Stalinism Essay Research Paper How far was

Stalinism Essay, Research Paper

How far was Stalinism the outcome of Leninist political practice.

The political system which existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin was a system of terror. The purges of the 1930s sent millions of Russians to their deaths or to the Gulags, the population was scared of the secret police, the NKVD, the forced collectivization of agriculture had wiped out a part of Russian society, the Kulaks. The show trials of the thirties had firmly established Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union. What requires investigation is how far was this regime of terror a new entity in the Soviet Union or how far it was a continuation the state set up by Lenin after the Russian revolution in 1917.

The regime set up by Lenin did have a secret police, the Cheka and it was authoritarian, especially in the the years after the revolution and the civil war. There was forced grain requisitioning during the period of War Communism and political enemies were exiled. That is by no means in question. The difference is that during the Leninist years there was not the wholesale slaughter of millions of Soviet citizens as there was under Stalin in the 1930s. It can be argued therefore, that Stalinism was partly the outcome of Leninist political practice because there were many similarities between the two regimes. However, the Stalinist system was by no means the inevitable outcome of Leninist political practice when one considers the differences between the two regimes and Stalin’s personality compared to that of Lenin. One must also remember that Stalin’s path to power was not a simple accession to power when Lenin died and there were other candidates for leader. Stalin had to out manoeuvre figures such as Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev to get power. Therefore Stalin was not, by any means, ultimately destined to become the leader of the Soviet Union. This may go some way to explaining why he felt the need to be so repressive to any potential political enemies.

After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 one of the first actions of the new regime was to end Russian involvement in the Great War. The signing of the Brest-Litovsk pact in March 1918 angered the allies because it meant that the Bolsheviks were going back on the Tsarist and Provisional Government’s policies of continuing the war against the Germans. This lead to the landing of Allied troops in Russia to support the ‘White’ anti – Bolshevik, counter – revolutionary armies. This, in turn lead to the setting up of the ‘Red’ army.

The Soviet secret police, or Cheka, was not a product of the civil war itself, it had been set up in December 1917. The role of the secret police changed though during the civil war into, as Fitzpatrick puts it an,

“..organ of terror, dispensing summary justice including executions, making mass arrests,..”.

From this we can see that the fledgling Socialist regime which promised freedoms from the repressions of the Tsarist days acting was acting in a repressive way itself under Lenin. However under Lenin in 1918 and the first half of 1919 in the region of 8,389 people were executed by the Cheka, this must be contrasted to Stalin’s regime when, during the terror of the 1930s, according to Bullock,

“..up to eight million were executed or died in 1937-8, leaving six million still in jail or camps at the beginning of 1939.”

The figures speak for themselves and illustrate how much more repressive the Stalinist system was only twenty years later.

`In the aftermath of the October revolution the Bolsheviks tried to nationalise the Russian economy along communist lines. On of the facets of this was the requisitioning of grain in the countryside to feed the cities because of poor transport and trading systems. The government decreed that all grain above that which was needed for re-planting and personal consumption was to be handed over to the state at a fixed price. Local ‘Committees of Poor Peasants’ were set up to oversee the acquisition of grain and distribution of food in the villages. However this proved inefficient and the town workers were sent in to requisition grain for themselves and to give industrial goods to those peasants that helped to gather the grain. In 1920-21 when the ‘White’ army was no longer a threat the peasants started to rise against the Bolsheviks in a series of insurrections in the black-earth provinces. An example being Tambov where an old SR leader Antononov lead a peasant ‘army’ against the Bolsheviks. Those peasants suspected of being part of Antonov’s army were executed and even whole villages were burned to the ground. Here Lenin can be seen as repressing a section of Russian society and using terror to force the peasants to give up their grain. Stalin, in the 1930s, used terror to enforce the wholesale collectivization of agriculture to a much greater extent than Lenin in order to fund industrialisation, to quote Alex De Jonge,

“..Stalin declared war on his peasants, calling for the immediate ‘liquidation of the Kulaks as a class’. The party went into immediate action, rounding up those peasants and their families, right down to breast-fed infants, that local activists had decided were Kulaks.”

From this it can be seen that to Lenin the peasants were a problem that was dealt with harshly, but from 1921 onwards the policy became more relaxed with the taxation on