Stalin consolidated his control over the Soviet Union in the 1930s through extreme centralization of power and brutal purges of opposition. He crushed political diversity and alternative ideologies by having opponents of his policies expelled from the Communist Party and assassinated. As General Secretary of the Communist Party, Stalin built a personal following within the Party apparatus that helped him remove political rivals to gain dominance. However, some historians argue that local Party officials pursued their own interests and were not fully beholden to Stalin. By the 1930s, Stalin had achieved total control over decision making as the dictator of the Soviet Union.

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3.  Psychological need: there was a psychological
need for a single leader to follow and worship.
 The Tsars of Russia had been worshipped as
fathers of the nation, with icons in homes – Stalin
now acted in place of the Tsar.
 Stalin created a Cult of Lenin after Lenin’s death
in January 1924. To millions of peasants, whose
religious instincts were repressed under the
revolution, the Lenin Mausoleum soon became a
place of pilgrimage.

5.  Stalin was personally responsible for the creation
of the cult – he defied Lenin, who had also filled
the psychological role as leader, and then used
the Lenin legacy to make himself the ‘Lenin of
Today’.
 Just as original Christianity, as it was spreading
into pagan countries, absorbed elements of
pagan beliefs and rites and blended them with its
own ideas, so now Marxism, the product of
western European thought, was absorbing
elements of the Byzantine tradition, so deeply
ingrained in Russia.

7.  Gigantic busts and portraits at every corner,
speeches on artistic and scientific subjects
glorified Stalin.
 Cities and streets named in honour of Lenin
and Stalin (Leningrad and Stalingrad) helped
create the cult.

9.  The abstract ideas of Marxism could exist, in
their purity, in the brains of intellectual
revolutionaries, especially those who had
lived as exiles in western Europe before the
revolution.
 Now, after the doctrine had really been
transplanted to Russia and come to dominate
the outlook of a great nation, it could
assimilate itself to that nation’s spiritual
climate, to its traditions, customs, and habits.

10.  Stalin supported every contention of his with
a quotation from Lenin, sometimes out of
context, in the same way that medieval
scholars had sought sanction for their
speculations in the holy writ of the Bible.
 Lenin had also sometimes backed his
arguments with all too frequent references to
Marx. Stalin might as well have said: “Give me
a quotation from Lenin and I will move the
earth.”

12.  As the cult of Stalin grew it became more
difficult to resist as people wished to follow
their neighbours and take part in mass
activities.
 People genuinely wished to thank Stalin for
material improvements in their lives, such as
the end of rationing in 1935, extended
education and the removal of ‘enemies of the
people’ in the purges of the 1930s.

14.  There was an element of fear in existence in
the Soviet Union in the 1930s due to the
purges, show trials and NKVD arrests that
meant that some people would feel pressured
into supporting the cult of Stalin.

15.  Under Stalin’s dictatorship the revolutionary
elements inherited from Lenin combined with
Russian traditions.
 Like Cromwell as Lord Protector or Napoleon as
Emperor of the French, Stalin became the
guardian and the trustee of the revolution. He
consolidated its gains and extended them. He
‘built socialism’; and even his opponents, while
denouncing his autocracy, admitted that most of
his economic reforms were indeed essential for
socialism.

17.  Stalin’s technique of power revealed his
distrustful attitude towards society, his
pessimistic approach to it. Socialism was to
be built by coercion rather than persuasion.
 Stalin had the last word in the Politbureau. He
did not even preside over its sessions. Usually
he listened silently to the arguments and
resolved most of the arguments by sarcasm,
a half-jovial, meaningful threat, or a brusque
gesture of impatience.

18.  Stalin’s desire to take total control of the
Soviet state led to the purges of the party, the
armed forces and the general population.
 Individuals who posed a potential challenge
to his rule, such as Trotsky, faced
assassination.

20.  Stalin’s main motive for the purges of Lenin’s
Old Guard including Trotsky, Bukharin,
Zinoviev and Kamenev, was to destroy the
men who represented the potentiality of
alternative government.
 From the outset Stalin identified any attempt
at creating an alternative government, and
even the thought of this, with counter-
revolution.

22.  The destruction of all political centres from
which an attempt at counter-revolution
might, in certain circumstances, have been
made, was the direct and undeniable
consequence of the trials.

23.  The NKVD sought to justify the powers they
received in 1934 by finding conspiracies.
 Gulags were responsible for 10 – 15% of the
Soviet GNP by 1939 and therefore the
economy relied on purging, and ‘enemies’
like Bukharin had been destroyed to win
Stalin’s patronage.

25.  It was essential that the Soviet Union was
united because of the threat of war presented
by international capitalism in the 1920s and
the aggressive Nazi dictatorship from 1933
which was distinctly anti-communist.

26.  The prospect of a single-handed fight
between the Soviet Union and Germany
seemed grim in the 1930s. In the First World
War the strength of the German military
machine sufficed to deal a shattering blow to
Russia and to sap Tsardom.
 The shadow of the last Tsar must have been
on Stalin’s mind as he viewed Hitler’s
preparations for war.

28.  How successful was Stalin’s regime in crushing
diversity in the Soviet Union in the 1930s?
 Political opposition and alternative ideologies were
crushed. Opponents of Stalin’s collectivisation were
expelled from the Communist Party.
 Sergei Kirov defended comrades and called
for a reduction in the speed of collectivisation
and was assassinated in 1934, and the
Congress that supported Kirov was purged.

30.  As General Secretary of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Stalin used his
control over appointments to build a personal
following in the Party apparatus.
 Stalin appointed individual Party secretaries
and gave them security of tenure. In return,
they voted for him at Party Congresses. Stalin
used this power to remove political rivals in
the course of his rise to power.

32.  However, with the opening of the historical
archives since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991,
new evidence suggests that Party officials pursued
agendas defined by their institutional interests and
not solely by the will of Stalin.
 Recent documents portray a Stalin nagged with
doubts that central directives were being fulfilled.
In this, his immediate subordinates were not the
problem, but the greater mass of the Party and
state bureaucracy responding to impossible
demands with foot-dragging and deception.

33.  Stalin provided security of tenure to many
Party secretaries. The gravest threat to their
power in the first decade of Soviet power
came from political infighting in local
organisations.
 Stalin won the support of secretaries by
attacking intra-party democracy and
reinforcing their power within their
organisations.

35.  Many Party secretaries voted for Stalin at
Party Congresses. They helped him defeat his
rivals in the Politburo because they had a
common interest in it, not because they felt
personally beholden to Stalin.
 In the early 1930s, their interests began to
diverge with the crisis of the First Five-Year
Plan, punishing grain collections, famine, and
the emergence of the ‘command-
administrative system’.

36.  The Party secretaries had helped Stalin to power,
but they may have begun to worry if they had
made the right choice. There was nothing they
could do about it though.
 In attacking intra-Party democracy, they
contributed to a situation in which it was
impossible to question the ‘Central Committee
line’. Since discussion and criticism of central
policy was impossible, footdragging and
subversion were the logical response.

38.  The 1930s was the time when Stalin achieved
an extreme centralisation of decision-making
functions in the top Party bodies and
ultimately in his own hands.
 The Politburo became less and less a
collective organ of decision-making. Its
formal procedures and routines fell into
disuse and its meetings became less and less
frequent. Informal, ad hoc subgroups of top
leaders made the decisions.

39.  In 1934 all aspects of internal state security were
co-ordinated in the NKVD (secret police). The
time of the Great Terror began, but the purges
meant not expulsion from the Party, as in the
1920s, but imprisonment, exile or death, with or
without a trial.
 Of the 1,996 delegates attending the Seventeenth
Party Congress in January 1934, 1,108 would
perish in the Great Terror. At this time the Soviet
Union was recovering from the catastrophe of
collectivisation.

43.  “A long piece of rough towelling was inserted
between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle; the
ends were then pulled back over his
shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying
on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine
breaking – and without water and food for
two days …”

47.  Trotsky in 1904 was in dispute with Lenin
and commented:
 “Lenin’s methods lead to this: the party
organisation at first substitutes itself for the
party as a whole; then the central committee
substitutes itself for the organisation; and
finally a single ‘dictator’ substitutes himself
for the central committee.”

48.  The Tsarist political heritage was important
for the consolidation of Stalin’s dictatorship.
 By the nineteenth century Russia was ruled
through an autocratic, centralised,
bureaucratic system. Stalin was following on
from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.
 Thus the Tsarist political heritage eased
Stalin’s elaboration of a repressive and
despotic regime.

50.  Marxism-Leninism’s pretensions to
‘scientific’ knowledge of history’s ‘laws’
rendered the party infallible (a secular
religion), an institution qualitatively different
from and superior to all other political parties
and ideologies; past, present and future.

51.  Some believe that Stalin may have been
clinically insane.
 Stories of Stalin’s insanity stem from an
examination carried out by the famous
neuropathologist Vladimir Bekhterev in
December 1927. He reportedly told his
colleagues that Stalin suffered from paranoia.

52.  For Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the historian
Robert Conquest, Stalin really was ‘the Lenin of
today’, but far more brutal, unscrupulous and
cunning than the dead leader.
 Driven on by morbid suspicion, lust for power
and a monstrous ideology Stalin consciously
planned and directed the entire purge process.
He sanctioned Kirov’s murder in 1934 to rid
himself of Politburo ‘moderates’ and used the
excuse of Kirov’s murder to start the Great
Terror.

54.  Trotsky observed in 1936:
 “The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of
society in objects of consumption …When there
are enough goods in a store, the purchasers can
come whenever they want to. When there are few
goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in
line.
 When the lines are very long, it is necessary to
appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the
starting point of the power of the Soviet
bureaucracy.”

55.  According to Trotsky totalitarianism arose in the
context of domestic backwardness and the
international situation after the Great War.
 It did not arise from Marxist-Leninist ideology or
the party form.
 If the bureaucrats – personified by Stalin – owed
their ascendancy to the belated European
revolution and the Russian proletariat’s
numerical weakness and cultural poverty,
material deprivation caused the bureaucratic
state to metamorphose into a police state.

57.  Under Stalin’s dictatorship (1928 – 1953),
material scarcity remained.
 Neither the bureaucracy or the police could
solve the country’s social and economic
problems in an egalitarian fashion. Socialism,
the USSR’s legitimating ideology, stood in
opposition to the state form (Stalin’s
dictatorship).

58.  In George Orwell’s ‘1984’ novel, the one-
party dictatorship have regular, daily ‘Two
Minutes Hate’ sessions against people that
the state describes as ‘scapegoats’ and
‘saboteurs’.
 So also Stalin’s Russia: Stalin resorted to a
‘frame-up system’ (the show trials), and a
medieval witch-hunt for ‘enemies of the
people’ caricatured as ‘Trotskyists’ (real or
imaginary).

59.  Stalin’s dictatorship abolished the distinction
between public and private life, and this also
disorganised social groupings that may have
menaced the regime.
 Once again, Orwell’s ‘1984’ illustrates this aspect
of Stalin’s Russia perfectly in the secret love
affair between Winston Smith and Julia which is
destroyed by the one-party state. Love between
human beings is a threat to any dictatorship
since a totalitarian regime only wants one form
of loyalty and love – love for the
Motherland/Fatherland/Stalin/Hitler.

63.  Terror included a psychological dimension. Since
Stalin and the bureaucrats were alienated from
society, paranoia and distrust pervaded the
government.
 Stalin feared rivals in the apparatus, likewise the
officials feared Stalin but each needed the other
because both feared the masses.
 Terror, purging and paranoia thus became
permanent and necessary adjuncts of state
power in the USSR.

64.  Issac Deutscher, biographer of Trotsky,
stated in ‘Stalin: A Political Biography’ that
Stalin functioned in a country of social and
economic backwardness. Deutscher also
characterised terror as ‘rational’, speculating
that Stalin launched a pre-emptive strike
against Old Bolsheviks, party officials and the
army high command to counter the threat of
a coup d'état should war break out with
Germany.

66.  Deutscher writes in his biography that Stalin
was probably thinking of 1917 when he
started the Great Terror and show trials. In
1917 government disunity and the army’s
political unreliability were major factors in
tsarism’s collapse.
 By staffing the party-state with inexperienced
cadres and officers completely dependent on
himself, Stalin may have been attempting to
strengthen the regime.

70.  Deutscher writes that although Stalin was
boundlessly cruel and probably insane, he
played a positive historical role because he
was a great ‘moderniser’, dragging the USSR
into the twentieth century.
 “Russia had been belated in her historical
development. In England serfdom had
disappeared by the end of the fourteenth
century. Stalin’s parents were still serfs.

71.  “By the standards of British history, the
fourteenth and twentieth centuries have, in a
sense, met …in Stalin. The historian cannot
be seriously surprised if he finds in him some
traits usually associated with tyrants of earlier
centuries.” (Deutscher, Stalin: A Political
Biography, 1972)

73.  The Soviet dissident historian, Roy Medvedev,
pointed to social and economic factors inherited
from the ancien regime (Tsarist Russia) which
shaped the politics of the 1930s.
 Medvedev lays far greater stress on personality
than other Marxist historians: “The first and most
important was Stalin’s measureless ambition.
This incessant though carefully hidden lust for
power appeared in Stalin much earlier than 1937
(the height of the show trials). Even though he
had great power, it was not enough – he wanted
absolute power and unlimited submission to his
will.”

74.  Stalin first took revenge upon Zinoviev and Kamenev,
who were accused of conniving in Kirov’s death. Kirov
had been murdered on 1st December 1934. They
agreed to accept moral and political responsibility for
their former minor adherent in return for an
assurance that they would receive a light sentence.
 On Stalin’s orders Zinoviev and Kamenev were
consigned to ten and five years of imprisonment
respectively. Stalin’s prisons were not rest homes. In
addition over 30,000 deportations of members of
social groups regarded as hostile to communism took
place; exile was to bleak Siberian locations.

75.  According to official records, 681,692 persons
were executed in 1937 – 38. The impact of the
Great Terror was deep and wide and was not
limited to specific political, administrative,
military, cultural, religious and national groups.
 Even a harmless old Russian peasant woman
muttering dissatisfaction with conditions or her
young worker-son complaining about housing
standards would be dispatched to the horrors of
the gulag.

80.  By 1939 the total number of prisoners in the
forced-labour system was 2.9 million. In each
camp there were gangs of convicted thieves who
were allowed by the authorities to bully the
‘politicals’. The trading of sexual favours was
rife.
 Many inmates would kill or maim a weaker fellow
victim just to rob him of his shoes.
 Stalin continued to expand the scope of the
terror.

81.  No institution in the Soviet state failed to
incur Stalin’s suspicion. Even Red Army
generals were executed. Stalin’s aim was to
ensure that the armed forces were incapable
of promoting policies in any way different
from his own, and Marshal Tukhachevski,
head of the Red Army, laid himself open to
trouble by arguing for a more adventurous
military strategy for the USSR.

83.  Stalin’s very success in prosecuting the Great
Terror brought about a crisis. The original
purpose had been to reconstruct the state so
as to secure authority and impose Stalin’s
policies. However, in carrying out the purges,
the executions and imprisonments, Stalin
came close to demolishing the state itself.
 The blood-purge of the armed forces
disrupted the USSR’s defences in a period of
intense international tension.

84.  The arrest of the economic administrators in
the people’s commissariats impeded
industrial output.
 The destruction of cadres in party, trade
unions and local government undermined
administrative co-ordination.
 This extreme destabilization endangered
Stalin himself. For if the Soviet state fell
apart, Stalin’s career would be at an end.

86.  Stalin had started the carnage of 1937 – 38
because of real hostility to his policies, real
threats to his authority, a real underlying menace
to the compound of the Soviet order. Yet his
reaction was hysterically out of proportion to the
menace he faced.
 However, Stalin was in his element amidst chaos
and violence, and had learned how to create an
environment of uncertainty wherein only he could
remain a fixed, dominant point of influence.

90.  Stalin believed in the rapid trainability of
functionaries and experts, and this gave him
equanimity when butchering an entire
administrative stratum.
 No one coming into frequent contact with
him in the late 1930s had a chance to
become disloyal: he had them killed before
such thoughts could enter their heads. He
was unflustered about murder.

91.  By the late 1930s Stalin was identifying
himself with the great despots of history. He
was fascinated by Genghis Khan, and
underlined the following adage attributed to
him: ‘The deaths of the vanquished are
necessary for the tranquillity of the victors.’
 Other rulers who attracted him included the
previous tsars, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the
Great.

93.  Stalin continued to admire Lenin even though
Lenin on his death-bed wished to sack him from
the General Secretaryship.
 Lenin’s ideas on violence, dictatorship, terror,
centralism, hierarchy and leadership were
integral to Stalin’s thinking.
 Lenin had bequeathed to Stalin the system of
terror – the Cheka (secret police), the forced-
labour camps, the one-party state, the
prohibition of free and popular elections, the ban
on internal party dissent.

95.  It is hard to imagine Lenin carrying out a
terror upon his own party.
 Nor was he likely to have insisted on the
physical and psychological degradation of
those arrested by the political police.
 Lenin would have been horrified by the scale
and methods of the Great Terror.

96.  The Soviet regime had always been desperately
insecure. Except for a brief moment in the
October Revolution and perhaps in the Civil War,
the Bolsheviks could never be sure of a popular
mandate.
 The frail peace of the New Economic Policy (NEP)
1921 – 28 was accompanied by a belief that
matters were balanced on a knife edge. Anxiety
increased once the risky adventures of
collectivisation and forced industrialisation
commenced.

98.  Foreign powers (Britain, France, Germany,
Japan, the United States) remained hostile to
the new communist state. The Civil War had
not been forgotten.
 Émigrés in a dozen European capitals
conspired against the regime. Peasants rose
against the government. Nationalist
sentiment had not been suddenly
extinguished.

99.  The state was a central and ubiquitous
presence.
 It was the formal distributor of goods and the
near-monopolistic producer of them, so that
even the black market traded in state goods.
 All urban citizens worked for the state. There
were virtually no other alternative employers.

100.  The state was a tireless regulator of life, issuing
and demanding an endless stream of documents
and permits without which the simplest
operations of daily life were impossible.
 As everybody including the leaders admitted, the
Soviet bureaucracy, recently greatly expanded
under Stalin to cope with its new range of tasks
and thus full of inexperienced and unqualified
officials, was slow, cumbersome, inefficient, and
corrupt.

102.  Law and legal process were held in low
regard, and the actions of officialdom were
marked by arbitrariness and favouritism.
 Citizens felt themselves at the mercy of
officials and the regime; they speculated
endlessly about the people “up there” and
what new surprises they might have in store
for the population, but felt powerless to
influence them.

105.  1 Communist Party rule
 2 Marxist-Leninist ideology
 3 Rampant bureaucracy
 4 Leader cults
 5 State control over production and
distribution
 6 Social engineering
 7 Affirmative action on behalf of workers
 8 Stigmatization of “class enemies”

106.  9 Police surveillance
 10 State terror
 11 Various informal, personalistic
arrangements whereby people at every level
sought to protect themselves and obtain
scarce goods

109.  Collectivisation and the First Five-Year Plan
(1929 – 32) marked the start of Stalin’s
revolution: the transformation of the Soviet
Union into an industrial great power.
 The outcome of the First World War resulted in
the dominance of the world economy by the
United States. By 1918, only two global powers
remained, the British Empire and the United
States. If the Soviet Union wished to gain
independence from the American-dominated
world economic system, it had to industrialise
quickly within ten years.

110.  With the devastation and geo-political shift of
the First World War, the age of European power
came to an end. The European powers were no
longer the world’s overlord. The empires of
Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the
Ottomans had come to an end. France, also,
ceased to be a great power of the first rank.
 Trotsky warned of a ‘Balkanised Europe' under
the domination of the new super-power, the
United States, just as the countries of south-
eastern Europe had once been under the
domination of Britain and France.

112.  Hitler warned in 1928, the ‘threatened global hegemony of
the North American continent’ would reduce all the states of
Europe to the status of Switzerland or Holland.
 The United States was a power unlike any other, a novel kind
of ‘super-state’. It was precisely the looming potential after
1918, the future dominance of American capitalist
democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler,
Stalin, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan to such radical action.
 All of them saw themselves as radical insurgents against an
oppressive and powerful world order dominated by the
United States and the British Empire.

114.  National power in the early twentieth century was
measured in the currency of battleships. The
rations of geostrategic power were fixed at the
Washington Naval Conference in 1922 in the
ratio of 10:10:6:3:3. At the head stood Britain
and the United States, accorded equal status as
the only truly global powers.
 Japan was granted third place as a one-ocean
power confined to the Pacific. France and Italy
were relegated to the east Atlantic and the
Mediterranean. Germany and Russia were not
even considered as conference participants.

115.  The purpose for Stalin and his First Five-Year
Plan (1929 – 32) was rapid economic
development using state planning and laying
the foundations for socialism by rooting out
private enterprise.
 The Plan involved massive investment in
heavy industry, skimping in the area of
consumer goods, and substantial involuntary
sacrifice of living standards by the general
population to pay for it all.

117.  From the start of the Five-Year plan in 1929,
Soviet borders were closed to people and goods
from the world market, and the country declared
its intention of achieving “economic autarchy.” In
the short term, this move had the beneficial
effect of cutting the Soviet Union off from the
Great Depression.
 In the long term, however, it set the stage for a
retreat into suspicious, parochial isolation that
was reminiscent of Muscovite Russia in the
sixteenth century.

119.  Increased suspicion of foreign enemies was
matched by a sharp rise in hostility to “class
enemies” at home: kulaks (rich peasants),
priests, members of the pre-revolutionary
nobility, former capitalists. In the Communist
view all these groups were natural opponents
of the Soviet state.

120.  A cultural revolution took place against
members of the pre-revolutionary
intelligentsia, known as “bourgeois
specialists.”
 During the New Economic Policy, Lenin had
insisted on the state’s need for the
specialists’ expertise, even though
recommending that they be supervised
closely by Communists.

122.  From spring 1928, groups of engineers were
charged with “wrecking” (intentionally
damaging the Soviet economy) and
treasonous contacts with foreign capitalists
and intelligence services.
 Stalin announced the urgent need for the
Soviet Union to acquire its own “workers’ and
peasants’ intelligentsia” to replace the
“bourgeois intelligentsia” inherited from the
Tsarist regime.

124.  Stalin initiated a major program for sending
workers, peasants, and young Communists to
higher education, particularly engineering
school, so that they could prepare for
leadership in the new society.
 The beneficiaries of the program achieved
rapid promotion during the Great Purges and
constituted a long-lasting political elite – the
“Brezhnev generation” – whose tenure in
power lasted until the 1980s.

126.  Following the Five-Year Plans and the Soviet
victory in the Second World War against Nazi
Germany, the Soviet Union became part of the
established order within the international
system.
 Marxism-Leninism served to legitimate an
established order, an established social and
political system, the dictatorship of Stalin and
his successors.

127.  Despite the predications of Marx and Engels, the
state in the Soviet Union was very far from
withering away under Stalin and his successors.
 The official Soviet account said that the state did
not disappear until the achievement of full
communism. Socialism was only a stage in the
development towards communism and the state
was necessary to protect the gains already made
and ensure the continued development towards
communism.

129.  Under Stalin, the Communist Party became
the supreme force in the Soviet Union. The
annual anniversary parades in Red Square to
mark the October Revolution personified this.
 Attempts to question the ‘leading role’ of the
Communist Party brought about the invasion
of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the
introduction of marital law in Poland in 1981.

130.  The first generation of communists, Lenin’s
colleagues, were intellectuals of middle-class
background who joined the Party when adult.
 The second generation, those of the 1930s and
1940s, were more men of peasant background who
joined the Party early in life. They had little higher
education and specialised in coercive political
organisation.
 In the post-Stalin period after 1953, the Party came
to be dominated by men with a very high degree of
technical education, specialists in administration and
business management.

132.  Life in Russia, later the Soviet Union, from the
First World War and Russian Civil War, was
unpredictable. Huge numbers of people were
uprooted geographically and socially, losing
touch with family and friends, working in
occupations different from the ones that had
seemed marked out for them.
 The October Revolution opened doors for
advancement for some people, closed them for
others. Stalin’s revolution in the 1930s shattered
routines and expectations.

133.  Despite its promises of future abundance and
massive propaganda of its current
achievements, the Stalinist regime did little to
improve the life of its people in the 1930s.
 The NKVD’s soundings of public opinion, the
Stalinist regime was relatively though not
desperately unpopular in Russian towns. In
Russian villages its unpopularity was much
greater due to collectivisation and famine.

135.  Overall, as the NKVD regularly reported and
official statements repeated, the ordinary “little
man” in Soviet towns, who thought only of his
own and his family’s welfare, was “dissatisfied
with Soviet power,” though in a fatalistic and
passive manner.
 The post-NEP situation was compared
unfavourably with NEP, and Stalin – despite the
officially fostered Stalin cult – was compared
unfavourably with Lenin, sometimes because he
was more repressive but more often because he
let the people go hungry.