares that the nation is full of traitors! Foreigners! Wreckers!  He calls for a national war against Subversives! Media whips up Mass Hysteria – Witchhunt atmosphere. In Leningrad – thousands are arrested and shot. The prison system – the GULAG – grows into a vast network of slave-labor camps. Stalin’s special target is the PARTY itself!  Thousands of Party leaders at all levels of the party “disappear” into the vast GULAG.   How many are killed?  No one knows.  The best guess is that around 800,000 were killed outright, and another 3,000,000 – 4,000,000 were arrested and imprisoned.     If you add to this the 5,000,000 or so who died during COLLECTIVIZATION, and several million more who were arrested and or killed for political reasons after 1939, you arrive at the astonishing figure of nearly 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 people killed or arrested by Stalin.  Robert Conquest thinks that the figure is around 20,000,000.   This doesn’t count yet another 20,000,000 or so Russians who die in World War II.   Meanwhile, astonishing STALIN CULT begins.  Endless propaganda about Stalin’s genius, he great love for everyone, his god-like abilities.    Among the most bizarre parts of the Terror are the MOSCOW SHOW TRIALS which reach a peak in 1936-8.  Several dozen Party leaders, groggy and disoriented, are hauled before courts and charged with a host of shocking crimes.  AND THEY ALL CONFESS!  Naturally, they’re all shot.
	In huge policy change, Stalin calls for the formation of a POPULAR FRONT against Nazism.  Stalin insists that he wants DEMOCRACY like everyone else, and promises to work with Socialists, Social Democrats, Liberals, and Conservatives – anyone who will oppose Hitler.
1936-9	CIVIL WAR IN SPAIN.  Stalin rushes support to the Popular Front Alliance of communists, socialists, liberals, etc., who are fighting the Hitler-like Franco.

 

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Modified by:  H.  Kamerling