Totalitarianism in Stalinist Russia

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Not long after gaining absolute political power, Stalin began a drive to industrialize and modernize the Soviet Union. He announced a Five-Year Plan based on Marxist principles of government control of the economy. First, he began the collectivization of agriculture by redistributing the land by taking over the estates of the “kulaks,” the wealthiest peasants. The kulaks resisted by destroying crops and livestock. This was followed by government persecution of the peasantry. This resulted in famine sweeping the country, killing as many as ten million citizens. At the same time, Stalin’s grip on power remained firm.

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To maintain his power, Stalin instituted the “Great Purge” from 1934 to 1940. The Great Purge was characterized by Stalin’s enemies, either real or imagined, being put to death or sent to Siberian prisons. The Great Purge did not only affect the military and government officials. For instance, the Soviet Secret Police also targeted professionals, scholars, artists and kulaks. Another feature of the Great Purge was confessions obtained by torture and then broadcast on television. This was an effective method in repressing opposition to Stalin’s rule.  It is estimated that the Great Purge resulted in the death of one million people.

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Meanwhile, World War II was fast approaching. As Hitler rose to power in Germany, Stalin first contemplated forming a defensive alliance with Britain and France against the Nazis. Similar to Great Britain’s Prime Minster Chamberlain, he wanted to avoid war at all costs. In 1938, Chamberlain signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Likewise, Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939. Unlike the British pact, this agreement included the division of Poland by Russia and Germany. This caused France and Great Britain to declare war on Germany.  In contrast to Great Britain, the Soviet Union entered World War II because Germany invaded in defiance of their pact. At first, the Red Army suffered catastrophic defeats, but they rallied, and after crushing the Nazis at Stalingrad in 1942-43, they were on their way to winning the war.

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At the close of World War II, the Soviet people, who had borne so many burdens during the conflict, now harbored the hope that their lives would improve. To Stalin, this was a threat to his power because if people began to long for something better, they might rebel. For this reason, he began a drive to maintain control at all costs. As a result, soldiers who had seen too much of the prosperous West were sent to camps to keep them from "infecting" the population with subversive ideas; there was a new purge of the military command; and a new cultural offensive was launched against newspapers and other literature considered threatening to the regime. This also led to propaganda attacks in the press on the former Western Allies, now Soviet enemies. Stalinist writers invented imagined atrocities and attributed them to the Americans and the British.

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After the defeat of Germany, post-war problems developed between the Soviets and the West. This was known as the Cold War. One reason for the problem was Stalin’s goal to expand the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence worldwide. He saw the United States as a rival that he needed to overcome to expand his power and Soviet influence. Stalin fueled the fires of the Cold War through the blockade of West Berlin, the seizure of power in Czechoslovakia, and by backing communist forces in North Korea and North Vietnam. The United States' foreign policy solution to the expanding Soviet sphere of influence was known as containment. The theory behind this policy was that to let one nation become communist, other nations would also fall to communism, much like a line of dominoes. The Cold War lasted from 1948 to 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.