What is Stalinism?
Stalinism is the name for the system that grew up in the USSR while Joseph Stalin ran the Communist Party, from about 1929 until his death in 1953. Stalin claimed to be carrying on the work of Marx and Lenin, in a package called Marxism-Leninism. Historians use the word for the specific mark of his rule. That means an economy owned and planned by the state, a rush to build heavy industry, the forced merging of farms, a worship of the leader and mass terror aimed at real and imagined enemies. This page describes it as history, and it does not endorse it.
Core beliefs
- Socialism could be built in a single country, without waiting for a world revolution.
- The state owns the big means of production, and officials set output targets in central five-year plans.
- Farms should be merged into large collective and state farms.
- The closer socialism gets, the sharper the class struggle becomes, so hidden enemies inside the country must be rooted out.
- A single party with one supreme leader runs the state and all of public life.
- Art, science and schooling must serve the party line, which in painting and writing meant socialist realism.
History
Lenin died in 1924. Over the next few years Stalin beat his rivals, among them Leon Trotsky, and held the party firmly by about 1929. His slogan was socialism in one country, set against Trotsky's call for revolution abroad. The first five-year plan, starting in 1928, drove industry forward at huge speed and cost. Collectivization stripped millions of peasants of their land. Those labelled kulaks were shot, deported or sent to camps, and the famine of 1932 and 1933, which hit Ukraine and Kazakhstan hard, killed millions. The Great Terror came in 1936 to 1938. Public show trials were followed by waves of arrests, and hundreds of thousands were executed, while the Gulag camps held millions over the years. Whole peoples, including the Chechens and Crimean Tatars, were deported in the 1940s. Once the war ended, Soviet-backed communist governments were set up in the countries of Eastern Europe. Three years after Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev attacked Stalin's crimes in a secret speech, and de-Stalinization began.
Variants
Copies of the Stalinist model appeared in the Eastern European states after 1945, in Mongolia, and during the first years of communist rule in China and North Korea. Enver Hoxha in Albania held to a hard Stalinist line long after others dropped it, which some call Hoxhaism. A few small communist groups still defend Stalin, yet most communist parties formally went along with de-Stalinization.
Criticisms
Historians have recorded the toll: famine, executions, deportations and camps, usually counted in the millions. Liberals and conservatives call the system totalitarian, because it lacked free elections, a free press and independent courts. Trotskyists and other leftists charge that Stalin created a privileged bureaucratic caste that betrayed the revolution. Economists grant that heavy industry grew quickly, but note the constant shortages, weak farm output and poor consumer goods. Defenders, a small minority, point to industrial strength and victory over Nazi Germany, but these cannot erase the terror.
In practice
This model ruled the USSR for some twenty-four years and was exported abroad. It changed a mostly rural land into a major industrial and military power, one that did much of the fighting that beat Nazi Germany, at an immense cost in lives. After 1956 most communist states eased off on mass terror and open worship of the leader, but planning and single-party rule mostly stayed until the late 1980s. On the 12 axes the profile is at the extreme of Public ownership, Planned markets, Strong leader and Order, and strongly Central on Structure.