Stalinism and the Cold War

October 13, 2011

The big question

n Why could one authoritarian dictatorship be reviled in the postwar period and another be celebrated?

Getting to know Eastern Europen What are communism’s ideological roots? (Lenin)

n What were the Soviet crimes until 1945? (Solzhenitsyn and Magentigorsk)

n What happened in 1945? How did Soviet Russia de-nazify?

n How did Communism spread over Eastern Europe?

n What did Western European Communists do and say? (Judt)

n Finally, how did the Cold War develop? (Churchill)

Ideological Roots

n Vladimir Lenin, “State and Revolution” (1918)

n “dictatorship of the proletariat”

Some Soviet Crimes

n Modernization (1930s)

n Gulags (1950s)

3. Purges (1949 ff)

n Dictatorship and conquest (1945 ff)

“Living Socialism”

Squeezing a village into a “city”

n “Future generations will never understand what ‘living space’ means to us. Innumerable crimes have been committed for its sake.” (S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain)

n reorient the family toward the “collective”

n Collective baths (200,000 residents; thirty public baths capacity 16,000 per day)

n Large, single-family apartments assigned to several families

n “In the barracks, mud and ceaseless noise. Not enough light to read. the library is poor, newspapers are few. They are stolen to roll cigarettes... Gossip, obscene anecdotes, and songs emerge from the mud-filled red corners....”

Gulag sites

What I Learned in the Gulagby Alexander Solzhenitsynby Alexander Solzhenitsyn

n It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

1945, Soviet Russia

“The people of the world do not want a repetition of the sorrows of war.” (Stalin)

The Gulag, 1951

Cold War from the West

n Winston Churchill: Iron Curtain

“people’s democracies”

people’s democracies

n Hungary, 1956

n Scaling the Berlin Wall in 1961

n How did the West view Communism? (Judt)