Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T18:53:48.718Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Stalinism, 1928–1940

from Part I - Russia and the Soviet Union: The Story through Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Ronald Grigor Suny
Affiliation:
University of Chicago and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Get access

Summary

In the late 1920s, the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under the leadership of its General Secretary, Joseph Stalin, launched a series of ‘socialist offensives’, a revolution that transformed the country. Within a few short years, the USSR bore little resemblance to the country it had been. In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was a minor industrial power, a poor but resource-rich country, based on a large but primitive agrarian network of small-hold peasant farms. By the late 1930s, very few individual farms remained. The country’s agricultural production had been forcibly reorganised on a massive and mechanised scale. Most of the rural population lived on huge state-managed agrifarm complexes. Through state planning and forced investment, industrial production had doubled, then tripled and quadrupled. By the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had become an industrial military power on the scale of the most advanced countries. The Great Patriotic War, as the Second World War was called, accelerated these modernising processes, and brought about other major changes. The country, which had been nearly 80 per cent rural in the late 1920s, was, by the early 1950s, becoming increasingly urbanised, mobile and educated. Literacy rates had soared as the result of intensive state spending on education. Roads, rail lines, radio and air travel connected the previously isolated parts of the country. Cultures that had had no language boasted their own schools, organised national institutions, written literary traditions and legal status as nations within the Soviet state.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Conquest, Robert, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (London: Hutchinson, 1986).
Davies, R. W., The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Graziosi, Andrea, ‘Collectivization, Peasant Revolts, and Government Policies through the Reports of the Ukrainian GPU’, Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 35, 3 (1994).Google Scholar
Hagenloh, Paul, ‘“Socially Harmful Elements” and the Great Terror’, in , Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London: Routledge, 2000).Google Scholar
Hoffmann, David, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Jasny, Naum, Soviet Industrialization, 1928–1952 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961).
Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
Martin, Terry, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History 70 (1998).Google Scholar
Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Polian, Pavel, Ne po svoei vole … Istoriia i geografiia prinuditel’nykh migratsii v SSSR (Moscow: O.G.I –Memorial, 2001).
Reiman, Michel, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the ‘Second Revolution’, trans. Saunders, George (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
Shearer, David, ‘Modernity and Backwardness on the Soviet Frontier: Western Siberia during the 1930s’, in Raleigh, Donald (ed.), Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917–1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Viola, Lynne, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Wehner, Markus, Bauernpolitik im proletarischen Staat: Die Bauernfrage als zentrales Problem der sowjetischen Innenpolitik 1921–1928 (Cologne: Boehlau Verlag, 1998).
Zemskov, V. N., Spetspereselentsy v SSSR, 1930–1 960 (Moscow, 2003).
Zhiromskaia, V. B., Demograficheskaia istoriia Rossii v 1930-e gody. Vzglad v neizvestnoe (Moscow, 2001).

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×