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What You’ll Learn in This Episode What the Gulag was — its origins, scale, and how it functioned as an economic and political institution How the camp system expanded dramatically under Stalin from the late 1920s onwards Who the Gulag’s prisoners were and how they were treated What role the Gulag played in the Soviet economy and why it was less economically rational than often assumed What Was the Gulag? The word “Gulag” is an acronym from the Russian — Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey, the Main Camp Administration — but it has come to mean something far larger than a bureaucratic…
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Here too is a quick nano-vid on the subject of Stalin’s rise to power How did Stalin rise to power? Watch this video on YouTube.
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In 1928 the Soviet economy experienced a moment of massive change. For four years, as power struggles between Stalin and the ‘troika’ of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev left Russia in a period of confused collective leadership, the biggest question had been one of economic direction. It was unclear how long Lenin’s New Economic Policy that had been introduced in the aftermath of the civil war and allowed a limited amount of free enterprise in Russia was meant to continue. Lenin, who died in 1924 after several strokes robbed him of speech did not make clear how long it should be,…
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The October Revolution of 1917 was at once a break with the past, a new beginning and an end of history, three ideas encapsulated within the dialectic of Marxism and the Hegelian eschatology that Marx’s ideas were based upon. A revolution staged by a radical intelligentsia who claimed to have correctly interpreted the processes of history itself was unprecedented, and because of this it would present specific philosophical and aesthetic challenges to the revolution’s heirs who set about building a new society on the ruins of the old. The revolution of October 1917 had been a based around what its…