Short History Of... - The Soviet Union, Part 1 of 2

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

From its initial creation in 1922, the Soviet Union was perhaps the most ambitious political experiment in human history. But how did this superpower come about? And in its first decades, how did its founding principles of equality transform to fit a nation that became synonymous with tragedy, poverty, suppression and terror?  This is the first in a special 2-part Short History of the Soviet Union. Written by Dan Smith. With thanks to historian and author Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick of the Australian Catholic University and the University of Sydney. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's early evening on Friday the 22nd of February 1980 in Lake Placid, New York. At the 13th Winter Olympics, a capacity crowd of 8,500 is inside the Olympic Centre, watching a crucial ice hockey match between the USA and the Soviet Union. There are just a few minutes left in the final period, and the atmosphere is electric. The raucous home crowd is chanting, but down on the bench the final period, and the atmosphere is electric. The raucous home crowd is chanting, but down on the bench the Soviet coach Viktor Tikhanov, smartly dressed in suit and tie, nervously runs his fingers through his hair. His team launch wave after wave of attack, but cannot find a way through. The players propel themselves across the ice like rockets,

sticks clashing, the puck hurtling off like a surface-to-air missile. But another Soviet attempt on goal comes to nothing, and the crowd lets out a collective groan as Tikhanov's center is sent clattering into the rinkside boards. There's no escaping the edge to this match. U.S. President Jimmy Carter has recently revealed America's plans to boycott the Moscow Summer Olympics in a few months' time. His response to the Kremlin sending troops into Afghanistan. The Cold War is heating up. The thing is, Tikhanov knows that the game on the ice should be a walkover. Just days ago, they crushed the Americans 10-3 in a pre-tournament exhibition.

Because of the complex rules around amateurism, the USA cannot use its stars from the National Hockey League, and instead it fields promising college youngsters and minor league veterans. By contrast, the Soviets draft their elite players into the army, sidestepping the amateur rules. The Soviets draft their elite players into the army, sidestepping the amateur rules. They haven't lost a match at the Olympics since 1968. But ten minutes ago, against the odds, the USA took the lead 4-3. Ever since, the crowd, almost all supporting the home side, has been on its feet, waving their stars and stripes, cheering themselves hoarse. Now there's just a minute left. One of the Soviets takes a

potshot from a distance, sending the puck whizzing just wide of the goal. Tikhanov thinks about substituting his goalie for an extra attacker. In a last ditch, winner takes all moved. He gestures to his subs to warm up, but for the first time in his long career, panic overtakes him. As the crowd counts down the last seconds, Tikhanov does nothing. The clock hits zero. The triumphant Americans race into each other's arms, falling in a heap on the ice. The Soviet players watch on, propped up on their hockey sticks, disconsolate and disbelieving. Tikhanov glowers at his players as they pile off the ice, stumping their blades on the ringside matting.

He won't spare any of them in his post-match team talk, because he knows what's waiting for them when their flight lands back in Moscow. No joyous crowd to greet them. None of the financial bonuses or military accolades that come with Olympic success. Just steely disappointment from the Kremlin and the resentment of the millions of people they've let down. What he won't be allowed to ignore is that this is more than just a sporting upset. It is a national disaster that undermines the USSR's position in the global hierarchy. Kharkov has to hope that the cold shoulder

is the worst of any punishment. If this had been a few years earlier under Stalin, there'd be a good chance he'd be on his way to exile in Siberia for such failure. Because in a contest among superpowers, second place is nowhere. The match, which came to be known in the West as the Miracle on Ice, was a microcosm of the geopolitical rivalry that dominated global affairs for most of the second half of the 20th century. The Cold War, symbolized by the game, saw much of the world aligning with either the USA or the USSR.

It was a hatred that at times brought the planet to the very brink of extermination. The Soviet Union was perhaps the most ambitious political experiment in human history. But how did this superpower come about? Why did a political project rooted in ideas of equality among all people result in a nation that became synonymous with tragedy, poverty, suppression, and terror? How did its leaders' personalities impact the fates of millions, and what precipitated its shockingly rapid collapse. I'm John Hopkins, and this is the first of a special two-part short history of the Soviet Union. It's the 30th of December 1922 in Moscow.

Mikhail Kalinin runs his fingers through his beard. A veteran of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and former mayor of St. Petersburg, Mikhail Kalinin runs his fingers through his beard. A veteran of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and former mayor of St. Petersburg, he is the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Quite a mouthful. But with such a title comes significant power. He has been attending the first All-Union Congress of the Soviets as Russia's senior representative. Vladimir Lenin, Russia's de facto leader, is elsewhere battling serious ill health.

Laid out on a long wooden table before Kalinin and the others crowding around is a treaty that's been months in the making. Kalinin takes the pen handed to him and signs it with a flourish. Another 85 signatures will follow, from more members of the Russian delegation but also from the Soviet Socialist Republics of Ukraine, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia, itself comprised of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. The term Soviet in the USSR's name literally translates as council and refers to the workers groups that form a vital level of government in Lenin's new nation.

Local village and factory-based Soviets sit at the bottom of a pyramid that includes town and regional Soviets, provincial Soviets, Soviets of individual republics, all the way up to the Congress of the Soviet Union, which itself elects the governing council. But the power structure within the USSR is complicated and opaque. In reality, the Soviets are secondary in terms of practical power to the Communist Party itself, with the party's Politburo, the nation's supreme policy-making body, sitting right at the top. Now, with these strokes of a pen, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the USSR

for short, is born. Over the next two decades it will expand to include five Central Asian republics, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, plus Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldavia. It is five years since the overthrow of the authoritarian Tsar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov dynasty who dominated Russia for centuries. October 1917 saw Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks triumph as they seized control of the machinery of government and instituted the world's first communist state. The Bolshevik philosophy is rooted in the 19th century teachings of Karl Marx. They see the history of humanity as a class struggle, where one social group dominates another until its overthrow. struggle, where one social group dominates another until its overthrow. Capitalism exploits the wage earning masses, or the proletariat, and should be replaced with a system in which property is

owned collectively. The communist vision sees everyone as equals, with crime, conflict, and even government eventually rendered redundant. But despite Lenin's dream, the last few years have been anything but plain sailing. The withdrawal from the First World War was humiliating and costly and saw the old empire fall apart. What followed was a brutal civil war in which millions have died. By 1922, the Bolsheviks, or Reds, have the upper hand over their opponents, the Whites,

a broad coalition of anti-communist forces. But sporadic fighting continues, and the economy is in a wretched state. Poverty is endemic, famine widespread, and its industrial sectors lag behind its international rivals. Lenin and the Bolsheviks have always been fiercely anti-nationalist and anti-imperialist. But when they set about creating a new nation, it bears a striking resemblance to the old Russian Empire. Sheila Fitzgerald is the author of The Shortest History of the Soviet Union and a professor at the Australian Catholic University and an associate of the University of Sydney.

The Bolsheviks were not nationalists, they were internationalists. They believed in international revolution and they were waiting for it to happen. Now that didn't happen. That left Russia having had a revolution in the name of international revolution and it turned out they were the only ones standing when the dust settles. Now, as to nationalism, the Bolsheviks regarded nationalism as false consciousness. In other words, they thought workers who thought of themselves primarily, let's say, as Russians or as Germans, were suffering from a wrong image, that what mattered about them was that they were workers

and that they were exploited by capitalists. And if they thought the fact that they were exploited by capitalists and if they thought the fact that they were german workers was overwhelmingly important they were on the wrong track however the bolsheviks recognized that this wrong track was a very popular one they basically looked at immediate past history in europe and thought small nation nationalism is something you can't stand up against and therefore go with the flow. By the time the USSR is created by Kalinin and his comrades in Moscow, Lenin has suffered two strokes. The battle is on to succeed him as the Soviet Union's de facto leader. There have already been a swathe of reforms. The old czarist social class system has been abolished

along with the once influential Russian Orthodox Church. Women have the vote, and the law around divorce and abortion has been liberalized. But many fundamental questions remain. Among them, how to kickstart the economy when the vast majority of people in the Soviet Union are rural peasants. There is a general acceptance among the country's rulers that fast-paced industrialization is essential not only to raise living standards but to make the Soviet Union's destiny a reality. But the impoverished USSR has expelled its capitalists and exists in a state of international isolation. There is no chance of investment from within or abroad.

Lenin's 1921 initiative, the New Economic Policy, attempted to alleviate the crisis by allowing some low-level private business. But the sight of bourgeois fat cats once again filling the restaurants of Moscow and St. Petersburg was a bitter pill to swallow for many of his revolutionary colleagues. When Lenin dies in January 1924, after suffering a third devastating stroke, the scene is set for an almighty power struggle that will determine the USSR's future. Lenin's rule is followed by four years of collective leadership, during which several dominant figures wrestle to be the first among equals.

For a while, Leon Trotsky seems most likely. Though once an opponent of Lenin, after joining the Bolsheviks in time for the revolution in 1917, he established himself as the leader's left-hand man. His charismatic oratory spellbinds audiences whenever he speaks. And he is responsible for creating the Red Army from nothing and leading it to victory in the civil war. His public image dwarfs those of his rivals. But not everything is in his favor. Now, Trotsky's problem in the party is extremely well known in the revolutionary movement, but he was a late comiter of the Bolshevik party.

Revolutionary politics was very factional. Before the revolution in emigration and underground, emotions ran high. Lenin and Trotsky had said nasty things about each other in the times when they were on different sides. And so if you're a Bolshevik old-timer, you've got your suspicions of Trotsky. And on top of that, he's Jewish. Now, he was not unusual in that a number of the leaders were Jewish, but nevertheless, it's a factor in a Russian context. Before he can claim the top job, he is outmaneuvered by three party heavyweights, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and Joseph Stalin. They attacked him for alleged errors made during the civil war,

and Trotsky finds himself falling behind in the race. But within a few months, the Khamenev-Zinoviev-Stalin alliance is breaking down as well, with the first two forming what becomes known as the New position. Stalin is now in the ascendancy. A Georgian by birth, he manages to position himself as either the experienced regime insider or as a non-Russian outsider, as the situation requires. Until now, few have regarded him as a serious candidate to succeed Lenin. He was not a flamboyant character, he didn't seem such. He was not a great orator like Trotsky. He wasn't known as an intellectual and that mattered in the Bolshevik party. What he is, he's the behind the scenes, he's the organization man.

He's Lenin's organization man. In the first years, the general secretary of the party, but secretary means a lot of administrative work, not anything, as it were, dramatic. It does, however, give you very good connections in a ruling party, if only because a ruling party is going to have to be sending out people to run different parts of the country. Now, it turned out that if you're the person who's in charge of basically

sending comrades, party comrades out to work in the provinces, you're also in close contact with the local branches who are electing delegates to the Congresses. You're the man who knows the people on the ground. And that proved to be a very advantageous situation in 1926 he outlines his vision of what he calls socialism in one country he acknowledges that the ussr is alone in the world and must focus on consolidating socialism within its borders over the next few months, he begins removing opponents from all levels of government. Kamenev and Zinoviev are both expelled from the Communist

Party by the end of 1927. Trotsky is also firmly in his sights. It's early morning on the 18th of January 1928 in Trotsky's apartment in Moscow. There is hammering on his front door. The dreaded calling card of the secret police. But he's been expecting them. He was due to be taken to the city's Yaroslavsky station and packed on his way into exile two days ago. But the roads around the station were full of his supporters, ready to protest his treatment, and so his would-be

supervisors didn't show up. Stalin wants none of that kind of fuss. Everything was put on hold, but now here they are to smuggle him away in the small hours, out of sight and hopefully out of mind. Trotsky surveys his apartment, full of crates ready for departure. He pulls his wife, Natalia, into the bedroom, locks the door behind him, and flattens himself against it. The knocking from outside gets louder, more aggressive. Raised voices demand he open up, but he stays where he is, giving Natalia, sat anxiously on the bed, a rueful smile. This may be the endgame, but he is still playing. A moment later, there is a crashing sound and the tinkling of glass.

His would-be captors have broken a window and now flood into the apartment, splintering the door into the bedroom. Still, Trotsky resists, although he's no match for the burly officers of the secret police. They wrestle him to the ground, his glasses slipping from his face, as Natalia weeps and begs them not to hurt him. The tussle does not last long. Trotsky is dragged down to a waiting vehicle and thrown inside natalia follows seconds later it is a short journey to the station through empty streets from there a train first to kagistan and then on to their new life in the unknown but word of the struggle at trotsky's apartment soon spreads. He has not simply been disappeared into the shadows. And that is, he knows, about as much

as he can hope for. Even with Trotsky exiled thousands of miles away in Central Asia, Stalin can't shift the fear that he remains a lightning rod for opposition. In 1929, Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Union altogether, labeled a traitor to the nation. With Stalin's major rivals all removed, the path is clear for him to impose his very own brand of leadership. His first target is an economic revolution. There'll be no return to Lenin's new economic plan or the watered-down policies of the collective rule. It's what his supporters want.

And he really does take ownership of it. But if you'd looked at his policy pronouncements in, let's say, 1925-26, he's not on the radical side among the people competing for Lenin's mantle. He's always being centrist. So to a degree, he is taking up a mood within the party to push forward. to push forward. His economic vision has two main pillars. Firstly, an accelerated program of industrialization that will see modern factories built across the USSR.

They'll be filled with tens of millions of new workers who once labored inefficiently in the fields. At the same time, agriculture is to be collectivized. Huge, technically advanced state-owned farms will replace the millions of small holdings where peasants use outdated equipment. He envisions a land of tractors, harvesters and threshers, all working to fulfill government targets and feed the nation. But there's a problem. Despite the grand ambitions, there is no realistic coordinated plan in place, just orders from on high that it should happen. Accordingly, the results are disastrous.

It's expected that the peasants will join the collective farms voluntarily. Some do sign up of their own volition, hopeful for great rewards for combining their efforts. But though others would rather continue as masters of their own fates, the policy of de-Kulakization means they have no real choice. Kulak was once the term for a peasant with over eight acres of land. But under the Bolsheviks, it has become a vaguer term of abuse for any peasant with some personal wealth who is considered an enemy of socialist ambitions. Stalin constantly frames himself at battle with enemies. Factionalists within his party, enemies abroad driven by their own nationalist and imperial

ends and class enemies intent on restoring the old order of haves and have-nots. When something goes wrong, he always has a convenient foe to blame. Peasant farmers refusing to collectivize risk being designated a kulak, which is the fate of maybe two million people in the 20s and 30s. At best, that means the requisition of land and property, followed by forced migration to the cities. At worst, it's deportation to a forced labour camp or death. The responsibility for persuading farmers to join the collective enterprises falls to

local officials and Komsomols, Soviet youth groups who serve as mobile political activists. They soon earn a reputation for intimidation, with stories emerging of resistors being beaten and women having their hair forcibly cut as punishment for disobedience. Faced with such indignities, many simply choose the path of least resistance. Between 1929 and 1932, around 20 million small peasant landholdings are consolidated into just under a quarter of a million collective farms.

But the promised modern equipment is routinely unavailable, or the peasants are ill-trained to use it. There is an institutional loss of knowledge and expertise, and specific local conditions are ignored. The expert winemakers of Georgia are treated in exactly the same way as, say, the nomadic herders of Kazakhstan. The agricultural system starts to fall apart. Many farmers choose to kill their livestock rather than hand it over to the government

for nothing. Others hide grain or dispose of it on the black market. Shortages take hold and rationing follows. Bad planning turns into disaster. Stalin is pushing really hard on collectivization, and not just to collectivize, but to get the largest amount of grain in to the state coffers. Now, the problem inherent in that

is that nobody knows how much grain there actually is. The peasants, of course, always say we have nothing. But it's a sort of cat and mouse game in which the state always says you've got more to give. And the peasants always say we haven't got any more to give. And at a certain point, it will happen that they don't have any more to give. Now, Stalin and the Politburo were getting all kinds of warnings that they were pushing too hard by 1932, that really and truly, now the peasants don't have anything left. But they were used to local officials trying to protect their own regions

from disaster. And so they habitually discounted this. and the famine is clearly a result of that. In other words, it's not a famine that emerges out of a weather disaster or whatever. It emerges out of a state policy where the state wouldn't stop pushing because it was not convinced that the peasants had given up everything that they could. By 1933, famine has spread across a vast area from Ukraine to western Siberia. And though the death toll is somewhere between 5 and 10 million, Stalin forbids any official mention of what's really happening. While collectivization accelerates, so does industrialization.

The country's original five-year plan, the first of 13 in the Soviet Union's history, focuses on heavy industry, especially mining, metallurgy and machine building. The country's original five-year plan, the first of 13 in the Soviet Union's history, focuses on heavy industry, especially mining, metallurgy and machine building. But with little funding and no foreign investment, the scheme relies on a massive surge in cheap labor. Some of this is supplied by women. Ten million joined the workforce during the 1930s. But it is nowhere near enough, even with the forced

labour of deported kulaks. The aggressive enforcement of collectivisation does, however, offer a solution of sorts. Many of working age see no future in the villages, and instead take themselves off to the towns and cities in search of new opportunities. Between 1928 and 1932, around 12 million make the move. Industrialization seeks to develop cities beyond the traditional powerhouses of Moscow and the former St. Petersburg, now called Leningrad. Plans are made to forge a new national landscape by developing regions like Siberia and Central Asia. One scheme is a mega-project in the Urals. But at what cost? It's late 1931, and a young man slouches on the floor of a boxcar as it rattles along the rails of the Trans-Siberian Railway. He has been travelling for days, destined for Magnitogorsk, a brand new city being built

almost a thousand miles east of Moscow, in the Ural Mountains, where Europe meets Asia. The boxcar slows to a halt, and its great panel door is slid back. A bitter cold breeze sweeps in, chilling him to the bone. A guard roughly orders the man and the others around him from the carriage. The first thing the traveler sees is the imposing Mount Magnitnaya, after which the city is named. It is known as Magnetic Mountain because of the vast quantities of iron ore it contains, so much so that compasses don't work near it and the birds don't fly over it. It is because of the mountain that the planners in Moscow hit

upon the idea of building a huge steel plant here. It is still a way off completion, but the air resounds with the clang of heavy tools. As he's ordered along a path, the man passes weary-looking workers, loading and unloading mule-pulled carts full of rubble, commanded by officious party apparatchiks. The man is set to join their ranks. Labelled a kulak, he has been exiled from his village hundreds of miles away. Now he is what they call a special resettler, one of thousands driven here to build the new city. Others are here by choice, attracted by the promise of new beginnings and a socialist

utopia out in the east. Just now, though, that vision is hard to imagine, as the newcomer listens to the barked orders of a ferocious-looking comrade. Behind him, the steelworks already rise proudly into the sky, great cranes clunking heavy equipment into place while steam engines whistle the arrival of new supplies. Smoke billows from tall chimney stacks, and the young man can hear the fiery roar of the new smelters as they are tested out. But the construction of homes for the near quarter of a million workers lags behind. He follows his comrade past a sea of tents and ramshackle barracks stretching for miles,

bordered by a barrier of barbed wire. His footsteps crunch over the frostbitten ground as he is led to a run-down shack, his new home. The door creaks open, sending the rats inside scuttling to the shadows. Once inside, he's designated a dusty patch of floor and an anemic mattress crawling with bugs. His skin tingles at the thought of a freezing night here. Next door is the canteen, another dilapidated hut, this one reeking of boiled vegetables. He takes a seat at a bench next to a group of workers too exhausted to chat. A tin bowl of thin potato soup and black bread is slapped down in front of him. Meager sustenance before the hard work begins. He eats quickly, but hardly has time to swallow his last

mouthful before he's ordered onto his feet and out of the door. He's gestured towards a group digging foundations for what will eventually be a block of flats for the workers, and handed a shovel. Dig, he's told, and the man has no choice but to get to work. Just a few weeks later, despite temperatures of almost minus 30 degrees centigrade, blast furnace number one at the steel plant becomes operational. But the city's infrastructure is not completed for several more years. The grand ambitions of the original architects soon give way to compromise and frequently shoddiness, including a dam that's built too shallow to function. So much for the socialist utopia.

There is little in the way of sanitation, and the housing is rudimentary. Thousands succumb to exhaustion and disease, with carts making daily rounds to collect the dead. But over the decades, as the steel starts to roll out the city will evolve there will be public baths and cafeterias cinemas libraries and educational facilities all overseen by a proud statue of stalin but for now in the 1930s magnetogorsk is a symbol of the Soviet Union's overreach in its industrial ambitions. Still, compared with the unmitigated disaster of collectivization, some of the economic indicators of industrialization are impressive.

The output of the industrial sector doubles between 1928 and 1932, and does so again over the span of the next five-year plan. But it's still far behind the economies of Western Europe and North America. Although there is full employment, there is no increase in the production of consumer products that make ordinary people feel like life is improving. The exception is vodka, which now provides a fifth of state revenues, but brings increased rates of alcoholism. What scant luxuries are available, an illicit bottle of vodka here, a cut of meat or extra food rationed there, are obtained through favor rather than money. The age of the cash

economy is all but over. What counts is connections. It is better to have a hundred friends, the saying goes, than a hundred rubles. Industrialization comes with vastly increased urbanization, but whether that's a benefit depends on who you are. If you were living in a city, let's say in the early 30s, and you were a woman with a family, in the early 30s and you were a woman with a family or a man with a family, a breadwinner, life was really difficult because it had become so hard to get the food, the living space, the clothes, everything that you need for everyday life. This had become terribly complicated and you had to spend huge amounts of time on it.

And so life was really, really tough. However, if you were young, you might have a totally different attitude. From your point of view, remember all that building of industrial plants out in distant parts of the Soviet Union, that gets merged into a feeling of we're on a sort of national adventure in which we are conquering nature. That generation that was in their 20s at the beginning of the 30s, they always remembered, they looked back on this period as the great period of national advance when there was a sense of purpose in which you were participating. Stalin is well aware that his policies are divisive.

When factions of his party press for more moderate approaches, he orchestrates their defeat at the 1930 Party Congress. To consolidate his control, he doesn't call another Congress for four years. Stalin's assumption was that a lot of people were critical of him. Although given to his increasingly effective control over their expression of that, they weren't going to tell him so. But he assumed that a lot of people were critical, and no doubt this assumption is correct.

So you've got this general tendency to become more repressive and to widen the circles of repression. It's now that the show trials begin. Heavily orchestrated criminal hearings against perceived enemies. Oversight for these quasi-legal pieces of theatre falls to the NKVD, the forerunners of the KGB responsible for interior affairs and the secret police. There are a series of such trials in the five years to 1933 against domestic and foreign experts prominent in the industrialization program accused of jumped-up crimes ranging from sabotage to treason and

espionage the largely innocent defendants become convenient scapegoats for the government's failings they're punished with death or exile to the gulag the harsh labor camps operated in some of the most remote and inhospitable corners of the Soviet Union. The trials act as excellent deterrence against opposition, and soon Stalin is commanding greater loyalty than ever. At least, that's the impression. One consequence of enforced total obedience is the suppression of the nation's liveliest, most critical minds. But to the leadership, a brain drain seems a reasonable price to pay for absolute obedience. The paranoia grows. Ordinary people accept the narrative of malevolent forces, that enemies of the government and the people are responsible for their hardship. Constant vigilance against alien forces conveniently distracts attention away from what their own leaders are doing.

Stalin assures his people, telling them, Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more cheerful. For some, it has. By the mid-1930s, peasants are allowed to grow crops other than grain and are permitted to keep a cow for personal use. In the cities, more people than ever have accommodation in communal apartments. But as a cult of personality grows around Stalin, the party's tentacles stretch into every aspect of life. All cultural output, from music and theatre to literature, sculpture and painting, is expected to reflect communist ideals. There are hints, however, of happier times ahead.

The USSR joins the League of Nations in 1934, shortly after restoring diplomatic ties with the US for the first time since the First World War. restoring diplomatic ties with the US for the first time since the First World War. Then a new constitution in 1936 announces that all the much mythologized class enemies have been defeated. In theory there is a relaxation in constraints on freedom of speech and assembly, but Moscow has a wary eye on events in Germany, where Hitler and his Nazis have taken control. Even as the Constitution promises greater liberty, Stalin instigates an extraordinary crackdown on dissent. It's the 24th of August, 1936, and 16 major Bolsheviks, including Stalin's former allies Kamenev and Zinoviev, stand accused of the murder of Politburo member

Kirov two years earlier. Worse, they are charged with conspiring with the exiled Trotsky to assassinate party leaders, including Stalin. The trial is a tightly stage-managed spectacle. The Moscow courtroom is crammed with 350 spectators, most of them NKVD agents in plain clothes, along with a few foreign journalists and diplomats. Kamenev runs his finger round the collar of the faded, ill-fitting suit he has been dressed in, a look designed to add to his humiliation. His guards stand close, fixed bayonets at the ready. The message is clear. These defendants are dangerous men. His guards stand close, fixed bayonets at the ready.

The message is clear. These defendants are dangerous men. There is a buzz about the place, as proceedings near their close. Kamenev squints up at the gallery, remembering the rumor that Stalin himself is somewhere up there. But if he is, he's keeping a low profile. Khamenev knows how this works. Fighting will only make it worse.

Cooperation is the only way to save his family further heartache. With a heavy heart, he tells the judge that he spent ten years waging a struggle against the party and against Stalin personally. A co-defendant confesses to his part in Kirov's murder, despite having been in prison at the time. In his closing speech, the judge calls them rabid dogs, demanding they be wiped out. As the sentence of execution is read out, one defendant dutifully cries, long live the cause of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. The next morning, they face the firing squad. But then you do get this quite extraordinary episode,

which we call the Great Terror or the Great Purges, starts in 36, goes on through 37 and into 38, where instead of having the party called to be vigilant against class enemies, those people like Kulaks that they were used to being vigilant again and knocking around. Now they have to be vigilant against something called enemies of the people. Now, enemies of the people is a very interesting concept because it has no substance, right? In other words, it doesn't tell you anything other than that they're bad. It doesn't tell you who they are. The way that is played out is that the enemies of the people are various, but the most important location of enemies of the people is in the ruling party and the ruling political apparatus.

in the ruling party and the ruling political apparatus. And that, of course, enables Stalin to get rid of a lot of people that he either sees as his personal enemies or doesn't trust. The second part of it is that I think it is a kind of terror that is intended to be popular. Why should it be popular? Because the people they are hitting are communists in positions of power. In other words, ordinary people have a lot of resentment against. And certainly one has to say it has some success. Millions come to live in fear of the knock on the door in the middle of the

night. Those arrested include engineers blamed for industrial failings, military leaders accused of conspiring with Germany, regional leaders charged with corruption, intellectuals suspected of anti-Soviet thoughts. Ethnic Poles, Finns and Germans are simply guilty of having roots in the wrong places. The witch hunts begin to wind down in 1938, when Lavrentiy Beria is appointed head of the secret police. His first job is to purge the purgers. But by now, 700,000 so-called counter-revolutionaries have been executed, and a million more sent to the Gulag. Now, whole sectors of the party, government, military and industrial machinery are now staffed by novices. But the picture is not entirely straightforward. If you get rid of an awful lot of people at the top, part of that is going to be dead wood.

So they had taken various measures to prepare a new elite generation. So they had people waiting in the wings. And these people get the most fantastic promotions in 37, 38. There's a whole class of beneficiaries. At first, they absolutely don't know their jobs. At first, it's chaos. It's terrible. But gradually, or even not so gradually, they're functioning pretty well. Now, as war looms again in Europe, Stalin has some difficult friendships to navigate. In August 1939, his foreign minister Molotov meets with his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow. Overseen by Stalin and a portrait of Lenin, the two men dip their pens into a crystal inkwell and sign a document. The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, known to all the world as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, is sealed. It guarantees

that the Soviet Union and Germany will not take up arms against each other. With Germany seemingly set on a collision course with the nations of Western Europe, news of the treaty is received with horror in the West. But for Stalin, whose greatest fear is a rapid invasion by the mighty German army, it buys breathing space while his rearmament program accelerates. It also gives him time to complete other unfinished business too. Even all these years later, Stalin never feels quite free of his old enemies. Later, Stalin never feels quite free of his old enemies. On the afternoon of the 20th of August 1940, in Mexico City, Trotsky sits at his desk in the office of his family home.

He was granted asylum here four years ago, a safe haven while he was convicted in absentia during the Great Purge. There is a knock on the door, and in comes his friend, a Canadian businessman, a raincoat over his arm despite the sunny weather. Trotsky does not realize it hides a shortened pickaxe. As he turns to greet his guest, he feels a crashing blow to his skull. Blood cascades down his face, but Trotsky fights back, alerting his guards who take the man down. They discover he is armed with a pistol and knife, too. Trotsky is taken to hospital and receives emergency surgery, but he dies the following

evening. The friend, it turns out, is a paid sleeper agent of the Soviet secret police. Stalin has seen off his oldest, most dangerous foe once and for all. Any hope that Stalin may harbor that he has definitively wrestled the advantage at home and abroad is short-lived. On the 22nd of June 1941, Hitler launches Operation Barbarossa, an assault on the Soviet Union and the largest land offensive in history. The Soviet air force is quickly destroyed, and millions of troops and civilians are thrust into a chaotic retreat.

Stalin makes for his dacha, or country getaway, where he sits alone and refuses to answer the phone. I think his sense was he'd gambled on getting at least another year, and his gamble hadn't come off. Hence, he was notoriously in denial for several days that this had actually happened. And according to the reports of later memoirs of Politburo members, he retreated to his stature. And when they came out and said, come back, he appeared to contemplate at least the possibility that they'd come to remove him.

In other words, he thought this was a tremendous mistake and it might be the end of him. But it wasn't. He was lucky. By the 3rd third of July he's back to his old self rallying the nation on the wireless however the war is going from bad to worse the Germans quickly sweep through the Baltic states annexed by the USSR only a year ago by October the Nazis are at the edges of both Leningrad and Moscow. Though the cities repel the initial onslaught, Stalin agrees that government departments and millions of citizens

must go east for safety. He considers abandoning the capital himself, but he stays and takes personal military responsibility for what he calls the Great Fatherland War, despite his lack of frontline experience. Never mind internationalism now, this is an existential fight that taps into wells of nationalist pride. Extreme sacrifice is the expectation upon all. The Red Army suffers high levels of desertion and defection, but the authorities make it clear that to be taken prisoner is an act of treachery. Nowhere are conditions harder than in Leningrad. It's January 1942, early morning.

Two slight brothers, aged 12 and 10, hurry along the street, their shoes crunching through inches of icy snow. Squinting through the glaring sunlight, they join the back of a snaking queue outside a bakery, the one concentrated mass of humanity in the neighborhood. If you don't need to leave your home, you stay in it, wrapping yourself up as best you can to see out another power cut and hope that the water pipes unfreeze soon. The boys have come for their ration of bread, which these days does not even come close to sating their hunger. They wear multiple layers, topped with a thick winter coat and fur hat that they keep on even when they sleep. But already they're shivering.

In the distance they hear the ominous sound of an artillery round. It's coming up to five months since the Germans encircled the city. Five months of hell. Their father is, to the best of their knowledge, still fighting out on the front. Their mother, though, is dead. An early victim of Germany's daily artillery bombardments. Their mother, though, is dead, an early victim of Germany's daily artillery bombardments. Just a week ago, their sister passed too, her hunger-ravaged body unable to fight off one of the many diseases sweeping Leningrad. And things are only getting worse. The ration has been reduced five times already.

The younger boy wheezes, his lungs crackling the way their sister sounded in her last days. It's enough to attract the attention of a man who's walking back past them from the front of the queue. He stops, breaks off a chunk of his ration and passes it to them. The older boy thanks him, giving the bread straight to his brother who gobbles it down. It's an act of extravagant generosity in these days when bread is like gold. They inch forward until a little later a middle-aged woman approaches. She looks them up and down sympathetically and tells them that she lives nearby and has bread and other food too. She invites them to come with her. They eagerly agree.

She invites them to come with her. They eagerly agree. The snow drifts down as they weave through the streets. When they're nearly at her door, a familiar voice calls to them, a neighbor from their block. But the older woman now quickens her pace, grasping the boy's wrists and dragging them into the building. Her friendly demeanor is gone. The older boy wriggles free, then releases his brother and runs to the neighbor who swallows them up in an embrace. You must be careful, she tells them. There have been reports of cannibalism these past few weeks, including tales of women kidnapping children. The neighbor summons a policeman and the woman is arrested on the spot.

She is adamant that she wanted only their ration cards, not their flesh. The boys head back to the queue and take up their spot at the back. The long wait for food begins again as a German bomber buzzes overhead. By the end of 1942, 12 million Russians have gone east. Almost half of Soviet territory and its people are under German occupation, with millions more held as prisoners of war or in forced labor in Germany. But the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in January 1943, after weeks of brutal hand-to-hand combat, is the first sign that the tide may be turning. I think Stalin never quite got over his feeling that that was really surprising that

they'd made it. But then comes the Battle of Stalingrad and that is the turning point. The German forces are not able to get across the Volga. They are defeated, and that's the beginning of the long march of the Soviet army towards the west and the retreat of the Germans. It's another year before the siege of Leningrad finally comes to an end, after almost 900 days. As the German forces begin their unwieldy retreat westwards, Leningrad counts the cost.

Some 600,000 were evacuated before the siege, and of the roughly 2.5 million left, around 50,000 civilians have been killed or wounded by enemy fire. Hunger and disease has claimed a further three-quarters of a million lives. In total, around a third of the population has perished. But it is the beginning of the end of the war. You know, the army pulls itself together. A leadership which appears in many ways to be pretty good and to work well with Stalin emerges.

And the home front is well run. Stalin and his generals work on the military side. The rest of the Politburo works on the very important home front is well run. Stalin and his generals work on the military side. The rest of the Politburo works on the very important home front. And both seem to do quite well. But if you look at it from the German perspective, they are tremendously overextended. You know, they're so far from their supply bases. It's not an easy environment to be occupied in. And they're so spread out in what they

have to keep control of. So I think my sense is it's a combination of these two things. The war has allowed Stalin to remodel himself on the international stage. Against expectations, he has forged a good working relationship with both Prime Minister Churchill in the UK and President Roosevelt in the US. In the West, there is now something almost charming about the pipe-smoking statesman they call Uncle Joe. Stalin is determined to win the race to Berlin.

Though the discovery of the Nazis' death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in early 1945 brings universal condemnation, the advancing Soviets are guilty of their own war crimes. As they pursue the Germans back across Europe, they leave behind a trail of rape, robbery, and murder. On the 30th of April 1945, the first Soviet troops reach the German capital ahead of their allies and jubilantly plant their nation's hammer and sickle flag on top of the German center of government, the Reichstag. In Moscow's Red Square, a few months later, the USSR celebrates its first Victory Day parade.

The Soviet view was that they won the war. It's just straightforward. There are other people around, you know, but they won the war. It's just straightforward. There are other people around, you know, but they won the war. That was a very strong feeling and a source of enormous pride and a feeling that this had been done against all the odds because of huge, of superhuman efforts that they had done this. So everything changes from that time. I think if you look at the way the national history is understood, the founding event quite soon after the war, it's going to shift away from being the revolution to being the Second World War. That's the coming of age of a nation. Battered and bruised, the Soviet Union nonetheless feels like it has earned its place at the international top table. Stalin looks to a

bright future. But what more will the Soviet people be expected to sacrifice in the quest for superpower status? Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you the second part in a special two-part short history of the Soviet Union. Now, from the Soviet point of view, I think it's really straightforward. He mucked everything up. He is the man who was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. We had a superpower. It stopped being a superpower. It stopped being even a global power of top rank.

Economic chaos and misery for many followed, but above all, the country fell apart. That's next time.