Stalin's Revolution, the Gulag and the Great Terror
Stalin forces through collectivisation and industrialisation, builds the Gulag, and in 1937–38 has about 680,000 people shot by official count.
- Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator — Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Yale University Press (2015)
- Gulag: A History — Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (2003)
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
- Russian History: A Very Short Introduction — Geoffrey Hosking, Oxford University Press (2012)
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals, Trotsky first among them, and by 1929 dominated the Soviet leadership. He then launched what he called a “great turn”.
- Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator — Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Yale University Press (2015)
Collectivisation and famine
From 1929 the peasants were forced into collective farms. Better-off farmers, labelled kulaks, were shot or deported with their families, some 1.8 million in 1930–31 alone. Grain was seized for export and the cities. The result was the famine of 1932–33, which killed several million people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Volga, the North Caucasus and elsewhere. In Ukraine it is remembered as the Holodomor, and Ukraine and many other states recognise it as genocide; Russia rejects that label and stresses that it was a Soviet-wide tragedy.
- Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator — Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Yale University Press (2015)
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
- Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine — Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (2017)
Industry and the Gulag
At the same time the five-year plans built steelworks, dams and whole cities, such as Magnitogorsk, at breakneck speed. Millions of peasants moved to the cities and into education, and for some this was a time of genuine enthusiasm and upward mobility. Much of the work in remote regions was done by prisoners. Historians estimate that some 18 million people passed through the Gulag labour camps between 1930 and 1953, and well over a million and a half died in them by the archival count, with more dying soon after release.
- Gulag: A History — Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (2003)
- Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator — Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Yale University Press (2015)
The Great Terror
In 1937–38 the secret police (NKVD) arrested about 1.5 million people. By its own records it shot 681,692 of them. Victims included old Bolsheviks, generals, engineers, priests, poets and ordinary workers and peasants, often chosen by quota. Whole national minorities, such as Poles, Koreans and Germans, were targeted; the “Polish operation” alone killed about 111,000 people. Historians’ estimates of the Terror’s total death toll, including those who died in camps, run from about 700,000 to over a million.
- Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator — Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Yale University Press (2015)
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
- Gulag: A History — Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (2003)
After the war, repression continued: whole peoples such as the Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars were deported in 1943–44, returning Soviet prisoners of war were often sent to camps, and a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” targeted Jews. Stalin’s death in March 1953 ended the worst of it.
- Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator — Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Yale University Press (2015)
- Gulag: A History — Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (2003)
Memory
In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s “cult of personality” in a secret speech, and millions were released and rehabilitated. Under Gorbachev the archives began to open. The human-rights group Memorial spent three decades building a database of victims. In December 2021, just before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered Memorial to be dissolved. Meanwhile busts of Stalin have reappeared in some Russian towns, and official history increasingly emphasises his role in the victory of 1945.
- The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia — Masha Gessen, Riverhead Books (2017)
- Gulag: A History — Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (2003)
- Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator — Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Yale University Press (2015)
Harsh measures were the price of turning a peasant country into an industrial power in time to defeat Hitler. Stalin was a strong "effective manager"; the scale of repression is exaggerated. In a 2021 Levada poll 56% of Russians agreed Stalin was "a great leader".
- Survey on attitudes to Stalin, May 2021 (as reported by The Moscow Times) — Levada Center, The Moscow Times (2021)
- The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia — Masha Gessen, Riverhead Books (2017)
Nothing justifies the killing and enslavement of millions of innocent people. The crimes must be named, the victims remembered by name, and the archives opened. Since 2007 people have gathered every 29 October at the Solovetsky Stone in Moscow to read victims' names aloud.
- Gulag: A History — Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (2003)
- Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator — Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Yale University Press (2015)
- The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia — Masha Gessen, Riverhead Books (2017)
Why it matters today
Almost every Russian family has someone who was arrested, deported or shot, and often also someone who served the system. How to remember Stalin, as the man who built a superpower and won the war, or as a mass murderer, is the sharpest memory fight in Russia today. The state's closure of Memorial, the group that documented the victims, made that fight a political one.