PAGE SUMMARY: Harry Blackman, March 2022 This page goes into depth about modern Russian history, giving many sources teachers can give students to help reinforce the learning. It starts with Lenin and his time in Power and how he installed the initial pushes towards communism. It also explores the Russian Civil war which ended in Russia becoming officially communist with the Red Army reigning victorious. After Lenin's reign, Joseph Stalin took control of the country and put the entire country under a totalitarian rule, killing off lots of his opponents in order to keep power. Additionally, during this time the page describes the Gulag, land changes, loss of individual rights, and increase in industrialization in Russia during Stalin's time in office.

  

Cross-Links

 

AP World History Period 6.2:  Global Conflicts

USSR Stamp: Communism Builders

The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolshevik Movement

 

Totalitarian Leaders Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin

 

Goals of Allied Leaders After World War II

 

Fascism and Totalitarianism

 

 

Topics on the Page

 

A. the establishment of a one-party dictatorship under Lenin

 

• The Red Terror
• The Russian Civil War

 

B. the suffering in the Soviet Union caused by Stalin’s policies of collectivization of agriculture and breakneck industrialization

 

• Ukrainian Black Famine of 1932-33

 

• Historical Biography page: Joseph Stalin

 

C. the destruction of individual rights and the use of mass terror against the population

 

Influential Literature page: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 

• Dramatic Event page: Stalin's Great Purges
• The Gulag 
• The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky
  

 

D. the Soviet Union’s emergence as an industrial power

 

E. the Soviet Union's role in WWII

 

 

Focus Question: What were the consequences of Soviet communism before 1945?

Link here to understand the Rise of unions, socialism, and the ideas of Karl Marx 

Library of Congress Documents from the Soviet Archives

 

• Soviet Archive: Half-Open, Dirty Window on the Past, The New York Times (April 28, 1995)

For background, see History of Communism from Communism and Computer Ethics, a website established by a group of faculty members at Stanford University.

Timeline of Russian/Soviet history from 1914-1939.

A map quiz game on The Former Soviet Union Countries to help familiarize students with the relevant geography.

 

This is a timeline of Lenin's life, which can give students a better idea what influenced Lenin and why he believed in the ideas he preached about. Lenin Timeline

 

As described later in this page, many groups of people were heavily oppressed under Soviet rule. One example of this is the Soviet Jewish Population. He is a timeline describing the oppression these group felt during this time. Timeline of Jewish History in Russia/Soviet Union

 

 

 

A. the establishment of a one-party dictatorship under Lenin

 

Vladimir Lenin

 

Lenin, 1921

 

• On November 8, 1917 Lenin was elected as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Soviet Congress.

 

• Lenin campaigned for a single, democratically accountable individual to be put in charge of each enterprise
• contrary to most conceptions of workers' self-management, but absolutely essential for efficiency and expertise.

 

• Following the assassination attempt on Lenin, Stalin, in a telegram to Lenin, argued that a policy of "open and systematic mass terror" be instigated against "those responsible.”

 

• Scholars estimate that between 1918-21 up to 200,000 were executed, also known as the Red Terror.

 

 An order from the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs to intensify the Red Terror (1918)

 

• Lenin was open about his view that the proletarian state was a system of organized violence against the capitalist establishment.

 

Lenin's pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902)

 

• argued that the lower classes (proletariat) can only achieve a successful revolutionary consciousness through the efforts of a vanguard party composed of full-time professional revolutionaries.

 

• such a party could only achieve its aims through a form of disciplined organization known as democratic centralism,
• wherein tactical and ideological decisions are made with internal democracy
• but once a decision has been made, all party members must externally support and actively promote that decision.

 

• Leninism holds that capitalism can only be overthrown by revolutionary means.
• Attempts to reform capitalism from within are doomed to fail.

 

• The goal of a Leninist party is to orchestrate the overthrow of the existing government by force and seize power on behalf of the proletariat
• then implement a dictatorship of the proletariat.
• although in the October Revolution of 1917 the Soviets seized power, not the Bolshevik Party

 

• The party must then use the powers of government to educate the proletariat
• remove the various modes of false consciousness the bourgeois have instilled in them in order to make them more docile and easier to exploit economically
• ex) religion and nationalism.

Lenin with Stalin, from an Albanian stamp

 

• The dictatorship of the proletariat is theoretically to be governed by a decentralized system of proletarian direct democracy
• in which workers hold political power through local councils known as soviets (see soviet democracy).
• The extent to which the dictatorship of the proletariat is democratic is disputed.
• Lenin wrote in the fifth chapter of 'State & Revolution':
• "Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people--this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism."

 

• The elements of Leninism that include:
• the notion of the disciplined revolutionary
• the more dictatorial revolutionary state
• war between the various social classes

 

• Leninism is often attributed to the influence of Nechayevschina and of the 19th century narodnik movement (of which Lenin's older brother was a member).
• "The morals of [the Bolshevik] party owed as much to Nechayev as they did to Marx," writes historian Orlando Figes. [1]

 

• This would help explain the traces of class bigotry (e.g. Lenin's frequent description of the bourgeoisie as parasites, insects, leeches, bloodsuckers etc [2] and the creation of the GULAG system of concentration camps for former members of the bourgeois and kulak (rich peasant) classes, [3]) detectable in Leninism but foreign in Marxism.

 

  BBC Bite Sized Audio History: Short Audio Recordings on Causes of the Russian Revolution Of 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Stalin and more.

Overview of Russia under Lenin and the transition to Stalin, 1921-1939.

• Click here for an article about Lenin's New Economy.

 

Watch this video on Lenin and his use of propaganda. 

Excerpts from Lenin's The April Theses: A Blueprint for Revolution, 1917.

 

The Russian Civil War

• Lenin would not be able to seize control of the Russian state peacefully. After a successful coup overthrowing the government centers of Petrograd and Moscow, Lenin, Trotsky and their "Red Army" still had to pacify and reform a massive country which spans eleven time zones. 

 

• The Bolsheviks or "Red Army" fought a devastating Civil War against the Mensheviks or 'White Army", a conglomeration of forces both domestic and foreign whose broad goal was the to reestablish the previous Russian state and economic system. 

 

• The communist Red Army was ultimately victorious in 1923, and casualty estimates range from seven to twelve million Russians, including many civilians.  

 

• A Link which goes into more detail in summarizing the key factors and players in the Russian civil war

 

• A link which describes the Bolshevik persecution of the church during the Civil War. 

 

A Russian propaganda poster from the Civil War which pitted the communist Bolshevik "reds" against the monarchial Menshevik "whites". 

 

A propaganda poster which reads "All in the Red Army" with the word "bread" aligned next to the trains coming in over the horizon. 

 

 

B. The suffering in the Soviet Union caused by Stalin’s policies of collectivization of agriculture and breakneck industrialization

 

Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union and he ruled from 1924-1953 as a totalitarian dictator.

See Historical Biography page on Joseph Stalin
 

Joseph Stalin v. Bugs Bunny Quote Game!

 

 

 

CASE STUDY:  The Ukrainian Black Famine of 1932-33

Depopulation in Ukraine and southern Russia, 1929 – 1933

White regions were not part of the USSR at that time


Considered the most horrible man made famine in world history, the Black Famine, or "Holodomor" (from the Ukrainian words holod, ‘hunger’, and mor, ‘plague’) was the result of Soviet "Collectivization" within Stalin's first Five year plan for rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization.

 

• The basic idea was to combine private individual farms into a large nationalized system. 

 

• It was thought that collectivism would increase production of food and materials for urban areas; however, it resulted in a massive famine which killed somewhere between 6 to 7 million Ukrainians (approx. 10-25% of the total population).

 

• The map shows the rate of population decline in some regions of the USSR during the period from 1929-1933.

 

• For more, see Ukrainian Famine from the Library of Congress

 

 Here is a link to some mostly short documents from the Library of Congress

 

Russian Archives concerning collectivization under Stalin's Five Year Plan!

 

 Here is a lesson plan with activities on the Ukrainian Black Famine.



Read more about collectivization from the BBC. 

Peasant Women's Protest During Collectivization

C. The destruction of individual rights and the use of mass terror against the population

 

Influential Literature page: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 

 

 

The Gulag

Gulag: Many Days/Many Lives presents an overview of the Soviet system from 1917-1988, featuring original documentaries and prisoner voices and an archive filled with documents and images.

Unbeknown to many people, it is estimated that up to 50 million died under the rule of Stalin, not including WWII.

 

• These deaths were from "Democides" (the killing of a population by a government), gulags, and economically induced famine.

 

 An interactive map of the Gulags in the country during the time of the Soviet Union. Interactive Gulag map  

For more information, see Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Primary Megadeaths of the Twentieth Century.
 

 

 

Image from an exhibit in a Russian museum depicting the amount of rocks

prisoners in the Gulags were forced to move every day

 

The Great Purges
 

 

 

The Great Purges (Video) of 1934-1938

The Davis Center's Harvard Project on Voices from the USSR, a module about working with oral histories.

 

A PDF of Leon Trotsky's famous book "The Revolution Betrayed" written in the 1930s for which Stalin had Trotsky assassinated.

 

New Research Reveals Misconceptions about Joseph Stalin and His Great Purge. Article by James Harris, author of the book, the Great Fear.

Stalin Killed Millions: A Stanford Historian Answers the Question, Was It Genocide?

Memorial to Victims of Great Purge 1930. Davydovo, Moscow Oblast

 

D. The Soviet Union’s emergence as an industrial power

 

"Smoke of chimneys is the breath of Soviet Russia"

As a part of the Joseph Stalin's "Five-year Plan", the Soviet state worked to mobilize the abundant natural resources present to create a strong industrial base.

• The goal of the plan was to transform from an agrarian to industrial socialist state. 
• Starting in 1928, The Soviet Union's industrial works grew at an astounding rate. 
• It is estimated that the country's production of coal and iron doubled by 1932. 
• Industrial centers included Magnitogorsk, Kuznetsk, Moscow and Gorky automobile plants. 
• They also included Urals and Kramatorsk (heavy machinery plants) and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Cheliabinsk (tractor plants).

Collectivization and Industrialization

A Soviet tractor plant (Cheliabinsk)

Learn more about how Stalin industrialized the USSR, here.


A PDF of USSR industrialization with statistics.

Here is a quick lesson plan or activity from Story Board That where you can add illustrations if you want to compare Theory and Practice in Communist Russia.

 

E. Soviet Role in WWII

 

In the American school system, attention is focused primarily on the western front in both World War 1 and World War 2.  We learn about trench warfare, about Hitler’s invasion of Poland, his occupation of France, about D-Day. It is often forgotten that the Russians played a critical role in both wars, and that the greatest death occurred on the eastern front.  Also important to realize is the fact that the fighting here would define the state of Eastern Europe for the duration of the Cold War.

 

“The Soviet Union in World War 2” is a broad topic, and only a few subtopics are here addressed.  These are the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in the lead up to the war, the large-scale death at battles like Stalingrad, and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference.  A few topics worth considering in future might be Soviet home front mobilization, compliance/resistance of Soviet soldiers, treatment of POWs, or the US-USSR alliance (Stalin as Man of the Year).

 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement

On August 23, 1939 Vyacheslav Molotov (Russia) and Joachim von Ribbentrop (Germany), foreign ministers of their respective countries, signed agreements partitioning Eastern Europe and promising nonaggression in the (likely) event of war.  This shocked the world. Although both were dictatorships and are rightly villainized, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia were largely polar opposites ideologically. Hitler had risen to power by persecuting the Socialists he claimed betrayed Germany in WWI, and the Soviets hated fascists.

 

Hitler invaded Poland, starting the war.  As they had agreed, Stalin invaded from the east.  Then, as the region was being parceled between the two, Russia floundered in “the Winter War” against Finland.  Aside: the Finns mockingly called their anti-tank gasoline explosives “Molotov cocktails”. This gave Hitler misdirected confidence to invade Russia, ending the alliance.

 

This section draws upon a PRI article regarding Roger Moorhouse’s “Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941”

 

Death at Stalingrad

While D-Day is an important turning point in the war, so is the Battle of Stalingrad, when the Soviets stopped the German advance into Russia.  The battle lasted from July 17, 1942 to February 2, 1943. See this Britannica article for military history details of the battle. The biggest take home, though should be the estimated 800,000 axis dead, 1.1 million Russians, and 40,000 civilians.  That’s almost 2 million people, and Stalingrad is but one of several massively deadly battles the Soviets fought.

 

Potsdam: The Last Conference Before the Cold War

Potsdam failed to create a peaceful agreement between the great powers and resulted in the Cold War situation as we know it.  Unlike previous conferences at Yalta and Tehran, new Western leaders were at Potsdam. Truman had succeeded FDR following his death, and Clement Atlee of the Labor Party was Britain’s new PM.  Truman was much less interested in making concessions or agreements with Stalin than his predecessor had been, fearing the spread of global communism.

 

The talks occurred the day after the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear bomb, carried out in the desert of America in the lead-up to Hiroshima.  This use and the two bombs dropped on Japan were intended to intimidate Stalin. Instead, he accelerated his own program and by 1949 the USSR boasted its own nuclear weapons.  Stalin’s fears motivated his desire for an Eastern European buffer zone.

 

Other key issues were reparations and the administration of Germany.  Russia, as seen above, had made massive sacrifices against Germany, and wanted $10 billion to make up for it.  Truman and Atlee, knowing the importance of the resurgence of Germany, told Stalin to extract reparations from his own eastern zone (Germany was partitioned between the allied powers).  Both sides agreed to demilitarize and denazify Germany, but in the end the western allies were much less strict with former SS and SA, fearing they would destabilize the fragile nation.

 

The information in this section is drawn from a YouTube channel designed to help British students review for their GCSEs/A Levels. Here’s the video.

 

Here's a lesson plan on how Operation Barbarossa (invasion of Russia) affected German decisions about the Holocaust.

 

Additional Resources:

 An informative website about Russian Gay History.

 

Click here for an article about how women lived under Soviet rule.

An essay by American poet Claude Mckay titled "Soviet Russia and the Negro" (1923)

An article on one African American family's immigration to the USSR.

A journal article on Women's Role in the Soviet Union or a more condensed review with additional sources also on The Role of Women in Soviet Russia.

 

An article detailing what life was like for women between 1917 and 1945 in the USSR.