Summary of the history and ideals of Communism in Russia between Lenin and Stalin.
Communism in Russia
The overthrow of Tsarism and the colossal revolutionary process that took place in Russia culminated in October 1917 with the seizure of power by Lenin’s Bolsheviks. They prepared to impose their power on the territory, repressing the opposition press, banning strikes and creating the Czech, the political police . The political elections, however, gave Lenin a very disappointing result, making the revolutionary soviets the first party in the country (40% of the votes).
The leaders of the revolution then decided to impose themselves by force, dissolving the Constituent Assembly and creating the Red Army , an army loyal to the Bolsheviks .
On March 3, 1918, the Peace of Brest-Litovsk was signed with the Central Powers, and the capital was subsequently moved to Moscow. The Bolshevik Party officially took the name of Communist Party, and on July 23, the birth of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (the future Soviet Union ) was proclaimed .
The End of Tsarism
To consolidate their power, the Bolsheviks began a civil war against several opponents.
First, the conflict was between the Red Bolsheviks and the White Tsarists , who aspired to restore the empire of Nicholas II. Soon, however, the Bolsheviks also had to face other adversaries, such as the European troops of the Entente who feared the advent of communism, the peasant class and the rural bourgeoisie, who did not recognize the hegemony of the working class, the Cossacks, against whom the Bolsheviks carried out real repressions, with killings and deportations. Finally, even the nationalities who claimed their own state rose up against Russia. ( Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia , etc.).
The struggle against all these adversaries brought the Bolshevik power to the brink of defeat. Fearing the consequences of a possible liberation of Nicholas II, they killed the Tsar and the entire royal family. If the revolutionary government did not fall, however, it was thanks to the organization of the Red Army by Trotsky, a skilled military commander, an army that faced and defeated the adversaries of the revolution one by one.
Lenin in power
During these years, Lenin conceived and idealized the so-called war communism , based on the direct control of the state of industrial and agricultural production, which had as its objective the supply of the army. Between 1917 and 1919, banks and industrial enterprises were nationalized, and factory work was militarized. The circulation of the ruble was suspended and Russians were given ration cards for basic necessities. Even in the countryside, the food dictatorship was supposed to solve the food problems of the Soviet population, through forced requisitions of grain. War communism succeeded in achieving its objective, the sustenance of the troops, but had disastrous results in every other respect. As a result, opposition to Bolshevik power began to mount again.
In the countryside, the peasants opposed the grain requisitions in every way , responding by reducing the cultivated surface area and thus causing an enormous drop in production. Even in the industries there was an air of crisis, with many fewer workers working than before the world conflict and therefore producing less.
Furthermore, the mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base in 1921, which was bloodily suppressed, was a sign that discontent was spreading not only among peasants and workers, but also in the army.
The NEP, New Economic Policy
To maintain power, Lenin abandoned war communism and resorted to the NEP (New Economic Policy) based on a partial return to private property and the liberalization of trade. In the countryside, the right to sell what was produced was recognized, and industrial work was accompanied by the grafting of Western technologies. Money began to circulate again and credit counters reopened. The economy recovered, agricultural and industrial production began to rise again, the circulation of goods favored the formation of a new class of rich people, the NEPmen and the kulaks .
The Birth of the USSR
In 1922, the USSR was born , the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , a multinational state cemented by the ideology of the Communist Party in power, which included those states that had asked for independence during the civil war. The constitution spoke of a federal form between sovereign nations, with equal rights and the possibility of freely leaving the Union. In reality, it was a centralist federation and there was no possibility of escaping from it.
Stalin in power
Upon Lenin’s death, Stalin took power. He had previously taken advantage of Lenin’s constant absences due to illness to centralize in his own hands the control of the bureaucratic apparatus of the party, whose size and power were continually increasing. In a few years he managed to marginalize the historical leaders of the revolution of 17, such as Trotsky , expelled from the party and sent into exile in Kazakhstan and then killed in Mexico. By the end of the 1930s, Stalin held full power in the party, which controlled the state. Internal dissent had been completely silenced and the will of the leader became the will of the country.
Socialism in one country
Stalin advanced the thesis of Socialism in One Country , according to which the USSR had to build socialism without waiting for the outbreak of revolution in the capitalist West. Trotsky had instead theorized the opposite thesis: to avoid the isolation of the Soviet Union and its encirclement by capitalist imperialism. It was Stalin’s thesis that triumphed, elaborating a coherent doctrinal corpus of Lenin’s thought. He presented himself as the natural continuator of Lenin himself, and Marxism-Leninism under Stalin became a monolithic ideology that would guide the policies of the communist parties for a long time to come.
The work camps
On paper, the country was supported by the power of the soviets , but in reality the state was in the hands of Stalin, while order was guaranteed by an efficient repressive police apparatus: the Cheka, a secret police with arbitrary powers, outside of any legality, which the party relied on to eliminate its adversaries. For this purpose, moreover, labor camps soon spread.
The forced collectivization of agriculture
In the economic field, Stalin abandoned the NEP in favor of a forced collectivization of agriculture : the definitive expropriation of the land from the hands of the peasants and entrusting it to a bureaucracy that would manage it for the good of the community.
It would have brought a very backward but central sector of the economy under centralized control, allowing the state to direct its development. Collectivization would also have allowed the goal of social equality to be relaunched. Peasants were directly affected, forced to give up their properties to be merged into kolkhozy and sovkhoz , the large state agricultural enterprises.
The five-year plans
A very bloody phase in the history of Soviet communism began, which led to the extermination of those who opposed the transfer to state-owned enterprises. Furthermore, collectivization did not bring the expected results, because the giant collective enterprises were devoid of modern technological means.
Despite the use of foreign capital and technology, the Soviet Union was far behind the major European powers in factory production. Thus, the State Planning Commission was established in Moscow to develop “five-year plans” that established the amount of goods and commodities that each sector of the economy was to produce in 5 years. In this way, within 10 years, the Soviet Union managed to become a world industrial power.
The worker, protagonist of industrialization, began to appear as the true hero of the new Soviet society: he was privileged in the assignment of housing and favored in every circumstance of daily life, his vote weighed more than that of a peasant in the election of deputies to the Congress of Soviets. But, on the other hand, the destruction of the unions deprived him of an essential instrument of defense and the worker began to become the subject of increasingly heavy workloads, absences and tardiness were severely punished.
The Stakhanovite Movement
In order to bind the worker to the goals of communism, the Stakhanovite or “assault workers” movement was born in 1935 (from Stakhanov, a miner who extracted 102 tons of coal in 6 hours thanks to the organization of the work team). Throughout the country, workers began to compete in the quantity of production and communism demonstrated its ability to create heroes of work. Stakhanovism, however, also led to other abuses, such as the extension of the working day and legitimized the subordination of the individual to power .
The new Constitution of the Soviet Union
In December 1936, the Soviet Union gave itself a new Constitution, among whose provisions stood out the recognition of the Communist Party with decision-making prerogatives on everything that concerned the country : the formula of the single party as the soul of the State and as an intermediary between the State and citizens was born. Initially, it was possible to maintain a semblance of democracy within the party; then, the dominant figure of Stalin inaugurated a much more rigid line: the political line dictated by the Central Committee of the party had to be observed at the base without any discussion. Since everything was in Stalin’s hands, the 1936 Constitution sanctioned the definitive subordination of the State to the head of the Soviet Union: Stalin therefore controlled every aspect of the social life of the country, applying a highly restrictive vision of the individual rights of the citizen.
Stalin’s power permeated every sector of Russian society and managed to crush any opposition. In the 1930s, a real cult of Stalin’s personality was born: exalted by artists, poets and intellectuals, praised by the party and loved by the people who gave him the nickname “little father”.
Internal order management
Stalin’s unlimited power was based above all on the terrorist management of internal order : the NKVD could arrest, hold closed-door trials, condemn without appeal, put to death, but above all it organized the concentration camp universe of the Soviet Union, which included hundreds of concentration camps, called gulags , which around 1935 contained 6-10 million citizens, including many “political criminals” (people who had shown even the slightest dissent against the regime’s initiatives) and those deported for social and ethnic reasons. All the deportees were exploited as labor for the construction of gigantic infrastructure projects or industrial complexes. These labor camps represented the worst product of Soviet totalitarianism, which had come to represent a power without limits and capable of annihilating any enemy.
In the gulags, mortality was very high. In 1935, the period of the “ Great Purges ” began (drastic political operations aimed at eliminating internal opposition to power), directed against the same Bolshevik social class that had given birth to the revolution and created the US. Over a three-year period, over 1.5 million people were arrested by the NKVS , almost all for political reasons and from any social class. The accusation was treason against the revolution and the State, but the evidence was false, confessions were extorted by force, the accused was forced to attribute crimes he had not committed and convictions were made without a trial. Even the relatives of the condemned became victims of the repression: they had to repudiate the family member in order not to be charged. It is likely that, due to the distortion created by political propaganda, many citizens believed the accusations.
The Stalinist purges
The peak was reached between 1937 and 1938 and then Stalin understood that things had gone too far and that the repression risked weakening power rather than strengthening it, given the weakened human resources and economy and the psychological state of the population which was continually worsening.
The culmination and outcome of the Great Purges were the three great trials in Moscow of Stalin’s great enemies whom he defined as “enemies of the people” themselves:
- 1936: Zinoviev and Kamenev convicted , accused of maintaining contacts with Trotsky and plotting against Stalin;
- 1937: Defendants charged with establishing an “anti-Soviet Trotskyist center” supported by German and Japanese funding with the aim of weakening the economic and military power of the Soviet Union;
- 1938: Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda (former head of the NKVD, who had organised the first trial in the capital) executed.
The Communist International or Comintern
Within a vast project to export the revolution for the triumph of socialism in Western countries, the Communist International, or Comintern, was born in Moscow in 1919. During the 2nd Congress of the Comintern, Lenin established that only national communist parties born from the expulsion of reformist and moderate socialists could participate in the organization .
The immediate consequence was the internal split in the European socialist parties. The Comintern assumed two main functions: to destabilize the democratic regimes of the capitalist countries and to defend Soviet Russia from the encirclement of capitalism.
The danger of Nazism induced Moscow to change strategy also because capitalism was not collapsing, but was strengthening and bringing anti-communist ideologies to power. Thus in 1935, after the Soviet Union had been recognized by the United States and admitted to the League of Nations, the so-called Popular Front policy was born: the communist parties had to seek useful alliances for the defense of the Soviet Union from external aggression and to stem the advance of fascism and Nazism.
During the civil war that broke out in Spain in 1963. Stalin entrusted K. with the organization of international brigades for the republic’s fight against anti-fascism. But the impotence of Western democracies in stopping Hitler and the need to defend the US, pushed Stalin to sign a “non-aggression” pact with Nazi Germany in August 1939.
