Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin - short biography
December 6, 1878 ᴦ. Joseph Stalin was born in Gori. Stalin's real name is Dzhugashvili. In 1888 ᴦ. he entered the Gori Theological School, and later, in 1894. - to the Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary. This time became the period of the spread of Marxist ideas in Russia. During his studies, Stalin organized and headed Marxist circles at the seminary, and in 1898. joins the Tiflis organization of the RSDLP. In 1899 ᴦ. he was expelled from the seminary for promoting the ideas of Marxism, after which he was repeatedly arrested and exiled. So, until 1910 ᴦ. The exile to Solvychegodsk lasted, and from 1913 to 1917 – the exile in the village of Kureika.
Stalin first became acquainted with Lenin's ideas after the publication of the newspaper Iskra. Lenin and Stalin met personally in December 1905, in Finland, at a Bolshevik conference. After the February Revolution, V.I. Stalin briefly, until Lenin’s return, served as one of the leaders of the Central Committee. And after the October coup he received the post of People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs. He showed himself to be an excellent military organizer, but, at the same time, demonstrated his commitment to terror. In 1922 ᴦ. elected General Secretary of the Central Committee. At that time, V.I. Lenin had already retired from active work and real power belonged to the Politburo.
Even then, his disagreements with Trotsky were obvious. During the 13th Congress of the RCPB, held in May 1924, Stalin announced his resignation, but the majority of votes received during the voting allowed him to retain his post. The strengthening of his power leads to the beginning of the personality cult of Stalin. Simultaneously with industrialization and the development of heavy industry, dispossession and collectivization were carried out in the villages. The result was the death of millions of Russian citizens. Stalin's repressions, which began in 1921, claimed more than 5 million lives over 32 years.
Stalin's policies lead to the creation and subsequent strengthening of a harsh authoritarian regime. The beginning of the career of Lavrenty Beria dates back to this period (20th ᴦ.). Stalin and Beria met regularly during the General Secretary's trips to the Caucasus. Later, thanks to his personal devotion to Stalin, Beria entered the leader’s closest circle of associates. And during the period of Stalin’s reign, he held key positions and was awarded many state awards.
A short biography of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin is impossible without a story about the most difficult period of the Great Patriotic War for the country. It should be noted that Stalin was already convinced in the 30s that a military conflict with Germany was inevitable. And he tried to prepare the country as much as possible. But this, given the economic devastation and underdevelopment of industry, required years, if not decades. Confirmation of preparations for war is the construction of large-scale underground fortifications, called the Stalin Line. On the western borders, 13 fortified areas were built, each of which, in case of extreme importance, was able to conduct military operations in conditions of complete isolation. In 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was concluded, which was supposed to be valid until 49 ᴦ. Finished at 38 ᴦ. After this, the fortifications were almost completely destroyed - blown up or buried.
Stalin understood that the probability of violation of this pact by Germany was very high, but he believed that Germany would attack only after the defeat of England and ignored persistent warnings about the impending June 41 ᴦ. attack. This, in many ways, became the reason for the catastrophic situation that developed at the front already on the first day of the war. The next day, June 23, Stalin headed the Headquarters of the High Command. On 30 he was appointed Chairman of the State Defense Committee, and on August 8 he was declared Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Soviet Union. During this most difficult period, Stalin managed to prevent the complete defeat of the army and thwart Hitler’s plans for the lightning takeover of the USSR. With a strong will, Stalin was able to organize millions of people. But the price of this victory was high. The Second World War became the bloodiest and most brutal war for Russia in history.
During 1941 – 1942. the situation at the front continued to remain critical. Despite the fact that the attempt to capture Moscow was prevented, there was a threat of seizing the territory of the North Caucasus, which was an important energy center; Voronezh was partially captured by the Nazis. During the spring offensive, the Red Army suffered huge losses near Kharkov. The USSR was actually on the verge of defeat. In an effort to tighten discipline in the army and prevent the possibility of retreat of the troops, Stalin’s order 227 “Not a step back!” was issued, which put the barrier detachments into action. The same order introduced penal battalions and companies as part of fronts and armies, respectively. Stalin managed to unite (at least for the duration of the Second World War) outstanding Russian commanders, the brightest of whom was Zhukov. For his contribution to the victory, the Generalissimo of the USSR was awarded in 1945. title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
The post-war years of Stalin's rule were marked by a renewal of terror. But, at the same time, the restoration of the country’s economy and the destroyed economy proceeded at an unprecedented pace, despite the refusal of Western countries to provide loans. In the post-war years, Stalin carried out many party purges, the pretext for which was the fight against cosmopolitanism.
IN last years During his reign, Stalin was incredibly suspicious, which was at least partly provoked by attempts on his life. The first attempt on Stalin's life took place back in 1931. (November 16). It was committed by Ogarev, a white officer and employee British intelligence. Later, further attempts were made to eliminate Stalin. 1937 ᴦ. (May 1) - possible coup attempt; 1938 ᴦ. (March 11) - an attempt on the life of the leader during a walk in the Kremlin, committed by Lieutenant Danilov; 1939 ᴦ. – 2 attempts to eliminate Stalin by Japanese special services; 1942 ᴦ. (November 6) - assassination attempt on Lobnoye Mesto, committed by deserter S. Dmitriev. The operation prepared by the Nazis, the “Big Leap” in 1947. had as its goal the elimination of not only Stalin, but also Roosevelt and Churchill during the Tehran Conference. Some historians believe that Stalin's death on March 5, 1953 ᴦ. wasn't natural. But, according to a medical report, it occurred as a result of hemorrhage in the brain. That ended the most difficult and controversial era of Stalin for the country.
The leader's body was placed in the Lenin Mausoleum. Stalin's first funeral was marked by a bloody stampede on Trubnaya Square, due to which many people died. During the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, many of Joseph Stalin’s actions were condemned, in particular his deviation from the Leninist course and the cult of personality. His body in 1961 ᴦ. buried near the Kremlin wall.
For six months after Stalin, Malenkov ruled, and in September 1953. power passed to Khrushchev.
Speaking about Stalin's biography, it is extremely important to mention his personal life. Joseph Stalin was married twice. Stalin's first wife, leaving him a son, Yakov, the only one who bore his father's surname, died of typhoid fever in 1907. Yakov died in 1943. in a German concentration camp. Stalin's second wife in 1918. became Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She shot herself in 1932. Stalin's children from this marriage: Vasily and Svetlana. Stalin's son Vasily, a military pilot, died in 1962. Svetlana, Stalin's daughter emigrated to the USA. She died in Wisconsin in 2011, November 22.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin - brief biography - concept and types. Classification and features of the category “Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin - short biography” 2017, 2018.
Generalissimo and sole leader of the USSR Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin truly is one of the few leaders who managed to put the country on the track of industrialization, win the Great Patriotic War, defeating Hitler, and save the whole world from an insane tyrant.
short biography
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin ( real name – Dzhugashvili) was born December 18, 1878 in the village of Gori, Tiflis province, Georgia.
His father - Vissarion Ivanovich Dzhugashvili, a shoemaker from a peasant family. His mother - Ekaterina Georgievna Geladze, a charwoman from a family of serfs.
Soso's childhood
Stalin himself did not like to remember his childhood, since it was difficult for his family: after the birth of Soso (Joseph), his father began to drink and at the same time showed fits of rage, which often ended in beatings, both of his mother and of Soso himself, who stood up for mother.
Education
In 1886, Joseph's mother tried to identify her son as Orthodox theological school in Gori, but due to ignorance of the Russian language, the boy was unable to enter there.
Theological school
Subsequently, for 2 years he studied Russian. His teachers were the children of one of the local priests. Already in 1888 Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was able to pass the exams at the school, immediately entering the 2nd preparatory class.
In September 1889, he successfully passed the certification and entered the school itself and in 1894 finished it.
Theological Seminary in Tifliss
Immediately after graduating from college, Joseph entered Tiflis Theological Seminary, where, according to his recollections, he first became acquainted with the works of Marx and began meeting with underground revolutionaries.
His passion and deep penetration into Marxism led to his being expelled from the seminary in his 5th year. The official reason was given as follows:
“...for failure to appear for exams for an unknown reason...”
Koba - revolutionary
After being expelled from the Tiflis Seminary, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin joined RSDLP(Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) and began to propagate revolutionary ideas with even greater zeal. He took his party nickname Koba- the hero of the novel “The Patricide”.
Underground worker
March 21, 1901 The police searched the physical observatory where Stalin lived and worked. He himself, however, escaped arrest and went underground, becoming underground revolutionary.
Bolshevik
When the RSDLP split into 2 camps (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) in 1903, Joseph Vissarionovich joined the Bolsheviks. In 1904, he organized a huge strike of oil workers in Baku, which ended with the conclusion of a collective agreement between the strikers and industrialists.
Trip abroad
In 1905, Stalin was sent abroad from the Caucasian Union of the RSDLP. He first visited the Finnish Tammerfors, where he first met IN AND. Lenin. Then he visited Stockholm.
In 1907, Joseph Vissarionovich visited London as a delegate of the RSDLP. It is also known that he visited Vienna and stayed there for about one month.
For him, a poorly educated Georgian guy who did not know foreign languages, rich foreign countries remained an alien, unknown capitalist world, according to whose laws he could never live.
Stalin
While in exile from 1908 to 1912, Joseph decided to change his party nickname "Koba" to "Stalin"- strong as steel. During this period and later, he actively helped the cause of the party, met with Lenin and spoke to people.
After the 1917 revolution
After the February and October revolutions in Russia, Stalin received a post in the new government - the Council of People's Commissars, led by Vladimir Lenin. He was appointed Commissioner for Nationalities.
General Secretary of the Central Committee
In 1922, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was appointed to the post General Secretary of the Central Committee. His manner of leading the party was in the style of despotism, for which Lenin himself wanted to remove the secretary general in 1823 and even wrote a letter to the party congress.
However, Vladimir Ilyich was very ill at that time and died a year later. Stalin was allowed to read the letter from the “leader of the proletariat,” and he promised to behave more calmly.
The rise of the country and the purge of the NKVD
After Lenin's death, Stalin began to gradually put the USSR on the rails of socialism. In 1928-33. collectivization of personal peasant farms took place, which united into collective farms.
The authorities' measures to carry out collectivization led to mass resistance among peasants, since collectivization was accompanied by the “dekulakization” of everyone indiscriminately. The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) declared all dissatisfied and dispossessed people enemies of the people and sent them to special settlements in the Gulags.
In March 1930 alone, there were 6,500 riots, eight hundred of which were suppressed using weapons. Overall during 1930 about 2.5 million peasants took part in 14 thousand protests against collectivization.
USSR before the war
The industrialization carried out by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in the 30s of the 20th century bore fruit: by 1940, the USSR took first place in Europe in terms of industrial production.
Metallurgy, energy, and mechanical engineering received noticeable development, and the chemical industry was created. The country now has its own aircraft, trucks and cars.
One of the strategic goals of the state was declared cultural revolution. Within its framework, since 1930, universal elementary education. In parallel with the massive construction of holiday homes, museums, and parks, an aggressive anti-religious campaign was also carried out.
The Great Patriotic War
Second World War started in 1939 and for almost two years, until June 22, 1941, it walked under the sign of the official friendship of Hitler and Stalin.
Until Hitler's attack, the Soviet Union collaborated with Nazi Germany. There is numerous documentary evidence of cooperation of various kinds, from friendship treaties and active trade to joint parades and conferences of the NKVD and the Gestapo.
Some historians blame Stalin personally USSR's unpreparedness for war and huge losses, especially in the initial period of the war.
Liberator of the whole world from fascism
In a short period, a significant part of the territory of the USSR was occupied, millions of people found themselves behind enemy lines. With great difficulty and enormous sacrifices, the country was rebuilt on a war footing. The further development of events was determined by the commanders, although Stalin was nominally Supreme Commander.
The defeat of the Nazis and the end of the war in 1945 made a huge impression on the occupied countries of Europe. The destruction of fascism began to be associated with the name of Stalin, although they gave their lives for the victory over 28 million Soviet people. Stalin met with the heads of Great Britain and the United States, planning with them the redivision of Europe.
His name was on the lips of many leaders of Eastern European countries. In people's democracies, the Stalinist authoritarian style of one-party leadership was introduced.
After the war, a difficult restoration of the country began, accompanied by repressions and purges of “enemies of the people.”
Death of Stalin
In the evening March 5, 1953 Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin died at his official residence - Near Dacha (Volynskoye, Kuntsevo district, Moscow region). According to the medical report, death was caused by a cerebral hemorrhage.
His body was buried first in the Mausoleum, and in 1961 it was reburied in the necropolis near the Kremlin wall.
Russian revolutionary of Georgian origin, Soviet political, state, military and party leader, Generalissimo of the Soviet Union
Joseph Stalin
short biography
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin(real name - Dzhugashvili, cargo. იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი; December 6, 1878 (according to the official version December 9, 1879), Gori, Tiflis province, Russian Empire - March 5, 1953, Volynskoye, Kuntsevo district, Moscow region, RSFSR, USSR) - Russian revolutionary, Soviet political, state, military and party leader, Generalissimo of the Soviet Union (1945). From the late 1920s and early 1930s until his death in 1953, Stalin was the leader of the Soviet state.
Having gained the upper hand in the internal party struggle for power, which ended by the end of the 1920s with the defeat of opposition movements, Stalin set a course for accelerated industrialization and complete collectivization of agriculture in order to carry out the transition in the shortest possible time from a traditional agrarian society to an industrial one through the full mobilization of internal resources, over-centralization of economic life and formation of an integral command and administrative system in the USSR.
At the end of the 1930s, in an aggravated foreign policy situation in Europe, Stalin moved towards rapprochement with Nazi Germany, reaching agreements on the delimitation of spheres of interest, on the basis of which, after the outbreak of World War II, the USSR annexed the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, the Baltic States, and Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and also initiated an attack on Finland.
Having been attacked by Germany in June 1941, the USSR, under the leadership of Stalin as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, suffered heavy material and human losses, joined the anti-Hitler coalition and made a decisive contribution to the victory over Nazism, which contributed to the expansion of the USSR's sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and Eastern Europe. Asia, the formation of the world socialist system, which, in turn, led to the Cold War and the split of the world into two opposing systems. In the post-war years, Stalin contributed to the creation of a powerful military-industrial complex in the country and the transformation of the USSR into one of the two world superpowers, possessing nuclear weapons and becoming a co-founder of the UN, a permanent member of the UN Security Council with the right of veto.
Stalin's reign was characterized by the presence of an autocratic regime of personal power, the dominance of authoritarian-bureaucratic methods of management, excessive strengthening of the repressive functions of the state, the merging of party and state bodies, strict state control over all aspects of social life, violation of the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens, deportations of peoples, mass deaths of people as a result of the famine of 1932-1933 and rampant repression.
Origin
Genealogy
Joseph Dzhugashvili was born into a Georgian family (a number of sources suggest versions about the Ossetian origin of Stalin’s ancestors) in the city of Gori, Tiflis province, and was from the lower class.
During Stalin’s life and for a long time after his death, it was believed that he was born on December 9 (21), 1879, but later researchers established a different date of birth for Joseph - December 6 (18), 1878 - and the date of baptism - December 17 (29), 1878.
Stalin had physical defects: the second and third toes on his left foot were fused, his face was pockmarked. In 1885, Joseph was hit by a phaeton, the boy received severe injuries to his arm and leg; after that, throughout his life, his left arm did not fully extend at the elbow and therefore seemed shorter than his right.
Parents
Father- Vissarion (Beso), came from peasants in the village of Didi-Lilo, Tiflis province, and was a shoemaker by profession. Prone to drunkenness and fits of rage, he brutally beat Catherine and little Coco (Joseph). There was a case when a child tried to protect his mother from being beaten. He threw a knife at Vissarion and took off running. According to the recollections of the son of a policeman in Gori, another time Vissarion burst into the house where Ekaterina and little Coco were and attacked them with beatings, causing a head injury to the child.
Joseph was the third son in the family; the first two died in infancy. Some time after Joseph's birth, things didn't go well for his father, and he started drinking. The family often changed housing. Ultimately, Vissarion left his wife and tried to take his son, but Catherine did not give him up.
When Coco was eleven years old, Vissarion “died in a drunken brawl - someone hit him with a knife.” By that time, Coco himself was spending a lot of time in the street company of young Gori hooligans.
Mother- Ekaterina Georgievna - came from the family of a serf peasant (gardener) Geladze in the village of Gambareuli, worked as a day laborer. She was a hard-working Puritan woman who often beat her only surviving child, but was infinitely devoted to him. Stalin’s childhood friend David Machavariani said that “Kato surrounded Joseph with excessive maternal love and, like a she-wolf, protected him from everyone and everything. She worked herself to the point of exhaustion to make her darling happy.” Catherine, however, according to some historians, was disappointed that her son never became a priest.
Early years, becoming a revolutionary
Soso Dzhugashvili - student of the Tiflis Theological Seminary (1894)
In 1886, Ekaterina Georgievna wanted to enroll Joseph to study at the Gori Orthodox Theological School, however, since he did not know the Russian language at all, he was unable to enroll. In 1886-1888, at the request of his mother, the children of the priest Christopher Charkviani began teaching Joseph Russian. As a result, in 1888, Soso did not enter the first preparatory class at the school, but immediately entered the second preparatory class, and in September of the following year he entered the first class of the school, which he graduated in June 1894.
In September 1894, Joseph passed the entrance exams and was enrolled in the Orthodox Tiflis Theological Seminary. There he first became acquainted with Marxism and by the beginning of 1895 he came into contact with underground groups of revolutionary Marxists expelled by the government to Transcaucasia. Stalin himself later recalled: “I joined the revolutionary movement at the age of 15, when I contacted underground groups of Russian Marxists who then lived in Transcaucasia. These groups had a great influence on me and instilled in me a taste for underground Marxist literature.".
According to the English historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Stalin was an extremely gifted student who received high marks in all subjects: mathematics, theology, Greek, Russian. Stalin liked poetry, and in his youth he himself wrote poems in Georgian, which attracted the attention of connoisseurs.
In 1931, in an interview with the German writer Emil Ludwig, when asked “What prompted you to become an oppositionist? Possibly mistreatment from parents? Stalin replied: "No. My parents treated me quite well. Another thing is the theological seminary where I studied then. Out of protest against the mocking regime and the Jesuit methods that existed in the seminary, I was ready to become and actually became a revolutionary, a supporter of Marxism...”
In 1898, Dzhugashvili gained experience as a propagandist at a meeting with workers at the apartment of the revolutionary Vano Sturua and soon began to lead a workers’ circle of young railway workers, he began teaching classes in several workers’ circles and even drew up a Marxist training program for them. In August of the same year, Joseph joined the Georgian social democratic organization “Mesame-Dasi” (“Third Group”). Together with V.Z. Ketskhoveli and A.G. Tsulukidze, Dzhugashvili forms the core of the revolutionary minority of this organization, the majority of which stood on the positions of “legal Marxism” and was inclined towards nationalism.
On May 29, 1899, in the fifth year of study, he was expelled from the seminary “for failure to appear for exams for an unknown reason”(probably the actual reason for the exclusion was Joseph Dzhugashvili’s activities in promoting Marxism among seminarians and railway workshop workers). The certificate issued to him stated that he had completed four classes and could serve as a teacher in primary public schools.
After being expelled from the seminary, Dzhugashvili spent some time as a tutor. Among his students, in particular, was his closest childhood friend Simon Ter-Petrosyan (future revolutionary Kamo).
From the end of December 1899, Dzhugashvili was accepted into the Tiflis Physical Observatory as a computer-observer.
On April 23, 1900, Joseph Dzhugashvili, Vano Sturua and Zakro Chodrishvili organized a work day, which brought together 400-500 workers. Joseph himself spoke at the meeting among others. This speech was Stalin's first appearance before a large gathering of people. In August of the same year, Dzhugashvili participated in the preparation and conduct of a major action by Tiflis workers - a strike in the Main Railway Workshops. Revolutionary workers took part in organizing workers’ protests: M. I. Kalinin (exiled from St. Petersburg to the Caucasus), S. Ya. Alliluyev, as well as M. Z. Bochoridze, A. G. Okuashvili, V. F. Sturua. From August 1 to August 15, up to four thousand people took part in the strike. As a result, more than five hundred strikers were arrested.
On March 21, 1901, the police searched the physical observatory where Dzhugashvili lived and worked. He himself, however, avoided arrest and went underground, becoming an underground revolutionary.
Path to power
Before 1917
In September 1901, the illegal newspaper Brdzola (Struggle) began printing at the Nina printing house, organized by Lado Ketskhoveli in Baku. The front page of the first issue belonged to twenty-two-year-old Joseph Dzhugashvili. This article is Stalin's first known political work.
In November 1901, he was included in the Tiflis Committee of the RSDLP, on whose instructions in the same month he was sent to Batum, where he participated in the creation of the Social Democratic Party organization.
After the Russian Social Democrats split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, Stalin joined the Bolsheviks.
In 1904, he organized a grandiose strike of oil field workers in Baku, which ended with the conclusion of a collective agreement between the strikers and industrialists.
In December 1905, a delegate from the Caucasian Union of the RSDLP at the First Conference of the RSDLP in Tammerfors (Finland), where he personally met V.I. Lenin for the first time.
In May 1906, a delegate from Tiflis at the IV Congress of the RSDLP in Stockholm, this was his first trip abroad.
Ekaterina Svanidze - Stalin's first wife
On the night of July 16, 1906, in the Tiflis Church of St. David, Joseph Dzhugashvili married Ekaterina Svanidze. From this marriage, Stalin's first son, Yakov, was born in 1907. At the end of the same year, Stalin's wife died of typhus.
In 1907, Stalin was a delegate to the V Congress of the RSDLP in London.
In 1909-1911, Stalin was twice in exile in the city of Solvychegodsk, Vologda province - from February 27 to June 24, 1909 and from October 29, 1910 to July 6, 1911. Having escaped from exile in 1909, Stalin was arrested in March 1910 and, after a six-month imprisonment in Baku, again transported to Solvychegodsk. According to a number of historians, Stalin had an illegitimate son, Konstantin Kuzakov, while in exile in Solvychegodsk. At the end of his period of exile, Stalin was in Vologda until September 6, 1911, from where, despite the ban on entering the capitals, he went to St. Petersburg with the passport of his Vologda acquaintance Pyotr Chizhikov, also a former exile; after another arrest in St. Petersburg on December 5, 1911, he was again exiled to Vologda, from where he escaped on February 28, 1912.
Since 1910, Stalin has been the representative of the Central Committee of the party (“agent of the Central Committee”) for the Caucasus.
In January 1912, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, which took place after the VI (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP, which took place in the same month, at the suggestion of Lenin, Stalin was co-opted in absentia into the Central Committee and the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP.
In 1912, Joseph Dzhugashvili finally adopted the pseudonym "Stalin".
In April 1912, he was arrested by the police and sent into exile in Siberia. This time the place of exile was determined to be the city of Narym, Tomsk province (Middle Ob). Here, in addition to representatives of other revolutionary parties, there were already Smirnov, Sverdlov and some other famous Bolsheviks. Stalin stayed in Narym for 41 days - from July 22 to September 1, 1912, after which he fled from exile. He managed to take a boat along the Ob and Tom undetected by the secret police to Tomsk, where he boarded a train and traveled with a fake passport to the European part of Russia. Then immediately to Switzerland, where he met with Lenin.
In March 1913, Stalin was once again arrested, imprisoned and exiled to the Turukhansky region of the Yenisei province, where he remained until the end of autumn 1916. In exile he corresponded with Lenin.
From February to October
Having gained freedom as a result of the February Revolution, Stalin returned to St. Petersburg. Before Lenin’s arrival from exile, he was one of the leaders of the Central Committee of the RSDLP and the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and was on the editorial board of the newspaper Pravda.
At first, Stalin supported the Provisional Government, based on the fact that the democratic revolution was not yet complete and overthrowing the government was not a practical task. At the All-Russian meeting of the Bolsheviks on March 28 in Petrograd, during a discussion of the Menshevik initiative on the possibility of reunification into a single party, Stalin noted that “unification is possible along the Zimmerwald-Kinthal line.” However, after Lenin returned to Russia, Stalin supported his slogan of turning "bourgeois-democratic" February revolution into the proletarian socialist revolution.
Stalin in the painting by V. A. Serov "Lenin proclaims Soviet power". USSR stamp, 1954
April 14 - 22 was a delegate to the First Petrograd City Conference of Bolsheviks. On April 24 - 29, at the VII All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP(b), he spoke in the debate on the report on the current situation, supported Lenin’s views, and made a report on the national question; was elected a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b).
In May - June he participated in anti-war propaganda; was one of the organizers of the re-election of the Soviets and participated in the municipal campaign in Petrograd. June 3 - 24 participated as a delegate in the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies; was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Bureau from the Bolshevik faction. Also participated in the preparation of the failed demonstration scheduled for June 10 and the demonstration on June 18; published a number of articles in the newspapers Pravda and Soldatskaya Pravda.
Due to Lenin's forced departure into hiding, Stalin spoke at the VI Congress of the RSDLP(b) (July - August 1917) with a report to the Central Committee. At a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b) on August 5, he was elected a member of the narrow composition of the Central Committee. In August - September he mainly carried out organizational and journalistic work. On October 10, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), he voted for the resolution on an armed uprising and was elected a member of the Political Bureau, created “for political leadership in the near future.”
On the night of October 16, at an extended meeting of the Central Committee, he spoke out against the position of L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinoviev, who voted against the decision to revolt, and at the same time he was elected a member of the Military Revolutionary Center, which joined the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee.
On October 24 (November 6), after the cadets destroyed the printing house of the newspaper Pravda, Stalin ensured the publication of a newspaper in which he published the editorial “What do we need?” calling for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and its replacement by a Soviet government elected by "representatives of workers, soldiers and peasants." On the same day, Stalin and Trotsky held a meeting of the Bolsheviks - delegates of the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets of the RSD, at which Stalin made a report on the course of political events. On the night of October 25 (November 7), he participated in a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), which determined the structure and name of the new Soviet government.
1917-1924
Nadezhda Alliluyeva - Stalin's second wife
After the victory October revolution Stalin entered the Council of People's Commissars (SNK) as the People's Commissar for Nationalities (at the end of 1912-1913, Stalin wrote the article “Marxism and the National Question” and from that time was considered an expert on national problems).
On November 29, Stalin joined the Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), together with Lenin, Trotsky and Sverdlov. This body was provided “the right to resolve all emergency matters, but with the obligatory involvement in the decision of all members of the Central Committee who are at that moment in Smolny”.
In the spring of 1918, Stalin married for the second time. His wife was the daughter of the Russian revolutionary S. Ya. Alliluyev - Nadezhda Alliluyeva.
From October 8, 1918 to July 8, 1919 and from May 18, 1920 to April 1, 1922, Stalin was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR. Stalin was also a member of the Revolutionary Military Councils of the Western, Southern, and Southwestern Fronts.
As noted by Doctor of Historical and Military Sciences M.A. Gareev, during the Civil War Stalin gained extensive experience in the military-political leadership of large masses of troops on many fronts (defense of Tsaritsyn, Petrograd, on the fronts against Denikin, Wrangel, the White Poles, etc.).
As many researchers note, during the defense of Tsaritsyn, Stalin and Voroshilov had a personal quarrel with the People’s Commissar for Military Trotsky. The parties made accusations against each other; Trotsky accused Stalin and Voroshilov of insubordination, in response receiving reproaches for excessive trust in “counter-revolutionary” military experts.
In 1919, Stalin was ideologically close to the “military opposition”, condemned personally by Lenin at the Eighth Congress of the RCP (b), but never officially joined it.
Under the influence of the leaders of the Caucasian Bureau, Ordzhonikidze and Kirov, Stalin in 1921 advocated the Sovietization of Georgia.
On March 24, 1921, in Moscow, Stalin had a son, Vasily, who was raised in a family together with Artyom Sergeev, who was born the same year, whom Stalin adopted after the death of his close friend, the revolutionary F.A. Sergeev.
At the Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) on April 3, 1922, Stalin was elected to the Politburo and Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), as well as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). Initially, this position meant only the leadership of the party apparatus, and the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, Lenin, continued to be perceived by everyone as the leader of the party and government.
Since 1922, due to illness, Lenin actually retired from political activity. Within the Politburo, Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev organized "three", based on opposition to Trotsky. All three party leaders at that time held a number of key positions. Zinoviev headed the influential Leningrad party organization, at the same time being the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Kamenev headed the Moscow party organization and at the same time also led the Council of Labor and Defense, which united a number of key people's commissariats. With Lenin's retreat from political activity, it was Kamenev who most often began to chair meetings of the Council of People's Commissars in his place. Stalin united the leadership of both the Secretariat and the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee, also heading the Rabkrin and the People's Commissariat of Nationalities.
In contrast to the Troika, Trotsky led the Red Army in the key positions of the People's Commissar for Military and Marine Affairs and the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council.
In September 1922, Stalin for the first time clearly demonstrated his inclination towards traditional Russian great power. According to the instructions of the Central Committee, he, as People's Commissar for National Affairs, prepared his proposals for regulating relations between Moscow and the Sovietized national outskirts of the former Russian Empire. Stalin proposed a plan for “autonomization” (the inclusion of the outskirts into the RSFSR with the rights of autonomy), in particular, Georgia was to remain part of the Transcaucasian Republic. This plan met with fierce resistance in Ukraine, and especially in Georgia, and was rejected under pressure from Lenin personally. The outskirts became part of the Soviet federation with the rights of union republics with all the attributes of statehood, however, under the conditions of a one-party system, they were fictitious. From the name of the federation itself (“USSR”) the word “Russian” (“Russian”), and geographical names in general, were removed.
At the end of December 1922 - beginning of January 1923, Lenin dictated a “Letter to the Congress”, in which he gave critical characteristics to his closest party comrades, including Stalin, proposing to remove him from the post of General Secretary. The situation was aggravated by the fact that in recent months Lenin's life there was a personal quarrel between Stalin and N.K. Krupskaya.
The letter was announced among members of the Central Committee on the eve of the XIII Congress of the RCP (b), held in May 1924. Stalin submitted his resignation, but it was not accepted. At the congress, the letter was read out to each delegation, but at the end of the congress, Stalin remained in his position.
Participation in internal party struggle
After the XIII Congress (1924), at which Trotsky suffered a crushing defeat, Stalin began an attack on his former allies in the Troika. After the “literary discussion with Trotskyism” (1924), Trotsky was forced to resign from the post of the pre-revolutionary military council. Following this, Stalin’s bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev completely collapsed.
At the XIV Congress (December 1925), the so-called “Leningrad opposition” was condemned, also known as the “platform of 4”: Zinoviev, Kamenev, People’s Commissar of Finance Sokolnikov and N.K. Krupskaya (a year later, she left the opposition). To fight them, Stalin chose to rely on one of the largest party theorists of that time, N.I. Bukharin, and those close to him, Rykov and Tomsky (later - “right deviationists”). The congress itself took place in an atmosphere of noisy scandals and obstruction. The parties accused each other of various deviations (Zinoviev accused the Stalin-Bukharin group of “semi-Trotskyism” and “kulak deviation,” especially focusing on the slogan “Get rich”; in return, he received accusations of “Axelrodism” and “underestimation of the middle peasants”), used directly opposite quotes from Lenin's rich heritage. Directly opposite accusations of purges and counter-purges were also used; Zinoviev was directly accused of turning into the “governor” of Leningrad, of purging from the Leningrad delegation all persons who had the reputation of “Stalinists.”
Kamenev’s statement that “Comrade Stalin cannot fulfill the role of a unifier of the Bolshevik headquarters” was interrupted by mass shouts from the place: “The cards have been revealed!”, “We will not give you commanding heights!”, “Stalin! Stalin!”, “This is where the party united! The Bolshevik headquarters must unite!”, “Long live the Central Committee! Hooray!".
As General Secretary, Stalin turned into the supreme distributor of various posts and privileges, including vouchers to sanatoriums. He made extensive use of this circumstance to methodically seat his personal supporters in all key posts in the country and to win a solid majority at party congresses. Stalin’s victory was particularly facilitated by the “Leninist conscription” of 1924 and the subsequent mass recruitment of semi-literate workers “from the machine” into the party, which took place under the slogan of “working up the party.” As researcher M.S. Voslensky notes, in his work “On the Foundations of Leninism,” Stalin “defiantly” wrote: “I dedicate it to Lenin’s call.” “Recruits to the Leninist draft” for the most part had little understanding of the complex ideological discussions of the time, and preferred to vote for Stalin. The most complex theoretical debates unfolded when up to 75% of party members had only a lower education, many did not know how to read or write.
In February 1926, Stalin's daughter Svetlana was born (in the future - translator, candidate of philological sciences, memoirist).
Trotsky, who did not share Stalin’s theory of the victory of socialism in one country, in April 1926 joined Zinoviev and Kamenev. The so-called “United Opposition” was created, putting forward the slogan “let’s move the fire to the right - against the NEPman, the kulak and the bureaucrat.”
In the internal party struggle of the 20s, Stalin tried to portray the role of a “peacemaker.” At the end of 1924, he even defended Trotsky from the attacks of Zinoviev, who demanded that he be expelled from the party on charges of preparing a military coup. Stalin preferred to use the so-called “salami tactics”: small, measured strikes. His methods are clearly visible from a letter to Molotov and Bukharin dated June 15, 1926, in which Stalin is going to “punch Grisha’s face” (Zinoviev), and make him and Trotsky “renegades like Shlyapnikov” (the former leader of the “workers’ opposition”, who quickly became marginal).
In 1927, Stalin also continued to behave as a “peacemaker.” His allies, the future “right deviationists” Rykov and Tomsky, made much more bloodthirsty statements at this time. In his speech at the XV Congress (1927), Rykov transparently hinted that the left opposition should be sent to prison, and Tomsky at the Leningrad regional conference of the CPSU (b) in November 1927 stated that “in a situation of the dictatorship of the proletariat there can be two or four parties , but only under one condition: one party will be in power, and everyone else will be in prison.”
In 1926-27, intra-party relations became particularly tense. Stalin slowly but surely squeezed the opposition out of the legal field. Among his political opponents were many people with rich experience in pre-revolutionary underground activities.
To publish propaganda literature, the oppositionists created an illegal printing house. On the anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7, 1927, they held a “parallel” opposition demonstration. These actions became the reason for the expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the party (November 16, 1927). In 1927, Soviet-British relations sharply deteriorated, and the country was gripped by war psychosis. Stalin considered that such a situation would be convenient for the final organizational defeat of the left.
However, the following year the picture changed dramatically. Under the influence of the grain procurement crisis of 1927, Stalin made a “left turn”, in practice intercepting Trotskyist slogans that were still popular among students and radical workers dissatisfied with the negative aspects of the NEP (unemployment, sharply increased social inequality).
In 1928-1929, Stalin accused Bukharin and his allies of “right deviation” and actually began to implement the “left” program to curtail the NEP and accelerated industrialization. Among the defeated “rightists” were many active fighters with the so-called “Trotskyist-Zinoviev bloc”: Rykov, Tomsky, Uglanov and Ryutin, who led the defeat of the Trotskyists in Moscow, and many others. The third Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, Syrtsov, also became an oppositionist.
Stalin declared 1929 the year of the “great turning point.” Industrialization, collectivization and cultural revolution were declared as the strategic objectives of the state.
One of the last opposition was Ryutin's group. In his 1932 seminal work, Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship (better known as the Ryutin Platform), the author made his first serious attack on Stalin personally. It is known that Stalin perceived this work as incitement to terrorism and demanded execution. However, this proposal was then rejected by the OGPU, which sentenced Ryutin to 10 years in prison (he was shot later, in 1937).
Richard Pipes emphasizes the continuity of the Stalinist regime. To come to power, Stalin only used the mechanisms that already existed before him. The gradual transition to a complete ban on any internal party opposition was directly based on the historical resolution “On Party Unity” of the Tenth Congress (1921), adopted under pressure from Lenin personally. In accordance with it, the signs of factions that could become the “embryos” of new parties and lead to a split were understood to be the formation of separate factional bodies and even the drawing up of their own factional program documents (“platforms”), different from the general party ones, placing intra-faction discipline above the general party one. According to Pipes, Lenin thus brought into the party the same regime of suppression of dissent that had already been established outside it.
The expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the party in 1927 was carried out by a mechanism developed personally by Lenin in 1921 to combat the “workers' opposition” - a joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (party control bodies).
All of Stalin's main competitors in the struggle for power were the same opponents of democracy as he was. Trotsky wrote the work “Terrorism and Communism” in 1919-20, filled with apologetics for the most ferocious dictatorship, which he justified by the difficult conditions of the Civil War. At the Tenth Congress (1921), Trotsky declared that the “workers’ opposition” was making a “fetish” out of the slogan of “democracy,” and the party intended to maintain its dictatorship on behalf of the workers, even if it “faces the transient sentiments of the working masses.” Finding himself in the minority, Trotsky quickly remembered democracy. The same evolution was carried out after him by Zinoviev, and then by the “right”; being at the pinnacle of power, they willingly silenced the opposition. Having become the opposition, they immediately remembered democracy and freedom of opinion.
As the director of a secondary school in Leningrad, R. Kulle, wrote:
1925 December 30. I wonder what they fought about? Outwardly, it seems that everything is because of Ilyich’s same old pants: who understands their smell better; 1926 August 1... The world is waiting for a dictator... A fight only because of personality: who will eat whom.
The so-called “congress of victors”, the XVII Congress of the CPSU (b) (1934), for the first time stated that the resolution of the X Congress had been implemented, and there was no longer any opposition in the party. Many former opposition members were accepted back into the party after publicly “admitting mistakes.” In an effort to preserve their posts, similar speeches were made at the congress, in particular: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Karl Radek, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Pyatakov, Preobrazhensky, Lominadze. The speeches of many delegates to the congress were densely filled with praises addressed to Stalin. According to V.Z. Rogovin’s calculations, Stalin’s name was used 1,500 times at the congress.
Zinoviev’s speech was filled with servile affection for Stalin personally, Kamenev called himself a “political corpse,” and Preobrazhensky spent a lot of time attacking his former comrade-in-arms Trotsky. Bukharin, who in 1928 called Stalin “Genghis Khan,” at the congress already called him “field marshal of the proletarian forces.” Radek's repentant speech stood somewhat apart from this series, densely filled with jokes and often interrupted by laughter.
Political Views
As Isaac Deutscher writes,
The evolution that led the former Georgian socialist to a position in which he began to be associated with “Great Russian chauvinism” is striking. It was even more than the process which transformed the Corsican Bonaparte into the founder of the French Empire, or the process by which the Austrian Hitler became the most aggressive leader of German nationalism.
In his youth, Stalin chose to join the Bolsheviks rather than Menshevism, which was then popular in Georgia. In the Bolshevik Party of that time there was an ideological and leadership core that, due to police persecution, was located abroad. Unlike such leaders of Bolshevism as Lenin, Trotsky or Zinoviev, who spent a significant part of their adult life in exile, Stalin preferred to be in Russia for illegal party work and was expelled several times.
Only a few of Stalin’s trips abroad are known before the revolution: Tammerfors, Finland (I Conference of the RSDLP, 1905), Stockholm (IV Congress of the RSDLP, 1906), London (V Congress of the RSDLP, 1907), Krakow and Vienna (1912-13). Stalin always called himself a “practician” and was contemptuous of the revolutionary emigration environment with its violent ideological disagreements. In one of his first works, the article “The Party Crisis and Our Tasks,” published in two issues of the newspaper “Baku Proletary” in 1909, Stalin expressed weak criticism of the foreign leadership center, divorced from “Russian reality.”
In his letter to the Bolshevik V.S. Bobrovsky on January 24, 1911, he wrote that “Blocs, of course, heard about the foreign “storm in a teacup”: Lenin - Plekhanov on the one hand and Trotsky - Martov - Bogdanov on the other. The attitude of the workers towards the first block, as far as I know, is favorable. But in general, the workers begin to look disdainfully at foreign countries: “Let them, they say, climb the wall as much as their heart desires, but in our opinion, those who value the interests of the movement work, and the rest will follow.” This, in my opinion, is for the best."
Even in his youth, Stalin rejected Georgian nationalism; over time, his views began to gravitate more and more towards traditional Russian great power. As Richard Pipes writes,
He realized long ago that communism draws its main strength from the Russian people. Of the 376 thousand party members in 1922, 270 thousand, or 72%, were Russians, and of the rest, most - half were Ukrainians and two-thirds of Jews - were Russified or assimilated. Moreover, during the civil war and, even more so, the war with Poland, there was an involuntary confusion of the concepts of communism with Russian nationalism. The clearest manifestation of this was the “Change of Milestones” movement, which gained popularity among the conservative part of the Russian diaspora, declaring the Soviet state the only defender of the greatness of Russia and calling on all its emigrants to return to their homeland... For such a vain politician as Stalin, more interested in really tangible power, yourself at home now, than in the future benefit of all mankind, such a development did not seem like a danger, but, on the contrary, a convenient coincidence of circumstances. From the very beginning of his party career, and with each year of his dictatorship, more and more Stalin took the position of Russian nationalism to the detriment of the interests of national minorities.
However, Stalin always positioned himself as an internationalist. In a number of his articles and speeches, he called for a fight against the “remnants of Great Russian nationalism” and condemned the ideology of “smenovekhism” (its founder N.V. Ustryalov was shot in 1937). Stalin's inner circle was very international in composition; Russians, Georgians, Jews, and Armenians were widely represented in it.
Only Russian communists can take upon themselves the fight against Great Russian chauvinism and bring it to the end... Is it possible to deny that there are deviations towards anti-Russian chauvinism? After all, the entire congress saw with their own eyes that local, Georgian, Bashkir, etc. chauvinism exists, and that it must be fought. Russian communists cannot fight Tatar, Georgian, Bashkir chauvinism, because if a Russian communist takes on the difficult task of fighting Tatar or Georgian chauvinism, then this fight will be regarded as the fight of a Great Russian chauvinist against the Tatars or Georgians. This would confuse the whole matter. Only Tatar, Georgian, etc. communists can fight against Tatar, Georgian, etc. chauvinism, only Georgian communists can successfully fight their Georgian nationalism or chauvinism. This is the duty of non-Russian communists
Stalin's true calling was revealed with his appointment in 1922 to the post of head of the party apparatus. Of all the major Bolsheviks of the time, he was the only one who discovered a taste for the kind of work that other party leaders found “boring”: correspondence, countless personal appointments, routine clerical work. Nobody envied this appointment. However, its position Secretary General Stalin soon began to methodically install his personal supporters in all key positions in the country.
Having announced himself as one of the candidates for the role of Lenin's successor, Stalin soon discovered that, according to the ideas of that time, such a role required the reputation of a major ideologist and theorist. He writes a number of works, among which one can highlight, in particular, “On the Foundations of Leninism” (1924), “On Questions of Leninism” (1927). Declaring that “Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular,” Stalin placed the Marxist doctrine of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” at center stage.
Stalin's ideological research was characterized by the dominance of the most simplified and popularized schemes, in demand in the party, up to 75% of whose members had only a lower education. In Stalin's approach, the state is a “machine”. In the Organizational Report of the Central Committee at the Twelfth Congress (1923), he called the working class the “army of the party” and described how the party controls society through a system of “transmission belts.” In 1921, in his sketches, Stalin called the Communist Party the “Order of the Sword.”
J. Boffa points out that such ideas were nothing new at that time, in particular, the expression “drive belts” in the same context had previously been used by Lenin in 1919 and 1920.
The military-command, militaristic phraseology and anti-democratic views characteristic of Stalin were quite typical for a country that had gone through world and civil wars. In many positions in the party there were people with practical experience of command and even outwardly maintaining a paramilitary appearance. The fact that Bolshevism came to establish a one-man dictatorship was also quite expected; in 1921, Martov directly said that if Lenin refused to democratize, a “military-bureaucratic dictatorship” would be established in Russia; Trotsky noted back in 1904 that the methods of party building used by Lenin would end with the fact that “the Central Committee replaces the party organization and, finally, the dictator replaces the Central Committee.”
In 1924, Stalin developed the doctrine of “building socialism in a single country.” Without completely abandoning the idea of a “world revolution,” this doctrine shifted its focus to Russia. By this time, the attenuation of the revolutionary wave in Europe had become final. The Bolsheviks no longer had to hope for a quick victory of the revolution in Germany, and the associated expectations of generous assistance dissipated. The party had to move on to organizing a full-fledged government controlled, to solve economic problems.
In 1928, under the influence of the grain procurement crisis of 1927 and the rising wave of peasant uprisings, Stalin put forward the doctrine of “strengthening the class struggle as socialism is built.” It became an ideological justification for terror, and after Stalin's death it was soon rejected by the leadership of the Communist Party.
Researcher Mikhail Alexandrov in his work “Stalin’s Foreign Policy Doctrine” indicates that in 1928, in his speech at the November plenum of the Central Committee, Stalin praised the modernization activities of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great.
In the 1930s, Stalin contributed to the banning of the works of the Marxist historian M. N. Pokrovsky. In 1934, Stalin opposed the publication of Engels’s work “On the Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism,” which, in particular, called the Russian diplomatic corps a “gang” and Russia itself as striving for “world domination.”
In the 40s, Stalin's final turn towards Russian great power took place. Already in the speech on July 3, 1941, there was practically no communist rhetoric and the phrase “brothers and sisters”, unusual for a communist, was used, while at the same time it contained obvious appeals to traditional Russian patriotism. In accordance with this course, the war received the official name “Great Patriotic War,” by analogy with the Patriotic War of 1812.
Back in 1935, personal military ranks were introduced in the army, and Cossack units were restored in 1936. In 1942, the institution of commissars was finally abolished in the troops and, finally, in 1943, the command staff of the Red Army began to be officially called “officers”, and shoulder straps were restored as insignia.
The war years also saw the end of the aggressive anti-religious campaign and mass closures of churches. Stalin was a supporter of the full expansion of the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church; Thus, in 1943, the state finally refused to support the Renovationism movement (which, according to Trotsky’s plan, was supposed to play the same role in relation to the Russian Orthodox Church as Protestantism in relation to catholic church), significant pressure was applied to the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. At the same time, under the obvious influence of Stalin, in 1943 the Russian Orthodox Church finally recognized the autocephaly of the Georgian Orthodox Church.
In 1943, Stalin dissolved the Comintern. Stalin's attitude towards him was always skeptical; he called this organization a “shop”, and its functionaries - useless “freeloaders”. Although formally the Comintern was considered a world, supranational communist party, into which the Bolsheviks were included only as one of the subordinate, national sections, in reality the Comintern was always an external lever of Moscow. During Stalin's reign this became especially clear.
In 1945, Stalin proposed a toast “To the Russian people!”, which he called “the most outstanding nation of all the nations that make up the Soviet Union.” In fact, the very content of the toast was quite ambiguous; researchers suggest absolutely different interpretations its meaning, including directly opposite ones.
At the head of the country
Collectivization. Hunger
At the XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), held from December 2 to 19, 1927, it was decided to carry out the collectivization of agricultural production in the USSR - the liquidation of individual peasant farms and their unification into collective farms (collective farms). Collectivization was carried out in 1928-1933 (in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus, as well as in Moldova, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, annexed to the USSR in 1939-1940, after the war, in 1949-1950).
The background for the transition to collectivization was the grain procurement crisis of 1927, aggravated by the war psychosis that gripped the country and the mass purchasing of essential goods by the population. The idea was widely spread that peasants were holding back grain, trying to inflate prices (the so-called “kulak grain strike”). From January 15 to February 6, 1928, Stalin personally made a trip to Siberia, during which he demanded maximum pressure on the “kulaks and speculators.”
In 1926-27, the “Trotskyist-Zinoviev bloc” widely accused supporters of the “general line” of underestimating the so-called kulak danger, and demanded the introduction of a “forced grain loan” at fixed prices among the wealthy strata of the village. In practice, Stalin even exceeded the demands of the “left”; the scale of grain confiscation was significantly increased and fell heavily on the middle peasants. This was also facilitated by the widespread falsification of statistics, which created the idea that the peasants had some fabulous hidden reserves of bread. According to recipes dating back to the Civil War, attempts were also made to set one part of the village against another; up to 25% of the confiscated grain was sent to the rural poor.
Collectivization was accompanied by the so-called “dekulakization” (a number of historians speak of “de-peasantization”) - political repressions applied administratively by local authorities on the basis of the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of January 30, 1930 “On measures to eliminate kulak farms in the regions complete collectivization."
According to OGPU order No. 44.21 of February 6, 1930, an operation began to “seize” 60 thousand “first category” fists. Already on the first day of the operation, the OGPU arrested about 16 thousand people, and on February 9, 1930, 25 thousand people were “seized.”
In total, in 1930-1931, as indicated in the certificate of the Department for Special Resettlements of the GULAG OGPU, 381,026 families with a total number of 1,803,392 people were sent to special settlements. During the years 1932-1940, another 489,822 dispossessed people arrived in special settlements. Hundreds of thousands of people died in exile.
The authorities' measures to carry out collectivization led to massive resistance among the peasants. In March 1930 alone, the OGPU counted 6,500 riots, eight hundred of which were suppressed using weapons. In total, during 1930, about 2.5 million peasants took part in 14 thousand protests against collectivization.
The situation in the country in 1929-1932 was close to a new civil war. According to OGPU reports, local Soviet and party workers took part in the unrest in a number of cases, and in one case even the district representative of the OGPU. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the Red Army was, for demographic reasons, mainly peasant in composition.
In 1932, a number of regions of the USSR (Ukraine, Volga region, Kuban, Belarus, Southern Urals, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan) were struck by famine. According to a number of historians, the famine of 1932-1933 was artificial: as A. Roginsky stated in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio, the state had the opportunity to reduce its scale and consequences, but did not do so.
At the same time, starting at least from the summer of 1932, the state allocated extensive assistance to starving areas in the form of so-called “food loans” and “semssuds”; grain procurement plans were repeatedly reduced, but even in a reduced form were disrupted. The archives contain, in particular, a coded telegram from the secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk regional committee, Khataevich, dated June 27, 1933, with a request to allocate an additional 50 thousand pounds of bread to the region; The document contains Stalin’s resolution: “We must give. I. St."
In total, in the USSR during this period, according to various estimates, from 4 to 8 million people died of hunger. The electronic version of Encyclopedia Britannica gives a range of 6 to 8 million. The Brockhaus Encyclopedia gives an estimate of 4-7 million.
The famous writer M.A. Sholokhov wrote a number of letters to Stalin, in which he spoke directly about the disaster that erupted in the Vyoshensky district of the North Caucasus region. As Ivnitsky notes, in response to Sholokhov’s letter dated April 4, 1933, Stalin responded with a telegram on April 16: “I received your letter on the fifteenth. Thank you for message. I'll do whatever it takes. Report the amount of assistance needed. Name the figure,” after which he instructed Molotov to “satisfy Sholokhov’s request in its entirety,” providing 120 thousand poods of food aid to the Vyoshensky district and 40 thousand to the Verkhnedonsky district. Two weeks later, on May 6, 1933, Stalin sent a long letter to Sholokhov, in which he admitted that “sometimes our workers, wanting to curb the enemy, accidentally hit their friends and descend into sadism,” but, at the same time, also directly accused the peasants of “ Italian strike,” in an effort to leave cities and the army without bread. As Ivnitsky writes, on July 4, 1933, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution recognizing the “excesses” in the Vyoshensky district, but recognizing them in such a way that “they were actually justified.” One of the most zealous performers, Pashinsky, was expelled from the party and sentenced to death, but this court decision was annulled, and Pashinsky limited himself to a severe reprimand.
According to V.V. Kondrashin, the root cause of the famine of 1932-1933 was the strengthening of the collective farm system and political regime by repressive methods associated with the nature of Stalinism and the personality of Stalin himself.
The latest data on the exact number of deaths from famine in Ukraine (3 million 941 thousand people) formed the indictment part of the verdict of the Kiev Court of Appeal dated January 13, 2010 in the case against the organizers of the mass famine of 1932-1933 in the Ukrainian SSR - Joseph Stalin and others representatives of the authorities of the USSR and Ukrainian SSR.
The famine of 1932-1933 is called “Stalin’s worst atrocity” - the death toll from it is more than two times higher than the number of those killed in the Gulag and those executed for political reasons during the entire period of Stalin’s reign. The victims of the famine were not the “class-alien” layers of Russian society, as was the case during the Red Terror, and not representatives of the nomenklatura, as would later happen during the years of the Great Terror, but those same ordinary workers, for whose sake the social experiments carried out by the ruling Bolshevik Party were carried out , led by Stalin. In accordance with the doctrine of “primary socialist accumulation,” first put forward by the major Trotskyist economist E. A. Preobrazhensky in 1925-26, the village turned into a reservoir for pumping out funds and labor for state needs. The situation in which peasants found themselves as a result of collectivization forced literally millions of people to move to the cities to work on the construction sites of industrialization. As Sheila Fitzpatrick points out, collectivization caused an unprecedented migration of the population of the USSR: in the late 1920s, on average, about 1 million people moved from villages to cities. per year, then in 1930 2.5 million people moved, in 1931 - 4 million. During the period 1928-1932, about 12 million people arrived in the cities. In conditions of a shortage of workers caused by the first five-year plan, the bulk of yesterday's peasants easily found work.
The traditional agrarian overpopulation for Russia was destroyed. One of the results of this migration, however, was a sharp increase in the number of eaters, and, as a consequence, the introduction of a bread rationing system in 1929. Another result was the restoration in December 1932 of the pre-revolutionary passport system. At the same time, the state realized that the needs of a rapidly growing industry required a massive influx of workers from the countryside. Some orderliness was introduced into this migration in 1931 with the introduction of the so-called “organizational set.”
The consequences for the village were, on the whole, disastrous. Despite the fact that as a result of collectivization, the sown area increased by 1/2, the gross grain harvest, milk and meat production decreased, and the average yield decreased. According to S. Fitzpatrick, the village was demoralized. The prestige of peasant labor among the peasants themselves fell, and the idea spread that for a better life one should go to the city.
The catastrophic situation during the first five-year plan was somewhat corrected in 1933, when it was possible to harvest a large grain harvest. In 1934, Stalin's position, shaken due to the failures of the first five-year plan, was significantly strengthened.
Industrialization and urban planning
The five-year plan for the construction of 1.5 thousand factories, approved by Stalin in 1928, required huge expenses for the purchase of foreign technologies and equipment. To finance purchases in the West, Stalin decided to increase the export of raw materials, mainly oil, furs, and grain. The problem was complicated by the decline in grain production. So, if in 1913 pre-revolutionary Russia exported about 10 million tons of bread, then in 1925-1926 the annual export was only 2 million tons. Stalin believed that collective farms could be a means to restore grain exports, through which the state intended to extract from the countryside agricultural products needed to finance military-oriented industrialization.
Rogovin V.Z. points out that the export of bread was by no means the main item of export income of the USSR. Thus, in 1930, the country received 883 million rubles from the export of bread, oil products and timber produced 1 billion 430 million, furs and flax - up to 500 million. According to the results of 1932-33, bread provided only 8% of export revenues.
Industrialization and collectivization brought about enormous social changes. Millions of people moved from collective farms to cities. The USSR was engulfed in a massive migration. The number of workers and employees increased from 9 million people. in 1928 to 23 million in 1940. The population of cities increased sharply, in particular, Moscow from 2 million to 5, Sverdlovsk from 150 thousand to 500. At the same time, the pace of housing construction was completely insufficient to accommodate such a number of new citizens. Typical housing in the 30s remained communal apartments and barracks, and in some cases, dugouts.
At the January plenum of the Central Committee of 1933, Stalin announced that the first five-year plan had been completed in 4 years and 3 months. During the years of the first five-year plan, up to 1,500 enterprises were built, entire new industries appeared (tractor building, aviation industry, etc.). However, in practice, growth was achieved due to industry of group “A” (production of means of production), there was no plan for group “B” completed. According to a number of indicators, the plans of group “B” were fulfilled by only 50%, and even less. In addition, agricultural production fell sharply. In particular, the number of cattle should have increased by 20-30% over the years 1927-1932, but instead it fell by half.
The euphoria of the first years of the Five-Year Plan led to storming, to an unrealistic inflation of planned indicators. According to Rogovin, the plan of the first five-year plan, drawn up at the XVI Party Conference and the V Congress of Soviets, was actually not implemented, not to mention the increased indicators approved by the XVI Congress (1930). Thus, instead of 10 million tons of cast iron, 6.2 million tons were smelted; in 1932, 23.9 thousand cars were produced instead of 100 thousand. Plan targets for the main indicators of group “A” industry were actually achieved in 1933-35, and increased targets for cast iron , tractors and cars - in 1950, 1956 and 1957, respectively.
Official propaganda in every possible way glorified the names of the leader of production Stakhanov, the pilot Chkalov, the construction site of Magnitka, Dneproges, Uralmash. During the second five-year plan in the USSR, there was a certain increase in housing construction and, within the framework cultural revolution, theaters and holiday homes. Commenting on a certain increase in the standard of living that emerged with the beginning of the Stakhanov movement, on November 17, 1935, Stalin noted that “Life has become better, life has become more fun.” Indeed, just a month before this statement, cards were abolished in the USSR. However, at the same time, the standard of living of 1913 was again achieved only in the 50s (according to official statistics, the 1913 level in terms of GDP per capita was reached in 1934).
In 1936, Soviet propaganda was also enriched with the slogan “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!”
At the same time emergency Industrialization construction projects and the low educational level of yesterday's peasants who arrived there often resulted in a low level of labor protection, industrial accidents, and breakdowns of expensive equipment. Propaganda preferred to explain the accident rate by the machinations of conspirators - saboteurs; Stalin personally stated that “there are and will be saboteurs as long as we have classes, as long as we have a capitalist encirclement.”
The low standard of living of the workers gave rise to general hostility towards the relatively more privileged technical specialists. The country was overwhelmed by “specialist” hysteria, which found its ominous expression in the Shakhty case (1928) and a number of subsequent processes (the Industrial Party Case of 1930, the TKP Case and many others).
Among the construction projects begun under Stalin was the Moscow Metro.
The cultural revolution was declared one of the strategic goals of the state. Within its framework, educational campaigns (which began in 1920) were carried out; in 1930, universal primary education was introduced in the country for the first time. In parallel with the massive construction of holiday homes, museums, and parks, an aggressive anti-religious campaign was also carried out. The Union of Militant Atheists (founded in 1925) announced in 1932 the so-called “godless five-year plan.” By order of Stalin, hundreds of churches in Moscow and other Russian cities were blown up. In particular, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was blown up in order to build the Palace of the Soviets in its place.
Repressive policies
Monument to the victims of political repression in the USSR: a stone from the territory of the Solovetsky special purpose camp, installed on Lubyanka Square on the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Political Repression, October 30, 1990. Photo 2006.
Bolshevism had a long tradition of state terror. By the time of the October Revolution, the country was already more than three years participated in a world war that greatly devalued human life, society became accustomed to mass deaths and the death penalty. On September 5, 1918, the “Red Terror” was officially declared. During the Civil War, up to 140 thousand people were shot by verdicts of various emergency, extrajudicial bodies.
State repressions decreased in scale, but did not stop in the 1920s, flaring up with particularly destructive force in the period 1937-1938. After the assassination of Kirov in 1934, the course towards “pacification” was gradually replaced by a new course towards the most merciless repressions. In accordance with the Marxist class approach, entire groups of the population fell under suspicion, according to the principle of collective responsibility: former “kulaks”, former participants in various internal party oppositions, persons of a number of nationalities foreign to the USSR, suspected of “double loyalty” (the repressions of “ Polish line"), and even the military. Many senior military leaders emerged under Trotsky, and during the period of internal party discussion in 1923, the military widely supported Trotsky. Rogovin also points out that the Red Army was predominantly peasant in composition, and dissatisfaction with the results of collectivization objectively penetrated into its environment. Finally, the NKVD itself was under a certain suspicion, paradoxically as it may seem; Naumov emphasizes that there were sharp structural imbalances in its composition, in particular, up to 38% were people of non-Bolshevik origin, while the social composition of workers and peasants was only 25%.
According to the Memorial Society, for the period October 1936-November 1938, 1,710 thousand people were arrested by the NKVD, 724 thousand people were shot, and up to 2 million people were convicted by courts on criminal charges. The instructions for carrying out the purge were given by the February-March plenum of the Central Committee of 1937; In his report “On the shortcomings of party work and measures to eliminate Trotskyists and other double-dealers,” Stalin personally called on the Central Committee to “uproot and defeat”, in accordance with his own doctrine of “exacerbating the class struggle as socialism is built.”
The so-called “Great Terror” or “Yezhovshchina” of 1937-1938 resulted in the self-destruction of the Soviet leadership on an unprecedented scale; Thus, out of 73 people who spoke at the February-March plenum of the Central Committee in 1937, 56 were shot. The absolute majority of the delegates to the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and up to 78% of the Central Committee elected by this congress also perished. Despite the fact that the main striking force of state terror was the NKVD, they themselves became victims of the most severe purge; The main organizer of the repressions, People's Commissar Yezhov, himself became their victim.
During the purge, some people from Stalin's inner circle also died; his personal friend Enukidze A.S. was shot, and Ordzhonikidze G.K. died under circumstances that are not completely clear.
As N. Werth stated in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio, mass repressions were the main form of government and society during Stalin’s time.
Kaganovich L.M. gave a rather frank explanation of the terror:
...after all, they were all members of the government. There was a Trotskyist government, there was a Zinoviev government, there was a Rykov government, it was very dangerous and impossible. Three governments could arise from opponents of Stalin... How could they be kept free? ...Trotsky, who was a good organizer, could lead the uprising... Who could believe that the old, experienced conspirators, using all the experience of Bolshevik conspiracy and the Bolshevik organization, that these people would not contact each other and would not form an organization?
A number of people from Stalin’s inner circle took the most active part in the purge, in particular, Yezhov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Malenkov and many others. However, there is no doubt that it was Stalin who was the main “manager” of terror. In particular, he personally wrote indictments for high-profile trials. There are hundreds of notes written by Stalin, in which he demanded that the security officers kill more and more. He passed sentences in red pencil. Opposite some names he wrote: “Beat again.” At the bottom of numerous pages was the message: “Shoot everyone.” On some days, Stalin sentenced more than 3,000 so-called enemies of the people to death. According to the human rights society “Memorial”, Stalin personally and his closest associates in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks signed lists for the condemnation of 43,768 people, the vast majority of them to death, in the years 1936-1938 alone, which became known as “Stalin’s execution lists.” During the period of the Great Terror, the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, submitted orders for each region for execution or exile to the Gulag for Stalin’s consideration, and Stalin determined the statistical plan for “cleansing operations.” Locally and in the districts there was a competition to see who would be the first to exceed this plan. And every time a local NKVD officer carried out orders, he asked for permission “for an extra-planned massacre,” and each time Stalin allowed it.
According to Yu. N. Zhukov, repressions could have occurred without the knowledge and without the participation of Stalin. Until 1934, the historian claims, repressions in the party did not go beyond the factional struggle and consisted of removal from high positions and transfers to non-prestigious areas of party work, that is, arrests were excluded. As for the repressions against workers, peasants and intelligentsia, Yu. N. Zhukov emphasizes that all the processes of the late 1920s, directed primarily against the intelligentsia, against engineers, took place on the initiative of Bukharin, who in those years controlled the activities of the OGPU and gave sanctions on all arrests, on all political trials.
According to Arseny Roginsky, chairman of the board of the international human rights society "Memorial", given in an interview with radio "Echo of Moscow", during the period of Soviet history, 4.5 - 4.8 million people were convicted for political reasons, of which approximately 1.1 million were shot , the rest ended up in the Gulag; at least 6.5 million were deported (from 1920, when 9 thousand families from five Cossack villages, or 45 thousand people, were deported, until the deportation of 1951-1952); approximately 4 million were deprived of voting rights (more than a million - according to the Constitution of the RSFSR of 1918, the rest - according to a 1925 decree, according to which family members were included in this category); approximately 400-500 thousand were repressed on the basis of various decrees and resolutions; 6-7 million died from the famine of 1932-1933; 17,961 thousand people became victims of the so-called labor decrees (issued on June 26, 1940, repealed in 1956). Thus, according to the Memorial organization, depending on the method of calculation, victims of terror ranged from 11-12 million to 38-39 million people. In another interview he says:
...in the entire history of Soviet power, from 1918 to 1987 (the last arrests were at the beginning of 1987), according to surviving documents, it turned out that there were 7 million 100 thousand people arrested by security agencies throughout the country. Moreover, among them there were those arrested not only on political charges. And quite a lot. Yes, they were arrested by security agencies, but security agencies arrested them over the years for banditry, smuggling, and counterfeiting. And under many other “common criminal” articles.Http://www.memo.ru/d/124360.html
It should be emphasized that Roginsky refers these figures to everything Soviet period history (and not just the reign of Stalin). In particular, it can be noted that discrimination in the form of deprivation of the so-called “non-labor elements” of voting rights was carried out in accordance with the Soviet Constitutions of 1918 and 1925, and was abolished by the “Stalinist” Constitution of 1936.
Rogovin V.Z., referring to archival data, indicates the following number of victims of terror:
- According to a memorandum presented by the USSR Prosecutor General Rudenko, the Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov and the Minister of Justice Gorshenin in February 1954, from 1921 to February 1, 1954, 3,770,380 people were convicted of so-called “counter-revolutionary crimes”, including 642 to capital punishment. 980, for detention in camps and prisons 2,369,320, for exile and deportation 765,180;
- According to data provided by KGB officers “in the early 1990s,” 3,778,234 people were repressed, of which 786,098 were shot;
- According to data presented by the archival department of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation in 1992, during the period 1917-1990, 3,853,900 people were convicted of state crimes, of which 827,995 were sentenced to death.
As Rogovin points out, during the period 1921-1953, up to 10 million people passed through the GULAG, its number in 1938 was 1,882 thousand people; the maximum number of the Gulag during its entire existence was reached in 1950, and amounted to 2,561 thousand people.
According to University of California professor Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, estimates range from five to nine million people were arrested during the Great Purge of 1936-1938. At the same time, it should be noted that the instructions for the beginning of terror were given only by the February-March plenum of 1937; in 1936 there was no purge yet.
During the period from 1930 to 1953, according to various researchers, from 3.6 to 3.8 million people were arrested on political charges alone, of which from 748 to 786 thousand were shot.
In April 1935, Stalin initiated legal act, according to which children over the age of twelve could be arrested and punished (including execution) on the same basis as adults. In P. Solomon’s book “Soviet Justice under Stalin,” published in 1998, it was stated that no examples of the execution of death sentences on minors were found in the archives; however, according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, in 2010, Ekho Moskvy journalists found documents about three minors who were shot (one 16-year-old and two 17-year-olds), who were later rehabilitated.
During Stalin's repressions, torture was used on a large scale to extract confessions.
Stalin not only knew about the use of torture, but also personally ordered the use of “methods physical impact“against “enemies of the people” and on occasion even specified what type of torture was to be used. He was the first to order the use of torture against political prisoners after the revolution; this was a measure that Russian revolutionaries rejected until he issued the order. Under Stalin, the methods of the NKVD surpassed all the inventions of the tsarist police in their sophistication and cruelty. Historian Anton Antonov-Ovseenko points out: “He planned, prepared and carried out operations to exterminate unarmed subjects himself. He willingly went into technical details; he was pleased with the opportunity to directly participate in the “exposure” of enemies. The Secretary General took particular pleasure in confrontations, and he more than once indulged himself in these truly diabolical performances.”
The Gulag system was created on the personal orders of Stalin, which he regarded as economic resource. In reality, the work of Gulag prisoners was extremely ineffective, and their productivity was negligible. Thus, output per worker in the Gulag during construction and installation work was approximately 2 times lower than in the civilian sector. The GULAG did not justify the costs for itself and required subsidies for maintenance from the state, which were constantly growing. The Gulag system was already in a huge crisis during Stalin’s lifetime, and everyone except Stalin understood this. Several million were sentenced to various types of fines. The camp guards alone had to support about 300 thousand people, not counting the escort troops and MGB officers.
As N. Vert stated in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio, during Stalin’s reign, more than 20 million went through the Gulag and another 6 million were deported to special settlements. At the same time, Rogovin, referring to archival data, indicates that a total of 10 million people went through the GULAG, 1.8 million people were in special settlements on February 1, 1937, and 2.6 million on February 21, 1939. The maximum number of special settlements was reached in 1950 and amounted to about 3 million people, most of whom were representatives of peoples deported during the war.
The years 1937-1938 saw a period of mass repression, often referred to as the “Great Terror.” The campaign was initiated and supported by Stalin personally and caused extreme damage to the economy and military power of the Soviet Union.
According to the largest expert in the field of internal party relations of the 1920s - 1930s. O. V. Khlevnyuk,
We have every reason to consider the “Great Terror” as a series of centralized, planned and carried out on the basis of decisions of the Politburo (in fact, Stalin) of mass operations to destroy “anti-Soviet elements” and “counter-revolutionary national contingents.” Their goal was to eliminate the “fifth column” in the context of a worsening international situation and the growing threat of war... Stalin’s exceptional role in organizing this surge of terror is beyond doubt and is absolutely confirmed by all documents... Everything that is known today about the preparation and conduct of mass operations of 1937-1938 ., allows us to assert that without Stalin’s orders the “Great Terror” simply would not have happened...
According to Yu. N. Zhukov,
Stalin began to fear that his course towards democratization, the center of which was to be a new Constitution, would fail. And being ready to carry it out at any cost, even through brutal repression, he gave the NKVD a free hand.
Stalin with the head of the NKVD Yezhov, who was shot in 1940.
After the execution, the photo was edited by Soviet censors.
In 1937-1938, large-scale political repressions were carried out against the command and control personnel of the Red Army and the Red Army, which are identified by researchers as one of the manifestations of the policy of “Great Terror” in the USSR. In fact, they began in the second half of 1936, but acquired the greatest scope after the arrest and conviction of M. N. Tukhachevsky and seven other high-ranking military men in May-June 1937; for 1937-1938 their peak occurred, and in 1939-1941, after a sharp decline, they continued with significantly less intensity.
Historians agree that Stalin's repressions in the Red Army caused serious damage to the country's defense capability and, among other factors, led to significant losses of Soviet troops in the initial period of the Great Patriotic War.
Those repressed during these years included three of the five marshals of the Soviet Union, 20 army commanders of the 1st and 2nd rank, 5 fleet flagships of the 1st and 2nd rank, 6 flagships of the 1st rank, 69 corps commanders, 153 division commanders, 247 brigade commanders.
There is still no consensus among historians regarding the scale of repression. Experts note that finding information about the exact number of those repressed is extremely difficult, since repressions in the Red Army were carried out in the strictest secrecy. As a result, exact data is still unknown.
Role in World War II
Pre-war foreign policy
The inevitability of a new big war was quite obvious to the Bolshevik party. Thus, Kamenev L.B. called for the start of a new “even more monstrous, even more disastrous war” in his report “On the capitalist encirclement” at the X Congress of the RCP (b) in 1921. Mikhail Alexandrov, in his work “Stalin’s Foreign Policy Doctrine,” points out that speaking at the ECCI on May 30, 1925, Stalin also stated that “a war will begin in Europe and that they will definitely fight there, there can be no doubt about that.” At the XIV Congress (December 1925), Stalin expressed confidence that Germany would not put up with the terms of the Versailles Peace.
After Hitler came to power, Stalin sharply changed the traditional Soviet policy: if earlier it was aimed at an alliance with Germany against the Versailles system, and through the Comintern - at the fight against the Social Democrats as the main enemy (the theory of “social fascism” is Stalin’s personal attitude), now it was to create a “collective” system security" as part of the USSR and the former Entente countries against Germany and the alliance of communists with all left forces against fascism ("popular front" tactics). This position was initially inconsistent: in 1935, Stalin, alarmed by the German-Polish rapprochement, secretly proposed a non-aggression pact to Hitler, but was refused.
In his speech to graduates of military academies on May 5, 1941, Stalin summed up the rearmament of troops that took place in the 1930s and expressed confidence that the German army was not invincible. Volkogonov D.A. interprets this speech as follows: “The leader made it clear: war in the future is inevitable. We must be prepared for the unconditional defeat of German fascism... The war will be fought on enemy territory, and victory will be achieved with little bloodshed.”
At the same time, Stalin preferred to maneuver between the two main alliances of Western powers. Taking advantage of Germany's clash with England and France in 1939, the USSR occupied the territories of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine and started a war with Finland, for which it was expelled from the League of Nations in December 1939 as an aggressor. As justification for the demands made on Finland, the USSR stated that Germany was planning an attack on Russia, including a lateral attack through Finland.
Until Hitler's attack, the Soviet Union collaborated with Nazi Germany. There is numerous documentary evidence of cooperation of various kinds, from friendship treaties and active trade to joint parades and conferences of the NKVD and the Gestapo. Before signing the friendship treaty, Stalin told Ribbentrop:
However, if, contrary to expectations, Germany finds itself in a difficult situation, then it can be sure that the Soviet people will come to Germany's aid and will not allow Germany to be strangled. The Soviet Union is interested in a strong Germany and will not allow Germany to be brought to the ground...
The Second World War began in 1939 and for almost two years, until June 1941, it went on under the sign of the official friendship of Hitler and Stalin. In December 1939, in response to congratulations on his 60th anniversary, Stalin replied to Ribbentrop:
Thank you, Mr. Minister. The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, sealed with blood, has every reason to be long-lasting and strong.
52% of all Soviet Union exports in 1940 were sent to Germany. Speaking at a session of the Supreme Council on August 1, 1940, Molotov said that Germany received the main support from the Soviet Union in the form of calm confidence in the east.
At the same time, relations between the allies, of course, were not cloudless. Hoffman I. points out that in November 1940, Stalin conveyed to Germany his demands for the further expansion of the Soviet zone of influence into Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary and Finland. These demands were met with extreme hostility by the German government and became one of the reasons for the attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941.
A number of historians blame Stalin personally for the unpreparedness of the Soviet Union for war and huge losses, especially in the initial period of the war, pointing out that many sources cited June 22, 1941 as the date of the attack to Stalin. Thus, Merkulov reported to Stalin the information received from an agent of the Berlin station under the name “sergeant major”: “All German military measures to prepare an armed uprising against the USSR are completely completed, and a strike can be expected at any time.” To this Stalin left a resolution: “Perhaps we should send your “source” from the German headquarters. Aviation to the fucking mother. This is not a “source”, but a disinformer.”
Execution of Polish officers in Katyn
In the spring of 1940, 21,857 Polish prisoners were shot by the NKVD of the USSR.
On November 26, 2010, the State Duma of Russia, with opposition from the Communist Party faction, adopted the statement “On Katyn tragedy and its victims”, in which he admits Katyn massacre a crime committed on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders, and expresses sympathy for the Polish people.
Stalin in the first days of the Great Patriotic War
Already at 5 hours 45 minutes on June 22, Stalin in his office in the Kremlin received the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. M. Molotov, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs L. P. Beria, the People's Commissar of Defense S. K. Timoshenko, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR L. Z. Mekhlis and Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army G.K. Zhukov.
The day after the start of the war (June 23, 1941), the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, by a joint resolution, formed the Headquarters of the Main Command of the Armed Forces of the USSR, which included Stalin and whose chairman was appointed People's Commissar of Defense, Marshal of the Soviet Union S.K. Tymoshenko. June 24 Stalin signs a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on the creation of an Evacuation Council under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, designed to organize the evacuation “population, institutions, military and other cargo, equipment of enterprises and other valuables” western part of the USSR.
When Minsk fell on June 28, Stalin fell into prostration. On June 29, Stalin did not come to the Kremlin, which caused great concern among his circle. On the afternoon of June 30, his Politburo colleagues came to see him in Kuntsevo, and, according to the impression of some of them, Stalin decided that they were going to arrest him. Those present decided to create the State Defense Committee. " We see that Stalin did not participate in the affairs of the country for a little more than a day"- writes R. A. Medvedev.
Military leadership
At the beginning of the war, Stalin was a weak strategist and made many incompetent decisions. As an example of such a decision, Dr. Simon Seabeg-Montefiore cites the situation in September 1941: although all the generals begged Stalin to withdraw troops from Kiev, he allowed the Nazis to take over and kill a military group of five armies.
At the same time, according to Marshal of the Soviet Union G.K. Zhukov, starting from the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin began to show himself as a person “... mastering the issues of organizing front-line operations and operations of groups of fronts and leading them with great knowledge of the matter, having a good understanding of big strategic issues,” and also able to “find the main link in a strategic situation.” In general, G.K. Zhukov evaluates Stalin as “a worthy Supreme Commander-in-Chief.” In addition, G.K. Zhukov considers it necessary to “pay tribute” to J.V. Stalin as an “outstanding organizer” in “ensuring operations, creating strategic reserves, organizing the production of military equipment and, in general, creating everything necessary for waging war.” In 1942 Time magazine named Stalin "man of the year."
The first page of the list of 46 “arrested, listed as members of the NKVD of the USSR” dated January 29, 1942. Resolution of I. Stalin: “Shoot everyone named in the note. I. St."
On the other hand, G.K. Zhukov points out that a number of developments in the art of war (methods of artillery offensive, methods of gaining air superiority, methods of encircling the enemy, dissecting encircled enemy groups and destroying them in parts, and so on), previously attributed personally to I V. Stalin, were in fact the fruit of the activities of a large number of military specialists. Stalin's merit in relation to these developments was, in the opinion of G.K. Zhukov, only in the fact that he developed, generalized and implemented in the form of directive documents the ideas submitted to him by competent people.
Initial period of the war
A week after the start of the war (June 30, 1941), Stalin was appointed Chairman of the newly formed State Defense Committee. On July 3, Stalin made a radio address to the Soviet people, beginning with the words: “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, soldiers of our army and navy! I am addressing you, my friends!” On July 10, 1941, the Headquarters of the Main Command was transformed into the Headquarters of the Supreme Command, and Stalin was appointed chairman instead of Timoshenko.
On July 19, 1941, Stalin replaced Timoshenko as People's Commissar of Defense. On August 8, 1941, Stalin, by Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, was appointed Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the USSR.
On July 31, 1941, Stalin received the personal representative and closest adviser of US President Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins. On December 16-20 in Moscow, Stalin negotiated with British Foreign Minister Eden Eden on the issue of concluding an agreement between the USSR and Great Britain on an alliance in the war against Germany and on post-war cooperation.
On August 16, 1941, Stalin signed Order No. 270 of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, which stated: “Commanders and political workers who, during battle, tear off their insignia and desert to the rear or surrender to the enemy, are considered malicious deserters, whose families are subject to arrest as the families of deserters who violated the oath and betrayed their homeland.”.
During the Battle of Moscow in 1941, after Moscow was declared under a state of siege, Stalin remained in the capital. On November 6, 1941, Stalin spoke at a ceremonial meeting held at the Mayakovskaya metro station, which was dedicated to the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution. In his speech, Stalin explained the unsuccessful start of the war for the Red Army, in particular, “shortage of tanks and partly aviation”.
The next day, November 7, 1941, at the direction of Stalin, a traditional military parade was held on Red Square.
In 1941-1942, the commander-in-chief visited Mozhaisk, Zvenigorod, Solnechnogorsk defensive lines, and was also in the hospital in the Volokolamsk direction and in the 16th Army, where he inspected the operation of BM-13 (Katyusha) rocket launchers, and was in the 316th division I. V. Panfilova. In 1942, Stalin traveled across the Lama River to the airfield to test the aircraft. On August 2 and 3, 1943, he arrived on the Western Front. On August 4 and 5 he was on the Kalinin Front. On August 5, he was on the front line in the village of Khoroshevo (Rzhevsky district). As A.T. Rybin, a member of the commander-in-chief’s personal security, writes: “According to the observation of Stalin’s personal guard, during the war years Stalin behaved recklessly. Members of the Politburo and N. Vlasik literally drove him into shelter from flying fragments and shells exploding in the air.”
On May 30, 1942, Stalin signed a GKO decree on the creation of the Central Headquarters of the partisan movement at the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command. On September 5, 1942, he issues an order “On the tasks of the partisan movement,” which became a program document for the further organization of the struggle behind the invaders’ lines.
On July 28, 1942, Stalin, as People's Commissar of Defense, signed “Order No. 227,” which tightened discipline in the Red Army, prohibited the withdrawal of troops without orders from the leadership, introduced penal battalions as part of the fronts and penal companies as part of the armies, as well as barrage detachments within the armies.
The introduction of barrier detachments was by no means an invention of Stalin; similar methods were already used by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. Researchers V. Krasnov and V. Daines argue that the famous Stalinist order No. 227 actually repeated the provisions of Trotsky’s order No. 65 on the Southern Front of November 24, 1918. Order No. 65 still shocks us with its cruelty; he demanded the shooting not only of deserters, but also of their concealers and the burning of their houses.
A turning point during the Great Patriotic War
On February 11, 1943, Stalin signed a GKO decree on the start of work on the creation of an atomic bomb. The beginning of a radical change in the war, which began in Battle of Stalingrad continued during the Winter Offensive of the Red Army in 1943. In the Battle of Kursk, what began at Stalingrad was completed, a radical turning point occurred not only in the Second World War, but in the entire Second World War.
Stalin, F. D. Roosevelt and W. Churchill at the Tehran Conference
On November 25, Stalin, accompanied by the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. M. Molotov and a member of the State Defense Committee, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR K. E. Voroshilov, travels to Stalingrad and Baku, from where he flies by plane to Tehran (Iran). From November 28 to December 1, 1943, Stalin participated in the Tehran Conference - the first conference of the Big Three during the Second World War - the leaders of three countries: the USSR, the USA and Great Britain.
End of the war
February 4 - February 11, 1945 Stalin participates in Yalta Conference Allied powers dedicated to establishing a post-war world order.
A number of people emphasize the importance of the fact that it was the Soviet flag that was hoisted over the Reichstag. Candidate of Sciences Nikita Sokolov on the radio “Echo of Moscow” explains this by the fact that the Americans and the British refused to take several large cities, including Berlin, since this could lead to large casualties.
At the same time, J. Boffa points out that, in contrast to the plans of General Eisenhower, “Churchill and the British generals sought to reach Berlin at any cost before the Russians got there”:
At the beginning of April, therefore, Stalin had two mutually exclusive documents in his hands: a message from Eisenhower and a Soviet intelligence report claiming that Montgomery’s troops were preparing to strike Berlin. Stalin praised Eisenhower's loyalty, but still decided to resort to cunning. In a response to the American general, he approved his plans and at the same time assured him that Berlin had lost its “former strategic importance” and that, in connection with this, Soviet troops would send only a minor group of forces to take the city. In fact, he had just signed a directive to carry out the last major offensive of this war - on the German capital. In the eyes of the Soviet people, the capture of Berlin was supposed to serve as the necessary crowning of their victory. It wasn't just a matter of prestige. Berlin in their hands meant a guarantee that the USSR would be able to force others to take their opinion into account when deciding the fate of Germany.
Researcher G.P. Kynin also believes that Stalin, having learned about the plans of his Anglo-American allies, also deliberately misinformed them, informing them that the main attack of the Soviet troops was supposedly scheduled for the “second half of May” (in fact, the offensive began on April 16, although the 2nd Belorussian Front did not have time to prepare for it).
In his message to President Roosevelt on April 1, 1945, Churchill bluntly stated that “... from a political point of view we should push Germany as far east as possible and that should Berlin come within our reach we should certainly take". General Eisenhower responded to Churchill's concerns as follows: "Of course, if at any time resistance is suddenly broken along the entire front, we will rush forward, and Lubeck and Berlin will be among our important objectives."
With the beginning of the Soviet Army Berlin operation On April 16, 1945, Churchill realized that Anglo-American troops were physically unable to break through to Berlin at that time, and focused on occupying Lübeck in order to prevent the Soviet occupation of Denmark.
Orlando Figes, a professor of Russian history at the University of London, on the Discovery Civilization TV channel, disputes the widespread opinion about Stalin’s merits in the victory, pointing out the complete unpreparedness of industry, agriculture and the country’s morale for war in 1941.
Deportations of peoples
In the USSR, many peoples were subjected to total deportation, among them: Koreans, Germans, Ingrian Finns, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks. Of these, seven - Germans, Karachais, Kalmyks, Ingush, Chechens, Balkars and Crimean Tatars - also lost their national autonomy.
Many other ethnic, ethno-confessional and social categories of Soviet citizens were deported to the USSR: Cossacks, “kulaks” of various nationalities, Poles, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Iranian Jews, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians , Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Kabardians, Hemshin Armenians, Dashnaks Armenians, Turks, Tajiks and others.
The deportations caused colossal damage to the USSR, its economy, culture, and traditions of peoples. Well-established economic and cultural ties between peoples were interrupted, and the national consciousness of the masses was deformed. Authority has been undermined state power, the negative aspects of state policy in the sphere of national relations emerged.
Post-war years
Economic policy. Development of the military-industrial complex
On December 14, 1947, Stalin signed Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks No. 4004 “On carrying out monetary reform and the abolition of cards for food and industrial goods.” The monetary reform was carried out in the form of denomination with confiscation and was very similar to the reform in post-Soviet Russia in 1993. That is, all savings were confiscated from the population. Old money was exchanged for new ones in the proportion for 10 rubles only 1 ruble.
On October 20, 1948, Resolution No. 3960 of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was adopted “On the plan for field protective forest plantations, the introduction of grass crop rotations, the construction of ponds and reservoirs to ensure high sustainable yields in the steppe and forest-steppe regions of the European part of the USSR,” which was included in history as Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature. An integral part of this grandiose plan was large-scale construction industrial power plants and channels that received the name Great construction projects of communism.
In the year of Stalin's death average calorie content the daily diet of an agricultural worker was 17% below the 1928 level. According to secret data from the CSB, the pre-revolutionary level of nutrition in terms of calories per day was achieved only in the late 50s - early 60s.
On July 24, 1945, in Potsdam, Truman informed Stalin that the United States “now there is a weapon of extraordinary destructive power”. According to Churchill's recollections, Stalin smiled, but did not become interested in the details. From this, Churchill concluded that Stalin did not understand anything and was not aware of events. That same evening, Stalin ordered Molotov to talk with Kurchatov about accelerating work on the atomic project. On August 20, 1945, to manage the atomic project, the State Defense Committee created a Special Committee with emergency powers, headed by L.P. Beria. An executive body was created under the Special Committee - the First Main Directorate under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (PGU). Stalin's directive obliged the PGU to ensure the creation of atomic bombs, uranium and plutonium, in 1948. On January 25, 1946, Stalin first met with the developer of the atomic bomb, Academician I.V. Kurchatov; Present at the meeting are: Chairman of the Special Committee on the Use of Atomic Energy L. P. Beria, People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs V. M. Molotov, Chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee N. A. Voznesensky, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars G. M. Malenkov, People's Commissar of Foreign Trade A. I. Mikoyan, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks A. A. Zhdanov, President of the USSR Academy of Sciences S. I. Vavilov, Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences S. V. Kaftanov. In 1946, Stalin signed about sixty documents that determined the development of atomic science and technology, the result of which was the successful test of the first Soviet atomic bomb on August 29, 1949 at a test site in the Semipalatinsk region of the Kazakh SSR and the construction of the world's first nuclear power plant in Obninsk (1954) .
Death
Stalin died at his official residence - the Near Dacha, where he constantly lived in the post-war period. On March 1, 1953, one of the guards found him lying on the floor of a small dining room. On the morning of March 2, doctors arrived at Nizhnyaya Dacha and diagnosed paralysis on the right side of the body. On March 5 at 21:50, Stalin died. According to the medical report, death was caused by a cerebral hemorrhage.
The medical history and autopsy results show that Stalin had several ischemic strokes (lacunar, but probably also atherothrombotic), which, according to the President of the World Federation of Neurologists W. Hacinski, led not only to vascular cognitive impairment, but also to a progressive disorder psyche.
Tombstone of J.V. Stalin at the Kremlin wall. 2011
There are numerous versions suggesting the unnaturalness of death and the involvement of Stalin’s entourage in it. According to historian I.I. Chigirin, N.S. Khrushchev should be considered the murderer-conspirator. Other historians consider L.P. Beria to be involved in the death of Stalin. Almost all researchers agree that Stalin's associates contributed (not necessarily intentionally) to his death by not rushing to call for medical help.
Stalin's embalmed body was placed in the Lenin Mausoleum, which in 1953-1961 was called the “Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin.” On October 30, 1961, the XXII Congress of the CPSU decided that “Stalin’s serious violations of Lenin’s covenants... make it impossible to leave the coffin with his body in the Mausoleum”. On the night of October 31 to November 1, 1961, Stalin's body was taken out of the Mausoleum and buried in a grave near the Kremlin wall.
Assessments of Stalin's personality
Professor A.A. Kara-Murza, speaking on the Ekho Moskvy radio station, stated that Stalin himself created a powerful cult of his own personality and dealt with this as a priority topic throughout the years of his reign, until March 1953. According to the professor, the cult was created by editing biographies, destroying witnesses, creating new textbooks, and interfering in any science, art and culture.
According to Yu. N. Zhukov, at the XX Congress of the CPSU “evolution happened... ago. The conservative part of the partyocracy has become so strong that it has already dared to place full responsibility for its past atrocities on the cult of the late dictator, and to present itself as victims.”.
The idea of the cult was that the entire Soviet people owed everything to the party, the state and their leader. And one of the aspects of this system of “gifts” was the need to express gratitude to Stalin, for example, for social services and in general for everything that you have. As Jeffrey Brooks, a professor of Russian history at Johns Hopkins University, notes, the famous phrase “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!” meant that children had a happy childhood only because Stalin provided it for them.
During Stalin's lifetime, Soviet propaganda created a halo around him "great leader and teacher". Many enterprises and organizations received an additional name to their name "them. I.V. Stalin"; Stalin's name could be found in the names of Soviet equipment produced in the 1930-1950s (Stalinets-1, Parovozov IS, Stalinets-60, IS-1 and IS-2 tanks). In press Stalin period his name was mentioned in the same breath as Marx, Engels and Lenin. Songs are written about Stalin: to the words of the poet A. A. Surkov, the songs “Stalin’s will led us” (composer V. I. Muradeli) and “Song about Stalin” (music by M. I. Blanter) are sung. In 1939, composer S. S. Prokofiev created the cantata “Zdravitsa” dedicated to Stalin. Stalin's name is mentioned in fiction literary works and in feature films.
It should be noted that geographical objects in many countries of the world were also named after Stalin.
After Stalin's death, public opinion about Stalin was largely shaped in accordance with the position of officials of the USSR and Russia. After the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Soviet historians assessed Stalin taking into account the position of the ideological bodies of the USSR. In the index of names to To the full meeting In the works of Lenin, published in 1974, the following is written about Stalin:
Along with the positive side, Stalin’s activities also had a negative side. While holding the most important party and government posts, Stalin committed gross violations of the Leninist principles of collective leadership and the norms of party life, violations of socialist legality, and unjustified mass repressions against prominent government, political and military figures of the Soviet Union and other honest Soviet people.
A report from the Carnegie Foundation (2013) notes that if in 1989 Stalin’s “rating” in the list of the greatest historical figures was minimal (12%, Lenin - 72%, Peter I - 38%, Alexander Pushkin - 25%), then in 2012 year he was in first place with 49%. According to a public opinion poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation on February 18-19, 2006, 47% of Russian residents considered Stalin’s role in history to be generally positive, 29% - negative. During the survey (May 7 - December 28, 2008) of public opinion, organized by the Rossiya TV channel in order to select the most valued, noticeable and symbolic personality Russian history, Stalin occupied the leading position by a large margin. As a result, Stalin took third place, losing about 1% of the votes to the first two historical figures.
The Carnegie Endowment's report on assessing the role of Stalin in modern Russia and Transcaucasia (2013) notes that his personality is still admired by a large number of people in the post-Soviet space. When answering the question “Which words best describe your attitude towards Stalin?”, the majority of Russians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis chose indifference(32%, 25 and 15% respectively), while Georgians - respect(27%), among Russians and Armenians respect- 21 and 16%. The authors of the report noted that the majority of respondents highly appreciate Stalin’s contribution to the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany, however, the overwhelming majority has a very negative attitude towards Stalin’s repressions - more than half of the survey participants believe that there can be no justification for them. However, about 20% responded that there may have been a political need for the repression. The report also talks about two opposing trends: on the one hand, “support for Stalin in Russia increased after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” on the other, young people are increasingly indifferent to the controversial historical figure.
At the beginning of 2015, Levada Center noted that the positive attitude of Russians towards Joseph Stalin reached its maximum in all years of measurements (52% of respondents).
Positive
In the obituary on the death of J.V. Stalin in the Manchester Guardian newspaper dated March 6, 1953, his truly historical achievement is called the transformation of the Soviet Union from an economically backward one to the level of the second industrialized country in the world.
The essence of Stalin's historical achievements is that he accepted Russia with a plow, and left it with nuclear reactors. He raised Russia to the level of the second industrial power in the world. This was not the result of purely material progress and organization. Such achievements would not have been possible without a comprehensive cultural revolution, during which the entire population attended school and studied very hard.
Original text (English):
The core of Stalin's historic achievements consists in this, that he had found Russia working with wooden ploughs and is leaving her equipped with atomic piles. He has raised Russia to the level of the second industrial Power of the world. This was not a matter of mere material progress and organization. No such achievement would have been possible without a vast cultural revolution, in the course of which a whole nation was sent to school to undergo a most intensive education. Isaac Deutscher. End of Stalinism. // The Manchester Guardian. - 1953. - March 6
In 1956, the phrase about the plow and the nuclear reactor was included in the article “Stalin” in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
According to the English historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Stalin had outstanding intellectual abilities: for example, he could read Plato in the original. When Stalin came to power, the historian continues, he always wrote his speeches and articles himself in a clear and often sophisticated style.
According to Simon Sebag-Montefiore, the myth of the ignorant Stalin was created by Trotsky. But in fact, Stalin's library consisted of 20,000 volumes; he spent many hours every day reading books, making notes in their margins and cataloging them. At the same time, Stalin's tastes in reading were eclectic: Chekhov's Maupassant admired Dostoevsky, considering him a wonderful psychologist.
The English writer Charles Snow also characterized Stalin's educational level as quite high:
“One of the many curious circumstances related to Stalin: he was much more educated in a literary sense than any of the statesmen of his time. In comparison, Lloyd George and Churchill are surprisingly poorly read people. As, indeed, did Roosevelt.".
Negative
Some historians believe that Stalin established a personal dictatorship; others believe that until the mid-1930s the dictatorship was collective in nature. According to the historian O. V. Khlevnyuk, the Stalinist dictatorship was an extremely centralized regime, relying primarily on powerful party-state structures, terror and violence, as well as mechanisms of ideological manipulation of society, selection of privileged groups and the formation of pragmatic strategies. According to Oxford University professor R. Hingley, for a quarter of a century before his death, Stalin had more political power than any other figure in history. He was not just a symbol of the regime, but a leader who made fundamental decisions and was the initiator of all any significant government measures. Each member of the Politburo had to confirm his agreement with the decisions made by Stalin, at the same time, Stalin shifted responsibility for their implementation to the persons accountable to him.
Some politicians, scientists, cultural and artistic figures, historians, sociologists, as well as the Moscow Patriarchate are of the opinion that the victory took place not thanks to, but in spite of Stalin. An open letter from 25 figures of Soviet science, literature and art speaks of Stalin’s responsibility for his unpreparedness for war. In an open letter dated April 20, 2010, the veterans also criticized Stalin, describing his collusion with Hitler as “criminal.” At the same time, other veterans suggested celebrating Stalin’s merits during the war years with the help of videos and posters. According to the English historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore, at the beginning of the war Stalin " made incompetent decisions. Their name is Legion. The most egregious of them: in September 1941, when all the generals begged him to withdraw troops from Kiev, he allowed the Nazis to take and kill a military group of five armies. Only towards the end of the war did Stalin become a military strategist and was able to lead his country to victory. But at what cost!»
According to Daniel Rancourt-Laferrière, Stalin did not speak a single European language, was a poor orator, and was considered, at best, a very mediocre theoretician.
Under Stalin, entire scientific fields were suppressed and banned, and persecution was organized against many prominent scientists, engineers and doctors, which caused colossal damage to Russian science and culture. In some cases, these campaigns contained elements of anti-Semitism. To one degree or another, ideological intervention affected such disciplines as: physics, chemistry, astronomy, linguistics, statistics, literary criticism, philosophy, sociology, demography, economics, genetics, pedology, history and cybernetics. Leading demographers of the TsUNKHU were shot after Stalin did not like the results of the 1937 census, which showed large population losses from famine compared to the estimated number. As a result, until the mid-1950s, no one knew how many people lived in the Soviet Union.
Doctor of Historical Sciences Gennady Kostyrchenko argues that Stalin was characterized by personal anti-Semitism, manifestations of which were noted even in the pre-revolutionary period, in the 1920s in the fight against the Trotskyist opposition. There is a number of evidence of Stalin’s personal anti-Semitism, which manifested itself already in early years his political activities. In particular, based on the complaint of Yakov Sverdlov, who was in exile with Stalin before the revolution, the court of honor of the exiles censured Stalin for anti-Semitism. In addition to Sverdlov, Stalin’s anti-Semitism was noted in their memoirs by his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, his former secretary Boris Bazhanov and a number of other people who knew him closely. Polish General Wladislaw Anders wrote about this in his memoirs.
Stalin did not hesitate to emphasize the Jewishness of his political opponents and, in particular, Trotsky. According to the Concise Jewish Encyclopedia, the persecution of the opposition in 1927 took on part of the character of an anti-Semitic campaign. Publicly, Stalin issued an official statement in 1931 severely condemning anti-Semitism.
After the Great Patriotic War in 1948-1953, a number of repressive actions and campaigns in the USSR were, according to researchers, anti-Jewish in nature. The most famous actions of this kind were the so-called “fight against cosmopolitanism”, the defeat of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the “Doctors’ Plot”. As Gennady Kostyrchenko writes, “the scale of official anti-Semitism that took place in the USSR at the beginning of 1953 was the maximum permissible within the framework of the then existing political-ideological system.” These actions caused protests even among the international communist movement. Thus, according to Howard Fast, in 1949 the National Committee of the Communist Party of the USA officially accused the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of “blatant acts of anti-Semitism.”
Mental condition
Mental health is the subject of research and analysis by a number of experts, such as psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, neurologists, sociologists and historians. Researchers note such traits in Stalin's character as: narcissism, vanity, sociopathy, sadistic tendencies, persecution mania and paranoidity. Erich Fromm puts Stalin on a par with Hitler and Himmler in terms of destructiveness and sadism. Historian Robert Tucker argues that Stalin was mentally ill ("a pathological personality somewhere on the continuum of psychiatric manifestations meaning paranoia"). Medical history and autopsy results show that Stalin had several ischemic strokes (lacunar, but probably also atherothrombotic), which, according to the President of the World Federation of Neurologists, Vladimir Khachinsky, led not only to vascular cognitive impairment, but also to progressive mental disorder .
Stalin in the assessment of the leaders of the USSR and Russia
- First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee N.S. Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, in his report “On the cult of personality and its consequences,” stated that Stalin “moved from the position of ideological struggle to the path of administrative suppression, to the path of mass repression, to the path of terror. He acted more and more widely and persistently through punitive agencies, often violating all existing moral norms and Soviet laws.”
- According to the position of ex-USSR President M.S. Gorbachev, “Stalin is a man covered in blood.”
- In 2009, Chairman of the Russian Government V.V. Putin said that under Stalin’s leadership the country “transformed from an agricultural one to an industrial one. True, there was no peasantry left, but industrialization did take place. We won the Great Patriotic War. And no matter who said anything, victory was achieved.” At the same time, the Russian Prime Minister called the repressions that took place “an unacceptable way of governing the state.”
- Russian President D. A. Medvedev, speaking about the Katyn tragedy, said that this was “the crime of Stalin and a number of his henchmen.” The President noted that “Stalin committed a lot of crimes against his people... And, despite the fact that he worked hard, despite the fact that under his leadership the country achieved success, what was done to his own people cannot be forgiven "
International condemnation
- Ukraine: January 13, 2010 Court of Appeal Kyiv found Stalin and other Soviet leaders guilty of the genocide of the Ukrainian people in 1932-1933, as a result of which, according to the judge, 3 million 941 thousand people died in Ukraine. The court stated that the pre-trial investigative body did not and could not bring charges against I.V. Stalin and others in connection with their death, and no conviction was made against them in this criminal case. The court decided to close the criminal case initiated on the basis of genocide in connection with the death of Stalin I.V. and others.
- European Union: The European organization PACE also condemned Stalin's policies, which, according to PACE, led to the famine and the death of millions of people. On April 2, 2009, the European Parliament adopted a Declaration proposing to declare August 23 a day of remembrance for the victims of Stalinism and Nazism. The Declaration refers to: “mass deportations, murders and acts of enslavement committed in the context of acts of aggression by Stalinism and Nazism, falling within the category of war crimes and crimes against humanity. According to the norms international law, the statute of limitations does not apply to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Additional Information
- Currently, Stalin is listed as an honorary citizen of the city of Ceske Budejovice (Czech Republic). From November 7, 1947 to April 29, 2004, Stalin was listed as an honorary citizen of Budapest. From 1947 to 2007 he was also an honorary citizen of the Slovak city of Kosice.
- January 1, 1940 American magazine Time called Stalin “man of the year” (1939). The editors of the magazine explained their choice with the conclusion "Nazi-communist" non-aggression pact and the outbreak of the Soviet-Finnish war, as a result of which, in the opinion Time, Stalin radically changed the balance of political forces and became Hitler's partner in aggression. On January 4, 1943, the magazine named Stalin “man of the year” for the second time. The article about this event said: “Only Joseph Stalin knows exactly how close Russia came to defeat in 1942. And only Joseph Stalin knows for certain what he had to do for Russia to overcome this..."
- Stalin's native language was Georgian. Stalin learned Russian later and always spoke with a noticeable Georgian accent. In addition to Russian and Georgian, he also knew Ancient Greek and Church Slavonic (which he began to study at the Gori Theological School). Stalin himself wrote in his questionnaires that he read in German and English languages. Historian V.V. Pokhlebkin writes that Stalin also understood Farsi (Persian), understood Armenian, and in the mid-1920s also studied French, but there is no information about the results of these studies.
Popular biographies
Stalin's period in power was marked by mass repressions from 1937 to 1939. and 1943, sometimes directed against entire social strata and ethnic groups, the destruction of outstanding figures of science and art, persecution of the Church and religion in general, the forced industrialization of the country, which turned the USSR into a country with one of the most powerful economies in the world, collectivization, which led to the death of the country's agriculture, the mass exodus of peasants from the countryside and the famine of 1932-1933, the victory in the Great Patriotic War, the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the transformation of the USSR into a superpower with enormous military-industrial potential, the beginning of the Cold War. Russian public opinion regarding Stalin's personal merit or responsibility for the listed phenomena has not yet been fully formed.
Name and nicknames
Stalin's real name is Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (his name and his father's name in Georgian sound like Ioseb and Besarion), his diminutive name is Soso. Very early, a version appeared according to which the surname Dzhugashvili is not Georgian, but Ossetian (Dzugati/Dzugaev), which was only given a Georgian form (the sound “dz” was replaced by “j”, the ending of Ossetian surnames “you” was replaced by the Georgian “shvili”) . Before the revolution, Dzhugashvili used a large number of pseudonyms, in particular, Besoshvili (Beso is a diminutive of Vissarion), Nizheradze, Chizhikov, Ivanovich. Of these, besides Stalin, the most famous pseudonym was “Koba” - as is usually believed (based on the opinion of Stalin’s childhood friend Iremashvili), after the name of the hero of Kazbegi’s novel “The Patricide”, a noble robber who, according to Iremashvili, was the idol of young Soso . According to V. Pokhlebkin, the pseudonym came from the Persian king Kavad (in another spelling Kobades), who conquered Georgia and made Tbilisi the capital of the country, whose name in Georgian sounds Koba. Kavad was known as a supporter of Mazdakism, a movement that promoted early communist views. Traces of interest in Persia and Kavad are found in Stalin’s speeches of 1904-07. The origin of the pseudonym “Stalin” is usually associated with the Russian translation of the ancient Georgian word “dzhuga” - “steel”. Thus, the pseudonym “Stalin” is a literal translation into Russian of his real last name.
During the Great Patriotic War, he was usually addressed not by his first name, patronymic or military rank (“Comrade Marshal (Generalissimo) of the Soviet Union”), but simply “Comrade Stalin.”
Childhood and youth
Born on December 6 (18), 1878 (according to the entry in the metric book of the Gori Assumption Cathedral Church) in Georgia in the city of Gori, although starting from 1929 [source?], his birthday was officially considered December 9 (21), 1879. He was the third son in family, the first two died in infancy. His native language was Georgian; Stalin learned Russian later, but always spoke with a noticeable Georgian accent. According to his daughter Svetlana, Stalin, however, sang in Russian with virtually no accent.
He grew up in poverty, in the family of a shoemaker and the daughter of a serf. Father Vissarion (Beso) drank and beat his son and wife; Stalin later recalled how as a child, in self-defense, he threw a knife at his father and almost killed him. Subsequently, Beso left home and became a wanderer. Exact date his death is unknown; Stalin's peer Iremashvili claims that he was stabbed to death in a drunken brawl when Soso was 11 years old (possibly confused with his brother Georgiy); according to other sources, he died a natural death much later. Stalin himself considered him alive back in 1909. Mother Ketevan (Keke) Geladze was known as a strict woman, but she loved her son dearly and strived to give him a career, which she associated with the position of a priest. According to some reports (which are mainly adhered to by Stalin's opponents), his relationship with his mother was cool. Stalin did not come to her funeral in 1937, but only sent a wreath with the inscription in Russian and Georgian: “To my dear and beloved mother from her son Joseph Dzhugashvili (from Stalin).” Perhaps his absence was due to the trial of Tukhachevsky that unfolded in those days.
In 1888, Joseph entered the Gori Theological School. In July 1894, upon graduating from college, Joseph was noted as the best student. His certificate contains A's in many subjects. Here is a fragment of his certificate:
A student of the Gori Theological School, Dzhugashvili Joseph... entered the first grade of the school in September 1889 and, with excellent behavior (5), showed success:
According to the Sacred History of the Old Testament - (5)
Best of the day
According to the Sacred History of the New Testament - (5)
According to the Orthodox Catechism - (5)
Explanation of worship with the church charter - (5)
Russian with Church Slavonic - (5)
Greek - (4) very good
Georgian - (5) excellent
Arithmetic - (4) very good
Geographies - (5)
Calligraphy - (5)
Church singing:
Russian - (5)
and Georgian - (5)
In September of the same 1894, Joseph, having brilliantly passed the entrance exams, was enrolled in the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi). Without completing the full course of study, he was expelled from the seminary in 1899 (according to the official Soviet version, for promoting Marxism; according to seminary documents, for failure to appear for an exam). In his youth, Soso always strived to be a leader and studied well, scrupulously completing his homework.
Memoirs of Joseph Iremashvili
Joseph Iremashvili, a friend and classmate of the young Stalin at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, was expelled from the USSR in 1922, after being released from prison. In 1932, a book of his memoirs was published in Berlin. German“Stalin and the Tragedy of Georgia” (German: “Stalin und die Tragoedie Georgiens”), which covered the youth of the then leader of the CPSU (b) in a negative light. According to Iremashvili, young Stalin was characterized by rancor, vindictiveness, deceit, ambition and lust for power. According to him, the humiliations suffered in childhood made Stalin “cruel and heartless, like his father. He was convinced that the person to whom other people should obey must be like his father, and therefore he soon developed a deep dislike for everyone who was above him in position. From childhood, the goal of his life was revenge, and he subordinated everything to this goal.” Iremashvili ends his description with the words: “It was a triumph for him to achieve victory and inspire fear.”
From the reading circle, according to Iremashvili, the aforementioned novel by the Georgian nationalist Kazbegi “The Patricide” made a special impression on young Soso, with whose hero - the abrek Koba - he identified himself. According to Iremashvili, “Koba became a god for Coco, the meaning of his life. He would like to become the second Koba, a fighter and hero, famous like this last one."
Before the revolution
1915 active member of the RSDLP(b)
In 1901-1902, member of the Tiflis and Batumi committees of the RSDLP. After the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP (1903) - Bolshevik. He was repeatedly arrested, exiled, and escaped exile. Participant in the revolution of 1905-1907. In December 1905, delegate to the 1st conference of the RSDLP (Tammerfors). Delegate to the IV and V congresses of the RSDLP 1906-1907. In 1907-1908, member of the Baku Committee of the RSDLP. At the plenum of the Central Committee after the 6th (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (1912), he was co-opted in absentia into the Central Committee and the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) (he was not elected at the conference itself). Trotsky, in his biography of Stalin, believed that this was facilitated by Stalin’s personal letter to V.I. Lenin, where he said that he agreed to any responsible work. In those years when the influence of Bolshevism was clearly declining, this made a great impression on Lenin.
In 1906-1907 led the so-called expropriation in Transcaucasia. In particular, on June 25, 1907, in order to raise funds for the needs of the Bolsheviks, he organized the robbery of a cash-in-transit carriage in Tiflis.[source?]
In 1912-1913, while working in St. Petersburg, he was one of the main employees in the first mass Bolshevik newspaper Pravda.
At this time, Stalin, at the direction of V.I. Lenin, wrote the work “Marxism and the National Question,” in which he expressed Bolshevik views on how to resolve the national question and criticized the program of “cultural-national autonomy” of the Austro-Hungarian socialists. This caused Lenin to have an extremely positive attitude towards him, who called him a “wonderful Georgian.”
In 1913 he was exiled to the village of Kureika, Turukhansk Territory, and was in exile until 1917.
After the February Revolution he returned to Petrograd. Before Lenin's arrival from exile, he led the activities of the Central Committee and the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolshevik Party. In 1917, he was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Pravda, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and the Military Revolutionary Center. In relation to the Provisional Government and its policies, I proceeded from the fact that the democratic revolution was not yet completed, and overthrowing the government was not a practical task. Due to Lenin’s forced departure into hiding, Stalin spoke at the VI Congress of the RSDLP(b) with a report to the Central Committee. Participated in the October armed uprising as a member of the party center under its leadership. After the victory of the October Revolution of 1917, he joined the Council of People's Commissars as People's Commissar for Nationalities.
Civil War
After the outbreak of the civil war, Stalin was sent to the south of Russia as an extraordinary representative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for the procurement and export of grain from the North Caucasus to industrial centers. Arriving in Tsaritsyn on June 6, 1918, Stalin took power in the city into his own hands, established a regime of terror there and began defending Tsaritsyn from the troops of Ataman Krasnov. However, the very first military measures taken by Stalin together with Voroshilov resulted in defeats for the Red Army. Blaming “military experts” for these defeats, Stalin carried out mass arrests and executions. After Krasnov came close to the city and semi-blocked it, Stalin was recalled from Tsaritsyn at the decisive insistence of Trotsky. Soon after Stalin left, the city fell. Lenin condemned Stalin for the executions. Stalin, being absorbed in military affairs, did not forget about the development of domestic production. So, he then wrote to Lenin about sending meat to Moscow: “There are more cattle here than necessary... It would be good to organize at least one canning factory, set up a slaughterhouse, etc..”
In January 1919, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky travel to Vyatka to investigate the reasons for the defeat of the Red Army near Perm and the surrender of the city to the forces of Admiral Kolchak. The Stalin-Dzerzhinsky Commission contributed to the reorganization and restoration of combat effectiveness of the broken 3rd Army; however, in general, the situation on the Perm front was corrected by the fact that Ufa was taken by the Red Army, and Kolchak already on January 6 gave the order to concentrate forces in the Ufa direction and move to defense near Perm. Stalin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his work on the Petrograd Front. The firmness of decisions, unprecedented efficiency and a smart combination of military-organizational and political activities made it possible to acquire many supporters.
In the summer of 1920, Stalin, sent to the Polish front, encouraged Budyonny to disobey command orders to transfer the 1st Cavalry Army from near Lvov to the Warsaw direction, which, according to some historians, had fatal consequences for the Red Army campaign.
1920s
RSDLP - RSDLP(b) - RCP(b) - VKP(b) - CPSU
In April 1922, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) elected Stalin as General Secretary of the Central Committee. L. D. Trotsky considered G. E. Zinoviev to be the initiator of this appointment, but perhaps it was V. I. Lenin himself, who sharply changed his attitude towards Trotsky after the so-called. “discussions about trade unions” (this version was set out in the famous “Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” and was considered mandatory during Stalin’s lifetime). Initially, this position meant only the leadership of the party apparatus, while the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Lenin, formally remained the leader of the party and government. In addition, leadership in the party was considered inextricably linked to the merits of the theorist; therefore, following Lenin, Trotsky, L.B. Kamenev, Zinoviev and N.I. Bukharin were considered the most prominent “leaders,” while Stalin was seen to have neither theoretical merits nor special merits in the revolution.
Lenin highly valued Stalin's organizational skills; Stalin was considered an expert on the national question, although in recent years Lenin noted his “Great Russian chauvinism.” On this basis (the “Georgian incident”) Lenin clashed with Stalin; Stalin's despotic behavior and his rudeness towards Krupskaya made Lenin repent of his appointment, and in his "Letter to the Congress" Lenin stated that Stalin was too rude and should be removed from the post of General Secretary.
But due to illness, Lenin withdrew from political activity. The highest power in the party (and in fact in the country) belonged to the Politburo. In the absence of Lenin, it consisted of 6 people - Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin and M.P. Tomsky, where all issues were decided by a majority vote. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev organized a “troika” based on opposition to Trotsky, whom they had a negative attitude towards since the Civil War (frictions between Trotsky and Stalin began over the defense of Tsaritsyn and between Trotsky and Zinoviev over the defense of Petrograd, Kamenev supported almost everything Zinoviev). Tomsky, being a leader of trade unions, had a negative attitude towards Trotsky since the time of the so-called. "discussions about trade unions". Bukharin could become Trotsky's only supporter, but his triumvirs began to gradually win him over to their side.
Trotsky began to resist. He sent a letter to the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (Central Control Commission) demanding strengthening of democracy in the party. Soon other oppositionists, not only Trotskyists, sent a similar so-called message to the Politburo. "Statement of the 46." The Troika then showed its power, mainly using the resources of the apparatus led by Stalin. At the XIII Conference of the RCP(b) all oppositionists were convicted. Stalin's influence increased greatly.
On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. The Troika united with Bukharin, A.I. Rykov, Tomsky and V.V. Kuibyshev, forming the so-called Politburo (which included Rykov as a member and Kuibyshev as a candidate member). "seven". Later, at the August plenum of 1924, this “seven” even became an official body, albeit secret and extra-statutory.
The XIII Congress of the RSDLP (b) turned out to be difficult for Stalin. Before the start of the congress, Lenin's widow N.K. Krupskaya handed over a “Letter to the Congress.” It was announced at a meeting of the Council of Elders (a non-statutory body consisting of members of the Central Committee and leaders of local party organizations). Stalin announced his resignation for the first time at this meeting. Kamenev proposed to resolve the issue by voting. The majority was in favor of leaving Stalin as General Secretary; only Trotsky's supporters voted against. Then a proposal was voted on that the document should be read out at closed meetings of individual delegations, while no one had the right to take notes and the “Testament” could not be referred to at the meetings of the congress. Thus, the “Letter to the Congress” was not even mentioned in the materials of the congress. It was first announced by N. S. Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956. Later, this fact was used by the opposition to criticize Stalin and the party (it was argued that the Central Committee “hidden” Lenin’s “testament”). Stalin himself (in connection with this letter, who several times raised the question of his resignation before the plenum of the Central Committee) rejected these accusations. Just two weeks after the congress, where Stalin's future victims Zinoviev and Kamenev used all their influence to keep him in office, Stalin opened fire on his own allies. First, he took advantage of a typo (“NEPman” instead of “NEP” in Kamenev’s quotation from Lenin:
I read in the newspaper a report by one of the comrades at the XIII Congress (Kamenev, I think), where it was written in black and white that another slogan Our party is supposedly transforming “NEPMAN Russia” into socialist Russia. Moreover, what’s even worse, this strange slogan is attributed to none other than Lenin himself
In the same report, Stalin accused Zinoviev, without naming him, of the principle of “dictatorship of the party”, put forward at the XII Congress, and this thesis was recorded in the resolution of the congress and Stalin himself voted for it. Stalin’s main allies in the “seven” were Bukharin and Rykov.
A new split emerged in the Politburo in October 1925, when Zinoviev, Kamenev, G. Ya. Sokolnikov and Krupskaya presented a document that criticized the party line from a “left” point of view. (Zinoviev led the Leningrad communists, Kamenev led the Moscow ones, and among the working class of large cities, which lived worse than before the First World War, there was strong dissatisfaction with low wages and rising prices for agricultural products, which led to the demand for pressure on the peasantry and especially on the kulaks ). The Seven broke up. At that moment, Stalin began to unite with the “right” Bukharin-Rykov-Tomsky, who expressed the interests primarily of the peasantry. In the internal party struggle that began between the “right” and “left,” he provided them with the forces of the party apparatus, and they (namely Bukharin) acted as theorists. The “new opposition” of Zinoviev and Kamenev was condemned at the XIV Congress
By that time, the theory of the victory of socialism in one country had emerged. This view was developed by Stalin in the brochure “On Questions of Leninism” (1926) and Bukharin. They divided the question of the victory of socialism into two parts - the question of the complete victory of socialism, i.e. about the possibility of building socialism and the complete impossibility of restoring capitalism by internal forces, and the question of final victory, that is, the impossibility of restoration due to the intervention of Western powers, which would be excluded only by establishing a revolution in the West.
Trotsky, who did not believe in socialism in one country, joined Zinoviev and Kamenev. The so-called "United Opposition". It was finally defeated after a demonstration organized by Trotsky’s supporters on November 7, 1927 in Leningrad. At this time, including the Bukharinites, the creation of a “personality cult” of Stalin began, who was still considered a party bureaucrat, and not a theoretic leader who could lay claim to Lenin’s legacy. Having consolidated his role as a leader, Stalin in 1929 dealt an unexpected blow to his allies, accusing them of a “right deviation” and beginning to actually implement (in extreme forms) the program of the “left” to curtail the NEP and accelerated industrialization through the exploitation of the countryside, until hitherto the subject of condemnation. At the same time, Stalin’s 50th birthday is celebrated on a grand scale (whose date of birth was then changed, according to Stalin’s critics, in order to somewhat smooth out the “excesses” of collectivization with the celebration).
1930s
Immediately after the murder of Kirov on December 1, 1934, a rumor arose that the murder was organized by Stalin. There are different versions of the murder, from Stalin’s involvement to domestic ones.
After the 20th Congress, on the orders of Khrushchev, a Special Commission of the CPSU Central Committee was created to investigate the issue, headed by N. M. Shvernik with the participation of the old Bolshevik Olga Shatunovskaya. The commission interrogated over 3 thousand people and, according to letters from O. Shatunovskaya addressed to N. Khrushchev, A. Mikoyan and A. Yakovlev, it found reliable evidence that allowed it to be asserted that Stalin and the NKVD organized the murder of Kirov. N.S. Khrushchev also speaks about this in his memoirs). Subsequently, Shatunovskaya expressed suspicion that documents incriminating Stalin had been confiscated.
In 1990, during a repeated investigation conducted by the USSR Prosecutor's Office, the following conclusion was given: “... In these cases, there is no information about the preparation in 1928-1934. The attempt on Kirov’s life, as well as the involvement of the NKVD and Stalin in this crime, is not contained.”
A number of modern historians support the version of the murder of Kirov on the orders of Stalin, others insist on the version of a lone killer.
Mass repressions of the second half of the 1930s
Politburo decision signed by Stalin obliging the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR to sentence 457 “members of counter-revolutionary organizations” to execution and imprisonment in a camp (1940)
As historian M. Geller notes, the murder of Kirov served as a signal for the beginning of the “Great Terror.” On December 1, 1934, on Stalin’s initiative, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution “On amendments to the existing criminal procedural codes of the Union republics” with the following content:
Make the following changes to the current criminal procedural codes of the union republics for the investigation and consideration of cases of terrorist organizations and terrorist acts against employees of the Soviet government:
1. The investigation in these cases should be completed within no more than ten days;
2. The indictment must be served on the accused one day before the hearing of the case in court;
3. Hear cases without the participation of the parties;
4. Cassation appeals against sentences, as well as filing petitions for pardon, should not be allowed;
5. A sentence of capital punishment shall be carried out immediately upon delivery of the sentence.
Following this, the former party opposition to Stalin (Kamenev and Zinoviev, allegedly acting on Trotsky’s instructions) was accused of organizing the murder. Subsequently, according to Shatunovskaya, in Stalin’s archive, lists of the “Moscow” and “Leningrad” opposition centers that allegedly organized the murder were discovered in Stalin’s own handwriting. Orders were issued to expose “enemies of the people” and a series of trials began.
Mass terror during the “Yezhovshchina” period was carried out by the then authorities of the country throughout the entire territory of the USSR (and, at the same time, in the territories of Mongolia, Tuva and Republican Spain controlled at that time by the Soviet regime), as a rule, on the basis of previously “released into place” by the party authorities figures of “planned tasks” to identify people (the so-called “enemies of the people”), as well as lists of pre-planned victims of terror compiled by the KGB authorities (based on these figures), the reprisal against whom was centrally planned by the authorities. [source?] During the period of the Yezhovshchina, the regime ruling in the USSR completely discarded even that socialist legality, which, for some reason, it sometimes considered necessary to observe in the period preceding the Yezhovshchina. During the Yezhovshchina, torture was widely used against those arrested; sentences that were not subject to appeal (often to death) were passed without any trial - and were carried out immediately (often even before the verdict was passed); all property of the absolute majority of arrested people was immediately confiscated; the relatives of the repressed themselves were subjected to the same repressions - for the mere fact of their relationship with them; Children of repressed persons left without parents (regardless of their age) were also placed, as a rule, in prisons, camps, colonies, or in special “orphanages for children of enemies of the people.” [source?]
In 1937-1938, the NKVD arrested about 1.5 million people, of whom about 700 thousand were executed, that is, on average, 1,000 executions per day.
Historian V.N. Zemskov names a smaller number of those executed - 642,980 people (and at least 500,000 who died in the camps).
As a result of collectivization, famine and purges between 1926 and 1939. The country lost, according to various estimates, from 7 to 13 million and even up to 20 million people.
The Second World War
German propaganda reporting Stalin's supposed escape from Moscow and propaganda coverage of the capture of his son Yakov. Autumn 1941
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference.
During the Great Patriotic War, Stalin actively participated in hostilities as Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Already on June 30, by order of Stalin, the State Defense Committee was organized. During the war, Stalin lost his son.
After the war
Portrait of Stalin on the freight diesel locomotive TE2-414, 1954Central Museum of the October Railway, St. Petersburg
Portrait of Stalin on the diesel freight locomotive TE2-414, 1954
Central Museum of the October Railway, St. Petersburg
After the war, the country set itself on a course of accelerated revival of an economy destroyed by military action and scorched earth tactics carried out by both sides. Stalin used harsh measures to suppress the nationalist movement, which was actively manifested in the territories newly annexed to the USSR (the Baltic states, Western Ukraine).
In the liberated states of Eastern Europe, pro-Soviet communist regimes were established, which later formed a counterweight to the militaristic NATO bloc to the west of the USSR. Post-war contradictions between the USSR and the USA in the Far East led to the Korean War.
The loss of life did not end with the war. The Holodomor of 1946-1947 alone claimed the lives of about a million people. In total, for the period 1939-1959. According to various estimates, population losses ranged from 25 to 30 million people.
At the end of the 1940s, the great power component of Soviet ideology (the fight against cosmopolitanism) intensified. In the early 1950s, several high-profile anti-Semitic trials were carried out in the countries of Eastern Europe, and then in the USSR (see Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, The Doctors' Case). All Jewish places were closed educational establishments, theaters, publishing houses and the media (except for the newspaper of the Jewish Autonomous Region “Birobidzhaner Shtern” (“Birobidzhan Star”)). Mass arrests and dismissals of Jews began. In the winter of 1953, persistent rumors circulated about the impending deportation of Jews; Whether these rumors were true is debatable.
In 1952, according to the recollections of participants in the October plenum of the Central Committee, Stalin tried to resign from his party duties, refusing the post of secretary of the Central Committee, but under pressure from the plenum delegates he accepted this position. It should be noted that the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was formally abolished after the 17th Party Congress, and Stalin was nominally considered one of the equal secretaries of the Central Committee. However, in the book “Joseph Vissarion Stalin,” published in 1947. Brief biography" said:
On April 3, 1922, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party... elected Stalin as General Secretary of the Central Committee. Since then, Stalin has been working in this post continuously.
Stalin and the metro
Under Stalin, the first metro in the USSR was built. Stalin was interested in everything in the country, including construction. His former bodyguard Rybin recalls:
I. Stalin personally inspected the necessary streets, going into the courtyards, where mostly rickety huts were breathing their last and huddled with many mossy sheds on chicken legs. The first time he did this was during the day. A crowd immediately gathered, did not allow us to move at all, and then ran after the car. We had to reschedule the examinations for the night. But even then, passers-by recognized the leader and escorted him with his long tail.
As a result long preparation The master plan for the reconstruction of Moscow was approved. This is how Gorky Street, Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya, Kutuzovsky Prospekt and other beautiful thoroughfares appeared. During another trip along Mokhovaya, Stalin said to the driver Mitryukhin:
It is necessary to build a new university named after Lomonosov, so that students study in one place, and do not wander all over the city.
During the construction process, by personal order of Stalin, the Sovetskaya metro station was adapted for the underground control center of the Moscow Civil Defense Headquarters. In addition to the civilian metro, complex secret complexes were built, including the so-called Metro-2, which Stalin himself used. In November 1941, a solemn meeting on the occasion of the anniversary of the October Revolution was held in the metro at the Mayakovskaya station. Stalin arrived by train along with his guards, and he did not leave the Supreme High Command building on Myasnitskaya, but went down from the basement into a special tunnel that led to the metro.
Stalin and higher education in the USSR
Stalin paid great attention to the development of Soviet science. Thus, according to Zhdanov’s memoirs, Stalin believed that higher education in Russia went through three stages: “In the first period... they were the main forge of personnel. Along with them, workers' faculties developed only to a very weak extent. Then, with the development of economy and trade, a large number of practitioners and businessmen were required. Now... we should not plant new ones, but improve existing ones. The question cannot be put this way: universities train either teachers or researchers. You can't teach without leading and knowing scientific work... now we often say: give us a sample from abroad, we’ll take it apart, and then build it ourselves.”
Stalin paid personal attention to the construction of Moscow State University. The Moscow City Committee and the Moscow City Council proposed building a four-story town in the Vnukovo area, where there were wide fields, based on economic considerations. The President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Academician S. I. Vavilov and the Rector of Moscow State University A. N. Nesmeyanov proposed building a modern ten-story building. However, at a meeting of the Politburo, which Stalin personally chaired, he said: “this complex is for Moscow University, and not 10-12, but 20 floors. We will entrust the construction to Komarovsky. To speed up the pace of construction, it will need to be carried out in parallel with the design... It is necessary to create living conditions by building dormitories for teachers and students. How long will students live? Six thousand? This means there must be six thousand rooms in the hostel. Special care should be taken for students with families.”
The decision to build Moscow State University was supplemented by a set of measures to improve all universities, primarily in cities affected by the war. Large buildings in Minsk, Voronezh, and Kharkov were transferred to universities. Universities in a number of union republics began to actively create and develop.
In 1949, the issue of naming the Moscow State University complex on the Lenin Hills after Stalin was discussed. However, Stalin categorically opposed this proposal.
Education and science
At the direction of Stalin, a profound restructuring of the entire system of humanities was undertaken. In 1934, history teaching was resumed in secondary and high schools. According to historian Yuri Felshtinsky, “Under the influence of the instructions of Stalin, Kirov and Zhdanov and the resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the teaching of history (1934-1936) in historical science Dogmatism and scolding began to take root, substitution of research with quotations, adjustment of material to preconceived conclusions.” The same processes occurred in other areas humanitarian knowledge. In philology, the advanced “formal” school (Tynyanov, Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, etc.) was destroyed; philosophy began to be based on a primitive presentation of the foundations of Marxism in Chapter IV “ Short course" Pluralism within Marxist philosophy itself, which existed until the end of the 30s, became impossible after that; “philosophy” was reduced to commenting on Stalin; All attempts to go beyond the official dogma, manifested by the Lifshitz-Lukacs school, were harshly suppressed. The situation has especially worsened in post-war period, when massive campaigns began against the departure from the “principle of party membership”, against the “abstract academic spirit”, “objectivism”, as well as against “anti-patriotism”, “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “derogation of Russian science and Russian philosophy”, Encyclopedias of those years report , for example, the following about Socrates: “ancient Greek. idealist philosopher, ideologist of the slave-owning aristocracy, enemy of ancient materialism.”
To encourage outstanding figures in science, technology, culture and organizers of production, the Stalin Prizes, awarded annually since 1941, were established in 1940 (instead of the Lenin Prize, established in 1925, but not awarded since 1935). The development of Soviet science and technology under Stalin can be described as taking off. The created network of fundamental and applied research institutes, design bureaus and university laboratories, as well as prison-camp design bureaus (the so-called “sharags”) covered the entire front of research. Scientists have become the country's true elite. Names such as physicists Kurchatov, Landau, Tamm, mathematician Keldysh, creator of space technology Korolev, aircraft designer Tupolev are known all over the world. In the post-war period, based on obvious military needs, the greatest attention was paid to nuclear physics. Thus, in 1946 alone, Stalin personally signed about sixty important documents that determined the development of atomic science and technology. The result of these decisions was the creation of the atomic bomb, as well as the construction of the world's first nuclear power plant in Obninsk (1954) and the subsequent development of nuclear energy.
At the same time, the centralized management of scientific activity, not always competent, led to the restriction of directions that were considered to contradict dialectical materialism and therefore have no practical use. Entire fields of research, such as genetics and cybernetics, were declared “bourgeois pseudosciences.” The consequence of this was arrests and sometimes even executions, as well as the removal of prominent Soviet scientists from teaching. According to one of the common points of view, the defeat of cybernetics ensured that the USSR was fatally lagging behind the United States in the creation of electronic computer technology - work on the creation of a domestic computer began only in 1952, although immediately after the war the USSR had all the scientific and technical personnel necessary for its creation. The Russian genetics school, considered one of the best in the world, was completely destroyed. Under Stalin, truly pseudoscientific trends enjoyed state support, such as Lysenkoism in biology and (until 1950) the new doctrine of language in linguistics, which, however, was debunked by Stalin himself at the end of his life. Science was also affected by the fight against cosmopolitanism and the so-called “adulation of the West”, which had a strong anti-Semitic connotation, which had been waged since 1948.
Stalin's personality cult
Soviet propaganda created a semi-divine aura around Stalin as an infallible “great leader and teacher.” Cities, factories, collective farms, and military equipment were named after Stalin and his closest associates. The city of Donetsk (Stalino) bore the name of Stalin for a long time. His name was mentioned in the same breath as Marx, Engels and Lenin. On January 1, 1936, the first two poems glorifying I.V. Stalin, written by Boris Pasternak, appeared in Izvestia. According to the testimony of Korney Chukovsky and Nadezhda Mandelstam, he “simply raved about Stalin.”
Poster depicting Stalin
Poster depicting Stalin
“And in those same days, at a distance behind the ancient stone wall
It is not a person who lives, but an act: an act the size of the globe.
Fate gave him the destiny of the previous gap.
He is what the bravest people dreamed of, but no one dared before him.
Behind this fabulous affair, the order of things remained intact.
It did not rise up like a heavenly body, did not become distorted, did not decay...
In the collection of fairy tales and relics of the Kremlin floating above Moscow
Centuries have become as accustomed to it as to the battle of a sentry tower.
But he remained a man, and if, against the hare
If he shoots at the cutting areas in winter, the forest will respond to him, like everyone else.”
Stalin’s name is also mentioned in the anthem of the USSR, composed by S. Mikhalkov in 1944:
Through the storms the sun of freedom shone for us,
And the great Lenin illuminated the path for us,
Stalin raised us to be loyal to the people,
Inspired us to work and to deeds!
Similar in nature, but smaller in scale, phenomena were observed in relation to other government leaders (Kalinin, Molotov, Zhdanov, Beria, etc.), as well as Lenin.
A panel depicting J.V. Stalin at the Narvskaya station of the St. Petersburg metro existed until 1961, then it was covered with a false wall
Khrushchev, in his famous report at the 20th Party Congress, argued that Stalin encouraged his cult in every possible way. Thus, Khrushchev stated that he reliably knew that, when editing his own biography prepared for publication, Stalin wrote entire pages where he called himself the leader of nations, a great commander, the highest theoretician of Marxism, a brilliant scientist, etc. . In particular, Khrushchev claims that the following passage was written by Stalin himself: “Masterfully fulfilling the tasks of the leader of the party and the people, having the full support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin, however, did not allow even a shadow of conceit, arrogance, or narcissism in his activities.” It is known that Stalin suppressed some acts of his praise. Thus, according to the recollections of the author of the Orders of Victory and Glory, the first sketches were made with the profile of Stalin. Stalin asked to replace his profile with the Spasskaya Tower. In response to Lion Feuchtwanger's remark "about the tasteless, exaggerated adulation of his personality", Stalin "shrugged his shoulders" and "excused his peasants and workers by saying that they were too busy with other things and could not develop good taste."
After the “exposure of the cult of personality,” a phrase usually attributed to M. A. Sholokhov (but also to other historical characters) became famous: “Yes, there was a cult... But there was also a personality!”
In modern Russian culture, there are also many cultural sources praising Stalin. So, for example, you can point to the songs of Alexander Kharchikov: “Stalin’s March”, “Stalin is our father, our Motherland is our mother”, “Stalin, get up!”
Stalin and anti-Semitism
Some Jewish authors, based on the fact that under Stalin, Jews were also subject to criminal liability, on some cases of manifestations of everyday anti-Semitism in Soviet society, and also on the fact that in some of their theoretical works Stalin mentions Zionism along with other types of nationalism and chauvinism (including anti-Semitism), and a conclusion is drawn about Stalin’s anti-Semitism. Stalin himself repeatedly made statements severely condemning anti-Semitism. Among Stalin's closest associates there were many Jews.
Stalin's role in the creation of the state of Israel
Stalin deserves great credit for the creation of the state of Israel. The first official contact between the Soviet Union and the Zionists took place on February 3, 1941, when Chaim Weizmann, a world-famous chemist and head of the World Zionist Organization, came to the Ambassador in London I.M. Maisky. Weizmann made a trade offer for oranges in exchange for furs. The business failed, but the contacts remained. Relations between the Zionist movement and Moscow leaders changed after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June. The need to defeat Hitler was more important than ideological differences - before this, the attitude of the Soviet government towards Zionism was negative.
Already on September 2, 1941, Weizmann reappeared Soviet ambassador. The head of the World Zionist Organization said that the appeal of Soviet Jews to world Jewry with a call to join forces in the fight against Hitler made a huge impression on him. Using Soviet Jews to psychologically influence world public opinion, especially Americans, was a Stalinist idea. At the end of 1941, a decision was made in Moscow to form the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee - along with the All-Slavic, Women's, Youth and Committee of Soviet Scientists. All these organizations were focused on educational work abroad. The Jews, at the call of the Zionists, collected and transferred $45,000,000 to the Soviet Union. However, the main role they played was in explanatory work among the Americans, because isolationist sentiments were strong at that time.
After the war, the dialogue continued. British intelligence services spied on the Zionists because their leaders were sympathetic to the USSR. The British and American governments imposed an embargo on Jewish settlements in Palestine. Britain sold weapons to the Arabs. The Arabs, in addition, hired Bosnian Muslims, former soldiers of the SS volunteer division, Anders' soldiers, and Arab units in the Wehrmacht. By Stalin’s decision, Israel began to receive artillery and mortars and German Messerschmitt fighters through Czechoslovakia. These were mostly German captured weapons. The CIA proposed shooting down the planes, but politicians wisely refused this step. In general, few weapons were supplied, but they helped maintain the high morale of the Israelis. There was also great political support. According to P. Sudoplatov, before the UN vote on the division of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in November 1947, Stalin told his subordinates: “Let's agree with the formation of Israel. This will be a pain in the ass for the Arab states, and then they will seek an alliance with us."
Already in 1948, a cooling began in Soviet-Israeli relations, which led to the severance of diplomatic relations with Israel on February 12, 1953 - the basis for such a step was a bomb explosion near the doors of the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv (diplomatic relations were restored shortly after Stalin’s death, but then they worsened again due to military conflicts).
Stalin and the church
Stalin's policy towards the Russian Orthodox Church was not uniform, but it was distinguished by its consistency in pursuing the pragmatic goals of the survival of the communist regime and its global expansion. To some researchers, Stalin's attitude towards religion did not seem entirely consistent. On the one hand, not a single atheistic or anti-church work of Stalin remains. On the contrary, Roy Medvedev cites Stalin’s statement about atheistic literature as waste paper. On the other hand, on May 15, 1932, a campaign was announced in the USSR, the official goal of which was the complete eradication of religion in the country by May 1, 1937 - the so-called “godless five-year plan.” By 1939, the number of churches opened in the USSR numbered in the hundreds, and diocesan structures were completely destroyed.
Some weakening of anti-church terror took place after L.P. Beria came to the post of chairman of the NKVD, which was associated both with a general weakening of repressions and with the fact that in the fall of 1939 the USSR annexed significant territories on its western borders, where there were numerous and full-blooded church churches. structures.
On June 22, 1941, Metropolitan Sergius sent out an appeal to the dioceses “to the Pastors and Flock of Christ’s Orthodox Church,” which did not go unnoticed by Stalin.
There are many mythical tales about Stalin’s alleged resort to the prayerful help of the Church during the war, but there are no serious documents that would confirm this. According to the oral testimony of Anatoly Vasilyevich Vedernikov, secretary of Patriarch Alexy I, in September 1941, Stalin allegedly ordered to lock Sergius Stragorodsky together with his cell attendant in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin, so that he would pray there in front of the icon Mother of God Vladimirskaya (the icon was moved there at that time). Sergius stayed in the Assumption Cathedral for three days.
In October 1941, the Patriarchate and other religious centers were ordered to leave Moscow. Orenburg was proposed, but Sergius objected and Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk) was chosen. Metropolitan Sergius and his staff stayed in Ulyanovsk until August 1943.
According to the memoirs of NKGB officer Georgy Karpov, on September 4, 1943, Stalin, at a meeting at which, in addition to Karpov, was attended by Molotov and Beria, ordered the formation of a body for the interaction of the Russian Orthodox Church with the government - the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Council of People's Commissars. A few hours after the meeting, late at night, Metropolitans Sergius, Alexy (Simansky), Nikolai (Yarushevich) were brought to Stalin. During the conversation, a decision was made to elect a Patriarch, open churches, seminaries and a theological academy. The building of the former German embassy was provided to the Patriarch as a residence. The state actually stopped supporting renovationist structures, which were completely liquidated by 1946.
The apparent change in policy regarding the Russian Orthodox Church causes much controversy among researchers. Versions have been expressed ranging from Stalin’s deliberate use of church circles to subjugate the people to the opinion that Stalin remained a secretly religious person. The latter opinion is also confirmed by the stories of Artyom Sergeev, who was brought up in Stalin’s house. And also, according to the recollections of Stalin’s bodyguard Yuri Solovyov, Stalin prayed in the church in the Kremlin, which was located on the way to the cinema. Yuri Solovyov himself remained outside the church, but could see Stalin through the window.
The real reason for the temporary change in the repressive policy towards the Church lay in considerations of primarily foreign policy expediency. (See article History of the Russian Church)
Since the autumn of 1948, after the Conference of Heads and Representatives of the Orthodox Churches was held in Moscow, the results of which were disappointing from the point of view of promoting the Kremlin’s foreign policy interests, the previous repressive policy was largely resumed.
Sociocultural scales of Stalin's personality
Assessments of Stalin's personality are contradictory. The party intelligentsia of the Lenin era rated him extremely low; Trotsky, reflecting her opinion, called Stalin “the most outstanding mediocrity of our era.” On the other hand, many people who communicated with him subsequently spoke of him as widely and versatilely educated and extremely smart person. According to the English historian Simon Montefiore, who studied Stalin’s personal library and reading circle, he spent a lot of time reading books, in the margins of which his notes remained: “His tastes were eclectic: Maupassant, Wilde, Gogol, Goethe, as well as Zola, whom he adored. He liked poetry. (...) Stalin was an erudite man. He quoted long passages from the Bible, the works of Bismarck, and the works of Chekhov. He admired Dostoevsky."
On the contrary, the Soviet historian Leonid Batkin, while recognizing Stalin’s love of reading, believes, however, that he was an “aesthetically dense” reader, and at the same time remained a “practical politician.” Batkin believes that Stalin had no idea “about the existence of such a ‘subject’ as art”, about the “special art world", about the structure of this world, and so on. Using the example of Stalin’s statements on literary and cultural topics given in the memoirs of Konstantin Simonov, Batkin concludes that “everything that Stalin says, everything that he thinks about literature, cinema, etc., is completely ignorant,” and that the hero of the memoirs is “quite “still a primitive and vulgar type.” To compare with Stalin’s words, Batkin cites quotes from marginalized people - the heroes of Mikhail Zoshchenko; in his opinion, they are almost no different from Stalin’s statements. In general, according to Batkin’s conclusion, Stalin brought “a certain energy” of the semi-educated and average layer of people to a “pure, strong-willed, outstanding form.”
It should be noted that Batkin fundamentally refuses to consider Stalin as a diplomat, military leader, and economist, as he says at the beginning of the article.
Roy Medvedev, speaking out against “often extremely exaggerated assessments of the level of his education and intelligence,” at the same time warns against downplaying it. He notes that Stalin read a lot, and widely, from fiction to popular science. In the article, the historian quotes Stalin’s words about reading: “This is my daily norm - 500 pages”; Thus, Stalin read several books a day and about a thousand books a year. In the pre-war period, Stalin devoted his main attention to historical and military-technical books; after the war, he moved on to reading political works, such as “History of Diplomacy” and the biography of Talleyrand. At the same time, Stalin actively studied the works of Marxists, including the works of his comrades-in-arms, and then opponents - Trotsky, Kamenev and others. Medvedev notes that Stalin, being the culprit for the death of a large number of writers and the destruction of their books, at the same time patronized M. Sholokhov, A. Tolstoy and others, returns from exile E.V. Tarle, whose biography of Napoleon he took with great interest and personally supervised its publication, stopping tendentious attacks on the book. Medvedev emphasizes knowledge of national Georgian culture; in 1940, Stalin himself made corrections to the new translation of “The Knight in the Skin of the Tiger.” .
Stalin as speaker and writer
According to L. Batkin, Stalin's oratorical style is extremely primitive. It is distinguished by “a catechismal form, endless repetitions and inversions of the same thing, the same phrase in the form of a question and in the form of a statement, and again the same phrase through a negative particle; curses and cliches of party bureaucratic dialect; an invariably meaningful, important face designed to hide that the author has little to say; poverty of syntax and vocabulary.” A. P. Romanenko and A. K. Mikhalskaya also draw attention to the lexical paucity of Stalin’s speeches and the abundance of repetitions. Israeli scholar Mikhail Weiskopf also argues that Stalin’s argument “is built on more or less hidden tautologies, on the effect of a stupefying drumming.”
The formal logic of Stalin’s speeches, according to Batkin, is characterized by “chains of simple identities: A = A and B = B, this cannot be, because it can never happen” - that is, there is no logic in the strict sense of the word in Stalin’s speeches at all. Weiskopf speaks of Stalin’s “logic” as a collection of logical errors: “the main features of this pseudologic are the use of an unproven proposition as a premise, etc. petitio principii, that is, the hidden identity between the basis of the proof and the thesis supposedly following from it. The tautology of Stalin's arguments (idem per idem) constantly forms a classic “circle in the proof.” There is often a rearrangement of the so-called. strong and weak judgments, substitution of terms, errors - or rather, falsifications - associated with the relationship between the volume and content of concepts, with deductive and inductive conclusions, etc.” Weiskopf generally considers tautology as the basis of the logic of Stalin’s speeches (more precisely, “the basis of the foundation,” as the author puts it, paraphrasing the real words of the leader). In particular, Weiskopf cites the following examples of Stalinist “logic”:
She can ruin the common cause if she is downtrodden and dark, of course, not by her own evil will, but by her own darkness
Weiskopf finds a petitio principii error in this phrase, arguing that one of the references to “darkness” is a premise, and the other is a conclusion following from it, thus the premise and conclusion are identical.
“The words and deeds of the opposition bloc invariably come into conflict with each other. Hence the discord between deed and word.”
“The misfortune of Bukharin’s group lies precisely in the fact that they do not see the characteristic features of this period. Hence their blindness.”
“Why is it the capitalists who take the fruits of the proletarians’ labor, and not the proletarians themselves? Why do capitalists exploit proletarians, and not proletarians exploit capitalists? Because the capitalists buy the labor power of the proletarians, and that is why the capitalists take the fruits of the labor of the proletarians, that is why the capitalists exploit the proletarians, and not the proletarians of the capitalists. But why exactly do capitalists buy the labor power of proletarians? Why are proletarians hired by capitalists, and not capitalists hired by proletarians? Because the main basis of the capitalist system is private ownership of the instruments and means of production...”
However, according to Batkin, it is unlawful to make claims against Stalin’s speeches in tautologies, sophisms, gross lies and idle talk, since they were not intended to convince anyone, but were of a ritual nature: in them the conclusion does not follow from the reasoning, but precedes it, “that is not a “conclusion,” of course, but “intention and decision. Therefore, the text is a way to make it clear, to guess about the decision, and to the same extent a way to prevent guessing.”
Georgy Khazagerov elevates Stalin's rhetoric to the traditions of solemn, homiletical (preaching) eloquence and considers it didactic-symbolic. According to the author’s definition, “the task of didactics is, based on symbolism as an axiom, to organize the picture of the world and to convey this ordered picture intelligibly. Stalinist didactics, however, also took on the functions of symbolism. This was manifested in the fact that the zone of axioms grew to include entire educational programs, and evidence, on the contrary, was replaced by reference to authority.” V.V. Smolenenkova notes the strong impact that, despite all these qualities, Stalin’s speeches had on the audience. Thus, Ilya Starinov conveys the impression made on him by Stalin’s speech: “We listened to Stalin’s speech with bated breath. (...) Stalin spoke about what worried everyone: about people, about personnel. And how convincingly he spoke! Here I first heard: “Personnel decides everything.” The words about how important it is to take care of people and take care of them are etched in my memory for the rest of my life...” Cf. also an entry in the diary of Vladimir Vernadsky: “Only yesterday the text of Stalin’s speech reached us, which made a huge impression. We used to listen on the radio from five to ten. The speech is undoubtedly from a very smart person."
V.V. Smolenenkova explains the effect of Stalin’s speeches by the fact that they were quite adequate to the mood and expectations of the audience. L. Batkin also emphasizes the moment of “fascination” that arose in the atmosphere of terror and the fear and respect it generated for Stalin as the personification of a higher power that controlled destinies. On the other hand, in the story “Atonement” by Julius Daniel (1964), student conversations about Stalin’s logic, conducted during his lifetime, are described in the spirit of future articles by Batkin and Weiskopf: “well, you remember - “this cannot be, because this it can never happen,” and so on, in the same spirit.”
Stalin and the culture of his contemporaries
Stalin was a very reading person and was interested in culture. After his death, his personal library remained, consisting of thousands of books, many with personal notes in the margins. He himself told some visitors, pointing to a stack of books on his desk: “This is my daily norm - 500 pages.” In this way, up to a thousand books were produced per year. There is also evidence that back in the 20s, Stalin attended the play “Days of the Turbins” eighteen times by the then little-known writer Bulgakov. At the same time, despite the difficult situation, he walked without personal security and transport. Later, Stalin took part in the popularization of this writer. Stalin also maintained personal contacts with other cultural figures: musicians, film actors, directors. Stalin also personally entered into controversy with the composer Shostakovich. According to Stalin, his post-war musical compositions were written for political reasons - with the aim of discrediting the Soviet Union.
Personal life and death of Stalin
In 1904, Stalin married Ekaterina Svanidze, but three years later his wife died of tuberculosis. Their only son Yakov was captured by the Germans during World War II. According to the widespread version, reflected, in particular, in Ivan Stadnyuk’s novel “War” and the Soviet film “Liberation” (the reliability of this story is unclear), the German side offered to exchange him for Field Marshal Paulus, to which Stalin replied: “I don’t exchange a soldier for a field marshal " In 1943, Yakov was shot and killed in the German concentration camp Sachsenhausen while trying to escape. Yakov was married three times and had a son, Evgeniy, who participated in the 1990s. in Russian politics (Stalin’s grandson was on the electoral lists of Anpilov’s bloc); this direct male line of the Dzhugashvili family still exists.
In 1919, Stalin married a second time. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, a member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, committed suicide in her Kremlin apartment in 1932 (her sudden death was officially announced) [source?]. From his second marriage, Stalin had two children: Svetlana and Vasily. His son Vasily, an officer of the Soviet Air Force, participated in command positions in the Great Patriotic War, after its end he headed the air defense of the Moscow region (lieutenant general), after Stalin's death he was arrested, died shortly after liberation in 1960. Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva asked for political asylum at the United States Embassy in Delhi on March 6, 1967 and moved to the United States that same year. Artyom Sergeev (the son of the deceased revolutionary Fyodor Sergeev - “Comrade Artyom”) was raised in Stalin’s family until the age of 11.
In addition, it is believed that in Turukhansk exile, Stalin had an illegitimate son, Konstantin Kuzakov. Stalin did not maintain relations with him.
Stalin with children from his second marriage: Vasily (left) and Svetlana (center)
According to evidence, Stalin beat his sons, so that, for example, Yakov (whom Stalin usually called “my fool” or “little wolf”) more than once had to spend the night on the landing or in the apartments of neighbors (including Trotsky); N.S. Khrushchev recalled that Stalin once beat Vasily with his boots for poor performance. Trotsky believed that these scenes of domestic violence reproduced the atmosphere in which Stalin was raised in Gori; Modern psychologists also agree with this opinion. With his attitude, Stalin drove Yakov to attempt suicide, to the news of which he reacted mockingly: “Ha, I didn’t make it!” . On the other hand, Stalin’s adopted son A. Sergeev retained favorable memories of the atmosphere in Stalin’s house. Stalin, according to the memoirs of Artyom Fedorovich, treated him strictly, but with love and was a very cheerful person.
Stalin died on March 5, 1953. The exact cause is still unknown. It is officially believed that death was caused by a cerebral hemorrhage. There is a version according to which Lavrenty Beria or N.S. Khrushchev contributed to his death without providing assistance. There is, however, another version of his death, and a very probable one [source?] - Stalin was poisoned by his closest associate Beria.
At Stalin's funeral on March 9, 1953, due to the huge number of people wanting to say goodbye to Stalin, a stampede arose. The exact number of victims is still unknown, although it is estimated to be significant. In particular, it is known that one of the unidentified victims of the stampede received the number 1422; numbering was carried out only for those dead who could not be identified without the help of relatives or friends.
Stalin's embalmed body was placed on public display in the Lenin Mausoleum, which in 1953-1961 was called the “Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin.” On October 30, 1961, the XXII Congress of the CPSU decided that “Stalin’s serious violations of Lenin’s covenants ... make it impossible to leave the coffin with his body in the Mausoleum.” On the night of October 31 to November 1, 1961, Stalin’s body was taken out of the Mausoleum and buried in a grave near the Kremlin wall. Subsequently, a monument was unveiled at the grave (bust by N.V. Tomsky). Stalin became the only Soviet leader for whom a memorial service was performed by the Russian Orthodox Church.
Myths about Stalin
There are many myths about Stalin. They were often spread by opponents of Stalin (mainly such as L. D. Trotsky, B. G. Bazhanov, N. S. Khrushchev, etc.). Sometimes they appeared on their own. This is how rape myths exist; that he was an agent of the secret police; that he only pretended to be a Marxist-Leninist/communist, but in fact was a hidden counter-revolutionary; that he was an anti-Semite and a Great Russian chauvinist/ethnonationalist; that he was an alcoholic; that he suffered from paranoia and even about Stalin’s statements.
Alleged poems by Stalin
On December 21, 1939, on the day of the solemn celebration of Stalin’s 60th birthday, an article by N. Nikolaishvili “Poems of Young Stalin” appeared in the newspaper “Zarya Vostoka,” in which it was reported that Stalin allegedly wrote six poems. Five of them were published from June to December 1895 in the newspaper “Iberia”, edited by Ilya Chavchavadze signed “I. Dzh-shvili”, the sixth - in July 1896 in the Social Democratic newspaper “Keali” (“Furrow”) signed “Soselo”. Of these, I. Dzh-shvili’s poem “To Prince R. Eristavi” was included in 1907, among selected masterpieces of Georgian poetry, in the collection “Georgian Reader”.
Until then, there was no news that young Stalin wrote poetry. Joseph Iremashvili does not write about this either. Stalin himself neither confirmed nor denied the version that the poems belonged to him. For Stalin's 70th birthday, in 1949, a book of his supposed poems was being prepared, translated into Russian (major masters were involved in working on the translations - in particular, Boris Pasternak and Arseny Tarkovsky), but on Stalin's orders the publication was stopped.
Modern researchers note that the signatures of I. Dzh-shvili and especially Soselo (diminutive of “Joseph”) cannot be the basis for attributing poems specifically to Stalin, especially since one of I. Dzh-shvili’s poems is addressed to Prince R. Eristavi, with whom seminarian Stalin clearly could not have known. It has been suggested that the author of the first five poems was philologist, historian and archaeologist, expert on Georgian culture Ivan Javakhishvili.
Awards
Stalin had:
* title of Hero of Socialist Labor (1939)
* title of Hero of the Soviet Union (1945).
Was a cavalier:
* three Orders of Lenin (1939, 1945, 1949)
* two Orders of Victory (1943, 1945)
* Order of Suvorov, 1st degree (1943)
* three Orders of the Red Banner (1919, 1939, 1944).
In 1953, immediately after the death of I.V. Stalin, four copies of the Order of Generalissimo Stalin were urgently produced (without the use of precious metals) for approval by the main members of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee.
Modern opinions about Stalin
The events of the Stalin era were so grandiose that they naturally gave rise to a huge flow of various literature. Despite all the diversity, several main directions can be distinguished.
* Liberal Democratic. Authors based on liberal and humanistic values consider Stalin to be the strangler of all freedom and initiative, the creator of a totalitarian type of society, as well as the culprit of crimes against humanity, comparable to Hitler. This assessment prevails in the West; during the era of perestroika and the early 1990s. it also prevailed in Russia. During the life of Stalin himself, a different attitude towards him was developed in leftist circles in the West (ranging from benevolent to enthusiastic), as the creator of an interesting social experiment; This attitude was expressed, in particular, by Bernard Shaw, Leon Feuchtwanger, and Henri Barbusse. After the revelations of the 20th Congress, Stalinism disappeared as a phenomenon in the West. [source?]
* Communist-anti-Stalinist. His followers accuse Stalin of destroying the party and of abandoning the ideals of Lenin and Marx. This approach originated among the “Leninist guard” (F. Raskolnikov, L. D. Trotsky, N. I. Bukharin’s suicide letter, M. Ryutin “Stalin and the crisis of the proletarian dictatorship”) and became dominant after the 20th Congress, and under Brezhnev was the banner of socialist dissidents (Alexander Tarasov, Roy Medvedev, Andrei Sakharov). Among the Western left - from moderate social democrats to anarchists and Trotskyists - Stalin is usually seen as a spokesman for the interests of the bureaucracy and a traitor to the revolution (according to Trotsky's view in What is the USSR and Where is It Going, also known as The Revolution Betrayed). on Stalin's Soviet Union as a deformed workers' state). The categorical rejection of Stalin’s authoritarianism, which distorted the principles of Marxist theory, is characteristic of the dialectical-humanistic tradition in Western Marxism, represented, in particular, by the Frankfurt School, as well as the “new left”. One of the first studies of the USSR as a totalitarian state belongs to Hannah Arendt (“The Origins of Totalitarianism”), who also considered herself (with some reservations) a leftist. In our time, Stalin is condemned from communist positions by Trotskyists and heterodox Marxists.
* Communist-Stalinist. Its representatives completely justify Stalin and consider him a faithful successor of Lenin. In general, they are within the framework of the official theses of Soviet propaganda of the 1930s. As an example, we can cite M. S. Dokuchaev’s book “History Remembers.”
* Nationalist-Stalinist. Its representatives, while criticizing both Lenin and the democrats, at the same time highly value Stalin for his contribution to strengthening Russian imperial statehood. They consider him the undertaker of the “Russophobes” Bolsheviks, the restorer of Russian statehood. In this direction, an interesting opinion belongs to the followers of L.N. Gumilyov (although the elements vary). In their opinion, under Stalin, the anti-system of the Bolsheviks died during the repressions. Also, excessive passionarity was knocked out of the ethnic system, which allowed it to gain the opportunity to enter the inertial phase, the ideal of which was Stalin himself. The initial period of Stalin’s reign, during which many actions of an “anti-system” nature were taken, are considered by them only as preparation before the main action, which does not determine the main direction of Stalin’s activities. One can cite as an example the articles by I. S. Shishkin “The Internal Enemy”, and V. A. Michurin “The Twentieth Century in Russia through the prism of the theory of ethnogenesis by L. N. Gumilyov” and the works of V. V. K
opinion
hafiz 08.03.2008 04:57:37
Stalin made Russia a very developed country in all spheres of society
About I.V.Stalin
16.10.2012 11:43:08
Large-scale statesman and politician. A man who had iron logic in his reasoning and actions.
On December 6, 1878, Joseph Stalin was born in Gori. Stalin's real name is Dzhugashvili. In 1888, he entered the Gori Theological School, and later, in 1894, the Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary. This time became the period of the spread of Marxist ideas in Russia.
During his studies, Stalin organized and headed “Marxist circles” at the seminary, and in 1898 he joined the Tiflis organization of the RSDLP. In 1899, he was expelled from the seminary for promoting the ideas of Marxism, after which he was repeatedly under arrest and in exile.
Stalin first became acquainted with Lenin's ideas after the publication of the newspaper Iskra. Lenin and Stalin met personally in December 1905 at a conference in Finland. After I.V. Stalin briefly, before Lenin's return, served as one of the leaders of the Central Committee. After the October coup, Joseph received the post of People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs.
He showed himself to be an excellent military organizer, but at the same time demonstrated his commitment to terrorism. In 1922, he was elected General Secretary of the Central Committee, as well as to the Politburo and Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP. At that time, Lenin had already retired from active work; real power belonged to the Politburo.
Even then, Stalin’s disagreements with Trotsky were obvious. During the 13th Congress of the RCP(b), held in May 1924, Stalin announced his resignation, but the majority of votes received during the voting allowed him to retain his post. The consolidation of his power led to the beginning of the personality cult of Stalin. Simultaneously with industrialization and the development of heavy industry, dispossession and collectivization were carried out in the villages. The result was the death of millions of Russian citizens. Stalin's repressions, which began in 1921, claimed more than 5 million lives over 32 years.
Stalin's policies led to the creation and subsequent strengthening of a harsh authoritarian regime. The beginning of the career of Lavrenty Beria dates back to this period (20s). Stalin and Beria met regularly during the General Secretary's trips to the Caucasus. Later, thanks to his personal devotion to Stalin, Beria entered the leader’s closest circle of associates and during Stalin’s reign he held key positions and was awarded many state awards.
In a brief biography of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, it is necessary to mention the most difficult period for the country. It should be noted that Stalin already in the 30s. was convinced that a military conflict with Germany was inevitable, and sought to prepare the country as much as possible. But this, given the economic devastation and underdeveloped industry, required years, if not decades.
Confirmation of preparations for war is the construction of large-scale underground fortifications, called the “Stalin Line”. 13 fortified areas were built on the western borders, each of which, if necessary, was able to conduct military operations in complete isolation.
In 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was concluded, which was supposed to be in force until 1949. The fortifications, completed in 1938, were then almost completely destroyed - blown up or buried.
Stalin understood that the likelihood of Germany violating this pact was very high, but he believed that Germany would attack only after the defeat of England, and ignored persistent warnings about an attack being prepared in June 1941. This was largely the reason for the catastrophic situation that developed at the front already on the first day of the war.
On June 23, Stalin headed the Headquarters of the High Command. On the 30th he was appointed chairman of the State Defense Committee, and on August 8 he was declared the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. During this most difficult period, Stalin managed to prevent the complete defeat of the army and thwart Hitler’s plans for the lightning takeover of the USSR. Possessing a strong will, Stalin was able to organize millions of people. But the price of this victory was high. The Second World War became the bloodiest and most brutal war for Russia in history.
During 1941-1942. the situation at the front continued to remain critical. Although the attempt to capture Moscow was prevented, there was a threat of seizing the territory of the North Caucasus, which was an important energy center. Voronezh was partially captured by the Nazis. During the spring offensive, the Red Army suffered huge losses near Kharkov.
The USSR was actually on the verge of defeat. In order to tighten discipline in the army and prevent the possibility of troops retreating, Stalin’s order 227 “Not a step back!” was issued, which put barrier detachments into action. The same order introduced penal battalions and companies as part of fronts and armies, respectively. Stalin managed to unite (at least for the duration of the Second World War) outstanding Russian commanders, the brightest of whom was Zhukov. For his contribution to the victory, the Generalissimo of the USSR was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1945.
The post-war years of Stalin's rule were marked by a renewal of terror. But at the same time, the restoration of the country’s economy and the destroyed economy proceeded at an unprecedented pace, despite the refusal of Western countries to provide loans. In the post-war years, Stalin carried out many party purges, the pretext for which was the fight against cosmopolitanism.
In the last years of his reign, Stalin was incredibly suspicious, which was partly provoked by attempts on his life. The first attempt on Stalin's life took place back in 1931 (November 16). It was committed by Ogarev, a “white” officer and employee of British intelligence.
1937 (May 1) - possible coup attempt; 1938 (March 11) - assassination attempt on the leader during a walk in the Kremlin, committed by Lieutenant Danilov; 1939 - two attempts to eliminate Stalin by Japanese secret services; 1942 (November 6) - assassination attempt at Lobnoye Mesto, committed by deserter S. Dmitriev. Operation Big Leap, prepared by the Nazis in 1947, was aimed at eliminating not only Stalin, but also Roosevelt and Churchill during the Tehran Conference. Some historians believe that Stalin's death on March 5, 1953 was not natural. But, according to the medical report, it occurred as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage. Thus ended the most difficult and contradictory era of Stalin for the country.
The leader's body was placed in the Lenin Mausoleum. Stalin's first funeral was marked by a bloody stampede on Trubnaya Square, resulting in the deaths of many people. During the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, many of Joseph Stalin's actions were condemned, in particular his deviation from the Leninist course and the cult of personality. His body was buried near the Kremlin wall in 1961.
For six months after Stalin, Malenkov ruled, and in September 1953 power passed to Khrushchev.
Speaking about Stalin's biography, it is necessary to mention his personal life. Joseph Stalin was married twice. His first wife, who bore him a son, Yakov (the only one who bore his father’s surname), died of typhoid fever in 1907. Yakov died in 1943 in a German concentration camp.
Nadezhda Alliluyeva became Stalin's second wife in 1918. She shot herself in 1932. Stalin's children from this marriage: Vasily and Svetlana. Stalin's son Vasily, a military pilot, died in 1962. Svetlana, Stalin's daughter, emigrated to the United States. She died in Wisconsin on November 22, 2011.
