High Stalinism
Cards (8)
- Dictatorship:
- high Stalinism was the culmination of Stalins regime
- unchallenged leadership
- heroic and god-like
- renewed terror
- cultural purges
- paranoia
- Party was sidelined - no party congresses between 1939-52
- renewed terror:
- around 15% of 1.8 million returned prisoners of war were sent to gulags as it was an offence to surrender
- contact with foreigners could result in arrest - marriage to foreigners outlawed
- around 12 million wartime survivors were sent to gulags
- Cultural purge:
- Zhdanov appointed in 1946
- soviet artists and writers followed party lines
- purge of The Adventures of a Monkey - for mocking the difficulties of soviet life
- Western cultural influences blocked
- Stalinist cult of personality:
- portrayed as world greatest living genius
- all books and articles had to start and end with a paragraph acknowledging Stalins genius on the subject
- man of the people
- towns competed to be renamed after him
- Stalin prizes launched to replace nobel prizes
- Leningrad affair:
- Stalin was suspicious of Party’s base in Leningrad
- Leningraders glorified their heroic struggle during war - Stalin may have been able to do more to help them
- when Zhdanov died in 1948, Stalin began a purge of Leningrad party officials
- by 1950, 2000 party officials has been dismissed
- purges:
- mingrelian case in 1951 - targeted at Georgian party officials - Beria was Mingrelian and accusations were against followers of Beria
- Stalin used accusations to contain Berias power
- Doctors plot:
- A doctor accused the doctors who treated Zhdanov of contributing to his death
- in 1952 Stalin used this to arrest many Jewish doctors who were in a ‘Zionist conspiracy’ on behalf of Israel
- thousands of ordinary Jewish people were also arrested and deported to the gulag
- 9 senior doctors were sentenced to death but Stalins death stopped this