Stalin’s Happy Little Land...

 

“Thank you, Stalin.  Thank you because I am joyful.  Thank you because I am well....  Thy name is engraven on every factory, every machine, every place on earth, and in the hearts of all men....  Every time I have found myself in his presence I have been subjugated by his strength, his charm, his grandeur....  I write books.  I am an author.  All thanks to thee, O great educator, Stalin.  I love a young woman with a renewed love and shall perpetuate myself in my children – all thanks to thee, great educator, Stalin.  Everything belongs to thee, chief of our great country.  And when the woman I love presents me with a child, the first word it shall utter will be:  Stalin.”

--published in Pravda, 1 February, 1935.

 

Constitution 1936

  • The Constitution of 1936 signaled that the end time had come for capitalism and that socialism was now the way of the land.

  • The Constitution was the most democratic looking Constitution in the world – yet most of it was lies. 

  • Using the assignment on the Constitution of 1936; compare and contrast what the “ideal” of the document was, with what really was what under the harsh and extreme rule of Mr. Yosif Stalin!!! – ESPECIALLY CONSIDER THE GUARNTEES MADE TO THE PEOPLE.

  • The Constitution also proclaimed “public ownership” over all resources and production in the country – “public” really meant “state” though – and who ran the state....

Cult of Personality

  • How did Stalin’s seminary training affect his idol stature in the USSR?

  • Catchy phrases which made sense and spoke to the lay-person

  • Pictures, monuments, etc.

  • “High Priest” of the atheist church. –(Chubarov)

  • “Yezhovshchina” = 1.5 million arrests & 700,000 executions from 1937-38.  90% of were for political prisoners.

  • Young population raised “on Stalin.”

  • Replacement of so many ‘old-timers’ during the Purges and replaced by people who then owed all the benefits of their position to Stalin...

The Great Purges

 (Students Do This)

  • NKVD

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Gulags

 

  • Forced labor camps located in the remote reaches of Siberia.

  • Provided cheap labor to dig canals, access natural resources, lay railway track, build factories, mine gold and cut lumber. 

  • Cities came from nowhere into existence as created by forced labor.

  • GULAGS became major components of the economic development of the Soviet State.  They produced ½ of the gold, 1/3 of lumber and platinum and 1/5 of all major construction projects.

 

“Stalinism with ‘Yezhovshchina’ as one of its hallmarks, also had deep roots in post revolutionary Soviet history.  Many of the important ingredients of the Stalinist system are detectable in the early Bolshevik regime as it evolved under Lenin, including the Communist party’s power monopoly, the destruction of all political opposition, the elevation of terror into an instrument of the state, ideological indoctrination, and growing ideological dogmatism and intolerance.  Stalin transformed these seeds into his own brand of extreme authoritarianism based on the party’s central role in the political system and the state monopoly over productive property.  He established an ideological dictatorship, propped by mass terror, the leader’s cult, and the invoking of the enemy image.  In doing all of this, he amplified the authoritarian features of Leninism by taking them to an extreme” (Chubarov, 110).

 

“. . . Now that ten years have gone by [Stalin died in 1953], I realize that Stalin's greatest crime was not the arrests and the shootings he ordered. His greatest crime was the corruption of the human spirit.”

 -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Precocious Autobiography (1963)