23c: The Time of Terror

As Stalin's power grew, bad harvests in 1927 and 1928 upset the Soviet economy. Stalin abandoned the New Economic Policy was abandoned and the government went back to seizing grain. The peasants who had profited from the NEP were called kulaks - or "fists" - and singled out for brutal treatment. The kulaks' resistance to "war communism" convinced Stalin that the class war wasn't just continuing, it was intensifying. Stalin therefore decided to establish the Soviet Union's first totally planned economy. This took the form of the First Five-Year Plan, covering 1928 through 1932. Under this Five Year Plan, the Soviet Union went on a crash industrialization program, financed by grain seized from the peasants. In 1929 Stalin sped up the Five-Year Plan by trying to turn agriculture into an industry - a form of the latifundia which sprang up during the Roman Republic. To make this happen, he resorted to mass terror. Millions of peasants were forced into huge collective farms which stretched over thousands of acres and employed hundreds of workers. They were ordered to give their livestock to the new collective farms, but those who owned cattle killed them rather than give them to the Soviet regime. The loss of needed food enraged Stalin, who declared that the kulaks had to be eliminated as a class. Sometimes the kulaks were shot and sometimes they were deported to remote regions of the USSR and never seen again. This being how Russia's most skilled and ambitious farmers were treated, the message was clear: try to better yourself... and get killed.

Despite this first round of Stalinist terror, Soviet industry grew rapidly by 1932. The price was the destruction of the bond between workers and peasants, upon which Lenin had placed such great importance. Even family ties were cut: Soviet children were expected to denounce grain hoarders, even if they were their parents. Literally millions of innocent peasants starved or died of disease, especially in Ukraine, while surplus grain was exported overseas to raise capital for industrial growth. Even before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Iosif Stalin had already murdered millions. The Second Five-Year Plan (1933-1937) was implemented in the same effective but bloody manner. The true costs of the Five-Year Plans would eventually be paid, with steep interest, during the Second World War.

But Stalin had even grander plans for restructuring Soviet society. He changed the existing Cheka (which was bad enough) into the fearsome NKVD - a secret police exceeding even the Oprichniks in their fury. On December 1, 1934 Stalin's close associate Sergei Kirov was shot to death in his Leningrad office. Whether or not Stalin staged Kirov's death himself is still argued to this day. But it gave him an excuse to tear apart the Communist Party and the Red Army by unleashing the Great Terror. Stalin's former associates Kamenev and Zinoviev were tried and executed for "Trotskyism" in August 1936. In 1938 it was the turn of Stalin's former associate Bukharin to be tried and executed. These show trials were but the tip of the iceberg. Not just Communist leaders, but people from all walks of Soviet life were denounced to the NKVD for various bogus offenses and imprisoned or put to death, often without trial. Those spared by the NKVD went into the GULag: a network of concentration camps spread all over the Soviet Union where prisoners were either worked or starved to death. The GULag inmates were meant to constitute an army of slave laborers, forced to work at jobs free Soviet citizens wouldn't do, under the worst imaginable conditions. But soon the GULag was so overwhelmed with prisoners that Stalin ordered that half of the arrestees should be executed at once. Each republic got quotas of people to execute or imprison, and were rewarded for exceeding their quotas. Nobody could be sure whether he or she would be arrested the next day - precisely what Stalin wanted. The people of the USSR were too frightened to frighten Stalin. The Great Terror made his mastery complete.

The Soviet Union pursued an aggressive foreign policy under Stalin's domination.  Although Stalin's "Socialism in One Country" approach won out over Trotsky's "Permanent Revolution" approach, the Soviet sponsored Comintern supported the cause of Communism around the world. They met with little success, though. Stalin tried to merge the Communist Party of China, led by young Mao Zedong, into Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang. This plan backfired when Chiang turned on the Communists in 1927 and massacred all the Communisra he could find. Understandably, Mao never forgave the Soviets' bungling. The German Communist Party was encouraged to combat Hitler's Nazis; in return, Hitler played on German fear of Communism to become dictator and found the Third Reich. The rise of Hitler also ended the Soviet Union's friendly relations with Germany. The Soviet Union then joined European socialist parties in an anti-Fascist "Popular Front" against Germany and Italy. As part of the "Popular Front" movement, the Soviet Union supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, against the Fascist-supported Nationalists of Francisco Franco (who is still dead, by the way). The Soviet Union was thus able to pose as the only great power to stand against Fascism. Meanwhile Britain, France, and the United States sat on their hands, giving Hitler the idea that he could get away with anything. It also let the USSR to get its hands on the Spanish Republic's entire gold reserves. Involvement in the Spanish Civil War didn't slow the Great Terror at all. To crown his purge of Soviet society, Stalin turned on the military in November 1938. The purges of the upper ranks were especially bloody, claiming perhaps 80 percent of the top Soviet generals and admirals. Only a few real men of genius survived. Stalin may have felt more secure for having purged so many potential enemies, but he had definitely crippled the USSR for a war which was approaching faster than he knew.