The the USSR under Stalin is an often qualified State of “Totalitaire”, modelled by a leader who had the totality of the capacities. The final advent of Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist party of Soviet Union or Gensek , between 1927 and 1929, mark the launching of a brutal and radical transformation of the Soviet company. Into a few years, the face of the the USSR is radically changed by the integral Collectivisation of the grounds and by the Industrialization “with any vapor” arranged by the very ambitious five-year plan.

This paid policy of million victims leads to a notable fall of the standard of living of the citizens and opens a long reign of Terreur and Délation, marked in particular by the Grandes Purgings and the considerable expansion of the camps of forced labor of the Gulag. But it also makes it possible the USSR to become, after its victory over the invader Nazi in 1945, the second world Superpuissance. All the continuation of its history, of died of Stalin (1953) to the disintegration-bankruptcy of 1991, will consist in managing the heavy heritage of the Stalinist time.

General history of the Stalinist period

Succession of Lénine

With died of Lénine, in 1924, the Bolsheviks exert a power without division on a country devastated by the civil war (1918-1920) and the famine (1921-1922). Indeed, the Union of the Soviet socialist republics, proclaimed in 1922, is directed by a sole party, the Parti Bolshevik, whose Stalin is the general secretary of the Central committee since April 3rd, 1922.

Tensions inside the party appear as of before the death of Lénine, seriously sick and in withdrawal since 1922. Stalin will get busy to draw aside from the capacity Leon Trotski, his principal rival, shown “revisionism anti-Bolshevik”. He profits for that from setting-up from the “democratic Centralisme” which removed the right of tendency in March 1921.

At the time of died of Lénine, on January 21st, 1924, the central committee of the Communist party (Bolshevik) decides to keep secret sound “will” (March 1923) recommending to draw aside Stalin but not designating a successor. The debates between the various factions of the party will lead to the reinforcement of this last.

Among the divergences between the opposition and the “center” (the faction of Stalin) is the question of the industrial development of the Soviet Union. Trotski and the “left” is favorable to its fast industrialization because they judge it threatened of “capitalist restoration”, because of its insulation on the international scene and of the development in its center of “middle-class forces” (easy farming community and contractors and private tradesmen known as nepmen ). Boukharine and the “line” is opposed to it, worrying about the consequences which would have on the peasants, who always form crushing it majority of the population, a too fast industrialization of the country. They prefer the continuation of the Nouvelle economic policy (NEP) and a slow and progressive development, more especially as the retreat of the vague revolutionist in Europe condemns them to carry out, according to them, the “Socialisme in only one country”, far from the ambitions of world revolution preached by Trotski and its close relations.

The left opposition carried out by Trotski has in addition denounced, for several years, the increasing bureaucratization of the mode whose Stalin would be the direct representative, and the responsibility for this one and its allies in the failure of the revolutions German (October 1923) and Chinese (1927), like in the failure of the General strike in England (1925-1926). Indeed, on the half million members who account the party Bolshevik in 1923, less: 10000 took part in the debates former in October 1917. Its social base changed considerably since the revolution and it counts nothing any more but 9,5% of workmen, which leads the left opposition to develop the slogan: “Forty thousand members of the party handle the hammer, four hundred and thousand the portfolio”. The “clan” of Stalin is quickly brought to use this new caste of Apparatchiks to isolate to the “old guard” Bolshevik rolled by the civil war.

A brutal fight then begins within the Communist party of the Soviet Union (PCUS), punctuated of violences and devices of intimidation. Stalin supports initially the line and represses the left severely. Trotski is gradually isolated capacity: it is driven out government since 1925, excluded from the Party in XVe Congrès (1927), relegated in Central Asia then exiled of the USSR in January 1929. Its partisans are imprisoned and off-set per thousands in all USSR, some join and make their “self-criticism”.

Paradoxically, as from 1929, Stalin will take again and even radicalize the industrialization policy formerly preached by Trotski (even if the economic context were different). He is turned over against the line and eliminates from the responsibilities Nikolaï Boukharine and Alexeï Rykov (1928-1929).

In 1929, it became leading supreme country, and the celebration of its 50 years on December 21st marks the beginning of a worship around its person. It installs its Dictature in the name of the construction of the “Socialisme in only one country”. It returns then on NEP and ceases sparing the peasants. At the end of 1929, it launches the watchwords of “the liquidation of the Kulak as a class” and “industrialization to any vapor”: the “great Turning” started.

The Great Turning (1929-1934) and its consequences

The goal of Stalin is not only to build a classless society, objective of the Communisme. It is also a question as fast as possible of supplying the cities, hearths of the capacity Bolshevik, whereas the “crisis of the collections” (1927-1929) obliged to restore rationing urban and shown the brittleness of the capacity. Beyond, it is a question as soon as possible of industrializing the USSR by taking the essential resources on the campaigns, to modernize the country and to make it able to face the capitalist countries in the event of war.

The “collectivization” of the grounds

Also Stalin issues it in 1929 the “collectivization” of the campaigns (in the facts, a nationalization) and the “liquidation of the Koulaks as a class”. The private property is abolished, the grounds and the means of production of the peasants are gathered in the Kolkhoze S or Sovkhoze S.

Resistance is considerable: rather than to give up their goods in the State, the Koulak S or alleged such set fire to harvests and cut down their herds (1930-1932). Certain areas are in prey with truths armed risings where the authority of the Party-State is seriously shaken during some time, unquestionable militant and local managers taking even sometimes party for their fellow-citizens.

Resistances are broken by violence. Only in 1929,1 300 country revolts are crushed. In March 1930, Stalin authorizes a retreat: its article the Giddiness of success , appeared in the Pravda , authorizes the exits of kolkhozes. Those are emptied at once. But hardly the harvest of the ensured year, of the battalions of volunteers recruited in the cities set out again violently with the attack of the campaigns. The dangerous inaccuracy of the concept of Koulak authorizes all the arbitrary ones: ends up being regarded as kulak any adversary real or supposed collectivization.

In few years, 400  000 families of kulaks and alleged such are off-set with haste in Siberia under conditions terrible, and given up on the spot with their fate. The total improvisation of the operation is concluded by a strong mortality among “dekoulakized” off-set. One attends even some scenes of cannibalism. Others flee their places of exile and are found to wander through the country under miserable conditions; the majority will be systematically stopped and liquidated during the Grandes Purgings.

In 1932, Stalin refuses to listen to the many warnings, of which those of the writer Mikhaïl Cholokhov, which predict that the continuation of the forced collections of seeds and cereals will lead to the famine. In fact, the terrible famine of 1932-1933 devastates the richest grain-bearing lands of the country, in particular the Ukraine (Holodomor). The existence of the tragedy is denied abroad, corn exports continue as so nothing was. Many famished which ebbs towards the cities is driven back by the Guépéou and is returned to the countryside. One will count at least 4 to 5 million deaths.

Bands of wandering orphans (the bespryzorniki ) will furrow during years the roads of the USSR. In a few years, also, 25 million peasants flees the campaigns where violence and the hunger prevail, and take refuge in cities condemned of this fact to an anarchistic explosion.

Constituting the last country war and the last serious famine which Europe knew, integral collectivization is completed in 1934, but the damage is irrevocable and the peasants enlisted in the Sovkhozes and the Kolkhozes continue to oppose a passive resistance, in the form of a systematic underproduction. In 1935, to counter this resistance, Stalin grants to each peasant a small holding (the dvor ) that it can use freely and of which it can sell the products on a free kolkhoz market. In 1939, these pieces which represent only 3  % of the grounds produce 25  % of harvests, more half of the fruits and vegetables, and 72  % of milk and the meat.

The overall performances thus remain disappointing. By eliminating the kulaks, agriculture was deprived of its most dynamic elements. The production crumbles. Old Russia, first cereal exporter in the world under the tsars, becomes definitively an importing country. The urban rationing restored in 1927 can be raised only in 1935, and one again attends scenes of famine in certain areas in 1936-1937.

Thanks to the rural migration of mass caused by the nationalization of the grounds, the industry of the country profits from an abundant labor. The purchase at cheap price of harvests by the State also enables him to finance industrialization.

Planning and industrialization

Decided to make Soviet Union an industrial great power, Stalin issues the nationalization of all the companies and removes the social category of the nepmen . Even the individual craft industry is prohibited, at least until 1936.

Stalin charges the Gosplan with the Planification of the economy. October 1st 1928 is launched the first Five-year plan. It privileges heavy industry and the communications with the detriment of the agriculture and industries of consumption, and fixed of the particularly ambitious production targets. “Industrialization with any vapor” wanted by Stalin is launched.

This one made of the USSR a dictatorship alive Productiviste in obsession to achieve and exceed always raised output norms. Since 1931, the official objective is to even achieve the five-year plan in four years only. Unemployment disappears officially, the Labor markets and the allowances with the unemployed persons are removed since 1930. Day's work is lengthened. The system of the “not-interruption” ( nepreryvka ), as from 1929, removes the weekly day of rest commune: so that the USSR is in continuous activity, each one has its 5 then 6 workdays and its last day of clean rest.

The achievements are spectacular. In 1940, the USSR places itself at the third world industrial rank. The country changes aspect and covers the great work, partly completed by the servile labor of Gulag: channels, stoppings, enormous factories, scrapes-ciels, Métro of Moscow, new cities…

But this industrialization with forced march has its price. Much more expensive than envisaged, the Plan must be financed by the Inflation (the money supply quadruples in a few years), by the forced loans of the workers and the private individuals, or by the obligatory handing-over in the State of their objects out of gold. The State develops also the extraction of the natural resources, which it throws on the international market while resorting to the need with the Dumping (oil of Siberia, gold of the Kolyma extracts by the Zek S).

The wasting of resources and energies is considerable, and much of work are bâclés or unfinished. Some appear useless, like the Canal of the sea Blanche (1930-1933), expensive in lives of convicts, and which almost never saw circulating of ship. The effectiveness is often sacrificed to imposing, precipitation and propaganda. The political decisions take precedence over competence: the specialists, engineers and technicians, who are seldom members of the Party, are indeed held in suspicion by Stalin and his faithful, for which counts before all unconditional obedience with the political regulations of in top.

Socially speaking, industrialization was done with the detriment of industries of consumer goods and of agriculture, which generated great sufferings for the populations. The pressure exerted on the working class is such as the popular standard of living drops by 40% during Ier Plan. The working wages do not find their level of 1928 qu' in 1940. As from 1935, the movement Stakhanoviste sponsored by the capacity allows the appearance of a new “working aristocracy”, the reintroduction of the wage the piece formerly honni, and a new rise of the output norms at the expense of the work conditions and the wages. As of 1931, a booklet of work prevents any change of unauthorized employment. In 1938 - 1940, a series of Draconian decrees punish sending in Gulag any delay repeated of more than 20 minutes.

Appeasing relative to the Great Terror (1934-1940)

Congress of the Winners to the murder of Kirov (1934-1935)

The XVIIe Congress of the Party, known as “Congress of the Winners”, seems to show a will of appeasing. The worst moments of the Dékoulakisation and the difficulties of Ier Plan passed. Former opponents are reinstated, of partial measurements of amnesty are adopted with regard to the prisoners of Gulag or the ex-kulaks. The signs of opening towards the non-members of the Party multiply. The lifting of rationing downtown (1935), the rise of the leisures and the renewal of consumption mark a looseness of the political pressure and social. A preserving turning takes shape with the rehabilitation of the family and the fatherland “Socialists”, the return to the academism, the Nationalisme large-Russian, the Militarisme.

Concerned also to approach the parliamentary democracies against the Third Reich hitlérien, Stalin splits humanistic declarations: “The man is the most invaluable capital” (May 1935). A news Constitution is put in building site: said “Stalinist constitution”, it is formally most democratic of the world, but will remain obviously unapplied, the more so as its coming into effect in December 1936 will coincide with the beginning of the Grandes Purgings.

Indeed, during the XVIIe Congress, Stalin measures also the share of the reserves towards his person: he is renewed with the Central committee only in the last of the list, 200 to 300 delegated on nearly 1200 having striped his name. In addition, it knows that a good portion of the Soviet company remains hostile or badly controlled, and that the brutal transformations that it imposed to him generated many dissatisfied and of displaced socially suspect.

February 1st 1934, its familiar Kirov is cut down with Leningrad by a revolted young person, Leonid Nikolaïev. If it did not organize itself the attack as one believed a long time, Stalin exploits the event to start again a campaign of Terreur.

The evening even, the Politburo promulgates a decree which removes all the elementary guarantees of defense and delivers without call the expeditious sentences of death of the special jurisdictions of NKVD. As of the following days, thousands of inhabitants of Leningrad are raids and deportees. April 7th, 1935, Stalin extends even the capital punishment to the older children of more than 12 years.

Great Purgings: mechanisms of the terror of mass (1936-1940)

The worst repression ever known by a country in times of peace, the Grandes Purgings lead between 1936 and 1939 to the execution of 680.000 people and the deportation of hundreds of thousands of others. In August 1937, Stalin authorizes personally the recourse to the Torture in the prisons, and again only fine 1938 prohibits it.

The country thus crosses an intense period of terror, denouncement and generalized suspicion, which puts many nerves at severely tested (the undergone pressure leads of them more one to the suicide), and which breaks friendly solidarity, family and professional. After the first Lawsuit of Moscow in August 1936, it is the year 1937 which marks the true launching of the Great Terror, with which it will become synonymous.

In the short run, Stalin wants to provide to the population scapegoats with the difficulties of the daily newspaper, by rejecting all the evil on a plethora of “saboteurs”. Beyond, it reinforces its absolute capacity by liquidating the old guard Bolshevik, which knows her weak role in the revolution, and by breaking the personal networks clientelists and strongholds that cut themselves the ministers, the members of the Politburo, or, at all the levels, the local managers of the Party and the directors of Gulag. The qualified executives and the technicians, who often dare to contradict his unrealistic political objectives, are also particularly aimed.

Lastly, Stalin intends to radically eliminate all the socially suspect elements, and all the dissatisfied ones caused by his policy. Whereas the diplomatic tensions accumulate in Europe since the advent of Adolf Hitler, and that the release of the Guerre of Spain in July 1936 makes fear a general conflict, it is a question of eliminating all that could constitute a “fifth column” of the enemy in the event of invasion.

For launching and developing this terror of mass, Stalin profits from the essential support of his faithful, but also from the undeniable zeal of many local managers, of many enthusiastic police officers and bureaucrats, or of many ordinary citizens informers.

Three Lawsuit of Moscow, in 1936 - 1938, make it possible to eliminate about fifty former companions of Lénine. It is the most spectacular face of the liquidation of the old guard of the Parti Bolshevik. Stalin gets rid definitively of rivals overcome for a long time. He eliminates also half of the Politburo, ten-per-cent tax the delegates of the XVIIe Congress, and makes exclude the three quarters from the members of the Party having adhered between 1920 and 1935. However, the purgings of the Party constitute only one very weak share of repression: according to calculations of Nicolas Werth, this one will touch to 94% of the not-Communists.

Terror does not save any organization indeed: dark cuts strike ministries, Gosplan, Komintern, Red Army and even in the long term… the guards and the chiefs with Gulag, as well as the police officers of NKVD. Purged are replaced by a new generation of frameworks which dedicates to Stalin a worship without reserves: the promoted young people of the “generation of 1937” (Khrouchtchev, Beria, Malenkov, Jdanov, Brejnev, etc) knew only him and he owes all.

Limiting itself by no means to the leaders, terror falls down on all the company. July 2nd, 1937, of the quotas fixing the number of suspects to be shot (category 1) or to off-set (category 2) are sent by the center at all the areas. The threatened local managers, themselves, compete of zeal to exceed these figures and to ask for the Kremlin the “permission” to strike even more people: from where a bloody higher bid, and a fast inflation of the judgments. From the 260.000 initially envisaged, one passes quickly thus to more than 400.000 arrests. Stalin signs in person 383 lists of condemned to dead representing 44.000 executions. Its faithful like Kaganovitch, Jdanov, Mikoyan or Khrouchtchev is also dispatched in the various Republics to radicalize the purging in the Party and the population. In parallel, a series of operations of NKVD striking per hundreds of thousands certain particularly suspectés elements:

• the decree n° 00447, signed on July 30th 1937 by Iejov, striking per hundreds of dekoulakized thousands of impoverished by the Collectivization, the innumerable vagrants and marginal generated by the latter, the former members of the leading classes and their children, “people of the past” downgraded by the revolution or the Great Turning.

• all the individuals maintaining or having maintained the relations with the foreigner are on the bolster. The diplomatic corps is decimated, of many pointed out and liquidated ambassadors, just like good number of agents of the Komintern, and certain war veterans of Spain. Terror extends until the Espérantophones, with the Philatélistes and the Astronome S.

• the frontier national minorities, already treated in suspect by the last tsars, then by the Bolsheviks, are particularly exposed. August 11th 1937, Iejov sign the decree n° 00485 which involves the arrest of 350.000 people, including 144.000 Pole and of many Baltic or Finnish: 247.157 will be carried out, including 110.000 Pole. At the Chinese border, 170.000 Korean are off-set in Central Asia, while the workmen having formerly worked on the Soviet railroad of Kharbin in Mandchourie are liquidated. But it is also the forced sedentarisation of the nomads of Central Asia, in particular with the Kazakhstan, which shows a demographic disaster and by the loss of many cultural traditions.

• the totalitarian principle of the collective responsibility makes fall down the “fault” of an individual to his spouse, his children, his whole family, with all her network of friends, subordinates, colleagues and relations. For example, on July 5th, 1937, the Politburo orders with NKVD to intern all the wives of “traitors” in camp for 5 to 8 years, and to place their children of less than 15 years “under protection of the State”. Order which results in stopping 18.000 wives and 25.000 children, and to place nearly a million children of less than 3 years in orphanages.

In 1939, with the stop of the Great Purgings - otherwise called Great Terror - Stalin eliminated the last spheres from autonomy in the party and the company, and definitively imposed its worship and its absolute capacity. It took the risk by doing this to seriously disorganize its army and its country, while at the same time the war approaches.

The Patriotic Great War and its continuations (1941-1953)

The Second world war will make it possible the Stalinist system to extend its influence.

Be a prelude to

After the advent of Hitler in 1933, Stalin worries for safety about the USSR and starts a bringing together with the parliamentary democracies, while continuing to cherish in secrecy the hope of an agreement with Berlin which would put the country at the shelter. In 1934, the USSR between with the Company of the Nations. She concludes a pact with France in 1935, intervenes at the end of 1936 in favor of the republican Spain (which she also seeks to put into orbit). But after the conference of Munich (30 September 1938), to which it, the USSR was not invited clearly makes understand that it will bind to highest offerer. August 23rd, 1939, the Pacte germano-Soviet is concluded with the the Kremlin.

The USSR benefits from this alliance in fact signed with the Nazi Germany: in two years, it seizes of more than 500000 km ² and increases by 23 million inhabitants. Terror and accelerated forced sovietization fall down at once on the Baltic States and the Moldavie absorptive, like on the territories torn off by the Red Army with the Poland and the Finland. Hundreds of thousands of inhabitants are off-set brutally and arbitrarily, the exported Soviet economic system such as it is, the choked local cultures, assassinated part of the elites, in particular them: 20000 massacred Polish officers with Katyń and in other places.

Risk of collapse to the victory (1941-1945)

The 22 June 1941, Hitler breaks the pact, and the German army invades the Soviet territory. In a few months, the Wehrmacht conquers a big part of Russia d' Europe, encircles immense armies and fact prisoners of the million soldiers, who deliberately famished and will be exterminated. The Soviet capacity disappears on a vast zone.

Accommodated sometimes well at the beginning by the populations, the Nazis quickly alienate any possible support while revealing their premeditated criminal projects, and by devoting to a racist war of extermination against the civil populations Slavic, gypsies and especially Jewish.

See also: War of destruction of IIIe Reich against the Soviet Union (1941-1944)

Delivered to administrators extremely brutal Nazis, at the image of the Gauleiter Erich Koch in Ukraine, the country is put out of regulated cut, its deliberately famished inhabitants. No concession is made to the local nationalists, and the Armée Vlassov, antibolchevik, will be used only in the West. To the great displeasure of the peasants, the Stalinist structures are not called into question, in order to facilitate the plundering of the agricultural resources, and the taxes and social security deduction are even worsened under penalty of death. The “decree of the police chiefs” signed by Wilhelm Keitel as of before the invasion results in the summary massacre of the captured political police chiefs and the members of the Party. Tortures and massacres of civilians are daily, or the massive raids of labor bound for Reich. First great slaughter of the Shoah, 1.500.000 Soviet Jews are massacred on the spot by the Einsatzgruppen, sometimes with the participation of inhabitants. Known on both sides face, these atrocities largely rejoin the Soviet population with the mode of Stalin, which even incarnates from now on the fight of the nation for its survival.

In spite of its serious reverses of the first months, the Red Army resists, at the price of million soldiers. With surprised of the enemy, it does not crumble, and does not cease as of the first day multiplying the counter-offensives. The Germans discover that his combative quality is infinitely higher than what they prejudged, just as the abundance and the quality of its material. They discover the heavy tank T-34, best of the Second world war, of which they did not even suspect the existence. The Soviets also engage against them several technical successes like the katiouchka or “Rocket launchers”. A burned Ground radical makes the vacuum in front of the invader.

As of the invasion, the factories are dismounted and moved in the East at the same time as 10 million people. Gone up in Siberia and in the Ural, they produce since 1942 more weapons than the Nazi Germany, at the price of enormous efforts authorized by the civil workers. The USSR also profits from an essential material aid of the Anglo-American Allies, abundant and of quality.

The patriotism and the context of All-out war explain in good portion the endurance of the soldiers and the civilians. Thus the city of Leningrad, subjected deliberately by Hitler to a fatal blockade responsible for: 700000 died, resists stoically a seat of almost thousand days. While remaining spectacularly in directly threatened Moscow, Stalin contributes in person to galvanize energies and to stop a beginning of popular panic, before the Red Army does not break with the doors of the city the German advance with end of forces (December 6th, 1941). In the occupied territories, strong bands of Partisans act since 1941; the Kremlin undertakes as of 1942 to supply them and to replace them under a narrow control. In June 1944, the Bielorussia will count a million partisans, the strongest concentration of guerilla of the occupied Europe.

The war radically changes the Stalinist system, which must make call from the start with the most thorough Nationalisme and join the orthodoxe Église in order to preserve a sufficient national cohesion to push back the German troops. Faithful reflections of the Russian party, the Communist parties of the whole world adopt lines patriotic and open to the dialog with the religious authorities and the most various political trainings. Stalin softens also the collectivization of the grounds, puts out of night light the class struggle, socialist realism in art, the political constraints. Thousands of officers of the Red Army formerly purged are reinstated and left to the need for Gulag, the such future marshal Rokossovki; a million prisoners released from the camps fight with the face. Time is with the Sacred union and patriotic.

However, the terror and the totalitarian nature of the mode play also a considerable part. Since 1941 and still with Stalingrad, teams of NKVD thus undertake mitrailler the soldiers who ebb backwards. Officers and generals are shot as of the first days, scapegoats of the errors of the Kremlin. The political police chiefs supervise closely the military chiefs, permanently exposed with a disgrace of Stalin. The prisoners of war are regarded as traitors and officially disavowed, their families left without assistances and liable to continuations. Any failure with the face is worth the arrest. In 1941-1942, it is not less: 994000 soldiers who are officially condemned, including 157.000 carried out. Still in 1945, very critical can be worth the sending in Gulag: Alexandre Soljenitsyne is thus stopped on the face of Poland to have questioned the military engineering of Stalin.

In 1941, no plan of evacuation of the civilians was envisaged nor outlined. The Jews as for them had been left in the ignorance of the atrocities German anti-semites, and often did not seek to flee before the arrival of the Nazis. Only the prisoners of the mode were taken along in dramatic forced marches, except with being often shot on the spot before the arrival of the Germans. It is however as in full enemy projection as inattentive NKVD of the considerable forces of the face to entirely off-set the German of the Volga, descendants of colonists installed at the 18th century (August 1941). In 1944, about fifteen nationalities are off-set in integrality, women, children, Communist militants and decorated soldiers included/understood, under the false charge of collaboration with the Nazis. Among them, them: 600000 Tchétchènes off-set in six days only (March 1944), unequalled historical records.

The Soviet projection in Europe of the East is also accompanied by a wave by plunderings, raids and disappearances; in Eastern Germany, the troops are encouraged to perpetrate massive Viols in reprisals with the exactions Nazis in Soviet territory, while by way of repairs, a large share of the industrial potential of future GDR is dismounted and dispatched in Russia.

Victorious in front of Moscow, the Red Army leaves triumphing over dramatic the Bataille over Stalingrad in January 1943, decisive turn of the war. The Battle of Koursk, the greatest confrontation of armoured tanks of the History is shown by a new Soviet success. In 1944, the national territory is reconquered. The Red Army inserts the face and releases half of Europe, pushing to Berlin.

This military position can only be ratified by the Anglo-American allies. The Conference of Yalta (4 February 11th, 1945), held in Soviet territory, confirms Stalin like principal winner of the war in Europe. To the late opening of the second face in Normandy in June 1944, the Soviet forces carried almost only the weight of the war, facing the German troops more aguerries and best equipped. At least 85% of the Germans put out of combat were it on the face of the East.

At the end of the conflict, the USSR becomes the 2nd world super power. Its annexations are ratified and it is permanent member of the Safety advice of UNO. Its international prestige is immense, well beyond the communist circles or of the men of the left. But the price of the victory is gigantic: undoubtedly 27 million deaths civil and military, million refugees and homeless people, and the vastest material destruction ever undergone by a belligerent in the human history. Thousands of cities, farms and transportation routes are destroyed. In 1946 - 1947, the dryness and a new famine in Ukraine cause more than 500000 dead.

Post-war period: The second Stalinism and the artistic Jdanovisme

After the flexibility and the relative liberalization of the years of war, Stalin disappoints all the hopes of change in the population. It decides to return without varying with the economic system and policy of the Années 1930, and to extend it to the very new “socialist camp”. Quickly, of the sole parties forged on the Stalinist model seize the power in the Eastern European countries, while the popular Army of release of Mao Zedong is victorious in China (1949).

Especially starting from 1947 and of the advent of the Cold war, all the news People's democracies must introduce the Collectivisme, the Planification, the Sole party and other institutions strictly copied on the Soviet model. Representatives of NKVD supervise the creation of the political police and the camps of work. The national armies are reformed on the model of the Red Army , and a Soviet of Polish origin, the marshal Rokossovki, becomes even Minister for Defense with Warsaw. The currencies are aligned on the Rouble, a certain number of companies placed under Soviet control, and the integration of the nation's economies to a block dominated by Moscow is confirmed in 1949 by the creation of the Comecon.

A series of lawsuits faked against the representatives of the old mode (the Midzentsy cardinal in Hungary for example) succeed about it of others against the local Communists suspected of “nationalism” or, after the rupture soviéto-Yugoslavian of 1948, “Titoism”.

During the war, million combatants and civilians found themselves out of the USSR. They discovered there countries with the more high level of life that theirs, and other ways of living and of thinking. Anxious of possible subversion, Stalin makes off-set in Gulag the ex-soldiers of the Armée Vlassov, delivered by the Westerners, but also a good number of prisoners of war survivors of the camps of dead the Nazis, or civil workers voluntary and forced in Germany.

Continue to also flow in camp many Baltic, Ukrainian the or Polish one recently annexed, and the members or sympathizers of the nationalist guerillas at the same time antiallemandes and anti-Soviet who remain with the Western borders of the USSR until the end of the Années 1940. They join there hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese prisoners.

Manpower of Gulag are thus carried to their apogee. In 1950, the Capital punishment removed in 1947 is reintroduced. Object of a Worship of the personality carried to its paroxysm (particularly at the time of its 70 years the December 21st 1949), a growing old Stalin and suspicious reign by opposing the clans ones to the others and by terrorizing its own entourage permanently. However, the mode knows a real stabilization: the great purgings of pre-war period do not reproduce any more.

The immense requirements of the rebuilding, the refusal of the Marshall plan (1947) and the constraints of the Cold war (armament, access to the atomic Weapon in 1949) involve a strong pressure productivist on the workmen, always subjected to an iron discipline. The “group of Leningrad”, around the young leaders Kouznetsov and Voznessenski, preaches a rebalancing at the expense of heavy industry: they are stopped (1949) and are carried out (1951).

As for the peasants, they are seen taking again the grounds cut down during the war on the collective ownership, and a monetary reform (1946) removes the personal benefit carried out to them at that time. Obligatory in kind deliveries do not cease increasing until the death of Stalin.

The intellectuals are given to the step by the artistic Jdanovisme (1946), forces doctrinary countryside orchestrated by protected from Stalin, Andreï Jdanov. The poetess Anna Akhmatova is excluded from the Union of the writers, is deprived of his ration card and is obliged to do housework to survive. The painters, the writers and all the artists are subjected more narrowly than ever to the dogma of the socialist Réalisme. The type-setters such Prokoviev and Chostakovitch are persecuted in their creations and see themselves intimating to compose of the melodies which siffloter the workmen with work can. The context of Cold war and the rehabilitation of a nationalism exacerbated large-Russian involve violent campaigns against all that comes from the Occident, as well the Psychanalyse as the Cybernétique or the Quantum physics, while the Espérantophones are off-set. In sciences, imposture lyssenkist is with his apogee, its adversaries purified or liquidated.

In the name of this fight against the “Cosmopolitanism”, the mode joins again in fact with the Antisémitisme. As of pre-war period, the Judaïsme religious was crushed by religious persecutions, the Yiddish and the Hebrew put outlaw. The Jewish section of the Party ( Yivsektia ) is dissolved during the Purgings. In 1946, Stalin prohibits the publication of the black Livre of Vassili Grossman and Ilya Ehrenbourg on the extermination of the Soviet Jews by the hitlériens. In 1948, the large actor Yiddish Solomon Mikhoels is assassinated on his orders while the writers of the Jewish Committee Antifascist, made up during the war to obtain the assistance of the American Jews, are stopped, then shot in 1952. The press, the theater and the Jewish schools disappear almost completely.

After having carried to end of arm the birth of the State of Israel (1948-1949), the USSR is turned over brutally against him, and the countryside “antisionist” and “anticosmopolite” clearly takes to accents anti-semites in all the Soviet block (Procès Slansky with Prague, whose defendants all are almost Jewish, 1952). Stalin is on the point of starting again the countryside anti-semite using the “Complot of the white blouses” (January 13rd 1953) when death carries it.

The death of Stalin: towards the Thaw

Stalin disappears the March 5th 1953 whereas it prepared new purgings (Complot of the white blouses), in particular elimination from the chief of the police force Lavrenti Beria.

After the death of Stalin, a collegial direction is restored. The first measurements of liberalization are paradoxically due to Beria: it makes slacken the Jewish doctors victims of the business of the White blouses, and releases a million prisoners (of common right) of the Gulag. It however is relieved, stopped (June 1953) and is shot (December) on order of his colleagues.

Arrived gradually at the capacity, Nikita Khrouchtchev will start again a certain liberalization of the political regime, said “Déstalinisation”. His report/ratio with the XXe Congress of the Party (February 23rd 1956) denounces the “Culte of the personality”, the violations of “socialist legality” and part of the crimes of Stalin - in fact especially the frequent purgings which destabilized the system periodically and made live in terror the bureaucrats and the leaders themselves. The survivors of the dictatorship are released overall from Gulag, and the thousands of marked rehabilitations. In 1961, the embaumé body of Stalin is withdrawn from the Mausolée of Lénine. The most repressive laws are abolished, and the police State gives up the terror of mass to the profit of more targeted and selective repression. Moreover, Khrouchtchev introduces economic reforms which restore elements of market economy within the planned system and reinforces the autonomy of the plant managers. It gives the accent on the rise in the standard of living of the citizens.

This “liberalism” does not prevent it from intervening militarily against the working insurrection in Hungary end 1956. Partisans of fire Trotsky, assassinated in 1940, gathered in the Fourth International (KNOWN), regard the Déstalinisation as a liberalization of frontage of the Soviet system, allowing the Bureaucratie to be maintained. Finally, Khrouchtchev is itself isolated of the capacity in 1964: the Nomenklatura modelled by the Stalinisme is from now on only main mode until the medium of the Années 1980, suspending the reforms and the Déstalinisation. They is while being shown consequently unable to cure the dysfunctions inherited the Stalinist era (bureaucracy, absence of spirit of initiative and public freedoms, shortages, ecological disaster, imbalance of the branches to the profit of an heavy industry less and less adapted to the historical evolution…) that the men of the “generation of 1937” prepare the final collapse of the the USSR.

Stalinist totalitarianism

The Stalinisme is often considered, with the Nazisme, like one of the forms of the “Totalitarisme”.

Reorganizing a narrowly embrigadée company radically, he affirms his ambitions to also control the spirits and to thus create a “New man”.

System resting on terror, it turns its violence of mass above all against its own population. For this reason, this police State is responsible of almost 700.000 executions between 1929 and 1953, while over the same period, 18 million Soviets knew the deportation with the Gulag and 6 other million the exile forced beyond the Ural - is an adult Soviet on five. It is necessary to add the million dead famines, and the unquantifiable sum of the broken destinies, psychological pressures and endured anguishes.

The worship of Stalin

True a Culte of the personality, returned to the “father of the people” gives to Stalin the possibility of affirming his authority. Appeared since 1929, it is radicalized starting from the Purgings and of the war.

Posters, photographs and processions celebrate “brilliant Stalin”, the “guide” ( Vojd ) “of the world proletariat” and “the fatherland”, the infallible, just and good man who “builds socialism in the USSR for the good of all”. Thousands of streets, cities, institutions and buildings bear its name, as well as the “peak Stalin”, culminating point of the USSR, or the Prix Stalin, equivalent Soviet of the Nobel Prize. Its name is quoted thousands of times per day in the media, the speeches, the schools. Its face is on all the walls. Its giant portraits and its statues strew the urban landscape.

Least apparent criticism against Stalin puts in danger: people disappear to have badly spelled its name or to have wrapped their pot of flowers with a page of newspaper comprising its photograph.

Imposed tardily and artificially on the Party as with the country, the worship of Stalin is deprived of theoretical justification taking into consideration Marxisme-léninisme, like thin sound role in the Révolution of October and its weak personal Charisme. Stalin is obliged besides to support his own worship on a deification of Lénine, of which he claims to be only the best friend and disciple. In front of its visitors, it enjoys to play modesty and to be presented in the form of a man of good sense, simple and close to people. The function of its worship is precisely to sit its historically debatable legitimacy, and to justify its absolute personal capacity, conquered little by little on its adversaries and its own colleagues.

It is also a populist strategy “” of its share: while the privileged people of the Party and the police force are hate, Stalin appears to simple people like a recourse against the abuses, and its figure remains saved criticisms. Many its victims sincerely believed that Stalin was innocent or being unaware of terror which he orchestrated against the country.

It acts finally, with the country of the Tsar S, to satisfy a population accustomed to venerate guardian figures. Besides the “Small Father of the People” (taken again title of tsarism) likes himself to compare himself to the despots modernisateurs Ivan the Terrible and Pierre Large the.

At least to the war, the worship of Stalin is much received in the campaigns, decimated by the Dékoulakisation, that in the cities. It is particularly strong in the youth, which knew only him, or in the Nomenklatura, which owes him all, promoted “generation of 1937” at the head. After the victory over the armies of Hitler, the popularity of the “Small Father of the People” shows that it succeeded in being identified with the Nation itself.

Propaganda and mobilizations

World cups outside, private of any point of comparison, the Soviets are narrowly framed and embrigadés of the birth to the death, and subjected to a Propagande of omnipresent and permanent mass. Press, radio, theater, books, cinema, posters, monuments or institutions diffuse the same watchwords, glorifient the mode uniformly, its achievements and its chiefs, finally pareillement stigmatize its designated enemies. Youth is enlisted in the Komsomol. The official discourse, or “Set language”, becomes the obligatory grid of reading of the reality, of which it masks also all the awkward aspects. The obsessional worship of the secrecy and the dressing-up of reality leave the masses in the ignorance of the latter.

The capacity encourages the emulation. It exalte heroes of work, kolkhoz stakhanovists or of elite, covers of medals, honors and material privileges. To each campaign of production or purification, the cells of the Party and the population must react like only one man, and multiply the meetings, the processions and the resolutions “spontaneous” which express their full agreement with the direction of the country.

The foreign visitors are skilfully taken in hand by the Intourist , which often manages to hide to them the dark faces of real Soviet and to show them only successes of them. In 1932, the mode thus manages to make visit Kiev and the famished Ukraine with the president of the French Council Edouard Herriot without this one not noticing anything. Not very many is the Communists or the lucid fellow travellers who dare to acknowledge on their return their doubts and their disappointments, with the image of André Gide ( Retour of the USSR , 1936).

Monitorings, terror and denouncement

The mode encourages the Délation of mass. By the press, the cinema, the school or the literature, it encourage each one to denounce the “suspects”, “spies” and other “saboteurs”, and to supervise its close relations and his own family. It surrounds by an intense worship posthumous the young informer Pavlik Morozov, killed in obscure circumstances in 1932, and presented in example to all Soviet youth.

The peasants of the Kolkhozes and the Sovkhozes are supervised through the MTS (stations of machines and tractors) which have the monopoly of the modern tools in the campaigns and which, with their political sections, are the eyes and the ears of the capacity. Until the death of Stalin, they are subjected to taxes in kind and often exorbitant taxes and social security deduction, fixed in spite of reality.

The Law of the Five Ears , promulgated the May 7th 1932 into full famine, punishes Gulag all “flight of the socialist property”. A mother having concealed what to prevent his/her children from dying of hunger will thus be off-set. This terrifying law is responsible for hundreds of thousands of arrests and deportations. In 1946, a similar law has comparable consequences, though of less width.

As of 1931, the workmen must have a booklet of work and cannot change employment without authorization. However, in the name of industrialization, the working class must undergo extremely hard work conditions: wage the piece, long days, multiplication of the accidents, suspicion generalized against the real or supposed “saboteurs”. No protection is offered to it: the Grève is impossible, the Syndicats are only relays of the capacity, the Commission of Work east dissolves in June 1933. After working risings of June 1932 in Ivanovo, any physical resistance disappears for about thirty years. Between 1938 and 1940, a series of Draconian decrees punish sending in Gulag any delay repeated of more than 20 minutes: these decrees are responsible for two million judgments in one year, and 11 million until their abolition in 1957.

As of the era léninienne, many Soviets are discriminated because of their social origins. These “people of last” ( byvchie ljudi ) and other “socially dangerous elements” (vague categories which includes common rights or the marginal ones as much as ex-small tradesmen, men of the church or kids of the ex-aristocracy) are priority targets of the monitoring and repression. As of 1929, one thus counts 4 million private Soviets of all their civic rights ( lichensty ), and discriminated with their children in the access to housing, work, higher education, etc

As of the Years 1920, these categories are the subject of raids regular in the cities, and off-set per thousands. During the Years 1930, their number increases hundreds of thousands of dekoulakized escaped of the campaigns or escaped prisoners their place of exile, as well as mass of many dispossessed ex-craftsmen, ex- nepmen , small traffickers, juvenile delinquents… all victims of the brutal transformations of the Soviet company. They will be priority victims of the Grandes Purgings, in particular of decree 00447 of Iejov signed on July 30th 1937. Starting from December 28th 1932, no citizen can more move, be placed or work without its interior Passeport ( Propiska ). To forget at home is enough to be off-set in the event of control. In the 5th line the indication of nationality appears, which facilitates the later discriminations or deportations. In the immediate future, the recording campaigns make it possible to flush out in mass the taken refuge Koulaks which hide downtown, the Tziganes, the members of the classes déchues, the “socially dangerous” elements. They then are expelled or off-set. The hundreds of thousands of inhabitants who see themselves refusing their passport lose any legal access to the means of existence (work, housing).

The iron hand of Stalin on the country: NKVD

Seldom equalized in the human history, the absolute power of the Stalinist police State durably ravaged and marked the Soviet people, and also indirectly the imaginary Westerner.

Million generally innocent people disappeared from the day at the following day, stopped the night in residence, challenged in full street, or raflées and off-set by whole trains. What left also the remainder of the population in uncertainty and the anguish which its turn occurs. Taking in mass the way of the prisons and Gulag, they populated the vastest network of camps of work ever organized (but by no means most fatal).

Service of the safety of the State, or GUGB

The Stalinist police State is the direct heir to the Tchéka, first political police Soviet, founded the December 20th 1917 by Felix Dzerjinski, and replaced in 1922 by the Guépéou. According to the words of Soljenitsyne, it is the “only repressive body in the history of humanity to have concentrated between its hands: the spinning mill, the arrest, the instruction, the representation of the public ministry E. the charge, the judgment and execution of the sentence. ”.

Combined narrowly as of the Years 1920 with the police machinery, Stalin confers on the political police a central role in its system, and does not hesitate to extend police terror to the members of the Party and the leaders themselves. In 1934, the Oguépéou or Guépéou is incorporated in the new whole Commissariat of the People to the Interior matters , in summary NKVD, as GUGB (pronounce guéouguébé ), or a Head office of the safety of the State . The NKVD, which was at the base only one ministry for the Interior, becomes by this addition a very powerful tool to the service of Stalin, who controls it by his faithful Iagoda (1934-1936, carried out in 1938), Iejov (1936-1938, carried out in 1939) and finally Beria (carried out in 1953). In 1937, it counts 370.000 civils servant, and a vast network of informers.

NKVD is responsible for the police force, the prisons, the places of exile for “special colonists”, and for the camps of detention. It is in charge with the great “purgings” planned by Stalin and of the deportations of mass in Gulag. Its role is to supervise, stop, question, sometimes to torture those which are stopped for often ridiculous reasons, sometimes non-existent. Of a frightening effectiveness, it is the instrument by which Stalin puts all the country at the step, punishing any supposed error, crushing any opposition, any deviance, even unimportant; and, more still, it is the instrument which plunges all USSR in a permanent Terreur.

Also in charge of espionage out of the borders, its operations extend abroad, with removal in full Paris of the generals tsarists Kroutepiov (1930) and Miller (1937), the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, or the disappearance of the leader of POUM Andrès Nin in 1937 in Barcelona.

Frontage of rule of law and lawsuits faked

The NKVD can stop no matter whom arbitrarily, of the dignitaries of the party to kolkhoz poorest, at any moment, under any pretext. There is always a legal frontage: especially celebrates it Article 58 of the penal code of the RSFSR, whose 26 extremely vague subparagraphs provide the legal base to show of a broad range of “crimes” and “treasons”.

The people put in a state of arrest do not re-examine often any more their close relations; they are questioned, judged at the time of a parody of lawsuit by the troikas or the Osso of the NKVD, then carried out or off-set.

Although Stalin hypocritically proclaimed that “the son is not responsible for the faults of the father”, the USSR practices since its origins the collective responsibility: the real or supposed crime involves the arrest of the family and the close relations of the culprit. For example, when the Gamarnik general commits suicide not to take part in the purgings of the Red Army, his wife receives 8 years of camp like “marries of enemy of the people”, then once at the camp, 10 years additional for “assistance to an enemy of the people”. She dies in deportation in 1943. Their daughter is sent in one of the orphanages of NKVD, where with her majority, it receives a 6 years sorrow of Gulag like “socially dangerous element”.

Even people having purged their sorrow are not out of business: thus in 1948-1949, one stops in mass the victims of the Purgings of year 1937 which completed their 10 years of camp, like their children. Many released prisoners do not have the right to return on their premises, still lengthily remain assigned with their place of exile, or the rule of the “101 kilometers” prohibits to them to approach the big cities at less this distance.

As of 1928, the police force is also charged by Stalin with organizing spectacular faked lawsuits which provide to the population scapegoats with the difficulties of the daily newspaper. The accused, subjected to long tortures morals and physics, exposed to reprisals on their families, are constrained to show themselves of espionage and imaginary sabotages, as well as delirious crimes. The “consents” and “revelations” of each lawsuit prepare the following, each one blaming of other people at the bar.

The principal lawsuit-spectacles were:

• In 1928, engineers “saboteurs” of Chakhty (11 condemned to death, 6 carried out).

• In 1930, the lawsuit of the “industrial Party”.
• In 1933, the lawsuit of the British engineers of the Vickers company.
• In 1936 - 1938, three famous Lawsuit of Moscow, where the disaster public prosecutor Vychinsky prevails, against the old guard of the Parti Bolshevik.
• In 1945, lawsuit of 16 envoys of the Polish government of London, decrees on their arrival in the USSR.

All the Soviet Union knows in fact, on various levels, of the spectacular public lawsuits (without forgetting those which are held behind closed doors, as for the 29 alleged assassins of Kirov, shot in December 1934). The practice is extended to the People's democracies post-war period.

The other pouring of the system: Gulag

detailed Articles : Origins of Gulag, Gulag.

More famous today than NKVD, Gulag (abbreviation of Head office of the Camps ) was the administration of the NKVD responsible for the camps of detention and Forced labor disseminated in all the country, of the Islands Solovki in the White Mer until the famous one and mortifère Kolyma, in Far-Eastern Siberia.

The “Gulag Archipelago” constitutes in the Stalinist USSR a true world with share, with its population, its manners, its geography, its institutions and its economy own.

True State in the State (the “small zone” in held jargon, the remainder of the country being the “great zone”), Gulag with the upper hand on whole areas: the Dalstroï manages with the Kolyma a large territory like France, and many camps have the extent of several departments… It would have counted 476 concentrationnaires units between 1929 and 1953, recovering an infinite variety of bagnes special, insulators, mobile or fixed camps. Up to 18 million Soviets passed under its orders, some for more than 15 or 20 years, as well as nationals of 110 nationalities. A Russian proverb said: “Which was not off-set it will be”.

Tsarism used long time its bagnes to repress the hostile elements, while populating and by at the same time Russianizing remote Siberia and other areas. During the Russian Civil war, the Tchéka has already recourse to the internment of the suspects and the enemies in camps. Those do not have a productive function, are only one repressive means among others, and shelter only one relatively limited population. However, they create a precedent, and do not disappear with the defeat from the White. June 1st, 1923 is inaugurated the bagne islands Solovki: he is generally regarded as the laboratory of the practical-keys of Stalinist Gulag. For the first time, the political prisoners are mixed to the criminals of common Droit there (the ourkis , whose violences terrorize the other prisoners), and the ration is proportional to provided work there: the prisoner who does not achieve his “standard” eats less, without its real needs importing.

With the Great Turning of 1929 - 1930, the incarceration population and concentrationnaire explodes of a blow. The massive surge of dekoulakized peasants and the Déportation in camp of work for professional misconduct or political (but all can constitute a fault) suddenly provide an inexhaustible labor for the construction of great installations, or the extraction of the natural wealths. In few years, the camps proliferate, their network covers all the country. The Zek or held becomes a true social category with whole share, and Gulag is seen allotting a very important economic role.

In 1931 - 1933, the fatal digging of the Belomorkanal (channel of the White Sea) by 100.000 prisoners armed with peaks and rudimentary wheelbarrows, is the first of great work (unusable) of Gulag. It is followed channel Moscow-Volga-Gift, roads and railway lines to Central Asia and Siberia (BAM, Siblag). “Flying camps” cut wood in the Taïga. Prisoners help with the industrialization of the the Ural, with the replanning of the big cities, the construction of the news Moscow and of sound subway. Gulag also makes it possible to extract gold and uranium from the Kolyma, the nickel of Norilsk, the oil of Petchora, the coal of the Vorkouta. Post-war period comes construction from hydro-electric stoppings on the Siberian the Volga and rivers. The last years of Stalin are remembered by certain megalomaniac projects that even the administrators of Gulag judge in unrealizable silence: the plane Davydov thus envisages to fertilize the deserts and Siberia, and the construction of the “Way died”, a railway line into full marshy Toundra on the Polar circle, abandoned in will have died of the dictator without ever to have been able to make circulate a train.

Very achieves itself under often extreme climatic conditions, with few tools, food and protection, and without concern of the life and the health of the prisoners. Gulag is deprived of machines and modern tools, and it slows down even the Mécanisation and with the Modernization of the USSR, since one can be able to rest on the exploitation of this mass corvéable at mercy. Many energies are wasted, the qualification of many prisoners remains unutilised - except in the Charachka, developed post-war period by Beria, where captive scientists and technicians work in a strict discipline, but with better living conditions.

The unrealistic plans and standards, the chaotic deportation and shovel-mixes with no matter whom, the bad living and working conditions contributed to disorganize Gulag, without counting the shootings of the Purges or the famine during the war. Gulag forever have either the means of its ambitions: too much moved away, delivered like all USSR to the incurie, corruption, the flight and resourcefulness, the majority of the camps do not receive and distribute only one insufficient supply. Its plethoric Bureaucratie (1 civil servant for 12 prisoners) is expensive without benefit any the Zek S. Enfin, the prisoners are protected as a practitioner masses “truffle of it” ( trouffa ), i.e. bâclé or simulated work.

The repressive function of Gulag thus seems well to have carried it on the tasks of production. It hardly represented forever more than 1% of the Soviet industrial production. Regularly overdrawn, “the country is even reduced to extremely expensive pay the pleasure of having it” (Soljenitsyne). The successors of Stalin will thus not seek to maintain this system concentrationnaire hypertrophied and against-productive.

The population concentrationnaire: the zeks

The camps retained variable manpower, constantly changing, and with the very moving composition. The million Zek S is reached with the massive surges of the Grandes Purgings, but the German invasion empties the camps of many valid men, slackened and sent to the face. Those which remain are the political prisoners, the women, the men too young or too old, exposed to a surmortality frightening (25% of death according to Anne Applebaum) because of their vulnerability to the general famine that the war causes in the country and the camps. The years of post-war period mark the historical apogee of the Gulag: after 1945, it permanently holds two to three million people.

It is necessary to add both to them to three million “special colonists” (country dekoulakized and national minorities, off-set by whole families): those do not live in camp, but less are exiled of it not compelled with residence, and supervised and discriminated second-class citizens, as well as a flexible and cheap labor.

The composition of the prisoners evolves/moves unceasingly. As a whole, the “political” prisoners ( kontriki ) never represented more than 10% of the total. The intellectuals, authors of the majority of testimonys, are less than 1% of the prisoners. Gulag initially struck the popular categories: 92% of the prisoners in 1935 do not have or little instruction. The very minority women initially pass with the war from 7 to 26% of the prisoners. The dekoulakized country and the victims of the Purgings and the repressive laws train large deportees of pre-war period. The purged remain often sincere Communists, or good citizens convinced to be victims of an simple error: shocked by their arrest, terrorized by their fellows-prisoner gangsters, they not including/understanding why they are found there, and can oppose only little resistance.

Dékoulakisés and purged become after 1945 fewer than the prisoners of war of the Axe, the collaborators of the Armée Vlassov, the many soldiers stopped with the face with the least peccadillo, the Soviet survivors of the Nazi camps, or many the at the same time anti-Soviet Partisans and antiallemands off-set in mass of Ukraine, the Baltic States or Poland with the civilians sympathizers. These categories have jointly to be beaten weapons with the hand, to be welded and organized, and of knowing why they are there. They will thus not be let make: this is why the post-war period sees in Gulag a strong expansion of the number of strikes, violent eliminations of the informers and gangsters with the pay of the guards, revolts.

The judgments in Gulag are always marked in the long term (perpetuity does not exist besides in the USSR). Releases of deserving or “rehabilitated” prisoners exist, of the partial amnesties too. It is thus possible but still very frequent to leave Gulag (and not less frequent to return there). Recent research shows the extent of the permanent rotation of the prisoners: in 1940, 57% of the prisoners of Gulag are condemned to less than 5 years of prison.

It is what explains why mortality, certainly heavy, remains very limited contrary to the Concentration camps Nazis, Gulag not having a finality homicide. On 18 million prisoners passed to Gulag, only one to two million died there. In the majority of the camps and the majority of the years, the rate of death (4% per annum on average) is even hardly higher than what it is in the remainder of the USSR. The hardest camps like Belomorkanal, the Kolyma or Vorkouta do not exceed the 5 to 10% of annual mortality, a rate terrifying, but largely lower than those of the Nazi camps.

In addition, if it does not miss indifferent guards or commanders, brutal or sadistic, the relations between the framing and the prisoners are far from being always inhuman, contrary to the treatments radically dehumanizing of the Kapo and the S in the Nazi camps. Many guards are besides of former prisoners freely engaged after their sorrow, or in the event of purgings, find themselves with their former prisoners behind the barbed wires. Lastly, a certain number of prisoners remained on the spot after their release of the camp: they often continued to be useful as free workers in the same companies as front.

With died of Stalin, a wave of revolts already accelerates the decomposition of a Gulag in bankruptcy. In March 1953, Beria amnesties a million ordinary prisoners (nothing not having been prepared to accommodate them and reintegrate them, this mass breaks on the country by making a wave of flights, rapes and murder traumatisante). Starting from the Report/ratio Khrouchtchev of February 1956, the mass of the “policies” is released in its turn. Many camps close. In 1960, the administration of Gulag is officially dissolved, and the Loubianka cease to be a prison: the era of the system concentrationnaire of mass is definitively completed.

However, the camps will remain a means of repression until the dissolution of the USSR - without speaking about sinister innovations of which Stalin itself had not thought, like the internment under Khrouchtchev and Brejnev of the dissenting in psychiatric hospitals, or the Forced labor in the prisons.

The Soviet company under Stalin

A population between modernizations…

Industrialization is a relative success. The USSR obtains a complete range of national industries and roof partly its delay on the Occident. The Stakhanovisme makes it possible to introduce in factory a Soviet version of the Fordisme and the Taylorisme, i.e of the Assembly line work modern. The production develops, even blocked by bureaucratic heaviness, the mistrust of the Stalinisme towards the specialists and the technicians, or by the frequent reversals related to the political purgings.

Successes are sufficiently positive to interest the other countries, including with the the United States where some hold the planned economy Soviet way like a development model. The Stalinist system is thus a relative success… from the capitalist point of view.

In the campaigns, the considerable effort of Mechanization and electrification does not exist only in propaganda. In spite of the dysfunctions born of inexperience, incuries or hastes, the modernization of the rural world progresses after the shock of the Dékoulakisation.

Prolonging the efforts of the Years 1920, the mode makes massively move back the Analphabétisme, passed from 43% to 19% between 1926 and 1939. He makes an immense effort for primary school education, the University and professional training. The children provided education for in the primary education pass in the Années 1930 from 11 to 30 million, the pupils of the secondary from 3 to 18 million. Everywhere the schools of formation for adults multiply. The number of engineers believes exponentially, and the frenzy of studies of the Soviets as their love of the reading are noted by all the observers. The USSR learns how to do without the foreign specialists ( spetz ), gradually eliminated: the last disappears in 1934.

However, education joins again with conservatism and the academism: the teaching innovations of the era léninienne are repudiated since 1932, all the revised school handbooks (decree of May 16th, 1934).

The Working class passes from 11 to 38 million members between 1928 and 1933 the Urbanisation progresses considerably: at the end of Plane Ier, the cities passed from 18% to 32% of the population. But this anarchistic explosion is explained above all by the uncontrolled surge of 25 million peasants driven out of the campaigns. Moscow passes thus from 2 to 3,6 million inhabitants in a few years. As example still, Sverdlosk, in the industrial Ural leaps from 150.000 to 3.600.000 inhabitants, and from the whole new cities emerge from the desert: thus Magnitogorsk, or, thanks to the Gulag, Karaganda and Magadan.

… and shortages

With the beginning of the year 1930, the Dékoulakisation involved the anarchistic and unforeseen escape of 25 million rural. The Soviet cities explode and become populated the marginal ones, vagrants and homeless people. In the industrial new cities, many workmen live in unhealthy and over-populated hutments. Many cities suffer from the lack from hygiene, safety, infrastructures, public transport.

The town population must pile up in the kommounalka , these collective apartments appeared after 1917, and which lodge more than 80% of the townsmen, often with a family by part. In many residences, forced promiscuity night with the private life, supports the daily tensions and often facilitates the denouncement.

Another consequence of collectivization and the famines, the USSR settles in the chronic food shortages. Butter, the meat, milk, the eggs become untraceable, the bread and all the current products are rationed. The tail in front of the shops ( otchered ) becomes durably a daily spectacle in the USSR, and a true institution, with its codes and its habits (for example, the possibility of moving away without losing its place).

In reaction to the lack of food, the canteens of factory multiply, the pilfering on the work places becomes a practice of banal survival and vigorously repressed, the Black-market and the traffics in any kind flower, the reign of resourcefulness settles. The inequality in front of the supply is considerable: there exists thus about fifteen categories only to the center of the working class. As for the leaders and the bureaucracy, they have access to the special stores supplied well.

The homo sovieticus cannot hope to be left there that if it profits from protections, of a network of relations placed well, blat (“piston”) essential. A popular proverb said then: “better is worth to have 100 friends than 100 roubles”. True networks clientélaires are tied at all the levels of the Soviet company.

Arts, sciences and culture under Stalinism

April 23rd, 1932, all the existing artistic organizations are dissolved. They make place in 1934 with the Union of the Artists. This one imposes to the creators the narrow dogma “socialist Réalisme” and returns to an academism of most traditional. The disavowal of the esthetic innovations is felt hard by much: thus the large poet Maïakovski commits suicide since 1930.

The national minorities had known in the years 1920 a powerful cultural revival which worries Stalin, concerned of its possible political prolongations. The Master of the Kremlin returns to the centralization and the forced Russianization of the time tsarist. Russian teaching in is made compulsory in all the Union (March 1938), the languages not-Russian must give up their alphabets suitable for the exclusive profit of the Cyrillique. The historical role and directing Russian nation is exalté.

The libraries are purified. Special sectors are even open to pile up the prohibited books ( spetskhran ), whose list lengthens without end. Many works are censured, expurgés or rewritten. Since 1932, Stalin puts under supervision the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow while making stop and off-set the scholar Bolshevik David Riazanov. The Histoire is rewritten permanently, and of many documents constantly improved and faked, in order to present of Stalin like nearest friendly to Lénine and the joint author of the revolution of October, to gum the role even the existence of its opponents and victims, or to justify each new change of political line. It is also a question of falsifying the past to allot to Russians the paternity of all the great inventions.

Important issue, the Statistique is object of all the pressures and fakings. In 1932, opposing it Rioutine written in a clandestine text: “Only a hopelessly idiotic man can accept the Stalinist statistics”. Thus in 1939, the census revealing the absence of 17 million Soviets, Stalin retracts these results and liquid the persons in charge. Many economists are also victims of Stalinism, thus Kondratiev, discoverer of the business cycles.

The mode intervenes even in the debates of Linguistique: the theories of Marr are proclaimed the only good ones from the point of view of the class struggle, its pursued adversaries, before the disavowal of Marr in the years 1950 does not involve troubles with its partisans.

The Lyssenkisme remains by far the most disastrous interference of the mode in the scientific field. Under the influence of the biologist charlatan Trofim Lyssenko, the mode declares false the Lois of Mendel on heredity. Holding of “middle-class science” are persecuted and sometimes eliminated physically, thus Nicolaï Vavilov, died in Gulag in 1943. The Soviet genetics, until there one of most brilliant of the world, leaves devastated lyssenkism. Its effects on the agricultural delay of the USSR are considerable.

The Sport yews are embrigadés with the service of the mode and its propaganda. The exploits of the Soviet pilots, very popular, are exaltés and recovered by the mode. Until 1952, in addition, the USSR is held in-outside international Olympic movement, before making its re-entry on the world scene with OJ of Helsinki.

The Jeu of failures is the subject of a comparable instrumentalisation and is instituted national play in 1932 at the time of the Congress of the Soviet players which proclaims “We must once and for all condemn the formula, the “failures for the failures” like “art for art's sake”. We must organize brigades of shock of players of failures and put to us at the execution of a five-year plan of the failures. ”

Religious life: to be believer under Stalin

The Great Turning is initially a pretext to start again the religious persecution which prevailed already under Lénine. During collectivization, the churches are systematically stripped, the tracked Pope S and deportees. The religious buildings everywhere are closed, sometimes destroyed or reconverted in antireligieux museums, thus with Leningrad. The Cathédrale of Christ Saver of Moscow is spectacularly dynamited to make place with an imposing palate of the Soviets which will never be born. May 15th, 1932, a Five-year plan of atheism is even adopted with the slogan: “More God in 1937! ”.

The last richness or the capacity of the orthodoxe Église does not explain only the antireligieuse policy of the State, since the other worships are not treated better. Repression thus also touches the Musulman S or some Bouddhiste S of the Republics of Central Asia, or the Lamaïsme in Mongolia.

The worship Juif is undoubtedly tested the most of all: since 1937, there remain nothing any more but 50 Synagog S opened, whereas there were thousands under the mode Pogrom ist and anti-semite of the tsars. As of the time of Plane Ier, the synagogs are stripped and closed, of the thousands of stopped rabbis, the prohibited Jewish celebrations, the practices as the éradiquées Circoncision - there would not be as of the end of the Années 1930 not more than 10% of the Jews to being circoncis. The Hebrew and the Yiddish are proscribed, the members of the Jewish section of the Party ( Yevsektsia ) not being the least keen as well to destroy the religious Judaism as to liquidate the press, the edition or the schools specifically Jewish, even when without religious implications.

After the Great Purgings and with the countryside Anti-semite of post-war period, it remains practically any more in the USSR no possibility of cultural and/or religious expression specifically Jewish. As for the experiment of the Birobidjan, Jewish Republic created in the Far East by the capacity, it is balanced on a fiasco.

Repression does not choke the beliefs. Thus with the Recensement of 1937,57% of the questioned adults have courage to answer: “yes” with the question “are you believers? ”. In Pskov in 1937,57% of the new-born babies are baptized, and NKVD estimates that 180  000 inhabitants of Leningrad go to the mass, that is to say more still than a few years earlier.

Wandering popes manage to say the mass at private individuals. The dissenting sects and religious groups multiply. In the campaigns, the kolkhoz ones continue to be unemployed of themselves many religious holidays, and the new workmen of the cities are not in remainder.

The war obliges Stalin to approach the orthodoxe Church, which has from the start given the absolute priority to the fight against the invader and adopts the capacity without states of heart. The League of the Atheists is dissolved as of the summer 1941. In 1943, a Synode can meet to elect new the patriarch. Religious dignities are received officially in the Kremlin, and order to request for Stalin and the victory. Certain places of worship are reopened, the assistance with the masses knows an undeniable renewal, and the number of church weddings a strong push. It is not rare that the Red Army is accommodated in the territories reconquered by villagers in procession who present their icons to him. Measurements of liberalization also benefit with the Jews and the Moslems.

The collusion of the orthodoxe Church with the mode can go rather far: thus in 1945, Stalin makes him allot the goods stolen to the Uniates persecuted (of Greek rite but recognizing the authority of the pope). In March 1953, of the orthodoxe persons in charge ravel even in homage in front of the coffin of Stalin.

However, the antireligieuse countryside is re-ignited after the war: if 70% of the places of existing worship in 1917 were closed in 1935 (and 95% in 1940), their number is still maintained to 85% in 1945, and the religious liberty in the USSR will remain problematic good after the death of Stalin, until the arrival of Gorbatchev to the capacity.

A policy more and more reactionary

With the beginning of the year 1930, Stalinism breaks with certain revolutionary “assets” of the time of Lénine and returns to the Nationalisme large-Russian like to a vision plus traditionalist of the company, art, education.

Stalin thus restores the free consumption of the Vodka, state monopoly very useful for the budget of the time of the tsars. The teaching innovations after 1917 are called into question, the searchs for new discouraged esthetic forms in arts. A policy natalist prohibits the Avortement in 1936, and again after the bleedings of the Second world war. The Divorce is made more difficult, the repressed Homosexualité, the exaltée “socialist family”.

Far from the austerity of the years of revolution and civil war, the mode encourages the new leading layers (as well as the recipients of the stakhanovism and industrialization) to consume and to be distracted. Stalin gives the tone in person when he proclaims that “the life became better, the life became merrier” (1935).

Thus as from 1933-1934, last the most difficult moments of Plane Ier, a culture of the Loisirs develops. Those which can it deliver with frenzy to discovered Jazz, Charleston and other American dances . They enjoy the multiplication of the cinemas or the recreation parks. The “fatherland of socialism” sees reappearing the private cars of luxury, and obtains even an industry of beauty products, entrusted to the woman of Molotov. In 1935, one sees even the mode again authorizing the Christmas tree, certainly under the name of “tree of the new year”.

After having physically liquidated a good portion of the old guard Bolshevik during the Great Purgings, Stalin surrounds himself by a new generation of leaders which did not do itself the revolution, and which has hardly scruples to deviate from internationalism or egalitarianism of the founders. The Nomenklatura and its protected enjoy without states from multiple hearts of privileges: Datcha, holidays at the edge of the Black Sea or in special Sanatorium, domesticity, stores, facilitated studies for the children…

The same symbols of the mode carry testimony of a renouncement increasing of the heritage léninien and of a return to the traditionalism, accelerated by the war. The “socialist fatherland” is the object of a new, significant worship as of 1934 with the penal notion of “treason of the socialist fatherland” and the creation of the title of Héros of the Soviet Union. The title of Maréchal is restored as of 1935, is followed after 1943 by the uniforms and the ranks of the old imperial army. Highly symbolic system with it all alone as an emblem of the militarism and the privileges of the Old Mode, the shoulder pad is given to the honor. International the cease in 1944 to be the Soviet Anthem to be replaced by a patriotic song which mentions the name of Stalin. The “decrees” become again as of 1936 of the oukazes as at times tsarists, and in 1943, the special camps hardest of Gulag, the Katorga , borrow their name from the imperial bagne. In 1946, the “police stations of the people” are not any more that traditional ministries, and the Red Army takes the Soviet official name of Army. It is not until the name of the Party which does not change: with the XIXe Congress of the PCUS (b) (November 1952), little before its death, Stalin makes abolish the reference to the Bolchevisme preserved up to that point in the name of the Party.

Outside, Stalin completes to confirm the official renunciation of internationalism and dissolves the Komintern in May 1943. In its eyes, the revolution should not extend by insurrections in each country (which would be likely to escape its control and to attract diplomatic complications in the USSR), but through the Red Army.

The Soviet company vis-a-vis being able it: resistances and adhesions

Mode of unforeseeable terror of mass, the Stalinisme potentially endangers each citizen to be stopped, off-set or shot under any pretext. Its ambitions in addition require enormous sacrifices of the masses. From where its problematic popularity, but as, limits as the Totalitarisme meets in its will of embrigader the populations and to reorganize the spirits.

The enthusiastic adhesion of part of the company is however not only one illusion or that a product of propaganda. The fast and spectacular exit of the ancestral backwardness, the exploits of the stakhanovists and the “kholkhoziens of elite”, the communist faith, the communion in the worship of Stalin played a great part. The victory of the Second world war, which saw the mode able to push back the threat of extermination Nazi, has without any doubt welded most of the Soviets around their supreme leader. Lastly, the mode was used as social elevator for many privileged people.

The social base of Stalin: the Party, bureaucracy and “promoted”

In the fight for the capacity, Stalin carries it because it lays out around him of the clan the faithful ones best welded. He has also the high hand on the recruitment of the executives, the support of the political police and that of the incipient Bureaucratie. More shining but solitary, Trotsky is seen reproaching its late adhesion the Parti Bolshevik, and the incipient Nomenklatura appreciates little its criticisms against its privileges.

As of 1924, a “Lénine promotion” ( Lenin Levy ) makes it possible Stalin to make enter to the Party more than 200.000 new recruits, generally of popular extraction, often illiterate, without political past nor doctrinal formation. The companions of Lénine, for the majority of the intellectuals of origin middle-class or noble, are drowned in the mass, and out of phase compared to these new-come who recognize themselves more easily in Stalin and make him personal allegiance. This “plebeianisation of the Party” (Marc Ferro) and its bureaucratization provide a social base to the incipient Stalinisme.

The integral nationalization of the economy at the time of the Great Turning (1929-1934) inevitably involves a new proliferation of bureaucrats: a whole mass of “promoted” ( vydvijentsy ), often of humble extraction and not always qualified, takes the responsability for the Kolkhozes and the Sovkhozes, the government enterprises which multiply, or for the camps of the Gulag expanding.

But they are also the workmen stakhanovists, the “workers of shock” ( oudarniki ), the kolkhoz of elite which form the support of the Stalinisme, or certain writers and official artists covers of emoluments. The mode guarantees honors, material rewards and advantages for them and their children to them. In the same way, industrialization profits to hundreds from thousands from workmen promoted on the heap with tasks from direction, and the million new engineers and technicians of popular origin who leave the new schools. Starting from the Great Purgings of the year 1937, it is them which fill the vacuums left by the liquidation of the former “middle-class specialists”. The latter, under-represented with the Party, were the object of the visceral mistrust of Stalin, prompt to suspect them of “sabotage”, and for which the allegiance partisane and personal must take precedence over the technical skill.

On the other hand, the Party remains under-represented among the peasants, the national minorities, the women, the “middle-class specialists” and… the workmen (3% in 1933).

Within the Party, criticisms deaf persons persist. A certain number of members are thus excluded for refusal to cooperate with the Dékoulakisation. End 1932, the police force discovers the “Rioutine platform” (a text violently criticizes against the general secretary, of the name of its author), which circulates within the hurdy-gurdy keeps Bolshevik. The business involves the arrest and the exclusion of high veterans of the revolution, of which Kamenev and Zinoviev. In 1933, a purging of the Party leads other than more than 20% of the members. In 1934, measurements of appeasing and rehabilitations multiply, but to the XVIIe Congress “Congress of the Winners says”, Stalin is renewed at the Central committee only in the last of the list, 200 to 300 delegated on nearly 1200 having striped its name.

The assassination of Kirov involves the whole of the Party, the elites and the bureaucracy in the storm of the Grandes Purgings, which make it possible Stalin to liquidate the last obstacles with its capacity and to promote the “generation of 1937”, these junior managers which owe him all. This new elite, core of the Nomenklatura, profits post-war period from the absence of new purgings and the stabilization of the system.

Only it misses the real decision-making power: after the Grandes Purgings, the Party loses the little indeed that it remained to him of political role. The collegial direction which perdurait a few years after the advent of Stalin yields definitively to a very autocratic practice. Until its death, the gensek does not join together practically any more the Central committee nor the Political office, and convenes only five Congresses between 1927 and 1952, of which none between 1939 and 1952.

After the death of Stalin and the ousting of Khrouchtchev, the Nomenklatura resulting from the “generation of 1937” is finally only main mode. It will preserve the capacity until the advent of Gorbatchev in 1985. Born from the Stalinism and incompetent to reform the system that she inherited it, she will be in good portion responsible for the final collapse of the the USSR.

The partially maintained autonomy of the company

As from 1933-1934, the great working revolts and country-women belong to the past, but the refusal continue in forms of passive resistance or underproduction.

The maintenance of multiple deviating practices shows also the failure of the capacity to impose the official thought and to control the situation. For example, pregnancy of the Anti-semitism, that of alcoholism, the black-market, the begging, criminality, the pilfering. Or multiple violences and incivilities which he baptizes of the name of Hooliganisme , a term promised with a great future.

Official propaganda is often turned in derision: in a country where humor is a traditional means of survival, the innumerable “jokes” which circulate on the leaders and the reality of the country prove that the critical spirit did not lose all its rights. More subversive, it does not miss Soviets to be delighted by the murder of Kirov, and to hope openly that Stalin is the next one on the list: “One killed the Kirov dog, remains still the Stalin dog. ”. Others are delighted by the Procès of Moscow because they seem to prove to them that the exécré mode has enemies.

During the German occupation, a certain number of Soviets find liking or of force members of the Armée Vlassov, setting-up by the Nazis. Nationalist guerillas at the same time antiallemandes and anti-Soviet remain in Ukraine and with the Baltic States until the end of the Années 1940, profiting from one supports tacit of part of the population.

After the war, for the first time, NKVD must dismantle several clandestine small groups which are constituted through the country around vague aspirations, but which are recut in the will of democratic changes and the criticism of the bureaucracy: The working Opposition, the true Work of Lénine, the Union of the young Socialists of Tcheliabinsk etc With died of Stalin, a wave of revolts shakes also the Gulag.

References

See too

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