1920: The civil war had entered its final phase

The armies of the newly independent Poland invaded Russia but the Red Army repelled them and pushed the war back into Poland.

The White armies in the south were evacuated across the Black Sea to Turkey, leaving Russia to the Communists.

In Siberia and the border regions: a number of quasi-independent states had arisen, and in 1921 and '22 the Red Army moved to bring these regions within the Communist fold.

Problems Lenins Government had faced after the war The disastrous failure of his economic policy of "War Communism," which entailed the seizure of food from the peasantry to fuel the war effort. This policy led to the terrible famine that swept Russia in 1921, eventually leaving nearly 5 million dead.

This famine led to an uprising among the sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt which forced Lenin to announce his New Economic Policy: it maintained state control of the major industries, but allowed farmers and small-scale manufacturers to trade freely.

The organization of a huge territory into what came to be called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or U.S.S.R. In theory, this was to be a federation of independent nationalities, to be joined by other "soviet republics" as revolution spread around the world. In practice, however, it was a reconstruction of the old Russian Empire now simply under the auspices of the Communist Party.
However, Russia was not yet ready to adopt pure Marxism in the economic sphere.

Lenins Legacy On January 21, 1924, Lenin died of a brain hemorrhage, at the age of fifty-three. The cult of Lenin sprang up immediately: his followers embalmed his body and placed it in Moscow's Red Square where it quickly became a shrine. In the decades after his death, the Soviet Union would hold up Lenin's writings as works of philosophical genius

Lenin, more than anyone else, laid the foundations for a state so rugged that it would endure for seventy yearsand so powerful that it would eventually challenge the United States for world supremacy.

Joseph Stalin By 1922, it was clear that Stalin and Trotsky disliked each other strongly, and that after Lenin's death they would come into conflict with one another. Lenin, after suffering a series of strokes in the winter of 1922, began to have serious doubts about Stalin. He dictated a Testament, in which he warned of a coming conflict between Trotsky and Stalin, and expressed his preference for Trotsky, suggesting that his fellow Communists remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary, claiming he was temperamentally unsuited for the job.

The struggle for power Stalin and another two politicians formed an alliance called "troika. As Lenin turned closer to death, they launched a series of attacks on Trotsky in party meetings, drawing on his former writings and speeches to attack him for disloyalty to his own movement. Once Lenin died, Stalin forced Trotsky to be absent for the funeral in order to create a symbols to his advantage. Nevertheless, Lenin's Testament, with its warning against Stalin and suggestion that he be removed from leadership, was read at the next Central Committee meeting. However, Trotsky kept silent and Stalin's allies came to his defense. Finally, Stalin retained his post as General Secretary.

Stalin in power Stalin never enjoyed a deep understanding of Marxist theory, and was always willing to twist it to his advantage. Once he consolidated his power, he betrayed his troikas allies and, in 1929, Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union. He pushed for immediate collectivization of land and rapid, state-controlled industrialization

Throughout 1928 and 1929, Stalin gathered support in the Central Committee: He stood alone at the top of the pyramid of Soviet power.
Lenin's New Economic Policy was abandoned, and the limited market economy that had been allowed to exist in rural areas was, quite literally, liquidated. In its place, Stalin imposed a vast and complex planned economy, in which every decision would be made centrally, rather than individually. 1. Five-Year Plan: It collected about one-fifth of the rural farm population. 2. In 1929, Stalin abruptly decided on immediate collectivization on an unprecedented scale. In theory, this meant that individual farm ownership would be abolished, and peasants would be consolidated into collective farms. In practice, the program was an excuse for a class war in rural areas, as the peasantry naturally resisted the government's attempts to make them leave their farms, and the government, in response, attacked the rich peasants who were, according to Stalin's propaganda, exploiting everyone else. It was therefore almost impossible for Soviet officials to separate "exploiting peasants" from "exploited peasants". The Result: Fifteen million peasants were uprooted from their homes and marched at gunpoint across the country into inhospitable regions, where they were expected to farm--or, more realistically, expected to die. Between four and five million people died in the Ukraine alone, and another two to three million in the rest of Russia--while the Soviet Union, under Stalin's direction, was exporting 1.7 million tons of grain, and keeping millions of tons in state "reserves" in case of war.

Stalin in power Class struggle: churches were destroyed, priests arrested, and a vast propaganda campaign conducted against organized religion; and at the same time, supposedly "bourgeois" influences were removed from academia, the army, and even engineering, leaving the Soviet Union bereft of talented men. The 1930s: During this period, with Europe and America wracked by the Great Depression, Stalin showed a truly remarkable period of industrial growth: every penny was reinvested in building industry, rather than improving the quality of life. Great Terror: On December 1, 1934, Kirov was shot, along with all his close relatives (this would become a typical Stalinist tactic). Stalin effectively liquidated all traces of opposition to his rule. In August of 1936, the first Show Trial was broadcast around the world. Oppositors confessed their supposed crimes and were sentenced to death. Of course, these confessions were elicited after long months of psychological torture and physical abuse. A wave of hysterical denunciations, arrests, and executions swept the country. By 1938, Stalin announced the end of the era of mass purges. Millions of Russians were either executed or shipped off to the dreaded Siberian gulags between 1936 and '38. Perhaps the Soviet psyche suffered just as much damage, as an entire nation and its attendant culture sank into a deep-seated paranoia and a frightened submission to the state--the effects of which are still being felt in Russia today.

Stalin in power Stalin's "cult of personality: his writings were handed out to schoolchildren with a reverence once reserved for the Bible, his childhood was mythologized and every reference to his name accompanied by phrases like "Leader of Genius of the Proletarian Revolution," "Supreme Genius of Humanity," and so on. A German Threat: Hitler Throughout the '30s, the Nazis and the Soviets seemed on a collision course, as Hitler denounced the "Bolshevik Menace" and the two nations fought a proxy war in Spain, each supporting a different side in that country's civil war. For a time, Stalin considered an alliance with the western Allies, France and Britain, in order to contain the growing Nazi threat. That offer remained on the table, however, until 1938, by which point Hitler had conquered Czechoslovakia and Austria, and seemed ready to swallow up Poland as well.

Nazi-Soviet Pact: It was a brilliant move on Stalin's part, since it gave him an opportunity to drastically improve his country's strategic position along its western border, without getting involved in a larger conflict. While Hitler flattened Poland, Soviet troops took possession of the eastern half of that country, which Germany and the U.S.S.R. shortly agreed to share. In October of 1939, the U.S.S.R. "convinced" the Baltic States--Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, independent since the Revolution--to allow Soviets to come within their borders. This paved the way for these states' becoming an annexation to the U.S.S.R. the following year. The Soviets applied similar pressure to Finland, but the Finns resisted; so, in November of '39, Stalin ordered an invasion.
By that time, Hitler's armies were racing across France, winning astonishing victories: Germany stood as the unquestionable master of continental Europe. This left Hitler free to turn on Stalin without fear of attack from the west. He had prepared what was called "Operation Barbarossa" against Russia. However, Stalin did little to prepare for invasion. on June 21, 1941, when German troops rolled through the U.S.S.R.'s border defenses and poured into the Soviet heartland. It was not until July 3 that Stalincalled for national unity in the face of the crisis. The following month, he officially assumed supreme command of the Red Army, a position he would hold until the end of the war.

Stalin in power The Ukraine was in German hands, as was Crimea and the Baltic States; German troops took Leningrad and Sebastopol. Moscow itself was threatened, and only saved by the onset of winter. In these months, Stalin began to panic: he made contact with the Nazis and offered vast territorial concessions in return for peace. The offer was rejected, however, and the war went on. 1943: Soviets and their new allies, the British and the Americans, trapped the German troops within the ruins of Stalingrad and annihilated them. The Red Army drove the Nazi armies back, out of Russia, and then penetrated into Germany itself, while the Allies invaded France in 1944. Hitler committed suicide April 31, 1945, effectively ending the fighting in Europe. After the war: Throughout his meetings with the two western leaders, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Stalin pushed for military and economic assistance for the Soviet Union while demanding that they recognize Soviet dominance of Eastern and Central Europe. Roosevelt and Churchill, unwilling to antagonize their ally, essentially gave in to his demands--although given the circumstances, they had little choice. (Neither knew that Stalin's spies were at work in the United States, and had already sent information on the atomic bomb project back to Russia, where Soviet scientists were hard at work on their own nuclear weapon.) Churchill appreciated the sacrifices the Russians had made during the war, and wanted to be conciliatory toward them, and Roosevelt seems to have decided that he could "manage" Stalin.

Stalin in power

Stalin began a drive to maintain control at all costs. He made strategical changes inside his inner circle. Soldiers who had seen too much of the prosperous West were interned in camps to keep them from "infecting" the population with subversive ideas; there was a new purge of the military. Newspapers and other literature considered threatening to the regime were forbidden. The Western Allies, now Soviet enemies in the fight for global influence, came under heavy attack in the press. The post-war conflict with the West came as no surprise to Stalin. In part, it constituted a continuation of the Marxist dream of world revolution. In the late 1940s: Soviet foreign policy was characterized by a steady belligerence, and the application of constant pressure on politically sensitive areas. Eastern Europe quickly belonged to Stalin, as did East Germany, and in February 1948 Stalinist forces seized power in Czechoslovakia. At the same time, Moscow supported Communist forces in the Greek Civil War and supported Communist insurrection in Indochina (Vietnam) among others strategical measures. Cold War: In the summer of 1948, Stalin ordered a blockade of West Berlin, which was controlled by the Allies. By the late 1940s, sympathy for the Soviet Union was in sharp decline in the United States, and this fact was the trigger for the begging of what was called Cold War. China: In 1949 the Soviets finally succeeded in exploding an atomic bomb, and China fell to the Communists under Mao Zedong. The Marxist revolution--the mere dream of revolutionaries in Stalin's youth--seemed to finally be at hand, and that December, Mao attended the impressive celebration of Stalin's seventieth birthday. In 1950, Mao and Stalin signed a Sino-Soviet friendship treaty, although the two leaders were wary of one another.

After Stalin On February 29, 1953, Stalin suffered a stroke. However, he finally passing from this life on March 5, 1953. Russians honored him--but only for a time. In February of 1956 his successor, Nikita Krushchev, addressed a "secret session" of the 20th Party Congress, where he spent three hours denouncing Stalin, thus beginning the process known as de-Stalinization. The departed dictator's name was removed from public buildings, streets, and cities; his cult of personality was denounced; his body was removed from Red Square. But the Soviet state that he had built survived for another forty years. Of course, the Cold War went on until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The final crack-up of the Soviet Union was in 1991-92.