23e: Conclusions

1. No clear successor
There were plenty of experienced candidates to succeed Lenin, but no anointed successor. The job eventually went to the one person who saw what was coming and formulated a plan. Joseph Stalin was considered to be a bureaucratic nonentity, installed as Commissar for Nationalities because he was a Georgian. When the onerous job of Party General Secretary came up, Stalin was considered a perfect fit. But as he appointed staff members to the Communist Party's higher echelons, Stalin created an elaborate patronage network with himself at the top. His clients followed him faithfully through the machinations which finally put him in complete power by 1929. He rewarded them with higher pay and better living conditions, founding the nomenklatura - the new, Soviet, ruling class.

2. Stalin versus Trotsky
As every great empire needs an Evil Empire, so every crackpot dictator needs an Evil Person or Evil Cause to help rouse and direct the hatred of the masses. The concepts of "Socialism in One Country" and "World Revolution First" had both been important in Lenin's day. But after Lenin's death, Stalin emphasized one and Trotsky the other out of mutual hatred. Stalin got the upper hand over Trotsky, exiled him in 1928, and spent the next 12 years hounding Trotsky around the world. In 1940, one of Stalin's agents killed him with an icepick in Mexico. By this time, Stalin had officially renamed Trotsky as "Judas-Trotsky," and had unleashed the Great Terror, executing or imprisoning lliterally millions of Soviets for their alleged "Trotskyism." As defined by Stalin, "Trotskyism" included a number of crimes: sabotage, spying for foreign powers, terrorism, and especially presenting a threat (real or imagined) to Stalin.

3. The Hammer and Sickle, Explained
The hammer stood, of course, for the urban working class, the true proletariat. The sickle stood for the peasant masses, who made up the great majority. Appearing together, the hammer and sickle stood for the smychka, the alliance between workers and peasants upon which the Soviet Union depended. The USSR desperately needed to industrialize; that much was a given. But the question was how much the peasants were to be made to suffer. Stalin's solution, implemented in 1929, was to force the peasants into huge collective farms, where they would produce enough of a surplus crop that the USSR could export it for needed foreign capital. When the collective farms turned out to be a failure, the Soviet government extorted the maximum possible amount of grain from the poor farmers anyway. Millions starved, especially in Ukraine, but the Soviet industrial complex was built in time to arm the Soviet Union for the Second World War. The cost was the suffering and alienation of the Soviet people, but this would not become clear until the war actually started.

4. Dragging the Party Line
The difference between party and state, at first fairly clear under Lenin, began to blur considerably under Stalin. The famous Five-Year Plans were a production of the Communist Party. Once the Communist Party (read: Stalin) had reached a conclusion, it could not be debated. So when Stalin announced that the first Five-Year Plan, announced in 1928, needed to be completed in four years, it was duly declared complete in 1932. A second Five-Year Plan was started. In the middle 1930s, the Party line dictated that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were the two pillars of the Evil Empire and must be resisted accordingly. Indeed, the USSR fought the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 as a proxy war against Germany and Italy. But when Stalin thought it wise to sign a treaty with Nazi Germany on the eve of the Second World War, the Party line dictated that Germany was good and the capitalist Western powers were bad. Communist parties around the world, all of which took marching orders from the Comintern (Communist International) in Moscow, set a world record for most crow eaten overnight. Realizing what happened to those who displeased Stalin, even foreign Communists were terrified of crossing the Party line.