Soviet World

• Lenin died (stroke)


  1924
• Lenin


  • Immortalized as a 'cult' and founder of the USSR
  • Ideas remained central to Soviet political project
  • What happened next: continuation, or deviation of Lenin's path?
• Key figures


  • Lenin
  • Trotsky
  • Stalin
• Joseph Vissarionovich 'Stalin'


  • Georgian Bolshevik (former seminarian from Gori)
  • Commissar of Nationalities
  • Pre-eminent leader of the Soviet Union (and Global communism) from 1929-1953
  • Transformed all aspects of life in the Soviet Union (political, economic, cultural)
• Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

  • Collectivization
  • Famine in Ukraine (the 'Holodomor')
  • 'building a better world' – Stalinist civilization
  • Magnitogorsk – 'The Magnetic Mountain'
  • Aleksei Stakhanov: worker-superman
• doctored image of Stalin next to Lenin


  • Personality Cult
• Stalin Museum, Gori (Georgia)

  • 'The Great Terror', 1936-1938
  • Purge of the (Communist) Party
  • Stalin's attempt to reclaim control of the party apparatuses, to eliminate threats to his power
• Geoffrey Hosking,: 'These men had given their whole lives to the party, and they still believed, in spite of everything, in its ultimate victory. To ask anything else would have been asking them to abjure everything they had ever believed. They had no moral or religious foundation on which they could take their stand and resist the pressures directed against them'
• 'Judeo-Bolshevism'


  Source of support for Fascism/Nazism
• Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

  • Existed from 1921-1991
  • Global Superpower from 1945 onwards and important alternative to Western international order
  • Continues to cast shadow on 21st century?
• Vladimir Putin


  Former KGB agent
• Stalin's era from 1929-1953 (his death)


  • Most important phase in Soviet history
  • Transformed the country from backward feudal empire into modern communist industrial colossus
  • Unleashed terror on the Soviet people