Was post-WWII Stalinism in Soviet-bloc Europe less deadly than pre-war Stalinism in USSR? Why?

Was post-war Stalinism less deadly than pre-war Stalinism

  • yes

    Votes: 33 75.0%
  • no

    Votes: 11 25.0%

  • Total voters
    44

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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Monthly Donor
When hearing about mass casualties under Soviet Communism, the 1928-1940 era really seems to stand out for the collectivization and later purges.

I've often heard it said that in the post-war Soviet Union under Stalin repression significantly increased after WWII and some regime internal relaxation (on matters like religion for instance) of the wartime years went away. However, I do not hear of comparable instances of mass death tolls in the USSR for the 1946-1953 era.

Likewise, in the new "people's democracies" of Europe we hear alot about repression but not mass death tolls like those of collectivization and the purges.

Yet in both periods, Stalin was the ultimate authority. Was there less murder by the regime (and its client regimes) after WWII than before? If so, why? Why didn't every newly communizing country have a holodomor? If regime murders in both eras were on a similar scale in both eras, why haven't we heard nearly as much about the latter era?
 
There was another famine in the Soviet Union in 1946-1947 that should be grouped in with postwar Stalinism. The holodomor happened as a result of the initial push to industrialize the USSR and disregard for human life. The early '30s was the Soviet Union's rapid period of industrialization, and Moscow needed to export as much grain as possible to pay for capital stock and industrial equipment.
 
Djilas argues that the intensity of violence against the peasantry, working class and nomenklatura in a "new class" society is dependent upon the difficulty that the nomenklatura faces in self-replication. Djilas would argue that despite the 1947 famine soviet nomenklatura did not face an effective threat to their power. Polish, Baltic and Ukraine nationalist groups didn't threaten the reproduction of the soviet economy or nomenklatura rule. Additionally in 1947 the Soviet Union possessed the logistic capacity to honour its requirement to supply food in famine. (It did not possess this in 1932 and is culpable for destroying NEP famin prevention economics without a substitute being available.)

In the European fraternal states the only real threats to the nomenklatura were:
1) the nomenklatura. Cue the "Titoist"/Rajk purges
2) the social democrats. Thus forced mergers
3) the industrial working class. Latent until Stalin died but seen before the purge of the anti-party group in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and the USSR itself

The question then is not why 1945-1957 was "mild." The question is why 1927-1941 was "hard."

And the answer, as always, is the scissors crisis which goes back to the liberation of the peasants from taxes, rent and tithes. Peasants enjoyed their new freedom as a relief from exertion. Commodities demanded weren't forth-coming and the NEP rural economy collapsed towards subsistence. This, of course, erupted into industrial proletarian unrest.

To hang on the nomenklatura simultaneously attacked the peasantry, proletariat and itself.

While a great purge of nomenklatura was inevitable it could have been a party card purge as in the very early 1930s, had the class war in the economy not been in its heightened form.

Now my fellow historians will immediately point to the war and post war "norms" of required labour output being much higher than in the 30s: is this not heightened class war? It is not. It is nomenklatura victory. The low norms of the 1930s were a sign of working classes strength. The failures of kholkoz productivity were a sign of rural proletarian strength.

By 1945 the Soviet nomenklatura had defeated the Soviet working class and destroyed the Soviet peasantry as a class. They did not feel threatened by the fraternal states' peasantries or proletariats until 1953/1956. And they were willing to spend the blood to maintain power. They were briefly threatened by the possibility Yugoslavia may have been a socialist state, but 1956 proved Togliatti was more dangerous than Tito to their class rule.

Yours,
Sam R.
 
Writing in the late 1950's, Philip Mosley suggested some reasons why collectviization was a more protracted and less violent process in eastern Europe than in the USSR:

"...except in Bulgaria the process of imposing the collective system has been longer and more gradual than it was in the Soviet Union after 1928.

"One reason for this generally slow development of collectivized agriculture is that the post-1945 regimes inherited from the period of Nazi control a workable system of forced deliveries from the individual peasants. Particularly in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland the Communists took over a highly centralized system of deliveries which went on operating with only slight interruption and which has, in large measure, met the immediate needs of the regime for large-scale deliveries from the peasantry. Thus, the puppet regimes in Eastern Europe have not generally faced the same problem in collecting from the peasants their surpluses after subsistence as did the Soviet government by 1928-1929. The satellite countries, unlike Russia of 1929, have an existing administrative alternative to collectivization. All-out pressure for collectivization would, of course, disrupt an already operating system of collections, and this may well have been another reason why the puppet leaders have proceeded more cautiously than did the Soviet regime.

"Another factor which may well have slowed down the impact of collectivization in Eastern Europe, except for Bulgaria, is the much greater role of individual investment and reinvestment in agriculture, a factor far more productive then it was in the Soviet Union up to 1928. The willingness of the peasants in Eastern Europe to scrimp, to perform extra work in draining their fields, cleaning their pastures, and raising their livestock--generally, to improve their work on the basis of several generations of agricultural advance--has built up a relatively satisfactory level of prosperity in the past, at least in the surplus-producing parts of the region. The same factor of individual effort and private savings is still indispensable today to the satellite governments in meeting their plans.." https://books.google.com/books?id=9-UeBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA62

Mosely also notes that in the USSR collectivization was a trial-and-error process in which the form finally adopted--the artel--was considerably short of full communism:

"A third aspect of the triai-and-error process was illustrated in the uncertainty over the preferred structure of the collective farm. In the early stage of collectivization, from 1929 to 1933, the government and the Party assumed, and the peasants were told, that the goal was complete collectivization in the form of the commune, with its suppression of private use of land and of privately owned livestock or poultry. Under the commune, of which a substantial number were created, there was no private livestock, no private market gardens, and no direct private earnings apart from sharing in the collective income of the commune. During this same period the 'society for joint cultivation of land" (TOZ), under which the peasant harvested the crop from his own land while cooperating in certain heavy farm operations with his fellow members, was suppressed. A third type, the artel rapidly became the dominant form of the collective farm, and by 1935 it was the only type permitted. The artel represents a compromise between the government's goal of complete collectivization and the immediate demands and needs of the peasants. Under it, the collectivized peasant is given a small market garden of his own, averaging between one-quarter and one-half acre, on which he raises potatoes and vegetables; he is also allowed to keep for his own use two or three pigs, a cow, two calves, and other small livestock. The importance of this permitted private sector within collectivized agriculture can be measured by the fact that even in 1952 more than one-half of the livestock was actually owned by the individual members of the collectives. At no point, however, has the peasant received the full return from his market garden and livestock, for he has to make heavy payments to the government from his private produce..." https://books.google.com/books?id=9-UeBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA57

Mosely also points out that not only was collectivization in east Europe far from complete (when he was writing in the late 1950's) but that it had omitted the stage of experimenting with "communes":

"In Eastern Europe, collectivization has proceeded to different levels, ranging from 6 percent to 50 percent, whereas in the Soviet Union the political factors forced the government to carry out almost complete collectivization within a very few years.

"In several countries of Eastern Europe, again except in Bulgaria, there are several types of collectives, ranging from (1) the cooperative use of machinery on individual plots, like the Soviet pre-1930 "society for joint cultivation," with a defined individual return for labor invested in an individual plot, through (2) the more common type, a collectively operated farm with a part of the return distributed in accordance with the amounts of land contributed by the peasant households, all the way to (3) the Soviet kolkhoz, or artel, in which no separate return is made for the land contributed. However, there is no evidence of the earlier Soviet "commune," forbidden in the Soviet Union today..." https://books.google.com/books?id=9-UeBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA63

Some additional reasons for the differences between collectivization in east Europe and the USSR are given in Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 by Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery:

"Fourth, collectivization in the multinational Soviet Union had a stronger component of denationalization than occurred in Eastern Europe (see, e.g., Gribincea 1996:130; Levesque 2006:1; Martin 2001: 320-25; Swath 2003). Part of this was intentional, part was simply an effect of expropriating and deporting national elites in areas like Ukraine and, later, Moldova and the Baltic states, an action that struck at the heart of potential national movements. Part was the result of Stalin's fear that in the impending war, minorities would form a fifth column against the Soviet state (Shearer 2001: 530-32). More than in Eastern Europe, Soviet collectivization involved mass deportations of minority peoples; resistance to it was stronger in the non-Russian areas (Martin 2001: 294) and was often couched as a fight for national existence. This is not to say that there was nothing comparable in Eastern Europe. In several countries, for example, Germans were targeted for discriminatory treatment, as ineluctably "bourgeois" and as representatives of the fascist wartime enemy. In Romania, beginning in 1946 Germans were deported for war reparations labor in the Soviet Union, and those who returned to Romania thereafter might subsequently be deported again within the country. Nonetheless, this link between nationality and collectivization policy was less marked than in the Soviet experience.

"A final difference between the Soviet and the East European cases was that the latter did not face grain crises as catastrophic as the former. There were indeed serious food shortages and famines, and there were war reparations that had to be paid to the Soviets in foodstuffs, but two things mitigated the food problem. First, according to Mosely, World War II bequeathed to these countries the systems the Nazis had put in place for requisitioning food from peasant households; those systems would initially help to supply the necessary grain. "The satellite countries, unlike Russia of 1929, had an existing administrative alternative to collectivization" (Mosely 1958: 62). This did not mean the grain would flow automatically, but at least the infrastructure was there. A second mitigating factor applies to only some East European countries: Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, and to some extent Hungary. They had higher industrial capacity than did the Soviet Union, and correspondingly, the "primitive accumulation" plan that underlay Soviet collectivization was less urgent for them. It remained a factor, however, in the Balkan countries..." https://books.google.com/books?id=rmzOtWapThUC&pg=PA82

Of course another factor may just have been luck. Stalin in 1952 in Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR indicated some discontent with the kolkhoz system as insufficiently communist, but if he was planning to move further toward "full communism" in the countryside in both the USSR and the "people's democracies" he died before this could be accomplished. And of course one reason there was not a bloodbath of 1937-8 proportions in eastern Europe is that there also wasn't any in the USSR in 1945-53, whatever Stalin may have been planning toward the end of his life.
 
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Djilas argues that the intensity of violence against the peasantry, working class and nomenklatura in a "new class" society is dependent upon the difficulty that the nomenklatura faces in self-replication. Djilas would argue that despite the 1947 famine soviet nomenklatura did not face an effective threat to their power.
This view is erroneous - Soviet society was a class of "state workers." Of course, this doesn't mean that Soviet society was monolithic - it isn't about classes, but about different layers in one class.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
What do you mean by this phrase? Only the period from 1945 to 1953? Or is the period before "perestroika" also considered?

I mean only 1945-1953. In my view, despite institutions and the economic structure remaining based on foundations set in the Stalin era for a long time after, there were perceptible differences within months of Stalin's death and certainly even more after the Secret Speech.

Also, if I included all the time through 1985 or so in "postwar Stalinism", the answer would have been way, way too easy. Of course the period 1954-1984 was far less deadly than pre-WWII Stalinism.
 
I mean only 1945-1953. In my view, despite institutions and the economic structure remaining based on foundations set in the Stalin era for a long time after, there were perceptible differences within months of Stalin's death and certainly even more after the Secret Speech.
In this case, my answer will be rather negative - the fact is that despite the smaller number of victims, postwar Stalinism was a much more reactionary phenomenon.
 
The bloodshed of the 30s came as a result of the need for massive amounts of human labor and resources to carry out joint processes of a hyper expedited industrialization and demographic transformation for then purposes of denationalizing the non-Russian areas of the USSR. It was an act of totalitarian nature requiring totalitarian methods and deaths were inevitable.

The purges were just as bloody but were different in that they were designed to elevate Stalin’s power internally against the party, where there had been clashes previously.

The Holodomor was a precursor for what happened in Mao’s Great Leap Forward, as they disrupted centuries old agricultural practices too quickly.

Post war satellites were generally slower in collectivization and mostly avoided that kind of disruption, and could also rely on USSR support.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
In this case, my answer will be rather negative - the fact is that despite the smaller number of victims, postwar Stalinism was a much more reactionary phenomenon.

sometimes more reactionary means more deadly, sometimes it does not. The OP was on lethality.
 
This view is erroneous - Soviet society was a class of "state workers." Of course, this doesn't mean that Soviet society was monolithic - it isn't about classes, but about different layers in one class.
You say potato, I say potato, let's call the bosses boss.
 
Yet in both periods, Stalin was the ultimate authority.
Well, here goes your first incorrect assumption.
Stalin was not secure in his power for first decade. He was paranoid, yes, but so you'd be if everyone was plotting against you. Great purge of late 1930s removed last major threat to Stalin power, by removing old revolutionary guard who were true believers, and replaced ideologues and zealots with technocrats and careerists. Only then Stalin's authority became truly ultimate.

Great Patriotic War gave USSR true founding myth, changed it from world's largest open-air insane asylum into an actual nation. And Generalissimo Stalin was the central divine figure in that myth, surrounded by host of lesser saints like Voroshilov and Rokossovsky. If your power is secure, you don't need that much repression.
 
I didn't understand - what you mean.

There is an English language joke about calling the same thing by two names: po-tah-to and po-tay-ho.

I'm suggesting that your characterisation of Soviet class society is exactly the same as mine, except we pronounce it different.

Apart from our disagreement about one area of theory of class, we are in agreement about who the bosses were.

This was my suggestion.

In the joke in the musical it is about class. As a lib com born in the 70s, I've got along great with tankies born in the 1930s. Because we agreed about who the boss was who needed to go. "Better call the calling off off:" we'd stick together more than we'd part.

(Shit, in 1956, a fair proportion of the bastards fighting tanks in Budapest *were* tankies).

yours,
Sam R.
 
There is an English language joke about calling the same thing by two names: po-tah-to and po-tay-ho.
I understood. By the way - from which movie this scene? My brother and I have a predisposition to musicals.

I'm suggesting that your characterisation of Soviet class society is exactly the same as mine, except we pronounce it different.
Apart from our disagreement about one area of theory of class, we are in agreement about who the bosses were.
This point is still important - the fact is that in the commonly used sense it is entirely permissible to use the concept of class to any estate or social community. So not only the intelligentsia class is possible, "middle class" and " political class ", but also a class of middle managers, for example, If we talk about the "class of bureaucrats" in this sense, then this is one thing. And if we talk about bureaucracy, as a socio-economic class, it's different.
 
I understood. By the way - from which movie this scene? My brother and I have a predisposition to musicals.


This point is still important - the fact is that in the commonly used sense it is entirely permissible to use the concept of class to any estate or social community. So not only the intelligentsia class is possible, "middle class" and " political class ", but also a class of middle managers, for example, If we talk about the "class of bureaucrats" in this sense, then this is one thing. And if we talk about bureaucracy, as a socio-economic class, it's different.
I'm short on time, but Djilas was weak on a socio-economic classification of the nomenklatura. The whole field is weak but spans 1917-1989. But it spans. I find the arguments cogent, within "state capitalism," and "private capitalism" of an intermediary relation to production, "Veblen on the Engineers" for example. But this doesn't satisfy our historical materialist perspective. As many of the contributors to the critique agree.

I would rather agree that many of us are with Mikoyan's report in supporting Hungary 1956 against Rakosi or Gero, and in favour of the Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest. Regardless of our analytical position. And to test workers' self rule in concrete material circumstance.

This is what I meant by "let us call the same things by different names if we agree on the central point."

Just like in struggle, a prole maoist or tankie or trot or deep green is a class conscious prole by another name.


The musical is "Shall We Dance" by Gershwin and Gershwin.

yours,
Sam R.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
I'm short on time, but Djilas was weak on a socio-economic classification of the nomenklatura. The whole field is weak but spans 1917-1989. But it spans. I find the arguments cogent, within "state capitalism," and "private capitalism" of an intermediary relation to production, "Veblen on the Engineers" for example. But this doesn't satisfy our historical materialist perspective. As many of the contributors to the critique agree.

I would rather agree that many of us are with Mikoyan's report in supporting Hungary 1956 against Rakosi or Gero, and in favour of the Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest. Regardless of our analytical position. And to test workers' self rule in concrete material circumstance.

This is what I meant by "let us call the same things by different names if we agree on the central point."

Just like in struggle, a prole maoist or tankie or trot or deep green is a class conscious prole by another name.


The musical is "Shall We Dance" by Gershwin and Gershwin.

yours,
Sam R.

Maybe some of the creative talent behind the film were tankies too!
 
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