Europe in an Age of Dictatorship, 1919–39573NEP, Lenin explained, was a matter of taking one step
backward to take two steps forward. Under the NEP, 98
percent of heavy industry, factory manufacturing, min-
ing, and public services were state-owned; simultane-
ously, however, 90 percent of handicraft manufacturing,
small shops, and agriculture remained privately owned.
At the time of Lenin’s death, 54 percent of all Soviet in-
come still came from the private sector.
Lenin died in 1924 following his third stroke and a
period of speechless incapacitation. He had favored
Trotsky to succeed him, but Stalin used his leadership
post in the Communist Party and maneuvering in the
Politburo to isolate Trotsky. During a period of collec-
tive leadership in the mid-1920s, Trotsky was edged out
of the Politburo (1925), out of the party (1927), and
out of the country (1929); a Stalinist agent assassinated
him in Mexico in 1940. After defeating Trotsky, Stalin
then used an ideological battle to divide the Politburo
and purge other leaders. The issues were the NEP and
Stalin’s doctrine known as “socialism in one country.”
Stalin asserted that the Soviet Union could create a
Communist society alone; the NEP should be retained
as the first step. His rivals on the left wing of the Polit-
buro (whom he branded “left deviationists”) backed
Trotsky’s idea of “permanent revolution”—work for rev-
olution everywhere and continue it in Russia by ending
the NEP. Stalin won this argument, and the left devia-
tionists were ousted. In 1927, however, Stalin turned
against his supporters in that fight; he purged them as
“right deviationists” because they still supported the
NEP. By 1928 Stalin’s dictatorial power was unchal-
lenged. He then announced his “new socialist offen-
sive,” borrowing ideas from the left deviationists and
abolishing the NEP.
One of the foremost attributes of Stalin’s dictator-
ship was the police state. The czarist secret police and
the Bolshevik Cheka (reorganized as the OGPU in
1922) formed the basis of Stalin’s secret police, known
by a series of Russian acronyms, beginning as the
NKVD (from 1926) and ending up as the KGB (from
1954). Under Feliks Dzerzhinsky and Nikolai Yezhov,
the Soviet secret police became one of the most feared
institutions in the world. The Bolsheviks had already
established Holmogor concentration camp in Siberia
for political prisoners in 1921 and had begun to use
such camps (gulags) for forced labor in 1923. Stalin ex-
panded this into an immense network of prison
camps—named the Gulag Archipelagoby Nobel
Prize–winning novelist Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (see
document 28.4). Many details about the gulagsremain
unclear, but more than ten million people were sent to
such notorious camps as Kolyma or Magadan in eastern
Siberia. Prisoners in the gulaglabored at preposterous
tasks such as building a railroad across the Arctic. At
Pelvozh camp on the Arctic Circle, prisoners slept four
men to a straw pallet, with three feet of space each;
they worked fourteen-hour shifts through the Siberian
winter (except when the temperature fell below minusDOCUMENT 28.4
Life in the Stalinist Police State
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Describes Being Arrested
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn is a Russian writer who won the No-
bel Prize for literature in 1970. He served eight years in a
concentration camp for the crime of criticizing Stalin in a let-
ter to a friend.For several decades political arrests were distin-
guished in our country precisely by the fact that
people were arrested who were guilty of nothing
and were therefore unprepared to put up any resis-
tance whatsoever. There was a general feeling of
being destined for destruction, a sense of having
nowhere to escape.... People leaving for work
said farewell to their families every day, because
they could not be certain they would return at
night....
By and large, the [police] had no profound
reasons for their choice of whom to arrest and
whom not to arrest. They merely had over-all as-
signments, quotas for a specific number of arrests.
These quotas might be filled on an orderly basis or
wholly arbitrarily....
The majority [of those arrested] sit quietly and
dare to hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can
they arrest you?... Others are being arrested en
masse, and that’s a bothersome fact, but in those
cases there is always some dark area: “Maybe hewas
guilty.”... Why, then, should you run away? After
all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you’ll
make it more difficult for them to sort out the mis-
take....
Once a person was arrested, he was never re-
leased; and [there was] the inevitability of a tenner,
a ten-year sentence.
Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope,trans. Max
Hayward. London: Collins & Harvill, 1971; and Solzhenitsyn,
Alexandr. The Gulag Archipelago,trans. Thomas Whitney.
New York: Harper & Row, 1973.