Stalinism

{{further|History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953)|Rise of Joseph Stalin}}

Stalinism is used to describe the period during which Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union while serving as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to his death on 5 March 1953.[https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism "Communism"]. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 4 February 2020. It was a development of Leninism,{{Sfn|Montefiore|2007|p=352}} and while Stalin avoided using the term "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism", he allowed others to do so.{{Sfn|Service|2004|p=357}} Following Lenin's death, Stalin contributed to the theoretical debates within the Communist Party, namely by developing the idea of "Socialism in One Country". This concept was intricately linked to factional struggles within the party, particularly against Trotsky.{{Sfn|Sandle|1999|pp=208–209}} He first developed the idea in December 1924, and elaborated upon it in his writings of 1925–26.{{Sfn|Sandle|1999|p=209}}

Stalin's doctrine held that socialism could be completed in Russia but that its final victory could not be guaranteed because of the threat from capitalist intervention. For this reason, he retained the Leninist view that world revolution was still a necessity to ensure the ultimate victory of socialism.{{Sfn|Sandle|1999|p=209}} Although retaining the Marxist belief that the state would wither away as socialism transformed into pure communism, he believed that the Soviet state would remain until the final defeat of international capitalism.{{Sfn|Sandle|1999|p=261}} This concept synthesised Marxist and Leninist ideas with nationalist ideals,{{Sfn|Sandle|1999|p=211}} and served to discredit Trotsky—who promoted the idea of "permanent revolution"—by presenting the latter as a defeatist with little faith in Russian workers' abilities to construct socialism.{{Sfn|Sandle|1999|p=210}}

The term Stalinism came into prominence during the mid-1930s when Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician and associate of Stalin, reportedly declared: "Let's replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism!"{{sfn|Montefiore|2004|p=164}} Stalin dismissed this as excessive and contributing to a cult of personality he thought might later be used against him by the same people who praised him excessively, one of those being Khrushchev—a prominent user of the term during Stalin's life who was later responsible for de-Stalinization and the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw era.{{sfn|Montefiore|2004|p=164}}

File:Lenin Stalin gorky-02 (cropped).jpg intended to show Vladimir Lenin with Stalin in the early 1920s{{cite book|last1=Gilbert|first1=Felix|author-link1=Felix Gilbert|last2=Large|first2=David Clay|title=The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present|edition= 6th|year=2008|page=213|publisher=W. W. Norton & Company|location=New York City|isbn=978-0-393-93040-5}}{{cite news|last1=Jones|first1=Jonathan|author-link1=Jonathan Jones (journalist)|title=The fake photographs that predate Photoshop|url=https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/aug/29/fake-photography-before-photoshop|access-date=27 August 2016|work=The Guardian|date=29 August 2012|quote=In a 1949 portrait, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is seen as a young man with Lenin. Stalin and Lenin were close friends, judging from this photograph. But it is doctored, of course. Two portraits have been sutured to sentimentalise Stalin's life and closeness to Lenin.}}]]

File:Stalin birthday2.jpg celebrating Stalin's birthday in 1949]]

Some historians view Stalinism as a reflection of the ideologies of Leninism and Marxism, but some argue that it is separate from the socialist ideals it stemmed from. After a political struggle that culminated in the defeat of the Bukharinists (the "Party's Right Tendency"), Stalinism was free to shape policy without opposition, ushering in an era of harsh totalitarianism that worked toward rapid industrialization regardless of the human cost.{{cite book|title=The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States|url=https://archive.org/details/sovietexperiment00suny|url-access=registration|last=Suny|first=Ronald|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=1998|location=New York, New York|pages=[https://archive.org/details/sovietexperiment00suny/page/221 221]}}

From 1917 to 1924, though often appearing united, Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky had discernible ideological differences. In his dispute with Trotsky, Stalin de-emphasized the role of workers in advanced capitalist countries (e.g., he considered the U.S. working class "bourgeoisified" labor aristocracy).{{Citation needed|date=February 2025}}

All other October Revolution 1917 Bolshevik leaders regarded their revolution more or less as just the beginning, with Russia as the springboard on the road toward worldwide revolution. Stalin introduced the idea of socialism in one country by the autumn of 1924, a theory standing in sharp contrast to Trotsky's permanent revolution and all earlier socialistic theses. The revolution did not spread outside Russia as Lenin had assumed it soon would. The revolution had not succeeded even within other former territories of the Russian Empire―such as Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. On the contrary, these countries had returned to capitalist bourgeois rule.On Finland, Poland etc., Deutscher, chapter 6 "Stalin during the Civil War", (p. 148 in the Swedish 1980 printing)

{{Quote box|width=25em|align=right|bgcolor=|quote=He is an unprincipled intriguer, who subordinates everything to the preservation of his own power. He changes his theory according to whom he needs to get rid of.|source=Bukharin on Stalin's theoretical position, 1928.{{cite book |last1=Sakwa |first1=Richard |title=The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union |date=17 August 2005 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-134-80602-7 |page=165 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CJ6IAgAAQBAJ&dq=bukharin+he+changes+his+theory+according+to+whom+he+needs+to+get+rid+of&pg=PA165 |language=en}}}}

Despite this, by the autumn of 1924, Stalin's notion of socialism in Soviet Russia was initially considered next to blasphemy by other Politburo members, including Zinoviev and Kamenev to the intellectual left; Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky to the pragmatic right; and the powerful Trotsky, who belonged to no side but his own. None would even consider Stalin's concept a potential addition to communist ideology. Stalin's socialism in one-country doctrine could not be imposed until he had come close to being the Soviet Union's autocratic ruler around 1929. Bukharin and the Right Opposition expressed their support for imposing Stalin's ideas, as Trotsky had been exiled, and Zinoviev and Kamenev had been expelled from the party.Deutscher, Isaac. [1949] 1961. "The General Secretary." Pp. 221–29 in Stalin, A Political Biography (2nd ed.). In a 1936 interview with journalist Roy W. Howard, Stalin articulated his rejection of world revolution and said, "We never had such plans and intentions" and "The export of revolution is nonsense".{{cite book |last1=Vyshinsky |first1=Andrey Yanuaryevich |title=Speeches Delivered at the Fifth Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, September–October, 1950 |date=1950 |publisher=Information Bulletin of the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics |page=76 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1VM1AQAAIAAJ&dq=Stalin+we+ever+had+such+plans+and+intentions&pg=PA76 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Volkogonov |first1=Dmitriĭ Antonovich |title=Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders who Built the Soviet Regime |date=1998 |publisher=Simon and Schuster |isbn=978-0-684-83420-7 |page=125 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=S5XlHA_75YwC&dq=Stalin+we+ever+had+such+plans+and+intentions&pg=PA125 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Kotkin |first1=Stephen |title=Stalin. Vol II, Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941 |date=2017 |publisher=London : Allen Lane |isbn=978-0-7139-9945-7 |page=125 |url=https://archive.org/details/stalinvoliiwaiti0000kotk/page/287/mode/1up}}

Traditional communist thought holds that the state will gradually "wither away" as the implementation of socialism reduces class distinction. But Stalin argued that the proletarian state (as opposed to the bourgeois state) must become stronger before it can wither away. In Stalin's view, counter-revolutionary elements will attempt to derail the transition to full communism, and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them. For this reason, communist regimes influenced by Stalin are totalitarian."[https://www.britannica.com/topic/Stalinism Stalinism]." Encyclopædia Britannica. [1998] 2020. Other leftists, such as anarcho-communists, have criticized the party-state of the Stalin-era Soviet Union, accusing it of being bureaucratic and calling it a reformist social democracy rather than a form of revolutionary communism.{{Cite web |last=Price |first=Wayne |title=The Abolition of the State |url=https://mirror.anarhija.net/usa.anarchistlibraries.net/mirror/w/wp/wayne-price-the-abolition-of-the-state.a4.pdf |access-date=2 March 2022}}

Sheng Shicai, a Chinese warlord with Communist leanings, invited Soviet intervention and allowed Stalinist rule to extend to Xinjiang province in the 1930s. In 1937, Sheng conducted a purge similar to the Great Purge, imprisoning, torturing, and killing about 100,000 people, many of them Uyghurs.{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IAs9AAAAIAAJ&q=warlords+and+muslims|title=Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: a political history of Republican Sinkiang 1911–1949|author=Andrew D. W. Forbes|year=1986|publisher=CUP Archive|location=Cambridge, England|isbn=978-0-521-25514-1|page=151|access-date=December 31, 2010}}{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MT2D_0_eBPQC&pg=PA57|title=Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism Along China's Silk Road|last1=Rudelson|first1=Justin Jon|last2=Rudelson|first2=Justin Ben-Adam|last3=Ben-Adam|first3=Justin|date=1997|publisher=Columbia University Press|isbn=978-0-231-10786-0|language=en}}

{{Main|August Uprising|Stalinist repressions in Azerbaijan|Stalinist repressions in Mongolia| Dekulakization|Doctors' plot| Anti-cosmopolitan campaign|Industrial Party Trial|Sharashka| Night of the Murdered Poets|UPTI Affair|Wrecking (Soviet Union)|1931 Menshevik Trial|Pavlovian session|Law of Spikelets|Blacklisting (Soviet policy)|Shakhty Trial|Korets–Landau leaflet}}

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|quote=Cybernetics: a reactionary pseudoscience that appeared in the U.S.A. after World War II and also spread through other capitalist countries. Cybernetics clearly reflects one of the basic features of the bourgeois worldview—its inhumanity, striving to transform workers into an extension of the machine, into a tool of production, and an instrument of war. At the same time, for cybernetics an imperialistic utopia is characteristic—replacing living, thinking man, fighting for his interests, by a machine, both in industry and in war. The instigators of a new world war use cybernetics in their dirty, practical affairs.

|source="Cybernetics" in the Short Philosophical Dictionary, 1954Quoted in {{harvnb|Peters|2012|p=150}}. From {{cite book |editor1-first=Mark M. |editor1-last=Rosenthal |editor2-first=Pavel F. |editor2-last=Iudin |title=Kratkii filosofskii slovar |trans-title=Short Philosophical Dictionary |edition=4th |location=Moscow |publisher=Gospolitizdat |date=1954 |pages=236–237 }}

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Under Stalin, repression was extended to academic scholarship, the natural sciences,{{cite book |last1=Service |first1=Robert |title=Stalin: A Biography |date=2005 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-01697-2 |page=307 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hSWK6Dh4wRgC&dq=stalin+repression+natural+science&pg=PA307 |language=en}} and literary fields.{{cite book |last1=Kemp-Welch |first1=A. |title=Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–39 |date=27 July 2016 |publisher=Springer |isbn=978-1-349-21447-1 |page=222 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=P-y-DAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+repression+natural+science&pg=PA222 |language=en}} In particular, Einstein's theory of relativity was subject to public denunciation, many of his ideas were rejected on ideological grounds{{cite book |last1=Vucinich |first1=Alexander |title=Einstein and Soviet Ideology |date=2001 |publisher=Stanford University Press |isbn=978-0-8047-4209-2 |pages=1-15, 90-120|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=f_-lAYZzP1UC |language=en}} and condemned as "bourgeois idealism" in the Stalin era.{{cite book |last1=Daniels |first1=Robert Vincent |title=Russia, the Roots of Confrontation |date=1985 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-77966-2 |page=181 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yhjO-9aB0nwC&dq=stalin+einstein+bourgeois+idealism+theory+of+relativity&pg=PA181 |language=en}}

A policy of ideological repression impacted various disciplinary fields such as genetics,{{cite book |last1=Stanchevici |first1=Dmitri |title=Stalinist Genetics: The Constitutional Rhetoric of T. D. Lysenko |date=2 March 2017 |publisher=Taylor & Francis |isbn=978-1-351-86445-9 |page=9 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qCUlDwAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+genetics+repression&pg=PA9 |language=en}} cybernetics,{{cite book |last1=Zubok |first1=Vladislav M. |title=A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev |date=1 February 2009 |publisher=Univ of North Carolina Press |isbn=978-0-8078-9905-2 |page=166 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3j2VJj1hs1EC |language=en}} biology,{{cite book |last1=Riehl |first1=Nikolaus |last2=Seitz |first2=Frederick |title=Stalin's Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb |date=1996 |publisher=Chemical Heritage Foundation |isbn=978-0-8412-3310-2 |page=199 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RycjxBr15NAC&dq=stalin+genetics+repression&pg=PA199 |language=en}} linguistics,{{cite book |last1=Harrison |first1=Selig S. |title=India: The Most Dangerous Decades |date=8 December 2015 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-1-4008-7780-5 |page=149 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9jbWCgAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+linguistics+repression&pg=PA149 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Gerovitch |first1=Slava |title=From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics |date=17 September 2004 |publisher=MIT Press |isbn=978-0-262-57225-5 |pages=41–42 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QirR7QYPFZQC&dq=stalin+linguistics+repression&pg=PA41 |language=en}} physics,{{cite journal |last1=Krylov |first1=Anna I. |title=The Peril of Politicizing Science |journal=The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters |date=10 June 2021 |volume=12 |issue=22 |pages=5371–5376 |doi=10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475 |pmid=34107688 |s2cid=235392946 |language=en |issn=1948-7185|doi-access=free }} sociology,Elizabeth Ann Weinberg, The Development of Sociology in the Soviet Union, Taylor & Francis, 1974, {{ISBN|0-7100-7876-5}}, [https://books.google.com/books?id=RXwOAAAAQAAJ&q=sociology+disappeared&pg=PA8 Google Print, pp. 8–9] psychology,{{cite book |last1=Ings |first1=Simon |title=Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905–1953 |date=21 February 2017 |publisher=Open Road + Grove/Atlantic |isbn=978-0-8021-8986-8 |pages=1–528 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OYz1DAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+Pedology+banned&pg=PT64 |language=en}} pedology,{{cite book |last1=Ings |first1=Simon |title=Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905–1953 |date=21 February 2017 |publisher=Open Road + Grove/Atlantic |isbn=978-0-8021-8986-8 |pages=1–528 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OYz1DAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+Pedology+banned&pg=PT64 |language=en}} mathematical logic,{{cite book |last1=Avron |first1=Arnon |last2=Dershowitz |first2=Nachum |last3=Rabinovich |first3=Alexander |title=Pillars of Computer Science: Essays Dedicated to Boris (Boaz) Trakhtenbrot on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday |date=8 February 2008 |publisher=Springer Science & Business Media |isbn=978-3-540-78126-4 |page=2 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GFX2qiLuRAMC&dq=stalin+repression+mathematics&pg=PA2 |language=en}} economics{{cite book |last1=Gregory |first1=Paul R. |last2=Stuart |first2=Robert C. |title=Soviet Economic Structure and Performance |date=1974 |publisher=Harper & Row |isbn=978-0-06-042509-8 |page=324 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JyiTAAAAIAAJ&q=stalin+repression+mathematics |language=en}} and statistics.{{cite book |last1=Salsburg |first1=David |title=The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century |date=May 2002 |publisher=Macmillan |isbn=978-0-8050-7134-4 |pages=147–149 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ej9xytYdkyAC |language=en}}

Pseudoscientific theories of Trofim Lysenko were favoured over scientific genetics during the Stalin era. Soviet scientists were forced to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko.{{cite journal |last1=Wrinch |first1=Pamela N. |title=Science and Politics in the U.S.S.R.: The Genetics Debate |journal=World Politics |date=1951 |volume=3 |issue=4 |pages=486–519 |doi=10.2307/2008893 |jstor=2008893 |s2cid=146284128 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2008893 |issn=0043-8871}} Over 3,000 biologists were imprisoned, fired,{{cite book| last1 = Birstein| first1 = Vadim J.| title = The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story Of Soviet Science| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=2XqEAAAAQBAJ| publisher = Perseus Books Group| date = 2013| page = | isbn = 978-0-7867-5186-0| access-date = 2016-06-30| quote = Academician Schmalhausen, Professors Formozov and Sabinin, and 3,000 other biologists, victims of the August 1948 Session, lost their professional jobs because of their integrity and moral principles [...]}} or executed for attempting to oppose Lysenkoism and genetic research was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953.{{cite book |last1=Soĭfer |first1=Valeriĭ. |title=Lysenko and The Tragedy of Soviet Science |date=1994 |publisher=Rutgers University Press |location=New Brunswick, N.J. |isbn=978-0-8135-2087-2}} Due to the ideological influence of Lysenkoism, crop yields in the USSR declined.{{cite web |last=Wade |first=Nicholas |title=The Scourge of Soviet Science |url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-scourge-of-soviet-science-1466192179 |website=Wall Street Journal |date=June 17, 2016}}{{cite book |last=Swedin |first=Eric G. |title=Science in the Contemporary World : An Encyclopedia |url=https://archive.org/details/sciencecontempor00swed |url-access=limited |date=2005 |publisher=ABC-CLIO |location=Santa Barbara, California |isbn=978-1-85109-524-7 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/sciencecontempor00swed/page/n181 168], 280}}{{cite journal |last=Soyfer |first=Valery N. |author-link=Valery Soyfer |title=The Consequences of Political Dictatorship for Russian Science |journal=Nature Reviews Genetics |date=1 September 2001 |volume=2 |issue=9 |pages=723–729 |doi=10.1038/35088598 |pmid=11533721 |s2cid=46277758 }}

Orthodoxy was enforced in the cultural sphere. Prior to Stalin's rule, literary, religious and national representatives had some level of autonomy in the 1920s but these groups were later rigorously repressed during the Stalinist era.{{cite book |last1=Jones |first1=Derek |title=Censorship: A World Encyclopedia |date=1 December 2001 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-136-79864-1 |page=2083 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gDqsCQAAQBAJ&q=stalin+mass+censorshipI&pg=PA2092 |language=en}} Socialist realism was imposed in artistic production and other creative industries such as music, film and sport were subject to extreme levels of political control.{{cite book |last1=Jones |first1=Derek |title=Censorship: A World Encyclopedia |date=1 December 2001 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-136-79864-1 |page=2083 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gDqsCQAAQBAJ&q=stalin+mass+censorshipI&pg=PA2092 |language=en}}

Historical falsification of political events such as the October Revolution and the Brest-Litovsk Treaty became a distinctive element of Stalin's regime. A notable example is the 1938 publication, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks),{{cite journal |last1=Suny |first1=Ronald Grigor |title=Stalin, Falsifier in Chief: E. H. Carr and the Perils of Historical Research Introduction |journal=Revolutionary Russia |date=2 January 2022 |volume=35 |issue=1 |pages=11–14 |doi=10.1080/09546545.2022.2065740 |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09546545.2022.2065740 |language=en |issn=0954-6545}} in which the history of the governing party was significantly altered and revised including the importance of the leading figures during the Bolshevik revolution. Retrospectively, Lenin's primary associates such as Zinoviev, Trotsky, Radek and Bukharin were presented as "vacillating", "opportunists" and "foreign spies" whereas Stalin was depicted as the chief discipline during the revolution. However, in reality, Stalin was considered a relatively unknown figure with secondary importance at the time of the event.{{cite journal |last1=Bailey |first1=Sydney D. |title=Stalin's Falsification of History: The Case of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty |journal=The Russian Review |date=1955 |volume=14 |issue=1 |pages=24–35 |doi=10.2307/126074 |jstor=126074 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/126074 |issn=0036-0341}}

In his book, The Stalin School of Falsification, Leon Trotsky argued that the Stalinist faction routinely distorted political events, forged a theoretical basis for irreconcilable concepts such as the notion of "Socialism in One Country" and misrepresented the views of opponents through an array of employed historians alongside economists to justify policy manoeuvering and safeguarding its own set of material interests.{{cite book |last1=Trotsky |first1=Leon |title=The Stalin School of Falsification |date=13 January 2019 |publisher=Pickle Partners Publishing |isbn=978-1-78912-348-7 |pages=vii-89 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PF2LDwAAQBAJ&q=stalin+school |language=en}} He cited a range of historical documents such as private letters, telegrams, party speeches, meeting minutes, and suppressed texts such as Lenin's Testament.{{cite book |last1=Trotsky |first1=Leon |title=The Stalin School of Falsification |date=13 January 2019 |publisher=Pickle Partners Publishing |isbn=978-1-78912-348-7 |pages=vii-89 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PF2LDwAAQBAJ&q=stalin+school |language=en}} British historian Orlando Figes argued that "The urge to silence Trotsky, and all criticism of the Politburo, was in itself a crucial factor in Stalin's rise to power".{{cite book |last=Figes |first=Orlando |title=A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 |pages=802 |publisher=Pimlico |date=1997}}

Cinematic productions served to foster the cult of personality around Stalin with adherents to the party line receiving Stalin prizes.{{cite book |last1=Nicholas |first1=Sian |last2=O'Malley |first2=Tom |last3=Williams |first3=Kevin |title=Reconstructing the Past: History in the Mass Media 1890–2005 |date=13 September 2013 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-317-99684-2 |pages=42–43 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-bjaAAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+film+directors+cult+of+personality&pg=PA42 |language=en}} However, film directors and their assistants were still liable to mass arrests during the Great Terror.{{cite book |last1=Nicholas |first1=Sian |last2=O'Malley |first2=Tom |last3=Williams |first3=Kevin |title=Reconstructing the Past: History in the Mass Media 1890–2005 |date=13 September 2013 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-317-99684-2 |pages=42–43 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-bjaAAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+film+directors+cult+of+personality&pg=PA42 |language=en}}

Censorship of films contributed to a mythologizing of history as seen with the films First Cavalry Army (1941) and Defence of Tsaritsyn (1942) in which Stalin was glorified as a central figure to the October Revolution. Conversely, the roles of other Soviet figures such as Lenin and Trotsky were diminished or misrepresented.{{cite book |last1=Nicholas |first1=Sian |last2=O'Malley |first2=Tom |last3=Williams |first3=Kevin |title=Reconstructing the Past: History in the Mass Media 1890–2005 |date=13 September 2013 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-317-99684-2 |pages=42–43 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-bjaAAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+film+directors+cult+of+personality&pg=PA42 |language=en}}

{{Main|Joseph Stalin's cult of personality|The Fall of Berlin (film)|The Unforgettable Year 1919| The Battle of Stalingrad (film)|The Third Blow}}

File:Poster of Azerbaijan 1938. Constitutions.jpg poster featuring an enlarged Stalin with workers]]

In the aftermath of the succession struggle, in which Stalin had defeated both Left and Right Opposition, a cult of Stalin had materialised.{{cite book |last1=Fitzpatrick |first1=Sheila |title=The Shortest History of the Soviet Union |date=6 February 2023 |publisher=Pan Macmillan |isbn=978-93-90742-78-3 |page=116 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2KynEAAAQBAJ&q=Sheila+Fitzpatrick.+A+Brief+History+of+the+Soviet+Union+%3D+Sheila+Fitzpatrick.+The+Shortest+History+of+the+Soviet+Union. |language=en}} From 1929 until 1953, there was a proliferation of architecture, statues, posters, banners and iconography featuring Stalin in which he was increasingly identified with the state and seen as an emblem of Marxism.{{cite journal |last1=Pisch |first1=Anita |title=Introduction |journal=The Personality Cult of Stalin in Soviet Posters, 1929–1953 |date=2016 |pages=1–48 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1q1crzp.6 |publisher=ANU Press|jstor=j.ctt1q1crzp.6 |isbn=978-1-76046-062-4 }} In July 1930, a state decree instructed 200 artists to prepare propaganda posters for the Five Year Plans and collectivsation measures.{{cite book |last1=Pisch |first1=Anita |title=The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953 |date=2016 |publisher=ANU Press |isbn=978-1-76046-062-4 |pages=87–190 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1q1crzp.8 |chapter=The rise of the Stalin personality cult|jstor=j.ctt1q1crzp.8 }} Historian Anita Pisch drew specific focus to the various manifestations of the personality cult in which Stalin was associated with the "Father", "Saviour" and "Warrior" cultural archetypes with the latter imagery having gained ascendency during the Great Patrotic War and Cold War.

File:PomnikStalina-Praga1.jpg in Prague]]

Some scholars have argued that Stalin took an active involvement with the construction of the cult of personality{{cite book |last1=Saxonberg |first1=Steven |title=Transitions and Non-Transitions from Communism: Regime Survival in China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam |date=14 February 2013 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-107-02388-8 |page=111 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zQw-RWxrPSUC&dq=stalin+built+a+cult+around+himself&pg=PA111 |language=en}} with writers such as Isaac Deutscher and Erik van Ree noting that Stalin had absorbed elements from the cult of Tsars, Orthodox Christianity and highlighting specific acts such as Lenin's embalming.{{cite book |last1=Ree |first1=Erik van |title=The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary Patriotism |date=27 August 2003 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-135-78604-5 |pages=1–384 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tLZy9dhBsPgC&dq=stalin+lenin+embalmed+cult+of+personality&pg=PT191 |language=en}} Yet, other scholars have drawn on primary accounts from Stalin's associates such as Molotov which suggested he took a more critical and ambivalent attitude towards his cult of personality.{{cite book |last1=Davies |first1=Sarah |last2=Harris |first2=James |title=Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order |date=14 October 2014 |publisher=Yale University Press |isbn=978-0-300-18281-1 |page=134 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TQiSBAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+cult+of+personality+molotov&pg=PA134 |language=en}}

The cult of personality served to legitimate Stalin's authority, and establish continuity with Lenin as his "discipline, student and mentee" in the view of his wider followers.{{cite book |last1=Stone |first1=Dan |title=The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History |date=17 May 2012 |publisher=OUP Oxford |isbn=978-0-19-956098-1 |page=465 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PHD3TsVlqKAC&dq=stalin+cult+of+personality+legitimise&pg=PA465 |language=en}} His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, would later denounce the cult of personality around Stalin as contradictory to Leninist principles and party discourse.{{cite book |last1=Claeys |first1=Gregory |title=Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought (set) |date=20 August 2013 |publisher=CQ Press |isbn=978-1-5063-0836-4 |page=162 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1qjlCAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+cult+of+personality+legitimise&pg=PA162 |language=en}}

Stalin blamed the kulaks for inciting reactionary violence against the people during the implementation of agricultural collectivization.Zuehlke, Jeffrey. 2006. Joseph Stalin. Twenty-First Century Books. p. 63. In response, the state, under Stalin's leadership, initiated a violent campaign against them. This kind of campaign was later known as classicide,Sémelin, Jacques, and Stanley Hoffman. 2007. Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 37. though several international legislatures have passed resolutions declaring the campaign a genocide.{{Cite web|url=https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/recognition-of-holodomor-as-genocide-in-the-world/|title=Worldwide Recognition of the Holodomor as Genocide|date=October 18, 2019}} Some historians dispute that these social-class actions constitute genocide.{{cite book|last1=Davies|first1=Robert|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4s1lCwAAQBAJ&pg=PR14|title=The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 5: The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931–1933|last2=Wheatcroft|first2=Stephen|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan UK|year=2009|isbn=978-0-230-27397-9|page=xiv|author-link1=Robert William Davies|author-link2=Stephen G. Wheatcroft|access-date=September 20, 2020}}{{cite journal |last=Tauger |first=Mark B. |url=https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/download/89/90 |title=Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1933 |journal=The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies |issue=1506 |year=2001 |pages=1–65 |issn=2163-839X |doi=10.5195/CBP.2001.89 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170612213128/https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/download/89/90 |archive-date=12 June 2017 |doi-access=free }}{{cite web |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/03/the-future-did-not-work/378081/ |title=The Future Did Not Work |last=Getty |first=J. Arch|author-link=J. Arch Getty |date=2000 |website=The Atlantic |access-date=September 20, 2020}}

{{Main|Great Purge|Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites"|Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization|Sandarmokh|1937 mass execution of Belarusians|Vinnytsia massacre|1941 Red Army Purge|Leningrad case| Polish Operation of the NKVD|Katyn massacre|Case of the Union of Liberation of Belarus|NKVD prisoner massacres|Estonian Operation of the NKVD|Metro-Vickers Affair|Latvian Operation of the NKVD|Stalin's shooting lists|Finnish Operation of the NKVD}}

{{multiple image|align=right|direction=horizontal|width=100|image1=Execute 346 Berias letter to Politburo.jpg|caption1=|image2=Execute 346 Stalins resolution.jpg|caption2=|image3=Execute 346 Politburo passes.jpg|footer=Left: Lavrenty Beria's January 1940 letter to Stalin asking permission to execute 346 "enemies of the Communist Party and of the Soviet authorities" who conducted "counter-revolutionary, right-Trotskyite plotting and spying activities"
Middle: Stalin's handwriting: "за" (support)
Right: the Politburo's decision is signed by Stalin}}

As head of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin consolidated nearly absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that claimed to expel "opportunists" and "counter-revolutionary infiltrators".Figes, Orlando. 2007. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. {{ISBN|0-8050-7461-9}}.{{sfn|Gellately|2007}} Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party; more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin. 1997. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. {{ISBN|0-521-56521-9}}. p. 300.Kuper, Leo. 1982. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press. {{ISBN|0-300-03120-3}}.

In the 1930s, Stalin became increasingly worried about Leningrad party head Sergei Kirov's growing popularity. At the 1934 Party Congress, where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes (the fewest of any candidate), while Stalin received over 100.{{sfn|Brackman|2001|p=204}}An exact number of negative votes is unknown. In his memoirs, Anastas Mikoyan writes that out of 1,225 delegates, around 270 voted against Stalin and that the official number of negative votes was given as three, with the rest of ballots destroyed. Following Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" in 1956, a commission of the central committee investigated the votes and found that 267 ballots were missing. After Kirov's assassination, which Stalin may have orchestrated, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev.{{sfn|Brackman|2001|pp=205–206}} Thereafter, the investigations and trials expanded.{{sfn|Brackman|2001|p=207}} Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts" that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys, or appeals, followed by a sentence to be imposed "quickly."{{sfn|Overy|2004|p=182}} Stalin's Politburo also issued directives on quotas for mass arrests and executions.{{cite book |last1=Harris |first1=James |title=The Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin |date=11 July 2013 |publisher=OUP Oxford |isbn=978-0-19-965566-3 |page=15 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8190eftcnDwC&dq=Stalin+quotas+police&pg=PA15 |language=en}} Under Stalin, the death penalty was extended to adolescents as young as 12 years old in 1935.{{cite book |last1=Mccauley |first1=Martin |title=Stalin and Stalinism: Revised 3rd Edition |date=13 September 2013 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-317-86369-4 |page=49 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oQ7dAAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+death+penalty+12+years+old&pg=PA49 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Wright |first1=Patrick |title=Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War |date=28 October 2009 |publisher=OUP Oxford |isbn=978-0-19-162284-7 |page=342 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ps5wZUFnE7IC&dq=stalin+death+penalty+12+years+old&pg=PA342 |language=en}}{{sfn|Boobbyer|2000|p=160}}

After that, several trials, known as the Moscow Trials, were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as a counter-revolutionary crime, was applied most broadly.{{sfn|Tucker|1992|p=456}} Many alleged anti-Soviet pretexts were used to brand individuals as "enemies of the people", starting the cycle of public persecution, often proceeding to interrogation, torture, and deportation, if not death. The Russian word troika thereby gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to the NKVD troika—with sentencing carried out within 24 hours.{{sfn|Overy|2004|p=182}} Stalin's hand-picked executioner Vasili Blokhin was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period.Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010. {{ISBN|0-465-00239-0}} p. 137.{{multiple image

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| caption2 = Nikolai Yezhov, shown walking with Stalin in the top photo from the 1930s, was killed in 1940 and following his execution was edited out of the photo by Soviet censors{{cite web|url=http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes/vanishes.htm|title=Newseum: The Commissar Vanishes|access-date=July 19, 2008|archive-date=June 11, 2008|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080611034558/http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes/vanishes.htm|url-status=dead}} (such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin's rule)

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Many military leaders were convicted of treason, and a large-scale purge of Red Army officers followed.The scale of Stalin's purge of Red Army officers was exceptional—90% of all generals and 80% of all colonels were killed. This included three out of five Marshals; 13 out of 15 Army commanders; 57 of 85 Corps commanders; 110 of 195 divisional commanders; and 220 of 406 brigade commanders, as well as all commanders of military districts.{{citation needed|date=October 2020}}

Carell, P. [1964] 1974. Hitler's War on Russia: The Story of the German Defeat in the East (first Indian ed.), translated by E. Osers. Delhi: B.I. Publications. p. 195. The repression of many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from Lenin's.Tucker, Robert C. 1999. Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, (American Council of Learned Societies Planning Group on Comparative Communist Studies). Transaction Publishers. {{ISBN|0-7658-0483-2}}. p. 5. In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937. This eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership.{{sfn|Overy|2004|p=338}}

Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities) such as Poles, ethnic Germans, and Koreans. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed.{{sfn|Montefiore|2004|p=229}} Many Americans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union during the worst of the Great Depression were executed, while others were sent to prison camps or gulags.Tzouliadis, Tim. August 2, 2008.) "[http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7537000/7537585.stm Nightmare in the workers paradise]." BBC.Tzouliadis, Tim. 2008. The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia. Penguin Press, {{ISBN|1-59420-168-4}}. Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they had never existed.

In light of revelations from Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and 328,612 in 1938) were executed in the course of the terror,{{cite book|editor=McLoughlin, Barry|editor2=McDermott, Kevin|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8yorTJl1QEoC&pg=PA141|title=Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|year=2002|isbn=978-1-4039-0119-4|page=141}} the great mass of them ordinary Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, and beggars.{{cite book|editor=McLoughlin, Barry|editor2=McDermott, Kevin|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8yorTJl1QEoC&pg=PA6|title=Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|year=2002|isbn=978-1-4039-0119-4|page=6}}Kuromiya, Hiroaki. 2007. The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. Yale University Press. {{ISBN|0-300-12389-2}}.{{Rp|4}} Scholars estimate the total death toll for the Great Purge (1936–1938) including fatalities attributed to imprisonment to be roughly 700,000-1.2 million.{{Citation |title=Introduction: the Great Purges as history |date=1985 |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511572616.002 |work=Origins of the Great Purges |pages=1–9 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |doi=10.1017/cbo9780511572616.002 |isbn=978-0-521-25921-7 |access-date=2021-12-02}}{{Cite journal|last=Homkes|first=Brett|date=2004|title=Certainty, Probability, and Stalin's Great Purge|url=https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=mcnair|journal=McNair Scholars Journal}}{{cite journal |last1=Ellman |first1=Michael |title=Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments |journal=Europe-Asia Studies |date=2002 |volume=54 |issue=7 |pages=1151–1172 |doi=10.1080/0966813022000017177 |jstor=826310 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/826310 |issn=0966-8136}}{{cite book |last1=Shearer |first1=David R. |title=Stalin and War, 1918–1953: Patterns of Repression, Mobilization, and External Threat |date=11 September 2023 |publisher=Taylor & Francis |isbn=978-1-00-095544-6 |page=vii |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CCHMEAAAQBAJ&dq=great+purge+1.2+million&pg=PR7 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Nelson |first1=Todd H. |title=Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory Politics and the Creation of a Useable Past in Putin's Russia |date=16 October 2019 |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |isbn=978-1-4985-9153-9 |page=7 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oJGyDwAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+great+purge+1.2+million&pg=PA7 |language=en}} Many of the executed were interred in mass graves, with some significant killing and burial sites being Bykivnia, Kurapaty, and Butovo.Snyder, Timothy (2010) Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, {{ISBN|0-465-00239-0}} p. 101.

Some Western experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete or unreliable.{{cite journal|author=Rosefielde, Stephen|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/RSF-New_Evidence.pdf|title=Stalinism in Post-Communist Perspective: New Evidence on Killings, Forced Labour and Economic Growth in the 1930s|journal=Europe-Asia Studies|volume= 48|issue= 6|year= 1996|doi=10.1080/09668139608412393|page=959}}[http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/CNQ-Comments_WCR.pdf Comment on Wheatcroft] by Robert Conquest, 1999.Pipes, Richard (2003) Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles), p. 67. {{ISBN|0-8129-6864-6}}.{{sfn|Applebaum|2003|p=584}}{{cite journal|author=Keep, John|year=1997|doi=10.4000/chs.1014|journal= Crime, Histoire & Sociétés|title=Recent Writing on Stalin's Gulag: An Overview|pages=91–112|volume= 1|issue=2|doi-access=free}} Conversely, historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, who spent much of his career researching the archives, contends that, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives for historical research, "our understanding of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been extremely poor" and that some specialists who wish to maintain earlier high estimates of the Stalinist death toll are "finding it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open and when there are plenty of irrefutable data" and instead "hang on to their old Sovietological methods with round-about calculations based on odd statements from emigres and other informants who are supposed to have superior knowledge."{{cite journal|last=Wheatcroft|first=S. G.|author-link=Stephen G. Wheatcroft|year=1996|title=The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–45|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-German_Soviet.pdf|journal=Europe-Asia Studies|volume=48|issue=8|pages=1319–53|doi=10.1080/09668139608412415|jstor=152781}}{{cite journal|author=Wheatcroft, S. G.|s2cid=205667754|year=2000|title=The Scale and Nature of Stalinist Repression and its Demographic Significance: On Comments by Keep and Conquest|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Comments_KEP_CNQ.pdf|journal=Europe-Asia Studies|volume=52|issue=6|pages=1143–59|doi=10.1080/09668130050143860|pmid=19326595}}

Stalin personally signed 357 proscription lists in 1937 and 1938 that condemned 40,000 people to execution, about 90% of whom are confirmed to have been shot.{{cite journal|author=Ellman, Michael|s2cid=53655536|year=2007|title=Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited|url=http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/soviet/famine/ellman1933.pdf|journal=Europe-Asia Studies|volume=59|issue=4|pages=663–93|doi=10.1080/09668130701291899|access-date=April 6, 2014|archive-date=October 14, 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071014232729/http://www1.fee.uva.nl/pp/mjellman/|url-status=dead}} While reviewing one such list, he reportedly muttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one."Volkogonov, Dmitri. 1991. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York. p. 210. {{ISBN|0-7615-0718-3}}. In addition, Stalin dispatched a contingent of NKVD operatives to Mongolia, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika, and unleashed a bloody purge in which tens of thousands were executed as "Japanese spies", as Mongolian ruler Khorloogiin Choibalsan closely followed Stalin's lead.{{Rp|2}} Stalin had ordered for 100,000 Buddhist lamas in Mongolia to be liquidated but the political leader Peljidiin Genden resisted the order.{{cite book |last1=Baabar |first1=Bat-Ėrdėniĭn |title=History of Mongolia |date=1999 |publisher=Monsudar Pub. |isbn=978-99929-0-038-3 |page=322 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xXxxAAAAMAAJ |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Kotkin |first1=Stephen |last2=Elleman |first2=Bruce Allen |title=Mongolia in the Twentieth Century |date=12 February 2015 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-317-46010-7 |page=112 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FWmmBgAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+100,000+order+mongolia&pg=PA112 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Dashpu̇rėv |first1=Danzankhorloogiĭn |last2=Soni |first2=Sharad Kumar |title=Reign of Terror in Mongolia, 1920–1990 |date=1992 |publisher=South Asian Publishers |isbn=978-1-881318-15-6 |page=44 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Aw4cAAAAIAAJ&q=stalin+100,000+order+mongolia |language=en}}

Under Stalinist influence in the Mongolian People's Republic, an estimated 17,000 monks were killed, official figures show.{{cite news |last=Thomas |first=Natalie |date=2018-06-04 |title=Young monks lead revival of Buddhism in Mongolia after years of repression. |url=https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-mongolia-monks-idUKKCN1J104O |work=Reuters. |access-date=2023-07-06}} Stalinist forces also oversaw purges of anti-Stalinist elements among the Spanish Republican insurgents, including the Trotskyist allied POUM faction and anarchist groups, during the Spanish Civil War.{{cite book |last1=Sakwa |first1=Richard |title=Soviet Politics: In Perspective |date=12 November 2012 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-134-90996-4 |page=43 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SQSiM2vPO54C&dq=spanish+civil+war+stalin+purged+nin&pg=PA43 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Whitehead |first1=Jonathan |title=The End of the Spanish Civil War: Alicante 1939 |date=4 April 2024 |publisher=Pen and Sword History |isbn=978-1-399-06395-1 |page=81 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7aLsEAAAQBAJ&dq=andreu+nin+stalin+purges&pg=PA81 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Service |first1=Robert |title=Comrades!: A History of World Communism |date=2007 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-02530-1 |page=212 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Frgm5QodnFoC&dq=andreu+nin+stalin+purged&pg=PA211 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Kocho-Williams |first1=Alastair |title=Russia's International Relations in the Twentieth Century |date=4 January 2013 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-136-15747-9 |page=60 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Vu2kOJbrCuMC&dq=spanish+civil+war+stalin+purged+nin&pg=PA61 |language=en}}

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet leadership sent NKVD squads into other countries to murder defectors and opponents of the Soviet regime. Victims of such plots included Trotsky, Yevhen Konovalets, Ignace Poretsky, Rudolf Klement, Alexander Kutepov, Evgeny Miller, and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) leadership in Catalonia (e.g., Andréu Nin Pérez).{{cite journal|author=Ellman, Michael|s2cid=13880089|year=2005|url=http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/soviet/famine/ellman.pdf|title=The Role of Leadership Perceptions and of Intent in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1934|journal=Europe-Asia Studies|page=826|volume=57|issue=6|doi=10.1080/09668130500199392|access-date=April 6, 2014|archive-date=February 27, 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090227181110/http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/soviet/famine/ellman.pdf|url-status=dead}} Joseph Berger-Barzilai, co-founder of the Communist Party of Palestine, spent twenty five years in Stalin's prisons and concentrations camps after the purges in 1937.{{cite book |last1=Deutscher |first1=Isaac |title=The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky |date=5 January 2015 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=978-1-78168-721-5 |page=1443|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YGznDwAAQBAJ&q=isaac+deutscher+trotsky+the+prophet |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Wasserstein |first1=Bernard |title=On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War |date=May 2012 |publisher=Simon and Schuster |isbn=978-1-4165-9427-7 |page=395 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HJSQZJKHX_8C&dq=Joseph+Berger-Barzilai+purge&pg=PA395 |language=en}}

{{Main|Population transfer in the Soviet Union|Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union|Deportation of the Balkars|Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush|Deportation of the Meskhetian Turks|Deportation of the Crimean Tatars|Deportation of the Karachays|Deportation of the Kalmyks|}}

Shortly before, during, and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations that profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule, and collaboration with the invading Germans were the official reasons for the deportations. Individual circumstances of those spending time in German-occupied territories were not examined. After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus, the entire population of five of the small highland peoples and the Crimean Tatars—more than a million people in total—were deported without notice or any opportunity to take their possessions.{{sfn|Bullock|1962|pp=904–906}}

As a result of Stalin's lack of trust in the loyalty of particular ethnicities, groups such as the Soviet Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and many Poles, were forcibly moved out of strategic areas and relocated to places in the central Soviet Union, especially Kazakhstan. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of deportees may have died en route.{{sfn|Boobbyer|2000|p=130}} It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949, nearly 3.3 million people{{sfn|Boobbyer|2000|p=130}}Pohl, Otto, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949, {{ISBN|0-313-30921-3}}. were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates, up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.{{cite web|title=Soviet Transit, Camp, and Deportation Death Rates|url=http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1B.GIF|access-date=June 25, 2010}}

According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the gulags from 1929 to 1953, with a further 7 to 8 million deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including entire nationalities in several cases).{{cite journal|author=Conquest, Robert |title=Victims of Stalinism: A Comment|journal=Europe-Asia Studies|volume=49|issue=7|year=1997|pages=1317–1319|quote=We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps' alone, to which must be added 4–5 million going to Gulag 'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent to, 'labour settlements'. However taken, these are surely 'high' figures.|doi=10.1080/09668139708412501}} The emergent scholarly consensus is that from 1930 to 1953, around 1.5 to 1.7 million perished in the gulag system.{{cite journal|author=Wheatcroft, Stephen G.|year=1999|title=Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Secret_Police.pdf|journal=Europe-Asia Studies|volume=51|issue=2|pages=315–345|doi=10.1080/09668139999056|author-link=Stephen G. Wheatcroft}}Rosefielde, Steven. 2009. Red Holocaust. Routledge, 2009. {{ISBN|0-415-77757-7}}. pg. 67: "[M]ore complete archival data increases camp deaths by 19.4 percent to 1,258,537"; pg 77: "The best archivally based estimate of Gulag excess deaths at present is 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953."Healey, Dan. 2018. "[https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/ou_press/golfo-alexopoulos-illness-and-inhumanity-in-stalin-s-gulag-i363rKPYOp Golfo Alexopoulos. 'Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag']" (review). American Historical Review 123(3):1049–51. {{doi|10.1093/ahr/123.3.1049}}. In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninism and reversed most of them, although it was not until 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhetians, and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands.

{{Main|Collectivization in the Soviet Union|Holodomor|Kazakh famine of 1930–1933|Industrialization in the Soviet Union}}

File:GolodomorKharkiv.jpg during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933]]

At the start of the 1930s, Stalin launched a wave of radical economic policies that completely overhauled the industrial and agricultural face of the Soviet Union. This became known as the Great Turn as Russia turned away from the mixed-economic type New Economic Policy (NEP) and adopted a planned economy. Lenin implemented the NEP to ensure the survival of the socialist state following seven years of war (World War I, 1914–1917, and the subsequent Civil War, 1917–1921) and rebuilt Soviet production to its 1913 levels. But Russia still lagged far behind the West, and Stalin and the majority of the Communist Party felt the NEP not only to be compromising communist ideals but also not delivering satisfactory economic performance or creating the envisaged socialist society.

According to historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation.{{cite journal |last1=Fitzpatrick |first1=Sheila |title=The Old Man |journal=London Review of Books |date=22 April 2010 |volume=32 |issue=8 |url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n08/sheila-fitzpatrick/the-old-man |language=en |issn=0260-9592}} Trotsky maintained that the disproportions and imbalances which became characteristic of Stalinist planning in the 1930s such as the underdeveloped consumer base along with the priority focus on heavy industry were due to a number of avoidable problems. He argued that the industrial drive had been enacted under more severe circumstances, several years later and in a less rational manner than originally conceived by the Left Opposition.{{cite book |last1=Deutscher |first1=Isaac |title=The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky |date=5 January 2015 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=978-1-78168-721-5 |page=1141|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YGznDwAAQBAJ&q=isaac+deutscher+trotsky+the+prophet |language=en}}

Officially designed to accelerate development toward communism, the need for industrialization in the Soviet Union was emphasized because the Soviet Union had previously fallen behind economically compared to Western countries and also because socialist society needed industry to face the challenges posed by internal and external enemies of communism.{{sfn|Kotkin|1997|p=70-71}} Rapid industrialization was accompanied by mass collectivization of agriculture and rapid urbanization, which converted many small villages into industrial cities.{{sfn|Kotkin|1997|p=70-79}} To accelerate industrialization's development, Stalin imported materials, ideas, expertise, and workers from western Europe and the United States,{{cite book |author-last1=De Basily |author-first1=N. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WkcrDwAAQBAJ |title=Russia Under Soviet Rule: Twenty Years of Bolshevik Experiment |publisher=Routledge |year=2017 |isbn=978-1-351-61717-8 |series=Routledge Library Editions: Early Western Responses to Soviet Russia |location=Abingdon, Oxon |quote=... vast sums were spent on importing foreign technical 'ideas' and on securing the services of alien experts. Foreign countries, again – American and Germany in particular – lent the U.S.S.R. active aid in drafting the plans for all the undertakings to be constructed. They supplied the Soviet Union with tens of thousands of engineers, mechanics, and supervisors. During the first Five-Year Plan, not a single plant was erected, nor was a new industry launched without the direct help of foreigners working on the spot. Without the importation of Western European and American objects, ideas, and men, the 'miracle in the East' would not have been realized, or, at least, not in so short a time. |access-date=3 November 2017 |orig-year=1938}} pragmatically setting up joint-venture contracts with major American private enterprises such as the Ford Motor Company, which, under state supervision, assisted in developing the basis of the industry of the Soviet economy from the late 1920s to the 1930s. After the American private enterprises had completed their tasks, Soviet state enterprises took over.

Fredric Jameson has said that "Stalinism was…a success and fulfilled its historic mission, socially as well as economically" given that it "modernized the Soviet Union, transforming a peasant society into an industrial state with a literate population and a remarkable scientific superstructure."Fredric Jameson. Marxism Beyond Marxism (1996). p. 43. {{ISBN|0-415-91442-6}}. Robert Conquest disputes that conclusion, writing, "Russia had already been fourth to fifth among industrial economies before World War I", and that Russian industrial advances could have been achieved without collectivization, famine, or terror. According to Conquest, the industrial successes were far less than claimed, and the Soviet-style industrialization was "an anti-innovative dead-end."Robert Conquest. Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000). p. 101. {{ISBN|0-393-04818-7}}. Stephen Kotkin said those who argue collectivization was necessary are "dead wrong", writing that it "only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology and its repudiation of capitalism. And economically, collectivization failed to deliver." Kotkin further claimed that it decreased harvests instead of increasing them, as peasants tended to resist heavy taxes by producing fewer goods, caring only about their own subsistence.{{sfn|Kotkin|2014|p=724–725}}{{Cite book |last=Fitzpatrick |first=Sheila |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/28293091 |title=Stalin's peasants : resistance and survival in the Russian village after collectivization |date=1994 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-506982-X |location=New York |oclc=28293091}}{{Rp|page=5}}

According to several Western historians,[http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/stalin.htm "Genocide in the 20th century"]. History Place. Stalinist agricultural policies were a key factor in the Soviet famine of 1930–1933; some scholars believe that Holodomor, which started near the end of 1932, was when the famine turned into an instrument of genocide; the Ukrainian government now recognizes it as such. Some scholars dispute the intentionality of the famine.{{cite book|last1=Davies|first1=Robert|author-link1=Robert William Davies|last2=Wheatcroft|first2=Stephen|author-link2=Stephen G. Wheatcroft|title=The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 5: The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931–1933|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4s1lCwAAQBAJ&pg=PR14|year=2009|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan UK|isbn=978-0-230-27397-9|page=xiv}}

The Stalinist era was largely regressive on social issues. Despite a brief period of decriminalization under Lenin, the 1934 Criminal Code re-criminalized homosexuality.{{Cite news |date=2017-11-10 |title=1917 Russian Revolution: The gay community's brief window of freedom |language=en-GB |work=BBC News |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41737330 |access-date=2023-05-29}} Abortion was made illegal again in 1936{{Cite web |title=When Soviet Women Won the Right to Abortion (For the Second Time) |url=https://jacobin.com/2020/03/soviet-women-abortion-ussr-history-health-care/ |access-date=2023-05-29 |website=jacobin.com |language=en-US}} after controversial debate among citizens,{{Cite web |date=2015-08-31 |title=Letters to the Editor on the Draft Abortion Law |url=https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1936-2/abolition-of-legal-abortion/abolition-of-legal-abortion-texts/abolition-of-legal-abortion/ |access-date=2023-05-29 |website=Seventeen Moments in Soviet History |language=en-US}} and women's issues were largely ignored.{{Cite book |last=Mamonova |first=Tatyana |title=Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union |location=Oxford |publisher=Basil Blackwell Publisher |year=1984 |isbn=0-631-13889-7}}

{{further|Leninism after 1924}}

Stalin considered the political and economic system under his rule to be Marxism–Leninism, which he considered the only legitimate successor of Marxism and Leninism. The historiography of Stalin is diverse, with many different aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the regimes Stalin and Lenin proposed. Some historians, such as Richard Pipes, consider Stalinism the natural consequence of Leninism: Stalin "faithfully implemented Lenin's domestic and foreign policy programs."{{cite book |first=Richard|last=Pipes|title=Three Whys of the Russian Revolution|pages=83–4}} Robert Service writes that "institutionally and ideologically Lenin laid the foundations for a Stalin [...] but the passage from Leninism to the worse terrors of Stalinism was not smooth and inevitable."{{cite journal|title=Lenin: Individual and Politics in the October Revolution|journal=Modern History Review|volume=2|year=1990|number=1|pages=16–19}} Likewise, historian and Stalin biographer Edvard Radzinsky believes that Stalin was a genuine follower of Lenin, exactly as he claimed.Edvard Radzinsky Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives, Anchor, (1997) {{ISBN|0-385-47954-9}}. Another Stalin biographer, Stephen Kotkin, wrote that "his violence was not the product of his subconscious but of the Bolshevik engagement with Marxist–Leninist ideology."{{cite web|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/understanding-stalin/380786/|title=Understanding Stalin|website=The Atlantic|date=2014-10-14|access-date=2015-04-04|author=Anne Applebaum}}

File:Ves mir budet nash.jpg

Dmitri Volkogonov, who wrote biographies of both Lenin and Stalin, wrote that during the 1960s through 1980s, an official patriotic Soviet de-Stalinized view of the Lenin–Stalin relationship (during the Khrushchev Thaw and later) was that the overly autocratic Stalin had distorted the Leninism of the wise dedushka Lenin. But Volkogonov also lamented that this view eventually dissolved for those like him who had the scales fall from their eyes immediately before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After researching the biographies in the Soviet archives, he came to the same conclusion as Radzinsky and Kotkin (that Lenin had built a culture of violent autocratic totalitarianism of which Stalinism was a logical extension).

Proponents of continuity cite a variety of contributory factors, such as that Lenin, not Stalin, introduced the Red Terror with its hostage-taking and internment camps, and that Lenin developed the infamous Article 58 and established the autocratic system in the Communist Party.{{cite book|first=Richard|last=Pipes|title=Communism: A History|url=https://archive.org/details/communismhistory00pipe|url-access=registration|year=2001|isbn=978-0-8129-6864-4|pages=[https://archive.org/details/communismhistory00pipe/page/n90 73]–74|publisher=Random House Publishing }} They also note that Lenin put a ban on factions within the Russian Communist Party and introduced the one-party state in 1921—a move that enabled Stalin to get rid of his rivals easily after Lenin's death and cite Felix Dzerzhinsky, who, during the Bolshevik struggle against opponents in the Russian Civil War, exclaimed: "We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly stated."George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police.

Opponents of this view include revisionist historians and many post–Cold War and otherwise dissident Soviet historians, including Roy Medvedev, who argues that although "one could list the various measures carried out by Stalin that were actually a continuation of anti-democratic trends and measures implemented under Lenin…in so many ways, Stalin acted, not in line with Lenin's clear instructions, but in defiance of them."Roy Medvedev, Leninism and Western Socialism, Verso, 1981. In doing so, some historians have tried to distance Stalinism from Leninism to undermine the totalitarian view that Stalin's methods were inherent in communism from the start.Moshe Lewin, Lenin's Last Testament, University of Michigan Press, 2005. Other revisionist historians such as Orlando Figes, while critical of the Soviet era, acknowledge that Lenin actively sought to counter Stalin's growing influence, allying with Trotsky in 1922–23, opposing Stalin on foreign trade, and proposing party reforms including the democratization of the Central Committee and recruitment of 50-100 ordinary workers into the party's lower organs.{{cite book |last1=Figes |first1=Orlando |title=A people's tragedy : a history of the Russian Revolution |date=1997 |publisher=New York, NY : Viking |isbn=978-0-670-85916-0 |pages=796–801 |url=https://archive.org/details/peoplestragedyhi00fige/page/796/mode/2up}}

Critics include anti-Stalinist communists such as Trotsky, who pointed out that Lenin attempted to persuade the Communist Party to remove Stalin from his post as its General Secretary.Trotsky also argued that he and Lenin had intended to lift the ban on the opposition parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries as soon as the economic and social conditions of Soviet Russia had improved.{{cite book |last1=Deutscher |first1=Isaac |title=The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky |date=5 January 2015 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=978-1-78168-721-5 |pages=528 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YGznDwAAQBAJ&q=isaac+deutscher+trotsky+the+prophet |language=en}} Lenin's Testament, the document containing this order, was suppressed after Lenin's death. Various historians have cited Lenin's proposal to appoint Trotsky as a Vice-chairman of the Soviet Union as evidence that he intended Trotsky to be his successor as head of government.{{cite journal |last1=Danilov |first1=Victor |last2=Porter |first2=Cathy |title=We Are Starting to Learn about Trotsky |journal=History Workshop |date=1990 |issue=29 |pages=136–146 |jstor=4288968 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4288968 |issn=0309-2984}}{{cite book |last1=Daniels |first1=Robert V. |title=The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia |date=1 October 2008 |publisher=Yale University Press |isbn=978-0-300-13493-3 |page=438 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=27JGzAoMLjoC&dq=Victor+Danilov+Trotsky&pg=PA438 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Watson |first1=Derek |title=Molotov and Soviet Government: Sovnarkom, 1930–41 |date=27 July 2016 |publisher=Springer |isbn=978-1-349-24848-3 |page=25 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xhm_DAAAQBAJ&dq=Trotsky+chairman+rykov&pg=PA25 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Deutscher |first1=Isaac |title=The prophet unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929 |date=1965 |publisher=New York, Vintage Books |isbn=978-0-394-70747-1 |page=135 |url=https://archive.org/details/prophetunarmed00isaa/page/134/mode/2up?q=promote+rykov+}}{{cite book |last1=Dziewanowski |first1=M. K. |title=Russia in the twentieth century |date=2003 |publisher=Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Prentice Hall |isbn=978-0-13-097852-3 |page=162 |url=https://archive.org/details/russiaintwentiet0000dzie/page/162/mode/1up?view=theater}} In his biography of Trotsky, British historian Isaac Deutscher writes that, faced with the evidence, "only the blind and the deaf could be unaware of the contrast between Stalinism and Leninism."{{cite book|first=Isaac|last=Deutscher|title=Trotsky: The Prophet Unarmed|url=https://archive.org/details/prophetunarmedtr0000unse_c1b0|url-access=registration|year=1959|pages=[https://archive.org/details/prophetunarmedtr0000unse_c1b0/page/n497 464]–5}} Similarly, historian Moshe Lewin writes, "The Soviet regime underwent a long period of 'Stalinism,' which in its basic features was diametrically opposed to the recommendations of [Lenin's] testament".{{cite book |last1=Lewin |first1=Moshe |title=Lenin's Last Struggle |date=4 May 2005 |publisher=University of Michigan Press |isbn=978-0-472-03052-1 |page=136 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iheBbViwVksC |language=en}} French historian Pierre Broue disputes the historical assessments of the early Soviet Union by modern historians such as Dmitri Volkogonov, which Broue argues falsely equate Leninism, Stalinism and Trotskyism to present the notion of ideological continuity and reinforce the position of counter-communism.{{cite book |last1=Broue. |first1=Pierre |title=Trotsky: a biographer's problems. In The Trotsky reappraisal. Brotherstone, Terence; Dukes, Paul,(eds) |date=1992 |publisher=Edinburgh University Press |isbn=978-0-7486-0317-6 |pages=19, 20}}

Some scholars have attributed the establishment of the one-party system in the Soviet Union to the wartime conditions imposed on Lenin's government;{{cite book |last1=Rogovin |first1=Vadim Zakharovich |title=Was There an Alternative? Trotskyism: a Look Back Through the Years |date=2021 |publisher=Mehring Books |isbn=978-1-893638-97-6 |pages=13–14 |language=en}} others have highlighted the initial attempts to form a coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.{{cite book |last1=Carr |first1=Edward Hallett |title=The Bolshevik revolution 1917–1923. Vol. 1 |date=1977 |publisher=Penguin books |isbn=978-0-14-020749-1 |pages=111–112 |edition=Reprinted}} According to historian Marcel Liebman, Lenin's wartime measures such as banning opposition parties was prompted by the fact that several political parties either took up arms against the new Soviet government, participated in sabotage, collaborated with the deposed Tsarists, or made assassination attempts against Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders.{{cite book |last1=Liebman |first1=Marcel |title=Leninism Under Lenin |date=1985 |publisher=Merlin Press |isbn=978-0-85036-261-9 |pages=1–348 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OQjzAAAAMAAJ |language=en}} Liebman also argues that the banning of parties under Lenin did not have the same repressive character as later bans enforced by Stalin's regime. Several scholars have highlighted the socially progressive nature of Lenin's policies, such as universal education, healthcare, and equal rights for women.{{cite book |last1=Adams |first1=Katherine H. |last2=Keene |first2=Michael L. |title=After the Vote Was Won: The Later Achievements of Fifteen Suffragists |date=10 January 2014 |publisher=McFarland |isbn=978-0-7864-5647-5 |page=109 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oyaxYvSG6gAC&dq=lenin+universal+literacy+after+the+vote+was+won&pg=PA109 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Ugri͡umov |first1=Aleksandr Leontʹevich |title=Lenin's Plan for Building Socialism in the USSR, 1917–1925 |date=1976 |publisher=Novosti Press Agency Publishing House |page=48 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gXknAQAAMAAJ&q=lenin+universal+literacy |language=en}} Conversely, Stalin's regime reversed Lenin's policies on social matters such as sexual equality, legal restrictions on marriage, rights of sexual minorities, and protective legislation.{{cite book |last1=Meade |first1=Teresa A. |author-link=Teresa Meade |last2=Wiesner-Hanks |first2=Merry E. |title=A Companion to Gender History |date=15 April 2008 |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |isbn=978-0-470-69282-0 |page=197 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZtQP5why918C&dq=stalin+criminalize+abortion+religion+nationalism&pg=PA197 |language=en}} Historian Robert Vincent Daniels also views the Stalinist period as a counterrevolution in Soviet cultural life that revived patriotic propaganda, the Tsarist programme of Russification and traditional, military ranks that Lenin had criticized as expressions of "Great Russian chauvinism".{{cite book |last1=Daniels |first1=Robert V. |title=The End of the Communist Revolution |date=November 2002 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-134-92607-7 |pages=90–94 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZKeJAgAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+abortion+criminalised&pg=PA94 |language=en}} Daniels also regards Stalinism as an abrupt break with the Leninist period in terms of economic policies in which a deliberated, scientific system of economic planning that featured former Menshevik economists at Gosplan was replaced by a hasty version of planning with unrealistic targets, bureaucractic waste, bottlenecks and shortages.{{cite book |last1=Daniels |first1=Robert V. |title=The End of the Communist Revolution |date=November 2002 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-134-92607-7 |pages=90–92 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZKeJAgAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+abortion+criminalised&pg=PA94 |language=en}}

File:First edition of Krushchev's "Secret Speech".jpg.]]

In his "Secret Speech", delivered in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, argued that Stalin's regime differed profusely from the leadership of Lenin. He was critical of the cult of the individual constructed around Stalin whereas Lenin stressed "the role of the people as the creator of history".{{cite book |last1=Khrushchev |first1=Nikita Sergeevich |title=The Crimes Of The Stalin Era, Special Report To The 20th Congress Of The Communist Party Of The Soviet Union. |date=1956 |pages=1–65 |url=https://archive.org/details/TheCrimesOfTheStalinEraSpecialReportToThe20thCongressOfTheCommunistPartyOfTheSovietUnion.}} He also emphasized that Lenin favored a collective leadership that relied on personal persuasion and recommended Stalin's removal as General Secretary. Khrushchev contrasted this with Stalin's "despotism", which required absolute submission to his position, and highlighted that many of the people later annihilated as "enemies of the party ... had worked with Lenin during his life". He also contrasted the "severe methods" Lenin used in the "most necessary cases" as a "struggle for survival" during the Civil War with the extreme methods and mass repressions Stalin used even when the revolution was "already victorious". In his memoirs, Khrushchev argued that his widespread purges of the "most advanced nucleus of people" among the Old Bolsheviks and leading figures in the military and scientific fields had "undoubtedly" weakened the nation.{{cite book |last1=Khrushchev |first1=Nikita Sergeevich |last2=Khrushchev |first2=Serge_ |title=Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev |date=2004 |publisher=Penn State Press |isbn=978-0-271-02861-3 |page=156 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uv1zv4FZhFUC&dq=stalin+weaken+soviet+union+old+bolsheviks&pg=PT170 |language=en}} According to Stalin's secretary, Boris Bazhanov, Stalin was jubilant over Lenin's death while "publicly putting on the mask of grief".{{cite book |last1=Kuromiya |first1=Hiroaki |title=Stalin |date=16 August 2013 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-317-86780-7 |page=60 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BRV4AAAAQBAJ&dq=Stalin+swearing+Lenin+testament&pg=PA59 |language=en}}

Some Marxist theoreticians have disputed the view that Stalin's dictatorship was a natural outgrowth of the Bolsheviks' actions, as Stalin eliminated most of the original central committee members from 1917.{{cite web |last1=Grant |first1=Alex |title=Top 10 lies about the Bolshevik Revolution |url=https://www.marxist.com/top-10-lies-about-the-bolshevik-revolution-part-one.htm |website=In Defence of Marxism |language=en-gb |date=1 November 2017}} George Novack stressed the Bolsheviks' initial efforts to form a government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and bring other parties such as the Mensheviks into political legality.{{cite book |last1=Novack |first1=George |title=Democracy and Revolution |date=1971 |publisher=Pathfinder |isbn=978-0-87348-192-2 |pages=307–347 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bLMgAQAAIAAJ |language=en}} Tony Cliff argued the Bolshevik-Left Socialist Revolutionary coalition government dissolved the Constituent Assembly for several reasons. They cited the outdated voter rolls, which did not acknowledge the split among the Socialist Revolutionary party, and the assembly's conflict with the Congress of the Soviets as an alternative democratic structure.{{cite web |last1=Cliff |first1=Tony |title=Revolution Besieged. The Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly) |url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1978/lenin3/ch03.html |website=www.marxists.org}}

A similar analysis is present in more recent works, such as those of Graeme Gill, who argues that Stalinism was "not a natural flow-on of earlier developments; [it formed a] sharp break resulting from conscious decisions by leading political actors."{{sfn|Gill|1998}} But Gill adds that "difficulties with the use of the term reflect problems with the concept of Stalinism itself. The major difficulty is a lack of agreement about what should constitute Stalinism."{{sfn|Gill|1998|p=1}} Revisionist historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick have criticized the focus on the upper levels of society and the use of Cold War concepts such as totalitarianism, which have obscured the reality of the system.{{cite book|title=Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared|last1=Geyer|first1=Michael|author1-link=Michael Geyer|last2=Fitzpatrick|first2=Sheila|author2-link=Sheila Fitzpatrick|year=2009|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-72397-8|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3wzDPQAACAAJ|doi=10.1017/CBO9780511802652}}

Russian historian Vadim Rogovin writes, "Under Lenin, the freedom to express a real variety of opinions existed in the party, and in carrying out political decisions, consideration was given to the positions of not only the majority, but a minority in the party". He compared this practice with subsequent leadership blocs, which violated party tradition, ignored opponents' proposals, and expelled the Opposition from the party on falsified charges, culminating in the Moscow Trials of 1936–1938. According to Rogovin, 80-90% of the members of the Central Committee elected at the Sixth through the Seventeenth Congresses were killed.{{cite book |last1=Rogovin |first1=Vadim Z |title=Was There an Alternative? 1923–1927: Trotskyism: a Look Back Through the Years |date=2021 |publisher=Mehring Books |isbn=978-1-893638-96-9 |pages=494–495 |language=en}} The Right and Left Opposition have been held by some scholars as representing political alternatives to Stalinism despite their shared beliefs in Leninism due to their policy platforms which were at variance with Stalin. This ranged from areas related to economics, foreign policy and cultural matters."While Trotsky was strongly biased toward industrial development, there is little basis to suppose that he would have adopted Stalin’s forcible collectivization, slapdash economic planning, anti expert campaigns, or cultural know-nothingism. Neither Trotsky nor Bukharin would have pursued anything like Stalin’s pseudo-revolutionary “third period” foreign policy and his connivance in the advent of Hitler, another product of his political manoeuvring against the Bukharinists."{{cite book |last1=Daniels |first1=Robert V. |title=The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia |date=1 October 2008 |publisher=Yale University Press |page=396 |isbn=978-0-300-13493-3 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=27JGzAoMLjoC |language=en}}{{cite journal |last1=Day |first1=Richard B. |title=The Blackmail of the Single Alternative: Bukharin, Trotsky and Perestrojka |journal=Studies in Soviet Thought |date=1990 |volume=40 |issue=1/3 |pages=159–188 |doi=10.1007/BF00818977 |jstor=20100543 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/20100543 |issn=0039-3797}}

{{Main|Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin|Predictions of the collapse of the Soviet Union}}

File:Saxlmuzeum.jpg]]

File:Yalta Conference (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) (B&W).jpg, United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin, the Big Three Allied leaders during World War II at the Yalta Conference in February 1945]]

In Western historiography, Stalin is considered one of the worst and most notorious figures in modern history.{{cite book |last1=Dunn |first1=Dennis J. |title=Caught Between Roosevelt & Stalin: America's Ambassadors to Moscow |date=1 January 1998 |publisher=University Press of Kentucky |isbn=978-0-8131-7074-9 |pages=6, 271 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Cm6IH1a4oksC&pg=PR3 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Creveld |first1=Martin van |title=The Rise and Decline of the State |date=26 August 1999 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-65629-0 |page=402 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FdhnbrZJ3ZQC&dq=joseph+stalin+%C2%A0one+of+the+worst+dictators%C2%A0&pg=PA402 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Taylor |first1=Jeremy E. |title=Visual Histories of Occupation: A Transcultural Dialogue |date=28 January 2021 |publisher=Bloomsbury Academic |isbn=978-1-350-14220-6 |page=239 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=baIyEAAAQBAJ&dq=joseph+stalin+%C2%A0one+of+the+worst+dictators+of+the+20th+century%C2%A0&pg=PA239 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Service |first1=Robert |title=Stalin: A Biography |date=2005 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-01697-2 |page=3 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hSWK6Dh4wRgC&q=Stalin+notorious+figures |language=en}} Biographer and historian Isaac Deutscher highlighted the totalitarian character of Stalinism and its suppression of "socialist inspiration".

Several scholars have derided Stalinism for fostering anti-intellectual, antisemitic and chauvinistic attitudes within the Soviet Union.{{cite book |last1=Tismaneanu |first1=Vladimir |title=Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe |date=10 November 2009 |publisher=Central European University Press |isbn=978-963-386-678-8 |page=29 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vqLeEAAAQBAJ&dq=Stalinism+anti+intellectualism+anti+westernism&pg=PA29 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Fürst |first1=Juliane |title=Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism |date=30 September 2010 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-957506-0 |page=94 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YCEUDAAAQBAJ&dq=Stalinism+anti+intellectualism&pg=PA94 |language=en}}{{cite book |title=Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism |date=31 December 2007 |publisher=BRILL |isbn=978-90-474-2360-7 |page=339 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3wOwCQAAQBAJ&dq=Stalinism+anti+intellectualism&pg=PA339 |language=en}} According to Marxist philosopher Helena Sheehan, his philosophical legacy is almost universally rated negatively with most Soviet sources considering his influence to have negatively impacted the creative development of Soviet philosophy.{{cite book |last1=Sheehan |first1=Helena |title=Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History |date=23 January 2018 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=978-1-78663-428-3 |page=230 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dG_nDwAAQBAJ&dq=most+soviet+philosophers+today+reject+stalin&pg=PT340 |language=en}} Sheehan discussed omissions in his views on dialectics and noted that most Soviet philosophers rejected his characterization of Hegel's philosophy.{{cite book |last1=Sheehan |first1=Helena |title=Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History |date=23 January 2018 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=978-1-78663-428-3 |page=230 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dG_nDwAAQBAJ&dq=most+soviet+philosophers+today+reject+stalin&pg=PT340 |language=en}}

Pierre du Bois argues that the cult of personality around Stalin was elaborately constructed to legitimize his rule. Many deliberate distortions and falsehoods were used.Pierre du Bois, "Stalin – Genesis of a Myth," Survey. A Journal of East & West Studies 28#1 (1984) pp. 166–181. See abstract in {{cite book|author1=David R. Egan|author2=Melinda A. Egan|title=Joseph Stalin: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Periodical Literature to 2005|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=C_7Xh2euykoC&pg=PA157|year=2007|publisher=Scarecrow Press|page=157|isbn=978-0-8108-6671-3}} The Kremlin refused access to archival records that might reveal the truth, and critical documents were destroyed. Photographs were altered and documents were invented.Carol Strong and Matt Killingsworth, "Stalin the Charismatic Leader?: Explaining the 'Cult of Personality' as a legitimation technique." Politics, Religion & Ideology 12.4 (2011): 391–411. People who knew Stalin were forced to provide "official" accounts to meet the ideological demands of the cult, especially as Stalin presented it in 1938 in Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which became the official history.N. N. Maslov, "Short Course of the History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)—An Encyclopedia of Stalin's Personality Cult". Soviet Studies in History 28.3 (1989): 41–68. Historian David L. Hoffmann sums up the consensus of scholars: "The Stalin cult was a central element of Stalinism, and as such, it was one of the most salient features of Soviet rule. [...] Many scholars of Stalinism cite the cult as integral to Stalin's power or as evidence of Stalin's megalomania."David L. Hoffmann, "The Stalin Cult' The Historian (2013) 75#4 p. 909.

But after Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev repudiated his policies and condemned his cult of personality in his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, instituting de-Stalinization and relative liberalization, within the same political framework. Consequently, the world's communist parties that previously adhered to Stalinism, except the German Democratic Republic and the Socialist Republic of Romania, abandoned it and, to a greater or lesser degree, adopted Khrushchev's positions. The Chinese Communist Party chose to split from the Soviet Union, resulting in the Sino-Soviet split.

Mao Zedong famously declared that Stalin was 70% good and 30% bad. Maoists criticized Stalin chiefly for his view that bourgeois influence within the Soviet Union was primarily a result of external forces, to the almost complete exclusion of internal forces, and his view that class contradictions ended after the basic construction of socialism. Mao also criticized Stalin's cult of personality and the excesses of the great purge. But Maoists praised Stalin for leading the Soviet Union and the international proletariat, defeating fascism in Germany, and his anti-revisionism.{{cite web|title=Mao's Evaluations of Stalin|url=http://www.massline.org/SingleSpark/Stalin/StalinMaoEval.htm|access-date=August 3, 2014|website=MassLine}}

Taking the side of the Chinese Communist Party in the Sino-Soviet split, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania remained committed, at least theoretically, to its brand of Stalinism (Hoxhaism) for decades under the leadership of Enver Hoxha. Despite their initial cooperation against "revisionism", Hoxha denounced Mao as a revisionist, along with almost every other self-identified communist organization worldwide, resulting in the Sino-Albanian split. This effectively isolated Albania from the rest of the world, as Hoxha was hostile to both the pro-American and pro-Soviet spheres of influence and the Non-Aligned Movement under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, whom Hoxha had also previously denounced.{{Cite web |last=Hoxha |first=Enver Halil |title=The Titoites |url=http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/TT82NB.html |access-date=2023-01-14 |website=From Marx to Mao |page=501}}{{Cite book |title= Imperialism and the Revolution |date=1979 |first1=Enver |last1=Hoxha |chapter-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/imp_rev/imp_ch1.htm |chapter=I - The Strategy of Imperialism and Modern Revisionism |access-date=2023-01-14 |via=Marxists Internet Archive }}

{{Main|Trotskyism|Anti-Stalinist Left|The Stalin School of Falsification|Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence}}

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R15068, Leo Dawidowitsch Trotzki.jpg was the leader of the Left Opposition which advocated for an alternative set of policies to Stalin.]]

Leon Trotsky always viewed Stalin as the "candidate for grave-digger of our party and the revolution" during the succession struggle.{{cite book |last1=Rogovin |first1=Vadim Zakharovich |title=Was There an Alternative? Trotskyism: a Look Back Through the Years |date=2021 |publisher=Mehring Books |isbn=978-1-893638-97-6 |page=431 |language=en}} American historian Robert Vincent Daniels viewed Trotsky and the Left Opposition as a critical alternative to the Stalin-Bukharin majority in a number of areas. Daniels stated that the Left Opposition would have prioritised industrialisation but never contemplated the "violent uprooting" employed by Stalin and contrasted most directly with Stalinism on the issue of party democratization and bureaucratization.{{cite book |last1=Daniels |first1=Robert V. |title=The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia |date=1 October 2008 |publisher=Yale University Press |page=195 |isbn=978-0-300-13493-3 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=27JGzAoMLjoC |language=en}} Trotsky also opposed the policy of forced collectivisation under Stalin and favoured a voluntary, gradual approach towards agricultural production{{cite book |last1=Beilharz |first1=Peter |title=Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism |date=19 November 2019 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-00-070651-2 |pages=1–206 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Lfe-DwAAQBAJ&dq=trotsky+widely+acknowledged+collectivisation&pg=PT196 |language=en}}{{cite book |last1=Rubenstein |first1=Joshua |title=Leon Trotsky : a revolutionary's life |date=2011 |publisher=New Haven : Yale University Press |isbn=978-0-300-13724-8 |page=161 |url=https://archive.org/details/leontrotskyrevol0000rube/page/160/mode/2up?q=forced+collectivization}} with greater tolerance for the rights of Soviet Ukrainians.{{cite book |last1=Deutscher |first1=Isaac |title=The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky |date=5 January 2015 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=978-1-78168-721-5 |page=637 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YGznDwAAQBAJ&q=isaac+deutscher+trotsky |language=en}}{{cite web |title=Leon Trotsky: Problem of the Ukraine (1939) |url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/ukraine.html |website=www.marxists.org}}

Trotskyists argue that the Stalinist Soviet Union was neither socialist nor communist but a bureaucratized degenerated workers' state—that is, a non-capitalist state in which exploitation is controlled by a ruling caste that, although not owning the means of production and not constituting a social class in its own right, accrues benefits and privileges at the working class's expense. Trotsky believed that the Bolshevik Revolution must be spread all over the globe's working class, the proletarians, for world revolution. But after the failure of the revolution in Germany, Stalin reasoned that industrializing and consolidating Bolshevism in Russia would best serve the proletariat in the long run. The dispute did not end until Trotsky was murdered in his Mexican villa in 1940 by Stalinist assassin Ramón Mercader.{{cite web |last=Faria|first=MA|title=Stalin, Communists, and Fatal Statistics|url=http://www.haciendapublishing.com/articles/stalin-communists-and-fatal-statistics|access-date=September 5, 2012|date=January 8, 2012}} Max Shachtman, a principal Trotskyist theorist in the U.S., argued that the Soviet Union had evolved from a degenerated worker's state to a new mode of production called bureaucratic collectivism, whereby orthodox Trotskyists considered the Soviet Union an ally gone astray. Shachtman and his followers thus argued for the formation of a Third Camp opposed to the Soviet and capitalist blocs equally. By the mid-20th century, Shachtman and many of his associates, such as Social Democrats, USA, identified as social democrats rather than Trotskyists, while some ultimately abandoned socialism altogether and embraced neoconservatism. In the U.K., Tony Cliff independently developed a critique of state capitalism that resembled Shachtman's in some respects but retained a commitment to revolutionary communism.Cliff, Tony (1948). [http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1948/xx/burcoll.htm "The Theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism: A Critique"]. In Cliff, Tony (1988) [1974]. State Capitalism in Russia. London: Bookmarks pp. 333–353. {{ISBN|9780906224441}}. Retrieved 23 April 2020. Similarly, American Trotskyist David North drew attention to the fact that the generation of bureaucrats that rose to power under Stalin's tutelage presided over the Soviet Union's stagnation and breakdown.{{cite book |last1=North |first1=David |title=In Defense of Leon Trotsky |date=2010 |publisher=Mehring Books |isbn=978-1-893638-05-1 |pages=172–173 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mVqvouA22IkC |language=en}}

{{Quote box|width=25em|align=left|bgcolor=|quote=At a time when hundreds of thousands and millions of workers, especially in Germany, are departing from Communism, in part to fascism and in the main into the camp of indifferentism, thousands and tens of thousands of Social Democratic workers, under the impact of the self-same defeat, are evolving into the left, to the side of Communism. There cannot, however, even be talk of their accepting the hopelessly discredited Stalinist leadership.|source=—Trotsky's writings on Stalinism and fascism in 1933{{cite book |last1=Trotsky |first1=Leon |title=The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany |date=1971 |publisher=Pathfinder Press |isbn=978-0-87348-136-6 |pages=555–556 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nH5KwgEACAAJ |language=en}}}}

Trotskyist historian Vadim Rogovin believed Stalinism had "discredited the idea of socialism in the eyes of millions of people throughout the world". Rogovin also argued that the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, was a political movement that "offered a real alternative to Stalinism, and that to crush this movement was the primary function of the Stalinist terror".{{cite book |last1=Rogovin |first1=Vadim Zakharovich |title=Was There an Alternative? Trotskyism: a Look Back Through the Years |date=2021 |publisher=Mehring Books |isbn=978-1-893638-97-6 |pages=1–2 |language=en}} According to Rogovin, Stalin had destroyed thousands of foreign communists capable of leading socialist change in their respective countries. He cited 600 active Bulgarian communists who perished in his prison camps along with the thousands of German communists whom Stalin handed over to the Gestapo after the signing of the German-Soviet pact. Rogovin further noted that 16 members of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party became victims of Stalinist terror. Repressive measures were also enforced upon the Hungarian, Yugoslav and other Polish Communist parties.{{cite book |last1=Rogovin |first1=Vadim Zakharovich |title=Was There an Alternative? Trotskyism: a Look Back Through the Years |date=2021 |publisher=Mehring Books |isbn=978-1-893638-97-6 |pages=380 |language=en}} British historian Terence Brotherstone argued that the Stalin era had a profound effect on those attracted to Trotsky's ideas. Brotherstone described figures who emerged from the Stalinist parties as miseducated, which he said helped to block the development of Marxism.{{cite book |last1=Brotherstone |first1=Terence |title=Trotsky's future. Brotherstone, Terence; Dukes, Paul,(eds) |date=1992 |publisher=Edinburgh University Press |isbn=978-0-7486-0317-6 |page=238}}

File:GULag 2 Museum Moscow Russia.jpg Museum in Moscow, founded in 2001 by historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko]]

Some historians and writers, such as Dietrich Schwanitz,Schwanitz, Dietrich. Bildung. Alles, was man wissen muss: "At the same time, Stalin was a kind of monstrous reincarnation of Peter the Great. Under his tyranny, Russia transformed into a country of industrial slaves, and the gigantic empire was gifted with a network of working camps, the Gulag Archipelago." draw parallels between Stalinism and the economic policy of Tsar Peter the Great; Schwanitz in particular views Stalin as "a monstrous reincarnation" of him. Both men wanted Russia to leave the western European states far behind in terms of development. Some reviewers have considered Stalinism a form of "red fascism".{{cite book |last= Fried |first= Richard M.|title= Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=1991|isbn=978-0-19-504361-7|page=50}} Fascist regimes ideologically opposed the Soviet Union, but some regarded Stalinism favorably for evolving Bolshevism into a form of fascism. Benito Mussolini saw Stalinism as having transformed Soviet Bolshevism into a Slavic fascism.MacGregor Knox. Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941: Politics and Strategy in Italy's Last War. pp. 63–64.

British historian Michael Ellman writes that mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil", noting that famines and droughts have been a common occurrence in Russian history, including the Russian famine of 1921–22, which occurred before Stalin came to power. He also notes that famines were widespread worldwide in the 19th and 20th centuries in countries such as India, Ireland, Russia and China. Ellman compares the Stalinist regime's behavior vis-à-vis the Holodomor to that of the British government (toward Ireland and India) and the G8 in contemporary times, arguing that the G8 "are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and that Stalin's "behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries".Ellman, Michael (November 2002). [http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments"]. Europe-Asia Studies. Taylor & Francis. 54 (7): 1152–1172. {{doi|10.1080/0966813022000017177}}. {{JSTOR|826310}}.

File:День памяти российских немцев, 28 августа 2011. Возложение цветов.jpg, made of a boulder from the Solovetsky Islands]]

David L. Hoffmann questions whether Stalinist practices of state violence derive from socialist ideology. Placing Stalinism in an international context, he argues that many forms of state interventionism the Stalinist government used, including social cataloguing, surveillance and concentration camps, predate the Soviet regime and originated outside of Russia. He further argues that technologies of social intervention developed in conjunction with the work of 19th-century European reformers and greatly expanded during World War I, when state actors in all the combatant countries dramatically increased efforts to mobilize and control their populations. According to Hoffman, the Soviet state was born at this moment of total war and institutionalized state intervention practices as permanent features.{{cite book |last1=Hoffmann |first1=David |title=Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 |date=2011 |publisher=Cornell University Press |location=Ithaca, New York |isbn=978-0-8014-4629-0 |pages=6–10}}

In The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America, anti-communist and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argues that the use of the term Stalinism hides the inevitable effects of communism as a whole on human liberty. He writes that the concept of Stalinism was developed after 1956 by Western intellectuals to keep the communist ideal alive. But "Stalinism" was used as early as 1937, when Trotsky wrote his pamphlet Stalinism and Bolshevism.[http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/08/stalinism.htm "Leon Trotsky: Stalinism and Bolshevism (1937)"]. Marxists.org, 28 August 1937. Retrieved 12 July 2013.

In two Guardian articles in 2002 and 2006, British journalist Seumas Milne wrote that the impact of the post–Cold War narrative that Stalin and Hitler were twin evils, equating communism's evils with those of Nazism, "has been to relativize the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure."Milne, Seumas (12 September 2002). [http://m.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/sep/12/highereducation.historyandhistoryofart "The battle for history"]. The Guardian. Retrieved 7 October 2020.Milne, Seumas (16 February 2006). [https://www.theguardian.com/Columnists/Column/0,,1710891,00.html "Communism may be dead, but clearly not dead enough"]. The Guardian. Retrieved 18 April 2020.

According to historian Eric D. Weitz, 60% of German exiles in the Soviet Union had been liquidated during the Stalinist terror and a higher proportion of the KPD Politburo membership had died in the Soviet Union than in Nazi Germany. Weitz also noted that hundreds of German citizens, most of them Communists, were handed over to the Gestapo by Stalin's administration.{{cite book |last1=Weitz |first1=Eric D. |title=Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State |date=13 April 2021 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-0-691-22812-9 |page=280 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JOgSEAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+handed+over+german+communists+gestapo&pg=PA280 |language=en}}

{{Main|Neo-Stalinism}}

In modern Russia, public opinion of Stalin and the former Soviet Union has improved in recent years.{{cite news|title=In Russia, nostalgia for Soviet Union and positive feelings about Stalin|url=http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/29/in-russia-nostalgia-for-soviet-union-and-positive-feelings-about-stalin/|access-date=23 July 2018|work=Pew Research Center|date=June 29, 2017}} Levada Center had found that favorability of the Stalinist era has increased from 18% in 1996 to 40% in 2016 which had coincided with his rehabilitation by the Putin government for the purpose of social patriotism and militarisation efforts.{{cite web |last1=Kolesnikov |first1=Andrei |title=A Past That Divides: Russia's New Official History |url=https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2017/08/a-past-that-divides-russias-new-official-history?lang=en}} According to a 2015 Levada Center poll, 34% of respondents (up from 28% in 2007) say that leading the Soviet people to victory in World War II was such an outstanding achievement that it outweighed Stalin's mistakes.{{Cite web|title=Stalin|date=April 6, 2015 |url=https://www.levada.ru/en/2015/04/06/stalin/|access-date=2021-02-12|language=en-GB}} A 2019 Levada Center poll showed that support for Stalin, whom many Russians saw as the victor in the Great Patriotic War,{{cite news |title=Joseph Stalin: Why so many Russians like the Soviet dictator |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47975704 |work=BBC News |date=18 April 2019}} reached a record high in the post-Soviet era, with 51% regarding him as a positive figure and 70% saying his reign was good for the country.{{cite news |last= Arkhipov|first=Ilya|date=April 16, 2019|title=Russian Support for Stalin Surges to Record High, Poll Says|url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-16/russian-support-for-soviet-tyrant-stalin-hits-record-poll-shows|work=Bloomberg |access-date=May 2, 2019 }}

Lev Gudkov, a sociologist at the Levada Center, said, "Vladimir Putin's Russia of 2012 needs symbols of authority and national strength, however controversial they may be, to validate the newly authoritarian political order. Stalin, a despotic leader responsible for mass bloodshed but also still identified with wartime victory and national unity, fits this need for symbols that reinforce the current political ideology."

Some positive sentiments can also be found elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. A 2012 survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment found 38% of Armenians concurring that their country "will always have need of a leader like Stalin"."[https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/poll-finds-stalins-popularity-high-21998 Poll Finds Stalin's Popularity High] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170320024227/https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/poll-finds-stalins-popularity-high-21998 |date=20 March 2017 }}". The Moscow Times. 2 March 2013."[http://carnegieeurope.eu/2013/03/01/stalin-puzzle-deciphering-post-soviet-public-opinion-pub-51075 The Stalin Puzzle: Deciphering Post-Soviet Public Opinion] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170402134541/http://carnegieeurope.eu/2013/03/01/stalin-puzzle-deciphering-post-soviet-public-opinion-pub-51075 |date=2 April 2017 }}". Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 1 March 2013. A 2013 survey by Tbilisi University found 45% of Georgians expressing "a positive attitude" toward Stalin.{{cite news |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21656615 |title=Georgia divided over Stalin 'local hero' status in Gori |website=BBC News |date=5 March 2013 |access-date=21 June 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180719183921/https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21656615 |archive-date=19 July 2018 |url-status=live |df=dmy-all }}

{{cols|colwidth=32em}}

• Anti-Stalinist left
• Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union
• Cybernetics in the Soviet Union
• Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism
• Foreign interventions by the Soviet Union
• Everyday Stalinism
• Leningrad Affair
• Juche
• Human rights in the Soviet Union
• Mass killings under communist regimes
• Political views of Joseph Stalin
• Soviet Empire
• Hoxhaism
• Stalin's Peasants
• Stalinisme : la politique soviétique pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale
• Stalin Society
• Stalinist architecture
• State socialism
• Socialism in one country
• The Stalinist Legacy

{{colend}}

{{reflist}}

{{reflist|group=lower-roman}}

{{refbegin}}

• {{cite book|last=Applebaum|first=Anne|author-link=Anne Applebaum|title=Gulag: A History|publisher=Doubleday|year=2003|isbn=978-0-7679-0056-0}}
• {{cite book|last=Boobbyer|first=Phillip|title=The Stalin Era|publisher=Routledge|year=2000|isbn=978-0-415-18298-0}}
• {{cite book|last=Brackman|first=Roman|title=The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life|publisher=Frank Cass Publishers|year=2001|isbn=978-0-7146-5050-0}}
• {{cite book|last=Bullock|first=Alan|author-link=Alan Bullock|title=Hitler: A Study in Tyranny|publisher=Penguin Books|isbn=978-0-14-013564-0|year=1962}}
• {{cite book|last=Conquest|first=Robert|author-link=Robert Conquest|title=Stalin: Breaker of Nations|publisher=Penguin Random House|location=New York|date=1991}}
• {{cite book|last=Davies|first=Sarah|author-link=Sarah Davies (historian)|year=1997|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yTGgOwH_mwgC|title=Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941|location=Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-56676-6}}
• {{cite book|editor-last1=Davies|editor-first1=Sarah|editor-last2=Harris|editor-first2=James|year=2005|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LXo-0FUpZccC|title=Stalin: A New History|location=Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-139-44663-1}}
• {{cite book|editor-last1=Davies|editor-first1=Sarah|editor-last2=Harris|editor-first2=James|year=2014|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TQiSBAAAQBAJ|title=Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order|location=New Haven|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0-300-18281-1}}
• {{cite book|last=Fitzpatrick|first=Sheila|author-link=Sheila Fitzpatrick|year=1996|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YlBvcNMlr4EC|title=Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization|location=Oxford|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-510459-2}}
• {{cite book|last=Fitzpatrick|first=Sheila|year=2000|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=A3M8DwAAQBAJ|title=Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s|location=Oxford|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-505001-1}}
• {{cite book|last=Gellately|year=2007|author-link=Robert Gellately|title=Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe|publisher=Knopf|isbn=978-1-4000-4005-6|first=Robert}}
• {{cite book|last=Getty|first=J. Arch|author-link=J. Arch Getty|year=1987|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=R5zx54LB-A4C|title=Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938|location=Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-33570-6}}
• {{cite book|last=Getty|first=J. Arch|year=1993|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NWYvGYcxCjYC|title=Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives|location=Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-44670-9}}
• {{cite book|last=Getty|first=J. Arch|year=2013|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RaYzAAAAQBAJ|title=Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition|location=New Haven|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0-300-16929-4}}
• {{cite book|last=Gill|first=Graeme J.|title=Stalinism|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3Pt35DCU580C|access-date=1 October 2010|year=1998|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|isbn=978-0-312-17764-5}}
• {{cite book|last=Kotkin |first=Stephen |author-link=Stephen Kotkin |title=Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 |date=2014 |publisher=Penguin Random House |location=New York |isbn=978-0-14-312786-4}}
• {{cite book|last=Kotkin |first=Stephen |title=Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 |date=2017 |publisher=Penguin Random House |location=New York}}
• {{cite book|author-last=Kotkin |author-first=Stephen |author-link=Stephen Kotkin |date=1997 |title=Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization |edition=1st |location=Berkeley |publisher=University of California Press |isbn=978-0-520-20823-0}}
• {{cite book|last=Montefiore|first=Simon Sebag|author-link=Simon Sebag Montefiore|title=Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar|publisher=Knopf|year=2004|isbn=978-1-4000-4230-2|url=https://archive.org/details/stalincourtofred00mont}}
• {{Cite book |last=Montefiore |first=Simon Sebag |title=Young Stalin |publisher=Weidenfeld & Nicolson |year=2007 |isbn=978-0-2978-5068-7}}
• {{cite book|last=Overy|first=Richard J.|author-link=Richard Overy|title=The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia|publisher=W. W. Norton & Company|year=2004|isbn=978-0-393-02030-4|url=https://archive.org/details/dictators00rich}}
• {{cite journal |first=Benjamin |last=Peters |title=Normalizing Soviet Cybernetics |journal=Information & Culture |volume=47 |issue=2 |date=2012 |pages=145–175 |doi=10.1353/lac.2012.0009 |jstor=43737425 |s2cid=144363003 }}
• {{Cite book |last=Sandle |first=Mark |title=A Short History of Soviet Socialism |publisher=UCL Press |year=1999 |isbn=978-1-8572-8355-6 |doi=10.4324/9780203500279}}
• {{Cite book |last=Service |first=Robert |title=Stalin: A Biography |publisher=Macmillan |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-3337-2627-3}}
• {{cite book|last=Tucker|first=Robert C.|author-link=Robert C. Tucker|title=Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941|publisher=W. W. Norton & Company|year=1992|isbn=978-0-393-30869-3|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/stalininpowerrev00tuck}}

{{refend}}

{{Main|Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union}}

Books

• Bullock, Alan. 1998. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (2nd ed.). Fontana Press.
• Campeanu, Pavel. 2016. Origins of Stalinism: From Leninist Revolution to Stalinist Society. Routledge.
• Conquest, Robert. 2008. The Great Terror: A Reassessment (40th anniversary ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Deutscher, Isaac. 1967. [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463015 Stalin: A Political Biography] (2nd edition). Oxford House.
• Dobrenko, Evgeny. 2020. Late Stalinism (Yale University Press, 2020).
• Edele, Mark, ed. 2020. Debates on Stalinism: An introduction (Manchester University Press, 2020).
• Figes, Orlando. 2008. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. Picador.

• Getty, J. Arch, and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, eds. Reflections on Stalinism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2024) [https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61417 Online review of this book.]

• Groys, Boris. 2014. The total art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, aesthetic dictatorship, and beyond. Verso Books.
• Hasselmann, Anne E. 2021. "Memory Makers of the Great Patriotic War: Curator Agency and Visitor Participation in Soviet War Museums during Stalinism." Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 13.1 (2021): 13–32.
• Hoffmann, David L. 2008. Stalinism: The Essential Readings. John Wiley & Sons.
• Hoffmann, David L. 2018. The Stalinist Era. Cambridge University Press.
• Kotkin, Stephen. 1997. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a civilization. University of California Press.
• McCauley, Martin. 2019 Stalin and Stalinism (Routledge, 2019).
• Ree, Erik Van. 2002. The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, A Study in Twentieth-century Revolutionary Patriotism. RoutledgeCurzon.
• Ryan, James, and Susan Grant, eds. 2020. Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).
• Sharlet, Robert. 2017. Stalinism and Soviet legal culture (Routledge, 2017).
• Tismăneanu, Vladimir. 2003. Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism. University of California Press.
• Tucker, Robert C., ed. 2017. Stalinism: essays in historical interpretation. Routledge.
• Valiakhmetov, Albert, et al. 2018. "History And Historians In The Era Of Stalinism: A Review Of Modern Russian Historiography." National Academy of Managerial Staff of Culture and Arts Herald 1 (2018). [http://journals.uran.ua/visnyknakkkim/article/download/178164/178189 online]
• Velikanova, Olga. 2018. Mass Political Culture Under Stalinism: Popular Discussion of the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Springer, 2018).
• Wood, Alan. 2004. Stalin and Stalinism (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Scholarly articles

• Alexander, Kuzminykh. 2019. "The internal affairs agencies of the Soviet State in the period of Stalinism in the context of Russian historiography." Historia provinciae–the journal of regional history 3.1 (2019). [https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/18046214 online]
• Barnett, Vincent. 2006. [https://doi.org/10.1080/09668130600601982 Understanding Stalinism: The 'Orwellian Discrepancy' and the 'Rational Choice Dictator']. Europe-Asia Studies, 58(3), 457–466.
• Edele, Mark. 2020. "New perspectives on Stalinism?: A conclusion." in Debates on Stalinism (Manchester University Press, 2020) pp. 270–281.
• Gill, Graeme. 2019. "Stalinism and Executive Power: Formal and Informal Contours of Stalinism." Europe-Asia Studies 71.6 (2019): 994–1012.
• Kamp, Marianne, and Russell Zanca. 2017. "Recollections of collectivization in Uzbekistan: Stalinism and local activism." Central Asian Survey 36.1 (2017): 55–72. [https://www.academia.edu/download/49354142/RecollectionsofCollectivization.pdf online]{{dead link|date=February 2025|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}
• Kuzio, Taras. 2017. "Stalinism and Russian and Ukrainian national identities." Communist and Post-Communist Studies 50.4 (2017): 289–302.
• Lewin, Moshe. 2017. "The social background of Stalinism." in Stalinism (Routledge, 2017. 111–136).
• Mishler, Paul C. 2018. "Is the Term 'Stalinism' Valid and Useful for Marxist Analysis?." Science & Society 82.4 (2018): 555–567.
• Musiał, Filip. 2019. "Stalinism in Poland." The Person and the Challenges: Journal of Theology, Education, Canon Law and Social Studies Inspired by Pope John Paul II 9.2 (2019): 9–23. [http://czasopisma.upjp2.edu.pl/thepersonandthechallenges/article/download/3446/3346 online]
• Nelson, Todd H. 2015. "History as ideology: The portrayal of Stalinism and the Great Patriotic War in contemporary Russian high school textbooks." Post-Soviet Affairs, 31(1), 37–65.
• Nikiforov, S. A., et al. "Cultural revolution of Stalinism in its regional context." International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Technology 9.11 (2018): 1229–1241' impact on schooling
• Wheatcroft, Stephen G. "Soviet statistics under Stalinism: Reliability and distortions in grain and population statistics." Europe-Asia Studies 71.6 (2019): 1013–1035.
• Winkler, Martina. 2017. "[https://muse.jhu.edu/article/666023/ Children, Childhood, and Stalinism]." Kritika 18(3), 628–637.
• Zawadzka, Anna. 2019. "Stalinism the Polish Way." Studia Litteraria et Historica 8 (2019): 1–6. [https://ispan.waw.pl/journals/index.php/slh/article/viewFile/slh.2186/5679 online]
• Zysiak, Agata. 2019. "Stalinism and Revolution in Universities. Democratization of Higher Education from Above, 1947–1956." Studia Litteraria et Historica 8 (2019): 1–17. [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/64a0/8ba796ce297f518dc38bc78b8bdabb6ac95b.pdf online]

Primary sources

• Stalin, Joseph. [1924] 1975. Foundations of Leninism. Foreign Languages Press.
• Stalin, Joseph (1951). [http://marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/index.htm Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR]. Foreign Languages Press.

{{Commons category}}

• [http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/index.htm "Stalin Reference Archive"]. [http://www.marxists.org/ Marxists Internet Archive]. Retrieved 11 May 2005.
• [https://spartacus-educational.com/RUSstalin.htm "Joseph Stalin"]. Spartacus Educational.
• [https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/stalin_joseph.shtml Joseph Stalin: National hero or cold-blooded murderer?]. BBC Teach (resources for school teachers).

{{Joseph Stalin}}

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