Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952 and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1941 until his death. Initially governing as part of a collective leadership, Stalin consolidated power to become a dictator by the 1930s. He codified his Leninist interpretation of Marxism as Marxism–Leninism, while the totalitarian political system he established became known as Stalinism.
The five-year plans for the development of the national economy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) consisted of a series of nationwide centralized economic plans in the Soviet Union, beginning in the late 1920s. The Soviet state planning committee Gosplan developed these plans based on the theory of the productive forces that formed part of the ideology of the Communist Party for development of the Soviet economy. Fulfilling the current plan became the watchword of Soviet bureaucracy.
The history of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953, commonly referred to as the Stalin Era or Stalinist Era, covers the period in Soviet history from the establishment of Stalinism through victory in the Second World War and down to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Stalin sought to destroy his enemies while transforming Soviet society with central planning, in particular through the forced collectivization of agriculture and rapid development of heavy industry. Stalin consolidated his power within the party and the state and fostered an extensive cult of personality. Soviet secret-police and the mass-mobilization of the Communist Party served as Stalin's major tools in molding Soviet society. Stalin's methods in achieving his goals, which included party purges, ethnic cleansings, political repression of the general population, and forced collectivization, led to millions of deaths: in Gulag labor camps and during famine.
Science and technology in the Soviet Union served as an important part of national politics, practices, and identity. From the time of Lenin until the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s, both science and technology were intimately linked to the ideology and practical functioning of the Soviet state and were pursued along paths both similar and distinct from models in other countries. Many great scientists who worked in Imperial Russia, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, continued work in the USSR and gave birth to Soviet science.
John Scott (1912–1976) was an American writer. He spent about a decade in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1941. His best-known book, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel, is a memoir of that experience. The bulk of his career was as a journalist, book author, and editor with Time Life.
The first five-year plan of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a list of economic goals, implemented by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, based on his policy of socialism in one country. Leon Trotsky had delivered a joint report to the April Plenum of the Central Committee in 1926 which proposed a program for national industrialisation and the replacement of annual plans with five-year plans. His proposals were rejected by the Central Committee majority which was controlled by the troika and derided by Stalin at the time. Stalin's version of the five-year plan was implemented in 1928 and took effect until 1932.
The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, also known as the Dnipro Dam, is a hydroelectric power station in the city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Operated by Ukrhydroenergo, it is the fifth and largest station in the Dnieper reservoir cascade, a series of hydroelectric stations on the Dnieper river that supply power to the Donets–Kryvyi Rih industrial region. Its dam has a length of 800 metres (2,600 ft), a height of 61 metres (200 ft), and a flow rate of 38.7 metres (127 ft) per second.
The Shakhty Trial was the first important Soviet show trial since the case of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1922. Fifty-three engineers and managers from the North Caucasus town of Shakhty were arrested in 1928 after being accused of conspiring to sabotage the Soviet economy with the former owners of the coal mines. The trial was conducted on May 18, 1928, in House of Trade Unions, Moscow. Thirty-four of the accused received prison terms, while eleven were sentenced to death. The remainder were acquitted or received suspended sentences.
Industrialization in the Soviet Union was a process of accelerated building-up of the industrial potential of the Soviet Union to reduce the economy's lag behind the developed capitalist states, which was carried out from May 1929 to June 1941.
John Dickinson "Jack" Littlepage was an American mining engineer. He was born in Gresham, Oregon on September 14, 1894. Littlepage was employed in the USSR from 1928 to 1937, becoming Deputy Commissar of the USSR's Gold Trust in the 1930s. He is one of the foreign recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
Great Construction Projects of Communism is a phrase that is used to identify a series of the most ambitious construction megaprojects of major great importance for the economy of the Soviet Union. The projects were initiated in the 1950s on the command of Joseph Stalin.
Robert Nathaniel Robinson was a Jamaican-born toolmaker who worked in the auto industry in the United States. At the age of 23, he was recruited to work in the Soviet Union. Shortly after his arrival in Stalingrad, Robinson was racially assaulted by two white American workers, both of whom were subsequently arrested, tried and expelled from the Soviet Union with great publicity.
Peter Akimovich Palchinsky was a Russian engineer who played a significant role in the introduction of scientific method into Russian industry.
Gigantomania is the production of unusually and superfluously large works.
The Great Turn or Great Break was the radical change in the economic policy of the USSR from 1928 to 1929, primarily consisting of the process by which the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 was abandoned in favor of the acceleration of collectivization and industrialization and also a cultural revolution. The term came from the title of Joseph Stalin's article "Year of the Great Turn" published on November 7, 1929, the 12th anniversary of the October Revolution. David R. Marples argues that the era of the Great Break lasted until 1934.
The economy of the Soviet Union was based on state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, and industrial manufacturing. An administrative-command system managed a distinctive form of central planning. The Soviet economy was second only to the United States and was characterized by state control of investment, prices, a dependence on natural resources, lack of consumer goods, little foreign trade, public ownership of industrial assets, macroeconomic stability, low unemployment and high job security.
Saul Grigorievich Bron, was a Soviet trade representative in United States and Great Britain. He is best known as Chairman of Amtorg Trading Corporation in New York City (1927–1930) and Chairman of the All-Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS) in London (1930–1931). He became a victim of Stalin's Great Purge and was executed on 21 April 1938. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.
The People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry was a government ministry in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the second volume in the three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin by American historian and Princeton Professor of History Stephen Kotkin. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 was originally published in October 2017 by Penguin Random House and then as an audiobook in December 2017 by Recorded Books. The first volume, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, was published in 2014 by Penguin Random House and the third and final volume, Miscalculation and the Mao Eclipse, is scheduled to be published after 2024.
Sergey Yakovlevich Zhuk was a Soviet hydraulic engineer, technician and state official. Hero of Socialist Labour (1952).
