The Russian Revolution and Stalinism

This book focuses upon significant aspects of Stalinism as a system in the USSR. It sheds new light on established questions and addresses issues that have never before been raised in the study of Stalinism. Stalinism constitutes one of the most striking and contentious phenomena of the twentieth century. It not only transformed the Soviet Union into a major military-industrial power, but through both the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War, and its effect on the political Left throughout much of the world, it also transformed much of that world. This collection of papers by an international cast of authors investigates a variety of major aspects of Stalinism. Significant new questions - like the role of private enterprise and violence in state-making - as well as some of the more established questions - like the number of Soviet citizens who died in the Second World War, whether agricultural collectivisation was genocidal, nationality policy, the politics of executive power, and the Leningrad affair - are addressed here in innovative and stimulating ways. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.

Graeme Gill is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. A long-time scholar of Soviet and Russian politics, his latest book on this is entitled Collective Leadership in Soviet Politics (2018). He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Roger D. Markwick is Conjoint Professor of Modern European History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. With particular expertise in Soviet historiography and the role of Soviet women in the Second World War, his latest book is Everyday War: Exploring the Soviet Home Front, 1941-45, co-edited, in Russian (2019).

Introduction: Stalinism as State Building Graeme Gill and Roger D. Markwick 1. The Pavlenko Construction Enterprise. Large-scale Private Entrepreneurialism in Stalin's USSR Oleg Khlevniuk 2. War, Violence and the Making of the Stalinist State: A Tillyian Analysis Roger D. Markwick 3. Russian Views of Stalinism as a Negative Satellite of Capitalism Roderic Pitty 4. The Rise and Fall of a Crimean Party Boss: Nikolai Vasil'evich Solov'ev and the Leningrad Affair David Brandenberger, Alisa Amosova and Nikita Pivovarov 5. Was There a Soviet Nationality Policy? Jeremy Smith 6. Stalinism and Executive Power: Formal and Informal Contours of Stalinism Graeme Gill 7. Soviet Statistics under Stalinism: Reliability and Distortions in Grain and Population Statistics Stephen G. Wheatcroft 8. Counting the Soviet Union's War Dead: Still 26-27 Million Mark Harrison 9. The Soviet Famine of 1931-1934: Genocide, a Result of Poor Harvests, or the Outcome of a Conflict Between the State and the Peasants? Sergei Nefedov and Michael Ellman