HSIE - Modern History Year 12 - Stalinism and a Totalitarian Society: Home

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: brief, basic information laid out in an easy-to-read format. May use informal language. (Includes most news articles)

: provides additional background information and further reading. Introduces some subject-specific language.

: lengthy, detailed information. Frequently uses technical/subject-specific language. (Includes most analytical articles)

Stalin at War, 1918-1953: Patterns of Violence and Foreign Threat
Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union from the 1920s invoked the specter of war. For some reason, however, we have never taken those invocations seriously. We have always understood them as a manipulative device, either to gain political advantage over his opponents, to mobilize the population, to deflect blame for ill-advised or extreme policies, or in some other way to consolidate the dictator's power. This article argues that the dictator's expectations of war were not just discursive or rhetorical, as most histories argue. In fact, Stalin' s perceptions of external threat were inextricably intertwined with policies of mass repression, as well as campaigns of industrial mobilization. This article examines the patterns of radicalized internal violence that so characterized the Stalinist regime. 

Repression and Terror: Stalin in Control
During the second half of the 1920s, Joseph Stalin set the stage for gaining absolute power by employing police repression against opposition elements within the Communist Party. The machinery of coercion had previously been used only against opponents of Bolshevism, not against party members themselves. 


Totalitarianism Case Study: Stalin Builds a Totalitarian State 
- scroll to page 442 of the PDF
Stalin aimed to create a perfect Communist state in Russia. To realize his vision, Stalin planned to transform the Soviet Union into a totalitarian state. He began building his totalitarian state by destroying his enemies—real and imagined. 


Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939 (note - published in 1977).
The thesis of this article is that Stalin had a special interest in the new cadres. He believed them to possess specific qualifications which were essential for Soviet leadership, and he also believed that the old cadres' lack of such qualifications exposed the regime to manipulation by its present and potential enemies.