Primary Source Documents for the Study of Russian/Soviet History

Primary Source Documents for the Study of Russian/Soviet History
Recommended by Dr. James Harris, University of Leeds & THF

http://academic.shu.edu/russianhistory/index.php/Main_Page (Translated Documents, Medieval to Modern Russia, from Seton Hall University, New Jersey)

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/intro.html ("Revelations from the Russian Archives", Library of Congress)

http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/hpsss  (Interviews with Soviet Emigres. Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System online)

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Interview with Stalin Expert Prof. Arch Getty

Arch Getty interviewed by James Harris

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Timeline re Stalin's Rise to Power

Created by Dr. James Harris, Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds.

7 November 1917 The Bolsheviks, a group of approximately 20,000 marxist revolutionaries, seize power in St. Petersburg, Russia.
3 April 1922 Joseph Stalin appointed General Secretary of the Central Committee, with responsibility for administering the process of filling all major Party posts.
8 October 1923 Trotsky writes a letter to the Central Committee and Central Control Commission complaining about the impact of Stalin’s Secretariat on inner-Party democracy.
21 January 1924 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the universally acknowledged leader of the Bolsheviks, dies after he is incapacitated by a series of strokes.
23-31 May 1924 Politbureau majority attacks Trotsky at XIII Congress of the Communist Party.
Autumn 1924 Stalin develops his theory of Socialism in One Country.
6 January 1925 Trotsky resigns as War Commissar and is largely isolated from power.
September 1925 Stalin clashes with former Politbureau allies Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev at a Central Committee plenum after disagreements over policy deepen in the course of 1925.

Spring 1926 Rapprochement between Trotsky and former enemies Kamenev and Zinoviev. They form what is referred to as the “United Opposition”.
December 1927 United Opposition expelled from the Party.

Spring 1928 Stalin’s relationship with Politbureau ally Nikolai Bukharin breaks down in the midst of a crisis in grain collections.
17 December 1929 Bukharin expelled from the Politbureau
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Glossary re 'Stalin's Rise to Power'

Recommended by Dr. James Harris, Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds.

Bolshevik: Literally “one of the majority”. The Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party split in 1903 in a dispute over tactics. The majority (the Bolsheviks) were the more radical than the minority (the Mensheviks).

Marxism-Leninism: Lenin’s contributions to Marxist thought. For example, Lenin proposed that a revolutionary underground party could seize power in Russia and use their control of the apparatus of state to build socialism. Marx believed that communism would emerge in the process of the development of capitalism.

New Economic Policy (NEP): A radical change in regime policy initiated at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. The preceding policy known as “War Communism” had failed, and it was deemed necessary to reintroduce some elements of capitalism.

Secretariat: A department of the Central Committee with responsibility for appointing the Party members to the most important (or “nomenklatura”) posts, such as the heads of the Commissariats (ministries) and regional Party Committees.

Circular Flow of Power: A description of the relationship between Stalin and senior Party officials presented by Robert Daniels in the 1950s and 1960s. Daniel thought that senior Party officials owed their places to Stalin personally, and voted for him at major Party meetings, in exchange for which Stalin ensured that they kept their jobs.

Party Rank and File: Party members not in “nomenklatura” posts. They made up the overwhelming majority of the membership of the Communist Party

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Further Reading re 'Stalin's Rise to Power'

Recommended by Dr. James Harris, Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds.

Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1949)

Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917-1922 (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1955)

R. V. Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960)

Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1973)

Robert Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974)

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1932 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982)

Lars Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, Oleg V. Khlevniuk eds., Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925-1936 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

James Harris, “Stalin as General Secretary: The Appointments Process and the Nature of Stalin’s Power” in Sarah Davies and James Harris eds., Stalin, A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

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Further Reading re the question: 'Why did Stalin seek to transform the USSR economically & how successful was he?'

Recommended by Dr. James Harris, Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds.

Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974) ch. 8 “The Crises of Moderation”

Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War” in Sheila Fitzpatrick ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (1978)

Michal Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the “Second Revolution” (1987)

Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (1992) esp. chs. 7-9.

R. W. Davies, Stephen Wheatcroft and Mark Harrison eds., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945 (1993) esp. ch. 7

Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

Erik Van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin (2002) ch. 15"

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Stalin's Rise to Power

James Harris, University of Leeds.

This podcast explores the variety of approaches to the question of Stalin’s power. It considers the relative importance of a/ Stalin’s control of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Party; b/ he opinion of both of the Party elite and rank and file, and c/ Soviet political culture in the 1920s. Dr. Harris briefly discusses the findings of his own research in the archives of the Central Committee Secretariat.

1. The Central Committee Secretariat and Stalin’s Rise to Power
2. The Role of Ideas vs Machine Politics
3. Stalin’s control of the political machine
4. The Policy Debate
5. Political culture
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Why did Stalin seek to transform the USSR economically & how successful was he?

James Harris, University of Leeds.

In this podcast Dr. Harris explains why all Bolsheviks agreed on the need to overcome economic backwardness. He explores why Soviet industrialisation took the form it did in the late 1920s, and then explores a fascinating paradox: How the Soviet planned economy in the 1930s was at once both a spectacular success and a catastrophic failure.
Contents:
1. Why did Stalin seek to transform the USSR economically?
2. But were Stalin’s Five Year plans successful?
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