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Stalin and Stalinism (Leadership (Totalitarian Paradigm, Fitzpatrick, 1999…
Stalin and Stalinism
Leadership
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Fitzpatrick, 1999 - signalling, not direct orders. But not necessarily a lack of power, but a strategy adopted consciously
Jan Palmer, 2012 - Sacral authority
Klehvniuk - the biography change. Argued that it is important in countering Russian apologists, but also an appropriate means of analysis because, in a dictatorship, the personal predilections of the dictator are of central importance
Little Stalins - vs Hitler's insistence eon personal authority, above and beyond the jurisdiction of individual ministers
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Culturally constructed, centralized leadership - Pravada spoke of Molotv, head of Soviet Gov, and Nikolai Ezhov, head of the NVKD
Cult of Stalin - pictures and visual elements of his sacral authority - art critics described images of him as 'life giving'
Terror and Violence
Debates: To what extent was terror and violence controlled, to what extent was it central to the power of the Stalinist state?
Robert Service - Show trials = at least trying to construct some level of justification for the execution of the state's enemies. In Nazi Germany, identity alone was enough to justify persecution
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Rittersporn - Inability to control violence meant that the state lost its monopoly over the use of legitimate violence
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The great debate in Nazi Germany - functionalists put Nazi German terror and violence in historical perspective and some have even argued that the Gulags served as inspiration
Wheatfiled - 10 mil deaths between 1927-1938, before the great terror even got under way
Economic policy and terror and violence went hand in hand - In the first five year plan, 2 million kulaks and other political enemies were deported
The Great Terror, 1936. Show trail of Zinoviev, Kamene and 14 others . Service estimates 750,000 were killed during the great terror
Economic policy
Main thing to remember: Not only an economic ideology in its own right, but an active rejection of Lenin and his NEP
First Five Year Plan, 1928 --> Rapid collectivization in the country side. Led to mass migration (TEN MIL) from the countryside to urban areas in search of wage work. Led to the implementation of internal passports in 1932
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Announced in 1932 that it had been a success. Gross ind output up 137& by 1933, 11 mil employment up to 23 mil
Figures that focus on 'output', rather than 'input'. Ignores the sacrifices made, e.g. the famine in Ukraine. Nation figures were 1. most likely very distorted, 2. not reflective of distribution of wealth. E.g. Champagne production when up from 300 thousand bottles to 4 mil a year by 1939
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Urban vs Rural
General plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow = a success. But the only success? Not even an urban/rural divide, but a plurality of experiences and levels of success within urban areas. E.g. the district of Liubertsy didn't have a single bathhouse for 65,000 people. less than 1/5 of pop to 1/3 were urban
Second Five Year Plan, 1933 - some recognition of the need for incentivsation. During this period, the state recognises the significance of the Stakhanovite movement
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Fitzpatrick 1999 - economic policy had been about class warfare and the elimination of the kulaks. But class was no longer about the relationship between different economic groups, but the relationship between citizen and state
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Foreign Policy and War
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War is inseparable from revolutionary politics - importance of contextualising within Russia's past. The Bolshevik revolution was forged in the first world war and was itself the product of a civil war
Richard Overy - Stalin depended on the apparatus of the party, the red army and the Beria. War, as much as pre-war politics in Stalin's Russia, demonstrated that power and authority was ultimately de-centralized
Mass mobilization and the rhetoric' of the front line - 25 thousanders = 70,000 volunteers
Like the Nazi state, the Stalinist state ensured that it dominated the army - Pol Admin was set up in 1918 to ensure the socialist education of army officers. 1926: 40% commies, 70% by the 1940s
- Where are these stats from? 2. What do they really show us if the 30% that were not self-professed communists were forced to conform tot he party line through threat of the use of violence
1937: Tukachevskt and 7 other army officers executed in a show trial. Widespread purge of the army saw 71/85 officers of the revolutionary military council GONE
Re-Staliization after the war - 1948, reaching pre-war levels, 1/5 of those returning to the gulag were interned
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Soviet Internationalism
Robert Conquest - Harvest of Sorrow; Ukraine focus. Only peasant movement that genuinely existed in the countryside in Ukraine was one of resistance to the Stalinist State
Katyn Massacre, 150,000 polish solders killeed
'Mother Russia' - 1938 made compulsory in all non-Russian schools. Made the sole language of the red army
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