Originally Posted by
Kill Bones
In Soviet Russia, Joseph Stalin helped transform the Soviet Union into a military and industrial superpower, but at a staggering cost in human lives and suffering. In the words of scholar Stephen Cohen, Stalin's rule was a "holocaust by terror" that "victimized tens of millions of people for twenty-five years."
Stalin was born Iosif Vissioronovich Djugashvili on December 21, 1879, in the Georgian village of Gori. The son of a poor shoemaker, Iosif became a professional revolutionary and at age thirty-four adopted the political name of Stalin, meaning "man of steel." A member of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, Stalin played a minor role in the 1917 October Revolution and entered the new Soviet government as Commissar of Nationalities. In 1922 he became General Secretary of the Communist Party, a position he subsequently transformed into the major base of power in the Soviet state. A gifted politician, Stalin outmaneuvered his rivals to become the sole leader of the party and the state by 1929.
Human life had little value for Stalin, who viewed people largely as instruments for serving the needs of the state. In the late 1920s, Stalin launched a massive drive to transform Soviet industry and agriculture. To support industrialization, he ordered the collectivization of agriculture and the creation of large-scale communal farms. But collectivization soon turned into a bloody civil war that raged across the countryside, resulting in the death and deportation of five to eight million people. Those who resisted faced either execution or exile to "special settlements" in remote northern regions, where up to a third of them died from the harsh conditions. Collectivization proved even more deadly during the famine years of 1932 and 1933 when an estimated five to eight million peasants died in Ukraine and Central Asia. Some scholars view this famine as a deliberate act of genocide, whereas others blame it on bureaucratic incompetence and poor planning.
Repression was central to Stalin's leadership from the beginning. Throughout the period from 1929 to 1953 the regime employed tactics of terror, arresting people on false charges of conspiracy and espionage, then either executing them or sentencing them to labor camps, where they toiled in harsh, debilitating conditions. Chronic absenteeism at work or picking up grain husks from a harvested field could bring a ten-year sentence. According to one scholar, over twenty-eight million Soviet citizens passed through the forced labor camps and colonies between 1929 and 1953. Located all across the Soviet Union, in every time zone, the camps were filthy, brutal, and dehumanizing. Death rates were high, averaging about 6 percent per year. One archival source states that over two million inmates died in the camps between 1929 and 1953, but this does not include all categories of prisoners.
The height of the Stalinist repression, known as the Great Terror, lasted from 1936 to 1939. The majority of victims during this period were from the Communist Party, the economic ministries, the military, the Communist International, and minority nationalities. No precise figures exist. Official KGB figures for 1937938 claim that just under 700,000 were executed and that at the beginning of the 1940s there were about 3.6 million in labor camps and prisons. Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies have calculated that the total number of excess deaths from 1927 to 1938 may have amounted to some ten million persons, 8.5 million killed between 1927 and 1936 and about 1 to 1.5 million between 1937 and 1938.
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