During the mid-1920s, Soviet society gradually recovered
from the enormous damage caused by the Great War. As
he consolidated his power at the expense of rivals within
the party, Joseph Stalin followed a centrist policy that
avoided confrontation with his capitalist enemies abroad
while encouraging capitalist forces at home under the
careful guidance of the state. But Stalin—fearful that the
rising influence of the small Russian bourgeoisie could
undermine the foundations of party rule—had no intention
of permitting the New Economic Policy to continue
indefinitely. In the late 1920s, he used the issue to bring
the power struggle to a head.
Stalin had previously joined with the moderate Bukharin
and other members of the party to defend the NEP
against Leon Trotsky, whose “left opposition” wanted
a more rapid advance toward socialism. Then, in 1928,
Stalin reversed course: he now claimed that the NEP had
achieved its purpose and called for a rapid advance to socialist
forms of ownership. Beginning in 1929, a series of
new programs changed the face of Soviet society. Private
capitalism in manufacturing and trade was virtually abolished,
and party and state control over the economy was
extended. The first of a series of five-year plans was
launched to promote rapid “socialist industrialization,”
and in a massive effort to strengthen the state’s hold over
the agricultural economy, all private farmers were herded
onto collective farms.
The bitter campaign to collectivize the countryside
aroused the antagonism of many peasants and led to a decline
in food production and in some areas to mass starvation.
It also further divided the Communist Party and
led to a massive purge of party members at all levels who
opposed Stalin’s effort to achieve rapid economic growth
and the socialization of Russian society. A series of brutal
purge trials eliminated thousands of “Old Bolsheviks”
(people who had joined the party before the 1917 Revolution)
and resulted in the conviction and death of many
of Stalin’s chief rivals. Trotsky, driven into exile, was dispatched
by Stalin’s assassin in 1940. Of the delegates who
had attended the National Congress of the CPSU (Communist
Party of the Soviet Union) in 1934, fully 70 percent
had been executed by the time of the National Congress
in 1939.
By the late 1930s, as the last of the great purge trials
came to an end, the Russian Revolution had been in existence
for more than two decades. It had achieved some
successes. Stalin’s policy of forced industrialization had
led to rapid growth in the industrial sector, surpassing in
many respects what had been achieved in the capitalist
years prior to World War I. Between 1918 and 1937, steel
production increased from 4 to 18 million tons per year,
and hard coal output went from 36 to 128 million tons.
New industrial cities sprang up overnight in the Urals
and Siberia. The Russian people in general were probably
better clothed, better fed, and better educated than they
had ever been before. The cost had been enormous, however.
Millions had died by bullet or starvation. Thousands,
perhaps millions, languished in Stalin’s concentration
camps. The remainder of the population lived in a
society now officially described as socialist, under the
watchful eye of a man who had risen almost to the rank
of a deity, the great leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph
Stalin.
The impact of Joseph Stalin on Soviet society in one
decade had been enormous. If Lenin had brought the
party to power and nursed it through the difficult years of
the civil war, it was Stalin, above all, who had mapped
out the path to economic modernization and socialist
transformation. To many foreign critics of the regime, the
Stalinist terror and autocracy were an inevitable consequence
of the concept of the vanguard party and the centralized
state built by Lenin. Others traced Stalinism back
to Marx. It was he, after all, who had formulated the idea
of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which now provided
ideological justification for the Stalinist autocracy. Still
others found the ultimate cause in the Russian political
culture, which had been characterized by autocracy since
the emergence of Russian society from Mongol control in
the fifteenth century.
Was Stalinism an inevitable outcome of Marxist-
Leninist doctrine and practice? Or as Mikhail Gorbachev
later claimed, were Stalin’s crimes “alien to the nature of
socialism” and a departure from the course charted by
Lenin before his death? Certainly, Lenin had not envisaged
a party dominated by a figure who became even
larger than the organization itself and who, in the 1930s,
almost destroyed the party. On the other hand, recent evidence
shows that Lenin was capable of the brutal suppression
of perceived enemies of the revolution in a way
that is reminiscent in manner, if not in scope, of that of
his successor, Stalin.
It is clear from the decade of the 1920s that there were
other models for development in Soviet society than that
adopted by Stalin; the NEP program, so ardently supported
by Bukharin, is testimony to that fact. But it is also
true that the state created by Lenin provided the conditions
for a single-minded leader like Stalin to rise to
absolute power. The great danger that neither Marx nor
Lenin had foreseen had come to pass: the party itself, the
vanguard organization leading the way into the utopian
future, had become corrupted.
World History
