Russian Revolution – the process and the system that grew out of it – rather than being motivated by the masses (as Marx had hoped) orchestrated from above by Lenin and the Bolsheviks

Lenin as a charismatic figure –
 some say Russians need/crave an authoritarian figure
 “great men” of history

After Lenin dies, there is jockeying for position at top of Soviet Communist Party

Stalin manipulates, isolates, destroys his competitors (Lenin opposed Stalin as head of party)

In Russian Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, but original name  was Georgian –  Ioseb  Dzhugashvili
son of poor washerwoman and cobbler father (who beat him); educated at church school and a seminary where he secretly read Marx and other forbidden texts; becomes a revolutionary; known for encouraging violent clashes between workers and police
1903 joins the Bolsheviks
agent provacateur – freq’ly arrested, exiled
longest exile Siberia 1913-1917

In his prime, Stalin hailed
as a “shining sun,” or “the staff of life,” a “great teacher and friend”;  once as “Our Father” by a metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Image propagandized through busts, statues, and icons

Became the object of a fanatical “cult of personality”
the sole infallible interpreter of party ideology
 
Autocracy;  the “Marxist Czar”
 uses secret police (subservient courts) to carry out
 his “reign of terror”
 
 

Great Purge – eliminates anyone who opposes him
 intelligentsia
 kulaks (wealthier peasant who opposed collectivization)

Lenin's pronouncements as dogma
Those opposed accused of treason

Late 1920s
– launches a program of rapid industrial development
-- declares “class war” on the rich farmers
-- collectivizes agriculture against considerable
resistance,
-- claimed that the need for expertise and efficiency in
 industry postponed the egalitarian goals of the Bolshevik Revolution;
-- denounced “levelers” and instituted systems of reward that established a socioeconomic stratification
 favouring the technical intelligentsia (e.g. engineers; “Moscow Engineer”
 - Heavy industry was emphasized to ensure Russia's
 future economic independence from its capitalist neighbours.
 -- asserted that the state must instead become stronger before it could be eliminated. “The enemies of socialism” within and without Russia would try to avert the final victory of the Revolution. To face these efforts and protect the
cause, it was argued, the state must be strong.
 
-- late 1930s bloody purge
political opposition = treason
used this against Leon Trotsky and Nikolay I. Bukharin

-- an estimated 7 million to 15 million were sent to forced-labour camps (an integral part of the Soviet economy).

--Three years after Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev’s
“secret speech” denounced the cult of Stalin and the terrorism perpetrated by his regime; cast Stalinism as a temporary aberration or a brutal but necessary phase of development.

 --In 1989 Soviet historian Roy Medvedev estimated that about 20 million died as a result of the labour camps, forced collectivization, famine, and executions. Another 20 million
 were victims of imprisonment, exile, and forced relocation.