1. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1921-1939)

2. Multinational USSR

3. How was the USSR ruled?
Officially, a Federation with widely dispersed powers.
In fact, highly centralized through the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
All leading government officials were communists.

4. Who ruled the USSR? Lenin’s creation Lenin (died in 1924)
Led to power struggle:
Josef Stalin
Leon Trotsky
Lev Kamenev
Grigor Zinoviev
Nikolai Bukharin

5. New Economic Policy (NEP), 1921-28
State-owned large businesses
Private small and medium-sized businesses
Some free trade
Peasants left alone to feed cities (N. Bukharin)
Tax-in-kind
Little use of violence
NEPmen

6. NEP, 1921-1928 National communist awakening
Indigenization (korenizatsiia)
National in form, socialist in content
Proletarian cultural flowering
Dziga Vertov’s Man with Movie Camera (1929)

7. Stalin won (by 1928) Why? Not brilliant
Ruthless: used extreme measures
Patronage
Will to win
Appealed to non-intellectuals

8. The Great Turn, 1928-> Move to Planned Economy
First Five-Year Plan,
Focus on Heavy Industry
Sacrificed consumer goods
Quotas for everything
Quantity over quality
Stakhanovites as role models

10.  31 August 1935: mined 102 tons of coal in 5 hours and 45 minutes (14 times his quota).
Aleksey G. Stakhanov,

11. The Great Turn (cont.) Collectivization, 1929-1935 1927: voluntary
1929: forced
Main goal: control of food
Requisitions
Peasants resisted (1600 large-scale revolts)
“Kulaks”
De-kulakization (1.5 million removed)

12. The collectivisation campaign in the USSR, 1930s
The collectivisation campaign in the USSR, 1930s. The slogan reads: "We kolkhoz farmers are liquidating the kulaks as a class, on the basis of complete collectivisation."

13. The Great Famine, 1932-33 Causes: 3-6 million starved to death
Requisitions for cities and export
De-kulakization
Poor collective farm management
Livestock slaughtered
Bad weather
3-6 million starved to death
Mostly in Ukraine

14. The Terror, 1934-39 Sergei Kirov, 1886-1934 Strong Stalinist
Leader of CPSU in Leningrad
17th CPSU Congress, February 1934
December 1, 1934: assassinated by a communist
Sparked Terror

15. Show Trials,
Stalin, Alexei Rykov, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev

16. Many Bolsheviks leaders wiped out of history
May 1920 Lenin photo retouched to remove Kamenev and Trotsky

17. Great Terror widens to army
June 1937: Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii, and three army commanders shot.
3 of 5 Marshals shot
15 of 16 army commanders
60 of 67 corps commanders
70 percent of division commanders

18. Great Terror widens to citizens, 1937-1938
“kulak operations”
By Nov. 1938: 767,397 sentenced by troikas
386,798 put to death
Remainder to GULAG system
“mass operations”
Poles, Germans, Latvians, Koreans, Chinese
335,513 sentences
247,157 to death

19. Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, 1892-1940
Bolsheviks’ Muslim
Worked for Stalin at NarKomNats.
1923 arrested, put on “trial,” and released.
“Sultangalievism”
1928 arrested, sentenced to death.
Commuted to 10 years in Solovki labor camp.
Released 1934.
Arrested 1937.
Executed 1940.

20. Evgeniia Ginzburg Journey into the Whirlwind
Loyal, dedicated communist
1937: arrested
“Trotskyist”
Conveyor belt
GULAG
Magadan
1955: released

21. Consequences Eight million arrested How many killed?
681,692 people were executed during 1937–38
Memorial society released list of 1,345,796 victims
Gradually, greatly undermined CPSU’s authority and legitimacy