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Paper 2 Study Guide - Joseph Stalin
Paper 2 Study Guide - Joseph Stalin
IB History
Paper 2 Study Guide: The USSR under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin
1. Social Divisions
● Land
○ In the rural areas, freed serfs faced constant threats, and harvest failures.
○ creation of Land Banks in 1866.
○ urban population roughly doubled
○ the bourgeoisie were the middle class, merchants, industrialists
2. Economic Factors
● War Communism
○ the fledgling state allocated resources
○ private enterprise was outlawed
○ the state requisitioned peasant produce.
● State Capitalism
○ The Russian economy was increasingly centralised through state capitalism,
which intensified during the Great War and was reinvented by the Bolsheviks
following the October Revolution.
○ Sergei Witte- minister of Finance
■ Increased production
■ Increased domestic taxes
○ state undertakes commercial activity. Production is organised and controlled by
the state for profit.
6. Ideology
● State reform and philosophy
○ Tsar’s October Manifesto
○ Duma
○ ‘The Fundamental Laws’
■ the Tsar’s restatement of his Supreme Autocratic Power
● Party Ideologies
○ strands of Russian Liberalism
○ further left, Socialist Revolutionaries
○ further left still, Russian Marxists.
● Marxism and Lenism
○ Emancipation of Labour Group
○ European socialism.
○ Lenin accepted Marx’s central premise that under capitalism.
8. Use of Force
● Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC).
○ Sent representatives key combat units and weapons depots to prevent
counterrevolutionary members
○ Issued an order that gave commissars unlimited veto power over military orders
9. Propaganda
● Use of Propaganda
○ reorientation or abandonment of existing policies and programmes, reinforce or
sustain others, or to introduce, advance, or further new ones.
● Pravda
○ Underground Printing Presses created leaflets, pamphlets, posters, newspapers
and journals, and brought out into the open after the Revolution
○ Both Lenin and Stalin’s key speeches and editorials were printed in Pravda.
● Sovnarkom
○ was a government institution formed after the Revolution in 1917 that became the
highest executive power of the Soviet Union. Lenin was Chairman.
○ Democratic centralism is an organisational system and practice that Lenin
implemented where political decisions are made through a voting process, and
then the decisions are binding on all Party members.
○ Decree on Peace
○ Decree on Land
■ eight-hour working days
■ free, universal and secular education
■ workers’ control over industry
● The Soviet Constitution
○ further legitimising the state.
○ Politburo was the principal committee/institution for policymaking, led by the
General Secretary.
● Economic Factors
○ The NEP replaced War Communism with a mixed economic system, proposed
by Lenin.
○ During the Civil War, the Bolsheviks implemented War Communism. Afterward
they adopted the New Economic Policy.
2. Use of Force
● Secret Police
○ Cheka
○ Establishment of Red Army
■ ‘Mass terror’
○ The CHEKA became the NKVD.
○ CHEKA agents functioned, as classic example of prerogative power,
independently of the courts and outside the law.
● The Red Army
○ primary goal of opposing those military confederations aligned with the opposition
forces during the Civil War.
● The Red Terror
○ To secure their position following the Bolshevik seizure of power.
○ The Bolsheviks' use of force increased in proportion to the growing opposition.
● The Gulags
○ Corrective Labour Camps and Settlements, established under Lenin in 1918.
○ Their use peaked during the Stalin period
○ The Gulags’ role in the economy expanded over time, and Gulag prisoners were
responsible for mining a third of the country’s gold, a considerable amount of its
coal, foresting much of its timber and growing many other staples.
3. Charismatic leadership
● Lenin’s Charismatic Leadership
○ Lenin’s intellectual authority and powers of persuasion that made it possible for
the Revolution to turn towards a Bolshevik victory.
○ would never have permitted ‘self-glorification’
○ Lenin’s revolutionary activities
○ The cult of Lenin only began after Lenin’s death. It was not a part of his
leadership, but was established by Stalin.
■ ‘Cult of Lenin’
● Stalin’s Charismatic Leadership
○ Self-promotion
○ Stalin too fell well short what might be recognised as being ‘charismatic.'
○ He spoke softly, letting others air their opinions, then guided participants on a
path toward consensus.
○ He laboured intensely, often working 16 hours a day.
○ massive lists of enemies
4. Use of Propaganda
● Agitprop
○ Agitprop was the abbreviated name of the Communist Party’s Department of
Agitation and Propaganda.
○ prominence of the Russian Orthodox Church
● Glavlit
○ Central Censorship Office
○ It was responsible for handling state secrets and the oversight and control of
purging from society any ideas deemed intellectually destructive to citizens in the
emerging new socialist order.
○ informal capacity
● Newspapers
○ Lenin gained valuable experience with print, co-founding Iskra.
■ forced him to take the material, practice and function of an underground
newspaper seriously.
○ Undoubtedly the most signficant Bolshevik propaganda vehicle was Pravda.
○ devoutness in their adherence to Marxism-Leninism
○ unquestioning obedience to shifts in Communist Party policies
○ diligent workers and devotion to collective activities
○ strongly opposition to bourgeois and imperialist temptations.
● Radio, Posters, Film.
○ create the society the Bolsheviks wanted to project through the State’s lens.
○ Lenin, in particular, had always felt that film was the best way to reach the
illiterate peasants.
○ Soviet films promoted ‘socialist realism’ and nationalism
○ to portray capitalist countries in a negative light
○ radio was seen over the following decades as a key outlet for bringing their ideas
to the masses.
1. Economic Policies
2. Social Policies
● Education
○ making education a priority.
○ a policy of compulsory education was adopted under Lenin’s campaign
○ Soviets often portrayed it as being ‘ideologically superior’
● Youth Movements
○ children were especially important because they represented the future of the
respective ideology
○ Young Pioneers led the Little Octobrist groups
● Religion
○ ‘state atheism’
○ Decree on the Separation of the Church and State which split the two.
○ religious teachings were removed from education.
○ Stalin too, had little sympathy for the church and organised religion.
○ The Orthodox Church ultimately had to support state policies and avoid all
criticism.
3. Policies on Women
● The Zhenotdel
○ Communist department
○ promoted women’s emancipation through networks of local, regional and national
meetings.
● Women in WWI
○ opened new opportunities for them in the professions as doctors and engineers
○ The Family Code of 1918, gave women equal status to men.
○ expanded earlier reforms to the status of marriage, divorce, and parenthood.
○ By the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks had legalised divorce and abortion,
and mandated equal pay and equal rights.
● Women after WWI
○ Ten million women entered the Soviet workforce in the 1930s
○ In the 1930s women took entrance exams and gained access to new educational
opportunities.
○ Women entered occupations formerly closed to them.
○professions of teaching and medicine became almost wholly the ‘preserve’ of
women
○ Women in collective farms joined the Kolkhoz as full individual members
■ Five Year Plans
■ The First Five Year Plan resulted in significant gains for women
○ the traditional role of women was promoted with a greater emphasis on marriage
and families
○ The gold wedding ring reappeared in shops, and women ‘earned’ medals by
giving birth to ten or more children
○ abortion was made illegal
○ Divorce was discouraged and made more difficult to obtain
● Women in WWII
○ gaps left were filled by women, who in the day drove the economy and in the
evening raised the next generation
○ The majority of women who served were young and unmarried.
○ More women were put in the workforce
○ More marriages
○ government initiated its ‘mother-heroine’ campaign, which offered rewards for
women who bore large numbers of children.
● Women after WWII
○ remained in the workforce after World War II
○ high cost of food with lower incomes.
4. Policies on Minorities
● Minorities in the party
○ The Great Purges had a strong effect on non-party members
○ operations conducted against those accused of spying, treason and other crimes.
● National Minorities
○ 1920s established a republic on a federal basis which brought Russia’s national
minorities under centralised control
○ Autonomy
○ Lenin favoured class over nationality.
■ only with socialism would people truly be free
○ Independent states that had been absorbed by Russia to abandon their language
and traditions and adopt Russian ones if they wanted to survive or thrive in the
Russian state.
● Decree on the Rights of People
○ guaranteed autonomy and even succession to ‘nations’ within the existing
Russian society who chose it.
○ local cultural development for all national groups in the Soviet Union.
○ Equality was only attainable under socialism and not with an imperialist attitude.