High Stalinism

• The years after WW2 until Stalin’s death are known as High Stalinism. This is where his authority over the State and the Party, and his cult of personality, reached their pinnacle.

  His leadership was undisputed and he was the hero of WW2.


  What is high stalinism
• Not only that, the USSR was now a world superpower.

  They had gained control over satellite states in Eastern Europe, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Eastern Germany.

  They were at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences and were no longer outsiders. Now they were the arbiters of post-war Europe. And in in 1949, they built their own atomic bomb.


  Worldpower
• •Stalin very much went “back to the future”.•Stalin was concerned about the growth in party membership during the war – it was now unwieldy and he didn’t know who reliable the new members were.•Stalin was also concerned about the popularity of the Red Army.•On 4th September 1945, he disbanded the GKO (State Defence Committee) and its functions went back to the commissariats.


  Stalin's political concerns
• •Stalin became the Minister of Defence and high-ranking officers were demoted to inferior posts. The best example was Marshal Zhukov whose popularity was seen as a challenge to Stalin. He was sent to the remote post of Odessa and lost his seat on the Party’s Central Committee. •A film was made about the USSR’s capture of Berlin. No generals were shown, only Stalin directing the great battle on his own. •Stalin even released a new version of his biography, The Short Biography, in 1948. He made notes in the margins where he thought praise was insufficient and made no mention of any generals.
• •Stalin encouraged popular wartime figures to battle against each other.•Malenkov was one of Stalin’s closest wartime aides and wanted to remove industrial plant from Germany and bring it to the USSR. Andrei Zhdanov challenged his position and started an investigation which condemned Malenkov’s ideas.


  Malenkov and Zhdanov
• •Malenkov lost his position as Party Secretary and Zhdanov took his place as Stalin’s closest advisor.•BUT! Then it switched! Zhdanov supported the Berlin Blockade in 1948 and Malenkov wanted a more moderate path. Malenkov was then reappointed as Party Secretariat and Zhdanov’s supporters were denounced. Zhdanov then died that same year.•Stalin used manipulation like this to make sure no-one could become strong enough to challenge his personal dominance.


  Snakey Stalin
• •Stalin also weakened the Communist Party itself. His private secretariat essentially bypassed both the government and the Party and exerted his direct authority.•Party Congresses should have been held every 3 years but there were none between 1939 and 1952. There were only 6 meetings of the Central Committee at this time.


  The party
• •The Politburo became just an advisory group waiting on instructions from Stalin. Decisions were made in small gatherings between Stalin and his inner circle.•In 1952, the Party had nearly 7 million members and Komsomol almost 16 million. The “new members” were not like the “old guard” who joined because of their commitment to Marxist ideals. These new men were cautious and careful. They waited to receive official policy instead of formulating it themselves. They became faceless bureaucrats.


  Shift from government to party
• •Zhdanov reintroduced “Socialist Realism”. It stressed conformity to socialist ideals and promoted the Cult of Personality. Unfortunately, this meant some old faces now found themselves out of favour once again 


  There was a cultural purge which started in 1946 and was led by Zhdanov. It became known as the Zhdanovschina. Anything Western was seen as bourgeois and decadent; anything Russian was seen as superior and uplifiting.
• Zoschenko was a satirist who wrote a story about a monkey who went on an adventure through a Soviet town.

  He was condemned for writing an anti-Soviet work.

  Mikhail Zoshchenko, Adventures of a Monkey:
• Anna Akhmatova:

  After broadcasting her poetry in Leningrad during the siege, Akhmatova was now called “poisonous”. Zhdanov called her “half-nun, half-whore”, her work was banned and the Literary Gazette, which had included her portrait the year before was condemned!
• Shostakovitch:

  He wrote his Leningrad Symphony but was now once again condemned and called a “rootless cosmopolitan”.
• Eisenstein:

  The revered filmmaker who made a movie about the 1917 revolution came under fire because Stalin disagreed with his portrayal of Ivan the Terrible.
• The theme is Leningrad. Stalin wanted Moscow to be the cultural and political centre of the USSR and so attacked Leningrad’s Party and culture.


  Why the Zhdanovshchina
• •Lysenko believed that plants could gain heritable changes from their environment e.g. wheat that was refrigerated consistently would eventually produce seeds that could survive in colder weather.•This was just not true!•Soviet biology was held back because Stalin supported him and purged renowned geneticists who disagreed!


  Lysenko
• •Stalin meddled with linguistics.•He wrote his own book called Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics which traced the origins of the Russian language to various places in the Russian mainland.•Academics had previously agreed that the origins were in Kiev in the Ukraine.


  Linguistics
• •Even though Stalin was Georgian, he emphasised the superiority of ethnic Russians over other nationalities.•In the non-Russian republics, the top jobs went to Russians. Soviet central planning, collective farms and other institutions were installed.


  Georgian Stalin
• •142,000 people were deported from the Soviet republics in Eastern Europe and replaced by Russian migrants to water down their culture. •The Moldavian language has Russian words added to it and could only be written in Cyrillic letters. •There was a spike in anti-Semitism. Stalin had initially supported the creation of Israel but when it allied with the USA he now saw them as a Cold War enemy. Jewish drama and literary critics disappeared, the last Jewish newspaper was shut down and Nazi atrocities were portrayed without any mention of the Jews.


  Anti-semitism
• -          Personalised and centralised control

  -          The command economy focussed on heavy industry

  -          Stiflinf bureaucracy

  -          The cult of personality

  -          The use of terror and an enhanced role for the secret police

  -          Effective propaganda and cultural uniformity

  high Stalinism features