Stalin: 1924-1929

1. Stalin: 1924-1929 Daniel W. Blackmon IB HL History Coral Gables Senior High

2. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • “A sociology in which the economic and social base determines the cultural, political, and ideological superstructure of society.”

3. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • “[A] theory of history in which mankind, driven by the class struggle, progresses from slave-holding to feudal to bourgeois society towards the end of its ‘prehistory’ in socialism”

4. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • “[A] theory of economics setting forth the ‘internal contradictions’ of capitalism that would at last produce the socialist revolution of the proletariat.” (Malia 36-38)

5. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • This process is held to be inexorable. This sequence is regarded as science, not theory. Marxist ideology provides the chief paradigm for looking at the world, the grammar and vocabulary with which Marxists analyze the world and express themselves.

6. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • Marxist economic theory “unfold with an implacable logic. Beginning with the principle that all value is created by human labor, this theory traces the inexorable process whereby the ‘surplus value’ of the laborer is confiscated to produce the ‘accumulation of capital.’

7. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • This capital is then invested in labor-saving machinery, which represents both a great advance in productivity and riches for the species and the beginning of the end for the ‘bourgeois mode of production.’

8. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • For competition generates the ‘law of the falling rate of profit,’ and this produces simultaneously the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands and the ‘increasing immiseration’ of the proletariat.

9. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • This process is held to be inexorable. This sequence is regarded as science, not theory. Marxist ideology provides the chief paradigm for looking at the world, the grammar and vocabulary with which Marxists analyze the world and express themselves.

10. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • The Communist Manifesto declares that “All history has been the history of class struggle.”

11. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • One of the problems facing the Bolsheviks was the paradox of a “proletarian revolution” taking place in a nation that was overwhelmingly peasant.

12. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • Lenin argued that the elitist Bolshevik Party was the “Vanguard of the Proletariat” • For the Bolsheviks, the October Revolution was a once and for all time transfer of legitimate authority from the workers to the Party, with therefore no need for any form of renewal of legitimation

13. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • For Lenin, anyone who did not have a “revolutionary consciousness” was automatically bourgeois and the enemy, regardless of his or her de facto class.

14. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • “The Leninist Party thus represented a metaphysical, not an empirical, proletariat.” (Malia 100)

15. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • Marx always regarded the peasantry with suspicion, thinking of them as counter-revolutionary or reactionary. In a sense, he was correct; peasants tend to be deeply conservative and to view government, all government, with hostility.

16. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • “Marx made clear his positive altitude toward coercion by copious encomia to ‘revolutions as the locomotive of history’ or ‘violence as the midwife of history.’ Thus, the main lines of his program for the future are hardly in doubt:

17. Preliminaries: Marxist Tenets • It was an all-embracing project of nationalization, collectivization and planning, presumably to be realized by the logic of history--and revolutionary coercion was also integral to that ‘logic.’”

18. Lenin’s War Communism • War Communism was intended to • seize the banks • nationalize commerce • eliminate the free market • liquidate the retail trade • introduce compulsory labor

19. Lenin’s War Communism • The Bolsheviks set out to destroy their currency. They did this by printing money as fast as they could.

20. Lenin’s War Communism • The result was devastating: the real value of Russian money in circulation went from 1 trillion, 919 billion in November 1917 to 29 billion in July 1921; prices rose from a base of 1.0 in October 1913 to 648,230,000 in October 1923.

21. Lenin’s War Communism • The Provisional Government had established a state monopoly on all grain sales, which Lenin continued. He stated that he would rather die than give up that monopoly.

22. Lenin’s War Communism • The reason is political, not economic. The cities needed the grain to survive, and Lenin would not grant the peasants the ability to strangle his revolution.

23. Lenin’s War Communism

24. Lenin’s War Communism

25. Lenin’s War Communism • Lenin tried to extract grain by fixed prices at ludicrous rates. Considering the inflation, the rates were little more than theft. This was also quite deliberate on Lenin’s part.

26. Lenin’s War Communism • The peasants simply refused to sell to the government at those prices, and either sold on the black market (which was ubiquitous since it was indispensable) or by refusing to plant more than they could eat themselves.

27. Lenin’s War Communism • In response Lenin declared “class warfare in the village” (which meant the incitement of “poor peasants” to seize “ ‘surplus’ “ grain from “petty bourgeois kulaks,” (Malia 117)

28. Lenin’s War Communism • Lenin organized thugs to attack villages and seize “surplus” grain and execute the “kulaks.” The thugs were rewarded by part of the surplus--in other words, theft and loot. The peasants resisted violently and desperately.

29. Lenin’s War Communism • The Bolsheviks confiscated so much that they even confiscated the food peasants needed to survive and the seed crops from the next harvest. Food production dropped to half the pre-war levels.

30. Lenin’s War Communism • Famine stalked the land in 1921. At least 5.1 million persons died in the famine of 1921, the worst such disaster to strike Europe (“other than those caused by war since the Black Death.” (Pipes Revolution 419) .

31. Lenin’s War Communism • Famine led to the intense discontent of the proletariat in the cities, and to the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors (14,000 sailors who were massacred by Trotsky and 50,000 Red Guards.) (Pipes Russia 385)

32. Lenin’s War Communism • Lenin also created the Cheka in December 1917, placing Felix Dzerzhinsky in charge, and declaring a Red Terror in 1918.

33. Lenin’s War Communism • Isaac Steinberg, Lenin’s Commissar of Justice, noted that, although the Civil War ended in 1920, the Terror continued because it was intrinsic to the regime. Steinberg wrote:

34. Lenin’s War Communism • “Terror is a system . . . a legalized plan of the regime for the purpose of mass intimidation, mass compulsion, mass extermination.

35. Lenin’s War Communism • “Terror is a calculated register of punishments, reprisals, and threats by means of which the government intimidates, entices, and compels the fulfillment of its imperative will. . . .

36. Lenin’s War Communism • Terror exists precisely because the minority, ruling on its own, regards an ever-growing number of persons, groups, and strata as its enemy . . . . “ (Pipes Revolution 793)

37. Lenin’s War Communism • In July 1918 alone, the Cheka executed 1,115 persons. (Pipes Revolution 816) Hostages were taken and forced to fulfill Bolshevik requirements or were executed (Hitler adopted this technique with the Jews)

38. Lenin’s War Communism • Zinoviev personally ordered the execution of 512 hostages. This is the same man who wrote “We must carry along with us 90 million of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.” (Pipes Revolution 819-20)

39. Lenin’s War Communism • The Chekist Nikolai Krylenko (who later prosecuted the first show trial under Lenin and went on to be Stalin’s prosecutor) said “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.” (Pipes Revolution 822)

40. Lenin’s War Communism • In 1920, Alexander Antonov led a peasant revolt in Tambov region that worried the Bolsheviks very much.

41. Lenin’s War Communism • Although publicly described as a conspiracy of the SR’s., they admitted privately that the Antonov revolt was spontaneous.

42. Lenin’s War Communism • The peasants wanted two things: • an end to food requisitions • the freedom to sell their surpluses (Pipes Russia 377)

43. Lenin’s War Communism • .In February 1921, a mass peasant rebellion broke out in western Siberia

44. Lenin’s War Communism • In 1918, Lenin organized the Council of the National Economy (VSNKh or Vesenkhi, which was renamed in 1921 the State Planning Commission or Gosplan.

45. Lenin’s War Communism • Overall large-scale industrial production” • 1913 100 • 1917 77 • 1919 26 • 1920 18

46. Lenin’s War Communism • Output of selected industrial goods in 1920 (1913 = 100) • Coal 27.0 • Iron 2.4 • Cotton yarn 5.1 • Petroleum 42.7

47. Lenin’s War Communism • Productivity (in constant rubles) of the Russian Worker • 1913 100 • 1917 85 • 1918 44 • 1919 22 • 1 920 26

48. Lenin’s War Communism • Number of Employed Industrial Workers • 1918 100 • 1919 82 • 1920 77 • 1921 49 (Pipes Revolution 696)

49. Lenin’s War Communism • .In late February 1921, there were mass strikes in Petrograd.

50. Lenin’s War Communism