Stalinism

Stalinism is the means of governing and related policies implemented by Joseph Stalin. Stalinist policies and ideas as developed in the Soviet Union, included rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, a centralized state, collectivization of agriculture, cult of personality[1] and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time.[2]

Stalinism promoted the escalation of class conflict, utilizing state violence to forcibly purge society of claimed supporters of the bourgeoisie, regarding them as threats to the pursuit of the communist revolution. This policy resulted in substantial political violence and persecution of such people.[3] "Enemies" included not only bourgeois people, but also working-class people accused of counter-revolutionary sympathies.[4]

Stalinist industrialization was officially designed[by whom?] to accelerate the development towards communism, stressing the need for such rapid industrialization on the grounds that the Soviet Union was previously economically backward in comparison with other countries; and asserting that industry was needed in order to face the challenges posed by internal and external enemies of communism.[5] Rapid industrialization was accompanied by mass collectivization of agriculture and rapid urbanization.[6] Rapid urbanization converted many small villages into industrial cities.[6] To accelerate the development of industrialization, Stalin imported materials, ideas, expertise and workers from Western Europe and America[7] and pragmatically set up joint-venture contracts with major American private enterprises, such as the Ford Motor Company, that under state supervision assisted in developing the basis of the industry of the Soviet economy from the late 1920s to the 1930s.[8] After the American private enterprises had completed their tasks, Soviet state enterprises took over.

Stalinism usually denotes a style of a government and an ideology. While Stalin claimed to be an adherent to the ideas of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx, hence purported that his policies were merely a style of government, some critics say that many of his policies and beliefs diverged from those of Lenin and Marx.[citation needed]

From 1917 to 1924, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin often appeared united, but they had discernible ideological differences. In his dispute with Leon Trotsky, Stalin de-emphasized the role of workers in advanced capitalist countries (for example, he considered the U.S. working class as "bourgeoisified" labour aristocracy). Stalin also polemicized against Trotsky on the role of peasants as in China, whereas Trotsky's position was in favor of urban insurrection over peasant-based guerrilla warfare.

While traditional Communist thought holds that the state will gradually "wither away" as the implementation of socialism reduces class distinction, Stalin argued that the state must become stronger before it can wither away. In Stalin's view, counter-revolutionary elements will try to derail the transition to full Communism and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them. For this reason, Communist regimes influenced by Stalin have been widely described as totalitarian.

Sheng Shicai collaborated with the Soviets, allowing Stalinist rule to be extended to the Xinjiang province in the 1930s. Sheng conducted a purge similar to Stalin's Great Purge in 1937.[12]

Class-based violence[edit]
Stalin blamed the Kulaks as the inciters of reactionary violence against the people during the implementation of agricultural collectivisation.[13] In response, the state under Stalin's leadership initiated a violent campaign against the Kulaks, which has been labeled as "classicide".[14]

As head of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that claimed to expel "opportunists" and "counter-revolutionary infiltrators".[15][16] Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.[15][17][18]

In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received at least over a hundred negative votes.[19][20] After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev.[21] The investigations and trials expanded.[22] Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts" that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys or appeals, followed by a sentence to be executed "quickly".[23]

Thereafter, several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as counter-revolutionary crime, was applied in the broadest manner.[24] The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "enemy of the people", starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD—NKVD troika—with sentencing carried out within 24 hours.[23] Stalin's hand-picked executioner Vasili Blokhin was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period.[25]

Economic policy
Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933

At the start of the 1930s, Stalin launched a wave of radical economic policies that completely overhauled the industrial and agricultural face of the Soviet Union. This came to be known as the Great Turn as Russia turned away from the near-capitalist New Economic Policy, and instead adopted a command economy. The NEP had been implemented by Lenin in order to ensure the survival of the Socialist state following seven years of war (1914–1921, World War I from 1914 to 1917; and the subsequent Civil War) and had rebuilt Soviet production to its 1913 levels. However, Russia still lagged far behind the West and the NEP was felt by Stalin and the majority of the Communist party, not only to be compromising Communist ideals, but also not delivering sufficient economic performance as well as not creating the envisaged Socialist society. It was therefore felt necessary to increase the pace of industrialisationin order to catch up with the West.

Fredric Jameson has said that "Stalinism was [...] a success and fulfilled its historic mission, socially as well as economically" given that it "modernised the Soviet Union, transforming a peasant society into an industrial state with a literate population and a remarkable scientific superstructure".[53] Robert Conquest disputed such a conclusion and noted that "Russia had already been fourth to fifth among industrial economies before World War I" and that Russian industrial advances could have been achieved without collectivisation, famine or terror. According to Conquest, the industrial successes were far less than claimed and the Soviet-style industrialisation was "an anti-innovative dead-end".[54]

According to several Western historians,[55] Stalinist agricultural policies were a key factor in causing the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, which the Ukrainian government now calls the Holodomor, recognizing it as an act of genocide.

Legacy
The "Big Three" Allied leaders during World War II at the Yalta Conference, British Prime MinisterWinston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin, February 1945

Pierre du Bois argues that the cult was elaborately constructed to legitimize his rule. Many deliberate distortions and falsehoods were used.[56] The Kremlin refused access to archival records that might reveal the truth, and key documents were destroyed. Photographs were altered and documents were invented.[57] People who knew Stalin were forced to provide "official" accounts to meet the ideological demands of the cult, especially as Stalin himself presented it in 1938 in Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which became the official history.[58]

Historian David L. Hoffmann, sums up the consensus of scholars:

However, after Stalin's death in 1953 his successor Nikita Khrushchev repudiated his policies, condemned Stalin's cult of personality in his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and instituted destalinisation and relative liberalisation (within the same political framework). Consequently, some of the world's Communist parties who previously adhered to Stalinism abandoned it and, to a greater or lesser degree, adopted the positions of Khrushchev. Others, such as the Communist Party of China, instead chose to split from the Soviet Union.

The Socialist People's Republic of Albania took the Chinese party's side in the Sino-Soviet Split and remained committed, at least theoretically, to Hoxhaism, its brand of Stalinism, for decades thereafter, under the leadership of Enver Hoxha. Despite their initial cooperation against "revisionism", Hoxha denounced Mao as a revisionist, along with almost every other self-identified Communist organization in the world. This had the effect of isolating Albania from the rest of the world, as Hoxha was hostile to both the pro-USA and pro-Soviet spheres of influence, as well as the Non-Aligned Movement under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, whom Hoxha had also denounced.

The ousting of Khrushchev in 1964 by his former party-state allies has been described as a Stalinist restoration by some, epitomised by the Brezhnev Doctrine and the apparatchik/nomenklatura "stability of cadres", lasting until the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Some historians and writers (like German Dietrich Schwanitz[60]) draw parallels between Stalinism and the economic policy of Tsar Peter the Great, although Schwanitz in particular views Stalin as "a monstrous reincarnation" of him. Both men wanted Russia to leave the western European states far behind in terms of development. Both largely succeeded, turning Russia into Europe's leading power.[citation needed] Others[who?] compare Stalin with Ivan the Terrible because of his policies of oprichnina and restriction of the liberties of common people.

Stalinism has been considered by some reviewers as a "Red fascism".[61] Though fascist regimes were ideologically opposed to the Soviet Union, some of them positively regarded Stalinism as evolving Bolshevism into a form of fascism. Benito Mussolini positively reviewed Stalinism as having transformed Soviet Bolshevism into a Slavic fascism.[62]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in writing The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America, argues that the use of the term "Stalinism" is an excuse to hide the inevitable effects of communism as a whole on human liberties. He writes that the concept of Stalinism was developed after 1956 by western intellectuals so as to be able to keep alive the communist ideal. The term "Stalinism" however was in use as early as 1937 when Leon Trotsky wrote his pamphlet "Stalinism and Bolshevism".[63]

Kristen R. Ghodsee, ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, posits that the triumphalist attitudes of Western powers at the end of the Cold War, and in particular the fixation with linking all socialist political ideals with the excesses of Stalinism, marginalized the left's response to the fusing of democracy with neoliberal ideology, which helped undermine the former. This allowed the anger and resentment that came with the ravages of neoliberalism (i.e., economic misery, unemployment, hopelessness and rising inequality throughout the former Eastern Bloc and much of the West) to be channeled into nationalist movements in the decades that followed.[64]

In modern Russia, public opinion of Stalin has increased in recent years: 34% of respondents in a 2015 Levada Center poll (up from 28% in 2007) say that leading the Soviet people to victory in the Second World War was such a great achievement that it outweighed his mistakes.[65]