What was the name of the era of Stalin's rule? Years of Stalin's reign

The story of Emperor Trajan's victory over the mighty barbarian kingdom is not just a story from a pen. It is an event whose glory is carved into 155 scenes on the spiral frieze of a mighty monumental column that still fascinates today.

Triumph of the Emperor.

Trajan's Column, with a statue of St. Peter erected by the Pope during the Renaissance on top, rises above the ruins of Trajan's Forum, which once included two libraries and a large citizen's square and a spacious Basilica. The construction of the Forum was carried out using war trophies obtained from Dacia.

Having fought alongside his warriors in campaigns between 101 and 106 AD, Emperor Trajan rallied tens of thousands of Roman legionaries to cross the Danube via two of the longest bridges the ancient world had ever seen. Trajan's victory demonstrated the visible power of Rome at the height of the Principate: crushing the mighty barbarian kingdom on the turf fields of their mountain home twice, methodically wiping it from the face of ancient Europe.

Trajan's war with the Dacians, whose country was located in what is now Romania, became the defining event of his 19-year reign. The wealth brought to Rome was stunning. One contemporary chronicler boasted that the conquest brought the state over 200 tons of gold and 450 tons of silver, not to mention a new fertile province.

Reconstruction of the appearance of the Trajan Bridge by engineer E. Duperrex (1907)

The mining literally changed the landscape of Rome. To commemorate the victory, Trajan ordered the construction of a new forum, which would include a spacious square surrounded by colonnades, two libraries, a large public building known as the Basilica Ulpia, and perhaps even a temple. The forum was " miracle in the open air", one of the early historians admired that no devastating words of mortal description would be enough to describe it.

A 38-meter-high stone column topped with a bronze statue of the conqueror towered over the forum. The spiraling band of bas-relief around the column, like a modern comic strip, is the narrative of the Dacian campaigns: thousands of elaborately carved Romans and Dacians march, build, fight, sail, sneak, negotiate, plead and die in 155 scenes. Completed in 113, the column stood for more than 1,900 years.

The column is one of the most characteristic monumental sculptures to survive the fall of Rome. For centuries, classicists treated the carving as a visual history of warfare, with Trajan as the hero and Decebalus, the Dacian king, as his worthy adversary. Archaeologists have carefully studied the scenes to learn about the uniforms, weapons, equipment and tactics of the Roman army.

Drawing from the relief: Dacians surrendering to the mercy of Trajan

Deceptive column. Heroic chronicle of conquest or collection of short stories?

The column was highly influential and inspired later monuments in Rome and throughout the empire. Over the centuries, as the city's landmarks were destroyed, the column continued to fascinate and inspire awe. The Renaissance pope replaced the statue of Trajan with a statue of St. Peter to consecrate the ancient artifact. Artists lowered themselves in baskets from above in order to study it in detail. It later became a favorite tourist attraction: the German poet Goethe climbed the 185 interior steps in 1787 to “ enjoy this incomparable view" Plaster casts of the column were made as early as the 16th century, and they preserve details that have been worn away by acid rain and pollution. Debate still rages over the column's design, meaning and, above all, historical accuracy. Sometimes it seems that there are as many interpretations as there are carvings, and there are 2,662 of them!

According to archaeologist Filippo Coarelli, working under the emperor's direction, the sculptors followed a plan to create a colonnaded version of the Scroll of Trajan on 17 drums from the finest Carrara marble. The Emperor is the hero of this story. He appears 58 times and is portrayed as a cunning commander, a skilled statesman, and a godly ruler. Here he makes a speech to the troops; there he thoughtfully consults with his advisers; there he is present at sacrifices to the gods. " This is Trajan’s attempt to show himself not only as a commander.”- "says Coarelli, " but also a cultural figure».

Of course, Coarelli is speculating. Whatever their appearance, Trajan’s memories have long since disappeared. In fact, evidence gleaned from the column and excavations at Sarmizegetusa, the Dacian capital, suggests that the carving tells more of Roman prejudice than reality.

John Coulston, an expert on Roman iconography, weapons and equipment at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, studied the column up close for several months from the scaffolding that surrounded it during restoration work in the 1980s and '90s. As the author of a dissertation on this monument, John cautions that modern interpretations and interpretations must be avoided when reading the monument. Coulston claims there was no genius behind the carving. Small differences in style and obvious errors, such as windows that disrupt the scenes and the scenes themselves being at inconsistent heights, convinced him that the sculptors were creating the column on the fly, relying on what they had heard about the wars.

The work, in his opinion, was more "inspired" than "based". Most of the column doesn't show much battle for the two wars. Less than a quarter of the frieze shows battles or sieges, and Trajan himself is never shown in battle. Meanwhile, the legionnaires, the highly trained backbone of the Roman military machine, are busy building forts and bridges, clearing roads and even harvesting crops. The column depicts them as a force of order and civilization rather than destruction and conquest.

War never changes.

The column emphasizes the enormous scale of the empire. Trajan's army included African cavalry, Iberian slingers, pointed-helmeted Levantine archers, and bare-breasted Germans in trousers that would have seemed barbaric to toga-clad Romans. They all fight the Dacians, anticipating that anyone, regardless of background, can become a Roman citizen. It is curious that Trajan himself comes from Roman Spain.

Some scenes remain ambiguous and their interpretations contradictory. Are the besieged Dacians reaching for the cup to commit suicide by drinking the poison rather than face humiliation at the hands of the victorious Romans? Or are they just thirsty? Did the noble Dacians gather around Trajan for surrender or negotiations? What about the image of women torturing shirtless, bound Roman prisoners with flaming torches? Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, head of the National Museum of Romanian History, disagrees: “These are definitely Dacian prisoners being tortured by the angry widows of murdered Roman soldiers.” Like many things in the column, what you see tends to depend on what you think about the Romans and Dacians.

Among Roman politicians, "Dacian" was synonymous with duplicity. The historian Tacitus called them " people who can never be trusted" They were known for demanding protection money from Rome and sending soldiers on raids into its border cities. In 101, Trajan moved to punish the restless Dacians. In the first major battle, Trajan defeated the Dacians in Battle of Tapai. The storm indicated to the Romans that the god Jupiter was on their side. This event is clearly reflected on the Column.

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Jupiter throwing lightning and modern battle art

After almost two years of battle, the Dacian king Decebalus made a treaty with Trajan, and then quickly broke it.

Rome has been betrayed too many times. Trajan didn't mess around during the second invasion. Just look at the scenes that show the sack of Sarmisegetusa or the village in flames. But when the Dacians were defeated, they became a favorite subject for Roman sculptors. Trajan's Forum had dozens of statues of beautiful bearded Dacian warriors, a proud marble army in the heart of Rome. Of course, such a message was intended for the Romans, and not for the surviving Dacians, most of whom were sold into slavery. None of the Dacians could come and see the column. This was created for the Roman citizens to demonstrate the power of the imperial machine to conquer such a noble and ferocious people.

In a visual narrative that stretches from the base of the column to its top, Trajan and his soldiers triumph over the Dacians. In this plaster and marble dust scene, cast between 1939 and 1943, Trajan (left) watches the battle as two Roman auxiliaries hand him the severed heads of an enemy.

During two bloody wars, literally all of Dacia was devastated; Rome did not leave a single stone unturned from the capital. One contemporary claimed that Trajan took 500,000 prisoners, bringing about 10,000 to Rome to participate in the gladiatorial games, which were held over 123 days. Truly, a new Carthage. The proud ruler of Dacia spared himself the humiliation of capitulation. Its end is carved on a column with this scene. Kneeling under the oak tree, he raises the long, curved blade to his own neck.

Death of Decebalus

« Decebalus, when his capital and his entire kingdom were occupied and he himself was in danger of being captured, committed suicide; and his head was brought to Rome", wrote the Roman historian Cassius Dio a century later.

Barbarically civilized.

Trajan's Column may be propaganda, but archaeologists say there is some truth to it. Excavations at Dacian sites, including Sarmizegetusa, continue to reveal traces of a civilization much more sophisticated than the Romans' disparaging term "barbarian" implied. The Dacians had no written language, so what we know about their culture is filtered through Roman sources. Numerous evidence suggests that they dominated the region for centuries, raiding and demanding tribute from their neighbors. The Dacians were skilled metalworkers, mining and smelting iron and gold to create magnificent jewelry and weapons.

Sarmisegethusa was their political and spiritual capital. The ruined city now lies high in the mountains of central Romania. In Trajan's time, the 1,600-kilometer journey from Rome would have taken at least a month. Tall beech trees, casting a cool shade even on a warm day, line the wide stone road leading from the thick, half-buried walls of the fortress down to the wide, flat meadow. This green terraced space, carved into the mountainside, was the religious heart of the Dacian world.

Romans loading a pack transport with spoils from the city

Recent archaeological data confirm the art of architecture, which is impressive for such an unfriendly people; some trends were even brought here by the influence of Rome and Hellas. There are a large number of artificial terraces on more than 280 hectares of the city area and there is no sign that the Dacians grew food here. There are no cultivated fields. Instead, archaeologists discovered the remains of dense clusters of workshops and houses, as well as iron ore furnaces, tons of ready-to-work iron pieces, and dozens of anvils. The city appears to have been a center for metal production, supplying other Dacians with weapons and tools in exchange for gold and grain.

The Dacians turned precious metals into jewelry. These gold coins with Roman images and bracelets are from the ruins of Sarmisegetusa, and have been recovered in recent years.

After the fall of Sarmizegetusa, the holiest temples and altars of Dacia were destroyed. Everything was dismantled by the Romans. The rest of Dacia was also devastated. At the top of the column is visible the denouement: a village set on fire, Dacians fleeing for their lives, a province empty of everyone except cows and goats.

Devastated Dacia at the very end of history

On this note, perhaps, we can conclude the story about the interesting things of this impressive, without exaggeration, influential and generally very beautiful building in its time.

Stalin period

Stalin period- a period in the history of the USSR when its leader was actually J.V. Stalin. The beginning of this period is usually dated to the interval between the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b) and the defeat of the “right opposition” in the CPSU (b) (1926-1929); the end comes with the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953. During this period, Stalin actually had the greatest power, although formally in the years 1923-1940 he did not hold positions in the executive power structures. The propaganda of the Stalinist period pathetically called it the Age of Stalin.

Stalin's period in power was marked by:

• On the one hand: the accelerated industrialization of the country, mass labor and front-line heroism, victory in the Great Patriotic War, the transformation of the USSR into a superpower with significant scientific, industrial and military potential, the unprecedented strengthening of the geopolitical influence of the Soviet Union in the world, the establishment of pro-Soviet communist regimes in Eastern Europe and a number of countries in Southeast Asia;
• On the other hand: the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorial regime, mass repressions, sometimes directed against entire social strata and ethnic groups (for example, the deportation of Crimean Tatars, Chechens and Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, Koreans), forced collectivization, which at an early stage led to a sharp decline in agriculture and the famine of 1932-1933, numerous human losses (as a result of wars, deportations, German occupation, famine and repression), the division of the world community into two warring camps and the beginning of the Cold War.

Characteristics of the period

An analysis of Politburo decisions shows that their main goal was to maximize the difference between output and consumption, which required mass coercion. The growth of the accumulation fund entailed a struggle between various administrative and regional interests for influence on the process of preparing and executing political decisions. The competition of these interests partly smoothed out the destructive consequences of hypercentralization.

Modern researchers believe that the most important economic decisions in the 20s were made after open, broad and heated public discussions, through open democratic voting at plenums of the Central Committee and congresses of the Communist Party.

According to Trotsky’s point of view, as set out in his book “The Revolution Betrayed: What is the USSR and Where is It Going?”, Stalin’s Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state.

Collectivization and industrialization

Real prices for wheat on foreign markets fell from 5-6 dollars per bushel to less than 1 dollar.

Collectivization led to a decline in agriculture: according to official data, gross grain harvests decreased from 733.3 million centners in 1928 to 696.7 million centners in 1931-32. Grain yield in 1932 was 5.7 c/ha compared to 8.2 c/ha in 1913. Gross agricultural production was 124% in 1928 compared to 1913, in 1929-121%, in 1930-117%, in 1931-114%, in 1932-107%, in 1933-101% Livestock production in 1933 was 65% of the 1913 level. But at the expense of the peasants, the collection of commercial grain, which the country so needed for industrialization, increased by 20%.

Stalin's policy of industrialization of the USSR required more funds and equipment obtained from the export of wheat and other goods abroad. Greater plans were established for collective farms to deliver agricultural products to the state. mass famine of 1932-33 , according to historians [ Who?], were the result of these grain procurement campaigns. The average standard of living of the population in rural areas did not reach the levels of 1929 until Stalin’s death (according to US data).

Industrialization, which, due to obvious necessity, began with the creation of basic branches of heavy industry, could not yet provide the market with the goods necessary for the village. The supply of the city through normal trade was disrupted; in 1924, the tax in kind was replaced by a cash tax. A vicious circle arose: to restore the balance it was necessary to accelerate industrialization, for this it was necessary to increase the influx of food, export products and labor from the village, and for this it was necessary to increase the production of bread, increase its marketability, create in the countryside a need for heavy industry products (machines ). The situation was complicated by the destruction during the revolution of the basis of commercial grain production in pre-revolutionary Russia - large landowner farms, and a project was needed to create something to replace them.

This vicious circle could only be broken through radical modernization of agriculture. Theoretically, there were three ways to do this. One is a new version of the “Stolypin reform”: support for the growing kulak, redistribution in its favor of the resources of the bulk of middle peasant farms, stratification of the village into large farmers and the proletariat. The second way is the elimination of pockets of capitalist economy (kulaks) and the formation of large mechanized collective farms. The third way - the gradual development of labor individual peasant farms with their cooperation at a “natural” pace - by all accounts turned out to be too slow. After the disruption of grain procurements in 1927, when it was necessary to take emergency measures (fixed prices, closing markets and even repression), and an even more catastrophic grain procurement campaign of 1928-1929. the issue had to be resolved urgently. The emergency procurement measures in 1929, already perceived as something completely abnormal, caused about 1,300 riots. The path to creating farming through the stratification of the peasantry was incompatible with the Soviet project for ideological reasons. A course was set for collectivization. This also implied the liquidation of the kulaks.

The second cardinal issue is the choice of industrialization method. The discussion about this was difficult and long, and its outcome predetermined the character of the state and society. Not having, unlike Russia at the beginning of the century, foreign loans as an important source of funds, the USSR could industrialize only at the expense of internal resources. An influential group (Politburo member N.I. Bukharin, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars A.I. Rykov and Chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions M.P. Tomsky) defended the “sparing” option of gradual accumulation of funds through the continuation of the NEP. L. D. Trotsky - forced version. J.V. Stalin initially supported Bukharin’s point of view, but after Trotsky was expelled from the Party Central Committee at the end of the year, he changed his position to the diametrically opposite one. This led to a decisive victory for the supporters of forced industrialization.

The question of how much these achievements contributed to victory in the Great Patriotic War remains a matter of debate. During Soviet times, the view was accepted that industrialization and pre-war rearmament played a decisive role. Critics point out that by the beginning of the winter of 1941, the territory was occupied, in which 42% of the population of the USSR lived before the war, 63% of coal was mined, 68% of cast iron was smelted, etc. As V. Lelchuk writes, “victory had to be achieved cannot be forged with the help of the powerful potential that was created during the years of accelerated industrialization.” However, the numbers speak for themselves. Despite the fact that in 1943 the USSR produced only 8.5 million tons of steel (compared to 18.3 million tons in 1940), while the German industry that year smelted more than 35 million tons (including those captured in Europe metallurgical plants), despite the colossal damage from the German invasion, the USSR industry was able to produce much more weapons than the German industry. In 1942, the USSR surpassed Germany in the production of tanks by 3.9 times, combat aircraft by 1.9 times, guns of all types by 3.1 times. At the same time, the organization and technology of production quickly improved: in 1944, the cost of all types of military products was halved compared to 1940. Record military production was achieved due to the fact that all new industry had a dual purpose. The industrial raw material base was prudently located beyond the Urals and Siberia, while the occupied territories were predominantly pre-revolutionary industry. The evacuation of industry to the Urals, Volga region, Siberia and Central Asia played a significant role. During the first three months of the war alone, 1,360 large (mostly military) enterprises were relocated.

The rapid growth of the urban population has led to a deterioration in the housing situation; a period of “densification” passed again; workers arriving from the village were housed in barracks. By the end of 1929, the card system was extended to almost all food products, and then to industrial products. However, even with cards it was impossible to obtain the necessary rations, and in 1931 additional “warrants” were introduced. It was impossible to buy food without standing in huge lines. According to data from the Smolensk party archive, in 1929 in Smolensk a worker received 600 g of bread per day, family members - 300, fat - from 200 g to a liter of vegetable oil per month, 1 kilogram of sugar per month; a worker received 30-36 meters of calico per year. Subsequently, the situation (until 1935) only worsened. The GPU noted acute discontent among the workers.

Changes in living standards

• The average standard of living throughout the country underwent significant fluctuations (especially associated with the first Five-Year Plan and the war), but in 1938 and 1952 it was higher or almost the same as in 1928.
• The greatest increase in living standards was among the party and labor elite.
• According to various estimates, the standard of living of the vast majority of rural residents has not improved or has worsened significantly.

Introduction of the passport system in 1932-1935. provided for restrictions for residents of rural areas: peasants were prohibited from moving to another area or going to work in the city without the consent of the board of a state farm or collective farm, which thus sharply limited their freedom of movement.

Cards for bread, cereals and pasta were abolished from January 1, 1935, and for other (including non-food) goods from January 1, 1936. This was accompanied by an increase in wages in the industrial sector and an even greater increase in state ration prices for all types of goods. Commenting on the abolition of cards, Stalin uttered what later became a catchphrase: “Life has become better, life has become more fun.”

Overall, per capita consumption increased by 22% between 1928 and 1938. Cards were reintroduced in July 1941. After the war and famine (drought) of 1946, they were abolished in 1947, although many goods remained in short supply, in particular there was another famine in 1947. In addition, on the eve of the abolition of cards, prices for ration goods were raised. The restoration of the economy allowed in 1948-1953. repeatedly reduce prices. Price reductions significantly increased the standard of living of Soviet people. In 1952, the cost of bread was 39% of the price at the end of 1947, milk - 72%, meat - 42%, sugar - 49%, butter - 37%. As noted at the 19th Congress of the CPSU, at the same time the price of bread increased by 28% in the USA, by 90% in England, and more than doubled in France; the cost of meat in the USA increased by 26%, in England - by 35%, in France - by 88%. If in 1948 real wages were on average 20% lower than the pre-war level, then in 1952 they were already 25% higher than the pre-war level.

The average standard of living of the population in regions remote from large cities and specializing in crop production, that is, the majority of the country's population, did not reach the levels of 1929 before the start of the war. In the year of Stalin's death, the average calorie content of the daily diet of an agricultural worker was 17% lower than the level of 1928 of the year .

Demography during the Stalin period

As a result of famine, repression and deportations, mortality exceeded the “normal” level in the period 1927-1938. amounted, according to various estimates, from 4 to 12 million people. However, during the 29 years in power, the population of the USSR increased by 60 million people.

Stalin's repressions

Make the following changes to the current criminal procedural codes of the union republics for the investigation and consideration of cases of terrorist organizations and terrorist acts against employees of the Soviet government: 1. The investigation in these cases should be completed within no more than ten days; 2. The indictment must be served on the accused one day before the hearing of the case in court; 3. Hear cases without the participation of the parties; 4. Cassation appeals against sentences, as well as filing petitions for pardon, should not be allowed; 5. A sentence of capital punishment shall be carried out immediately upon delivery of the sentence.

The mass terror of the Yezhovshchina period was carried out by the then authorities of the country throughout the entire territory of the USSR (and, at the same time, in the territories of Mongolia, Tuva and Republican Spain controlled at that time by the Soviet regime), based on the figures of “planned targets” for identifying and punishing people who harmed the Soviet government (the so-called “enemies of the people”).

During the Yezhovshchina, torture was widely used against those arrested; sentences that were not subject to appeal (often to death) were passed without any trial - and were carried out immediately (often even before the verdict was passed); all property of the absolute majority of arrested people was immediately confiscated; the relatives of the repressed themselves were subjected to the same repressions - for the mere fact of their relationship with them; Children of repressed persons left without parents (regardless of their age) were also placed, as a rule, in prisons, camps, colonies, or in special “orphanages for children of enemies of the people.” In 1935, it became possible to attract minors, starting from the age of 12, to capital punishment (execution).

In 1937, 353,074 people were sentenced to death, in 1938 - 328,618, in 1939-2,601. According to Richard Pipes, in 1937-1938 the NKVD arrested about 1.5 million people, of whom about 700 thousand were executed, that is, on average, 1,000 executions per day.

Historian V.N. Zemskov names a similar figure, arguing that “in the most brutal period - 1937-38 - more than 1.3 million people were convicted, of whom almost 700,000 were shot,” and in another of his publications he clarifies: “according to documented data, in 1937-1938. 1,344,923 people were convicted for political reasons, of which 681,692 were sentenced to capital punishment.” It should be noted that Zemskov personally participated in the work of the commission, which worked in 1990-1993. and considered the issue of repression.

As a result of famine, repression and deportations, mortality exceeded the “normal” level in the period 1927-1938. amounted, according to various estimates, from 4 to 12 million people.

In 1937-1938 Bukharin, Rykov, Tukhachevsky and other political figures and military leaders were arrested, including those who at one time contributed to Stalin’s rise to power.

The attitude of representatives of society who adhere to liberal democratic values ​​is reflected in particular in their assessment of the repressions carried out during the Stalin period against a number of nationalities of the USSR: in the RSFSR Law of April 26, 1991 No. 1107-I “On the rehabilitation of repressed peoples”, signed by the President RSFSR B. N. Yeltsin, it is argued that in relation to a number of peoples of the USSR at the state level, on the basis of nationality or other affiliation “a policy of slander and genocide was pursued”.

War

According to modern historians, arguments about the quantitative or qualitative superiority of German technology on the eve of the war are unfounded. On the contrary, in terms of certain parameters (the number and weight of tanks, the number of aircraft), the Red Army grouping along the western border of the USSR was significantly superior to the similar Wehrmacht grouping.

Post-war period

Soon after the end of the war, repressions were carried out among the senior command staff of the USSR Armed Forces. So, in 1946-1948 according to the so-called. In the “trophy case”, a number of major military leaders from the inner circle of Marshal of the Soviet Union G.K. Zhukov were arrested and put on trial, among whom were Chief Marshal of Aviation A.A. Novikov, Lieutenant General K.F. Telegin.

The ideological split between the communist doctrine that guided the USSR and the democratic principles that guided the “bourgeois” countries, forgotten during the war against a common enemy, inevitably came to the fore in international relations, and after Winston Churchill’s famous Fulton speech, none of the former allies tried to hide this split. The Cold War began.

In the states of Eastern Europe liberated by the Soviet Army, with the open support of Stalin, pro-Soviet oriented communist forces came to power, which later entered into an economic and military alliance with the USSR in its confrontation with the United States and the NATO bloc. Post-war contradictions between the USSR and the USA in the Far East led to the Korean War, in which Soviet pilots and anti-aircraft gunners took direct part.

The defeat of Germany and its satellites in the war radically changed the balance of forces in the world. The USSR turned into one of the leading world powers, without which, according to V. M. Molotov, not a single issue of international life should now be resolved.

However, during the war years, the power of the United States grew even more. Their gross national product rose by 70%, and economic and human losses were minimal. Having turned into an international creditor during the war years, the United States gained the opportunity to expand its economic and political influence on other countries and peoples.

All this led to the fact that instead of cooperation in Soviet-American relations, a time of mutual competition and confrontation was coming. The Soviet Union could not help but be concerned about the US nuclear monopoly in the early post-war years. America saw a threat to its security in the growing influence of the USSR in the world. All this led to the beginning of the Cold War.

However, human losses did not end with the war, in which they amounted to about 27 million. The famine of 1946-1947 alone claimed the lives of from 0.8 to two million people.

In the shortest possible time, the national economy, transport, housing stock, and destroyed settlements in the former occupied territory were restored.

State security agencies took harsh measures to suppress nationalist movements that were actively manifested in the Baltic states and Western Ukraine.

The measures taken led to an increase in grain yields by 25-30%, vegetables by 50-75%, and herbs by 100-200%.

In 1952, the cost of bread was 39% of the price at the end of 1947, milk - 72%, meat - 42%, sugar - 49%, butter - 37%. As noted at the 19th Congress of the CPSU, at the same time the price of bread increased by 28% in the USA, by 90% in England, and more than doubled in France; the cost of meat in the USA increased by 26%, in England - by 35%, in France - by 88%. If in 1948 real wages were on average 20% lower than the pre-war level, then in 1952 they were already 25% higher than the pre-war level. In general, during 1928-1952. the greatest increase in living standards was among the party and labor elites, while for the vast majority of rural residents it did not improve or worsened.

The fight against cosmopolitanism

In the post-war period, massive campaigns began against the departure from the “principle of party membership”, against the “abstract academic spirit”, “objectivism”, as well as against “anti-patriotism”, “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “the derogation of Russian science and Russian philosophy”.

Almost all Jewish educational institutions, theaters, publishing houses and the media were closed (except for the newspaper of the Jewish Autonomous Region “Birobidzhaner Shtern” ( Birobidzhan star) and the magazine "Soviet Gameland"). Mass arrests and dismissals of Jews began. In the winter of 1953, rumors circulated about the supposed impending deportation of Jews; the question of whether these rumors were true is debatable.

Science in the Stalinist period

Entire scientific fields, such as genetics and cybernetics, were declared bourgeois and banned; in these areas, the USSR, after decades, was still unable to reach the world level. . According to historians, many scientists, for example, academician Nikolai Vavilov and others, were repressed with the direct participation of Stalin. Ideological attacks on cybernetics could also affect the development of the closely related field of computer science, but the resistance of dogmatists was eventually overcome thanks to the position of the military and members of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Culture of the Stalin period

• List of films of the Stalin period

• Stalinist architecture ("Stalinist Empire")

Stalin's time in works of art

see also

Literature

Links

Notes

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7. Lelchuk V. Industrialization
8. MFIT Reform of the defense complex. Military Herald
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10. I. Economics - World revolution and world war - V. Rogovin
11. Industrialization
12. A. Chernyavsky Shot in the Mausoleum. Khabarovsk Pacific Star, 2006-06-21
13. See review: Demographic modernization of Russia 1900-2000 / Ed. A. Vishnevsky. M.: New publishing house, 2006. Ch. 5.
14. CHRONOLOGY OF IMPORTANT EVENTS AND DATES. 1922-1940 "World History
15. The national economy of the USSR in 1960. - M.: Gosstatizdat TsSU USSR, 1961
16. Chapman J. G. Real Wages in the Soviet Union, 1928-1952 // Review of Economics and Statistics. 1954. Vol. 36, No. 2. P. 134. DOI:10.2307/1924665 (English)
17. Jasny N. Soviet industrialization, 1928-1952. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
18. Post-war reconstruction and economic development of the USSR in the 40s - early 50s. / Katsva L. A. Distance course in the History of the Fatherland for applicants.
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20. Nineteenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Bulletin No. 8, p.22 - M: Pravda, 1952.
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22. See review: Denisenko M. Demographic crisis in the USSR in the first half of the 1930s: estimates of losses and problems of study // Historical demography. Collection of articles / Ed. Denisenko M. B., Troitskaya I. A. - M.: MAKS Press, 2008. - P. 106-142. - (Demographic Studies, Vol. 14)
23. Andreev E. M., et al., Population of the Soviet Union, 1922-1991. Moscow, Nauka, 1993. ISBN 5-02-013479-1
24. Resolution of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR on December 1, 1934 // SZ USSR, 1934, No. 64, art. 459
25. Documents on repression
26. Great Russian Encyclopedia. Volume 4. Great Terror.
27. See Explanation to the court and prosecutor's office dated 04/20/1935 and the previous Resolution of the Central Executive Committee and Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated 04/07/1935 “On measures to combat juvenile delinquency”
28. STATISTICS OF THE REPRESSIVE ACTIVITIES OF THE SECURITY BODIES OF THE USSR FOR THE PERIOD FROM 1921 TO 1940.
29. Richard Pipes. Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles), p. 67.
30. Internet vs TV screen
31. On the issue of the scale of repression in the USSR // Viktor Zemskov

Fifty years have passed since Stalin's death. But Stalin and everything connected with his activities did not become a distant, indifferent past for living people. There are still quite a few representatives of generations alive for whom the Stalin era was and remains their era, regardless of how they feel about it. And most importantly, Stalin is one of those great historical figures who forever remain significant phenomena of our time for all subsequent generations. So the round half-century anniversary is only an occasion to speak out on eternally relevant topics. In this essay, I intend to consider not specific facts and events of the Stalin era and Stalin’s life, but only their social essence.

Stalin era. To give an objective description of the Stalin era, it is necessary first of all to determine its place in the history of Russian (Soviet) communism. Now we can state as a fact the following four periods in the history of Russian communism: 1) origins; 2) youth (or maturation); 3) maturity; 4) crisis and death. The first period covers the years from the October Revolution of 1917 until Stalin's election as General Secretary of the Party Central Committee in 1922 or until Lenin's death in 1924. This period can be called Leninist by the role that Lenin played in it. The second period covers the years after the first period until Stalin's death in 1953 or until the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. This is the Stalinist period. The third began after the second and. continued until Gorbachev came to supreme power in the country in 1985. This is the Khrushchev-Brezhnev period. And the fourth period began with the seizure of supreme power by Gorbachev and ended with the anti-communist coup in August 1991, led by Yeltsin, and the destruction of Russian (Soviet) communism. After the 20th Congress of the CPSU (1956), the idea of ​​the Stalinist period as a period of villainy was firmly established, and about Stalin himself - as the most villainous villain of all the villains in the history of mankind. And now only the exposure of the ulcers of Stalinism and Stalin’s defects is accepted as truth. Attempts to speak objectively about this period and about the personality of Stalin are regarded as apologetics of Stalinism. And yet I will risk stepping back from the revealing line and speaking out in defense of... no, not Stalin and Stalinism, but their objective understanding. I think that I have a moral right to this, since from my early youth I was a convinced anti-Stalinist, in 1939 I was a member of a terrorist group that intended to assassinate Stalin, was arrested for publicly speaking out against the cult of Stalin, and until Stalin’s death conducted illegal anti-Stalinist propaganda. After Stalin's death, I stopped it, guided by the principle: even a donkey can kick a dead lion. Dead Stalin could not be my enemy. Attacks on Stalin became unpunished, common and even encouraged. And besides, by this time I had already embarked on the path of a scientific approach to Soviet society, including the Stalin era. Below I will briefly outline the main conclusions regarding Stalin and Stalinism, which I came to as a result of many years of scientific research.

Lenin and Stalin. Soviet ideology and propaganda during the Stalin years presented Stalin as “Lenin today.” Now I think this is true. Of course, there were differences between Lenin and Stalin, but the main thing is that Stalinism was a continuation and development of Leninism both in theory and in the practice of building real communism. Stalin gave the best presentation of Leninism as an ideology. He was a faithful student and follower of Lenin. Whatever their specific personal relationships, from a sociological point of view, they form a single historical person. The case is unique in history. I don’t know of another case where one large-scale political figure literally raised his predecessor in power to divine heights, as Stalin did with Lenin. After the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Stalin began to be contrasted with Lenin, and Stalinism began to be seen as a retreat from Leninism. Stalin really “retreated” from Leninism, but not in the sense of betraying it, but in the sense that he made such a significant contribution to it that we have the right to talk about Stalinism as a special phenomenon.

Political and social revolution. The great historical role of Lenin was that he developed the ideology of the socialist revolution, created an organization of professional revolutionaries designed to seize power, led the forces to seize and retain power when the opportunity presented itself, assessed this opportunity and took the risk of seizing power, used power to destruction of the existing social system, organized the masses to defend the gains of the revolution from counter-revolutionaries and interventionists, in short, to create the necessary conditions for building a communist social system in Russia. But this system itself took shape after him, during the Stalinist period, and took shape under the leadership of Stalin. The role of these people is so enormous that we can safely say that without Lenin the socialist revolution would not have won, and without Stalin the first communist society of enormous scale in history would not have arisen. Someday, when humanity, in the interests of self-preservation, nevertheless again turns to communism as the only way to avoid destruction, the twentieth century will be called the century of Lenin and Stalin. I distinguish between political and social revolutions. In the Russian Revolution they merged into one. But in the Leninist period the first dominated, in the Stalinist period the second came to the fore. The social revolution did not consist in the fact that the classes of capitalists and landowners were eliminated, that private ownership of land, factories and plants, and the means of production was eliminated. This was only a negative, destructive aspect of the political revolution. The social revolution as such, in its positive, creative content, meant the creation of a new social organization of the masses of the country's multi-million population. It was a grandiose and unprecedented process of uniting millions of people into communist collectives with a new social structure and new relationships between people, a process of creating many hundreds of thousands of business cells of a hitherto unprecedented type and uniting them in the same way into a hitherto unprecedented single whole. It was a grandiose process of creating a new way of life for millions of people with a new psychology and ideology. I would like to draw special attention to the following circumstance. Both critics and apologists of Stalinism portray this process as if Stalin and his associates were only implementing Marxist-Leninist projects. This is a deep misconception. There were no such projects at all. There were general ideas and slogans that could be interpreted and which were in fact interpreted, as they say, at random. Neither the Stalinists nor Stalin himself had such projects. Historical creativity in the full sense of the word took place here. The builders of the new society had specific tasks to establish public order, fight crime, combat homelessness, provide people with food and housing, create schools and hospitals, create means of transport, build factories for the production of necessary consumer goods, etc. They did due to vital necessity, due to available resources and conditions, due to objective social laws, about which they did not have the slightest idea, but which they were forced to reckon with in practice, acting on the principle of trial and error. They did not think that they were thereby creating cells of a new social organism with their natural structure and objective social relations independent of their will. Their activities were successful to the extent that they, one way or another, took into account the objective conditions and laws of social organization. In general, Stalin and his comrades acted in accordance with vital necessity and objective trends of real life, and not with some ideological dogmas, as the falsifiers of Soviet history attribute to them. I note by the way that the material and cultural values ​​created during the Stalin years were so enormous that the values ​​inherited from pre-revolutionary Russia look like a drop in the ocean in comparison. What was nationalized and socialized after the revolution was in fact not as significant as is commonly said. The material and cultural basis of the new society had to be created anew after the revolution, using a new system of power. Over time, the specific tasks that forced the builders of the new society to carry out collectivization, industrialization and other large-scale measures faded into the background or exhausted themselves, and the unconscious and unplanned social aspect declared itself as one of the main achievements of this period in the history of Russian communism. The most important, Perhaps the result of the social revolution, which attracted the overwhelming majority of the country's population to the side of the new system, was the formation of business groups, thanks to which people became involved in public life and felt cared for by society and the authorities. The desire of people for a collective life without private owners and with the active participation of everyone was unheard of anywhere and never before. Demonstrations and meetings were voluntary. They were treated like holidays. Despite any difficulties, the illusion that power in the country belonged to the people was the overwhelming illusion of those years. The phenomena of collectivism were perceived as indicators of democracy. Democracy not in the sense of Western democracy, but literally. Representatives of the lower strata of the population (and they were the majority) occupied the lower floors of the social stage and took part in the social performance not only as spectators, but also as actors. The actors on the higher floors of the stage and in more important roles then also for the most part came from the people. History had never known such vertical population dynamics as in those years.

Collectivization and industrialization. There is a strong opinion that collective farms were invented by Stalinist villains for purely ideological reasons. This is monstrous absurdity. The idea of ​​collective farms is not a Marxist idea. It has nothing in common with classical Marxism at all. It was not brought into life from theory. She was born in the very practical life of real, not imaginary, communism. Ideology was only used as a means of justifying one’s historical creativity. Collectivization was not malicious intent, but a tragic inevitability. The process of people fleeing to the cities could not be stopped anyway. Collectivization accelerated it. Without her, this process would have become, perhaps, even more painful, stretching over several generations. It was not at all as if the top Soviet leadership had the opportunity to choose a path. For Russia, in historical conditions, there was only one choice: to survive or die. And there was no choice regarding the ways of survival. Stalin was not the inventor of Russian tragedy, but only its exponent. Collective farms were evil, but far from absolute. Without them, in those real conditions, industrialization was impossible, and without the latter, our country would have been defeated already in the thirties, if not earlier. But the collective farms themselves had not only disadvantages. One of the attractions and one of the achievements of real communism is that it frees people from the worries and responsibilities associated with property. Although in a negative form, collective farms played this role for tens of millions of people. Young people got the opportunity to become tractor drivers, mechanics, accountants, and foremen. Outside the collective farms, “intellectual” positions appeared in clubs, medical centers, schools, and machine and tractor stations. The joint work of many people became a social life, bringing entertainment through the very fact of being together. Meetings, deliberations, conversations, propaganda lectures and other phenomena of the new life associated with collective farms and accompanying them made people's lives more interesting than before. At the level of culture at which the mass of the population was, all this played a huge role, despite the wretchedness and formality of these events. The industrialization of Soviet society was as poorly understood as collectivization. Its most important aspect, namely the sociological one, fell out of sight of both apologists and critics of Stalinism. Critics viewed it, firstly, according to the criteria of Western economics, as economically unprofitable (according to their concepts, meaningless) and, secondly, as voluntaristic, dictated by ideological considerations. But the apologists did not notice that a qualitatively new phenomenon of the super-economy was being born here, thanks to which the Soviet Union in a surprisingly short time became a powerful industrial power. And what is most striking is that they did not notice the role industrialization played in the social organization of the masses of the population.

Organization of power. During these years, on the one hand, the unification of various peoples scattered over a vast territory into a single social organism took place, and on the other hand, internal differentiation and structural complication of this organism took place. This process necessarily gave rise to the growth and complexity of the system of power and management of society. And in the new conditions it gave rise to new functions of power and management. It was during the Stalin era that that system of party-state power and governance was created. But she was not born immediately after the revolution. It took many years to create it. And the country needed governance from the very first days of the existence of the new society. How was it managed? Of course, before the revolution there was a Russian state apparatus. But it was destroyed by the revolution. Its wreckage and work experience were used to create a new state machine. But again, something else was needed to do this. And this other means of governing the country in the conditions of post-revolutionary devastation and a means of creating a normal system of power was the democracy born of the revolution. When using the expression “democracy” or “power of the people,” I do not put any evaluative meaning into them. I do not share the illusion that people's power is good. I I mean here only a certain structure of power in certain historical circumstances and nothing more. These are the main features of democracy. The vast majority of leadership positions from the very bottom to the very top were occupied by people from the lower strata of the population. And these are millions of people. A leader who comes from the people addresses in his leadership activities directly to the people themselves, ignoring the official apparatus. For the masses of the people, this apparatus appears as something hostile to them and as an obstacle to their leader-leader. Hence the voluntaristic methods of leadership. Therefore, the top leader can, at his own discretion, manipulate officials of the lower apparatus of official power, remove them, arrest them. The leader looked like a people's leader. Power over people was felt directly, without any intermediate links or disguises. Democracy is the organization of the masses of the population. The people must be organized in a certain way so that their leaders can lead them according to their will. The will of the leader is nothing without appropriate preparation and organization of the population. There were certain means for this. These are, first of all, all kinds of activists, founders, initiators, shock workers, heroes... The mass of people is, in principle, passive. To keep it in tension and move it in the desired direction, you need to isolate a relatively small active part in it. This part should be encouraged, given some advantages, and de facto power over the rest of the passive part of the population should be transferred to it. And in all institutions, unofficial groups of activists formed, which actually kept the entire life of the collective and its members under their supervision and control. It was almost impossible to manage the institution without their support. Activists were usually people who had a relatively low social position, and sometimes the lowest. Often these were disinterested enthusiasts. But gradually this grassroots activist grew into a mafia that terrorized all employees of institutions and set the tone for everything. They had support from the team and from above. And this was their strength. The highest power in the Stalinist system of power was not the state, but the super-state apparatus of power, not bound by any legislative norms. It consisted of a clique of people who were personally obliged to the leader (leader) for their position in the clique and the share of power granted to him. Such cliques formed at all levels of the hierarchy, from the highest, headed by Stalin himself, to the level of districts and enterprises. The main levers of power were: the party apparatus and the party as a whole, trade unions, the Komsomol, state security agencies, internal order forces, the army command, the diplomatic corps, heads of institutions and enterprises performing tasks of special national importance, the scientific and cultural elite, etc. State power (the soviets) was subordinate to the superstate. An important component of Stalin’s power was what came to be called the word “nomenklatura”. The role of this phenomenon was greatly exaggerated and distorted in anti-Soviet propaganda. What is nomenclature actually? In the Stalin years, the nomenclature included specially selected and reliable party workers from the point of view of the central government, who led large masses of people in various regions of the country and various spheres of social life. The leadership situation was relatively simple, the general guidelines were clear and stable, the methods of leadership were primitive and standard, the cultural and professional level of the masses being led was low, the tasks of the masses and the rules of their organization were relatively simple and more or less uniform. So almost any party leader included in the nomenclature could with equal success lead literature, an entire territorial region, heavy industry, music, and sports. The main task of this kind of leadership was to create and maintain the unity and centralization of the country's leadership, to accustom the population to new forms of relationships with the authorities, and to solve certain problems of national importance at any cost. And the nomenklatura workers of the Stalin period completed this task.

Repression. The question of repression is of fundamental importance for understanding both the history of the formation of Russian communism and its essence as a social system. In them there was a coincidence of factors of various kinds, associated not only with the essence of the communist social system, but also with specific historical conditions, as well as with the natural conditions of Russia, its historical traditions and the nature of the available human material. There was a world war. The tsarist empire collapsed, and the communists were least to blame for this. A revolution has occurred. The country is in disorganization, devastation, hunger, poverty, and crime is flourishing. A new revolution, this time a socialist one. Civil war, intervention, uprisings. No government could establish basic social order without mass repression. The very formation of a new social system was accompanied by a literal orgy of crime in all spheres of society, in all regions of the country, at all levels of the emerging hierarchy, including the authorities themselves, management and punishment. Communism entered life as liberation, but liberation not only from the shackles of the old system, but also the liberation of the masses of people from elementary restraining factors. Hackwork, fraud, theft, corruption, drunkenness, abuse of official position, etc., which flourished in pre-revolutionary times, literally turned into norms of the general way of life of Russians (now Soviet people). Party organizations, Komsomol, collectives, propaganda, educational authorities, etc. made titanic efforts to prevent this. And they really achieved a lot. But they were powerless without punitive authorities. The Stalinist system of mass repression grew up as a self-protective measure of the new society against the epidemic of crime born by the totality of circumstances. It became a constantly operating factor of the new society, a necessary element of its self-preservation.

Economic revolution. It is too little to say about the economy of the Stalin era that collectivization and industrialization took place in it. It developed a specifically communist form of economy, I would even say a super-economy. I will name its main features. During the Stalin years, a huge number of primary business collectives (cells) were created, which together formed a specifically communist super-economy. These cells were not created spontaneously, not privately, but by decisions of the authorities. The latter decided what these cells were supposed to do, how many hired workers to have and which ones, how to pay them and all other aspects of their life. This was not a matter of complete arbitrariness by the authorities. The latter took into account the real situation and real possibilities. The created economic (economic) cells were included in the system of other cells, i.e. they were parts of large economic associations (both sectoral and territorial) and, ultimately, the economy as a whole. They, of course, had some kind of autonomy in their activities. But basically they were limited by the tasks and conditions of the mentioned associations. Above the economic cells, a hierarchical and network structure of institutions of power and management was created, which ensured their coordinated activities. It was organized according to the principles of command and subordination, as well as centralization. In the West, this was called a command economy and was considered the greatest evil, opposing it to its market economy, glorifying it as the greatest good. The communist super-economy, organized and controlled from above, had a specific goal. The last one was as follows. First, to provide the country with material resources that allow it to survive in the outside world, maintain independence and keep up with progress. Secondly, to provide the country's citizens with the necessary means of subsistence. Thirdly, provide all able-bodied people with work as the main and, for the majority, the only source of livelihood. Fourth, to involve the entire working population in labor activities in primary collectives. With this attitude was organically connected the need to plan the activities of the economy, starting from the primary cells and ending with the economy as a whole. Hence the famous Stalinist five-year plans. This planned nature of the Soviet economy caused especially strong irritation in the West and was subject to all sorts of ridicule. And yet it is completely groundless. The Soviet economy had its shortcomings. But the reason for them was not planning as such. On the contrary, planning made it possible to contain these shortcomings and achieve successes that in those years were recognized throughout the world as unprecedented. It is generally accepted that the Western economy is more efficient than the Soviet one. This opinion is simply meaningless from a scientific point of view. It is necessary to distinguish between economic and social criteria for assessing the efficiency of the economy. The social efficiency of the economy is characterized by the ability to exist without unemployment and without the ruin of unprofitable enterprises, easier working conditions, the ability to concentrate large amounts of money and effort on solving large-scale problems, and other characteristics. From this point of view, it was the Stalinist economy that turned out to be as efficient as possible, which became one of the factors in victories of an epoch-making and global scale.

Cultural revolution. The Stalinist period was a period of cultural revolution unprecedented in the history of mankind, which affected millions of people in all countries. This revolution was absolutely necessary for the survival of the new society. The human material inherited from the past did not meet the needs of the new society in all aspects of its life, especially in production, in the management system, in science, in the army. Millions of educated and professionally trained people were needed. In solving this problem, the new society demonstrated its advantage over all other types of social systems! The most easily accessible for him turned out to be what was most difficult to access in previous history - education and culture. It turned out that it was easier to give people a good education, to give them access to the heights of culture, than to give them decent housing, clothing and food. Access to education and culture was the most powerful compensation for everyday squalor. People endured everyday difficulties that are now scary to remember, just to get an education and join culture. The craving of millions of people for this was so strong that no force in the world could stop it. Any attempt to return the country to its pre-revolutionary state was perceived as the most terrible threat to this gain of the revolution. In this case, everyday life played a secondary role. You had to personally experience this time to appreciate this state. Then, when education and culture became something taken for granted, familiar and everyday, this state disappeared and was forgotten. But it existed and played its historical role. It didn't come by itself. It was one of the achievements of Stalin's social strategy. It was created deliberately, systematically, systematically. A high educational and cultural level of people was considered a necessary condition for communism in the very foundations of Marxist ideology. At this point, as at many others, practical life needs coincided with the postulates of ideology. During the Stalin years, Marxism as an ideology was still adequate to the needs of the real course of history.

Ideological revolution. Everyone who writes about the Stalin era pays a lot of attention to collectivization, industrialization and mass repression. But during this era, other events of enormous scale also took place, about which little or nothing is written about. These include primarily the ideological revolution. From the point of view of the formation of real communism, it is, in my opinion, no less important than other events of the era. Here we were talking about the formation of the third main support of any modern society, along with the system of power and economy - a single state secular and non-religious) ideology and a centralized ideological mechanism, without which the success of building communism would have been unthinkable. In the Stalin years, the content of ideology was determined, its functions in society, methods of influencing the masses of people, the structure of ideological institutions was outlined and rules for their work were developed. The culmination of the ideological revolution was the publication of Stalin's work “On Dialectical and Historical Materialism.” There is an opinion that this work was not written by Stalin himself. But even if Stalin appropriated someone else’s work, in its appearance he played a role immeasurably more important than the composition of this rather primitive, from an intellectual point of view, text: he understood the need for such an ideological text, gave it his name and imposed on it a huge historical role. This relatively small article was a real ideological (not scientific, but ideological) masterpiece in the full sense of the word. After the revolution and the Civil War, the party that seized power was faced with the task of imposing its party ideology on the entire society. Otherwise she would not have remained in power. And this practically meant the ideological indoctrination of the broad masses of the population, the creation for this purpose of an army of specialists - ideological workers, the creation of a permanent apparatus of ideological work, the penetration of ideology into all spheres of life. What did you have to start with? Ninety percent of the population is illiterate and religious. Ideological chaos and confusion among the intelligentsia. Party workers are half-educated, bookish and dogmatic, entangled in all sorts of ideological trends. And they knew Marxism itself only so-so. And now, when the vitally primary task arose of reorienting ideological work towards the masses of a low educational level and infected with the old religious-autocratic ideology, the party theorists turned out to be completely helpless. What was needed were ideological texts with which one could confidently, persistently and systematically address the masses. The main problem was not the development of Marxism as a phenomenon of abstract philosophical culture, but the search for the simplest way to compose Marxist-shaped phrases, speeches, slogans, articles, and books. It was necessary to lower the level of historically given Marxism so that it became the ideology of the intellectually primitive and poorly educated majority of the population. By understating and vulgarizing Marxism, the Stalinists thereby removed from it the rational core, the only thing worthwhile that it had at all. Let the reader pay attention to the ideological chaos that is taking place in today's Russia, to the fruitless search for a certain “national idea”, to the endless complaints about the lack of effective ideology! But the educational level of the population is immeasurably higher than it was at the beginning of the Stalin era, enormous intellectual forces are involved in the search for ideology, and we have decades of experience in this area of ​​world progress! And the result is zero. To appreciate Stalinism in this regard, it is enough to compare those times with the present. Of course, Marxism has become a subject of ridicule over time. But this happened several decades later, and in relatively narrow circles of intellectuals, when the Stalinist ideological revolution had already fulfilled its great historical mission. And the Soviet ideology, born during the Stalinist years, did not die a natural death, but was simply discarded as a result of the anti-communist coup. The ideological state that replaced it was a colossal spiritual degradation of Russia.

Stalin's national policy. One of the many injustices in the assessment of Stalin and Stalinism is that they are also blamed for those national problems that arose as a result of the defeat of the Soviet Union and the Soviet (communist) social system in the countries of this region. Meanwhile, it was during the Stalin years that the best solution to national problems took place out of everything that was known in the history of mankind. It was during the Stalin years that the formation of a new, supranational and truly fraternal (in terms of attitudes and in the main tendency) human community began. Now that the Stalin era has become a part of history, it is more important not to look for its shortcomings, but to emphasize the successes of internationalism that have actually been achieved. I do not have the opportunity to dwell on this topic in this article. I will note only one thing: for my generation, formed in the pre-war years, national problems were considered solved. They began to be artificially inflated and provoked in the post-Stalin years as one of the means of the West’s “cold” war against our country.

Stalin and international communism. The topic of the international role of Stalin and Stalinism is also beyond the scope of the purpose of my article. I will limit myself to just a brief remark. Stalin began his great mission to build a real communist society with a decisive rejection of the generally accepted dogma of classical Marxism, that communism can only be built in many advanced Western countries at the same time, and with the proclamation of the slogan of building communism in one single country. And he carried out this intention. Moreover, he deliberately took the path of using the achievements of communism in one country to spread it throughout the planet. Towards the end of Stalin's rule, communism really began to rapidly conquer the planet. The slogan of communism as the bright future of all humanity began to look more real than ever. And no matter how we feel about communism and Stalin, the fact remains indisputable that no other political figure in history achieved such success as Stalin. And hatred of him still does not fade away, not so much because of the evil he caused (many in this regard surpassed him), but because of this unparalleled personal success of his.

The triumph of Stalinism. The war of 1941-1945 against Nazi Germany was the greatest test for Stalinism and personally for Stalin himself. And it must be recognized as an indisputable fact that they passed this test: the greatest war in the history of mankind against the strongest and most terrible enemy, militarily and in all other aspects, ended in the triumphant victory of our country, and the main factors of victory were, firstly, the communist social system , established in our country as a result of the October Revolution of 1917, and, secondly, Stalinism as the builder of this system and Stalin personally as the leader of this construction and as the organizer of the country’s life during the war years and the commander-in-chief of the country’s armed forces. It would seem that all the battles Napoleon as a whole is nothing in comparison with this battle of Stalin. Napoleon was ultimately defeated, and Stalin won a triumphant victory, and contrary to all the forecasts of those years, which predicted an early victory for Hitler. It would seem that the winner is not judged. But with regard to Stalin, everything is done the other way around: the darkness of pygmies of all sorts is making titanic efforts to falsify history and steal this great historical act from Stalin and Stalinism. To my shame, I must admit that I paid tribute to such an attitude towards Stalin as the leader of the country during the years of preparation for the war and during the war, when I was an anti-Stalinist and an eyewitness to the events of those years. Many years of study, research and reflection passed before the question “What would you do if you were in Stalin’s place?” I answered myself: I could not have done better than Stalin. And why not accuse Stalin in connection with the war! To listen to these “strategists” (a poet said about them back in the 19th century: “Everyone fancies himself a strategist, looking at the battle from the outside”), you couldn’t imagine a more stupid, cowardly, etc. person at the pinnacle of power than Stalin in those years . Stalin allegedly did not prepare the country for war. In fact, from the first days of his stay in power, Stalin knew that we could not avoid an attack from the West. And with Hitler coming to power in Germany, I knew that we would have to fight the Germans. Even we, schoolchildren of those years, knew this as an axiom. And Stalin not only foresaw this, he prepared the country for war. But it is one thing to organize and mobilize available resources to prepare for war. And it's another thing to create these resources. And in order to create them in the conditions of the country of those years, industrialization was needed, “and for industrialization, collectivization of agriculture was needed, a cultural and ideological revolution was needed, education of the population was needed, and much more. And all this required titanic efforts over many years. I doubt that any other leadership of the country other than Stalin would have coped with this task. Stalin's did it. It has literally become a cliché to attribute to Stalin that he missed the start of the war, that he did not believe intelligence reports, that he believed Hitler, etc. I don’t know what is more in such statements - intellectual idiocy or deliberate meanness. Stalin was preparing the country for war. But not everything depended on him. We simply did not have time to prepare properly. And the Western strategists who manipulated Hitler, like Hitler himself, were not fools. They needed to defeat the Soviet Union by attacking it before it was better prepared to repel the attack. It's all banal. Didn’t one of the most outstanding political strategists in human history understand such platitudes?! I understood. But he also participated in the global strategic “game” and sought to delay the outbreak of war at any cost. Let's say he lost at this stage of history. But he more than compensated for the failure in other steps. History did not stop there. Stalin is blamed for the defeat of the Soviet army at the beginning of the war and much more. I will not bore the reader with an analysis of this kind of phenomena. I will only formulate my general conclusion. I I am convinced that in understanding the overall situation on the planet during the Second World War, including as part of the war of the Soviet Union against Germany, Stalin was head and shoulders above all the major politicians, theorists and commanders who were in one way or another involved in the war. It would be an exaggeration to say that Stalin foresaw and planned everything during the war. Of course, there was foresight, there was planning. But there was no less unforeseen, unplanned and unwanted. It is obvious. But something else is important here: Stalin correctly assessed what was happening and used even our heavy defeats in the interests of victory. He thought and acted, one might say, like Kutuzov. And this was a military strategy that was most adequate to the real and concrete, rather than imaginary, conditions of those years. Even if we assume that Stalin succumbed to Hitler’s deception at the beginning of the war (which I cannot believe), he brilliantly used the fact of Hitler’s aggression to attract world public opinion to his side, which played a role in the split of the West and the formation of the anti-Hitler coalition. Something similar happened in other difficult situations for our country. Stalin’s services in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 are so significant and indisputable that it would be a manifestation of elementary historical justice to return Stalin’s name to the city on the Volga where the most important battle of the war took place. The fiftieth anniversary of Stalin's death is a suitable occasion for this.

Stalin and Hitler. One of the ways to falsify and discredit Stalin and Stalinism is to identify them with Hitler and, accordingly, with German Nazism. The fact that there are similarities between these phenomena does not provide grounds for their identification. On this basis, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, Bush and many others can be accused of Stalinism. Of course, there was influence here. But Stalin's influence on Hitler was greater than the latter's on the former. In addition, the social law of mutual assimilation of social opponents was in effect here. Such a similarity was once recorded by Western sociologists in relation to the Soviet and Western social systems - I mean the theory of convergence (rapprochement) of these systems. But the main thing is not the similarity of Stalinism and Nazism (and fascism), but their qualitative difference. Nazism (and fascism) is a phenomenon within the Westernist (capitalist) social system, in its political and ideological spheres. And Stalinism is a social revolution in the very foundations of the social system and the initial stage of the evolution of the communist social system, and not just a phenomenon in politics and ideology. It is no coincidence that there was such hatred of the Nazis (fascists) for communism. The masters of the Western world encouraged Nazism (fascism) as anti-communism, as a means of fighting communism. And do not forget that Hitler suffered a shameful defeat, and Stalin won a victory unprecedented in history. And it would not hurt today’s anti-Stalinists to think about the specific historical conditions in which this happened and what tremendous impact this victory had on humanity and on the course of world history. And if we draw analogies with historical figures, then the historical giant Mao Zedong became a follower of Stalin, and Hitler's follower is the historical pygmy Bush Jr. But today’s anti-Stalinists remain silent about such a deep and far-reaching analogy.

De-Stalinization. The actual struggle against the excesses of Stalinism began in the Stalin years, long before Khrushchev’s exorbitantly inflated report at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. It was going on in the depths of Soviet society. Stalin himself noticed the need for change, and there was enough evidence of this. Khrushchev's report was not the beginning of de-Stalinization, but the result of the beginning of the struggle for it among the mass of the population. Khrushchev used the de-Stalinization of the country that had actually begun in the interests of personal power. Having come to power, he partly contributed to the process of de-Stalinization, and partly made efforts to keep it within certain limits. He was, after all, one of the figures of the Stalinist ruling elite. On his conscience there were no less crimes of Stalinism than on other close associates of Stalin. He was a Stalinist to the core. And he even carried out de-Stalinization using voluntaristic Stalinist methods. De-Stalinization was a complex and controversial process. And it is absurd to attribute it to the efforts and will of one person with the intellect of an average party official and the habits of a clown. What did de-Stalinization essentially mean, from a sociological point of view? Historical Stalinism as a certain set of principles for organizing the business life of the country, the masses of the population, management, maintaining order, indoctrination, education and training of the country's population, etc. played a great historical role, building the foundations of a communist social organization in the most difficult conditions and protecting them from attacks from outside. But it has exhausted itself, becoming an obstacle to the normal life of the country and its further evolution. The country, partly thanks to and partly in spite of it, has matured the forces and capabilities to overcome it. Precisely to overcome in the sense of moving to a new, higher stage of the evolution of communism. During the Brezhnev years, this stage was called developed socialism. But no matter what they call it, the rise actually happened. During the war years and in the post-war years, the country's enterprises and institutions began to function in many ways in ways that were not Stalinist. Suffice it to say that the number of business collectives of national importance (factories, schools, institutes, hospitals, theaters, etc.) by the middle of the Brezhnev years increased hundreds of times compared to the Stalin years, so the assessment of the Brezhnev years as stagnant is an ideological lie. Thanks to the Stalinist cultural revolution, the human material of the country changed qualitatively. In the sphere of power and management, a state bureaucratic apparatus and a party super-state apparatus have developed, more effective than Stalin’s democracy, and making the latter unnecessary. The level of state ideology no longer corresponds to the increased educational level of the population. In a word, de-Stalinization occurred as a natural process of the maturation of Russian communism, its transition to a routine mature state. The removal of Khrushchev and the coming to his place of Brezhnev occurred as an ordinary performance in the ordinary life of the party ruling elite, as the replacement of one ruling clique by another. Khrushchev's “coup,” despite the fact that it was the highest in terms of changing personalities in power, was, first of all, a social revolution. Brezhnev’s “coup” was such only in the highest spheres of power. It was directed not against the state of society that developed during the Khrushchev years, but against the absurdities of the Khrushchev leadership, against Khrushchev personally, against Khrushchev’s voluntarism, which developed into adventurism. From a sociological point of view, the Brezhnev period was a continuation of the Khrushchev period, but without the extremes of the transition period. As a result of de-Stalinization, the communist dictatorship of the Stalin period was replaced by the communist democracy of the Khrushchev and then Brezhnev periods. I I associate this period with the name of Brezhnev, and not Khrushchev, since the Khrushchev period was only a transition to the Brezhnev period. It was the second that presented an alternative to Stalinism, and the most radical one within the framework of communism. Stalin's style of leadership was voluntaristic: the highest power sought to force those under its power to live and work the way it, the power, wanted. Brezhnev’s style of leadership turned out to be opportunistic: the highest authorities themselves adapted to objectively developing circumstances... Another feature of Brezhnevism is that the Stalinist system of democracy gave way to an administrative-bureaucratic system. And the third feature is the transformation of the party apparatus into the basis, core and skeleton of the entire system of power and management. Stalinism did not collapse, as anti-Stalinists, anti-communists, and anti-Sovietists claimed and still claim. He left the arena of history, having won his great role and exhausted himself in the post-war years. He came down ridiculed and condemned, but misunderstood even in the Soviet years. And now, in conditions of rabid anti-communism and the unrestrained falsification of Soviet history, one cannot count on an objective understanding of it at all. The triumphant pygmies of post-Sovietism, who destroyed Russian (Soviet) communism, in every possible way belittle and distort the actions of the giants of the Soviet past in order to justify their betrayal of this past and themselves look like giants in the eyes of their duped contemporaries.

The text of this report was published in the book. “The End of the Prehistory of Humanity: Socialism as an Alternative to Capitalism” (Omsk, 2004, pp. 207-215) - a collection of materials from the international scientific and practical conference of the same name, held on the basis of the open academic theoretical seminar “Marxian Readings” at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (27-29 May 2003).

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Dzhugashvili)
Years of life: December 6 (18), 1878, according to the official date December 9 (21), 1879 - March 5, 1953)
Years of Stalin's reign: 1922-1953
Soviet statesman, political and military figure. General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) since 1922.
Head of the Soviet Government (Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars since 1941, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR since 1946, Generalissimo of the Soviet Union (1945).
General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee.

The young years of Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich (Dzhugashvili)

Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was born on December 9 (21), 1879 in the village Gori, Tiflis province (Georgia). Stalin's father, Vissarion Ivanovich, was a shoemaker by profession. I. Stalin's mother, Ekaterina Glakhovna (Georgievna) Geladze, was the daughter of a serf. Joseph was born as the third (according to other sources, fourth) child in the family, and the only one of all the children to survive.

In 1888, Joseph’s mother enrolled Joseph in the Gori Theological School. In 1894, Joseph Dzhugashvili graduated from theological school, and the teachers noted him as the best student. In the same year, Joseph Dzhugashvili entered the Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary.

In 1898, I. Dzhugashvili became a member of the 1st social democratic organization in Georgia, “Mesame-Dasi” (“Third Group”). He was expelled from the seminary's graduating class because of his participation in Marxist circles.

After a while, he gets a job and an apartment at the Tiflis Physical Observatory.

In 1901, Joseph Dzhugashvili went underground. Became a member of the Batumi and Tiflis committees of the RSDLP. He worked under the party nicknames Stalin, David, Koba.

In the same year, he was arrested for the first time for organizing a demonstration on May 1 in Tiflis.

In 1903, after the Second Party Congress, Joseph Dzhugashvili became a Bolshevik. He actively participated in the revolutionary work of the Bolsheviks in 1905 - 1907. Gradually he became a professional underground fighter. The authorities repeatedly exiled him to the north and east of the country. He successfully escaped from places of exile and returned to his activities.

In December 1905, I. Dzhugashvili became a delegate to the First Party Conference and met Lenin.

In 1912, during the VI All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP, I. Stalin was introduced to the Central Committee and the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee (hereinafter referred to as the Central Committee) of the party. The first issue of the Pravda newspaper was created with the active participation of party member Koba. It was during this period that he turned from Joseph Dzhugashvili into Joseph Stalin. Under this pseudonym his first scientific work, “Marxism and the National Question,” was published.

In February 1913, I. Stalin was arrested in St. Petersburg and exiled to Siberia (“Turukhansk exile”).

In 1916, I. Stalin was called up for military service, but did not join the army due to a hand injury.

In 1917, after the February Revolution, Joseph Vissarionovich returned to Petrograd. Reinstated as a member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party and is a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Pravda. At the same time, he led the activities of the Central Committee and the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks.

In Petrograd, Stalin met his future wife, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of a Bolshevik.

In May 1917, Stalin was elected a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. He personally participated in the October armed uprising and the preparation of the revolution. Soon he became part of the 1st Soviet government, in which he took the post of People's Commissar for Nationalities.

In 1918, I. Stalin was appointed a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense.

At the beginning of the Civil War, he was sent to the south of Russia as an extraordinary commissioner of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for the procurement and export of grain from the North Caucasus to industrial centers.

In the fall of 1918, Joseph Stalin was appointed chairman of the Military Council of the Ukrainian Front.

In December 1918, I. Stalin and Dzerzhinsky prevented the union of the armies of Kolchak and the Entente in Siberia.

In 1919, Stalin skillfully repelled the blow of General Yudenich. The city was recaptured. After which he acquired the image of a party member who knew how to make decisions and achieve his goals. He became known as a talented leader and organizer, and at the Eighth Party Congress, Joseph Stalin was elected a member of the Politburo and the Organizing Bureau. V. Lenin nominated Stalin to a new position - People's Commissar of State Control ("People's Commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate").

In the summer of 1920, I. Stalin participated in the liberation of Kyiv from the Poles.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and his time

In 1922, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin became the General Secretary of the Central Committee, that is, the head of the entire USSR.

In 1925, Stalin eliminated members of the Central Committee he disliked.

At the end of the 20s. In the Soviet Union, the regime of personal power of I. Stalin was established. Historians have characterized this regime as totalitarian, or rather terrorist. The country pursued a policy of forced collectivization, the dissatisfied were subjected to repression, and many were exterminated. The “cult of Stalin’s personality” actively developed. Stalin was actually deified by the people (artificially).

At the end of the 1920s. the policy of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” was also proclaimed. Actively forced collectivization covered all villages. All private enterprises have been liquidated. With the adoption of the 1st 5-year plan (1928–1931), accelerated industrialization and the development of mechanical engineering and the military industry began. The standard of living of citizens decreased, and in 1932–1934. The village was struck by massive famine.

The Great Terror brought mass purges of “enemies of the people.” Most of the communists with pre-revolutionary experience were placed in special camps or shot. Total number of victims in the 1930s has not yet been established.

In 1939, I. Stalin's attempts to conclude a treaty of non-aggression and mutual assistance between the USSR, England and France failed. He began to intensify Soviet-German negotiations and on August 23, 1939, a non-aggression pact was signed between the USSR and Germany. However, Germany soon attacked the USSR. While, according to economic agreements, the USSR sent trains with food, non-ferrous metals, and strategic raw materials to Germany, the Germans had already developed the Barbarossa plan to capture the European part of the USSR.

In 1940, the Baltic states that were previously part of the Russian Empire - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - were again annexed to the USSR in 1940; The territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina also became part of the USSR.

With the outbreak of the 1941 war, I. Stalin headed the State Defense Committee, became Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, Supreme Commander-in-Chief, People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR.

For his personal contribution to the victory in World War II, Stalin was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded the Order of Suvorov, 1st degree, and 2 Orders of Victory.
On June 27, 1945, he was awarded the title of Generalissimo of the Soviet Union (the highest military rank in the USSR).

After the end of the war in 1945, Stalin's regime of terror resumed. Totalitarian control over society has been re-established. However, Soviet industry developed rapidly, and by the early 1950s. The level of industrial production was already 2 times higher than the level of 1940. The standard of living of the rural population remained extremely low. Under the pretext of fighting “cosmopolitanism,” Stalin carried out purges one after another, and anti-Semitism actively flourished.

On March 5, 1953, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin died in Moscow. According to the medical report, his death was caused by a cerebral hemorrhage. However, there were versions of poisoning and murder as a result of a conspiracy (Lavrentiy Beria, N.S. Khrushchev and G.M. Malenkov).

His embalmed body was placed in a mausoleum next to Lenin, and in 1961, after the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, it was moved from the mausoleum and buried near the Kremlin wall.

Stalin was married twice:

on Ekaterina Svanidze (1904-1907)
on Nadezhda Alliluyeva (1919-1932)
sons: Yakov and Vasily
daughter: Svetlana

The political system that was implemented by Stalin in 1928-1953 was called “Stalinism”.
Public opinion about Stalin's personality very polarized.

Stalin's period in power was marked, on the one hand, by the active industrialization of the country, victory in the Great Patriotic War, massive labor and military heroism, the transformation of the USSR into a superpower with significant scientific, industrial and military potential, and the strengthening of the geopolitical influence of the Soviet Union in the world; and on the other hand, the establishment of the totalitarian dictatorial regime of Stalin, mass repressions directed against entire social strata and nationalities (especially Jews), forced collectivization, which led to a sharp decline in agriculture and the famine of 1932-1933, horrific millions of human losses (as a result wars, deportations, famine and repression), the division of the world community into 2 warring camps, the establishment of pro-Soviet communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the beginning of the Cold War.

Joseph Stalin - honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences since 1939.

He is a two-time winner of the title “Man of the Year” (according to Time magazine) (1939, 1942).

In 1953, 4 copies of the Order of Generalissimo Stalin were made.

After the XXII Congress of the CPSU, numerous monuments dedicated to Stalin that stood throughout the country were dismantled. Currently, monuments to I. Stalin have been erected in Gori, Mozdok, Mirny, Chikola, Beslan and Makhachkala, Kutaisi. In the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow there is a bust of I. Stalin, as one of the commanders of the Red Army. The largest monumental composition in Europe, in Prague, is dedicated to him.

Numerous museums store historical documents from the Stalinist era (Gori, Museums, Solvychegodsk, Vologda, Volgograd).

The image of Stalin is reflected in novels, essays, stories: Roy Medvedev. Stalin in the first days of the Great Patriotic War, Alexander Bushkov. Stalin. A ship without a captain; Stalin. Red Monarch; Stalin. The Frozen Throne, V. Soima. Forbidden Stalin and many others.

There is evidence that he even wrote poetry (“Novices”).

Stalin's works: “On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union”, “Marxism and Issues of Linguistics”, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”, as well as a collection of works in 9 volumes.

In cinema, Stalin is vividly characterized in the films: “The Feasts of Belshazzar”, the series “Stalin.Live”, “Young Stalin”.

In the television project of the Rossiya TV channel, “The Name of Russia” in 2008, Joseph Stalin took 3rd place, gaining 519,071 votes (losing to Alexander Nevsky and Stolypin).

The chapter of Soviet history, which it is logical to call “Stalin’s time”, named after the General Secretary of the Central Committee, who left his indelible imprint on the era, determining the course of development of the state and the fate of all its citizens, takes approximately 30 years. Its first stage is the struggle for Lenin’s “kaftan”. Stalin demonstrates an excellent understanding of the essence of the system left as a legacy by Lenin, an understanding of the main thing - the apparatus, the party machine is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for power. Stalin shows the talent of a political player, changing his views depending on the situation, borrowing slogans from his opponents, attributing to them a point of view that they do not adhere to. He divides his competitors, pitting one against the other. First, in alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev, as a junior partner, he destroys the position of Trotsky, who is quickly losing all opportunities to claim a leadership position in the country. Then, in alliance with Bukharin, Stalin crushes the “united” opposition of Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev, so that in the late 20s. attack the “right,” i.e., Bukharin and his supporters.

In 1926, the NEP began to choke. Economic recovery is largely complete. First of all, this concerned agriculture. The question arises: what next? In what direction should agriculture be developed? What funds should be used to build a strong industry? The most important feature of the management system created by the party after October was that all problems were solved only from the point of view of political benefits, taking into account the interests of political power. From a political point of view, all national economic problems were solved.

If we look at the history of Joseph Stalin's unstoppable rise, we see that his views on economics were always determined by the interests of the struggle for power. He teams up with Bukharin to deal with the “left”, and then he will call on the “left” to finish off the “right”. Until 1927, Stalin supported the program of Bukharin, who called on the peasants to “get rich.” This gives him the opportunity to deal with the “left” opposition. Since the summer of 1927, Stalin has been turning the front around.

Difficulties with grain procurement caused by the state policy on prices for agricultural products become a pretext for an attack on the village. 30 thousand communists are sent to the villages to “beat out” bread. The peasants say: “19 is back.” January 15, 1928 Stalin leaves Moscow and heads to Siberia - the last time he makes such a trip around the country. Stalin returns with a directive - it will be called the “Ural-Siberian method” - to apply Article 107 of the Criminal Code to the peasants and punish “for concealing” grain, as for speculation, to involve “poor people” in the search for grain, giving them 25% of the confiscated grain. This was Lenin's method of introducing civil war into the countryside.

The main enemy is declared to be the fist. More recently, Kalinin wrote: “The fist is a bogeyman, it is a ghost of the old world. This is not a social stratum, not even a group, not even a handful, these are endangered units.” Now Stalin proudly declares at the plenum of the Central Committee: “We are gradually crushing and squeezing out the capitalist elements of the countryside, sometimes leading them to ruin.” In April 1928, Stalin announced the dissolution of the “civil peace”: “We have internal enemies, we have external enemies. We must not forget this, comrades, not for a minute.”

November 7, 1929 "Is it true" publishes Stalin's article "The Year of the Great Turning Point". It ended with the words: “We are moving full steam ahead along the path of industrialization.”

The poetic metaphor became a reality seven weeks later: on December 27, 1929, addressing Marxist agrarians, Stalin announced a transition to the policy of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”, to the policy of collectivization. The NEP is over. The next “big leap” had begun. A “revolution from above” began, much more radical than the October Revolution, which broke the foundations of life for more than 130 million villagers, who made up 2/3 of the country’s population, and finally changed the nature of the state.

Winter 1929-30 - was a terrible time of “complete” collectivization. The Soviet historian writes: “In the resolution on the pace of collectivization adopted on January 5, 1930, it was planned to basically complete collectivization in the North Caucasus, Lower and Middle Volga in the fall of 1930, and in the remaining grain-growing regions - in the fall of 1931.” ( "Is it true", 9.8. 87). The Soviet historian does not write - who “adopted the resolution” on the insane pace. But he announces: “In March 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks took decisive measures to correct the situation.” It is enough to turn to the newspapers of 1930 to discover that the resolution on the pace was adopted by the same Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which two months later sounded the - temporary - all-clear.

65 days - from December 27, 1929, when Stalin announces the transition to complete collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, adding “those who have taken off their heads do not cry,” to March 2, 1930, when the same Stalin publishes "Pravda" The article “Dizziness from Success,” in which all the blame for excesses is placed on the performers, shocked the country much more than those “ten days” that John Reed wrote about.

Two processes are taking place simultaneously: collective farms are being created and the “kulaks” are being dispossessed. Both processes are interconnected. Dispossession should give collective farms a material base that the state is unable to provide. Dispossession, depriving the village of the most active, enterprising, independent peasants, undermined the spirit of resistance in the village and facilitated collectivization. Finally, the fate of the “kulaks”, expelled from their homes, exiled to the north, sent to prisons and camps, demonstrated the omnipotence of the Soviet government.

There was no legal definition of the concept of “fist”. And this gave the authorities a powerful weapon. In one region a peasant with two horses was considered a “kulak”, in another - with one. The one who did not go to the collective farm was declared a kulak. It was not the fist that was the enemy, but the enemy that was the fist. Anyone who did not want to go to the collective farm became an enemy. To facilitate collectivization, each republic, region, and district received a plan. The rate of collectivization was the same everywhere - 100%, the rate of dispossession varied between 5–7%. Where management wanted to excel, the plan was exceeded. In some areas, up to 15–20% of peasants were dispossessed.

The peasants resisted: they refused to enroll in collective farms, and in some places they started riots, which were suppressed in the most brutal manner. The most common form of resistance was the destruction of livestock. Then it will take 30 years to restore the livestock population to the level of 1928. The final blow to the peasantry was dealt by a famine, deliberately organized by the authorities in 1931-32. It is difficult to find more eloquent evidence of the party’s attitude towards the people than the figures for grain exports during the period of collectivization: 1928 - 1 million centners, 1930 - 48.3 million centners, 1931 - 51.8 million centners. During these years, millions of peasants die of hunger. According to the calculations of the English historian R. Conquest, about 15 million people, more than 10% of the population, became victims of collectivization - from hunger, during resettlement, in prisons and camps.

The economic results of collectivization were catastrophic: in 1929-33. Gross grain harvests decreased and yields fell. The demographic results were tragic - collectivization turned into genocide. From a political point of view, collectivization was a remarkable success. First of all, the state could easily take grain from collective farms, which previously had to be bought from individual farmers. “The party,” Stalin summed up satisfied, “has achieved that instead of 500–600 million poods of grain, which was procured during the period of predominance of peasant farming, it now has the opportunity to procure 1200–1400 thousand poods of grain annually.”

Stalin put it precisely: “the party has achieved it.” The party achieved the elimination of the peasantry, the last class that retained some (economic) independence from the state. Now there were no obstacles to the creation of a totalitarian system in which everything and everyone belonged to the party. Political power was in the hands of the party before, but now it has completely taken control of the economy.

The consequences of collectivization are still vividly felt today. The chronic, incurable crisis of Soviet agriculture is a direct result of collectivization. The permanent crisis state of the collective and state farm economy does not allow the Soviet national economy to emerge from the crisis. The Soviet Union today is, to a large extent, a product of collectivization. That is why, to this day, Soviet historians and ideologists are afraid to tell the truth about collectivization. Continuing to justify the “great turning point,” ideologists refer to the benefits that collective farms brought to the country during the war, allowing the state to concentrate all food in its own hands. This is a convincing argument that was understood by Hitler. As you know, the Nazis did not dissolve collective farms in the occupied areas. But it is also well known that the presence of collective farms was not a prerequisite for victory over Nazi Germany. Great Britain, for example, withstood Nazi attacks without collective farms.

Collectivization was a necessary stage in the process of building a totalitarian state. Simultaneously with the liquidation of the individual peasantry, the nationalization of the country's spiritual life is taking place. In 1931, Stalin declared himself the greatest historian and gave instructions on how to write about the past. In 1932-34. Writers are sworn in: the Union of Soviet Writers is created, and after it - unions of representatives of other areas of culture. The spiritual life of the country is regulated, unified, and completely controlled by the party.

“The year of the great turning point” is the beginning of the first five-year plan, the start of a “planned economy.” The dream of a plan, a magic key that would open the door to heaven, tormented Lenin from the moment he read the book of the Berlin professor Ballod "State of the Future". The book, published in 1898, attracted no attention. The Prussian economist's fantasies of a "state of the future" in which all means of production and foreign trade were nationalized, in which all economic life and labor were regulated from above, read as yet another utopian program. Lenin promotes publication "States of the Future" in Russia in 1906. The book was republished after the revolution. During the World War, the German Minister of Economics Rathenau organized the country's economy using some of Ballod's ideas. For Lenin, this is evidence of the real possibilities of a planned economy. The famous slogan - communism is Soviet power plus electrification - masked Lenin's true thought: communism is Soviet power plus the Kaiser's (regulated) economy.

Insisting on drawing up the first plan - GOEL - Lenin referred to the ideas of Ballod and the practice of Rathenau. The GOELRO plan, which provided for 100 power plants, then 20, remained on paper. The NEP came and planning was put aside. They returned to it in 1927, when the NEP began to choke, when the successes of the national economy began, as it seemed to Stalin and his associates, to erode the power of the party. Economists begin to develop a five-year plan for the development of the national economy under the strictest supervision of the Politburo.

The Five-Year Plan was supposed to start in October 1928. But the plan was not yet ready. In April 1929, it was approved by the XVI Party Conference, although it was still not ready. Complications with the preparation of the plan were caused by two main reasons. The first is the extraordinary difficulty of the task. The necessary information was not available to draw up a comprehensive plan for the use of all the country's resources for the purpose of its industrialization. They turned to foreigners for help. American firms designed Soviet heavy and light industries. The Americans, Germans, British, French, and Italians designed, supervised construction, and supplied equipment for the main facilities of the first five-year plan. The second reason was ideological. Economists have prepared a five-year plan in two versions - starting and optimal. Even the starting version was monstrously optimistic. As the English economist Alec Nove wrote: “Miracles rarely happen in economics, and without the intervention of Divine Providence it would be difficult to imagine a simultaneous increase in investment and consumption, not to mention a simultaneous stunning increase in the output of industrial and agricultural goods, and labor productivity.” The plan was adopted in its optimal form. But as soon as it was approved, Stalin ordered all figures to be raised to a new, unprecedented height. More recently, Stalin ridiculed Trotsky's proposal to build a hydroelectric power station on the Dnieper. The General Secretary explained that the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station would be too expensive. Such construction, he said with his characteristic humor, would be reminiscent of the behavior of a man who saved a few kopecks and spent them on buying a gramophone, and not on repairing a plow. Now - less than two years later - Stalin is demanding the purchase of millions of "gramophones", Trotsky's figures he calls "shabby". The optimal plan, for example, provided for doubling coal production in five years: instead of 35 million tons - 75 million tons. The Stalinist figure, which became the “control”, is 105 million tons. All numbers increase in approximately the same proportion. In December 1929, the congress of shock workers decided to implement the five-year plan in 4 years. In February 1931, Stalin spoke about the possibility - this meant: the necessity - of fulfilling the five-year plan in the decisive branches of industry in three years. Stalin announces: “Pace is everything.” Acceleration begins.

The numbers intoxicate the planners headed by Stalin. They also intoxicate the builders, the Soviet people. It seems: one more effort, another plant built, a dam erected, a kilometer of canal - and here it is - socialism, universal happiness. “Boudin fever” is declared a sign of health. The party and the poets are urging: time is forward. And it begins to seem that time belongs to the state, belongs to the party.

In the first five-year plan, the ideological, most important function of planning appears for the first time. Lenin was responsible for discovering the possibility of linking numbers and goals. In 1919, he registered this discovery in the formula: if you give a man 100 thousand tractors, he will say - I am for communion. The figure is 100 thousand tractors; the goal is communication. In Russia at that time there were about 2 thousand tractors. Consequently, the path to “community” could be calculated by increasing the number of agricultural machines, or power plants, or factories, etc. The path to the future became visible. Time was cut into portions, overcome by numbers. The Five-Year Plan became the unit of the road to communism.

In 1932, summing up the results of the first five-year plan began, the first stage on the path to the goal. In January 1933, Stalin announced that the plan had been completed by 93.7%. Juggling with numbers, calculations in percentages, in rubles, the value of which was determined by the planning authorities at will - made it possible to say whatever they wanted, to celebrate victory. In addition, there were undoubted results: heavy industry giants grew up in an extraordinary time frame - in the Urals, Kuzbass, Volga, Ukraine, factories were built in Moscow and Leningrad, 5,500 km of railways were laid (the plan included 16 thousand km). Stalin will ask at the XVII Congress: “Isn’t this a miracle?”

Doubts arose not even when comparing control figures and recognized results. For example, it was planned to smelt 10.3 million tons (in 1928 - 4.2 million tons), but 5.9 million tons were smelted. Doubts arose when the question was asked about the price of the “miracle.” The main source of funds for the implementation of the five-year plan were the so-called. internal savings. They were obtained primarily through what Stalin's chief economist Strumilin called “consumer asceticism”: raw materials, including food, are exported from the country, although the population - even in the city - lives from hand to mouth. In the summer of 1932, Stalin announced: “There was no need to overthrow capitalism in November 1917 and build socialism over a number of years if we do not ensure that our people live in comfort... It would be foolish to think that socialism can be built on based on poverty and deprivation, on the basis of a reduction in personal needs and a decline in living standards.”

At the end of the first five-year plan, the standard of living decreased not only compared to 1913. It was lower than the level of 1928. In the next half century, Soviet leaders would repeatedly repeat Stalin’s words about the need to ensure that “our people live in comfort.” And “contentment” will recede like a horizon line.

The price of the five-year plan is not limited to a sharp decline in living standards. This period included a government-organized famine that claimed millions of victims, including at least 7 million in Ukraine. Criminal legislation is sharply escalating. On August 7, 1932, perhaps the most severe law in the history of legal proceedings was adopted: for the theft of public or cooperative property, the punishment is the death penalty; only in extenuating circumstances was it replaced by camp imprisonment for 10 years. For the first time, prison labor is being used to build socialism on an unprecedented scale. The White Sea-Baltic Canal is being built by 300 thousand prisoners at a time. According to official data, 800 thousand people were kept in prisons alone in May 1933. The number of prisoners in concentration camps far exceeded this figure.

The nightmarish glory of Hitler's concentration camps should not obscure Soviet priority in this area. The honor of the first use of the term “concentration camp”, which was born in Cuba at the very end of the 19th century. belongs to Trotsky. In an order dated June 4, 1918, the People's Commissar for Military Affairs demanded the imprisonment of Czechoslovaks who did not want to surrender their weapons in concentration camps. On June 26, Trotsky proposes to the Council of People's Commissars to send officers who do not want to serve in the Red Army to concentration camps. On August 9, Lenin, concerned about the scale of the peasant uprising in the Penza province, demands from the provincial executive committee: “Carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; those who are dubious will be locked up in a concentration camp.” On September 5, 1918, after this measure of repression was already widely used, it was legitimized by a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars: “It is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.” Very soon it becomes clear that among the prisoners there is a steadily growing number of workers and peasants who are punished for “sabotage”, leaving work, failure to comply with standards, etc. In 1919, Dzerzhinsky announced that “concentration camps are a school of labor.”

During the years of the first five-year plan, a special, Soviet attitude towards work finally took shape. It ceases to be an economic function, as it has always been since the moment when the ancestor of man stood on his hind legs and picked up a stone in his front paws. Soviet labor acquires political functions. It becomes a measure of a person’s dignity, determining his place in life, but at the same time it turns into the gravest punishment. A good worker is a good person, because he contributes to the construction of socialism. But “bad” people, enemies, also build socialism, re-educating themselves in the process of labor in the camps. Stalin declares: work is a matter of honor, valor and heroism. But this Stalinist slogan adorns the gates of concentration camps, the number of which does not cease to grow. Labor is a matter of honor, valor and heroism, and at the same time all the largest (and even medium and small) objects of the Five-Year Plan are built by prisoners. Slave labor becomes the most important tool for building socialism.

The feverish construction of a new world is underway, and fear is becoming an integral part of the air that Soviet people breathe. In November 1928, the plenum of the Central Committee decided to conduct a second general purge of party members. Also in 1928, the first - after 1922 - large show trial, the so-called. Shakhtinsky. Engineers and technicians are being tried, accused of a previously unknown crime - sabotage. The pest becomes a new enemy and an explanation for all the failures of socialist construction. The Shakhty trial - entirely fabricated by the OGPU - another incarnation of the Cheka - ends with death sentences and a campaign of hatred. In 1930, another campaign of hatred “towards enemies” is organized around another fabricated trial - the so-called. Industrial parties.

In 1932, passports were introduced in the Soviet Union. In a volume of the Soviet encyclopedia published in 1930, one could still read: “The passport system was an important tool for police influence and tax policy in the so-called. police state. The passport system operated in pre-revolutionary Russia. Soviet law does not know the passport system.” Two years later it recognized her. Moreover, passports were issued only to city residents; peasants were deprived of them, and thereby assigned to collective farms.

Fear, as a necessary element in the construction of communism, was used by Lenin immediately after the October Revolution. The Cheka was terrifying because it was - for the first time in the history of Russia - a body that had the right to search for enemies, conduct investigations, pronounce a sentence and carry it out. One of the signs of the change in policy in 1921 was the reduction in the functions of the "bodies", which were renamed. The terrible letters - VChK - were replaced by a still meaningless abbreviation - GPU, then - OGPU. From the second half of the 20s. the new name takes on an increasingly sinister meaning. In the popular play by A. Afinogenov "Fear", which premiered in the early 30s, physiologist prof. Borodin, who studied Soviet citizens, said in a famous monologue: “80% of all those studied live under the eternal fear of being shouted at or losing their social support. The milkmaid is afraid of the confiscation of her cow, the peasants are afraid of forced collectivization, the Soviet worker is afraid of continuous purges, the party worker is afraid of being accused of deviation, the scientist is afraid of being accused of idealism, the technical worker is afraid of being accused of sabotage.” Prof. Borodin, who at the end of the play will renounce his views after a conversation with employees of the GPU, adds: there are another 20% of citizens who, it would seem, have nothing to fear, “they are the masters of the country,” these are workers, nominees. “For them,” explains the physiologist, “their brain is afraid... They are always trying to catch up and overtake. And, suffocating in a continuous race, the brain goes crazy or slowly degrades.” Prof. Borodin concludes: “We live in an era of great fear.” And this was only 1931!

When the Romanian writer Panait Istrati, very popular in the USSR, came to the country of the Soviets for the 10th anniversary of October, he discovered that much did not correspond to what he had previously been told about the new world. The writer's Soviet friends answered: you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. The writer objected: I see broken eggs, but I don’t see an omelette. He wasn't entirely right. The main result of the “broken eggs” was the creation of the cult of Stalin. On the 50th anniversary of Stalin's birth, it was announced for the first time that the party, the state, the international communist movement, and all progressive humanity were led by a great leader - Stalin. During the years of the first five-year plan, Stalin seized enormous power in all areas of life and became the object of a cult.

1934 begins with a holiday. The 17th Party Congress opens on January 26. This, as Kirov will say, is a congress of winners. Those who led collectivization and organized the famine for the final defeat of the peasantry, who led industrialization and, at the cost of incredible hardships and efforts, using an army of prisoners, achieved considerable victories, gathered in the Kremlin.

Speaking with his report, Stalin states with satisfaction: “If at the XV Congress it was necessary to prove the correctness of the party line and fight against well-known anti-Leninist groups, and at the XVI Congress to finish off the last adherents of these groups, then at this congress there is nothing to prove, and, perhaps, and there’s no one to hit.” The praises of Stalin, the leader of the victors, from his most faithful comrades, reach their limit in the anthem sung by Kirov: Stalin is the greatest genius of all times and peoples.

On December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, member of the Politburo, secretary of the Central Committee, secretary of the Leningrad party organization was killed. For the first time since the civil war, one of the party leaders became a victim of a terrorist attack. The circumstances of Kirov's death are of extreme interest not only because the murder of the leader of the Leningrad communists became a signal for the “Great Terror.” Legends associated with Kirov today play an important role in the process of yet another falsification of history. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, in a “closed” report at the 20th Congress, left no doubt that the murder of Kirov was carried out on the orders (never written, of course) of Stalin. A commission was created to investigate the matter. The results of her work have not yet been made public.

It is known that the Leningrad leader was killed by a revolver shot by the young communist Leonid Nikolaev. It is known that, having learned about the murder, Stalin immediately went to Leningrad, where he personally interrogated the killer and those who were considered his accomplices. It is known that on the evening of December 1, as soon as the news of the shot in Smolny reached Moscow, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee signed a decree, practically introducing a state of emergency in the country. Mass arrests are immediately carried out in Leningrad using ready-made lists. Arrests are also taking place in other cities. In the first days of January 1935, newspapers published reports of executions of “White Guards” initially accused of a terrorist act: 37 in Leningrad, 33 in Moscow, 28 in Kyiv, etc., etc. These numbers are significant underestimated, as evidenced by survivors of those arrested.

After the “White Guards,” the perpetrators of the terrorist act are called “spies” who infiltrated from abroad. Finally, the accusation is addressed to the old Bolsheviks, Lenin's comrades - Zinoviev and Kamenev. In January 1935, the first show trial was organized at which communists were tried. Zinoviev and Kamenev are found “morally responsible” for the murder of Kirov and sentenced to 10 years (Zinoviev) and 5 years (Kamenev) in prison. In August 1936, for the same “crime” at the next show trial, they were sentenced to death.

The “Great Terror” begins. In terms of the number of victims, this period - 1935-1938 - is inferior to the previous one - the period of collectivization. But in the mid-30s. the object of the main attack was not the “gray mass” of the peasantry, but members of the ruling party, the most prominent leaders of the revolution, party, government, and major commanders. The massacre of the power elite shocked the world, which did not pay attention to the millions of nameless victims.

The murder of Kirov and the first two trials of the Old Bolsheviks were prepared by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, headed by Yagoda. On September 25, 1936, Stalin and Zhdanov, vacationing in Sochi, signed a telegram addressed to members of the Politburo: “We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade. Yezhov was appointed to the post of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. Yagoda has definitely shown himself to be clearly incapable of exposing the Trotskyist-Zinoviev bloc.”

The “Yezhovshchina” begins. This time can be depicted graphically by a wavy line, the peaks of which were show trials that announced the liquidation of the next “conspiracies”: the trial of Pyatakov, Serebryakov and others in January 1937; the trial of Bukharin, Rykov and others in March 1938; message about the arrest of the largest Soviet military leaders in June 1937. At the same time, mass arrests and executions are taking place. The population of the camps is increasing to unimaginable proportions. In Tvardovsky’s poem “Terkin in the Next World” it is said about this: “There - in rows, according to years, Kolyma and Magadan, Vorkuta and Narym marched in invisible formation... Who, for what, by whose will - science will figure it out...”

Many books have been written about the Yezhovshchina, about Stalin’s terror: memoirs, studies... Among these books - "Gulag Archipelago" Alexander Solzhenitsyn, monograph by Robert Conquest "Great Terror", "Stalin" Boris Suvarin. All of these, however, are unknown publications in the USSR. Soviet science, which A. Tvardovsky proposes to understand, is either silent or telling lies.

The “Great Terror” begins with the murder of Kirov. Several years pass after the shot in Smolny and the delegates of the “Congress of Winners” find themselves, as N. Khrushchev put it, in a “meat grinder.” Of the 1,956 delegates, it was said at the 20th Congress, 1,108 were arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes. Of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee elected at the XVII Congress, 98 people, i.e. 70%, were arrested and shot. What is the reason what happened?

She explained everything to her contemporaries “History of the CPSU (b). Short course", the first edition of which appeared in 1938. It explained that the victims of repression were enemies of the people, “White Guard pygmies,” “White Guard boogers,” “insignificant lackeys of the fascists.” In the seventh edition "History of the CPSU"(1984) explanation is completely different. “The party and the people at that time were unaware of Stalin’s abuses of power” (p. 425). The implication is that the terror that gripped all segments of the population was accepted as something so natural and normal that no one noticed anything. And only many years later were Stalin’s “abuses” suddenly discovered. In the mid-60s. the concept of resistance of Leninists to Stalin is born, expressed during the voting at the XVII Congress, when, allegedly, during the elections to the Central Committee, fewer votes were cast for Stalin than for Kirov. This is the theory of “good” Kirov and “bad” Stalin. It is most consistently presented in the novel by A. Rybakov "Children of Arbat". Until now, there is no convincing evidence of “real Leninists” opposing Stalin at the 17th Congress. Neither their speeches at the congress (including Kirov’s speech), nor their activities during collectivization and industrialization give reason to doubt their gratitude to the main “winner.”

Khrushchev, recalling the past, asks: “Why did Stalin commit these crimes? Maybe he was deceived? But if he was deceived, then by whom?” When asked about the causes of the “Great Terror,” different answers are given. Including: Stalin was deceived by Beria! A clue may lie in the memoirs of Walter Krivitsky, the former head of the Soviet spy network in Western Europe. He talks about the enormous impression that the “Night of Long Knives,” organized by Hitler in the summer of 1934, made on Stalin. On the night of June 30, Hitler’s closest associates, the leaders of the SA, were captured and killed. On occasion, “non-party” opponents of the Fuhrer were eliminated. Krivitsky recalls that as soon as the news of the “night of long knives” reached Moscow, Stalin convened the Politburo. Rejecting the opinions of specialists - intelligence officers, diplomats, experts - Stalin came to the conclusion that the mass murders organized by Hitler would bring the consolidation of Nazism and strengthen the personal power of the Fuhrer.

The murder of Kirov, organized six months after Hitler’s “action,” became a signal for the completion of the construction of a totalitarian state. Stalin still lacked “his own party.” The cadres of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, who built socialism under his leadership after Lenin’s death, still, despite their devotion to the General Secretary, remembered the revolution, the time when their founder stood at the head of the party and state. Stalin needed a monolithic party, obedient to him “like a corpse.” To do this, it was necessary to destroy the old Leninist apparatus, eliminate the memory of Lenin, and fill the shell of the party with new content, new members. In 1935, the party had already so permeated all the cells of the state organism that the blow to it was reflected everywhere. The pulled thread dragged a ball along with it: the state apparatus, economic, military, culture...

In March 1937, Stalin gave his most frank and most cynical speeches. He warns: the enemy is everywhere, a person with a party card is the main danger. Stalin invites all party leaders to prepare two deputies for themselves. The General Secretary, who at one time dreamed of a party - the Order of the Sword, now represents a dream come true - a party - an army. On March 3, Stalin speaks of “the leading cadres of our party”: 3-4 thousand senior command personnel, 30-40 thousand - officer corps, 100-150 thousand - non-commissioned officers. The rest, one could understand from the speech, were the rank and file, gray cattle. Lenin's organizational plan was implemented.

Stalin sets out at the plenum his main discovery, his contribution to Marxism: as the construction of socialism progresses, the class struggle will become more and more intensified. In other words: the better it is, the worse it will be.

The years of the “Great Terror,” when no one knew whether he would be awakened at night by a knock on the door and arrested, were at the same time a time of “turn to man.” Stalin declares that “man is the most valuable capital,” he says “life has become better, life has become more fun.” Flowers, tango and foxtrot are being rehabilitated. The poet proclaims: “You can wear a very bright tie and be a hero of labor in the mine.”

August 30, 1935 Alexey Stakhanov cuts down 102 tons of coal per shift instead of 7 according to the norm. Obviously, such an overfulfillment of the plan could be explained either by a ridiculously low standard, or by special conditions that were created for Stakhanov. The Central Committee “approves the initiative of the working people” - the Stakhanov movement is born. Industry standards are being raised by 15–20%. Genuine enthusiasm is combined with deception and postscripts - bullshit becomes the key to fulfilling plans. In 1935, the eighteenth year of the revolution, the vast majority of the country's population lives worse than before the revolution. Academician Strumilin calculated that on average a Soviet citizen consumed 261.6 kg of grain products per year. Lenin, in his early work on the development of capitalism in Russia, complained that the farm laborer consumed only 419.3 kg of grain per year. Lenin also spoke about 13.3 kg of lard. Strumilin doesn’t remember lard. Due to industrialization, the urban population is increasing sharply. As a result, the housing crisis is becoming particularly acute.

In the second half of the 30s. The Soviet system is finally taking shape, in which reality disappears, tightly disguised by lies.

On the night of the “Great Terror,” there is a joyful nationwide discussion of the new constitution, which was previously declared the most democratic in the world, or Stalin’s. The structure of the state did not change compared to the previous constitution of the USSR. But what was previously implied was written into the Basic Law: the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) is the vanguard of the working people, representing the leading core of all working people’s organizations, both public and state. The power of the party was legalized. The new constitution, unlike the previous ones, gave all Soviet citizens the right to vote, made elections to the councils direct, equal and secret, guaranteed freedom of speech, press, assembly, secrecy of correspondence, etc. It is significant that the first elections under the new constitution were held in December 1937, when the terror reached its highest point, when all citizens of the USSR could be arrested at any minute. However, the constitution contained a clause that crossed out all the rights it granted. A special article stated that all rights were respected “in accordance with the interests of the working people and in order to strengthen socialism.” Therefore, all rights depended on who determined what the interests of workers were, which contributed to the strengthening of socialism.

A wave of mass arrests of party members is growing; the party card, as Stalin says at the February-March plenum of the Central Committee (1937), is a cover for the enemy, but on the eve of the plenum the party congress adopts a resolution on “the restructuring of party work on the basis of the unconditional and full implementation of the principles of internal party democracy " It was decided to establish a closed vote during the elections of party officials.

The Constitution declares all Soviet citizens equal. They are equal, because they all equally do not have any real rights. By this time, the cult of Stalin acquired the character of deification. All are equal, all are slaves. And He, the Master, rises above everyone. French writer Henri Barbusse signs (there is reason to believe that he was not the author of the book) the official biography of Stalin. “The new Russia,” says the biography, “has created a real cult of Stalin, a cult born of trust and arose from below. This is... a person who is interested in everything and everyone, who has done what he has done and will do what needs to be done. He saved. He will save you." Before us is a new god who has descended from the sky, born of a wave of love from below. “Whoever you are,” ends the biography of God, “you need this benefactor.”

In 1920, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a novel "We"- a book about the future, about a totalitarian state, headed by the Benefactor - the loving father of all numbers - the inhabitants of the United State, and at the same time an almighty executioner. A fanatic of philanthropy, as Dostoevsky put it. The Benefactor imagined by Zamyatin left the pages of the novel and took into his own hands the fate of the Soviet Union, which turned into a United State in the 30s.

In the second half of the 30s. to the standard epithets that accompanied the name of Stalin - wise, brilliant, steel, iron - are added: dear, adored, kind, beloved.

The transformation of the country, the creation of a state of total lies and universal fear was expressed with exhaustive completeness in M. Gorky’s message “To the shock workers at the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal.” Defender of women, who spent decades crying over their fate in Tsarist Russia, author "Mothers", wrote, addressing female prisoners: “Your work once again shows the world how wonderfully work, meaningful by the great truth of the Bolsheviks, has an effect on a person, how miraculously the work of Lenin-Stalin organizes women.”

“The Time of Stalin” is also a war with Germany. Everything that has been done since the second half of the 20s, including collectivization, industrialization, monstrous terror, the establishment of complete power over the spiritual life of the country, in short - the creation of a totalitarian state, was justified and justified by the need to prepare the country for the “last decisive battle” with the imperialists. The intimidation of war forced the Soviet people to hurry, to race against time.

Thousands of books, including historical monographs, are devoted to the war of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. Six-volume edition released "History of the Patriotic War". In 1987, when the opportunity was given to question some of the official truths, it turned out that a lot had to be rewritten, even more told anew. Academician A. Samsonov, a military historian, admits that even “the version of a “sudden attack by Germany on the USSR” cannot be accepted unconditionally...” ( "Socialist Industry", 24.5.1987). A. Samsonov poses the main question. He writes that the war against the Nazi aggressor cost millions of victims, brought enormous material and cultural losses, caused incalculable suffering and asks: “Were all these victims inevitable?” ( "Moscow News", № 18,1987).

The decision made in August 1987 to write a 10-volume history of the Patriotic War (instead of the 6-volume one) convincingly indicates that there are many “blank spots” in the seemingly detailed history of the war with Germany.

Among the most striking “blank spots”, which, judging by the latest publications, it was decided to leave “white”, is the history of the beginning of the Second World War.

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet people were amazed to the core when they read on the front pages of the newspapers the news of the arrival in Moscow of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Third Reich, Ribbentrop. The next day, newspaper readers could get acquainted with the text of the Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the USSR and admire the photograph: smiling Stalin and Ribbentrop, united by a friendly handshake.

The amazement of the Soviet people was understandable: for many years they had been told that Nazism, Hitlerism, and fascism were the worst enemies of humanity and, first of all, the world’s first socialist state. Anti-Hitler propaganda intensified after the capture of Austria, then Czechoslovakia, after Germany presented territorial demands to Poland. The Soviet people never stopped talking about Hitlerism as the most important factor in the military threat.

The publication after the Second World War of documents from the German Foreign Ministry, memoirs, and research (ignored by Soviet historians) tells the long story of Stalin’s search for an agreement with Hitler’s Germany, who wanted to maintain the same good relations with it as the Soviet Union had with the Weimar Republic. The search for an agreement was conducted in strict secrecy.

For the first time, Stalin publicly hinted at the possibility of collusion at the XVIII Party Congress in March 1939. On May 3, Maxim Litvinov, who personified the policy of collective security and anti-German orientation, was removed from the post of People's Commissariat. His place was taken by the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Vyacheslav Molotov. Throughout the summer of 1939, intensive secret negotiations were conducted between Moscow and Berlin. Hitler is actively preparing for war and wants to avoid a fight on two fronts. Stalin seeks to exploit Hitler's impatience and get as much as possible from him for a guarantee of non-interference. At the same time, in August 1939, negotiations began with representatives of England and France who arrived in Moscow.

The Soviet government has three choices: an agreement with England and France against the Nazi aggressor; agreement with Hitler; neutrality. The first choice would have given Hitler pause and delayed the outbreak of war in Europe; The third choice was also not very convenient for the Fuhrer: a neutral Soviet Union would remain a potential danger hanging on the flank. The third choice - an agreement with Germany - meant, first of all, permission to start a war.

Stalin chose Hitler and war. Several reasons dictated this choice. First of all, Hitler paid much more for the agreement than democratic countries that could not dispose of territory that was not theirs. The Fuhrer gave Stalin the Baltic states, part of Poland, and Bessarabia. Secondly, Stalin hoped that Germany, having become involved in the war in the West, would weaken democratic countries and become weaker itself. Finally, Stalin always organically did not tolerate democracy; the psychology of the Fuhrer was close and understandable to him. He firmly believed that he could outwit him.

The agreement between the USSR and Germany, signed on August 23, was called the Non-Aggression Treaty. "Is it true" declared the pact an “instrument of peace,” an “act of peace” that would help “relieve tension in the international situation.” The secret additional protocol to the Treaty, never published in the USSR and never mentioned by official historians, did not look like an “instrument of peace.” The protocol stated that “in the event of territorial and political transformations (meaning the war that Germany would unleash in the coming days - M.G.), the northern border of Lithuania will be the line dividing the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR.” The second paragraph of the protocol stated: “The question of whether it is desirable in the interests of both Parties to maintain the independence of the Polish state and the boundaries of such a state will be finally resolved only by the course of future political developments.” In the history of diplomacy, there are few documents so cynically proclaiming the intention to liquidate and divide a sovereign state.

Even today, Soviet historians explain the need to conclude a “Non-Aggression Pact” by the desire to gain time, the hesitation of England and France, who were in no hurry to reach an agreement with Moscow. Such explanations can be given because the secret protocol is not published, because the joy that reigned in the Kremlin after the signing of the Treaty is hidden. Soviet newspapers published Stalin's toast: “I drink to the health of the Reich Chancellor, I know how much the German people love him. “I know,” added the Secretary General, “that the Germans want peace.” The words of Stalin addressed to Ribbentrop were not published by Soviet newspapers (they were recorded by the Germans): “The Soviet government is considering the new pact very seriously. Stalin can guarantee with his word of honor that the Soviet Union will not let its comrade down.”

The “peace-loving Germans” started the war a week after the signing of the Treaty and Protocol. On September 14, the ambassador of the Third Reich in Moscow sends a dispatch to Berlin: Molotov wants to know when Warsaw will fall in order to announce that Poland has ceased to exist and national minorities related to the Soviet people need protection. On September 17, the Red Army struck in the back of the Polish army, which was fighting the Nazi aggressor, and entered Polish territory to seize territories included in the Soviet zone on the basis of a secret protocol. On October 31, Molotov boasted at a meeting of the Supreme Council of the USSR: “A short blow to Poland from the German army, and then the Red Army, so that nothing remains of this ugly brainchild of the Treaty of Versailles..."

The non-aggression pact signed on August 23 can still be explained using very dubious arguments. It is much more difficult to explain the second treaty - On Friendship and Borders, signed on September 28, 1939. Soviet historians, as usual in difficult circumstances, turn to a simple method: The Treaty on Friendship and Borders is not mentioned in Soviet historiography. If the term “agreement signed in September” appears, its content is not stated. The Soviet Union pledged to supply Nazi Germany with the strategic raw materials necessary for waging war (oil, metals, grain), the NKVD and the Gestapo collaborated in Poland (this is written in the Treaty) in the fight against national resistance to the occupiers, as a sign of friendship the NKVD handed over to the Gestapo German communists who found refuge in Moscow, and then arrested during the years of terror. German newsreels captured a joint military parade of Soviet and Nazi troops in Lvov. A secret agreement on borders clarified the zones of influence: the Soviet Union received Lithuania, giving Germany the Warsaw Voivodeship in return.

“We don’t deserve this,” Molotov said with bitterness and despair to the German ambassador, who came to him on June 22 to declare war, which had already begun a few hours earlier. Molotov was right if we assume that by “we” he meant the Soviet leadership. Stalin did everything to help Hitler start the Second World War. For almost two years he was an ally of Hitler.

At the cost of innumerable disasters and millions of victims, the Soviet Union, supported by democratic countries, defeated Nazi Germany. As you know, winners are not judged. But history cannot forget the guilt of the Soviet leadership in the tragedy of the Second World War.

On the night of January 1, 1944, the Soviet people heard the new anthem of the USSR for the first time. Instead of “No one will give us deliverance, neither God, nor the tsar, nor the hero...” burst out: “The indestructible union of free republics has been united forever by Great Rus'!... The great Lenin illuminated the path for us... Stalin raised us...” In 1920, the ideologist of National Bolshevism Nikolai Ustryalov wrote: “Over the Spassky Gate, which is still the deepest historically national shrine, the ancient chimes sing “Internationale”... In the depths of my soul, the question involuntarily arises: is the “International” desecrating the Spassky Gate with unholy sounds, or is the Spassky Gate introducing a new one with the Kremlin spirit What's the point of "Internationale"?

On the night of January 1, 1944, the anthem of the international proletariat stopped desecrating the Spassky Gate. This was not a complete surprise. Not only because in 1943 the Third International was dissolved in order to demonstrate to the allies that there was no communist danger. But first of all, because many changes - large, small, medium - having taken shape together marked a new direction for Stalin's policy. Russian patriotism, which at the critical moment of the battle of Moscow is mobilized to save the Soviet state, becomes the most important element of Stalin’s imperial ideology.

The victory at Stalingrad becomes the starting point - a terrible blow was dealt to the enemy, the Soviet army demonstrated its strength, and the prospect of the final defeat of Nazi Germany opened up. Stalin sees himself as the father of victory. He produces a bizarre monarchist-Leninist ideological cocktail. He draws up a new genealogy for himself, choosing as the main ancestor Ivan the Terrible, portrayed as the Collector of the State. Many terms associated with revolutionary origins are disappearing. The Red Army becomes the Soviet Army. As a reward for victories, the General Secretary and Supreme Commander returns the old Russian uniform to the army, including shoulder straps, which for a quarter of a century were a symbol of the damned tsarist regime. The revolutionary orders - Lenin, the Red Banner - are joined by orders associated with pre-revolutionary history - Alexander Nevsky, Suvorov. It is stipulated that pre-revolutionary orders are worn on the right side of the chest, revolutionary ones - on the left.

Stalin's imperial idea is the absolute, unlimited power of Stalin. The foundation of absolute power is the absolute obedience of subjects. The Leader, Father, Teacher had in his hands many tools that ensured the obedience of the citizens of the world's first socialist state. This seems to be not enough for Stalin. He wants submission to be expressed outwardly and dresses all Soviet citizens in uniforms: each ministry receives its own color of cloth, its own uniform, shoulder straps, stripes, edgings. Ranks are being introduced that everyone seemed to have forgotten about. The Decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of September 16, 1943, for example, introduced the following titles for lawyers: actual state councilor of justice, state councilor of justice of the first rank, then second, third, and so on.

Stalin's imperial idea is an omnipotent totalitarian state, which all citizens serve, headed by a god-like leader-Benefactor. On June 25, 1945, Stalin could sum up the results with satisfaction. Speaking in the Kremlin at a reception in honor of the participants of the Victory Parade, the Generalissimo raised a toast. “I have,” he said, modestly as usual, “a very simple, ordinary toast. I would like to drink to the health of the people... who are considered the “cogs” of the great state mechanism... I raise a toast to the simple, ordinary, modest people, to the “cogs” who keep our great state mechanism in a state of activity... These are the people who keep us how the base holds the top. I drink to the health of these people, our respected comrades.”

"Doctor Zhivago" ends with the words: “Although the enlightenment and liberation that were expected after the war did not come with victory, as they thought, but still, the harbinger of freedom was in the air all the post-war years, constituting their only historical content.” The post-war years were a time of great expectations.

The war was so difficult, so terrible, the victory was so complete and convincing that it seemed that everyone who contributed to the victory - at the front and in the rear - would be rewarded. Stalin thought completely differently. It was precisely because everyone hoped, because a “harbinger of freedom” appeared, that the leader decided to put an end to all hopes. He also remembered that the victorious regiments of the Soviet army crossed the borders of the Soviet Union and millions of Soviet citizens saw with their own eyes for the first time how they lived abroad. Stalin, who knew history well, remembered that the young officers who entered Paris in 1813 came to Senate Square in 1825.

Measures were taken to strengthen the morale of the Soviet people. Blows fell on culture, science, and all areas of thinking. At the end of the 20s, when a similar hurricane passed over the country, it was called the “cultural revolution.” Second half of the 40s. began to be called “Zhdanovshchina”. The name itself, associated with the Yezhovshchina, speaks of the scale of persecution, terror, and cruelty. Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee for ideology, led the campaign. On August 14, 1946, the first salvo of “Zhdanovshchina” is heard: the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopts a resolution on magazines "Star" And "Leningrad". Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova are becoming targets of harassment. Then decisions are made on issues of music, cinema, and theater. Targets are assigned - writers, composers, film directors, at whom fire is fired. In 1948, at a session of the All-Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Lysenko’s dictatorship over biology was established. In 1949, a front was opened in the fight against “rootless cosmopolitanism,” against foreignness.

“Stalin died without a plan, without instructions from the decision-making bodies,” wrote Vasily Grossman in the story "Everything flows". - Stalin died without the personal instructions of Comrade Stalin himself. In this freedom, the waywardness of death, there was something dynamic, contrary to the innermost essence of the state. Confusion gripped minds and hearts. Stalin is dead! Some were overcome by a feeling of grief - in some schools, teachers forced schoolchildren to kneel and, on their knees, shedding tears, read out the government message about the death of the leader. At mourning meetings in institutions and factories, many were seized by a hysterical state, crazy women's cries and sobs were heard... Others were overcome by a feeling of happiness. The village, languishing under the iron weight of Stalin’s hand, breathed a sigh of relief. Rejoicing gripped the multi-million population of the camps..."

On March 5, 1953, as newspapers reported, Stalin died. His death was unexpected, because everyone believed that the Leader was immortal. Naturally, a rumor was immediately born that Stalin had been killed. While there are no documents about the conspiracy organized by Beria, with the participation of Malenkov, Khrushchev and Bulganin, the proposals remain a hypothesis. Since there is very little hope for the appearance of documents, or even for their existence, it is possible that the mystery of Stalin’s death will remain a mystery forever. Although the hypothesis about the murder of Stalin is based on serious arguments.

January 13, 1953 "Is it true" published the TASS Chronicle, which reported on the discovery by state security agencies of “a terrorist group of doctors whose goal, through sabotage treatment, was to shorten the lives of active figures of the Soviet Union.” In the same issue of the newspaper, the article “Despicable spies and murderers disguised as doctors” was published. If Stalin did not write this article himself, he undoubtedly walked through it with the hand of a master. Not only the main ideas, but the expressions and words in the article were familiar, Stalinist. The article talked about uncovering a conspiracy of doctors, most of whom were Jews. Later it became known that it was supposed to serve as the first signal for the start of an anti-Semitic campaign in the country, which was supposed to end with the final solution to the Jewish question in Stalin's style: the public execution of doctors on Red Square, the deportation of all Jews to camps in the Far North. There was, however, another “thought” in the article, which directly affected the leader’s closest associates, including Beria. “Some people,” wrote an anonymous author, “conclude that the danger of sabotage and espionage has now been eliminated... But only right-wing opportunists, people who stand on the anti-American point of view of the attenuation of the class struggle, can think and reason like that. They do not understand that our successes do not lead to a fading, but to an intensification of the struggle, that the more intensified our progress is, the sharper the struggle of the enemies of the people will be.”

These lines could not help but frighten Stalin’s inner circle. They were an almost verbatim quote from Stalin’s report at the February-March plenum of the Central Committee in 1937, which was a signal of a bloody purge, including of senior cadres. In 1937, Stalin said: the enemies have penetrated into all institutions and are hiding behind the party card. In 1953 "Is it true" wrote: “Some of our Soviet bodies and their leaders lost their vigilance and became infected with rosetism; The security authorities did not open the sabotage terrorist organization among doctors.”

The arrest of the doctors itself was an ominous sign. In 1937, the arrest of doctors preceded the arrests of Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda and others. Historian A. Avtorkhanov, author of the book "The Mystery of Stalin's Death", believes that Stalin, out of senile stupidity, literally repeated the scenario of the purge of 1937 and this became the reason for his death. It can also be assumed that Stalin’s plan contained the deepest contempt for his comrades-in-arms, whom he, according to Khrushchev, called “blind kittens.”

Whether Stalin was killed or died from illness - he died on March 5, 1953. His funeral, during which hundreds of people died, was a fitting end to the life of one of the bloodiest tyrants in history.

Notes:

Hitler was happy too. Von Speer recalls that, having received a telegram about the signing of the Pact, the Fuhrer danced and shouted: “Here they are, where I have them now!”, showing his fist.