Why stalinism failed

Yet the state he built up collapsed in and today Russia is again only a regional power. So Russia has gone full circle. May one trace this fiasco back to Stalin, or is it the fault of his inept successors?

To answer these questions, we need to examine the purpose of foreign policy and criteria for its success or failure. Instead, the Soviet premier sought a more open and flexible approach to his foreign policy, even with neighboring countries such as Finland, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Europe was poor, devastated, full of displaced and disaffected people, and morally, physically and spiritually spent. It was something of a miracle that Europeans got themselves back on their feet as quickly as they did.

Certainly after the war, Stalin saw Europe with the eyes of an ultra-realist, meaning he saw opportunities he could exploit for expansion and influence.

But he was also wary of getting the Soviet Union in any kind of clash with the Americans and British on the continent. Thus, he frequently discouraged the more radical aims of European communists. He was hopeful that the Americans would withdraw their troops from Europe, return to their prewar isolationist policies and allow him maximum room for maneuver. When this did not happen, he sought to forward the interests of communism, especially in those areas under his control, but always with the view of not antagonizing the West to the point of being drawn into a military conflict.

What made the years and such a watershed in the history of the Cold War and the division of Europe? Several important — irreversible — events happened that changed the character of the relationship between the East and West. Skip to main content. The Ohio State University. Department of History. Home Topics Africa. Middle East.

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Privacy Policy. Log In. The working class had been ravaged by three years of civil war. Many workers who survived the conflict had moved into administrative positions in the Soviet government or relocated to the countryside.

Internationally, the USSR stood alone. The proletarian revolution Trotsky had expected to spread and take hold elsewhere had been stymied. The radical Left underwent terrible defeats in in Germany and Hungary. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist, acquired power in Rome in and his Fascist dictatorship became a fierce enemy of the Bolsheviks. More defeats soon followed in Germany, Estonia, and Bulgaria in After Lenin died in January , the question arose immediately about who would be the next leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Trotsky was one of the most recognizable figures associated with the October Revolution—admired, hated, and emulated within and outside the USSR. A mistake, fateful for all three, though, had already been made. In , Lenin, appreciating his organizational talents, chose Stalin for the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party.

This gave him authority over party membership and appointments. Stalin quickly accrued enormous power and influence in the party over the next few years. Once Lenin, who, in his last months, sorely regretted his choice of Stalin, was no longer in the picture, Stalin sided with Zinoviev and Kamenev in their opposition to Trotsky.

As Trotsky later recognized, Stalin took advantage of the situation not only to appoint his own people but also to advance his own ideas about the future of the USSR. While he had advocated centralization during the Civil War, he had done so out of necessity. Further support came from unexpected quarters. After Stalin maneuvered them out of positions of authority, Kamenev and Zinoviev threw in their lot with Trotsky in This Joint Opposition, never the most robust alliance, did not hold.

Stalin, wielding his power like a club, expelled Trotsky and his followers from the party in late In that book is this remarkable description of Stalin, by then the sole ruler of the Soviet Union. He is gifted with practicality, a strong will, and persistence in carrying out his aims. His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive. His work of compilation, The Foundations of Leninism, in which he made an attempt to pay tribute to the theoretical traditions of the party, is full of sophomoric errors.

His ignorance of foreign languages compels him to follow the political life of other countries at second-hand. His mind is stubbornly empirical and devoid of creative imagination.

To the leading group of the party in the wide circles he was not known at all he always seemed a man destined to play second and third fiddle. And the fact that today he is playing first is not so much a summing up of the man as it is of this transitional period of political backsliding in the country. With his opponents removed, Stalin enacted the collectivization of agriculture and state-directed industrialization, programs once championed by the Left Opposition, but now brutally implemented with a staggering toll of lives.

Thus, Stalinism, the counterrevolutionary system and ideology Stalin represented, preoccupied him. In this form of totalitarianism, a bureaucracy, a privileged caste, at the top of which Stalin perched like an absolute monarch, lorded it over the working class.

As late as , he thought, however, the Soviet system could be reformed by working through the structures of the Communist Party. The Left Opposition might dislodge Stalin from within without directly challenging state power. Trotsky held to this position until Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January Germany was a country with a modern urban, industrial society he had long regarded as vital to the prospects for socialism.

The Soviet leadership had tied the hands of the German Communist Party and hindered a united front against the Nazi Party by construing moderate socialists as the real threat. After Hitler took power, Trotsky concluded that reform of the Stalin regime had to be abandoned. Ousting Stalin by working through the channels of the Communist Party was no longer possible.