Soviet Statistics under Stalinism: Reliability and Distortions in Grain and Population Statistics

Abstract

This essay attempts to understand the history and politics of Soviet grain and demographic statistics, and to show how they were used by the government. It covers the period from Lenin until Stalin’s death. Distortions arose because of over-ambitious planning. Attempts to correct these distortions in 1932 failed because of the cover-up of the famine. Also the results of the census of 1937 were rejected, but the repeat census of 1939 did provide more realistic indicators. For grain, distortions remained to the end of the Stalin period and even increased. The essay argues that the basic statistics available in the archives are reliable and that distortions arose in the reworking of these statistics.     

Understanding stalinism—the ‘Orwellian discrepancy’ and the ‘rational choice dictator’

This discussion article examines the logical bases of the arguments often encountered in the literature that compares Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism. It analyses the ‘Orwellian discrepancy’ between Marxist ideals and Soviet reality, the comparative differences in numbers of people that were murdered by the Stalin and Hitler regimes, and the distinction between ‘murder’ and ‘execution’ that is sometimes applied to the actions of the two tyrants. It then examines the notion of Stalin as a ‘rational choice’ dictator who, through the use of state-sponsored terror, was simply ensuring the survival of his regime, and suggests that a better model for Stalin's government would be that of ‘pseudo-rational choice irrationality’. Arguments that imply that ‘Team Stalin’ should not be seen as a totalitarian corporate form of government because of some attempted reforms and recently revealed institutional complexity are also considered. It concludes by reaffirming the importance of understanding human belief and intellectual factors to a comprehension of historical development.     

Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932 – 33: A reply to Ellman

This Reply, while confirming that Stalin's policies were ruthless and brutal, shows that there are no serious grounds for Ellman's view that Stalin pursued a conscious policy of starvation of the peasants during the famine. It also rejects Ellman's claim that in their recent book [Davies and Wheatcroft (the authors neglect Soviet policy and leadership perceptions in their account of the famine.     

Enforcing Stalinist Discipline in the Early Years of Post-war Reconstruction in the USSR, 1945–1948

A distinctive approach to disciplining the Soviet population emerged following the Terror of 1937–1938, and as a consequence of World War II, around the notion of socio-political and socio-economic ‘organisation’. The early post-war years as a consequence saw the introduction of innovative means of social disciplining in all areas of Soviet society. The infamous attack on the post-war intelligentsia, in particular, resulted from Stalin’s belief that only through the intelligentsia’s correct ‘leadership’ of this socio-economic ‘organisation’ would the Soviet Union be able to meet its challenges of reconstruction and superpower consolidation. This post-Terror and post-war phase in Stalinism marked a lasting turn, which consolidated the authoritarian socio-political dynamics evident in the later post-Stalin Soviet system.     

Did He Really Do It? Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev,Party Disloyalty,and the 1923 Affair

The article uses a variety of documents, published and unpublished, to explore the 1923 arrest, interrogation and ‘trial’ of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, often considered the Bolsheviks' leading expert on Muslim affairs in the early Soviet period. Contrary to the historiography on this crucial moment in the development of Soviet nationality policy, I argue that Sultan-Galiev was not Stalin's ‘first victim’. Rather, responding to the vagaries of Soviet nationality policy, he did indeed violate party discipline in a number of ways, and was engaged in developing conspiratorial ties outside of the party. In fact, the party leaders, and Stalin in particular, treated him less severely than they could have.     

Discontent and Uncertainty in the Borderlands: Soviet Moldavia and the Secret Speech 1956–1957

This article examines reactions to de-Stalinisation in Soviet Moldavia between February 1956 and March 1957. The article is based on evidence from the archives of both the former Communist Party of Moldavia and the Moldavian KGB. It highlights the uncertainty there was at local levels because of the denunciation of Stalin. Local party reports demonstrate concern about the activities of religious activists, Western propaganda, nationalism and disaffected youth. The Hungarian revolution of 1956 caused the party to change tack, and to begin a clampdown. These reports highlight that Soviet rule had very shallow roots in Moldavia.     

Anti-Russian and Anti-Soviet Subversion: The Caucasian–Japanese Nexus, 1904–1945

This article examines the little known history of political collaboration between Caucasian national groups and Japan directed against the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The collaboration, begun at the time of the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, resumed in the 1920s and continued through World War II. The Caucasian groups (Haidar Bammat's ‘Caucasus Group’ in particular) and Japan worked together to pursue their common goal of dismembering the Soviet Union. Their anti-Soviet subversion was real yet achieved few results in the face of extraordinary Soviet security. Nevertheless, Stalin took no chances and terrorised anyone suspected of any possible link to the subversive activity.     

Strengthening Friendship and Fraternal Solidarity: Soviet Youth Tourism to Eastern Europe under Khrushchev and Brezhnev

Abstract

The three decades following Stalin’s death in 1953 witnessed a dramatic expansion in Soviet tourism to the other countries of the European socialist bloc. Youth tourism in particular was an important feature of efforts to build friendlier and more durable links with the satellite states at the grassroots level. However, the prospects for long-term success in this endeavour were continually hampered by Soviet concerns about the dangers of interaction, and as the years passed, the economic benefits of tourist travel rather than the initial goal of building solidarity were accorded priority.     

A Soviet West: nationhood,regionalism, and empire in the annexed western borderlands

This article considers the role the Soviet Union's western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it argues that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy-making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Different experiences of World War II and late Stalinism and contacts with the West ultimately led to this region becoming Soviet, yet different from the rest of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet West was far from uniform, perceived differences between it and the rest of the Soviet Union justified claims at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations.     

Status Shift and Ethnic Mobilisation in the March 1956 Events in Georgia

The large-scale demonstrations that took place in Georgia in early March 1956 following Khrushchev's criticism of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress were the first significant expressions of public protest and civil disobedience in the Soviet Union for decades, and they also bore a clearly nationalistic character. Based primarily on materials from the Georgian KGB and Party archives and interviews with former Party officials and participants of the events, this article examines potential interpretations of these events derived from elite incorporation and ethnic mobilisation theories.     

The Soviet Famine of 1932–1933 Reconsidered

Recent advances in research on the 1932–1933 Soviet famine, most notably the monograph by R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft [2004, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan)], have generated a debate, involving Michael Ellman and Mark Tauger, on the pages of this journal. The present essay re-examines this debate in two areas: intentionality (did Stalin cause the famine in order to kill millions?) and the Ukrainian factor (was the famine a Ukrainian ethnic genocide?). I argue that there is not enough evidence to answer in the affirmative. The essay concludes by discussing the international context of the famine as a factor of critical importance.     

“The laughing third man in a fight”: Stalin's use of the wedge strategy

Although much IR theory focuses on balancing, this paper examines a version of the wedge strategy, what Stalin allegedly called being “the laughing third man in a fight.” This is the practice of advancing one's goals by setting up other states to fight each other. The first case study is Soviet strategy in Europe from September 1939 until June 1941. The second is Soviet strategy in the Far East in 1941–45. What I am looking at here is a policy of deliberately encouraging the start of a war and/or aiding its prolongation in order to weaken both sides. The two case studies indicate that the Soviet Union used such a strategy at times in place of the usual forms of balancing, discussed in the international relations literature. Additionally, analysis of Moscow's conduct, statements by Soviet leaders, and the policies of a number of foreign communist parties indicate that, in addition to any security goals, Stalin's agenda included furthering the USSR's goal as a revolutionary state, even thought this had at times to be constrained by realpolitik.     

‘Letting the Beasts Out of the Cage’: Parole in the Post-Stalin Gulag, 1953–1973

After a lapse of 15 years under Stalin, parole was reintroduced into the Soviet Gulag in 1954. For justice officials anxious to expunge Stalin's repressive legacy, the resurrection of parole signalled a return to correctionalism, societal oversight over the Gulag, and a vastly reduced rate of incarceration. In practice, though, parole exposed significant continuities with the Stalinist Gulag, including endemic corruption, overwhelming concern with production, suspicion of outside interference in penal affairs, and constant upward pressure on the inmate population. In the broader view, the experience of parole in the post-war USSR aligned closely with that of the Western world.     

Latvians on the road to market democracy

This article began as a contrast between the politics and processes of budgeting and revenue mobilization in Latvia under Soviet rule and as an independent country. The dynamics of events in Latvia and opportunities presented during our research broadened its scope. The article became a broad review of the economic and political processes in Latvia since independence, with an emphasis on the effects of attitudes inherited from fifty years of Soviet rule, traditional Latvian values, and emerging public policies. The interdependence between government and business infrastructure is dramatically shown in the bank scandal of 1995. The bank failures caused near catastrophic reductions in tax revenues.     

Policing the Party: Conflicts between Local Prosecutors and Party Leaders under Late Stalinism

During the late Stalin era, many of the USSR's local party control officials and prosecutors entered into a protracted conflict over who had the right to judge the conduct of communists; prosecutors charged that party committees were shielding communists from prosecution, while control officials claimed that party organs were deferring to prosecutors and abandoning their traditional oversight role. This article will argue that although some party committees were interfering in the courts, the dominant story of party–procuracy relations under post-war Stalinism involved the disengagement of party organs from the oversight of administrative wrongdoing, with long-lasting consequences for the Soviet regime's attitude toward corruption.     

Generational Differences in Russian Attitudes towards Democracy and the Economy

The purpose of this article is to explore whether there is evidence of generational differences in Russian attitudes towards democracy. Are the attitudes, values and beliefs of those who came of age politically after the fall of the Soviet Union significantly different from those who did so in the Soviet period? The main finding is that the post-Soviet generation of Russians is generally more supportive of democratic values and institutions and a free market economy than the generations which came of age politically during the Soviet years. Such a result is not surprising. However, while support was found to be the case generally, the differences appear much more strongly for economic reforms than for political ones. In trying to explain why this should be, the authors argue that instrumentalist rather than culturalist considerations are paramount. Put another way, the current generation appears to be less interested in politics than in getting ahead in the world. If these differences are generational and not simply a function of aging, in the future this generation may be less interested in the public good than in their own.     

Remembering the repression of the Stalin era in Russia: on the non-transmission of family memory

Research into some 30 families has revealed blank spaces in the history of many of these families, most of which date from the Stalin period. My thesis is that the internal policy of the Soviet state, with its repression and stigmatization of victims and their families, contributed to making certain pages of Soviet history disappear from family memories, or be reinterpreted within these memories. The policies of physical and symbolic stratification of the new “communist” society and stigmatization of broad social groups tended to create a gap between the social outcasts and their families. Families were impelled to “purge” their past and to eliminate the elements that could make them discreditable: to change names, surnames, and fathers’ names, to destroy the documents and photographs containing information about repressed people and to forget relatives lost from sight in the political turmoil. With the disappearance of eyewitnesses, firsthand memories that had not been transmitted to subsequent generations fell out of family history. These memory omissions result in these pages of family history being entirely wiped out, or lead to fragmented and impersonal memories.     

The Soviet and the Post-Soviet: Street Names and National Discourse in Almaty

Abstract

While discussing Kazakhstan's post-Soviet identity, scholars treat ‘Kazakhisation’ as a given, and the substance of the process of developing such an identity is usually ignored. This article gives an insight into this process by analysing the politics of street names in Almaty and its relation to collective memory in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It is argued that the so-called ‘Kazakhisation’ of the country has been shaped primarily by the Soviet legacy, and it is in no sense pursuing the elimination of the Soviet past, or moving essentially anti-Russian lines. In fact, the post-Soviet discourse of the Kazakh nation is not a rupture but a continuation of Soviet discourses.     

Nation-state, nationalism, and the prospects for democratization in East Central Europe

Recent political developments in East Central Europe have resulted in contradictory and ambivalent tendencies towards the nation-state in post-communist democracies. The liberation from Soviet influence and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire have created political space for the reconstruction of sovereignty in former Soviet-dominated states. This liberation and the institutionalization of new constitutional structures has become a “national” issue. The reaffirmation and resurrection of national unity, national traditions, national culture, and national interest are current themes in post-communist politics.     

The Partition of Khorezm and the Positions of Turkestanis on Razmezhevanie

Cold War historiography, in many instances, explained the delimitation of borders in Central Asia as a part of Moscow's divide and rule policy in Turkestan. However, the viability of this approach can be challenged by an examination of the archival documents of the time and the actual publications of the nationalities commissariat under Stalin. Among the Bolsheviks of Turkestan, Uzbeks were leading the drive towards the repartition of Turkestan, along with their Turkmen comrades who were trying to gain land from the former Khivan Khanate, at that time the People's Soviet Republic of Khorezm. The partition of Khorezm between three newly created administrative divisions, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia and Kirgizia, played a key role in the demarcation of borders in 1924. However, from the point of view of communists from the European parts of the former Tsarist Empire, as well as others from the region, delimitation was first a betrayal of internationalism; second it was an immature project both economically and theoretically; and third, it was believed that the liquidation of the traditional Muslim states of Turkestan, namely the Bukharan Emirate and the Khivan Khanate, would have a negative impact on the image of the Soviet revolution in the eyes of reformers in other Muslim countries in the Middle East.