Jo Manta

IB History

Paper 2 Study Guide: The USSR under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin

Rise To power- Conditions in which they Emerged

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.

3. Weakness of Political System

● The Tsar
○ The Russian Orthodox Church, one of the great pillars of the system, was an
extremely conservative institution.
○ Had all bodies of Government work for him.
○
4. Impact of WWI
● Domestic Problems
○ they mobilised, economically, politically and socially.
○ a weak arms industry
○ poor communication systems.
5. Leaders
● Lenin
○ Bolshevik leaders used their ideological knowledge to formulate strategies and tactics,
and relied on persuasion, coercion and the use of force and propaganda to secure the
emergence of their new state.
○ St. Petersburg was renamed the more Slavic Petrograd at the start of World War I to
appeal to patriotic sentiment. In 1924, following Lenin’s death, the city was renamed
Leningrad.
○ achieving Bolshevik economic control with the seizure of land and factories by
peasants and workers
○ withdrawing from the war
○ exporting communism abroad.

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.

7. Persuasion and Coercion

● Seizing power and integrating masses
○ Lenin inherited from Marx the belief that capitalism can be overthrown by way of
revolution.
○ Explain to the proletariat through propaganda and agitation, not only the ‘political
significance’ but the ‘practical organizational aspect’ of the impending armed
uprising.
○ Explain the role that mass political strikes, might play in beginning and during an
uprising.
○ Take steps to arm the working class, to draw up plans for an uprising,to provide
leadership, and establish special groups if required.
○
 ● Social Democracy
○ Another threat that Lenin and the Bolsheviks faced concerned developments in
the German Social Democratic movement.
● Mensheviks
○ Bolshevik/ Menshevik troubles continued and spilled into the international realm
on the eve of World War I when the Second International failed in its attempt to
unite the two parties.

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.

Consolidation and Maintenance of Power

1. Use of Legal Methods

● 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.

Aims and Results of Policies

1. Economic Policies

● New Economic Policy

○ In 1921, the Bolsheviks initiated the New Economic Policy which recognised that
more food was urgently needed
■ Bolsheviks turned to the market economy
○ state-controlled industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation.
○ offered a mixed economy – both capitalist and socialist
○ the government would keep control of the banks, foreign trade and large-scale
industry.
○ scissors crisis
● Five Year Plans
○ formed the basis of Russia’s second revolution.
○ industrial production was controlled by the state and administered by Gosplan
■ calculated the sum of the country’s resources and facilities.
● Collectivization
○ Agriculture
○ comparative early success of Lenin’s New Economic Policy
○ gradual process

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.