The Stalin era

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1924

Lenin died on January 21, 1924, the official cause of death being arteriosclerosis. On the morning of January 22 his body was mummified temporarily to be placed on the bier for several days in the Archway of the House of the Unions. But Stalin immediately shows that he counts as well: he wants to prove that the bolsheviks can even overcome death. The Kremlin announces that Lenin's body will be preserved in a special mausoleum on the Red Square. And the name of the capital of the Romanovs, Saint-Petersburg, is changed into Leningrad.

End of January a wooden mausoleum is set up. Behind closed doors many people are very busy to realise Stalin's plan. The anatomist Vladimir Vorobyov (1876-1937) and the young biochemic Boris Zbarsky (?-1952) mummify the body in such way that it can be preserved for a long time. When Zbarsky asks if the result of his work resembles to reality, Lenin's brother replies: "I can't say nothing, I'm just speechless. He looks like when I saw him just after his death." And so Stalin offered a present to the first Congress without Lenin: he offered Lenin himself. Then he ordered the transformation of the wooden mausoleum to an impressive, monumental building, covered with dark red porphyry and black Labrador stones.

1926-1928

At the XVth Party Congress of the Communists, in 1927, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev are thrown out of the party and the NEP is finished. Still in 1927, the jubilee year of the Cheka, dozens of engineers are arrested in the Donets basin, on suspicion of "sabotage". On May 20, 1928 they are shown in Moscow - 53 engineers are brought up. It's a wonderful show: all defendants chastise themselves plentifully. They seem to want to compete with the public prosecutor on who could reveal the most serious accusations. The public prosecutor demands death penalty against 23 defendants, but only 5 executions take place by way of thanks for their good cooperation. Stalin orders the laborers to search for saboteurs in all factories.

On October 1, 1928 the first Five-Year Plan starts. Emphasis is made on industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. The sovkhoz farms are held up as example. A sovkhoz was a collective farm completely owned by the state. The machines were leased from leasing companies and the people working there were on the payroll of the state. The word Совхоз is an abbreviation of Советское хозяйство (sovetskoe khozyaistvo) or soviet household.

On other collective farms, the kolkhoz farms, the farmers worked for a profit share, they were not working for the state or someone else. The kolkhoz farms were property of groups of cooperating farmers, they had no guarantee for their income. The word колхоз is an abbreviation of коллективное хозяйство (kollektivnoe khozyaistvo) or collective household.

The farmers are called more and more kulaks. Stalin goes into the forced collectivization of agriculture, and to the "liquidation of the kulak class". The notion kulak appeared to be very flexible: millions (often poor) farmers were deported to inhospitable places of the Soviet Union.

1929

Stalin urges the "collectivization without limits". The country is preparing its 50th birthday, in December. He chose that day to start the Big Turn. Special goods trains, formerly used for the transportation of cattle, were now waiting for the transportation of people. Besides the kulaks the old Russian villages had to be destroyed too. The Revolution had offered land to the rural population. Now they had to return it, together with the cattle they had collected. Instead of "mine" they had to learn to say "ours" in the future. The kulaks, the farmers who had been doing relatively well until then, did not accept and were ready to resist. Therefore Stalin decided to solve the problem in a revolutionary way by destroying them all. He appointed Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890-1986) as the head of the commission made responsible for it and Molotov did it in a diligent and bloody way.

In February the kulaks were divided into groups. The contra-revolutionary activists would be sent to camps or shot and their families would be deported to the farthest corners of the country. After that the most wealthy kulaks would be deported to far-away and unfruitful areas. They disappeared to the north, the Ural, Kazakhstan and Siberia. Nobody knew exactly who belonged to which category. The poor countrymen and smallholders who escaped from deportation were united in collective state farms. The carefully kept livestock of the kulaks and their well kept farms were transferred to the kolkhoz farms, together with all their other properties and savings.

As from April 1929 started the biggest experiment of the 20th century, which would cause endless shedding of blood. In order to expose "saboteurs" Stalin would start using the secret police. It was the start of the show trials. Right wing activists were put in the pillory all over the country, and found guilty in meetings organized in factories, training centers, kindergartens and even graveyards. From the beginning the church was one of the targets of the bolshevik regime. And Stalin demolished the churches literally, like Lenin wanted it. The climax of the campaign was the destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow's biggest church, by thousands of people. The churches that were not demolished were transformed into entrepots. School kids were ordered to take icons at school, in order to burn them in public. They received posters with Lenin's image, to put them in place of the icons.

While the end of the decade was drawing near, hordes of filthy people were wandering around and a great famine afflicted the country. Rural people had usurped the cities. The huge apartments of the rich became communal residences, in which lived ten or more families. Pope Pius XI incited the believers to pray for the persecuted christians in Russia. On the eve of the day on which this prayer would be announced worldwide, Stalin published a decree. Stalin blamed the malicious overzealous party officials who had closed some churches contrary to the party rule. And, though the priests and monks did not return from exile and at the end 80 % of the country churches were closed, the people reacted enthusiastically to the fact that on Stalin's orders a few churches were re-opened. It successfully created a popular Russian character: the good czar with the bad ministers.

1930

In the summer of 1930 the intelligentsia were next to be arrested by the secret police. In some scientific disciplines 85% of the scientists was purged. Most were deported to Siberian or Asian labor camps or exiled. Some were executed by firing squad or committed suicide when they were visited by the NKVD. Many of them died in the Gulag.

A next show trial is organized, this time against so-called interventionists. The accused are members of the Industrial Party, mainly technically skilled intellectuals who were accused of preparing a push with the help of foreign governments.

1931-1932

In the beginning of the awful thirties the avant-garde poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893-1930) committed suicide by putting a bullit through his head. The avant-garde had wished a revolution in art, but the new regime wanted an art in the service of the revolution. Lenin had already created the Российская Ассоциация Пролетарских Писателей (RAPP) or the  Russian Association of Proletarian Writers by which he wanted to counter the futurists. The RAPP was openly trying to put art under the control of the regime. When the association was abolished by Stalin in 1932 by decree, many writers were relieved, but the same decree prohibited the existence of all other literary groupings. At the same time the Союз Советских Писателей (Soyuz Sovietskich Pisateley) or Union of Soviet Writers was created, presided by Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). As from 1934-1935 it would be almost impossible for non-members to get something published.

In the winter of 1931-1932 Ukraine, the Wolga area, the Caucasus and Kazakhstan were in grip of the most important famine the country ever knew. Millions of starving people tried to take refuge in the cities, but there bread was only supplied to inhabitants of the city having bread coupons. Nobody ever knew how many people died as a result of this famine. Estimations vary from 5 to 8 million. Stalin fighted famine with his usual weapon: terror. In August 1932 he drew up personally the notorious law stating that "individuals who misappropriate public funds must be considered as enemies of the people" and he proclamed cruel punishments for offenders of this law.

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