Quick questions on Soviet society under Stalin 1928-1939: VCE Modern History Unit 3

Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP, March 1921 to 1928) allowed small private trade and peasant land use after the catastrophes of War Communism (1918 to 1921). By the late 1920s the policy was under attack from the left wing of the Bolshevik Party as a concession to capitalism.

The Five-Year Plans prioritised heavy industry (steel, coal, machine tools, electricity).

In November 1929, Stalin announced the collectivisation of agriculture. Peasants were forced into collective farms (kolkhozy) or state farms (sovkhozy). By March 1930, 57 per cent of peasant households had been collectivised; resistance, including the slaughter of livestock, was widespread.

Procurement targets in Ukraine were set at levels peasants could not meet. Internal passports (December 1932) prevented peasants from leaving the countryside in search of food. Villages that failed to meet quotas were placed on "blacklists" and denied manufactured goods. The Ukrainian famine (Holodomor) killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people in 1932 to 1933.

The murder of Sergei Kirov (1 December 1934) provided the pretext for purges. The People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (NKVD) under Genrikh Yagoda, then Nikolai Yezhov from September 1936, ran the campaign.

Initial Bolshevik liberalism (Family Code of 1918: civil marriage, easy divorce; legal abortion from 1920) was reversed under Stalin. Abortion was banned by decree on 27 June 1936 except where the mother's life was endangered. Divorce was made expensive and bureaucratised. Adultery was discouraged through party discipline.

On 31 August 1935, the Donbas miner Alexei Stakhanov mined 102 tons of coal in a single shift, 14 times his quota. The Stakhanovite movement was launched from his example. Outstanding workers received pay bonuses, housing, and public honours. The movement enabled tighter labour discipline (the workbook system, December 1938, tied employment history to a single document).

Cultural policy aligned with industrial policy. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers (August 1934), Andrei Zhdanov proclaimed socialist realism as the official aesthetic: "truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development" with the task of "ideological transformation of the working masses in the spirit of socialism."

Adult literacy rose from around 40 per cent in 1926 to around 88 per cent in 1939. Compulsory schooling expanded; technical education for industry was prioritised. History teaching was rewritten: the Short Course of the History of the CPSU (1938), edited under Stalin's supervision, set the official Bolshevik narrative.

Sheila Fitzpatrick (Everyday Stalinism, 1999; Stalin's Peasants, 1994) explores how ordinary Soviet citizens navigated the regime, including denunciation, social mobility and survival strategies. She emphasises social history alongside high politics.

They were also social policy: collectivisation destroyed peasant society; rapid urbanisation created a new working class.

"Structural" causation alone misses Stalin's direct intervention in the Terror (the lists of names he signed, the show trial scripts he edited). Pin the individual where the evidence supports it.

NEP allowed limited market activity but the Bolshevik state still controlled "the commanding heights." Stalin did not break with Lenin so much as radicalise the existing single-party regime.

Modernism dominated early Soviet art (Mayakovsky, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin 1925, the Constructivists). Socialist realism became compulsory only at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers.