Sidebar: The Soviet Union
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1955 was often held to have been inevitable. Other researchers, though, cite it as a proof of the influence of one individual on history.
Such was Stalin, born Joseb Bessarion Dzu Gashvili in Sakartvelo. His rise to power in the Bolshevik authority was made possible by his control of the party bureaucracy and his cunning ability to forge temporary alliances, and by 1929 he was in absolute control of the country and the party.
The first signs of his efforts became obvious in the early nineteen-thirties. On the national level, Stalin’s policies called for consolidation of farms. In this effort, hundreds of thousands of more-productive farmers were arrested and deported or executed, and the entire Soviet Republic of Ukraine devastated by an artificial famine.
The next step was his turning against the other leaders of the by-then Communist Party. In a series of dramatically staged trials, the surviving Bolshevik leaders accused themselves of having always been agents of Tsarism, Capitalism, and foreign governments, having always worked to overthrow Soviet Power, for which they were all executed.
This effort diffused downwards. Senior party members, administrators, industrial managers, and military officers were deported to prison camps to be worked to death, or merely shot. The result of all this was to make the administration of the country less capable.
By the nineteen-forties, the series of purge trials had essentially eliminated all of the other leaders of the Revolution. Similarly, the higher leadership of the Party ceased to exist. It is estimated that by the time of Stalin’s death in 1952, fewer than a hundred members of the Communist Party from prior to the revolution were left alive, and the majority of them had defected to capitalist countries.
The series of purges cast up some extraordinary figures. After the trial of NKVD chairman Lavrenti Beria (who confessed to having always been an agent of British and Turkish intelligence and a plotter for the restoration of capitalism in Sakartvelo) the turnover in chairmen of the security apparatus was constant, with the average NKVD chairman having a term of seven months.
The final People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs was the notorious David I. Borov, a Young Communist League activist. He became People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs at the age of twenty-two, and launched another sweeping purge of the higher ranks of the Communist Party. A foreign journalist in Moscow commented, “Whenever Borov’s smirky face, with its chin cocked up so arrogantly, made an appearance in a ministry, the Angel of Death seemed to follow.”
After Stalin’s death, Borov was shot, removed from office, and tried.
But it was too late. The Soviet Union was already becoming broken up, due to the constant turnover of administrators. Industry was failing, with skilled engineers, or even half-skilled engineers, being denounced as “wreckers” and shot on a regular basis. The giant collective farms produced less grain per hundred-square-kilometre farm than a small English farm would produce. The armed forces could not maneuver, or in most cases, even leave barracks, as a unit of ten thousand men, designated a division, would have perhaps three officers total, and they would be denounced as bonapartists and wreckers and shot within the week.
By 1955 there was no organised government in the territories of the Soviet Union; only bandit gangs of various strengths, living by looting. The neighbouring countries have been forced to increase their border patrols to prevent the bandits for heading where there are fresh fields of endeavour.