Seminar 2

‘Socialism in one country’: The Soviet Union in the 1920’s

• Why did Stalin win the power struggle after Lenin’s death?
• Was the New Economic Policy a deviation from the ‘right path’ of Socialism? [debate]
• How was everyday life in the 1920s like? In villages, in cities and towns, for workers, peasants, new Soviet bureaucracy, members of the old middle class?

PPT

Sources

Bucharin, N.I., ‘Enrich yourselves’ [1925, excerpt, translation by Francis King], in N.I. Bucharin, Izbrannye proizvedeniya (Moscow, 1988), pp. 195-197.

‘Letter from peasant or Cossack Ivan Khomich from the Azov region, Don okrug to the local newspaper, Krasnoe Priazov’e. Copied and forwarded to V.M. Molotov from Rostov-on-Don 22 February 1927 [translation by Francis King]’, in: S.S. Kryukova (compiler), Krest’yanskie istorii: Rossiyskaya derevnya 20-ch godov v pis’makh I dokumentakh (Moscow, 2001), pp. 86-88.

Stalin, J.V., ‘The Results of the Work of the Fourteenth Conference of the R.C.P.(B.), May 1925’, in J.V. Stalin, On the Opposition (Peking, 1974), pp. 188-229 [based on J.V. Stalin, Works, Vol. 7 (Moscow, 1954), pp. 90-134] [please read chapters 4-6]

Essential Reading

Husband, William B., ‘The New Economic Policy (NEP) and the Revolutionary Experiment 1921-1929’, in: Freeze, Russia, pp. 263-290.

Recommended Reading

McCauley, Martin, Stalin and Stalinism (London, 2019), pp. 22-32 [Chapter 4: The new economic policy (NEP), 1921-1928]

Attwood, Lynne, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester, 2010), pp. 40-60 [Chapter 2: The New Economic Policy)

Further Reading

Davies, R.W., The Socialist offensive. The collectivisation of Soviet agriculture 1929-1930 (London, Basingstoke, 1980), pp. 1-55 [= Chapter 1: ‘The peasant economy and the Soviet system’].

Hughes, J., Stalin, Siberia and the Crisis of the New Economic Policy (Cambridge, 1991).

Harris, James, ‘Stalin as General Secretary: the appointments process and the nature of Stalin’s power’, in Davies/Harris, Stalin, pp. 63-82

Smith, Jeremy, ‘Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs’, in Davies/Harris, Stalin, pp. 45-62

Suny, Ronald G., The Soviet Experiment. Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York, Oxford, 1998), pp. 121-213 [= Chapter 5: ‘The Evolution of the Dictatorship’, Chapter 6: ‘Socialism in One Country’, Chapter 7: ‘NEP Society, Chapter 8: Culture Wars’].

The chapters on the 1920's in another good History of the Soviet Union, for example:

Kenez, Peter, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End (Cambridge, 1999)

or

Hosking, Geoffrey, A History of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (London, 1992)

or

Read, Christopher, The Making and Breaking of the Soviet System: An Interpretation (Basingstoke, 2001)

or

Service, Robert, A History of Modern Russia, From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2009)