Stalin and Stalinism

In 1927 Stalin emerged as the victor in the bitter power struggle that had raged among party leaders since Lenin’s death. Born in 1879 in Georgia of poor parents, Stalin (his real name was Dzhugashvili) was an early convert to Bolshevism.

As Stalin exercised tyrannical dominance of the party, it, in turn, systematically expanded its control over all aspects of society. Open criticism of (let alone resistance to) Stalin became impossible as a powerful and growing secret police methodically terrorized and later liquidated real, imagined, or potential opposition. Some scholars describe this Russian-Marxist combination of personal dictatorship and monolithic organization as totalitarianism. Others simply call it Stalinism. The Soviets view it as a necessary phase in the building of socialism and have long praised Stalin for his leadership, iron will, and realism. But critics have invariably stressed his ruthlessness, incredible disregard for human suffering, and murderous paranoia (which caused him to see enemies and plots everywhere). As Nicholas Riasanovsky remarks about Stalin, there was, as in the case of Ivan the Terrible, whom Stalin admired, madness in his method.¹

Probably more than other Bolsheviks, Stalin had an exceedingly low opinion of peasants, for he considered them to be incurably conservative and a major barrier to revolutionary change. In the words of his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, “For Stalin, peasants were scum.”² Although Stalin was not an ethnic Russian, he embraced Russian nationalism as a means of strengthening the Soviet empire. And because Ukrainians were an overwhelmingly peasant people among whom native nationalism was on the rise, they were doubly vulnerable to his designs.