How Stalin Made Communism Work

From the very beginning of the revolution, part of the Soviet economy was dependent upon slave labor. The way the Soviets would tame this labor was through a system that the Russian author Solzhenitsyn would later call the Gulag Archipelago. But at the very beginning of the Russian Revolution, around the year 1918, the first Gulag that would later set the blueprints for the later death camps would be established. Innocent people were forced to admit to crimes they never even thought of committing or transported to places controlled by the Cheka where they were forced to be slaves for the Soviet economy, either mining precious minerals, or building equipment for the war effort. Slavery was part of the Soviet economic system from the start, and it continued to be so even up until its collapse. One can argue the varying degrees, but what is undebatable is that people who were deemed enemies of the state by the Soviet government were rounded up and put onto trucks and shipped out into the middle of nowhere where they were forced to do hard labor with very minimal protection and equipment if they resisted they were shot. The Soviet government, along with an economy that was directed from a top-down administration, took what was a Russian Tzarist economy that was arguably making Russia the China of the early 20th century back to a very troubled, third-world economy. Under Lennon’s leadership people across the world would see for the first time, communism in action and they didn’t like it. Eventually, due to lackluster economic results and international pressure, Lenin decided to revert to a more ” hands-off” approach with his NEP plan. This worked, and for the first time since before the Russian Civil War, the average Russian was obtaining more wealth for himself and his family. 

 Barely anyone would doubt that Stalin took the Gulag system and put it to 11. Stalin rounded up and sent far more people into exile than Lenin did. Millions of people were sent to the Gulag, where products from either the war or the domestic homefront under Stalin’s reign were created. If they were not forced to work in sweatshops, they were then forced to build things such as railroads, canals, and even factories. The Soviet Union saw the most significant expansion of its GDP under Stalin’s reign. Stalin also oversaw the most critical growth in wealth for the average Russian with his forced urbanization policies. Stalin destroyed the NEP economic program and returned to a direct top-down command economy. Stalin reshaped the Soviet economy through a series of five-year plans. These plans would consist of things like forced relocation plans for slave labor and the regulation of more markets within the economy; as stated before, from the start of the first five-year plan to the beginning of World War II, the Soviet economy would grow at a rate of 5% each year during the Great Depression.  With millions of people relocating from the rural areas and being forced to work and live within the cities, the Soviet Union eventually came into trouble with its agricultural system. Many farmers simply didn’t have any incentive to work; they were working with outdated equipment and doing a hazardous job and were all doing this for a wage that wasn’t high and fixed, meaning that it would never change. Many farmers simply wondered why they would risk their lives and health for very little money on farms they don’t own. This idea baffled Stalin similarly to how it baffled Lenin. Enraged at a problem, he thought Lenin solved Stalin and set out to solve the Kulak problem once and for all. Not only did Stalin confiscate literally every single grain of food from any resisting farmer within Ukraine, but he also rounded them up and sent them to the Gulags; those who were not rounded up and sent to the Gulag were left to starve and work. 3.5-7 million people were forced to grow food they could not eat, but they had to watch as their hard work was shipped to the cities to feed the industrial workers. But what I found most interesting out of everything to come out of the Holodomor was the West's disinterest and non-interference. Many newspapers and government officials either downplayed or outright ignored what was happening (reference will be provided below).  It is not like reporters and journalists in the United States. I didn’t know what was going on in the Soviet Union. There were people such as Emma Goldstein, who traveled there herself because she was a former supporter. When she got there she saw what Lenin in the Bolsheviks were doing in the name of socialism and became disgusted. She then left and traveled around the United States, giving speeches about what the Bolsheviks were doing. Yet somehow, journalists were just entirely blindsided by the horrible actions of the Soviet Union, and somehow, they felt no reason to question the Soviet government even with this accessible access information at their fingertips; all they had to do was go to somebody who went there for herself and ask her what was going on and they didn’t. It is very hard for me to understand why journalists who try to find the truth would allow themselves to ignore something like this. I am not in their heads, so I cannot understand 100% of the reasons, but if I had to guess, it might’ve had to do something with the fact that if the reporters were to write fluff pieces on the Soviet Union, then the Soviet government would reward them with things like Beachside houses on the Crimean sea and privileges within the Soviet Government. All of what was just explained was part of Stalin‘s propaganda machine. It is important to remember that Stalin wasn’t the one who built this so much as he was the one who perfected it. Stalin was able to get away with the Holodomor with no Western governments putting anything close to a sanction on the Soviet Union; there wasn’t even a diplomatic outcry. Until Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization efforts, Stalin carried a particular personality within the West, like how you would see an uncle. This is where we get the nickname Uncle Joe, which was used by the Western press to sort of affectionately refer to the brutal dictator Joseph Stalin. 

With a growing economy during the Great Depression and the Western countries looking fondly upon him, this is how Stalin made communism work. Had Stalin ruled the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he would’ve never been able to get away with the things he was able to do before and during World War II. There was still a cost to his effort, but this was just a cost he didn’t care about. Stalin killed somewhere between 3.3000,00 and 60 million of his people, all to help his industrialization effort and secure his political power. The reason why the numbers are unsure even to this very day is that the Russian government will not allow its people to investigate the Soviet archives and find out not only how many victims were killed but also where their bodies are. Who knows when we will indeed find out the damage done by Communism to the Russian people since Putin's government just keeps acting the same way? A modern example of the emperor's new clothes. 

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Reference Links:

https://education.holodomor.ca/teaching-materials/holodomor-denial-silences/ (Reasons why the Holodamor was ignored)

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/ch05.htm (Emma Goldsteins speech given after her time in the Soviet Union during Lenin's reign)