Stalin’s Heirs

This chapter examines the changes that were made in Russia after Joseph Stalin's death. Within weeks of Stalin's death, the charges against the “murderer doctors” had been dropped, the use of torture had been outlawed, and the punitive authority of the security apparatus had been limited. Furthermore, the last remaining victims of the “Mingrelian Affair” were released from prison, and Solomon Mikhoels, the assassinated chairman of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, was rehabilitated posthumously. Despotism, the hallmark of Stalinism, would disappear from daily life, and fear and dread would no longer be the ruling standard. Nikita Khrushchev became the new party leader, Georgi Malenkov was made prime minister, Vyacheslav Molotov was allowed to return to his former post as foreign minister, and Stalin's executioner Lavrenty Beria assumed control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the state security apparatus. Throughout the years of de-Stalinization, it remained the great exception for any of the crimes against defenseless individuals to be prosecuted.

Wars

This chapter looks at Stalinism during the Great Patriotic War. It first discusses Joseph Stalin's changing approaches to terror following the end of his policy of exterminatory violence. This shift is well illustrated by two incidents, one in September 1939 when Nikita Khrushchev traveled with Marshal Timoshenko to the town of Vynnyky. This episode shows that the Stalinist terror was also an instrument of ethnic cleansing with which the Stalinist regime did its best. The other incident was in 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The front-line soldiers of the Red Army were trapped in a cycle of violence from which there was no escape. This chapter considers how the Great Patriotic War allowed Stalinism to develop to its full potential. The Soviet Union had become a world power, and yet it could offer its subjects nothing but misery and slavery. Only the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953 put an end to Stalinism and with it, despotism.

Pyrrhic Victories

This chapter examines the aftermath of the Bolsheviks' victory over both the Whites, or counterrevolutionaries, and all rival socialists. The Bolsheviks broke the military resistance of the Whites, crushed the unrest and strikes of the peasants, and even restored the multiethnic empire, which, in the early months of revolution, had largely fallen apart. In spring 1921, when the Red Army marched into Georgia, the Civil War was officially over. For the Bolsheviks, however, military victory was not the end but rather the beginning of a mission, not simply to shake the world but to transform it. Although weapons may have decided the war in favor of the revolutionaries they had not settled the question of power. This chapter considers Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) that would implement economic reforms, the Bolsheviks' failure to carry power into villages, and the dictatorship's lack of support from the proletariat. It also describes the nationalization of the Russian empire and Joseph Stalin's rise to power.

Imperial Spaces of Violence

This chapter shows that Joseph Stalin's reign of violence in the 1930s was born out of a culture of war and was itself a civil war being fought with different means. It first considers the preconditions that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, who cultivated a style of violence that remained alien to the liberals and the educated. It then looks at the civil wars that erupted among the Bolsheviks, the counterrevolutionaries, independence movements, and non-Bolshevik socialists. It shows how civil war and terror not only wreaked havoc and psychological devastation; it also resulted in Russia losing its intellectual and political elite. Those who survived the excesses fled to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The new Russia became a land of terror where no one was safe from the state-sponsored violence.

Dictatorship of Dread

This chapter describes Stalinism as a dictatorship of dread. It shows how Joseph Stalin's slave state destroyed and uprooted millions in a series of violent interventions that showed no regard for either human lives or dignity. Kolkhoz peasants were bound to the land, while draconian disciplinary laws tied workers to the factories. The Bolsheviks' public sphere left few possibilities for eluding the Stalinist regime's prescribed rituals and rules of language. This chapter also considers how Stalin used violence to subjugate even the elite of the Bolshevik Party, along with his destruction of the Communist Party, his annihilation of the army officer corps, and the self-destruction of the state apparatus because of his reign of terror. Finally, it emphasizes Stalin's omnipotence as a ruthless despot, his implementation of a system of mass murder, the end of mass terror, and the different situations of violence during his rule.

Subjugation

This chapter describes Stalinism as a dictatorship of subjugation. It argues that Stalinism was a war against its own people that respected no boundaries, whose violence arose not from ideas but from situations and their possibilities. It shows how the atmosphere of total arbitrariness and uncertainty ruling the Soviet Union at this time allowed Joseph Stalin to live out his fantasies of total power and sate his lust for violence. The Bolsheviks' crusade against old Russia opened the floodgates of unabated violence. In the chaos created by the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution, by the collectivization of agriculture, and by the rapid industrialization every violent act could be justified by invoking higher purposes and ideals. This chapter examines Stalin's war against religion and the peasants as well as the birth of the Gulag.

What Was Stalinism?

This book examines the violent excesses of Stalinism and the culture that made them possible. It considers how the omnipresence of terror that marked Joseph Stalin's regime is to be understood and looks at the source of violence with which Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, as well as the sort of havoc that this violence wreaked. It argues that Stalinism's acts of violence were not the product of texts or ideas. They developed in historical spaces that made their epidemic spread possible. The book also discusses the concept of totalitarian dictatorship and some legitimate criticisms of the theory of totalitarianism in the context of Soviet historiography, along with the limitations of revisionist historical accounts of Stalinism. Finally, it rejects the notion that modernity had something to do with the monstrous violence fomented by the National Socialists and communists in the first half of the twentieth century.