LIFE
AND
S TALIN
POLIT
ICS U
NDER
THE R
ED ST
AR
copyright page
on the web: stalinproject.com
edited by: David Hosford
compiled by: Cris Martin & Nicole Rivett
about the editor: david hosford
David Hosford is a teacher at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional
High School in Massachusetts. He is also the Director of
the Stalin Project. Before his present job, Hosford spent
the previous six years living in Russia and was the Director of Russian/NIS Programs for Project Harmony, a cultural exchange organization located in Vermont. During
his tenure at Lincoln-Sudbury, Hosford has taken two
high school groups to Russia (the Ob River region and
Karelia) to interview the survivors of the Stalinist purges.
He is also the Co-author of a high school unit on the Gulag
that was written together with the Davis Center at Harvard and the National Park Service.
about the stalin project:
In , the National Endowment for the Humanitie
awarded a grant to create a textbook and a website about
Stalinism for high school teachers and college professors.
The project provides a multi-media look at this time
period with the hope that students will be better able to
understand the vital lessons from this chapter of history.
about the textbook:
The textbook is unique in many ways:
• It includes original texts from over  scholars in
the field, including  Pulitzer Prize winners
• It provides three levels of text which allows learners
of all levels to access the materials
• There is a companion website that provides:
• Lesson plans developed in a cooperative effort of
Russian scholars and high school teachers
• A searchable database of images and other primary
documents
• Video clips from survivors
C O
N
policies: collectivization
Collectivization
Dekulakization
Famine
43
49
53
Lynne Viola
Lynne Viola
Andrea Graziosi
policies: industrialization
Industrialization
...
policies: the purges
timeline
9
1
Western Opinion
World War II
Cold War
Politics, Geography & Philosophy
Elizabeth A. Wood
Elizabeth A. Wood
15
17
2
63
69
73
77
83
Joshua Rubenstein
87
Michael David-Fox
89
93
99
Hiroaki Kuromiya
Mark Kramer
3
everyday life under stalin
the dream
life
Stilin's Early Life
Donald Rayfield
Rise to Power
Hiroaki Kuromiya
Stalin: The Person
Donald Rayfield
Death of Stalin & The Aftermath
Donald Rayfield
23
27
31
33
policies: the party
Stalin & the Party
Nomenklatura
Secret Police
Donald Rayfield
Special Settlements
Lynne Viola
Mass Deportation
Mark Kramer
The Great Terror
J. Arch Getty
Show Trials
Cynthia Hooper
The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign / Doctor’s Plot
policies: foreign policy
background
The Russian Revolution
57
Michael Ellman
Andrea Graziosi
Graeme Gill
35
39
Education
Propaganda
Heroes
Socialist Realism
Michael David-Fox
Michael David-Fox
Michael David-Fox
Elizabeth Papazian
105
111
115
121
the reality
Building Socialism
Don
Work
Don Filtzer
Scarcity and Want
Don
Housing
Don
Life During WWII and the Cold War
Don
000
127
000
000
000
T
E
N
T S
4
6
gulag
legacy
road to the gulag
Overview of the Gulag
Fear & Denunciation
Arrest
Interrogation
Prison
Deportation
Steven Barnes
Ted Fitts
Cynthia Hooper
J. Arch Getty
Cynthia Hooper
David Hosford
133
137
141
145
149
153
life in the gulag
Living Conditions
Survival in Camps
Work
Prisoners
camps
&
Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum
157
163
167
173
projects
Solovki
White Sea Canal
Vorkuta
Karaganda
Kolyma
Jehanne Gheith
Anne Applebaum
Alan Barenberg
Steven Barnes
Anne Applebaum
177
181
185
189
193
5
inner circle
Yagoda
Yezhov
Beria
Kaganovich
Mikoyan
Molotov
Khrushchev
Voroshilov
Zhdanov
J. Arch Getty
J. Arch Getty
J. Arch Getty
Hiroaki Kuromiya
Mark Kramer
Mark Kramer
William Taubman
Mark Kramer
Mark Kramer
199
201
203
205
207
209
211
213
215
Children of the Enemy
Confronting the Past
The Stalinist Legacy
Jehanne Gheith
Mark Kramer
Graeme Gill
219
221
223
...
short summaries
medium summaries
glossary
further reading
contributing authors
225
239
265
269
271
T
1878 December 18
Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili ( later Stalin ) is born in Gori, Georgia.
1899
Joseph is expelled from the seminary where he
was studying to be a priest, just before completing his final exams, for propagating Marxism.
1902 April 5
Joseph is arrested for the first time for revolutionary activity. He is exiled to Siberia.
1903
Joseph marries Ekaterina Svanidze, with whom
he will have one son, Yakov ( 1907 ).
1904 January 5
Joseph escapes exile and returns to Georgia.
1905 December
Joseph attends the Bolshevik conference in Finland, where he meets Vladimir Lenin for the first
time.
1907
Joseph’s wife, Ekaterina, dies of tuberculosis.
1912 January
Lenin demonstrates his faith in Joseph’s abilities by appointing him to the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
I
M
1913
Joseph adopts the surname Stalin, which is derivative of the Russian word for steel ( stal ).
1917
Stalin is named editor of Pravda, the official
newspaper of the Bolshevik Party.
1917 October
The Russian Revolution dethrones the Provisional Government, which was ruling in place of
the dethroned Tsar Nicholas . The Bolsheviks
take control of the country, but Stalin plays only
a very minor role in the uprising.
1917 – 1922
Russian Civil War, which pits the Red Army ( soldiers fighting for the Bolsheviks ) against the
White Army ( soldiers fighting for the Provisional Government ). During this time, Stalin holds
a bureaucratic post as People’s Commissar for
Nationalities.
1919
Stalin marries Nadezhda Alliluyeva, and together they have two children, Vasili (1921 ) and Svetlana ( 1926 ).
192 April 3
Stalin is named General Secretary of the Communist Party. Although not originally a position of much power, Stalin turns it into the most
powerful position within the party.
1923 January 4
In his Final Testament, Lenin warns fellow party members that Stalin may need to be removed
from his position of power due to severe character flaws.
E
L
I
N
E
1924 January 21
Lenin dies, resulting in a struggle for power
over who would rule the  between Stalin,
Kamenev and Zinoviev, and Trotsky.
1927
Stalin’s first Five Year Plan is enacted, calling for
the collectivization of agriculture and the rapid
industrialization of the Soviet Union.
1928
Stalin is the de facto leader of the Communist
Party and the .
1932
Famine devastates Ukraine and other areas within the  — the resulting death toll is estimated at 5 to 10 million people.
1932 November 9
Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda, takes her own life after
a public argument with her husband.
1934 December 1
Sergei Kirov is assassinated, an event that greatly escalates Soviet terror, leading to the Great
Terror of 1937 – 1938.
1937 – 1938
The Great Terror — hundreds of thousands of
Soviet citizens, including a great number of important politicians, military officers, academics,
doctors, and journalists, are arrested and either
executed or imprisoned in Soviet labor camps
( Gulags ) for alleged anti-Soviet activity. During
this time period, four show trials are staged.
1939 August 24
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (also known as
the Treaty of Non-Aggression Between Germany and the  ) is signed in Moscow.
1941 June 22
Germany invades the Soviet Union, pulling the
 into World War II.
1943 February
The Soviets declare victory in the Battle of
Stalingrad, considered by many to be the turning point of World War II.
1945 May 8
Germany surrenders to the Allies. The Allied victory produces two world superpowers, the 
and the .
1953 March 5
Stalin dies of natural causes in the Kremlin in
Moscow.
section 1 background
Politics, Geography & Philosophy Elizabeth A. Wood
The Russian Revolution
Elizabeth A. Wood
15
17
270
STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
POLITICS, GEOGRAPHY AND PHILOSOPHY
Elizabeth A. Wood
Russian geography has greatly influenced Russian politics and society over
the centuries. For starters, it is and was the largest country in the world. At
its greatest extent the former Soviet Union encompassed one-sixth of the
Earth’s land mass. It spanned  time zones and straddled two continents,
Europe and Asia, bringing Russia into contact with both European and Asian
civilizations. It had , miles of borders with oceans and other countries
which always needed guarding. It was larger than all of North America, three
times the size of the continental United States, forty times the size of France
and seventy times larger than the British Isles. It took ten days by train to
travel from Leningrad ( modern day St. Petersburg ) in the West to Vladivostok in the Far East.
The Soviet Union was also one of the most multinational countries in the
world. It had at least  distinct nationalities, each speaking its own language. Twenty-two of these nationalities numbered over one million in population. Fifty-four had their own national territories. Almost all of the world’s
dominant religions were represented within its borders in substantial
numbers.
The fact that Russia is one of the two most northern countries in the world
( together with Canada ) has greatly affected its economic development. Only
 –   of Soviet land was arable, the rest being tundra ( arctic climate characterized by lack of forests, permanently frozen subsoil; supporting principally the growth of mosses and lichen ); taiga ( the subarctic evergreen forest
of Siberia ) and desert ( especially in Kazakhstan and Central Asia more generally ). The rains have always been erratic, so even arable land in certain parts
of the country have been prone to crop failures every nine or ten years. The
winters are long so the growing season is extremely short. The resultant low
agricultural productivity meant that even in the late th century Russian
peasants were only able to harvest three seeds of grain for every seed planted,
a rate of agricultural productivity so low it could only be compared to Western Europe in medieval times. Lack of access to the seas also dramatically
Tsar Nicholas, the last tsar of Russia.
section 1
history & background
271
Russia, 1974.
Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin
hindered the development of trade networks and the development of national
wealth. As a result the country supported quite a low population density in
comparison to Western Europe.
In terms of natural resources the country was a mix of wealth and poverty.
Its wealth lay in oil ( Baku ), coal ( the Ural Mountains ), gold, platinum,
diamonds ( far northeast ), and furs ( especially prior to the th century ). The
country had also developed some concentrated, large-scale agriculture
in the th century so it was possible to export grain in large quantities in
order to gain hard currency reserves and invest in the advanced technology that was necessary for the country, though periodically there were huge
famines ( , , as well as the famous famine of ). By  the country was among the top five powers in the world in terms of iron, steel, oil,
and textile production. Yet, at the same time, the country experienced abject
poverty and technological backwardness. The income per capita in Russia
was  times lower than in Germany, four times lower than in the United Kingdom, and one-third lower even than the regions of the Balkans ( modern
Yugoslavia ). There were four opera houses in Moscow, yet whole regions
lacked state-run secular schools.
The fact that the country experienced rapid expansion in virtually every century from the th century on meant an intense demand for extensive
272
STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
defenses, as well as labor shortages in agriculture and the army. From the
th century to the second half of the th the peasant population was bound
to the land by the system of serfdom. Serfs could be bought and sold much
like American slaves. The elite nobles became increasingly alienated from the
rest of the population in the th and th centuries because they primarily
spoke French (with some English and German) rather than Russian at
home and they lived in the city for at least the winter months rather than on
the land like the peasants.
The state meanwhile existed primarily to extract revenues and men from
the populace in order to feed the northern cities ( which could not produce sufficient grain in their surrounding areas ) and to staff the armies ( for
border guarding and fighting wars ). By the end of the th century the state,
which was governed by a monarch known as the tsar, was the largest landowner, the largest employer, the largest investor, and the largest supporter
of industry in the country.
As the gulf between nobility and peasantry widened, a small group of educated people began to hold views that were critical of the state and the
organization of the society; they were known as the intelligentsia. Over time
they became increasingly alienated from both the state and the society. Some
of them, infected by radical ideas from Western Europe ( where there
were revolutions in  and , as well as in  ), became committed
to revolutionary causes and began to ponder the overthrow of the system
since they saw no hope of peaceful reform.
Until  the country had no Parliament, no elected offices except at the
local level, and no political rights or civil liberties. Only after  did the
citizens of Russia gain the rights to freedom of the press, peaceful assembly,
labor organizing, and universal suffrage. Many thought that these gains
meant that the country would quiet down. Unfortunately, Tsar Nicholas
had no confidence in the rights he had granted to his people and he
especially loathed the Duma ( Russia’s new Parliament ). After  the regime
responded to all organizing attempts with renewed vigor and even violence.
For a few brief years the country was relatively passive. However, on the eve
of World War I all classes in the country became increasingly disaffected and
a new round of radicalism set in.
The legacy of the revolution of  was one of swirling currents that juxtaposed radicalism and conservatism, disaffection with the regime and the
defense of it, or at least of the ideas of the unification of the Slavs, the ethnic majority in Russia. The net effect was to enhance the precariousness of
the tsarist regime and to set the stage for the February and October Revolutions in .
section 1
history & background
273
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Elizabeth A. Wood
In the February Revolution of  the Romanov tsars who had ruled Russia
for three hundred years were forced to abdicate the throne. This left a political vacuum that Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks took advantage of in the
October Revolution of the same year.
The fall of the Romanov dynasty had two principal causes: first, the regime’s
loss of legitimacy as it was battered by a series of crises over some  years;
and second, the rising tide of workers’ strikes and revolutionary sentiment
(and organizing) among the intelligentsia.
The regimes of Alexander III, the penultimate tsar, and his son Nicholas II,
the last tsar, were gradually defeated in a series of mishaps and misadventures when they were unable to safeguard their subjects. The first was the
famine of  when educated society and peasants alike felt that the tsarist
government had contributed to the famine by exporting too much grain and
by failing to provide sufficient relief. In  the coronation of Nicholas II
was the site of a mass stampede in which almost  people died. In
 –  the Russian government embarked on the Russo-Japanese war in
the hope that it would stem the rising tide of revolution by having a “victorious little war.” Unfortunately, the results were to the opposite of what the
regime had wanted. The Russian sea and land forces were soundly beaten by
the Japanese, who were quite a new force in world history at the time. In
 Russia was engulfed in a giant revolution that overtook the whole country as peasants seized the landlords’ lands; soldiers and sailors mutinied;
workers went on strike with the support of their bosses; and railroad workers brought the country to a massive standstill for ten days in the largest general strike the world had ever seen. The European War (as World War I was
then known) provided a coup de grace in –  when Tsar Nicholas I
assumed the position of commander-in-chief, yet was unable to stop the
deep and humiliating losses on the Russian side.
In February  a delegation from the Duma (the Parliament that Nicholas
II had finally permitted in October ) persuaded the tsar to abdicate.
Vladimir Lenin
Courtesy of Wikipedia
section 1
history & background
275
When his brother refused to take the throne, the country was left with a
power vacuum. A committee from the Duma began to rule, calling themselves the Provisional Government. They were not the only ones with aspirations to rule, however. At the same time the Soviet (or Council) of Workers’,
Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies also claimed power, issuing orders that particularly affected the organization of the soldiers. Since the soldiers listened
only to the Soviets, while educated society turned to the Provisional Government, a system of “dual power” was soon in place in which the Soviet and the
Provisional government tried to rule in tandem.
This dual power was completely ineffective, however, as the two parts of the
government could not agree on fundamental issues which needed speedy
resolution: what to do about the war (whether to stay in the war and prosecute it to the maximum, try to end the war “without annexations and without losses,” or whether to declare the war a defeat and try to exit as quickly
as possible regardless of the consequences); what to do about bread prices
(which had skyrocketed) and disorder in the capital cities; and what to do
about land redistribution (which was happening spontaneously throughout
the countryside).
By the fall of  the cities had become increasingly radicalized. Huge factories with , workers each were going on strike, incensed by horrific living conditions (long lines for food and fuel) and the failures of the Provisional
Government to provide law and order. In late August  General Kornilov,
commander-in-chief of the Russian forces, attempted a coup to take over
Petrograd and restore order. When this coup was put down by groups of
workers acting spontaneously, forces on the left, especially Lenin, Trotsky
and the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, were able to claim that a
revolution by the workers was absolutely necessary to keep the country from
being forced into a right-wing dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks were able to seize power relatively easily in  because they
were not afraid to make ruthless decisions. Power, they felt, was “lying in the
gutter,” waiting to be seized. It helped that authority in Russia at this time
was highly concentrated in Petrograd (modern day St. Petersburg) and, to a
lesser extent, Moscow, with little military protection since virtually all the
troops were at the front. It was thus relatively easy to seize the key ministries
in a matter of hours. Other political parties which might have been popular
with the general population had lost a great deal of credibility during this
period because they had had representatives in the Provisional Government
which was by now massively discredited.
The Bolsheviks also, it must be remembered, had a program which was genuinely popular: “All power to the Soviets” (instead of the Provisional Government), land (i.e., let the peasants seize the land they want), peace (exit the
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STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
war immediately); and bread (re-open the bakeries, let everyone have as
much grain as they wanted).
Staying in power was much harder than seizing it. Although historians debate
whether the Bolsheviks’ involvement in the Russian Civil War was the result
of a deliberate act or an accidental response to events of the day, the war does
seem to have benefited them, as they were able to consolidate their hold over
first the center and later the peripheries of Russia. This they did by offering
bribes to people who were loyal to the regime in the form of increased rations
(it cannot be overstated how
hungry the country was with
famine looming in the south in
), new landownership, new
relations of authority and the
like.
Once the Russian Civil War drew
to a close in the fall of  with
the defeat of most of the White
forces (comprised of supporters
of both the Provisional government and the tsar), the Bolsheviks faced new problems of
legitimacy and self-definition. Lenin and Trotsky, the Commander of the Red Army
They could no longer requisition during the Russian Civil War (dead center in the first
row of standing men) with soldiers in Petrograd in 1921.
grain in the name of supporting Courtesy of Wikipedia
the war effort, nor could they
easily require that men continue to serve in the Red Army. They did not have
the excuse to continue to restrict trade in grain. Nor, they discovered, were
they capable of running all industry from small factories to large ones.
In  they instituted the New Economic Policy (nep) which allowed some
freedom of production and trade. Still, it failed to solve the question how
Russia (the Soviet Union) was going to reach the levels of industrialization
and collectivized agriculture of which the revolutionaries had dreamed. The
ruthlessness of the Russian Civil War combined with the magnificence of the
dream of collectivization meant that many party members remained dissatisfied well into the s, praying for the day they would be able to stage
another revolution that would transport the country from semi-capitalism
to communism. This, of course, laid the groundwork for Stalin’s rise to power
in the s and s.
section 1
history & background
277
section 2 life & policies
Stalin's Early Life
Donald Rayfield
Rise to Power
Hiroaki Kuromiya
Stalin: The Person
Donald Rayfield
Death of Stalin & The Aftermath
23
27
31
Donald Rayfield
33
Andrea Graziosi
35
39
policies: the party
Stalin & the Party
Nomenklatura
Graeme Gill
policies: collectivization
Collectivization
Dekulakization
Famine
Andrea Graziosi
43
49
53
Michael Ellman
57
Lynne Viola
Lynne Viola
policies: industrialization
Industrialization
policies: the purges
Secret Police
Donald Rayfield
Special Settlements
Lynne Viola
Mass Deportation
Mark Kramer
The Great Terror
J Arch Getty
Show Trials
Cynthia Hooper
The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign / Doctor’s Plot
63
69
73
77
83
Joshua Rubenstein
87
Michael David-Fox
89
93
99
policies: foreign policy
Western Opinion
World War II
Cold War
Hiroaki Kuromiya
Mark Kramer
1
STALIN'S EARLY LIFE
Donald Rayfield
Joseph Stalin was born Josef Dzughashvili in Gori, a provincial town in Georgia on the th of December , and undoubtedly had a traumatized childhood. His mother concentrated all her ambitions on him, her third son and
only child to survive infancy. His father drank heavily, was violent and abandoned the family when Stalin was nine. The young Josef had a series of illnesses, from smallpox to tuberculosis, and injuries to arm and leg which left
him partly disabled and in constant physical pain for life. No psychiatrist
would say, however, that his childhood alone explains his future ruthlessness
and success: his surly, self-reliant, distrustful, vindictive character and a
sharp intelligence with a photographic memory were as important. His education in a church school and theological college was better than one might
think. He acquired a second language, Russian, to the same standard as his
native Georgian; he had a thorough knowledge of Greek history and literature, and, as later events prove, he could read French, German, English and
even Esperanto, although he concealed this knowledge. All his life he read
avidly and was self-taught, if badly, in a very wide range of subjects.
Despite a number of affairs (at least three illegitimate as well as three legitimate children are known) and a brief marriage in , family meant nothing
for Stalin. When his father, an alcoholic tramp, died in , Stalin’s only gesture was to adopt his father’s name as a pseudonym for a few articles. He saw
his mother on only a few brief occasions before she died in . He had no
contact with Yakov, his first legitimate son, for the child’s first  years.
Student circles brought him to Marxism, and his life-long scorn for those
who talked but did not act motivated in him a desire to take the lead. Marxism provided a framework and organization for Stalin to foment strikes and
uprisings among workers in Baku and Batumi, but he was probably no more
a believer than a Borgia Pope was a believing Christian. Stalin read Machiavelli’s The Prince early on, and took from this philosopher two ideas: one, that
A young Stalin in 1894.
Courtesy of Wikipedia
section 2
life & policies
281
all means justify the end, the winning and retention of power and, two, that it is better
to be feared than loved, since love changes, but fear does not. To this cynicism Stalin
added a Romantic touch: he took a pseudonym, by which he was known to close comrades
until , ‘Koba,’ from a Georgian melodramatic novel about an outlaw who takes vengeance on everybody and is the only person to survive at the end of the plot.
Unlike other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin was
happy to collaborate with violent criminals, organizing robberies and murders.
He would bribe policemen and exploit
casual acquaintances in ways that Bolshevik leaders, who were often ‘gentlemen’ by
upbringing, shunned.
When Stalin entered the Russian political
arena during the th and th party congresses of  and , he was adopted
by Lenin, Trotsky and others as a useful
organizer and agent. He thus got to know
all the future revolutionaries and was able
to
choose in advance the ‘alpha’ leaders
Close up of mugshots taken after Stalin’s arrest in March
1908
(except for Lenin) as rivals to be destroyed
Courtesy of The Library of Congress
and the ‘omega’ followers as men whom
he could recruit when they were snubbed
by others. Highly educated leaders like Lenin and Trotsky despised Stalin for his inability
to argue theory or to speak fluent German, and they underestimated his political hunter
instincts. Even during the revolution of , Stalin was little known to outsiders and
only when it was clear that Lenin was dying did Stalin show himself to be a master of psychology and politics. Within  years, this skill enabled him to sideline, and later physically
eliminate, all his rivals. His most brilliant strategy, however, was to accept the apparently
humble post of general secretary to the Party’s central committee and, by manipulating
the agenda and the list of those to be appointed to positions within the party, made himself as secretary more powerful than any chairman. Thus while not holding the chief ministerial ‘Commissar’ posts, Stalin accumulated, too late for anyone to take counter-measures,
great power in both the Soviet government and the Bolshevik Party.
282
STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
Recreation of the first meeting between Stalin
and Lenin in Tampere, Finland in 1905.
Courtesy of The Library of Congress
Stalin and the Inner Circle in exile in Siberia,
1915. Stalin is in the back row, the third from
the right.
Courtesy of the David King Collection
section 1
history & background
283
2
RISE TO POWER
Hiroaki Kuromiya
When the February  Revolution broke out in the Russian capital of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Stalin was in exile in Siberia. After the Revolution,
which deposed the tsar, a Provisional Government of liberal politicians was
established to rule the country. Stalin returned to the capital in the wake of
the Revolution and, although he initially backed the new government, he
very quickly changed course and backed Lenin when the Communist leader
entered the country from his exile in Switzerland. This Leninist platform was
reflected in the well-known Bolshevik slogan: "No support for the Provisional
Government, All Power to the Soviets."
Stalin worked with Lenin closely in the course of  and gained Lenin's confidence. By the summer of , Stalin had risen to one of the top positions
in the Bolshevik party, despite the fact that many claim he had "missed October" and that his contribution to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October
 was negligible. Lenin and Trotsky were prominent leaders and eloquent
orators, and were closely associated with the October or Bolshevik Revolution in the popular mind. Nevertheless, it was Stalin, a poor orator at best,
who steadily climbed behind the scenes, due mainly to his talent for
organization.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin was appointed the People's Commissar
(Minister) of Nationalities. As political commissar, he participated extensively in the Civil War that followed the October Revolution, bringing him
into direct conflict with Trotsky, head of the Red Army. Trotsky used old,
tsarist military specialists as Red Army commanders, but Stalin not only
opposed the practice, he also persecuted the officers and terrorized them.
While Lenin deplored Stalin's abuse of power, he appreciated his extraordinary competence as an administrator and generally supported him against
the protests of Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders.
The Bolshevik victory in the Civil War led to the adoption of the New Economic Policy ()—a policy that allowed small scale private enterprises in
Stalin and Lenin in 1922.
Courtesy of The Library of Congress
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285
order to restore an economy ruined by world war, revolution, and civil war.
How long this temporary concession to capitalism was to last became a serious bone of contention. One camp felt that NEP was a step backwards towards
capitalism whereas the other camp felt that the country had to recover from
the devastation that had been wrought during WWI and the Civil War.
Stalin generally followed Lenin's policy, and Lenin appears to have trusted Stalin over all other Bolshevik leaders. It was Lenin who helped to promote Stalin
to the position of the General Secretary of the Bolshevik party in . Lenin
prized Stalin's "ability to exert
pressure." He also apprecated
Lenin’s Final Testament:
Stalin as a leader who was "free
“Stalin is too rude and this defect,
of any sentimentality."
although quite tolerable in our
midst and in dealing among us
Communists, becomes intolerable
in a Secretary-General. That is why I
suggest the comrades think about
a way of removing Stalin from that
post…”
In  Lenin died without
naming his successor to the
leadership of the Bolshevik
Party. His "final testament,"
the authenticity of which is
now suspected by some historians, contains both praise and
criticism of Stalin and Trotsky
as two outstanding leaders. Stalin is characterized as being "rude" and prone to
use power "without sufficient caution". Trotsky, according to Lenin, had "displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with purely
administrative side of the work." In fact, Trotsky had alienated many party cadres but still retained influence, particularly over the youth.
When the party’s Central Committee (CC)did not agree with Trotsky, he
responded by boycotting meetings. This prompted Stalin to call Trotsky, "a
superman standing above the CC, above its laws, above its decisions." By contrast, Stalin's positions appeared to be politically principled to the party rank
and file. Stalin appeared to stand above party intrigue after the death of
Lenin, tendering his resignation as General Secretary of the Communist
Party on several occasions, but he never failed to attack his opponents at
their weakest points. According to both Lenin and Trotsky's own supporters,
Trotsky was a poor politician. Stalin, however, was a master of politics. Other
contenders for power such as Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin fared no better than Trotsky.
By the late s Stalin emerged as the uncontested victor in the post-Lenin
struggle for power.
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Stalin and the Inner Circle at a party conference
in 1919. This is a photo that was doctored so that
only Stalin, Lenin, and Kalinin appeared.
Courtesy of the David King Collection
In a later photo, Kalinin has been erased from
the picture.
Courtesy of the David King Collection
The takeover of power is complete. Stalin is the
only member of the Politburo to survive.
Courtesy of the David King Collection
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3
STALIN: THE PERSON
Donald Rayfield
Whatever Stalin’s qualities as a politician, as a man of action, and as a thinker,
it would be hard to find a worse son, father, husband, friend or colleague.
While capable of affection, he was paranoically suspicious and his trust, once
lost, was never recovered. Understandably, he was not fond of his violent
drunken father who deserted the family when Stalin was a young boy, but he
could not even remember the year of his death. Stalin owed everything to his
mother’s efforts to get him an education, but apart from a few short notes
and gifts, and two visits in the last twenty years of her life, he largely ignored
her and did not go to her funeral in . He had no contact with his three
illegitimate children, one of whom was arrested in the streets of Moscow
and perished in the terror of . His eldest legitimate son, Yakov, was
handed to a sister-in-law shortly after birth, and Stalin only saw him again
 years later, driving the adolescent to attempt suicide and then laughing at
him: ‘Ha, you missed!’ When Yakov was captured by the Germans in World
War II, Stalin planned to have him killed by Spanish partisans, but the German guards shot him first.
The second legitimate son, Vasili, was largely left to the care of the head of
Stalin’s bodyguards and grew into a drunken lout, although he was promoted
to a general in the air force. Stalin was initially fond of his daughter, Svetlana,
whom he called “little Satan,” but when she began to have boyfriends he took
a dislike to her and had the men in her life beaten up or imprisoned.
Nobody killed more of his friends than Stalin: those that helped him
to power in the  s, like the mild-mannered economist Bukharin, were
then discarded and finally shot. Just a few men, Max Litvinov, the foreign minister from  to , the ex-cobbler Lazar Kaganovich, the
incompetent military commander Kliment Voroshilov, and the unfeeling
automaton Viacheslav Molotov, worked with Stalin for decades and at
times seemed to be friends. But even they must have spent many sleepless
nights wondering if Stalin had decided to kill them. Even when he showed
extreme fatherly concern, as he did to the dwarf Nikolai Yezhov who,
Stalin as a young revolutionary
Courtesy of The Library of Congress
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289
from  to , was the most murderous chief of secret police in Soviet
history, this affection died and the substitute son was tortured and shot.
The young Stalin charmed women with his moodiness, his rough looks and his
extraordinary intelligence, but he discarded them quickly. His first wife died of
tuberculosis before Stalin had time to turn against her. His second wife, Nadezhda, killed herself, and Stalin believed that any suicide, by a wife, a friend or an
enemy, somehow cheated him of his power over them. The older Stalin may have
occasionally slept with other women, notably his devoted housekeeper Valentina
Istomina, but there is no evidence of any
interest in any human being for the last
twenty years of his life.
As a colleague, Stalin impressed
those who worked with him or for
him: his cold-blooded planning for
power, his insight into the worst
aspects
of human nature, his photoGerman propaganda during WWII, which reads:
“Do not shed your blood for Stalin! He has already graphic memory for anything he had
fled to Samara! His own son has surrendered! If
ever read, and his frequently deliberStalin’s son is saving his own skin, then you are
not obliged to sacrifice yourself either!”
ate efforts to be charming were all
Courtesy of Wikipeda
masterly sides of his character. But at
any moment a colleague of Stalin
knew that he could be outwitted, outcast and probably exterminated.
When Stalin died, nobody who
knew him mourned. The hysterical crowds in Moscow did not
know Stalin the human being:
they wept for a god without whom
they were unable to see how their
world could function.
Stalin’s son, Yakov, captured and shot by the
Germans during WWII.
Courtesy of Answers.com
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STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva.
Stalin and his daughter, Svetlana, whom he called “Little Satan.”
Courtesy of Wikipedia
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4
THE DEATH OF STALIN AND THE AFTERMATH
Donald Rayfield
Stalin died on March rd,  at the age of . He was alone, perhaps for 
hours, before he was discovered dying, and the delay by his frightened ministers in summoning medical help may have hastened his death.
Rumors that he was poisoned by Lavrenti Beria, his effective Minister of the
Interior, are probably groundless. It is true that Stalin for the last four
years had shown signs that he was thinking of dismissing, perhaps imprisoning and killing, his most long-serving political henchmen. It must have
been tempting to some of them, if they could think of a way of conspiring
against him undetected, to have disposed of him, but for over twenty years
such dangers had existed and such was the paralyzing fear that Stalin
inspired, there was not a single assassination attempt. In the post-war
years, Stalin showed many symptoms of arterial sclerosis— he may have had
several minor strokes — and he was becoming more and more forgetful, sometimes mercifully so, as when he failed to carry out threats. He had not been
physically well since early childhood, and his illnesses were exacerbated by
his suspicions of doctors: several Kremlin doctors were executed in the s,
accused of poisoning political leaders. In  Stalin dismissed his own private doctor and ordered the arrest of Jewish doctors as ‘assassins in white
coats.’ Given the lack of medical attention he received, his enormous workload and his unhealthy nocturnal life, it is amazing that he lived to be . He
also dismissed General Vlasik, his doggedly loyal personal assistant and commandant, and his faithful secretary Alexander Poskriobyshev, who had forgiven Stalin for everything, even shooting Poskriobyshev’s wife. Apart from
his discreet housekeeper, Valentina Istomina, and the squirrels in the grounds
of the dacha, Stalin had no company. In his last years he found refuge in sentiment and in things that had not interested him before, such as listening to
recordings of Mozart piano concertos, or sending parcels of cash to old school
friends still alive in provincial Georgia.
Stalin lying in state in 1953.
Courtesy of The Library of Congress
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6
NOMENKLATURA
Graeme Gill
The nomenklatura was central to the functioning of the Soviet system. This
term is generally used in two ways, as a system of personnel administration,
and as a collective name for people who filled responsible positions within
the Soviet political system. As a system of personnel administration, the
nomenklatura was established in mid- as a means of regularizing the
party’s management of its staffing problems. The nomenklanomenklatura, n.
tura system involved party
committees at each level of the
1. In the former Soviet Union and
party structure having two lists.
One was a list of formal posi- other Communist countries: a list of
tions which that party commitposts in politics and the economy
tee had the authority to fill. The
filled by Party appointees. Now
second was a list of responsible
chiefly historical. 2. As a collective
workers from among whom
noun: the holders of these posts,
appropriate personnel could be
who enjoy a number of social
chosen to fill those positions.
and economic privileges. Also (in
The nomenklatura was thus a
way of matching vacant posi- extended use): any powerful or
tions with qualified people. At
privileged elite.
each level, control over the
nomenklatura was vested in the
secretaries of the relevant party committee, and it was therefore these people who, in theory, controlled appointments to positions within their particular region. However all such appointments were subject to ratification at
higher levels of the party apparatus. The most important positions throughout the country were to be found on the nomenklatura list of the Central
Committee and its Secretariat, located in Moscow.
The power over appointment that lay in the nomenklatura meant that it was
potentially a very powerful weapon that could be used by political leaders to
consolidate their positions of power. If the General Secretary, the most pow-
Stalin and his supporters.
Courtesy of the David King Collection.
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295
erful secretary in the party, who ran the Central Committee Secretariat
could ensure that his supporters filled secretarial positions at lower levels, he
could bring about a situation whereby people who supported him filled most
of the responsible positions within the party structure. Stalin was the first
person to make use of this weapon. From the early  s, he used his
position and the control over the appointment powers of the nomenklatura that it provided him to promote his own supporters and get rid of the
supporters of his opponents. Such bodies, most importantly the Central
Committee, party congresses and conferences, and the secretarial apparatus
that ran right through the party, were dominated by people who supported him. They voted for him, engaged in political in-fighting on his
behalf, and were a principal means of consolidating his power over the party
and the Soviet system more generally. The nomenklatura as a personnel system was therefore an important weapon used by Stalin to
both establish and consolidate his power.
The second use of the term nomenklatura refers to the people who occupied
responsible offices as a result of the operation of the nomenklatura system.
An important aspect of this characteristic is the link between responsible
position and privilege. The Soviet economy was a consumer deficit economy,
meaning that while the basic necessities of life were generally available, there
was little in the way of advanced consumer or luxury goods; most people had
the bare necessities, but little else. However, responsible officials were given
access to different sorts of privileges, depending on their positions in the
structure. The higher up the structure one was, the more responsible the
position, the more valuable were the privileges that that person received.
Such privileges could include special housing, access to scarce foodstuffs and
consumer supplies, use of a car and driver, access to overseas travel, and extra
pay. The lifestyles of such responsible officials were therefore much better
than those of the ordinary populace, even for those officials on the lowest
rung of the hierarchy.
The responsible officials, or the nomenklatura, thus constituted a privileged
and powerful section of Soviet society, although the levels of both privilege
and power differed substantially within that group. Some have argued that
the nomenklatura constituted a privileged ruling class possessing a collective
consciousness that gave them a basis for unity of action which they could use
to defend their positions. However, they were not a class per se, as they could
not pass their positions on to their heirs. While some members of this group
did act collectively, the group as a whole lacked any such unity of outlook.
They are probably better seen as a hierarchy of officials than as a social class.
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Stalin and his inner circle, whom he hand picked in order to solidify his power. Who are they?
Courtesy of the David King Collection.
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7
COLLECTIVIZATION
Lynne Viola
The collectivization of agriculture was a key feature of the Communist
economy of the Soviet Union. Collectivization was intended to socialize
peasant agriculture through the creation of collective farms.
Within the collective farms, equipment and work animals were held in
common, while the land was worked jointly by the collective farmers;
peasant families continued to live in separate homes and were permitted
a small plot of land to farm for their personal needs. In theory, after paying their taxes and other obligations to the state, the collective farmers
were supposed to divide the remains of the harvest. However, throughout most of the Stalin era, the state would take the lion’s share of what
was produced, leaving peasants
to live on what they managed to “Now even the blind can see
grow on their private plots. The
that if there is any serious
result was widespread rural povdissatisfaction among the main mass of the
erty which led in  –  to
peasantry it is not because of the collective
mass famine.
We will
fully finis
farm policy, of the Soviet government, but
Collectivization was viewed as
because the Soviet government is unable
an essential ingredient in the
to keep pace with the growth
“construction” of socialism.
of the collective farm.” 
Socialist construction meant
not only the eradication of traditional peasant farming, but
the industrialization and modernization of the country. The collectivization of agriculture was intended
to pay for industrialization through what Stalin called in  a “tribute”
from the peasantry.  What this meant was that the peasantry would be
“squeezed” for the resources to pay for industrialization. This would occur
through high taxation, artificially low prices for agricultural produce, and
severe grain requisitions to meet export needs. The collective farms were
intended to regulate the production and transfer to the state of agricultural goods, thus simplifying the control of the rural economy. By increasIn our collective farm, there is no place for popes and
kulaks
Courtesy of the Hoover Institute.
Overleaf: Life on a collective farm.
An idyllic look at life on a collective farm.
Courtesy of the Hoover Collection
section 2
Workers are urged to wo
as hard as possible on th
newly-created collective
farms.
life & policies
Courtesy of the Hoover Inst
299
ing grain production and mechanizing agriculture, collectivization was
expected to free up capital and labor for industry and food resources for a
growing urban industrial work force. 
And although most historians agree that collectivization did not pay for
industrialization, at least in the short term, it is clear that this expectation
was an important motivation behind collectivization.
The idea of collectivization was derived from Communist ideology. The tenets
of Marxism-Leninism judged collectivization to be not only a more rational
economic
system
than the capitalist system of farming based on market forces, but presumed
collectivization to be the logical outcome of the supposedly progressive
dynamics of class forces in the countryside. Marxist-Leninists artificially
grafted urban concepts of class and class struggle onto the peasantry. They
divided the peasantry three groups — poor peasants and rural proletarians,
the supposed allies of the working class; middle peasants, a large and politically wavering intermediate stratum sharing features common to both proletariat and bourgeoisie; and the kulak, a rural bourgeoisie with social and
economic power disproportionate to its relatively small numbers, considered
to be the class enemy. They assumed that poor peasants and agricultural
laborers would rally to the side of the collective farm on the basis of their
class interests, swaying the middle peasant to their side and defeating the
kulak in the process. In practice, peasants rarely performed according to class
principles, instead uniting in defense of common interests— subsistence,
ways of life, and belief — threatened by the theory and practice of collectivization. The poor peasant in most cases failed to support the regime, and the
regime’s inability to provide a clear and consistent definition of the kulak
most often meant that politics rather than social or economic status
determined who was classified as a kulak.
The Communist Party launched the collectivization campaign in early .
Collectivization was a top-down, state initiated transformation based on
force. Violence was widespread as peasants were forced into the collective
farms. At village meetings, the authorities would lay their guns on the table
and, instead of calling a vote for or against the collective farm, simply asked
the assembled peasants, “Who is against the Soviet government?” Anyone
who put up his hand could face arrest or a beating.  The momentum of the
collectivization campaign was such that already by March , close to 
of the peasantry was declared collectivized! In fact, most of these statistics
were based on a “race for percentages” waged among the cadres of collectivization and based on “paper” collective farms i.e., collective farms in name
only.
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STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
Along with collectivization, the Communist Party launched two other repressive campaigns in the countryside. The first campaign was a frontal attack on
religion and the village church. Priests were subject to widespread arrest; as
many as  of village churches were closed and believers were subject to
harassment in the form of the desecration of religious symbols and objects.
Peasants in fact associated collectivization with what they saw as “godless communism.” In one village, a peasant said to her neighbor, “Look Matrena, yesterday your husband joined the collective farm and today they took our icons.
What is this communism, what is this collectivization?”
The second, the campaign to “liquidate the kulak as a class” was aimed at
peasant families who were considered to represent capitalism in the countryside. “Liquidation” meant that as many as , such peasant families (in
 alone ) were declared to be kulaks and subject to the forced expropriation of their properties; of these, no less than , were expelled from
their villages and exiled to the most remote hinterlands of the Soviet
Union. Both the attack on the church and the liquidation of the kulak as
a class aimed at the destruction of traditional sources of village leadership.
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bove
ranslation: Easter Egg
Drawing of a worker exposing
he enemies of Communism:
he Pope, a banker, a kulak,
and a social-democrat.
Courtesy of the Hoover Institute.
below
On the left is a new, Soviet
collective farm. On the right
is a barren land of religious
peasants controlled by
capitalists.
8 DEKULAKIZATION
Lynne Viola
Dekulakization accompanied the collectivization of Soviet agriculture.
Dubbed the “liquidation of the kulak as a class” by Joseph Stalin in
December , the policy was enacted into legislation in January  and
carried out in  – . Although aimed ostensibly at what the Communist
Party considered to be the
rural class enemy, the kulak
or rural capitalist, the imple- “The kulak problem is now so
mentation of the policy would
pressing, given the exacerbated
be both violent and arbitrary,
situation in the countryside, that it
striking all manner of peasant
is immediately necessary to plan a
critics of the regime and most
whole host of measures to totally
especially sources of traditional
purge the countryside of the kulak
village leadership. The policy, in
element.”
effect, decapitated the village,
-G. Yagoda
weakening authority structures
and making the village more
vulnerable to the incursions of
the Communist Party.
Dekulakization consisted of the expropriation of the properties of kulak
households ( to be used to fund the new collective farms) and their expulsion
from the village. The Politburo decree on dekulakization established three
categories of kulaks.  The first category consisted of supposed “counterrevolutionary kulak activists” who were subject to incarceration in concentration camps or execution. Following property expropriation, their
families were subject to exile in the most remote hinterlands of the Soviet
Union. The second category was to be made up of the remaining “ kulak activists,” especially the most wealthy kulaks; they and their families were also to
be exiled to distant parts of the Soviet Union. The third category of kulaks,
the majority, were to be resettled beyond the collective farm, but within
“Down with the kulak from the collective farm.” In the box: “Kulaks are the most evil, most disgusting, most wild
exploiters who are the helpers of tsars, popes and capitalists in other countries.”
Courtesy of The David King Collection
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9 FAMINE
Andrea Graziosi
Between the end of  and the summer of , the most severe famine in
Soviet history claimed five to seven million victims. It was the turning point
of the  s as well as of Soviet pre-war history as it foreshadowed the Great
Terror of  – . This was not a famine caused only by natural causes, it was
also caused by Stalin, who was afraid that the southern regions of Russia and
Ukraine were a threat to his control of the country.
The areas where the largest number of deaths occurred were located in
the most fertile regions of the country where grain was grown. Areas like
Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, and the Volga Basin were targeted
by Stalin as areas that were dangerous because of their independent-minded
peasants and their important role in feeding the rest of the country. Starting
with the Civil War in , there had been a constant struggle over who controlled the land and the crops grown on this land. The peasants felt that they
should be able to do what they wanted with the land, while the Soviet government set out to control both the land and the people who lived there. This
was done in part to seize as much food as possible, and in part because Stalin
wanted to eliminate the religious and national independence that these peasants insisted upon.
Officials from Moscow were repeatedly sent to these regions to get grain at
any cost. In the fall of , when the procurements of grain proved unsatisfactory, Stalin sent Molotov, Kaganovich, and Postyshev to Ukraine, the
northern Caucasus, and the Volga basin to redress the situation. They decided
to take advantage of the devastation caused by the famine and teach the
peasants a lesson. This lesson was tragically simple: he who does not work (i.
e., does not accept the kolkhoz /collective farm system ) shall not eat. Stalin
continued to put pressure on the starving peasants in Ukraine by ordering
them to return the meager grain advances for the new crop they had received
as compensation for their work. This also resulted in the repression of local
officials who had helped starving peasants. Hundreds of these sympathizers
were shot and thousands more were arrested.
Meanwhile, the state resorted to punishing the peasants by seizing their
meat and potatoes. Specific areas of Northern Caucasus and Ukraine, where
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10 INDUSTRIALIZATION
Michael Ellman
From  to , the Soviet Union under Stalin undertook a rapid industrialization program that drastically impacted the future of the country. In ,
Stalin summarized his overall goal for industrialization, “We are fifty or a
hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.”  Stalin was able to
catch up to the “advanced” countries, and in many cases sur“To transform our society from an
passed them.
agrarian one into an industrial one
The Soviet economy was concapable with its own powers of
trolled from the center, through
producing essential machinery — that
a system of national economic
is the essence, the basis of our
planning that was mapped out
general line.”
by five year plans. In reality the
five year plans were primarily
public relations documents for
— Stalin, 23 December 1925 
a system of political and bureaucratic resource allocation. However, the long term goal of the plans — to catch up with and overtake the
most advanced countries in industrial development and military potential — remained constant throughout the Stalin era and determined
many everyday decisions. The five year plan served more as the beginning of
a continuous process of political and bureaucratic allocation of resources.
Other unplanned factors such as the harvest, internal politics (e.g. the intensified terror of  –  ), and international politics ( e.g. World War  ) also
played a role in determining the economic outcome in the country.
Industrialization depended on three main factors. The first factor was massive investments in heavy industry. These investments focused largely in the
areas of coal mining and oil production, iron and steel production, engineering, electrification, and tractor, tank and military airplane production.
The Soviet planners felt that increasing output in these sectors would allow
The smoke from the smokestacks is the breath of Soviet Russia
Courtesy of the Hoover Project
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11
SECRET POLICE
Donald Rayfield
Within six weeks of the October  revolution, the Bolsheviks realized that
they needed an effective and ruthless secret police even more than soldiers
and party activists to hold and protect the revolution against its enemies.
The result was the Cheka, which grew into an ungovernable force, arresting
and executing its victims often with no just cause. After the Civil War of ,
Felix Dzerzhinsky, chief of the Cheka, gradually, brought some semblance of
order into the organization. Stalin made friends with Dzerzhinsky: they had
neighbouring dachas ( summer /country homes ) and the puritanical Dzerzhinsky was even induced to accept Caucasian hospitality on the Black Sea.
Dzerzhinsky was regarded by Lenin as an excellent and devoted organizer
but of too little intelligence to be able to take part in the Party’s strategic decisions. Worse, in  after the war, many members of the Soviet
government, especially Bukharin, felt that there was no need for a large
secret police force. Trotsky was interested only in using the Red Army to
foment world-wide revolution; the ‘economists’ in the party were inclined
towards a more democratic society. Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka leadership,
faced with unemployment, gravitated towards Stalin. Stalin soon understood that the support of the secret police was vital if he was to achieve
power. Only they could side-step and if necessary eliminate Stalin’s
rivals on the road to succeed Lenin as leader of the . Stalin alone
offered a future in which the secret police would go on fighting an intelligence war against ideological enemies at home and abroad.
With Dzerzhinsky’s death in , Stalin formed a close alliance with
his highly educated and satanic successor, Viacheslav Menzhinsky.
Together they devised two important strategies: the destruction of a prosperous peasantry and the ‘show trial.’ As a postgraduate student, Menzhinsky had long advocated the dissolution of the peasantry as a backward
element for a modern society; as a novelist and poet, Menzhinsky took
pleasure in devising fictitious plots in which the accused would be
trained like actors to publicly admit their guilt. As a result of Menzhinsky
and Stalin’s strategizing, approximately ten million peasants were killed
Long live the leadership of the OGPU
A sign found at the White Sea canal, a secret police project using slave labor.
Courtesy of the David King Collection
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table 1
the evolution of the secret police, 1917-1954
date
title
leader
1917 – 1922
Cheka
All-Russian Extraordinary Committee to Combat
Counter-Revolution and Sabotage
Felix Dzerzhinsky
1922 – 1923
GPU
State Political Directorate
Felix Dzerzhinsky
1923 – 1934
OGPU
Joint State Political Directorate
Felix Dzerzhinsky (1923 – 1926)
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
(1926 – 1934)
1934 – 1946
NKVD
People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs
Genrikh Yagoda (1934 – 1936)
Nikolai Yezhov (1936 – 1938)
Lavrenti Beria (1938 – 1946)
1946 – 1954
MGB
Ministry for State Security
Victor Abakumov (1946 – 1951)
Semion Ignatiev (1951 – 1953)
1953
MVD
Ministry of Internal Affairs
Lavrenti Beria (1953)
1954 –
KGB
Committee for State Security
between  and  and countless engineers, academicians, and bankers
were forced to participate in show trials because of the belief that they were
responsible for the failings of the economy.
After Menzhinsky died, Stalin was left to deal with the deputy director, Genrikh Yagoda, whom he distrusted. Yagoda feared Stalin and did his best to
win him over by turning the secret police into a new
organization, using  camps to make hundreds of
thousands of individuals into slave labourers and contribute to the economy with gold mining, canal building and forestry. Despite his efforts, Yagoda failed: he
was too friendly with Stalin’s enemies and he was therefore reluctant, after the assassination of Leningrad
Party boss, Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s close ally to put the
blame on Stalin’s enemies.
In  Stalin had Yagoda dismissed, arrested, and
eventually shot, and for the first time had his own
Genrikh Yagoda, head of the
appointee, Nikolai Yezhov, head the secret police.
secret police from 1934-1936.
In  Stalin and Yezhov decided to embark on the
Courtesy of the David King Collection
mass elimination of all potential enemies, especially
non-Russians in any position of power, in the country: it turned into a bloodbath in which, it is now acknowledged, nearly , were executed and
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STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
In the top photograph, Voroshilov, Molotov, Stalin, and Yezhov stand next to the Moscow-Volga
Canal. Next, in the same picture as above, Yezhov was removed after he was executed.
Courtesy of the David King Collection
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311
even more sent to 
labor camps in just eighteen
months. As one sponsor said
of Yezhov, his only fault was
‘not knowing when to stop.’ As
the country’s very functioning was threatened by the disappearance of experts from
every field, from physicists to
army generals, Stalin himself
stopped this action, and had
Yezhov arrested and shot.
Again, Stalin appointed his
own man to lead the secret
police, Lavrenti Beria, the
highly intelligent and pathological sadist who had run the
Caucasus on Stalinist lines for
seven years, balking at nothing. Like Yezhov, Beria was
Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD.
often closeted with Stalin for
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
whole nights on end as the
elimination of further ‘enemies’ was plotted. Beria earned plaudits for succeeding where Yagoda and
Yezhov had failed, in organizing the murder of Stalin’s last significant enemy,
Leon Trotsky. Later, after the Second World War, Beria proved his worth by
managing the Soviet atomic bomb program. Increasing distrust led Stalin to
split up the secret police during and after the Second World War; he installed
the vicious Abakumov as the head of  (‘Death to Spies’), and when he
became disillusioned in Abakumov, who was too slow to pursue anti-Semitic
arrests, he found other scorpions to put in the jar, watching with interest to
see which secret policeman would destroy the others. But, despite Stalin’s
paranoia, Beria outlived his master, if only by a few months.
Stalin thus relied more on the secret police than on any other group. I n so
doing he was imitating successful tsars, such as Ivan the Terrible and Boris
Godunov, who also understood that intelligence was as important as armed
force or a strong economy for the retention of power and founded a force
answerable only to themselves.
We will destroy the spies and enemies!
Courtesy of The David King Collection
312
STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
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313
12
SPECIAL SETTLEMENTS
Lynne Viola
Throughout the  s there had been a series of discussions about how best
to utilize prison labor in the extraction of natural resources in the desolate
and remote hinterlands of the Soviet Union, where a permanent or even a
seasonal labor force had been nearly impossible to maintain. In April ,
Genrikh Yagoda, de facto head of the  ( Soviet secret police ) articulated his vision of a new penal system that would build upon earlier
plans for the use of prisoners in the extraction of the Soviet Union’s vast natural resources. Yagoda argued that the concentration camps were little
more than holding pens for prisoners, whose labor was wasted. He called for
the transformation of the camps into “colonization villages” of  to 
households each. The prisoners would build the villages themselves and work
as a permanent labor force in forestry, mining, fishing, and elsewhere
in the remotest areas of the Soviet Union, while occupying their free
time with various agricultural pursuits that would allow them to support
themselves and free up the government budget from supporting its unfree
labor. Yagoda aimed in this way “to colonize the North in the fastest possible tempos”  and assure the maximum extraction of the Soviet Union’s rich
mineral and natural resources for industrialization. Although the
camps would never be displaced by such “colonization villages,” Yagoda’s
proposal envisioned the emergence of special settlements that would
house a continuing assortment of state-defined social and ethnic enemies
through the duration of the Stalin years.
Dekulakization provided the first army of forced labor for the special
settlements. In  and , the Communist Party sent close to two million people into internal exile, mainly so-called kulaks and their families.
They accounted for the largest contingent of any category of prisoner in the
Soviet Union through the mid-s. The special settlements were located in
the most desolate and isolated regions of the Soviet Union, such as the
Northern Province, the Ural Mountatins, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Special
settlers worked primarily in the forestry industry, mining, and agriculture.
In most places, the settlers and their families engaged in small-scale agricul-
Territory of ‘special settlement’ Voryu in the Syktyvdinsk District, which existed here during the
1930s. Photo 1967.
Courtesy of Memorial
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315
Balts
!
Poles
!
Moldavians
!
Bulgars
!
Ukranians
!
Greeks !
Tartars !
Greeks!
Karachai !
Khemchins !
! !
! !
Germans
!
Kalmyks
!
Kurds
Balkars
Meshkhetians
Chechens / Ingush
! Koreans
!
Deported Peoples
Zones of Deportation
Routes of Deportation
13
MASS DEPORTATION
Mark Kramer
One of the hallmarks of the Stalin era was the forced transfer of millions
of people from one location in the Soviet Union to other locations. The
largest group of those deported, numbering at least several million, were
the kulaks. Kulaks were peasants who were wealthier than others, though
many of those accused of being “kulaks” were not at all wealthy and were
merely the targets of vendettas. Stalin’s campaign of dekulakization in the
early  s was one of the largest forced population transfers in history.
Dekulakization was explicitly aimed at “eradicating the kulaks as a class,” a
phrase used by Stalin that bears disturbing resemblance to some of the slogans used by the Nazis about Jews. Millions of peasants in Russia, Ukraine,
and other Soviet republics were forcibly uprooted from their homes,
expelled to distant regions, and forbidden to ever return to their previous
residences. Vast numbers died during these upheavals, and the survivors experienced unmitigated hardship and cruelty. The sweeping
transfers of people did not abate even when severe complications arose,
including grossly overcrowded internment camps, railway depots, and boxcars. The pervasive overcrowding, endemic shortages of food and medicine,
harsh weather, and lack of basic sanitary conditions led to rampant disease
and death. All who tried to resist orders to leave were forced to comply at
gunpoint or, in some cases, were summarily shot. When those accused of
being kulaks arrived at their new permanent “homes,” they often had
to fend for themselves, without adequate food, clothing, or shelter, and without a supporting infrastructure that would help them start new lives.
The other major groups of people deported during the Stalin era were
national, ethnic, and religious minorities. Although Russians constituted the
majority ethnic group in the Soviet population, more than  other ethnic
groups and nationalities lived in the Soviet Union. Deportations of hundreds
of thousands of Poles from western Ukraine and Finns from northwestern
Russia to Soviet Central Asia, Siberia, and other remote locations were carried out in the first half of the  s. In , nearly , Koreans were
deported from the Far East to Central Asia. Soon after the Soviet Union and
Deportation routes.
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317
Nazi Germany secretly agreed in  to divide Poland into spheres of interest, the Soviet army and security organs moved into eastern Poland, territory later formally annexed by the , and initiated mass arrests and
deportations of former Polish citizens, sending them to prison camps and
hard labor in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Soviet Arctic region. During the
 months before Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June , Soviet
troops forcibly removed as many as . million people of all nationalities
from formerly Polish territory, including , Poles. Of those deported,
more than , died. At least , to , more Poles were shot by
Soviet troops.
The deportations of Poles proFrom a report sent to Stalin by a Party comceeded simultaneously with
mittee instructor in western Siberia in 1932:
the forced transfer of vast
“On 29 and 30 April 1933 two convoys of ‘outnumbers of ethnic Germans
dated elements’ were sent to us by train from
from the Volga region to
Moscow and Leningrad. On their arrival in
forced-labor sites in Central
Tomsk they were transferred to barges and
Asia. Nearly , Volga
unloaded…. on the island of Nazino…The first
Germans were deported
convoy contained 5,070 people, and the second
within a few months. In addi1,044: 6,114 in all. The transport conditions
were appalling: the little food that was available
tion, more than , Finns
was inedible, and the deportees were cramped
were transferred from northinto nearly airtight spaces… The result was a
western Russia to Central Asia
daily mortality rate of 35 – 40 people. These
and Siberia in , joining
living conditions, however, were luxurious in
the large number of Finns
comparison to what awaited the deportees on
who had been deported in the
the island of Nazino… The island of Nazino is a
totally uninhabited place, devoid of any settleearly to mid- s. In midments… There were no tools, no grain, and no
June , just a week before
food. That is how their new life began… On
the Germans attacked, Soviet
the first day, 295 people were buried… It was
forces that had occupied the
not long before the first cases of cannibalism
three Baltic states ( Latvia,
occurred.” 
Lithuania, and Estonia ) in
 deported more than
, people to Gulag camps in Siberia. With ruthless efficiency, Soviet
 troops removed all of these people in less than  hours, separating
the males and females and killing anyone who tried to resist.
During the war itself, Stalin continued to deport ethnic minorities, even
though these deportations required the use of huge numbers of troops who
were diverted from the frontlines where they were desperately needed. In
, the entire population of Karachais and nearly all Kalmyks, more than
, people in total, were forcibly removed from their homelands and
deported to Central Asia and Siberia. ( The remaining , Kalmyks were
318
STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
mass deportation from the baltic states
The three tiny Baltic states — Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia — had
been independent from 1918 until
October 1939 when Stalin sent
nearly 100,000 Soviet troops to
occupy them under the terms of the
Nazi-Soviet Pact. Over the next year,
hundreds of thousands of additional
Soviet troops moved into the three
republics and carried out wholesale
arrests and summary executions of
thousands of “hostile elements.” On
June 14, 1941, Soviet troops deported tens of thousands of Latvians,
Lithuanians, and Estonians to Gulag
camps in Siberia. This brutal operation was completed within twentyfour hours, sweeping out all the
men, women, and children, including
many newborns, who were deemed
“enemies of the Soviet regime.”
To get a sense of the ordeal suffered by the victims of the mass
deportations, it is worth focusing
on the experience of one of them,
Sima Kleimana, who was a 20-yearold university student in Riga, the
Latvian capital, in June 1941 when
Soviet  troops burst into her
parents’ home and ordered the family to leave immediately. She, her
mother, and her sister were separated from her father, whom they never
saw again. Kleimana later learned
that her father had died of malnutrition and dysentery at a forced-labor
camp in January 1942.
One of the Soviet troops tried to
rape Kleimana’s sister, who desperately tried to fight him off. Enraged,
the soldier beat her with his rifle and
then shot her to death, in full view
of all the other deportees. Kleimana
and her mother were then packed at
gunpoint into a boxcar along with
hundreds of other Latvian deportees
for a long, suffocating journey to the
Tomsk-Kargasok Gulag camp in the
desolate reaches of Siberia. Some of
the deportees, including Kleimana
and her mother, knew Russian well,
but many could speak only Latvian
and German, with just a smattering of Russian. The Soviet guards
berated those who knew little or no
Russian, saying, “You’re all fascists!
How dare you not know Russian?!”
Many prisoners were executed on
the spot or died of suffocation during the journey.
Kleimana’s mother quickly weakened
under the strain of the Gulag and by
February 1942, was too exhausted to
stand. She had also become severely
dehydrated. Kleimana went desperately to one of the guards, begging
for a glass of milk that would help
her mother recover. Kleimana offered to trade her only blouse to the
guard in return for some milk, but
the guard, a female Russian, stood
impassively and then snatched the
blouse away. With a sneer, the guard
handed over a thimble-sized glass
of milk. Kleimana brought the liquid
back to her mother, but it was far too
little. Her mother died the next day.
Kleimana spent the next sixteen
years in the Gulag, surviving a regimen that killed most of her fellow
prisoners. When she was released
from captivity in May 1956, the
Soviet government provided no financial support and no means for her
returning to Riga. Because Kleimana
had been deprived of all her belongings on the night of the deportations,
she was forced to stay in the camp
another year until she managed to
contact her fiancee, whom she had
not seen in seventeen years. By that
point, he had made it back to Riga
from a separate deportation site in
Kazakhstan, and he persuaded his
mother to sell her wedding ring so
that he could pay for Kleimana’s trip
back to Riga.
This tragic story of a young student
who was robbed of her family, her
health, and the prime years of her
life is little different from the terrible fate of countless other Latvians,
Estonians, and Lithuanians during
the Stalin era. The mass deportations to the Gulag in June 1941
are only an abstraction for most
Americans, but memories of those
events remain vivid in the Baltic
states. Kleimana herself, who died
in early 2003, was deeply scarred
by the trauma of her 17 years in the
Gulag.
In the mid-1990 s the Latvian government compiled a multi-volume
book to commemorate the deportations, emulating the Vietnam War
memorial in Washington, dc. The
volumes list the names of the many
thousands of deportees along with
basic information about them, such
as date of birth, date deported, date
of death or release, and place of
imprisonment. The names of Sima
Kleimana and her family appear on
page 23. The death toll was particularly high among babies, young
children, and the elderly. Anyone
who glances through the stark lists
of names cannot help but be struck
by the large percentage who died en
route to the camps or within months
of arriving.
section 2
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319
deported in . ) Many died along the way or soon after arriving. In February, , the
same fate befell the entire Chechen, Ingush, and Balkar populations, totaling roughly
, people. The current Russian-Chechen conflict can be traced, at least in part, to
Stalin’s decision to uproot every man, woman, and child in Chechnya and ship them
off to barren sites in Central Asia. Nearly a quarter of the Chechens died in the
process, and the survivors were forced to remain in exile.
Later in , with the war still raging, Stalin proceeded with the mass deportation of the
entire populations of Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, and Hemshins. The Crimean
Tatars alone numbered more than ,.
The end of the war against Germany did not bring an end to Stalin’s mass deportations of
minority groups. Roughly , more Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians were
deported from their homelands to Gulag camps in Siberia, and large communities of
Greeks and Armenians ( numbering some , ) were deported from the Black Sea
coast to barren regions of Central Asia. Many other smaller groups were also deported en
masse. As late as April , the entire community of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Soviet Moldova, a newly annexed Soviet republic, numbering roughly ,, were deported to Gulag
camps in Siberia.
None of the deported groups was permitted to return to their homelands in Stalin’s lifetime. Not until -, several years after Stalin’s death, were most of the surviving deportees permitted to return. The main exception was the Crimean Tatars, who
were not permitted to move back to Crimea until the late s, thus bringing to an end
the era of mass deportation in the Soviet Union.
1
320
Courtois, S., N. Werth, J.L. Panne, A. Paczkowski, K. Bartosek, & J.L. Margolin. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.
Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. P.154.
STALIN:LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR
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321
14
THE GREAT TERROR
J Arch Getty
Stalin’s Great Terror of the  s is an umbrella term for a series of separate
but related operations directed against various groups within the Soviet
government and society that Stalin considered untrustworthy or potentially disloyal. In only two years, some , people were executed
and more than a million others were sent to  camps for political
crimes.
Some historians date the beginning of the Terror to , when Stalin’s associate Sergei Kirov was assassinated. Opinion is divided among
historians on whether Stalin was behind the assassination or not, but it is
clear that he used the killing as an excuse to begin arrests of former dissidents who had opposed him in the struggle for power following Lenin’s death
in . He claimed that these former opponents had organized Kirov’s
assassination and in  ordered their arrest as well as a screening of the
party’s membership to weed out but not arrest those with dubious loyalties.
However, the large scale mass terror did not begin until the second half of
.
In August , the world was shocked to witness a public Moscow
show trial in which several of the party’s most famous former leaders and
associates of Lenin, including Grigoriy Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev,
were accused of treason and executed. This was followed in January
 and March  by two additional staged show trials in which other
famous communists who had at one time opposed Stalin were tried and
executed, including Nikolai Bukharin. These public spectacles comprise one element of the Great Terror and set off waves of arrests of lesser
dissidents.
Another element of the Terror was the scapegoating of high ranking economic leaders for failures in the Soviet economy. They were blamed for
industrial and agricultural slowdowns and accused of deliberately wrecking
the economy. As with the political dissidents, their arrests touched off waves
of arrests of lower ranking economic leaders.
Stalin and Voroshilov carrying Kirov’s ashes after the Leningrad party leader was assassinated.
Courtesy of The Library of Congress
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323