Nature and extent of the opposition
- As we have already seen, Stalin saw opposition everywhere, but that doesn’t mean opposition was real.
- According to historians like Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Conquest, people in the USSR hated Stalin, but there were no channels for them to express themselves.
- Stalin faced (or considered) opposition from within the party and from a particular group within the peasantry, the kulaks.
- The opposition within the party was neutralized or eliminated during his rise to power and the Great Purge.
Note
- See the section on Methods in the emergence to power and the one on Use of Terror.
Note
- Who Were the Kulaks?
- Kulak (originally): affluent peasants with more land/livestock in late Imperial Russia
- Under Stalin: term became politicized, labeling peasants resisting grain requisition, hiring labor, or holding surplus
- Portrayed as class enemies of socialism and the proletariat
- Fitzpatrick: term was arbitrary, inconsistent, and a “floating signifier” to justify repression
- Used to stigmatize a broad section of rural society
Peasant Resistance and Dekulakization
- Widespread peasant resistance to collectivization, seen as a return to serfdom
- Acts of protest: “kulak terror” (arson, sabotage, killing officials) and mass livestock slaughter
- 1929: Stalin called for “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”
- Dekulakization campaigns: confiscation, arrest, deportation, execution (Viola)
- Peak in Holodomor (1932–33): famine in Ukraine caused by collectivization and grain requisitions
- 3.5–5 million deaths in Ukraine; grain still exported abroad
- Ukrainian famine seen as targeted and deliberate, unlike other regions
Historiography
- Was the Holodomor a genocide?
- Fitzpatrick: famine caused partly by state requisitions, but not genocide
- Conquest & Applebaum: famine deliberately engineered to crush Ukrainian nationalism
- Local officials blocked aid and movement, worsening deaths
- 2006: Ukraine officially recognized Holodomor as genocide, supported by many Western historians and parliaments
- Critics see genocide label as politicized, but evidence shows regime’s callous indifference or intent
Historiography
- Did Kulaks Really Exist?
- Historians debate whether kulaks were a real class or a fabricated enemy
- Fitzpatrick: term was vague, inconsistently applied, often to middle/poor peasants → more political than economic
- Lewin: “kulak” served as a scapegoat for repression and mobilization
- Wheatcroft: local officials labeled entire villages kulak to meet quotas
- Service: acknowledges some wealthier peasants, but far fewer than claimed; many eliminated earlier under war communism
Gulags Under Stalin
- Gulag (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei): Soviet forced labor camp network, expanded massively under Stalin though created under Lenin
- 1929–1953: millions imprisoned for political, criminal, or fabricated charges (e.g., kulaks, “enemies of the people”)
- Camps spread across USSR, from Arctic to Central Asia
- Served punitive and economic roles: cheap labor for mining, logging, construction, infrastructure
- Conditions: overwork, malnutrition, extreme climate, brutality → high mortality
- Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973): exposed scale and ideology of the system
- Gulags were central to social control and industrialization, sacrificing lives for state goals
- By 1953: population peaked at 2.5 million prisoners
Case study
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s multi-volume exposé of Soviet forced labor camps
- Based on his own imprisonment (1945–53) and accounts from 200+ former prisoners
- Detailed mass arrests, interrogations, degradation, and suffering
- Framed Gulag as a core instrument of Stalinist terror, upheld by ideology, bureaucracy, and fear
- Banned in USSR, but globally influential, shaping Cold War critiques of the Soviet regime
