Stalin's+Solution

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 Stalin’s Solution: Interwar Russia In 1924, when Lenin died, he expressed concern that Joseph Stalin, at that time General Secretary of the Communist Party, could not be trusted with his power. Stalin was able to have Lenin’s warning suppressed, and by 1928 was clearly the supreme power in the Soviet Union. With absolute power in his hands, Stalin set about changing Lenin’s revolution to meet his own goals – not all of which were consistent with Marxism, or even with the needs of the majority of Russians. Stalin used total control of the political, ideological, military, legal, and economic apparatus of the state to build the Soviet Union into a superpower by 1945, but the costs, in lives, money, and morality, were stunningly high. Russia has paid, and continues to pay dearly for Stalin’s modern solutions to modern problems – perhaps chief among which was, for Stalin, the question of how Stalin could get and keep absolute power. After 1921, following the successful victory of the Red Army in the civil war that followed the revolution, Lenin came to realize that Russia was far less ready for revolution than even he had thought. One of the chief costs of the war, the revolution, and then civil war was an unemployment rate of near 85% in Russia and its sattelites. This was combined with continuing hunger and disastrous harvests. Lenin decided that the first order of business was to get the USSR back on its feet economically, and that the sacrifice, temporarily, of a few principals would not hurt the revolution in the long run. In 1921 he instituted what he called the New Economic Policy (the NEP). This program offered farms and small businesses the opportunity to produce their goods for market, not for the state, and to sell them at market price. Any profit gained from such ventures was theirs to keep. In order to be fair, and produce incentive, the NEP allowed salaries incentives for workers in major industries of which the state retained control. The NEP worked beautifully between 1921 and 1928. Production rose, unemployment dropped. The level of Russian industrialization, which stood in 1921 at 1/7 of its prewar capacity, increased rapidly, and the economy recovered well. State farms and state-owned industry was required to operate according to capitalist principals, including the goal of showing a profit. While Lenin’s NEP was successful in restarting the Soviet Economy, it made many good communists very nervous, for it was an abandonment of many of their most cherished economic pricipals. Among those dismayed by the NEP was Joseph Stalin. When Stalin came to power after Lenin’s 1924 death, one of his first moves was to dismantle the NEP, and replace it with his own, more socialist, centrally planned system for recovering from the depression Russia had experienced. Central to Stalin’s plan, as it had been to Lenin’s, was the idea of class warfare. That is, Lenin, and Stalin, like Marx before them, saw the revolution as a st