The communist Soviet Union was founded in 1922 and was ruled by the Communist party as a one-party state. Although the Soviet Union was officially a union of fifteen subnational Soviet socialist republics, the government and economy were highly centralized.
Until its collapse in 1991, the Soviet Union didn’t treat its civilians very well. It is estimated that around 20 million to 61 million people were killed due to the communist regime in the Soviet Union.
“Why didn’t the leaders of the Western countries develop their countries with bloodshed like Stalin did, decades ago?”
I stumbled on this question on Quora.
When I first read this question, I thought it was some joke. Obviously, western countries didn’t want to ‘develop’ their countries as Stalin did back in the USSR. The bloodshed in Soviet states is horrendous, and it’s something we don’t want to happen again.
The Soviet states are the perfect example of why you wouldn’t want a totalitarian communist state. This article will point out some differences between the ‘free’ western world and the Soviet Union after the war.
The Second World War
The War started in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland but and we all know the details on that but let’s take a look at where the war started for the Soviet Union.
At that time, Joseph Stalin was in charge since 1924.
The constant growth of international tension, the aggressions of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the direct and indirect threats to the survival of the Soviet Union had strongly favored Stalin’s political decisions and his ruthless terror action against real opponents or presumed to be in power in the party, in the army, in ethnic minorities, in the remnants of the antagonist classes of the Bolshevik state.
At the beginning of 1939, the international position of the Soviet Union was fragile: the country was substantially isolated, it had to face the enmity of its western neighbors while in the Far East in the summer of 1938, the Red Army had been engaged in a real battle on Lake Chasan against the Kwantung Army.
The Soviet Union was also weak because of the Stalinist terror policy, which had torn the ruling group, undermined the population’s morale, and upset and disorganized the entire military structure. Stalin tried to react to this pessimism by speaking at the 18th Party Congress in March 1939.
He spoke of a probable second imperialist war for the division of the world, distinguished between aggressors and non-aggressive countries. Democrats, who nevertheless, in his opinion, had decided in favor of a” non-intervention policy that could turn against them.
He warned the Western powers: the Soviet Union would be cautious.
The destruction of Czechoslovakia by Hitler’s March 15, 1939, seemed final to change the attitude of the Western powers.
Britain affirmed its decision to oppose further Nazi aggression and began a policy of unilateral guarantees to the countries that seemed most threatened Germany, starting with Poland.
Stalin remained extremely suspicious and proposed to France and Great Britain a concrete political-military alliance against aggressive countries meticulously codified with detailed military clauses that considered every possible circumstance and included all the nations of the old anti-Soviet cordon sanitaire
At the beginning of August, the German leaders made the first diplomatic moves to favor an agreement with the Soviets.
After a proposal by the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on 3 August to regulate the problems of Soviet-German relations, Hitler himself wrote to Stalin requesting a meeting at the highest level very quickly in Moscow.
Stalin accepted the proposal, and Ribbentrop arrived on August 23, 1939. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was concluded the same evening during a meeting in the Kremlin.
Which apparently took place in a convivial atmosphere. The non-aggression treaty was accompanied by a secret protocol outlining the reciprocal areas of influence in Eastern Europe: the Soviet Union gained freedom of action over a series of territories lost during the First World War.
On the night of June 22, 1941, the first reports of German air strikes and trespassing and gun battles began to arrive in Moscow; among the Soviet leader’s disbelief and confusion; the general, chief of staff of the Red Army, spoke on the telephone with Stalin, who had just woken up, to warn him of the situation.
The Soviet leader looked shocked by the news; an immediate meeting was called in the Kremlin.
Molotov announced that the German ambassador had just delivered Germany’s declaration of war. All Stalin’s plans had collapsed, and the Soviet Union found itself exposed to the brunt of the military machine of Nazi Germany alone.
Recovery of the Soviet Union
At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union, the main protagonist of the victory over Nazism, achieved unprecedented world prestige; arrived in the heart of Europe, the Red Army, with over 6.3 million personnel and 14 000 front-line armored vehicles, constituted the most powerful army and the armed arm of the USSR position of power which was proposed as imperial successor to the expansionist aspirations of the Tsar Russia.
According to Stalin’s patriotic concepts, the socialist and revolutionary demands that had been the qualifying elements of the first socialist state in the world for so many years were of much less importance.
However, the Soviet aspirations for power clashed with the sad reality of the conditions of extreme attrition in which the USSR found itself at the end of the war. The human losses were almost incalculable; official statistics on military losses show the figure of 11 285 000 soldiers who died from all causes, of which 6.2 million were killed in combat, and 4.4 million were missing.
Civilian deaths have never been calculated exactly but are likely to exceed 10 million. The so-called Great Patriotic War certainly cost over 20–25 million deaths to the Soviet peoples, mostly adult males of working age.
The material destruction was enormous in the occupied territories: 1 710 cities or towns and over 70 000 villages were destroyed; 25 million people lost their homes; many large cities were in ruins.
In comparison with the wealth and power of the United States, underlined by the possession of the atomic weapon, the USSR found itself in a situation of great inferiority at the end of the war.
Furthermore, while the army was quickly demobilized directly in Germany and the soldiers returned to their homeland in horse-drawn carts, the fighting was not yet over on Soviet territory; NKVD troops were busy for years to suppress the still strong nationalist guerrilla warfare in the Baltic states, western Ukraine and Poland.
The resistance of the nationalist fighters was finally crushed in Lithuania in 1947, while the last nuclei in western Ukraine were eliminated only in 1951
After so much suffering and deprivation to obtain victory in the country, there was the expectation of an easing of the regime’s pressure, of an improvement in living conditions, of greater internal liberality.
Stalin was far from these ideas. He believed that the victory definitively sanctioned the correctness of his policy and the solidity of the Soviet state; he called the war an exam, which had been passed, for the government and the party of the USSR.
He was ready to challenge the West to safeguard the position of power achieved in Europe and the world.
There would have been no respite for the USSR. Under Stalin, the country would have undertaken difficult reconstruction while the Cold War began in Europe.
Originally Published on Medium by me (Bryan Dijkhuizen)
