A World Power

The USSR 1924-1964

Trotsky versus Stalin

· Compare the personalities and careers of Trotsky and Stalin.

· Why did Stalin’s position as Party General Secretary prove to be an enormous advantage in his rivalry with Trotsky?

· What was Lenin’s political testament? Why was it a threat to Stalin? Why didn’t the testament prove to be a serious obstacle in his assumption of power?

· What were the major policy disagreements between Stalin and Trotsky?

· What factors eventually enabled Stalin to win the leadership competition with Trotsky?

An inherent weakness of most dictatorships is that there is no well-defined mechanism to pass power from one leader to the next. Lenin was the one person in the party who possessed unchallenged authority. After his death, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, rivals with dramatically conflicting policies and personalities, fought for power.

Trotsky was a star in the political arena. A magnificent, charismatic orator (speaker), he was an energetic and magnetic leader in all areas as well as a first-rate intellectual. He turned to Marxism as a teenager and, like Lenin, had been exiled to Siberia for his revolutionary activities. At the time of the March Revolution, Trotsky had been living in New York City, but he rushed back to Russia where he soon became the leader of the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin’s rise to power certainly could not have been accomplished without the support of Trotsky and the Soviet. Although not formally a member of the Bolsheviks until 1917, Trotsky had participated in all the major events of revolutionary Russia. He had been present in London in 1903 for the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, played a key role in the 1905 Russian Revolution, and forged the Red Army into the fighting force that defeated the Whites in the civil war. Although obviously brilliant, Trotsky had an ego and arrogant manner that alienated other party leaders.

Joseph Stalin, unlike the flamboyant Trotsky, labored for the revolution in obscurity. Whereas Trotsky was a star, Stalin worked behind the scenes. The son of a peasant shoemaker, Stalin was admitted to a seminary to be trained for the priesthood but was later expelled for his radical opinions.[1] In the years before the revolution, he served the Bolsheviks by robbing banks to gain funds for the party’s organization and propaganda activities. Arrested seven times, Stalin was exiled to Siberia before he was able to returned to Petrograd just after the March Revolution. Unlike Trotsky, Stalin’s role in the October Revolution was relatively insignificant, his presence being described by one historian as “a gray blur,” and his name did not appear in any document related to the takeover.[2] During the civil war, Stalin acquired a reputation as being an efficient and brutal leader, prized by Lenin as a man who could get things done. Most notably, Stalin was credited with saving the important southern Volga town of Tsaritsyn from a White takeover (it was later renamed Stalingrad in his honor). Trotsky was a crowd-pleasing orator; Stalin, when he spoke in his second language, Russian (Georgian was his native language), was not an inspiring speaker. Stalin had long both envied and resented Trotsky, characterizing him in 1907 as being “beautifully useless.”[3]

Whereas Trotsky enjoyed being in the spotlight, Stalin did a lot of the less glamorous organizational work of the party. A day after the October Revolution, Lenin named him Commissar for Nationalities. In 1922, he was named as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. While this position was not considered a key one, it eventually placed Stalin in control of the party organization. In the beginning, the General Secretary was mainly responsible for keeping records on all party members, earning Stalin the derisive nickname of “Comrade Card Index;” however, as the Central Committee selected more and more party leaders, this task fell to the General Secretary. While others in the Politburo concerned themselves mainly with ideological questions, Stalin built up his own network of associates and gained control of the party bureaucracy (the apparat), appointing many regional secretaries who functioned in the role of mayors or governors.

When Lenin died it was not certain who would take over, but Trotsky was clearly viewed as the most likely successor. Lenin had described him as “the most capable man in the present Central Committee.” Late in 1922, after his recovering first stroke, Lenin wrote a lengthy political testament in which he critiqued the leading members of the Politburo. He reminded readers that Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of his oldest supporters, had argued against the seizure of power in October 1917. Nikolai Bukharin, although immensely popular within the party, was viewed as insufficiently Marxist. In the testament, Lenin warned of the danger of the party being split between supporters of Trotsky and Stalin. While generally complimentary toward Trotsky, Lenin did mention that he was a latecomer to Bolshevism and made note of his “excessive self-confidence.” In the case of Stalin; however, Lenin was savage in his criticism: “Having become General Secretary, Comrade Stalin has concentrated unlimited power in his hands, and I am not sure that he will always use that power with sufficient care.” He went on to say:

Stalin is too rude, and this failing, which is entirely acceptable in relations among us Communists, is not acceptable in a General Secretary. I therefore suggest that the comrades find a means of moving Stalin from this post and giving the job to someone else who is superior to comrade Stalin in every way, that is, more patient, more loyal, more respectful and attentive to comrades, less capricious and so on.[4]

Although Lenin’s testament was potentially devastating to Stalin, it eventually proved to have little effect on the question of his successor. The others on the Politburo viewed Trotsky as the main threat. Weakening Stalin, according to Zinoviev and Kamenev, would only lead to a dictatorship under Trotsky. As a result, Lenin’s testament was never openly discussed by the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924 and was not released to the public until after Stalin’s death.[5] Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin soon formed a “triumvirate,” isolating Trotsky. Zinoviev and Kamenev made the fatal error of underestimating Stalin, viewing him as the less dangerous candidate. In the early 1920s, Zinoviev had commented to friends: “Stalin is a good executive, but he always has to be led, and can be. Stalin himself does not have leadership qualities.”[6]

The split between Trotsky and Stalin was due both to personality factors and ideological differences. Trotsky continued to support the idea that worldwide revolution was ultimately necessary for the survival of the revolution in the Soviet Union. For this reason, the Communist International or Comintern had been established in 1919 to support communist parties in other countries. Stalin disagreed with Trotsky, arguing instead that socialism could be built in one country without the aid of other communist states. Trotsky also became a vocal critic of NEP, maintaining that it both betrayed the fundamental principles of communism and delayed the industrial development of the country. Trotsky argued that industrialization would only be possible through the modernization of agriculture and urged that agriculture be collectivized to permit the greater use of machinery and modern farm techniques.

Ultimately, Stalin’s control of the party bureaucracy doomed his political opponents. His appointment of local party leaders gave him a firm basis of support at the Party Congresses. Although Trotsky criticized the growing “bureaucratization” of the party, there was little he could do to stop it. Party membership had grown substantially following the victory in the civil war. In a one-party state, advancement depended upon party membership, thus the party attracted an increasing number of members who joined less for ideological factors than for the material benefits of party membership. These new members were especially susceptible to the power of patronage wielded by Stalin. Recruited during and after the civil war, these party members had no experience of the party in its more democratic times and were less likely to challenge the party leadership. The Fourteenth Party Congress removed Trotsky as the head of the Red Army in 1925, signaling the end of his challenge for the leadership of the party. Admitting defeat, Trotsky could only comment: “The Party is always right.” Belatedly, Zinoviev and Kamenev realized the growing power of Stalin and attempted to form a “Left Opposition” with Trotsky, but it was too late. In 1926, the Party Congress removed all three from the Politburo and a year later they were charged with “factionalism” and expelled from the party. Trotsky was expelled from the USSR in 1929. In Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico, he produced a flood of publications, vehemently attacking Stalin as the “grave digger of the revolution.” Finally, in 1940, a Stalinist agent murdered Trotsky in his home in Mexico by burying an ice pick in his skull.[7] By 1929, Stalin’s supporters occupied every key position in both the government and he was referred to in the press as “ the Lenin of today.”

Collectivization

· What factors led to the end of the New Economic Policy and the collectivization of agriculture?

· Describe the collectivization process.

· Why did collectivization prove beneficial to Stalin and the government?

Stalin’s defense of the New Economic Policy played a significant role in his battle with Trotsky. The debate painted Trotsky as an attacker of Lenin’s policies and also won Stalin the allegiance of a key Politburo member, Bukharin, who was the most outspoken supporter of NEP. By 1927, however, serious problems with NEP had become apparent. Peasants still held tremendous power over the government through their ability to withhold grain. In the “Scissors Crisis” of 1923, peasants had refused to sell their grain at low, government dictated prices, primarily because the rising cost of manufactured goods had seriously virtually eliminated their buying power. Facing a food crisis, the government had been forced to back down, lowering industrial prices. Resentment of the capitalist “NEP men” was increasing, especially among the core of the party’s support, urban workers. Also, the country had made little progress toward industrialization. To build Stalin’s version of “socialism in one country,” the Soviet Union needed to rapidly industrialize; however, the inefficient peasant economy simply did not produce the wealth necessary to create the massive investment funds required for industrialization. Efforts to raise industrial prices as an incentive to development, as mentioned previously, only created strong opposition from the peasantry. Leftist economists began to argue, as Trotsky had before, that the power of the peasant had to be broken before Russia could industrialize. Only through the collectivization of agriculture could the government gain control of the grain harvest, preventing peasants from withholding or destroying grain as they had in the past. Collectivization would also increase total production through the greater use of machinery and the benefits of economies of scale. As Stalin later explained to Winston Churchill:

It was absolutely necessary for Russia, if we were to avoid periodic famines to plow the land with tractors. We must mechanize our agriculture. When we gave tractors to the peasants they were all spoiled within a few months. Only collective farms with workshops could handle tractors. We took the greatest trouble explaining it to the peasants. It was no use arguing with them. After you said all you can to a peasant he says he must go home and consult his wife, and he must consult his herder. After he has talked it over with them he always answers that he does not want the collective farm and would rather do without the tractors.[8]

Agricultural reform had been attempted numerous times throughout Russian history without success as the peasantry steadfastly clung to the old ways. With NEP, the Communist government had attempted to entice the peasant with incentives. The end of NEP signaled a new approach—the “final solution” of the peasant problem through coercion and terror.

In 1928 Stalin announced the first Five Year Plan, calling for the rapid development of heavy industry. The plan also called for the voluntary collectivization of 15% of Soviet agriculture. Any hopes of a voluntary change in agriculture disappeared with another withholding crisis in 1927-28. Angered by low prices and the high cost of industrial goods, peasants again withheld grain from the market. Unlike the earlier Scissors Crisis, this time the government did not surrender to the peasants. Stalin responded by sending troops to seize grain. The war on the peasants had begun.

Following the 1929 harvest, Stalin published an article entitled “The Great Turn,” in which he advocated massive collectivization. Party officials and over 25,000 industrial workers with military backgrounds were dispatched to rural villages to urge peasants to join the collectives. The government used class warfare to enhance its message as less wealthy farmers were urged to “smash the kulaks” and seize the land and livestock of their more prosperous neighbors, even though this meant depriving them of their homes during the middle of the winter.[9] In most areas the appeals to join the collective were opposed by the vast majority of the peasants who wanted to retain their land and livestock. By the end of the year, only 7% of the land had been collectivized. Bukharin, an opponent of forced collectivization, predicted that it could only succeed if Stalin “drowned the risings in blood.” This is exactly what the government chose to do. Anyone resisting collectivization was declared an “ideological kulak” and murdered or deported to Siberia. In one year, two million “kulaks” were deported to remote areas of Siberia, many of them dying in the process. “Repression,” Stalin told the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930, “is a necessary element in the advance.” Still, Stalin could not allow this battle to endanger the next year’s grain harvest. In March, he wrote an article charging that local officials had become “dizzy with success,” and overstepped their bounds in enforcing collectivization. “Collectivization,” he wrote, “must be voluntary.” This was an expedient (convenient) lie. As soon as the crop was planted, the coercion resumed. By the next year, over 50% of the peasants had been forced into collectives, and by 1936 total collectivization had been accomplished, but at a horrific cost. Rather than surrender their livestock, many peasants simply slaughtered them. The disruption in agriculture caused renewed famines which killed four to six million people, often because the government seized all the grain of a harvest, including next year’s seed. Grain production did not recover to 1930 levels until 1937, and the total number of livestock did not recover until after the Second World War. In addition to the famine, millions of resisting “kulaks” were killed or deported. In 1942, Stalin told Churchill that the War on the Peasants had cost over ten million lives.[10]

The result of the collectivization of agriculture was the creation of two types of collective farms. The sovkohz, or state farm, operated like a factory where workers were simply paid wages. The more prevalent form of collective farm was the kolkhoz where farmers received a share of the farm’s produce after it had paid its taxes to the government. In both cases farmers were permitted to keep a small plot of land in which they could grow fruits and vegetables for their own use or for sale on the open market. For peasants, collectivization meant a virtual return to serfdom, as in 1932 the government introduced a system of internal passports required for movement within the country. These passports were usually denied collective farmers. Thus, without government permission, they were tied to their collective farms. Most importantly, however, collectivization finally gave the government complete control over the food supply. Rather than dealing with 25 million independent farms, the state now dealt with 250,000 collectives, each with a government-appointed manager. As a result, while harvests declined in the early 1930s, the percentage of grain taken by the government increased dramatically.[11] Finally, collectivization removed the last major member of the Leninist Politburo as a potential rival to Stalin. Bukharin, who had steadfastly supported Stalin against Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, was removed from the Politburo in late 1929 and eventually expelled from the party for “sponsoring capitalist development in agriculture” and “splitting the party.”

Industrialization

· What were the goals of the Five Year Plans? How were these achieved? Assess their success.

· Describe how other aspects of the Soviet Union changed during the 1930s.

· How did communism under Stalin differ from Marx’s writings?

Stalin was deeply concerned with his country’s economic weakness. In 1931 he spoke to industrial managers in Leningrad: “The history of old Russia is the history of defeats due to backwardness…. We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do this or they will crush us.” Beginning in late 1927, he had ordered a radical overhaul of the entire economy with the goal of rapidly industrializing the entire Soviet Union.

NEP was officially scrapped in 1928 in favor of a series of Five Year Plans, which called for rapid heavy industrialization to coincide with the collectivization of agriculture. The entire power of the state was mobilized to accomplish this goal. Stalin and his advisers assumed that by centralizing all aspects of the allocation of resources and removing market forces from the economy, they could ensure a swift buildup of capital goods (large items such as tractors and industrial machinery) and heavy industries. The Five Year Plans restricted the manufacture of consumer goods (things deemed to be luxuries such as stylish clothing, small appliances, etc.) and abolished capitalism in the forms permitted under the NEP. Citizens were still allowed to own certain types of private property, such as houses, furniture, clothes, and personal effects, but they could not use their property to make profits by hiring workers. The state was to be the only employer.

The first Five Year Plan called for a 250% increase in overall industrial productivity. Although this target was not reached, both astonishing growth, as well as great chaos occurred. Because factories did not have to purchase their raw materials or pay high labor costs (they were simply assigned by the government), enormous amounts of resources and labor were wasted. For example, buildings were erected for no machines and machines were shipped to where there were no buildings. Failures were harshly punished. Factory managers were accused of sabotage and imprisoned or executed as “wreckers” when production targets were not met. Despite such difficulties, Soviet industry and society were nevertheless totally transformed in less than a decade. In the period of the first Five Year Plan, steel production rose 137%, the number of motorized vehicles (mostly trucks and tractors) increased almost 3,000%, and huge projects such as the Dnieper hydroelectric dam were completed. The costs were enormous, but Stalin portrayed his country as being isolated in a world of enemies, and many Soviet citizens operated with a zeal typically found only in wartime.

The second Five Year Plan began in 1933 and sought to avoid some of the mistakes of the first. The government placed greater emphasis on improving the quality of industrial products and on making more consumer goods. Gigantism was the key word in planning, as the world’s largest tractor factory was built in Chelyabinsk, the greatest power station in Dnepropetrovsk, and the largest automobile plant in Gorki (a virtual copy of the Ford factory in Dearborn, Michigan). In addition, the huge Moscow subway was completed under the direction of a rising young member of the party, Nikita Khrushchev.[12] In total, the first two Five Year Plans achieved remarkable results. By 1940, Soviet industrial output had increased 260% from 1928 levels at a time in which production severely declined in virtually every other industrialized country due to the Great Depression. The high volume of production, however, often resulted in mediocre quality, and the achievements were gained only with an enormous cost in human life and suffering. The cost of importing heavy machinery, tools, equipment, and finished steel from abroad forced a subsistence (barely survivable) scale of living on the people as per capita (per person) consumption of consumer goods actually fell during the period. What was produced was often of hideous quality:

Clothes were sloppily cut and sewn, and there were many reports of gross defects like missing sleeves in those for sale in state stores. Handles fell off pots, matches refused to strike, and foreign objects were baked into bread made from adulterated flour. It was impossible to get clothes, shoes, and household items repaired, to find a locksmith to replace a lock, or a painter to paint a wall. To compound the difficulties for ordinary citizens, even those with the appropriate skills were usually unable to obtain the raw materials to make or fix things themselves. It was no longer possible to buy paint, nails, boards, or anything similar for home repairs from the [state stores]; they had to be stolen from state enterprises or construction sites if they were to be obtained at all. Nor was it usually possible even to buy thread, needles, buttons, or similar items.[13]

With the crushing shortages, the ability to obtain items outside of the official markets became a paramount. An entire network of unofficial trading relationships developed. Goods were frequently stolen from worksites and then bartered for other items. As a popular saying noted: “One must not have 100 rubles but 100 friends.” As a result of the shortages, food and almost all consumer goods began to be rationed in 1929.[14] Disenchantment soon ensued. Stalin could proclaim that: “Life has become better, comrades; life has become more cheerful,” as he did in 1935; however, Soviet citizens could clearly see the truth. Exhorted to “catch up to the West,” workers privately joked that when the pulled aside the United States, they hoped that they could get off and stay there.

With the stresses of rapid industrialization came enormous social change as well. Twenty million rural peasants migrated to the cities between 1926 and 1939. Overcrowding and a lack of housing were serious problems in every city. In Moscow, in 1935, only 6% of working families lived in apartments of more than one room and in many cases multiple families shared single room apartments. Education levels increased dramatically, and huge numbers of working class young people entered managerial and technical positions. The rate of adult literacy rose from 51% in 1929 to 81% in 1940. Women worked in the factories as government provided daycare looked after their children. Citizens worked longer hours for less money; the purchasing power of industrial wages probably declined between 20-40%. The human cost of these years can be found in the biography of Boris Yeltsin, who would become the first freely elected President of Russia in 1991. It describes the hardships of the era in the central Russian town of Butka:

Ignat Yeltsin (Boris’ grandfather), eighty years old and almost blind, was declared a kulak, stripped of all his possessions and, together with his wife, shipped in a boxcar to a forced-labor settlement in the northernmost corner of the province, near the town of Serov. Along with Boris’s grandparents, ten other families from Butka were exiled. Several months later Ignat Yeltsin died.

In the autumn of that year, Yeltsin’s mother recalls, the entire harvest collected by the recently collectivized Butka peasants was taken away by the state “to the last little grain.” In 1932, Nikolay (Yeltsin’s father) decided to leave the village forever and took his family and the youngest of his brothers, Andrian, as far away as he could: to a construction site in the city of Kazan on the Volga, more than 1,100 kilometers from Butka. The brothers worked as carpenters for two years until both were arrested as “de-kulakized kulaks” who had “conducted anti-Soviet propaganda” and were sentenced to three years in a hard-labour camp.

In 1935 Nikolay’s brother Ivan, a blacksmith like his father, failed to deliver to the kolkhoz his grain quota. He was arrested as a “saboteur” and “wrecker” and exiled to Berezniki. Berezniki was the site of one of the giants of Stalin’s industrialization, a campaign to make the Soviet Union a major industrial and military power within ten to fifteen years. The Berezniki Potassium-Processing Plant was the shock (udarniy) or pre-eminent construction project of the second Five-Year Plan. When he returned from the camp after serving two years, Nikolay took Klavdia and Boris to join his brother in Berezniki.

The Yeltsins were given a room in a barak, an enormously long, one-story hut made of thin wooden boards. The most common variety of communal lodgings in urban Russia at the time, baraks were a veritable institution that shaped two generations of Russians. As much a fixture of “socialist industrialization” as the [prison labor camp], these structures became an indelible part of Soviet popular culture. Like hundreds of thousands of other baraks throughout Russia, Yeltsin’s consisted of a long corridor, into which opened twenty rooms—one per family. Behind the barak were a wooden privy and the well from which the tenants drew water for washing and cooking.

Shortly after their arrival in Berezniki, Yeltsin’s brother Mikhail was born, in August 1937. The Yeltsins bought a she-goat to secure milk for the children. All five of them—four humans and the goat—slept together on the floor, pressed close to one another. The goat was “warm, like a stove,” and the boys curled up next to her in the winter, when there was no protection against the piercing cold: the barak was “draughty through and through.” Boris was one year old when the Yeltsins moved into their first barak in Kazan. He was fourteen when they were given the keys to an apartment of their own. Forty years later, he still hated the memory of the barak years.[15]

In the rush to industrialize, several cornerstone principles of Marxism were set aside and the plight of the worker was probably worse than in the nineteenth century capitalist societies Marx had criticized. The workweek was expanded to six days, and workers were forbidden to quit their jobs. Tardiness was made a criminal offense, and almost 30,000 workers were sentenced to labor camps for lateness to work during the first six months of 1940 alone. Industrial accidents occurred frequently. Ironically, capitalist practices were used to stimulate the growth of the communist economy. Bonuses and incentives were used to speed up production and workers who exceeded quotas were help up as examples. One such worker, Alexis Stakhanov, supposedly mined an extraordinary amount of coal in one evening. He became a national hero and Stakhanovite brigades of outstanding workers were organized in the factories and collective farms. These Stakhanovites were afforded special privileges. Most Soviet citizens took their only substantial meal of the day at work in company cafeterias. Stakhanovites were issued special cards so that they could obtain second and third helpings. There was also a differentiation by job classification, as company managers ate separately in special dining rooms. Membership in the elite also qualified party members, company managers, and government bureaucrats to shop at well-stocked GORT stores, which were closed to ordinary citizens. Elaborate systems of rank were restored to the military and the uniforms soon began to resemble their Tsarist predecessors. Party members seldom viewed their privileges as a betrayal of the revolution. On the contrary, the fact that men and women who had been born as peasants were now assuming these traditional marks of privilege was viewed as evidence that the revolution had finally triumphed. A visiting Finish Communist Party leader noted that nowhere “would it be possible for the range of classes to be publicly displayed so blatantly as it was in Russia.”[16]

Stalin and Russia had greatly deviated from the Marxist maxim of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” As a common joke in later years commented: “What is the difference between capitalism and socialism?” The answer was: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, while socialism is the exact opposite.” Still, despite the brutality and immense human sacrifice associated with the Five Year Plans, the 12 to 13% rate of annual industrial growth attained in the Soviet Union during the 1930’s has few parallels in the economic history of other countries.[17]

The Great Terror

· Why did Stalin believe that his position as party leader was in jeopardy in 1934?

· Why is it likely that Stalin ordered the assassination of Kirov?

· Describe the Great Purges.

· How did the Purges change the operation of the party?

In February 1934 Stalin convened the Seventeenth Party Congress, which he had dubbed “The Congress of Victors.” In his report, he emphasized the “great and unusual progress” that the Soviet Union had made since the last Party Congress in 1930. Serious problems, however, remained and his hold on power was by no means assured. The great leap forward in industrialization had done nothing to improve living conditions. Public protest was impossible, but top officials did receive hostile anonymous notes. One such note read: “Don’t think that people follow you and vote for you unanimously. Many are against you, but are afraid to lose a crust of bread and their privileges. Believe me, all the peasantry is against you. Long live Leninism! Down with the Stalinist dictatorship!” Propaganda had begun to lose its effect, with a common reaction being: “It’s all lies! There aren’t any Stakhanovites, they just make it all up!”[18]

Even Stalin’s power over the party was not yet absolute. As an example, in 1932 an Old Bolshevik hero of the civil war, Martemyan Ryutin, circulated a letter addressed to all party members in which he charged: “The rights of the party have been usurped (taken over) by a tiny gang of political intriguers… Stalin and his clique are destroying the Communist cause and the leadership of Stalin must be finished with as quickly as possible.” Stalin demanded Ryutin’s execution, however, the remainder of the Politburo overruled him and Ryutin received only a sentence of ten years imprisonment.[19]

Stalin had worked hard to ensure that the Seventeenth Party Congress would glorify his rule, even to the point of insisting that his once discredited opponents, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, who had been readmitted to the party, be permitted to speak for the purposes of confessing the errors of their ways and praising his rule. Bukharin, for example, stated in his speech: “Stalin was entirely correct when he smashed a whole series of theoretical premises… which had been formulated above all by myself…. It is the duty of every party member to rally round Comrade Stalin as the personal embodiment of the will of the party.”[20] Despite these efforts, many delegates obviously remained unimpressed. Sergei Kirov, the young Leningrad party chief, was seen by many as a potential alternative to Stalin’s leadership. When Kirov rose to give his speech at the Congress, the delegates burst into tumultuous applause that even overshadowed the reception previously afforded the General Secretary. On the final day of the Congress, delegates voted for the Central Committee. Before the totals were announced, Stalin was informed that only 3 delegates had voted against Kirov, while almost a quarter of the 1,225 delegates had cast votes against him! Stalin ordered the ballots destroyed, and it was announced that Kirov and Stalin had both been elected with only three ballots cast against them.[21] During the Congress, several delegates approached Kirov and urged him to challenge Stalin for the position of General Secretary. Although Kirov refused and told Stalin of the plan, Stalin could clearly sense the growing discord within the party.

Even prior to the Party Congress, Stalin had taken several steps to deflect criticism and build a police apparatus capable of destroying his enemies. In 1933, he had alluded to the presence of internal enemies, determined to destroy the success of the Five Year Plans:

The remnants of the dying classes—industrialists and their servants, private traders and their stooges, former nobles and priests, kulaks and their henchmen, former white officers and Non Commissioned Officers, former gendarmes and policemen—they have all wormed their way into our factories, our institutions and trading bodies, our railway and river transportation enterprises and for the most part into our collective and state farms…. They set fire to warehouses and break machinery. They organize sabotage. The organize wrecking in the collective and state farms, and some of them, including a number of professors, go so far in their wrecking activities as to inject the livestock in collective and state farms with plague and anthrax, and encourage the spread of meningitis among horses and, so on.[22]

Despite the absurdity of these charges (virtually every member of the groups mentioned in his speech had already been ruthlessly eliminated), they served an important purpose for Stalin. They deflected criticism for the failures of his policies, diverting the people’s energy into search for “wreckers” and other “enemies of the people.” They also provided an excuse for destroying his enemies, laying the way for a series of Great Purges that would destroy any internal opposition to his rule, either real or imagined.

In retrospect, it is easy to identify the beginning of these Great Purges. On December 1, 1934, Kirov was shot and killed in the Smolny Institute, the Leningrad party offices. The assassin was identified as Leonid Nikolaev, a party member. A key witness, Kirov’s bodyguard, was mysteriously killed the next day in an automobile crash in which none of the other occupants were injured. Stalin publicly expressed his outrage at the murder of Kirov and personally took charge of the investigation. Less than a month later it was announced that Nikolaev had confessed to being a member of a secret Trotskyite terrorist organization and had been executed. An enduring question of Soviet history is Stalin’s role in the assassination. Although no “smoking gun” has been uncovered since the fall of communism, ample circumstantial evidence exists to indicate that he ordered the assassination and then destroyed every bit of the evidence of his complicity. Regardless of his role in Kirov’s murder, Stalin seized upon it as an excuse to destroy his perceived enemies. On the very day of the assassination, Stalin (without any discussion with the Politburo) issued what became known as the “Kirov Decrees,” authorizing the secret police (now known as the NKVD) to arrest political dissidents, try them before special courts, and swiftly execute them. Cases were to be investigated in less than ten days, defendants tried without representation, and all appeals automatically denied.

What followed the Kirov Decrees was a terror unprecedented even in Russian history. A series of show trials were held in Moscow where prominent party leaders were forced to confess their crimes—which always included plotting with Trotsky to overthrow Stalin and destroy the Soviet Union—and then were swiftly executed. In August 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were put on trial, found guilty, and shot. A similar fate awaited Bukharin in 1938.[23] Throughout the trials, Trotsky, in exile, denied the existence of any plot and mocked Stalin by asking why, if his agents had occupied the top positions in the government, “how is it that Stalin is in the Kremlin and I’m in exile?” The terror extended far beyond Stalin’s most prominent rivals. Of the 139 members of the Central Committee elected by the 1934 Party Congress, 98 were executed between 1937-38. Of the 1,225 delegates at the Congress, over 1,100 were eventually arrested, most of them to either be shot or sentenced to long periods of imprisonment. Some officials were purged on orders from above, but in many cases the Purges were used as a convenient excuse to settle personal rivalries and grudges. The Purges were not just confined to party members; they soon invaded every section of the country. Over 150,000 clergymen were arrested in 1937-38, and two-thirds of these were executed by the secret police. It has been estimated that between 5 and 6% of the population was under arrest at some point in the Purges. Soon, every Soviet citizen feared arrest. A popular story circulated of a couple that heard the dreaded knock on their front door. The husband opened the door and then announced to his wife: “Don’t worry dear, it is only bandits who have come to rob us.” Overall, an estimated 700,000 people were executed at the height of the Purges (in the years of 1937-38) and over a million more were imprisoned.[24]

The hard times of the early 1930s fueled the terror and reinforced the government’s claims of enemies within. The revolution was not producing its promises of a better life despite the enormous sacrifices. There had to be an explanation, and someone had to be to blame. As one woman noted in her diary, how could the factories be full of Stakhanovite workers, and yet there were no products in the stores to buy? The easy answer was that the country was being sabotaged from within. The purge of party leaders was popular amongst many citizens. Most could easily cite some personal experience with an arrogant, privileged Party bureaucrat. Therefore there was little sympathy when they heard that such officials had been arrested.

In 1937, the leaders of the Red Army were accused of treason and cooperating with Nazi intelligence agents.[25] Among the accused was the top Soviet military officer, Marshall Tukhachevsky, hero of the civil war and the man that Lenin had entrusted to crush the Kronstadt revolt in 1921. Tukhachevsky was declared guilty and executed. Eventually, the Purges claimed 3 of 5 army marshals, 14 of 16 army commanders, 8 of 8 admirals, 60 of 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 divisional commanders, 221 of 397 brigade commanders, and roughly one-half of the remaining officer corps, a total of 40,000 men. Finally, the Purges came to a close in late 1938 with an attack on the secret police itself. Nikolai Yezhov, who had headed the NKVD during the height of the terror, was one of its last victims as he was executed in 1939. The 1940 assassination of Trotsky in Mexico served as the culminating chapter of Stalin’s successful campaign to rid the Soviet Union of all opposition.[26]

The changes that occurred in the Soviet Union during the first decade of Stalin’s rule were immense both for their material progress and brutality. In all, it is estimated that between 17 and 22 million people lost their lives as a result of Stalin’s agricultural policies and the Great Purges.[27] Soviet society was entirely transformed. The power of the peasantry was finally broken, and the country became significantly more urban and literate. Whatever remained of political liberty, however, was extinguished. The new constitution of 1936 declared: “All power in the USSR belongs to the workers of town and country as represented by the Soviet of workers’ deputies,” and affirmed many basic rights, such as free speech, secret ballot, and universal suffrage, but it was mere window-dressing with no relationship to reality. Under Lenin, the party had increasingly exercised dictatorial power, but within the party itself there was still room for disagreement and debate. Under Stalin, the dictatorship of the party elite became the dictatorship of one man. Even Party Conferences, which had been held every year or every two years during the 1920s, became infrequent. The Seventeenth Congress met in 1934, the Eighteenth in 1939, and the Nineteenth not until 1952. The Purges destroyed what remained of the old party and in its place substituted a new group of leaders, distinguished only by their total subservience to Stalin and desire to reap the privileges of high party office. As Stalin’s biographer commented: “The Leninist ‘old guard’ was consciously liquidated because they knew too much. Stalin wanted devoted executives, functionaries of a younger generation, people who had not known him in an earlier life.”[28] To this new class of rulers, the lessons of the Purges were chilling and effective. The way to succeed, to survive, was to be a dependable member of the party apparatus—an apparatchik (order following bureaucrat). Many of the apparatchiks who ascended to positions of power as a result of the Purges remained in place until the 1980s. Unlike the party leaders of the Lenin era, these new party men tended to be working class in origin, poorly educated, and ignorant of the outside world.

Stalin’s authority permeated every aspect of Soviet society. He dictated that all art, science, and thought should exist only to serve the party’s program and philosophy. Artists and thinkers were to become, in Stalin’s words, “engineers of the mind.” Art for art’s sake was counterrevolutionary. In its place, Socialist Realism, the portrayal of life in the socialist ideal as opposed to its current reality, replaced the modernist, anti-traditional focus of Soviet art during the early Twenties. The writing of history became only a means to prove the correctness of Stalin’s policies. Under Stalin’s rule, critics and censors exercised total control over artists and scholars. Artists and intellectuals found it safer to investigate, write, and perform according to the party line. A massive police state was created, and the remote regions of the country were dotted with slave labor camps, which soon became referred as the Gulag Archipelago.[29] In the late 1930s and the 1940s, between two and four million Soviet citizens were incarcerated in the camps or forced into exile in Siberia. Education included political indoctrination from the very first grade. Children, organized into communist organizations such as the Young Pioneers, were taught to obey the party above all, even their family. Every Soviet child was taught to revere the example of Pavlik Morozov, a twelve-year-old Young Pioneer, who had turned his own father into the police for hiding grain during the collectivization process.

Stalin’s rule left many open questions in regard to communism. Was he the betrayer of the revolution or merely its logical outcome? Defenders of Marxism insist that the system does not inevitably produce a brutal dictatorship, yet the history of communist regimes throughout the world provides little to support their contention.

The Great Patriotic War

· Why did Russia sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact? Why did Hitler violate this agreement in 1941?

· How did Stalin stiffen Soviet resolve to defeat the Nazi invasion?

The Soviet Union had been shunned by other countries following the revolution and played little role in world politics during the period of internal chaos in the early 1920s. During the latter part of the 1920s, and into the early 1930s, diplomatic relations with major nations were gradually reestablished. The fact of Communist leadership was accepted, and the Soviet Union was allowed into the League of Nations, although the USSR still preferred to focus primarily on its own internal development.

Adolf Hitler’s rise was a clear signal that more active concern was necessary.[30] A strong Germany was inevitably a threat to Russia from the west, and Hitler was vocal about his scorn for Slavic peoples, hatred of communism, and desire to create “living space” for Germany to the east. Stalin initially hoped that he could cooperate with the western democracies in blocking the Nazi threat. The Soviet Union tried to encourage a common response to German and Italian intervention during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and 1937. France and Britain, however, were as suspicious of the Soviets as of the Nazis and refused these calls for a common front against fascism. Finally the Soviet Union, unready for war and greatly frustrated with the West, signed the historic Nazi-Soviet Pact with Hitler in 1939. This agreement bought some time for greater war preparation and also enabled the USSR to regain territories in eastern Poland and Finland lost in World War I.

The awkward honeymoon with Hitler did not last. The Nazis, having completed their sweep of France but blocked from invading Britain, quickly regained their eastern appetites, sharpened by the belief that the Soviets were an easy target. Hitler told his generals in 1941: “You have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” The invasion of the Soviet Union was launched in June 1941. As German troops entered the western portions of the USSR, many non-Russians greeted them as liberators. Within months the Nazis had penetrated to the suburbs of Leningrad and Moscow. Stalin, of course, deserves considerable blame for this debacle. His purges had decimated the leadership corps of the Red Army, and he ignored ample warnings of the Nazi attack.[31] For weeks after the attack, he seemed paralyzed as the Soviet armies crumbled.

The story of the Soviet comeback against the Germans staggers the imagination. Through enormous sacrifice (approximately 27 million deaths) and willpower, Stalin was able to rally his nation and defeat the Germans. This was accomplished through a mixture of patriotic zeal and brutal coercion. During the war, Soviet propaganda focused less on communist ideology than on traditional Russian values. Rather than fighting to save communism, Soviet troops were urged to defend the motherland during “the Great Patriotic War.” Entire factories were shifted eastward, beyond the grasp of the Nazi assault. Officers were executed if they retreated, and men were told that if they surrendered their families would lose their pensions.[32] Entire ethnic groups, most notably Germans and Chechens, who were suspected of disloyalty, were rounded up in mass and deported to inhospitable areas of Kazakhstan where many soon perished.

The end of the war probably signifies the high watermark of communism in the USSR. In the eyes of many Soviet citizens, victory in the war served to legitimize the brutal collectivization and industrialization campaigns that had preceded it. Never again would the Soviet people be so united. The worst brutality ended with Stalin’s death in 1953, but coercion would remain the essential tool by which to control the people and preserve the power of the party. When that coercion came to an end, almost five decades following the Great Patriotic War, the system would come to a crashing halt.

The Beginnings of the Cold War

· What goal did Stalin have in order to preserve Soviet security following the war? Why was he able to achieve this goal?

· How did the major Allied powers guarantee their control of the United Nations?

As the Soviets began to push back the Nazi invaders, Stalin was in a greater position of international power than any Russian leader in history. With the defeat of Germany, however, the Soviet Union was to acquire a new and even more powerful enemy, the United States of America. The end of World War II did not bring a period of peace, but rather a Cold War between the USSR and the United States. Even before the end of the war, Soviet leaders began to plan for their future security. Twice in their lifetime they had faced horrible German invasions through the weak countries of Eastern Europe, which were either powerless to stop the Germans or actively assisted their conquests. Never again, they resolved, should this be allowed to happen. To defend their western border, the Soviets needed to both eliminate Germany’s power and guarantee that the countries of Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union were friendly toward the USSR. To Stalin, friendly meant communist and totally under Soviet control. The Soviet leaders never had any intention of allowing the countries of Eastern Europe any postwar course other than Soviet-style communism. In 1940, the NKVD executed over 25,000 captured Polish officers and civilians in the Katyn Forest of Eastern Poland. Similarly, as the Soviet Army approached the Polish capital of Warsaw in 1944, they halted, allowing the Germans to wipe out the Polish resistance before the Soviets took the city. The purpose of these acts clearly was to eliminate potential rivals to communist rule after the war.

With Germany nearly defeated, the Allied leaders, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Stalin, met in the Yalta Conference at a Black Sea resort in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945. When the meeting began the Soviet Union held the strongest military position of the three allies. Its armies occupied much of Eastern Europe, and were preparing to enter Berlin. The agenda at the Yalta Conference included the major problems in postwar Europe, and Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were able to agree on several points. The first was to establish a world peacekeeping organization that was to become the United Nations. Secondly, they agreed to create temporary “coalition” governments, representative of all anti-Nazi elements—including communists and non-communists—in the areas liberated from the Germans and then to allow free elections to determine new, permanent governments. Also, Germany was to be divided into four temporary occupation zones. The prewar borders of Poland were to be adjusted to extend the Soviet Union’s territory westward to compensate the Soviets for land they had lost to Poland in 1920. Poland would then be compensated with land taken from the eastern part of Germany. Lastly, and most importantly to the U.S. at the time, the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender.

It was the question of postwar governments in Eastern Europe that was to soon cause the most controversy. Although he promised to allow “free elections,” Stalin had no intention of allowing governments potentially hostile to the Soviet Union on his border. He told a Yugoslavian communist, “whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system on it…. It cannot be otherwise.”[33] Stalin especially felt that control of Poland was necessary to Soviet security. After the war, critics in the United States said that President Roosevelt had “sold out” Eastern Europe by not getting a stronger guarantee of free elections at Yalta. Nevertheless, most analysts now argue that the Soviet Union’s postwar domination of Eastern Europe resulted more from their occupation of this territory at the war’s end than from decisions made at the Yalta Conference.

It was the issue of Eastern Europe that ended the postwar cooperation between the USSR and her western allies. President Roosevelt died in April 1945 and was succeeded by Harry S. Truman. After Germany surrendered in May 1945, the Allies established four occupation zones—French, British, American, and Soviet. They also divided the capital, Berlin, located deep inside the Soviet sector, into four parts. The Soviets promised free access from the western zones to Berlin. The Allied leaders met for a final time at Potsdam, near Berlin, in July 1945. At Potsdam, Great Britain and the United States charged the USSR with breaking the promises that it had made at Yalta. Even before World War II ended, the USSR had taken over the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania; parts of Poland, Finland, and Romania; and eastern Czechoslovakia. Soviet troops occupied a third of Germany and all of Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.

Only on one issue, the establishment of an international peacekeeping organization, could the major powers agree. Representatives of fifty governments met in San Francisco in the spring of 1945 to draft the charter of the United Nations. The UN consists of two main parts: a General Assembly, which functions as a form of limited world congress, and a Security Council, which is charged with maintaining peace and order. The “Big Five,” the triumphant winners of the war (United States, Soviet Union, China, France, and Great Britain), maintained that they had special interests and responsibilities in maintaining world peace and security. The Security Council, therefore, consists of fifteen members, with the Big Five as permanent members and ten seats elected by the General Assembly for a term of two years. On the most important matters of substance, all permanent members have to agree. A “no” vote or veto cast by any one of the five prevents the UN from taking any action.

From 1945 to 1948, Stalin expanded his control over Eastern Europe, working through coalition governments that were made up of communists and non-communists. Usually, however, the communists occupied the most powerful positions in these coalition governments while opposition parties gained largely symbolic posts. The communists soon used intimidation and outright force, exploiting a number of advantages to gain power. Most of the local leaders of the Eastern European countries had either been killed during the war or could be discredited for collaborating with the Nazis. The communist parties, most of whom were underground during the interwar period, had gained immense prestige by leading the resistance to the Nazis after June 1941. Most importantly, the Red Army remained in place to intimidate Eastern Europe. During 1945 and early in 1946, the Soviet Union cut off nearly all contacts between the West and the occupied territories of Eastern Europe. In March 1946, Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent” of Europe. Behind this barrier, the USSR steadily expanded its power. Stalin intended to use the countries of Eastern Europe as a four-hundred-mile-deep buffer against Western invasion and as a source to help the USSR rebuild. He blocked any political, economic, or cultural contact with the West and dominated the natural resources and trade of these countries. Once his allies gained control, he ordered a purge of the local parties based on those in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The main targets for the purges were the “National Communists,” those who were seen as being more loyal to their own nation than to Moscow or Stalin. By the end of 1948, the governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania were controlled by communists. With the exception of Yugoslavia, all of these governments were totally subservient (under the control of) to Moscow.[34] The Soviet dream of securing its western border with a buffer of satellite states had been achieved.

Containment

· Describe the various tactics that the Truman administration utilized to oppose the spread of communism.

· Why did the Berlin Blockade prove to be a defeat for the USSR?

· Why did the balance of power between the U.S. and the USSR equalize after 1949?

In the late 1940s, the expansion of European communism threatened to go beyond those areas occupied by Soviet forces during the war as armed communist movements challenged the governments in Greece, Turkey, and Iran.[35] In the fall of 1946, Greek communists revolted against the Greek government. Great Britain had been giving military and economic aid to the Greek government, but the British could no longer afford to continue their assistance. They also warned the U.S. that they could not help Turkey resist communist pressure. Under the leadership of President Truman, the U.S. moved swiftly to fill the gap. In March 1947, Truman declared that the United States would help any free nation resist communist aggression and Congress granted his request for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey. With this aid, both Greece and Turkey successfully resisted communism. The new American policy, to give assistance to any country menaced by communism, became known as the Truman Doctrine. George F. Kennan, an American diplomat serving in Moscow, also urged Truman to adopt a strategy of actively opposing communist expansion. In an article entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” written under the byline of “Mr. X” in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, Kennan proposed “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”[36] The Containment Policy would take many forms over the next forty years, ranging from economic aid to the direct intervention of U.S. military forces. Shedding its historical isolation once and for all, the U.S. became involved in virtually every corner of the globe.

While armed communist rebellions were being turned back in Greece and Turkey, the spread of communism through democratic means was a threat in Western Europe. France and Italy possessed strong communist parties that had played a major role in the resistance movement against German occupation during the war. After the war, capitalizing on the horrible economic conditions, communist parties demonstrated great strength in free, democratic elections and, although they did not gain a majority, became the largest political party in both countries. Facing communist expansion in Eastern Europe, the United States believed that it could not allow these countries to turn to communism also. If France fell, Western Germany would also be gone and communism would be in place from Asia to the Atlantic. In 1948, the United States launched a $13 billion program to rebuild Western and Central Europe, believing that a strong, stable Europe would block the further spread of communism. Popularly referred to as the Marshall Plan, after Truman’s Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the European Recovery Program stabilized conditions in Western Europe and prevented the communists from taking advantage of postwar problems. Czechoslovakia and Poland wanted to take part in the Marshall Plan, but the USSR would not allow them to accept U.S. aid.

Within three years after 1945, the four-power agreement on the governing of Germany broke apart. In June 1948, the Western Allies announced plans to unify their German occupation zones. The Berlin Blockade was the Soviet answer to the West’s plans for Germany. In July, after opposing a western series of currency and economic reforms, the Soviets blocked all land and water transport to Berlin from the west. The city lay 110 miles inside the Soviet occupation zone. Soviet leaders thought their blockade would force the West to leave Berlin. Instead of pulling out of West Berlin, the Americans, British, and French set up the Berlin Airlift. For 11 months, West Berlin was supplied with food and fuel entirely by airplane. They made over 277,000 flights to bring 2.3 million tons of food and other vital materials to the besieged city. Rather than risk war over the city and the possible use of American nuclear weapons, the Soviets removed their blockade in May 1949. In the same month, the Federal Republic of Germany, made up of the three western allied zones, came into existence. Almost immediately, the Soviet Union established the German Democratic Republic in East Germany. Germany would remain divided for the next 41 years.

In the spring of 1949, Washington established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance pledged to oppose communist expansion in Europe. The initial members were Great Britain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, Iceland, the United States, and Canada. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, followed by West Germany in 1955. In 1955, the Soviets created the Warsaw Pact, which consisted of the USSR and the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. Europe was now officially divided into two armed camps. The nuclear arms race accelerated when the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949. The Soviet development of an atomic bomb, long before the Americans believed was ever possible, was a devastating shock. Despite the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, Americans had been secure in the knowledge that they possessed a monopoly on the most devastating weapon in the world. Now that was no longer true.

Red China and a new Red Scare

· Why did the communist takeover of China become a domestic political issue in the United States?

· Why was the Hiss Case significant?

· What factors led to the prominence of Senator Joseph McCarthy? Why was McCarthy a controversial figure?

Truman’s policy of containment of communism, although generally successful in Europe, was less effective in Asia. During the 1940’s, communist strength increased immensely in the Far East. The USSR had occupied Chinese Manchuria just before the end of World War II. After they left in 1946, the Chinese Communists took over most of northern Manchuria. The USSR also set up a North Korean “People’s Republic” under a communist dictator, Kim Il Sung.

Civil war between Chinese Communists, led by Mao Zedong, and the non-communist Kuomintang Party (Nationalists), led by Chiang Kai-shek, had been raging since the late 1920s. During the war both sides had somewhat cooperated to fight the Japanese, but after the war the two sides began fighting again. Mao’s highly dedicated and skilled guerrilla forces were a marked contrast with Chiang’s larger but disorganized and often corrupt Nationalists. Despite two billion dollars of U.S. aid to Chiang, his forces were badly divided by internal disunity, and the economy was paralyzed by spiraling inflation. In 1948, the Communists began to achieve a clear military advantage, and by the summer of 1949 Nationalist resistance collapsed. In late 1949, Chiang and his government fled to the island of Taiwan, and the Mao’s Communists now ruled the world’s most populous country. This development caused great turmoil in the United States when critics charged that the Truman administration had “lost China” by failing to adequately support Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists.

During the late 1940’s and 1950’s, the Cold War became increasingly tense. Each side accused the other of wanting to rule the world and continually strengthened its armed forces. Both sides viewed the Cold War as a moral dispute between right and wrong, and saw every local revolt and international incident as part of a larger global strategy by their opponent. This situation, and the memory of Munich-style appeasement, made it difficult to settle any dispute peacefully through compromise with each side giving up something. Fear grew among all peoples that a local conflict would touch off a third world war that might destroy humanity.

For the United States, the last years of the 1940s were very disillusioning. Eastern Europe was lost, China had fallen to communism, and the Soviet Union now had the atomic bomb. Republicans in Congress began to blame the Truman administration for these events. Some Republican congressmen even charged that communists inside the U.S. government had aided the Soviet Union. As early as 1947, President Truman had set up a nationwide system of loyalty boards to investigate government employees, but generally criticized Republican charges of internal subversion as a “red herring.”

Truman’s unwillingness to join in an all out search for domestic communists was shaken in 1948 when Alger Hiss was accused of being a communist in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Hiss, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had previously served as a key aide to President Roosevelt at Yalta and as the head of the conference that organized the United Nations in 1945. Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was an American writer and editor of Time magazine. The two men could not have been more dissimilar. Hiss was a star of the New Deal. Handsome, well dressed, and charming, Hiss was one of the most respected figures in Washington. Chambers, on the other hand, was overweight, rumpled, and an admitted former member of the Communist Party. To most Americans, the thought that Chambers could be telling the truth seemed absurd. Hiss testified before HUAC and strongly denied that he had worked with Chambers as a member of the Communist Party in the early 1930s. Most of the members were willing to let the matter drop, but one young Congressman, Richard Nixon of California, believed Chambers. Nixon was able to arrange a face to face confrontation between the two men in which Hiss challenged Chambers to repeat his charges in public so that Hiss could sue for libel. When Chambers did this and Hiss sued, the case moved into the courtroom.

In his defense, Chambers produced microfilm copies of documents that he had hidden inside a hollowed-out pumpkin. These were later identified as classified papers belonging to the Departments of State, Navy, and War, some apparently containing Hiss’s own handwriting. The Department of Justice conducted its own investigation, and Hiss was indicted for perjury (lying under oath). Although the evidence that Hiss had been involved in espionage was highly circumstantial, his early claims that he had not even known Chambers were found to be clearly false. The jury failed to reach a verdict, but Hiss was convicted after a second trial in January 1950 and sentenced to a five-year prison term, still vehemently maintaining his innocence.[37]

The Hiss verdict was a bombshell. If Hiss had been a secret communist, who could be above suspicion? Any effort to maintain that the hunt for internal communists was just a political “red herring” as Truman had charged was now clearly impossible. The case also had another important effect on American politics; it made Richard Nixon a national figure. In 1950, he was elected to the Senate and two years later became vice president upon the election of a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower. The Hiss Case had illustrated the dogged determination and refusal to give up that would both make him president in 1968 and eventually lead to his downfall in the Watergate Scandal.

In the midst of the Hiss Trial, one of the Los Alamos scientists, Klaus Fuchs, was arrested by the British on charges that he had given secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviets. Fuchs, a refugee from Germany who was one of many foreign scientists that had worked on the Manhattan Project, was found to have been a long-time member of the Communist Party and a Soviet spy. The investigation of Fuchs led to the complicity of several Americans including David Greenglass, an enlisted man who had access to most of the information at Los Alamos. Greenglass’ sister, Ethel Rosenberg, and her husband Julius, had served as couriers carrying secrets to Soviet agents in New York City. Although the value of the information given the Soviets by these spies was debatable, at the time it provided a logical explanation of why the Soviets had been able to develop a bomb so quickly.[38] The Rosenbergs were eventually convicted of treason and executed in Sing Sing prison’s electric chair in 1953. In combination with the Hiss Trial, the news of the atom bomb spies made Americans conclude that the US’s very existence was in jeopardy due to widespread communist infiltration of American society. Any politician who could seize upon this concern could make a name for himself overnight.

Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin first attracted national attention in February 1950 with a charge that communists had infiltrated the State Department. In a speech delivered in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy, who was in a tough re-election battle and desperate for a good campaign issue, proclaimed: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 (people) that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”[39] When asked to provide his list, McCarthy hesitated and eventually the number 205 was reduced to 81, then 57, and finally McCarthy claimed he had been misquoted. Regardless of the lack of evidence to support these accusations, thousands of Americans were called before Congressional Committees and their careers ruined just because of the suspicion that they had been or even associated with communists. Although almost all of McCarthy’s accusations were never substantiated, during the next three years he repeatedly accused various high-ranking officials of subversive activities. In April of 1954, McCarthy accused the Secretary of the Army of concealing foreign espionage activities. In rebuttal, the Secretary stated that members of the subcommittee staff had threatened army officials in efforts to obtain preferential treatment for a former unpaid consultant of the subcommittee who had been drafted. During the ensuing Senate investigations, which were given nationwide television coverage, McCarthy was cleared of the charges against him but was censured (formally criticized) by the Senate for the methods he had used in his investigations and for his abuse of certain senators and Senate committees. His influence both in the Senate and on the national political scene diminished steadily thereafter, although he remained in the Senate until his death in 1957.

The Korean War

· What factors led to the Korean War?

· Why was the UN able to send forces to oppose the North Korean invasion?

· Describe the four phases of the war.

· Why did President Truman fire General MacArthur?

· How did he war finally end? Was it a victory for the United States?

The tension between the rival systems finally snapped in Korea, and for the first time, Americans fought a “hot war” against communism. Some historians believe the Korean War, which lasted from June 1950 to July 1953, was a major turning point in the Cold War. It extended the Containment Policy to the Far East. It also introduced limited warfare to the Cold War as a substitute to all-out, and possibly nuclear, war. Each side avoided attacking targets that could have led to expansion of the war, and each side limited the weapons it used and the territory in which it would fight.

After Japan’s surrender in World War II, Korea (which had formerly been occupied by Japan) had been divided at the 38th parallel into American and Soviet zones of occupation. When the occupying troops left, they were replaced by two hostile states, each claiming the right to rule over the entire country. North Korea was a tightly controlled communist state led by Kim Il Sung, while South Korea had strong U.S. support, although its leader, Syngman Rhee, often frustrated U.S. policymakers with his undemocratic methods. The Korean War began in June 1950 when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel, invading South Korea. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung was convinced that he would be welcomed by many South Koreans as a liberator intent on overthrowing the unpopular Rhee government and reuniting the two Koreas. As a champion of Korean unification, Kim would also undermine ongoing opposition to his own Communist regime in North Korea. Kim had raised the question of invading the South as early as March 1949, but Stalin had counseled against such a move, predicting that the U.S. would intervene “more decisively than they did in China.” As Kim continued to press for Soviet support, Stalin reluctantly began to modify his position. China and the USSR had signed a thirty year Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance in February 1950 and the Soviets believed that their possession of the atomic bomb would deter full-scale American intervention. Stalin began to send Kim large amounts of weapons early in 1950 and, although he warned him that the USSR would not directly intervene, suggested that the North Koreans could rely on Chinese military support.[40]

After the North Korean attack began, the United States responded by calling for a special meeting of the UN Security Council, whose members demanded a ceasefire and withdrawal of the invaders. In a incredible diplomatic blunder, the Soviet delegate was boycotting the Council at the time over it’s refusal to replace Nationalist Chinese representatives with Communist ones after Mao’s takeover of power in 1949.[41] As a result, the Soviets could not veto the action. Three days later, President Truman ordered U.S. combat forces stationed in Japan deployed to Korea. When North Korea ignored the UN’s demand for a cease-fire, the Security Council also sent UN troops to help the South Korean government. American forces, those of South Korea, and, ultimately, contingents from over twenty different countries were placed under a unified UN command headed by the U.S. commander in chief in the Far East, General Douglas MacArthur. This marked the first time that the UN or its predecessor, the League of Nations, had ever used military measures to repel an aggressor.

Even after Truman committed American ground forces to Korea, the war continued to go badly for the South Koreans. Before the North Korean attack was halted in August, they had captured Seoul, the capital of South Korea, and the Americans and South Koreans were pushed back to a small pocket around the southeastern port city of Pusan. American reinforcements were able to hold this small area; however, and on September 15, 1950, General MacArthur launched the second phase of the war, a brilliant amphibious invasion behind enemy lines, striking at the port city of Inchon on South Korea’s west coast, about 25 miles west of Seoul. In a coordinated move, UN forces broke out of the Pusan perimeter. Very quickly, the North Koreans were routed and forced above the 38th parallel.

Truman now sensed an opportunity not only to stop communist expansion but also to reunify Korea and approved orders for UN forces to cross the 38th parallel and conquer North Korea. Despite repeated warnings from the Chinese that they would enter the war if the Americans came near the Yalu, River, which separated North Korea from China, UN forces crossed into North Korea on October 7 and later captured Pyongyang, its capital. By October 25, some advance units had reached the Yalu. Shortly thereafter, the Chinese attacked in massive numbers, beginning the third phase of the war. UN troops, outnumbered, and ill equipped to fight the huge Chinese Army in the bitter Korean winter, were soon in a full-scale retreat. The communists reoccupied Pyongyang on December 5 and swept into South Korea, capturing Seoul for the second time on January 4, 1951. The communist offensive was halted by January 15 along a front far south of Seoul. Unwilling to engage in an all-out war with China, which could have led to a nuclear war involving the Soviet Union, President Truman abandoned his objective of the military reunification of Korea and returned to the original goal of merely stopping communist expansion. Under pressure of superior UN firepower, the Chinese were slowly pushed out of most of South Korea. Seoul changed hands for the fourth and final time in the war as UN forces again captured it in March. By April, UN forces occupied positions slightly north of the 38th parallel along a line that, with minor variations, remained stationary for the rest of the war.

In its final phase, the war stagnated in combat resembling the First World War. General MacArthur became more critical of the Truman Administration’s policy. In a letter to a Republican congressman, he criticized the policy of his civilian and military superiors and advocated bombing bases inside China. Due to the general’s insubordination and the fear that widening the war by attacking China could induce the Soviet Union to enter the war, President Truman relieved MacArthur of his command in April 1951. Truman’s firing of the popular general was widely criticized, and MacArthur returned home to a hero’s welcome in Congress.

Under MacArthur’s successor, Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgeway, the war continued to be a costly stalemate. In July 1951, representatives of the UN and communist commands began truce negotiations, which continued at a frustratingly slow pace for two years. By 1952, the negotiations finally resulted in settlement of all but one major issue; many North Koreans captured by the UN did not want to return to the North. In late spring of 1953, the two sides agreed that prisoners unwilling to return to their own countries would be placed in the custody of a neutral commission for 90 days following the signing of a truce. During this period, each nation could attempt to persuade its soldiers to return home. In July, the truce agreement was signed at Panmunjom ending the war after more than three years of conflict. Little ground had changed hands from the original division of Korea; however, the U.S. had succeeded in its original mission to push back the North Korean invasion. The U.S. suffered 157,530 casualties, including 33,629 deaths. South Korea sustained 1.3 million military casualties, and the other UN allies totaled 16,532. Estimated communist casualties were two million. The economic and social damage to the Korean nation was incalculable and the two Koreas remain divided today. Persistent rumors that the North Korean government has developed nuclear weapons make Korea an enduring world trouble spot.

The Khrushchev Years

· Describe life in the Soviet Union between 1945-1953.

· What immediate changes resulted from Stalin’s death?

· What was the significance of Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress?

· How did life improve for ordinary Soviet citizens during the Khrushchev years?

· Describe Khrushchev’s virgin lands program. Why did his agricultural policies eventually fail?

· How did the Cold War change during Khrushchev’s rule?

· Why was the issue of decolonization problematic for the United States?

· What factors led to the split between China and the USSR?

· What factors led to the Cuban Missile Crisis? Why was the resolution of the crisis a defeat for Khrushchev?

· Why was Khrushchev removed from power in 1964?

Despite the immense destruction it had suffered, the USSR emerged after the war as one of the world’s two superpowers. Stalin rewarded the Soviet people for their sacrifices in World War II with a return to the iron repression of the 1930s. A new purge was launched against the Leningrad party leadership and his half-million strong security police squashed any sign of dissent, criticism, or free expression. Especially suspect were those who fell under foreign control during the war. Over 25% of the surviving party leaders in areas occupied by the Germans during the war were purged in 1947, and over 2.7 million Soviet prisoners of war, who had suffered horribly in German captivity, were immediately arrested after their return to the USSR, with over half eventually sent to the Gulag.[42]

To achieve military equality with the United States, Stalin launched the fourth Five-Year Plan in 1946 once again focusing on in heavy industry and military weapons. Huge new factories sprang up east of a line from Leningrad to Moscow to Stalingrad. The state lured workers to the new sites with salary increases and other benefits, but much of the need for workers was filled by mass deportation of people to labor camps. The population of the camps swelled beyond that of the purge years of the late 1930s, at one point to over two and a half million. [43] Thousands died in the camps from overwork, inadequate food, and bitter cold. Even for those not imprisoned, life remained bleak. Not until 1950 did industrial production return to prewar levels. Agriculture and consumer goods production took even longer to recover. Even ten years after the war, the urban ration of meat was one half pound per person per week.

On March 5, 1953, Stalin died suddenly from a stroke. Seldom in the history of the world has a single man had such an enormous impact. As one supporter said decades later: “He took Russia, which had a wooden plow in its hands, and he left it with an atomic bomb.”[44] Stalin had taken Lenin’s revolution and preserved it in Russia while exporting it to the world. In a quarter-century he remade his society, withstood Hitler’s strongest attacks, and emerged from the Second World War as the leader of one of the two superpowers. Stalin built the Soviet economic and political system that lasted for the next 35 years and cultivated a group of bureaucratic survivors who ran the country until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s. In doing all of this, he killed at least twice as many people as Hitler.[45]

A committee made up of four of Stalin’s closest aides, Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Vyacheslav Molotov succeeded him. They placed Stalin’s embalmed body in the tomb next to Lenin and then slowly began to relax his policies. Beria, who had headed the notorious NKVD since 1937, was soon arrested by the other leaders and executed. Censorship was eased, and many were released from prison and the labor camps.[46] The NKVD was eventually disbanded, its internal security responsibilities transferred to a new organization, the KGB. The Soviet Union’s softer course of action at home did little to ease international tensions. Soviet troops put down a revolt in East Germany in June 1953, and the nuclear arms race accelerated. The United States tested its first hydrogen bomb in November 1952, and the USSR set off its first H-bomb in November 1955.

Within three years, Nikita Khrushchev outmaneuvered Malenkov and Molotov and established himself as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union.[47] A Ukrainian of Russian ancestry, Khrushchev was born of peasant parents and worked as a miner and factory worker. He joined the Communist Party before the revolution and quickly rose through its ranks, attending his first Party Congress in 1925. Like so many of his colleagues, Khrushchev rose to power in the 1930s by taking the jobs of people killed in the Great Purges. He became a Central Committee member in 1934, served as Moscow Party Leader, and ascended to the Politburo by 1939. By July 1953, he was the First Secretary of the party, and by 1955 he led the country. Chubby and bald, Khrushchev was capable of joking and displaying a huge grin, marking him as distinctly different from either Lenin or Stalin. Foreigners and educated Russians may have viewed him as uncultured and crude; however, he possessed sharp mind and was a skilled politician, as evidenced by his survival during the Stalin years and quick emergence as his successor.

Khrushchev’s greatest contribution was to begin a de-Stalinization campaign. In February 1956, at the Twentieth Party Congress, he gave an eight-hour speech detailing the “crimes of the Stalin era.” He attacked Stalin as a bloodthirsty tyrant and revealed many of the cruelties of the Purges and mistakes of World War II. For the first time, the details of Lenin’s testament criticizing Stalin were openly revealed to the entire party. Khrushchev blamed Stalin’s crimes on the dictator’s “cult of personality.” Notably, Khrushchev did not criticize Stalin’s actions prior to the Great Purges; in fact, he openly praised Stalin’s policies of collectivization and industrialization. In addition, he did not acknowledge any responsibility for Stalin’s crimes by his top associates, including himself.[48] Nevertheless, the speech hit like a bombshell. The leader of the party had now spoken words that would have previously landed any Soviet citizen in the Gulag. Although the speech was delivered in a closed session and only heard by the Central Committee, the general tenor of Khrushchev’s speech became widely known. Stalin soon became an “unperson,” just as he himself had sought to eradicate the contributions of Trotsky from Soviet history. In 1961, his body was removed from the Lenin mausoleum and placed in a less prestigious grave by the Kremlin wall. His name also disappeared from streets and cities; the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.

Khrushchev led an expansion of party membership and weakened the power of regional party bosses by pushing power downward to the local level. Khrushchev’s 1956 speech and the liberalizations in the USSR echoed throughout the communist world, helping to spark liberal uprisings in Poland and Hungary and to widen the gulf between China and the Soviet Union. In truth, Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin was more an effort to boost his own popularity than to usher in an era of freedom and liberalization in the communist world; however, the outright fear and oppression of the Stalinist era lessened dramatically and authors were free to criticize the excesses of the Stalinist era. For example, the government permitted the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, an account of the Stalinist labor camps, in 1962. Most aspects of the Soviet state, however, remained rigidly controlled.

Khrushchev was also more willing to allow the Eastern European satellites to develop their own forms of communism, although there were clear limits. In 1956 he welcomed Yugoslavia’s Tito to Moscow, healing the rift that had developed when Tito had refused to follow Stalin’s orders following World War II. Demonstrations and strikes in Poland succeeded in forcing the reinstatement of a popular Communist leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, whom Stalin had purged and ordered imprisoned in 1951. However, when the Hungarian party chief Imre Nagy announced a series of sweeping reforms, Khrushchev sent Soviet troops to crush the uprising. Nagy had agreed to end the party’s domination of the Hungarian government by legalizing other parties and announced that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and demanded a complete withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungarian soil. In November 1956, Khrushchev sent 15 army divisions and 4,000 tanks into the Hungarian capital of Budapest. For two weeks fighting raged throughout the city, as Hungarians attacked the Soviet tanks with rifles and homemade bombs. Nearly 700 Soviet soldiers died as did between 3,000 and 4,000 Hungarians. During the fighting, approximately 200,000 Hungarians fled the country, crossing the border into non-communist Austria. Eventually, the Hungarian Uprising was crushed. A pro-Soviet government was placed in power, and Nagy was executed on Soviet orders in 1958. Similar protests within the USSR were brutally crushed as well. In 1962, workers at the Electric Locomotive Works in Novocherkassk went on strike to protest wage cuts and price hikes. The Army fired upon a peaceful march of 7,000 workers. Twenty-four were killed and dozens more injured. Seven surviving leaders of the march were later executed.[49]

During Khrushchev’s rule, the standard of living in Russia gradually improved, for the first time since the late 1920s. A massive program of apartment building began in Soviet cities in 1957, addressing the chronic shortage of housing in a country that was now 50% urban. Wages increased, the workweek was shortened to five days, and workers began to receive longer vacations that they could take in inexpensive Black Sea resorts. The government also began to permit the manufacture of more consumer goods. Although greatly inferior to the quality of goods available in the West, they represented a significant advancement for Soviet consumers.

One of Khrushchev’s main goals was to reform agriculture. He proposed increasing incentives for peasants and enlarging the area under cultivation in Soviet Siberia and central Asia—what were referred to as “the virgin lands.” A total of ninety million acres (more than the combined farmland of Britain, France, and Spain) of steppe land was planted with grain. Between 1953 and 1958, agricultural production rose by 50%. In the long run, however, farming in the virgin lands proved to be economically wasteful and many of the areas reverted to dry desert-like conditions. In his efforts to dramatically improve agriculture, Khrushchev also embarked on vast, ill-conceived schemes that ultimately, as in the case of the virgin lands, proved disastrous. He refused to allow any form of local experimentation, insisting on experimenting with the entire country by imposing, and then frequently altering, uniform requirements with respect to crops, fertilizers, and the use of agricultural machinery. Corn, for example, was ordered to be planted in areas where it could not possibly thrive due to inadequate rainfall or harsh temperatures. Like many ideas of the Khrushchev era, agricultural reform began with high hopes, but eventually stalled and failed to bring the dramatic improvements that had been originally promised. By the late 1950s, the USSR was forced to begin purchasing grain from abroad.[50]

In the late 1950s, Khrushchev relaxed the tensions of the Cold War and pursued “peaceful coexistence” with President Eisenhower of the United States. The two leaders met several times to discuss world issues and, although little was agreed upon, at least the two sides were talking to each other. Relations began to deteriorate again in the latter part of the decade, as the Soviet Union became perceived as an even greater threat to the United States. Soviet scientists made remarkable strides, launching the first earth satellite, Sputnik, in the fall of 1957, and building a powerful fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Khrushchev also turned up the heat on the U.S. by pursued aggressive policies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America designed to encourage the development of communist governments in the third world (a term used to describe the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America). The Soviet Union sponsored various “national liberation movements” as colonies fought to assert their independence from their former rulers or peasants sought to overthrow aristocratic rulers. This new conflict placed the U.S. in an awkward position as its key European allies (Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and Portugal) generally sought to oppose these independence movements in their colonies. Communism had been one of the first ideologies to condemn colonialism, and thus had a powerful appeal to the developing world as the Soviets tried to portray the U.S. as the defender of unpopular colonial regimes. Soviet-backed clients in Vietnam, the Belgian Congo, and Cuba fought against forces backed by the United States.

After 1956, Chinese-Soviet relations soured drastically, and by 1960 Khrushchev had pulled all Soviet assistance from China. Two issues were basically the cause of the split. The Chinese resented the Soviet’s attitude of paternalism and opposed Khrushchev’s reforms, especially his criticism of Stalin. Khrushchev later commented, “Mao Zedong had started down a wrong path that would lead to the collapse of his economy and consequently, the failure of his policies. We did all we could to influence the Chinese and stop them before it was too late, but Mao thought he was God.”[51] In return, the Chinese accused Khrushchev of “revising, emasculating, and betraying” Lenin and Stalin’s heritage by endorsing a doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the West.

A feeling that the USSR was overtaking the U.S. in the late 1950s in terms of missile technology and support in the developing countries played a role in the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. Kennedy promised a far more aggressive foreign policy to combat the expansion of communism. In his inaugural address he pledged:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans… unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed…. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This new American attitude, combined with Soviet efforts in the third world, soon intensified the Cold War to a level reminiscent of the early 1950s. The Kennedy years (1961-63) featured an almost never-ending series of crises, most notably in Laos, Vietnam, Berlin, and Cuba. After failing to force the U.S. to withdraw from West Berlin, Khrushchev was forced to authorize the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to prevent highly trained East Germans from fleeing to higher paid jobs in the West.[52]

The greatest crisis of the Kennedy years occurred in Cuba. In 1959, a charismatic young rebel, Fidel Castro had overthrown the corrupt regime of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. This revolution had occurred without any Soviet assistance, but U.S. opposition to Castro’s nationalization of U.S. property soon drove him closer and closer to the Soviet Union. In 1961, Kennedy backed an invasion of Cuban exiles that attempted to overthrow the Castro regime. This Bay of Pigs invasion was a dismal failure, as the U.S.-trained exiles were met at the beach by overwhelming Cuban forces. The threat of another U.S.-backed invasion led Castro to ask for increased military aid from Khrushchev, and Cuba became a virtual Soviet satellite, ninety miles from the U.S. shore. In October 1962, Kennedy learned that the Soviets were deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba. These missiles, when activated, would be capable of hitting the U.S. with little or no warning. Khrushchev saw this as an inexpensive way of closing the gap between U.S. and Soviet nuclear capabilities, in which he believed the USSR trailed by almost fifteen years, describing the plan as a method of “Putting one of our hedgehogs down the Americans’ trousers.”[53] Only cautious negotiating by the Kennedy administration averted a potential nuclear war. After drawing the world to the brink of catastrophe in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev was forced to back down and remove the missiles in return for a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba.

Khrushchev’s reformist inclinations and impulsive decision-making style did not sit well with the rest of the Soviet leadership group. His 1956 speech denouncing Stalin had been opposed by most of the Presidium, and it was only his threat to make the speech in an open session as a delegate from the floor that resulted in its reluctant approval.[54] In 1957, the Presidium attempted to remove him from power but was blocked by Khrushchev supporters in the army and KGB. As a result, the Central Committee selected a new Presidium, removing most of the remaining members from the Stalin era and replacing them with Khrushchev supporters such as Leonid Brezhnev. Ultimately, however, Khrushchev’s humiliation in the Cuban Missile Crisis and failures in agriculture led to his removal from power. While on vacation in October 1964, the Presidium voted to remove him from power. Isolated, Khrushchev accepted his fate, telling his son: “Could anyone have ever dreamed of telling Stalin that he no longer pleased us and should retire? He would have made mincemeat out of us. Now everything is different. Fear has disappeared, and a dialogue is carried on among equals. That is my service. I won’t fight it any longer.”[55] As evidence of the changes he had instigated, Khrushchev was allowed to retire peacefully to his dacha outside of Moscow under a mild form of house arrest. There, he remained out of the public eye, writing his memoirs, until his death in 1971.

Jeffrey T. Stroebel, The Sycamore School, 2000. Revised 2001

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[1] Stalin’s real name was Joseph Vissarionovich Dzugashvili. He took the revolutionary name of Stalin, or “man of steel.”

[2] The author of the “gray blur” statement, Nikolai N. Sukhanov, was later killed by Stalin in the Purges of the 1930s.

[3] Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p. 91.

[4] Volkogonov, Stalin, pp. 79, 81.

[5] The testament was published in the New York Times in 1932. The Soviet government condemned it as a forgery.

[6] Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 94.

[7] All members of Trotsky’s family left in Russia were killed (two married daughters and a married son, Sergei). His second son, Lev Sedov, was apparently murdered by a Stalin agent in a French hospital in 1938.

[8] Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 167.

[9] Following the revolution, the Bolsheviks had outlawed private landownership (except for small private plots) and the peasant communes were reorganized as rural soviets. Although the land was communally held, peasants owned their own livestock and tools.

[10] Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 167.

[11] For example, 73m. tons of grain had been harvested in 1928, of which 11m. tons had been acquired by the government through taxation. In 1936, only 59m. tons were harvested, yet the government acquired 28m. tons.

[12] Khrushchev would eventually prove to be Stalin’s successor, ruling from 1957-1964.

[13] Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times—Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 44.

[14] Rationing increased the amount of government control over workers. Disobedient or lazy workers could be stripped of their ration cards.

[15] Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martins, 2000), pp. 5-6.

[16] Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 98, 107.

[17] Economic statistics are taken from Christian, Imperial and Soviet Russia, pp. 275-290.

[18] Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 184-188.

[19] In 1937 Stalin exacted his revenge, ordering that Ryutin and members of his family be executed.

[20] Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 197.

[21] Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 200.

[22] Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 186.

[23] Some have suggested that Stalin’s anti-Semitism played a great role in the purges. Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev were Jewish. Kirov and Bukharin had Jewish wives. Stalin took great pains to hide the fact that Lenin’s maternal grandfather was Jewish. See Arkady Vaksberg, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Stalin Against the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1994).

[24] For an excellent account of the Purges, see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, (New York: Macmillan, 1973). Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (New York: Macmillan, 1941) provides an excellent fictionalized account of the fate of an Old Bolshevik. For the memoirs of a party official arrested and imprisoned during the period, I highly recommend Eugenia S. Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1967).

[25] There is some evidence to suggest that the German counterintelligence agency, Abwer, fabricated some of the evidence used against Soviet military leaders in their trials.

[26] Trotsky was murdered by Ramon Mercader, a Spanish Communist working for the NKVD, who buried an ice pick in his head. After serving twenty years in a Mexico prison, Mercader traveled to the USSR where he received a medal as a hero of the Soviet Union.

[27] V. P. Popov, “State Terror in Soviet Russia 1923-1953,” Russian Social Science Review 35 (September 1994), pp. 48-70.

[28] Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 212.

[29] The term Gulag is derived from the Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, which was established in 1930. Archipelago refers to a chain of islands. The term “Gulag Archipelago” was used as the title of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 expose of the Soviet secret police and slave labor system. For a classic description of camp life, see Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (New York: Dutton, 1963).

[30] Indirectly, Stalin deserves some of the blame for Hitler’s rise. He ordered the German Communist Party to direct its attack on the country’s moderate socialists rather than join forces with them to oppose the Nazis.

[31] Stalin rejected intelligence information from the Soviet Union’s spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, that an attack by Germany was imminent, labeling Sorge’s reports “German disinformation.” Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, p. 114.

[32] Over 150,000 Soviet soldiers were executed during 1941-42 alone. Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, p. 118.

[33] Milovan Djilas, translated by Michael B. Petrovich, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harvest ,1962), p. 133.

[34] Yugoslavia’s immensely popular communist leader, Josip Tito, a hero of the resistance against the Nazis soon broke with Stalin, refusing to obey Soviet orders. Although outraged, the Soviets had no desire to provoke a military conflict with the mountainous and fiercely nationalistic Yugoslavia.

[35] The U.S. and Britain automatically assumed that these communist forces were acting on Moscow’s orders, although this was not always the case. In Greece for example, Stalin had told the Greek communists that conditions were not ripe for an armed rebellion. The Greek communists ignored him and Stalin did little to assist them in their campaign.

[36] David Rees, The Age of Containment (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 23.

[37] Evidence released from Soviet files following the end of communism indicates that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy. Soviet correspondence from the 1930s repeatedly refers to a high State Department official operating under the codename “ALES.” Venona Archives No. 1822, dated March 5, 1945.

[38] It is difficult to determine how much this information benefited Soviet scientists who, with the help of former Nazi scientists, had been working on a Soviet atomic bomb fervently since 1945. The current consensus is that the effect was minimal and that the USSR would have developed its own bomb within two years anyway.

[39] William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), p. 639.

[40] Paul Wingrove, “Who Started Korea?” History Today (July 2000), pp. 44-46.

[41] Both Mao’s mainland regime and the Nationalists on Taiwan insisted that they were the “real Chinese government.” The U.S. supported the claims of “Nationalist China” over “Red China” until the 1970s when the communist government was awarded the permanent seat on the UN Security Council. After formally recognizing the legitimacy of the communist government, the U.S. has maintained that Taiwan is a province of China, but should not be forced to reunite with the mainland against the will of its inhabitants.

[42] Even those closest to Stalin were not able to protect their families from the terror. The wife of his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, was imprisoned for Zionist activities after the war. Molotov could do nothing to affect her release until after Stalin’s death.

[43] J. P. Nettl, The Soviet Achievement (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), p. 198. In comparison, the number of Siberian exiles under the Tsar in 1900 was less than a third of a million, with only a very small percentage of political prisoners.

[44] Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, p. 131.

[45] Stalin’s Russian biographer, Volkogonov, estimates that between 19.5 and 22 million Soviets died as a result of Stalin’s policies between 1929-1953. A third of these either were executed or died in the camps. Stalin, p. 524.

[46] At Stalin’s death, there were over four million Soviet citizens imprisoned in the Gulag and an additional 2.5 million sentenced to internal exile. Volkoganov, Autopsy for an Empire, p. 195.

[47] Indicative of the gentler new regime, Malenkov and Molotov were not imprisoned or killed. Both were transferred to relatively insignificant positions and then eased into retirement.

[48] For example, in 1936, Khrushchev had delivered a speech urging the execution of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky, and others accused of treason by Stalin. Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, p. 205.

[49] A Soviet general who refused to fire on the demonstrators was forced out of the army and expelled from the party. The Novocherkassk incident received no coverage in the press and was virtually unknown until the 1980s. Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, pp. 414-419.

[50] As a result of these purchases, Soviet gold reserves declined from 13.1 million tons in 1954 to 6.3 million in 1963. In comparison, prior to World War I, Russia had been the world’s largest grain exporter, exporting 11.5 tons per year on average during the period of 1910-1914.

[51] Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, trans. and ed. Jerrold L. Schecter with Vyacheslav Luchkov (Boston: Little Brown, 1990) p. 153.

[52] Prior to the construction of the Wall, more than three million people had used Berlin to flee from Eastern Europe to the West, 21,000 in the week prior to the Wall’s construction. By the time the Wall finally fell in November 1989, 235 people had been killed there trying to flee to West Berlin. Another 750 people died trying to cross other parts of the border between the two Germanies.

[53] Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, p. 236.

[54] In 1952 Stalin had changed the name of the Politburo to the Presidium. The name reverted back to Politburo in 1962. Regardless, it means the most select group of party officials, selected by the Central Committee.

[55] Christian, Imperial and Soviet Russia, p. 365.