Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he consolidated power to become a dictator by the 1930s. Ideologically adhering to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, he formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are called Stalinism.
Nikolay Gerasimovich Kuznetsov was a Soviet naval officer who achieved the rank of Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union and served as People's Commissar of the Navy during the Winter War and the Second World War. The N. G. Kuznetsov Naval Academy and the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, as well as the Kuznetsov-class carrier class, are named in his honor.
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, which Stalinism deemed 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.
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 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.
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 Dnipro Dam, in the city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, is the largest hydroelectric power station on the Dnieper river. It is the fifth step of the Dnieper cascade of hydroelectric stations that provides electric power for the Donets–Kryvyi Rih Industrial region. The Dnieper Reservoir stretches 129 kilometres (80 mi) upstream to near Dnipro city.
Stephen Mark Kotkin is an American historian, academic, and author. He is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. For 33 years, Kotkin taught at Princeton University, where he attained the title of John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs, and he took emeritus status from Princeton University in 2022. He was the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the co-director of the certificate program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy. He has won a number of awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He is the husband of curator and art historian Soyoung Lee.
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.
Great Construction Projects of Communism is a phrase that used to identify a series of the most ambitious construction projects and had great importance for the economy of the Soviet Union. The projects were initiated in 1950s on the command of Joseph Stalin.
The Main Turkmen Canal was a large-scale irrigation project in the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. The canal was intended to transport water from the Amu Darya river to Krasnovodsk, a city in Turkmenistan on the coast of the Caspian Sea. The canal was going to use the course of the ancient dry Uzboy River bed.
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.
Kharkiv Tractor Plant (KhTZ or HTZ) (Ukrainian: Харківський тракторний завод, romanized: Kharkivskyi Traktornyi Zavod) is an agricultural machinery manufacturer in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Established in 1930–31, as a centerpiece of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan for Soviet industrialization (1927–32), KhTZ was Ukraine's largest tractor manufacturer, producing both wheeled and tracked tractors. In 2016, the Ukrainian security service (SBU) alleged that at the Kremlin's direction the Russian owners were planning to decommission the enterprise. The industrial plant was reported destroyed by extensive shelling and resulting fires on the fourth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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 2020.
Sergey Yakovlevich Zhuk was a Soviet hydraulic engineer, technician and state official. Hero of Socialist Labour (1952).
