Download From the USSR to Russia

THE HOUSE THAT STALIN BUILT
Kievan Rus
• First great civilization of the Eastern Slavs.
• Centred on Kiev and Novgorod on trade routes
between Scandinavia and Black Sea –
Constantinople.
• Grand Prince Vladimir imposes Orthodox
Christianity in 988: religion, alphabet.
• Rus becomes part of the Eastern sphere.
What is Russia?
• Approximately 1240 Mongols conquer Rus,
rule for 200 years.
• Western area (now Ukraine) largely absorbed
into Polish kingdom.
• Beginning in around 1320 Moscow becomes
the centre of a new state: Muscovy.
• 1556 Ivan IV takes Kazan, headquarters of
Mongols.
Ivan IV (“The Terrible” 1533-1554)
The dynamic of expansion
• Muscovy grows to absorb the surrounding
lands.
• Late 16th century reaches across Siberia to the
Pacific.
• 17th century absorbs eastern part of Ukraine
from Poland.
The Russian Empire
• Peter I decides to bring
Russia into European
sphere.
• moves capital to St
Petersburg in 1703.
• Builds a strong navy
and military.
• Fights Swedes and
Turks.
Peter I (1682-1725)
Battle of Poltava against Sweden (1709)
Growing the Empire
• Catherine II (17621796) continues Peter’s
program of expansion.
• Expands to the south to
absorb Crimea.
• Division of Poland
between Russia, Prussia
and Austria.
•
The power structure of the Russian State
The Tsar
The Boyars (chiefs of bureaucracy)
The intelligentsia (middle class, small layer)
The Narod (Common People)
The Origin of the Soviet Union
• First World War: Russia fights against
Germany and Austria.
• Russia becomes exhausted, the last Emperor
Nicholas II abdicates.
• Lenin’s Bolshevik party overthrows the
provisional government on 25th October / 7th
November 1917.
Vladimir Lenin (1917-1924)
What was Bolshevism?
• 1903 Lenin splits the Socialist movement: instead of
working through parliamentary means (menshevism
or Social Democracy), he advocates a dictatorship of
the proletariat.
• The Russian revolution was the first proletarian
revolution. The Bolshevik party renamed Communist.
• Lenin unleashes terror in the name of class warfare.
• In 1921, with the Civil War over, Lenin announces
the New Economic Plan, allows small business to
thrive.
The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s call to
revolution
Let’s march !
Let’s fly !
Let’s sail !
Let’s roll !
Checking the list of all creation.
That thing is necessary –
Fine, keep it.
Unnecessary ?
To the devil !
A black cross.
We’ll destroy you,
old romantic world !
In place of faith in our soul we have
electricity
and steam.
In place of misery,
pocket the riches of all
worlds !
The old men ? Kill them.
And use the skulls for
ashtrays!
The Soviet Empire?
• USSR occupies most of territory of the former
Russian Empire.
• Exceptions: Finland, Poland, Baltic States
(Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) which become
independent in 1918 (and were reabsorbed
after 1945).
• 1924 Lenin dies, Georgian Bolshevik Josef
Stalin consolidates power.
Josef Stalin (1924-1953)
JOSEPH STALIN: BIOGRAPHY
- born Dec. 21, 1879, Georgia, Russian Empire
- expelled from the seminary for revolutionary activities in 1899
- served in minor party posts and was appointed to the first Bolshevik
Central Committee in 1912
- served as commissar for nationalities and for state control in the
Bolshevik government (1917–23).
- overcame his rivals and took control of Soviet politics after Lenin's
death (1924)
- radically altered the economic and social structures leading to
millions of deaths and the rise of Soviet Union as a world super
power.
What was Stalinism?
• 1920s saw rise of Fascism in Germany, Italy: war
inevitable to defend the only communist country
• Socialism in one country meant building a powerful
industrial state
• 1928 First Five-Year Plan to raise production.
• Millions arrested, used as slave labour in construction
• Electrification of the country: dams and canals
Collectivization of Agriculture
• Decision to sell grain abroad to purchase
industrial equipment
• Peasants forced into collectives, contributing
their own livestock, land, equipment
• Industrialization of agriculture: tractors and
combines
• Partly class war against peasants
“Holodomor”
• In 1933 the crops fail,
Soviets confiscate grain
• Millions die of
starvation in the
villages, especially in
Ukraine
• Was it genocide by
Russians against
Ukrainians?
Collectivization
Theory:
• increased output possible due to concentration,
mechanization
Doubtful results:
• eradication of peasants’ motivation
• Millions of people are starved to death when
land and food is confiscated
• Soviet agriculture permanently disabled
Industrialization
Introduction of ambitious 5-year plans:
• Successful development of heavy industry.
• Tractors, trucks, planes, Moscow metro
• Soviet Union becomes a sophisticated industrial
power
• Massive exploitation of prisoners’ work. Labour
camps.
• Stalin’s utopian projects: White (Belomor) Sea Canal
THE NEW SOVIET MAN
• Socialist state requires the support of a man of a new
social and psychological type:
• devoted to the ultimate goal of building communism,
an ideal society on earth
• capable of shifting from words to deeds
• represents the mass
• In post-Soviet Russia despised as “homo sovieticus”
Voloshyn, Reconstruction of Dnieper Hydro Plant, 1947
Gulags: Labour camps
3,000,000
2,500,000
2,000,000
Camps
Colonies
Total
1,500,000
1,000,000
500,000
0
1945
1948
1951
1953
Official police data. Reported to Stalin by Minister Kruglov.
Source: Ahlberg 1992
PURGES: THE GREAT TERROR
Elimination of political rivals:
• murder of Kirov (1934)
• show trials of fellow Bolsheviks
• the Great Terror (peak in 1937)
• Millions arrested, shipped to Siberia, worked to death
in the GULAG camps
Why the Terror?
• Stalin falsified history to eliminate Trotsky from the
history books
• Wrote his own History of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union exaggerating his own role
• Feared a coup d’état and his own replacement by
Trotsky, in exile in various countries
• Trotsky finally murdered in Mexico City by a Soviet
agent in 1940
Why the Terror? The external situation
• Poland: invaded Soviet Russia in 1920, reached Kiev
before being driven back to the gates of Warsaw; in
1930 plotted a second invasion with Japan; in 1939
negotiated with Hitler, broke off negotiations in April
• Japan defeated Russia in 1903-5; had designs on
Siberia; invaded Mongolia in 1939
• Germany had controlled large chunk of Ukraine in
1918; Hitler hated Bolshevism, fought proxy war
with USSR in Spain (1936)
The most important victory of the war?
Khalkin Gol
• August 23-30, 1939
• Soviet forces under General Zhukov surround and
annihilate Japanese force in Mongolia.
• Japan signs treaty with USSR, turns to the Pacific
• Stalin gains time for war with Germany, does not
have to fight on two fronts
• USSR declares war on Japan August 8, 1945,
occupies Kuril Islands
The Prelude to War
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact 23 August 1939.
Germany and USSR:
secret protocols divide
Eastern Europe into
“spheres of interest.”
USSR granted Eastern
Poland, Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Finland and
Bessarabia (Moldavia).
Execution of Polish Officers
• Some 20,000 Polish officers surrendered to
Soviets
• In 1940 Stalin gives the order for them to be
eliminated
• Why? – they pose a risk in case of invasion;
they represent a hostile force
• Falsification of history: Soviets claim they
were murdered by the Germans
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
(THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR)
• June 22, 1941 Germany
invades USSR.
• Defence of Moscow and
Leningrad
• July 1942 - February
1943 the Battle of
Stalingrad
• “Generals win battles,
economies win wars.”
Spoils of war
• Victory and the division of Europe
• Growth of Stalin’s popularity at home. Soviet Union becomes
a a world superpower.
• In 1945 USSR is superpower.
• Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukrainian-speaking part of Poland,
Moldavia (part of Romania) all absorbed into USSR.
• Part of German East Prussia around Königsberg (Kaliningrad)
becomes Soviet.
• “Soviet bloc” of occupied countries is formed:
East Germany (GDR), Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria.
“Personality Cult”
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Stalin as an Icon
People cried when he died
Religious-style indoctrination
Forged history
Stalin=Motherland
Denounced by Nikita Khrushchev on 25
February1956 at 20th Communist Party congress.
• Most popular leader in Russia today
Question
• Was Stalin inevitable, i.e., would another
leader (for example, Leon Trotsky) have acted
in the same way?