The Stalin Era (Routledge Sources in History)
Philip Boobbyer
Language: English
Pages: 270
ISBN: 0415182980
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book provides a wide-ranging history of every aspect of Stalin's dictatorship over the peoples of the Soviet Union. Drawing upon a huge array of primary and secondary sources, The Stalin Era is a first-hand account of Stalinist thought, policy and and their effects. It places the man and his ideology into context both within pre-Revolutionary Russia, Lenin's Soviet Union and post-Stalinist Russia. The Stalin Era examines:
* collectivisation
* industrialisation
* terror
* government
* the Cult of Stalin
* education and Science
* family
* religion: The Russian Orthodox Church
* art and the state.
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process or in protecting village churches from closure and pillage (see Document 11.9). The slaughter and consumption of livestock were memorably described by the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov in his novel Virgin Soil Upturned, a sanitised view of collectivisation which began to appear in 1932. Sholokhov, a loyal servant of the Soviet state, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965 for his The Quiet Don, an account of cossack life during the revolution which first started to appear in 1928. In
heighten tension. Speaking to a group of Moscow Communists about the Shakhty trial in April 1928, Stalin suggested that foreign powers were attempting to interfere with Soviet policy. Document 4.5 Stalin on the Shakhty Trial What is the class background of the Shakhty affair, where are its roots, and on what class basis could this economic counter-revolution arise? There are comrades who think the Shakhty affair accidental. They usually say: we are really caught napping this time; we didn’t have
blessing. For after Stalin’s death, the release of millions of prisoners meant the introduction of an embittered community back into ordinary life. The experience of that community profoundly influenced the late Soviet intelligentsia and its attitude to the Soviet state. Government According to traditional Marxist doctrine, the state was supposed to wither away under socialism. In theory, the state and the law were part of the so-called ‘superstructure’, i.e. they grew out of the social and
science youth predominate there. There is no doubt that our educational institutions will soon be turning out thousands of new technicians and engineeers, new leaders for our industries. But that is only one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that the industrial and technical intelligentsia of the working class will be recruited not only from those who have had higher education, but also from practical workers in our factories, from the skilled workers, from the working-class cultural
place as an emotional experience multiplying human happiness . . . Modern love always sins, because it absorbs the thoughts and feelings of ‘loving hearts’ and isolates the loving pair from the collective . . . In the new world the accepted norm of sexual relations will probably be based on free, healthy and natural attraction (without distortions and excesses) and on ‘transformed Eros’ . . . [At the present moment] the moral ideal defining relationships is not the unadorned sexual instinct but