Stalinist socialism is 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, several waves of terror. Socialism of the Stalin era is a classic totalitarian state with a command economy and a broad repressive apparatus.
New economy
The first thing that relates to 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 a long Civil War and a severe economic crisis. Therefore, to stabilize the situation, the party led by Lenin decided to make an ideological compromise and initiated the NEP. This name was given to a new economic policy, which implied the existence of free market entrepreneurship.
NEP in the shortest possible time led to the restoration of the country. Meanwhile, in 1924, Lenin died. Power for a while became collective. Around the party helm, eminent Bolsheviks concentrated behind the organization of the October Revolution and the victory in the Civil War. Gradually, Stalin eliminated all his competitors. At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, he established one-man totalitarian power. Having secured his exclusive right to lead a huge state, the Secretary General of the Central Committee proceeded to industrialization. It became the basis of what will soon become known as Stalinist socialism.
Five years
The industrialization plan consisted of several critical points. The absorption of the entire economy by the public sector has begun. The national economy now had to live according to five-year plans. A “saving mode" was proclaimed. All funds of the country were allocated for the construction of new factories and plants.
Finally, Stalinist socialism implied industrialization itself - the creation of machine production in industry and other sectors of the economy. Its goal was to move away from agricultural vestiges in the economy. The country lacked experienced personnel, and the USSR itself was in international isolation. Therefore, the Politburo strove to ensure economic and technical independence from the West.
Forced industrialization was carried out at the expense of resources pumped out of the village, domestic loans, cheap labor, prison labor and proletarian enthusiasm. The "saving mode" was reflected in everything - housing, food, salary. The state has created a system of strict exploitation of the population, limiting its consumption. In the years 1928-1935. in the country there were grocery cards. Forced industrialization was pushed by ideology. Soviet power still dreamed of a world revolution and hoped to take advantage of a short peaceful respite to create a new economy, without which a struggle against the imperialists would not be possible. Therefore, the years of industrialization in the USSR (1930s) ended not only with the advent of a qualitatively different economy, but also with the strengthening of the country's defense capability.
Impact construction
The first five-year plan fell on 1928-1932. New industrial facilities in this period appeared mainly in the field of energy, metallurgy and mechanical engineering. Separate plans were prepared for each industry and some particularly important economic regions (for example, Kuzbass). The Dneprostroy project became an exemplary project, within the framework of which a hydroelectric power station and a dam were built on the Dnieper.
Stalinist 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 have changed things. Now Soviet industry was distributed throughout the vast country in a more balanced way. The transfer of enterprises to the east was also dictated by the fears of the political leadership of the war with the collective West.
In Stalin's time, Dalstroy appeared, engaged in gold mining in the Far East (especially in Kolyma). In this region, the work of the Gulag prisoners was actively used. It was these people who built many enterprises of the first five-year plans. They also dug the famous Belomorkanal, which united the European river basins of the USSR.
Agriculture Change
Together with industrialization, collectivization is what belongs to Stalinist socialism in the first place. Two processes went 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 by the state were hardly spurred on by the state. Collective farms existed together with private farms of kulaks, which were actually independent western type farmers. These were enterprising peasants who earned average capital in the village. For the time being, Stalinist socialism did not limit their activities.
In 1929, on the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution, the party’s general secretary issued 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 called not to limit the kulaks, but to destroy him as a class. Immediately after these words, the so-called “complete collectivization” followed.
Dispossession
To complete collectivization, the authorities used methods similar to the military. Communist agitators were sent to villages. If after a generally peaceful appeal the peasant did not go to the collective farm and did not leave his individual economy, he was repressed. Confiscation of property was carried out.
Fists were considered owners who used hired labor in their households, traded products, owned churns or windmills. In total, about 15-20% of peasants who did not want to go to collective farms were "processed". Many of them, together with their families, were sent to camps, prisons, and exiles. Such special migrants lost their civil rights.
"Dizziness from success"
The long-standing Stalinist model of socialism was indefatigable cruelty. Local party organs and newspapers called on the “asset” not to be shy to incite hatred of class-alien fists and other counter-revolutionaries. Middle peasants and their prosperous neighbors often resisted repression. They killed sent communists and organizers of collectivization, fled to cities, set fire to collective farms, slaughtered their own livestock. A series of armed demonstrations was spontaneous. She did not take an organized character, and soon the state suppressed resistance.
The village in the Soviet era was tormented not only by Stalinist socialism. The introduction of food surplus during the Civil War, when agricultural producers were obliged to hand over part of their harvest to the state, also hit farmers painfully. From time to time, the Bolsheviks alternated pressure and weakening in their pressure on the village.
In the spring of 1930, Stalin, frightened by the armed resistance of his fists, wrote a conciliatory article, "Vertigo from Success." The pace of collectivization has subsided somewhat. A significant part of the peasants left the collective farms. However, in the fall, repressions resumed. The active phase of collectivization ended in 1932, and in 1937 about 93% of peasant farms were on collective farms.
Pumping resources from the village
Many features of Stalinist socialism were an ugly creature of totalitarianism and violence. The repression was justified by the construction of a new society and the expectations of a brighter future. One of the main symbols of the socialist economy in the village was MTS - machine and tractor stations. They existed in 1928-1958. MTS provided collective farms with new equipment.
For example, the center of Soviet tractor construction was Stalingrad, whose plant was redesigned into a tank plant during the war years. The collective farms paid for state machinery with their own products. So, MTS efficiently pumped resources from the village. In the years of the first five-year plans, the USSR actively exported grain abroad. Trade did not stop even during periods of terrible famine on collective farms. The government spent the proceeds from the sale of grain and other crops 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, competent and active peasants was destroyed, while the new collective-farm movement entailed the degeneration of the peasantry. Resisting fists slaughtered 26 million livestock (about 45%). It took another 30 years to restore the population. Even the new agricultural machinery did not allow to bring the crops to at least NEP times. The numbers were achieved not by high-quality work, but by an increase in sown area.
State and Party Splicing
In the mid-1930s, totalitarian socialism finally developed in the USSR. Years of suppression policies have completely changed society. However, the apogee of repression fell precisely in the second half of the 1930s, and it ended largely thanks to the ensuing war with Germany.
An important feature of totalitarian power was the coalescence of party and state bodies - the party completely controlled the legislative activity and the court, and the party itself was kept in the gauntlet only one person. In total, Stalin conducted 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 several times changing the name of special services (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 the Bolsheviks of the older generation, who knew the Secretary General as an illegal revolutionary. People like Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin (“Lenin’s Guard”), all of them became victims of show trials at which they were publicly recognized as traitors to the motherland.
The peak of repression against party cadres came in 1937-1938. Then there was a purge 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 suffered. Skilled professionals who had experience in the Civil War have virtually disappeared. All this negatively affected the army, which only a few years later had to enter its largest war.
Pest and enemy control
The first show trials that thundered throughout the country took place in the late 1920s. Such were the Shakhty affair and the trial of the Industrial Party. During this period, technical and engineering specialists were repressed. Joseph Stalin, whose years of rule passed in a series of propaganda campaigns, was very fond of loud cliches and labels. From its submission, such terms and symbols of the era as “pests”, “enemies of the people”, “cosmopolitans” appeared.
The year 1934 became a turning point for repression. Prior to this, the state terrorized the population, and now it has taken on the iconic members of the party. That year the 17th Congress passed, which became known as the "Congress of the Shot". At it, a vote was taken for the new Secretary General. Stalin was re-elected, but many did not support his candidacy. Everyone considered Sergei Kirov an important figure in the congress. A few months later he was shot dead by an unbalanced party worker Nikolayev in Smolny. Stalin used the figure of the deceased Kirov, making her a sacred symbol. A campaign was announced against traitors and conspirators, who, as propaganda explained, had killed an important party member and were about to ruin it.
High-profile political labels appeared: White Guards, Zinovievites, Trotskyists. Intelligence agents "uncovered" 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 executed and convicted, which local authorities had to carefully implement. Repressions were carried out under the slogans of the class struggle (the thesis was put forward that the more successful the construction of socialism is, the more acute the class struggle will become).
Stalin did not forget to carry out purges in the special services themselves, with whose hands numerous executions and courts were carried out. The NKVD survived several such campaigns. In the course of them, the most odious heads of this department, Yezhov and Yagoda, died. Also, the state did not take its eyes off the intelligentsia. These were writers, film and theater workers (Mandelstam, Babel, Meyerhold), and inventors, physicists and designers (Landau, Tupolev, Korolev).
Stalinist 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 XX Congress of the CPSU, condemned the personality cult of Stalin and his repression. Under Brezhnev, the official ideology was softer towards the figure of the leader.