Imagine yourself in prison. You are awakened one day by the guard, who orders you and others to the prison yard. You are being moved, but no one has told you where. If you move to the left or the right, you will be shot on the spot. You and 50 other prisoners are loaded into small trucks- There is little room for you to move, the air hot with the breath of the other prisoners. After an incredibly long journey, you are moved from the trucks to a train, specifically a cattle car. Where will this train take you? No prisoner knows. The guards do, though, and allow you to take some winter clothing- a scarf, a pair of gloves, a coat. This does not tell you much though, as Russia in winter is usually a cold place. In talking with your fellow prisoners, you realize that everyone has been arrested for similar reasons, reasons for which many of them advocate their innocence. They were forced to sign the confession, they said. They were tortured; they might have not even known why they were arrested. Soon you piece together the commonalities between them- You all are political prisoners- imprisoned for your political beliefs, or imprisoned because you were supposedly a part of a giant conspiracy to overthrow the ‘People’s Government’ and sell the country to the greedy and exploitive capitalists. For Ekaterina Olitskaia, this story would be similar to her experiences shared in “My Reminiscences,” and for millions of others in the Soviet Union during the 1930s this story would be similar. How did this situation come to be? Why were people jailed for their political beliefs? One has to look back to the situation of Russia from 1900 to the 1930s to trace the path and beliefs of Olitskaia and others to determine why they were jailed during the Gr...
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Hellbeck, Jochen. "Fashioning the Stalinist Soul," in Stalinism: New Directions. Edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick. London & New York: Routledge, 2000
Mochulsky, Fyodor Vasilevich. Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir Edited and Translated by Deborah Kaple. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Olitskaia, Ekaterina. “My Reminiscences,” from In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War. Edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Zhukov, Innokenty. "Voyage of the 'Red Star' Pioneer Troop to Wonderland." In Mass Culture in Soviet Russia, edited by James Von Geldern and Richard Stites. Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Tucker, Robert C. "Stalinism as Revolution from Above". Stalinism. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1999.
During the Communist Party, if people were to resist and speak up about any grievance that they had, they would be incarcerated and possibly executed. In her memoir, Kovály stated “By 1951, the atmosphere in Prague was almost as bad as it had been during the war. No one dared to speak out loud, and hardly a week passed without news of someone’s arrest” (101). This statement further explains how constantly were people arrested, and how people were so fearful that they were afraid to express themselves about anything publicly. In order to stay out of danger, “People no longer aspired toward things but away from them.
Moss, W., 2014. A History of Russia Volume 2: Since 1855. 1st ed. London, England: Anthem Press London, pp.112-113.
As relations changed between Russia and the rest of the world, so did the main historical schools of thought. Following Stalins death, hostilities between the capitalist powers and the USSR, along with an increased awareness of the atrocities that were previously hidden and ignored, led to a split in the opinions of Soviet and Western Liberal historians. In Russia, he was seen, as Trotsky had always maintained, as a betrayer of the revolution, therefore as much distance as possible was placed between himself and Lenin in the schoolbooks of the 50s and early 60s in the USSR. These historians point to Stalin’s killing of fellow communists as a marked difference between himself and his predecessor. Trotsky himself remarked that ‘The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism… a whole river of blood’[1].
Intro with Thesis: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that documents totalitarian communism through the eyes of an ordinary prisoner in a Soviet labor camp. This story describes the protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, as he freezes and starves with the other prisoners, trying to survive the remainder of his ten-year sentence. In this story, Solzhenitsyn uses the struggles in the camp as a way to represent the defaults of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime. By doing this, Solzhenitsyn uses authoritative oppression in his labour camps to demonstrate the corrupt nature of the Soviet system.
"Stalin, Joseph." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William A. Darity, Jr. 2nd ed. Vol. 8. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. 86-87. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.
Westwood, J. N., “Endurance and Endeavour: Russian history, 1812-1980”. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1981.
Overy, Richard. The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2004. Print.
To further transform the Soviet Union, state officials encouraged citizens to help improve the literacy rate and recognize the many heroes of the socialist state. These heroes, including Joseph Stalin, “received huge amounts of fan mail and were lionized on appearances throughout the country” (72). They also encouraged the remaking of individuals, particularly through work. Before the transformation, many did not enjoy working, but “under socialism, it was the thing that filled life with meaning” (75). Numerous interviews an author had with “transformed” felons, illustrated that even criminals could be transformed into good citizens through work (76). However, Sheila Fitzpatrick argues that these interviews were “clearly a propaganda project.”
In 1934, Sergey Kirov a rival to Stalin was murdered. Stalin is believed to have been behind the assassination, he used it as a pretext to arrest thousands of his other opponents who in his words might have been responsible for Kirov’s murder. These purges not only affected those who openly opposed Stalin but ordinary people too. During the rule of Stain o...
In the late 1930’s while the United States was going through The Great Depression the Soviet Union was going through its own turbulent times. This would be known as the Moscow Show Trials, which took place under the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The book Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler takes place during this time period. The main character Nicholas Rubashov has been imprisoned even though he always has been loyal to the goals of the party (Koestler). This showed a shift that was happening in the country and an attempt by Stalin to eliminate any possible opposition even if they were heroes in the revolution. In the text two different concepts come to light vivisection morality where the party comes before the individual and anti-vivisection morality where the individual is sacred. Rubashov in the beginning does not embrace individualism however throughout the novel he begins to adopt individualism that he refers to as grammatical fiction. Vivisection morality is never a justifiable political system. Suppressing the rights of human beings is not only inhumane but also counter productive in creating an effective and wealthy society.
During Stalin’s regime, the individual Russian was the center of his grand plan for better or worse. Stalin wanted all of his people to be treated the same. In the factory the top producer and the worst producer made the same pay. He wanted everyone to be treated as equals. His goal to bring the Soviet Union into the industrial age put tremendous pressure on his people. Through violence and oppression Stalin tried to maintain an absurd vision that he saw for the Soviet Union. Even as individuals were looked at as being equals, they also were viewed as equals in other ways. There was no one who could be exempt when the system wanted someone imprisoned, killed, or vanished. From the poorest of the poor, to the riches of the rich, everyone was at the mercy of the regime. Millions of individuals had fake trumped up charges brought upon them, either by the government or by others who had called them o...
The Communist Party was one of the main sections in Soviet society that was impacted profoundly by Stalin’s terror. In 1935, the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a faithful Communist and Bolshevik party member that had certain popularity, threatening Stalin’s consolidation of power, initiated The Great Purge. His death, triggering three important, widely publicised ‘show trials’ in Moscow, ultimately encouraged the climate of terror during the Great Purge. Bolsheviks Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates were accused of conspiring against Stalin and the government, with each confessing to their supposed crimes, which were then broadcast around the world. It was later discovered that these confessions were forced after long months of psychological abuse and cruel acts of torture. As Stalin...
Franklin, Simon and Emma Widdis, eds. National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., and Mark D. Steinberg. A History of Russia. 7th ed. Oxford: Oxford, 2005. Print.