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Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin's ideology to begin to wane in the USSR.
In the USSR, during the eleven-year period from the death of Joseph Stalin (1953) to the political ouster of Nikita Khrushchev (1964), the national politics were dominated by the Cold War, including the U.S.–USSR struggle for the global spread of their respective socio-economic systems and ideology, and the defense of hegemonic spheres of influence. Since the mid-1950s, despite the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) having disowned Stalinism, the political culture of Stalinism — a very powerful General Secretary of the CPSU—remained in place, albeit weakened.
Lysenkoism was a political campaign led by Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting. In time, the term has come to be identified as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically or socially desirable.
The Soviet Union introduced the collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into collectively-controlled and state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food needed to be produced to keep up with urban demand.
Agriculture in the Soviet Union was mostly collectivized, with some limited cultivation of private plots. It is often viewed as one of the more inefficient sectors of the economy of the Soviet Union. A number of food taxes were introduced in the early Soviet period despite the Decree on Land that immediately followed the October Revolution. The forced collectivization and class war against "kulaks" under Stalinism greatly disrupted farm output in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the Soviet famine of 1932–33. A system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes, respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly productive and fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness. Under the administrations of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, many reforms were enacted as attempts to defray the inefficiencies of the Stalinist agricultural system. However, Marxist–Leninist ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of market mechanism to coexist alongside central planning, so the private plot fraction of Soviet agriculture, which was its most productive, remained confined to a limited role. Throughout its later decades the Soviet Union never stopped using substantial portions of the precious metals mined each year in Siberia to pay for grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an economic indicator showing that the country's agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been. The real numbers, however, were treated as state secrets at the time, so accurate analysis of the sector's performance was limited outside the USSR and nearly impossible to assemble within its borders. However, Soviet citizens as consumers were familiar with the fact that foods, especially meats, were often noticeably scarce, to the point that not lack of money so much as lack of things to buy with it was the limiting factor in their standard of living.
Nothing Can Stop Us is a compilation album by Robert Wyatt released in 1982.
NEPmen were businesspeople in the early Soviet Union, who took advantage of the opportunities for private trade and small-scale manufacturing provided under the New Economic Policy. The famine of 1921–1922 epitomized the adverse effects of war communism, and to mitigate those effects, Vladimir Lenin instituted the NEP, which encouraged private buying and selling, with people even being encouraged to "enrich yourselves", as one Bolshevik leader, Nikolai Bukharin, put it. However, many Bolsheviks saw the policy as "a step backwards". That included Lenin himself, who defended the measure as "taking one step backward to take two steps forward later on".
The New Course was an economic policy that aimed to improve the standard of living, increase the availability of consumer goods in East Germany, lower the price of foodstuffs, small businesses and farms would be returned to the private sector.
Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of kulaks and their families. Redistribution of farmland started in 1917 and lasted until 1933, but was most active in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929, portraying kulaks as class enemies of the Soviet Union.
Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov was a Soviet politician who briefly succeeded Joseph Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union. However, at the insistence of the rest of the Presidium, he relinquished control over the party apparatus in exchange for remaining Premier and first among equals within the Soviet collective leadership. He then became embroiled in a power struggle with Nikita Khrushchev that culminated in his removal from the premiership in 1955 as well as the Presidium in 1957.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control", while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis".
Kulak, also kurkul or golchomag, was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned over 8 acres of land towards the end of the Russian Empire. In the early Soviet Union, particularly in Soviet Russia and Azerbaijan, kulak became a vague reference to property ownership among peasants who were considered hesitant allies of the Bolshevik Revolution. In Ukraine during 1930–1931, there also existed a term of pidkurkulnyk ; these were considered "sub-kulaks".
The following lists events that happened during 1943 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The following lists events that happened during 1945 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The following lists events that happened during 1946 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The following lists events that happened during 1947 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The following lists events that happened during 1948 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The following lists events that happened during 1949 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The following lists events that happened during 1950 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
References
- ↑ Gupta, R. C. (1997). Collapse of the Soviet Union. Krishna Prakashan Media. ISBN 9788185842813.
- ↑ "Реформы Маленкова". www.contrtv.ru. Retrieved 2018-07-29.
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