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Hitler, a cautious dictator for the first couple of years of his rule, had become reckless by 1941, and had gambled everything on a swift victory in the USSR. If Stalin’s regime could be crushed and thirty million Russians starved to death as a result, then there would be enough living space for Aryan German settlers and the resources to defeat any enemy in the west. The defeat of the USSR would have to be swift and decisive, an outcome that was only possible in the racial imaginings of Hitler and his inner circle. The first three to four months…
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In the late 1920s Stalin faced a seemingly unsolvable economic dilemma. How did the USSR industrialise, build defence industries and protect itself from a hostile world when its weak agriculture could not provide enough grain surpluses for export or to create cheap food to feed the cities? The NEP had produced a social class that, in Marxist Leninist discourse, was hostile to the Soviet regime, the Kulaks (though in reality, they posed no threat at all). Therefore, in order deal with the problems of food shortages, and the threat of an enemy class emerging, Stalin chose collectivisation, the forceful transfer…
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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,…