The Rise and Fall of the USSR
The rise and fall of the USSR was in great part due to the role that Joseph Stalin played during his tenure as its leader. The previous blog post established that Stalin was an integral part of the Bolshevik party both by being the editor of the Pravda Newspaper and when Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly in 1918. However, towards the end of his life, Lenin grew distant from Stalin and wanted him removed from power. This came from personal and political grudges between the two. The two didn’t agree on how to consolidate the Soviet republics and to make matters worse Stalin was rude to Lenin’s wife during a phone conversation which Lenin took extreme exception to. Lenin authored a ‘Political Testament’ in 1922 which stated that he wasn’t sure whether Stalin would always be able to wield his ‘authority with sufficient caution’. In a follow up letter written a month later in January 1923, Lenin further demonised Stalin by stating that he was ‘rude’ and characterising that particular trait at a ‘defect’, one that should result in his removal from power. The breakdown of the relationship could be seen even more when Stalin rallied for the Soviets to go against Lenin’s final wishes regarding his burial. It has been claimed that Lenin wished to be buried alongside his mother in Petrograd, it has also been claimed that his closest friends and relatives, especially his widow, were against any kind of lavish celebrations in his memory. Stalin, on the other hand, along with Felix Dzerzhinsky who was the Chairman of the Commission for Organising Lenin’s Funeral, later named Commission for Perpetuating the Memory of Lenin had different plans in mind. They organised a lavish funeral by displaying his coffin at the Hall of Columns in the House of the Unions for three days, then moving him to Red Square where speeches were delivered and music was played, then on to a mausoleum where he remains to this day. Lenin’s body was embalmed and is still visible to tourists in the mausoleum which was renamed after him. There have been many arguments over the fate of Lenin’s body and whether just over one hundred years later he should finally be buried.
The funeral procession of Lenin, with Stalin as Chief Mourner
Stalin’s complete disregard for his predecessor’s wishes was only the beginning of his brutal reign over the USSR. Lenin didn’t name a successor and there was a power struggle that followed his death, the contenders being Stalin, Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. First of all, Stalin gave Trotsky the wrong date for Lenin’s funeral so that he was able to establish himself as the chief mourner and then sided with Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to isolate Trotsky which ultimately meant that he lost his job as Commissar for War in 1925. Not long after Trotsky was banished from the USSR by Stalin and in 1940 he was assassinated on Stalin’s orders. With Trotsky out of the way Stalin turned his attention to expelling Zinoviev and Kamenev by siding with Bukharin and stating they were factionalists which had been outlawed by Lenin in 1921. The key element to this is that Stalin initially sided with Bukharin over the continuation of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was gradual, as opposed the views of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev who believed in rapid industrialisation and collectivisation in agriculture. However, when Stalin had removed those three as threats to his absolute power, he reversed his decision and used that to denounce Bukharin and remove him from the party for a time until he reversed his beliefs. Bukharin never recovered from this and lost the majority of his power and influence, he was ultimately executed by Stalin for being a ‘Trotskyite’ in 1938.
1930 – Children’s book entitled Piatiletka which outlined Stalin’s First ‘Five-Year Plan’ – the image depicts the collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union – translated
Stalin was finally able to have complete and utter authority over the leadership of the USSR and put his doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’ into practice. Stalin launched his system of ‘Five-Year Plans’ in 1928 as a way to rapidly place the USSR into the twentieth century through ending the country’s economic backwardness. The first plan was introduced in 1928, lasting until 1932, and set about what was termed the ‘Great Leap Forward’ which encompassed the collectivisation of agriculture and the expansion of heavy industry and has been considered as the most successful of the plans. The plan did indeed increase the output of many areas, for instance capital goods were increased by 158 percent and total industrial output increased by 118 percent. However, the initial targets set by Stalin were so monumental that they were near on impossible to reach. This combined with the fact that some farmers did not want to collectivise their farms meant that Stalin’s idealistic view of the plans was somewhat turned on their head, which paved the way for the ‘Great Terror’ that followed.
Firstly, there was a famine from 1930 to 1933 which was in large part down to the massive collectivisation of the farming industry. Stalin wanted to remove the peasantry as a class system and in order to accomplish this they were forced to relinquish their livestock to the government. However, many of the peasant farmers refused and instead slaughtered their animals in protest. There were droughts in the areas of the USSR, leading to a decreased output and there was also the matter of overextraction of grain which meant that there was less food for the people and animals of the farm. Furthermore, there was food requisitioning in order to increase grain exports which resulted in the peasants being forced to give away the little grain that they had produced. The most well-known famine was the one in Ukraine called ‘Holodomor’ which lasted from 1932 to 1933. Ukraine was one of the largest grain producing areas and was therefore subject to extremely high grain quotas, leading to upwards of 3.5 million deaths, and what has been classed as a horrendous genocide. The people of Ukraine were subjected to blacklisting by Stalin for not producing what he demanded which meant that their farms were encircled by troops, they were not allowed to leave and were ultimately forced to starve.
Prisoners in the ‘Gulag’ working to build the White Sea - Baltic Sea Canal - 1932
Moreover, those who refused to participate in the collectivisation were subject to being arrested and put in the ‘Gulag’ which was a system of forced labour camps. It wasn’t just peasant farmers that were part of the ‘Gulag’, it was made up of all those who opposed Stalin, from political rivals to those who had been purged from the Communist party, and then to captured World War II soldiers. The ‘Gulag’ majorly underpinned Stalin’s rapid industrialisation of the USSR. From 1929 to 1953 it has been estimated that there were about eighteen million people in the ‘Gulag’ system. One of the major instances of this was when the White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal from 1931 to 1933. It was the first waterway built by prison labour and demonstrated the ‘effectiveness’ of the ‘Gulag’ System. It was critical to the Soviet way of life as a means to transport vital goods and people. By the end of its construction, between 21,000 and 25,000 of the prisoners had died due to the inhumane working conditions, lack of food and improper medical care.
The one benefit, if it could be called that, of Stalin’s first ‘Five-Year Plan’ was the way that it prepared Russia for their entry into World War II. Stalin was disinclined to become involved in another war after what had happened during the First World War, and according to many scholars he didn’t believe that the USSR was efficiently prepared for the conflict. This led to the ‘Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’ in August 1939, which was a non-aggression agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. There was a secret element to the pact which was a protocol that established German and Soviet spheres of influence in eastern Europe, as well as, facilitating the German invasion of Poland after which it would be divided and split between the two. However, this was a false sense of security for Stalin and the USSR because less than two years later, in June 1941, Germany launched ‘Operation Barbarossa’ which called for the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Red Army was caught completely by surprise as there were over 3.5 million German and Axis troops which was 80 percent of the German army, the largest invasion force that had been implemented to date. They attacked along a 1,800 mile front and in the beginning were the more successful, especially because of the success of the Luftwaffe. How ironic that what Stalin did to the people in his party to seize power, Hitler did to him. Russian armies were being caught left, right and centre and Germany were making their way into completely overpowering Russia, by the end of September, Kiev had fallen and over 650,000 troops had been captured or killed.
The Battle of Stalingrad – 1942-43
The major turning point for the Soviets was the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’ which was fought between August 1942 and February 1943. At this point Hitler believed that it was only a formality to defeat the Soviets at Stalingrad and further his takeover. However, the German troops were bested by the ‘concrete jungle’ of the city and became bogged down in the fighting. Many German soldiers died of malnutrition and by simply freezing, it was that cold that their machinery didn’t work, only worsening their efforts at victory. Hitler was adamant that the German army were not allowed to surrender and would fight until the last man fell. The Germans and their allies suffered more than one million casualties, 900 aircraft, 500 tanks and 6,000 artillery pieces. The ‘Battle of Stalingrad’ was one of the most major battles of the war and was a significant turning point, marking the beginning of the end for Hitler and his Nazis. Not only that, Stalingrad, established the Soviet Union and Stalin on the influential world map.
Berlin Blockade and Airlift - 1948
Arguably, World War II and its aftermath paved the way for the Cold War that followed between the United States and the USSR. The two nations were unlikely allies from the start, who had been brought together out of necessity. When the Bolsheviks had taken over in 1917 the U.S. was one of the countries that refused to recognise them, this only changed in 1933 under FDR who established diplomatic relations with them. Relations that cooled significantly after the ‘Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’ and only changed after Hitler reversed his position on it. The relations established at the conferences at Tehran in 1943, Yalta in 1945, and Potsdam in 1945 were to be significantly challenged after the war. The conferences decided that Germany would be divided into four with the Soviet Union taking the east and the U.S., Britain and France taking the west. Berlin, as Germany’s capital, was also divided, even though it was in the middle of the Soviet section of Germany. Tensions arose when the U.S. and Soviet Union disagreed on how to rebuild Germany, furthered by Stalin’s efforts to reclaim countries in eastern Europe, namely Poland. What’s more, President Truman announced to Stalin at the Potsdam Conference that the first atomic bomb had been built. The Cold War was born. Truman, fearing the spread of communism in Europe, established the ‘Truman Doctrine’ in 1947 which was about the policy of containment. Truman pledged the support of America to any democracies against the threat of communism. In June 1948 the Soviet Union cut off all traffic in to and out of West Berlin, hoping to force the Allies out of the capital completely. In response, British and U.S. planes carried out the greatest air relief operation in history. They transported around 2.3 million tonnes of supplies into West Berlin using more than 270,000 flights over eleven months. The ‘Berlin Blockade’ and following ‘Berlin Airlift’ was the first major incident of the Cold War and set the precedent of what was to come over the coming decades.
The ‘Berlin Blockade’ was only the beginning of a long Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Korean War, 1950 to 1953, was the first proxy war between them and marked the end of Stalin’s leadership of the USSR due to his death four months before the armistice was signed. Communist North Korea, supported by the Soviet Union, was pitted against the Western backed South Korea. The major take-away from the war was that it would have been extremely hard for either side to use atomic bombs decisively in battle. The following year marked the beginning of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War which was the next major conflict of the Cold War, one that spanned decades and numerous leaders on both sides. The Vietnam War was one of the most devastating conflicts with the death toll reaching around 3.8 million. Both conflicts were major instances of the implementation of ‘Domino Theory’ by the U.S. which stated that if one country fell to communism more would follow. Thus, reinforcing the idea to the U.S. that they must interfere in order to save the nations from communism and thereby the rest of the globe.
The New York Times reporting on the Cuban Missile Crisis - 1962
The death of Stalin and following leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, marked the end of an era for the USSR. There was a process of de-Stalinization that occurred which saw a true irony taking place. Stalin was embalmed and placed next to Lenin in his mausoleum, however, as a part of the de-Stalinization process, he was removed in 1961 and shut away in a nearby tomb. The immortality of his legacy was, quite literally, no longer on display for the world to see. Khrushchev, although a believer in communism, wished to have a peaceful existence with capitalist societies, leading to his visitation of the United States. However, the ‘Bay of Pigs’, ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ and construction of the Berlin Wall would put an end to the so-called niceties. In early 1961, the then President JFK concluded that Fidel Castro was a Soviet agent and approved the ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion which failed terribly within two days. In 1962 Khrushchev secretly introduced missiles into Cuba which created the crisis after American spy planes spotted them. Tensions rose and only simmered down when the U.S. agreed to remove missiles from Turkey if Russia did the same in Cuba. Around the same time in 1961, Khrushchev approved the construction of the Berlin Wall to stop East Germans fleeing to the west.
Sputnik 1 before launch - 1957
Whilst all of this was occurring, so too was the ‘Space Race’, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The two nations were engaged in a battle to prove their supremacy over the other in not just the battleground but in the technological world too. The ‘Space Race’ consisted of the Soviet Union launching Sputnik I in 1957, beating the U.S. to the first artificial satellite to enter space. NASA was then launched by President Eisenhower in 1958, however, they were still lagging behind Soviet technology in space. The tide turned in 1968 when the Americans were the first successful ones to orbit the moon, followed by Apollo 11 in 1969, where Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins touched down on the moon. Thereby, having the final say in the matter.
The last major leader of the USSR was Mikhail Gorbachev who took office in 1985. He marked an incredibly different leader to the rest with his policies of ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’. The first was the intended restructuring and rebuilding of the political economy of the Soviet Union, the second was meant to be the transparency and openness of the USSR with the West, and both marked the end of the Cold War. These policies were majorly influenced by the Chernobyl incident surrounding nuclear power in 1986. Alongside this Gorbachev decided to allow election with a multi-party system, creating a slow process of democratisation, which eventually destabilised Communist control, contributing to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Other contributing factors included the USSR’s struggling economy, the Berlin Wall falling in 1989, and the fallout of the Cold War and thereby America’s policy of containment.
The Soviet flag was lowered for the final time on 25 December 1991, and the USSR was formally dissolved the following day. It would not be the last time that the Stalinist flag would fly, however. There are many to this day that believe that Russia, today, is returning to the Stalin era, especially with a Soviet-style election last year.
About the Author
Grace E. Turton is an aspiring historical consultant with an MA in Social History and BA in History & Media from Leeds Beckett University. Grace specialises in British and Italian history but loves reading and researching about all aspects of history. In her free time, you can find her exploring the Yorkshire Dales with her dog Bear, watching classic films and playing rugby league. Grace is passionate about keeping history alive and believes that an integral part of this is maintained through History Through Fiction’s purpose.
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