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Early Life, 1878-1912
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Russia – The Rise and Reign of Stalin, 1878-1938
In this course, Professor Christopher Read (University of Warwick) examines the rise of Joseph Stalin from his birth in 1878 to the eve of the Second World War in 1938. We begin in the first module by thinking about his early life, including upbringing in Georgia, his early education, and – later – his involvement with industrial workers in Tiflis and Baku. In the second module, we trace Stalin's political rise from his appointment to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1912, up to Lenin's death in 1924. In the third module, we follow Stalin as he becomes undisputed leader of the Communist Party, before moving on in the fourth and fifth modules to consider two major strands of Stalinst policy: Collectivization and Industrialization. In the sixth module, we think about the period of Stalin's rule known as the Terror – what caused it, how it proceeded, why it ended, and what it achieved – before moving on in the seventh module to consider how Stalin might have seen himself and the state of Russia in 1938, and what (if anything) held the policies of the previous ten years together.
Early Life, 1878-1912
In this module, we think about Stalin's early life, focusing in particular on the idea of Stalin as a revolutionary. As we move through the module, we consider his parents and his early education, the impact of the Russian government's 'Russification' policy, his involvement with the railway workers in Tiflis and later with the oil workers in Baku, his role in the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, and his (unrelated) later arrests and time spent in prison.
Hello, my name's Chris Read.
00:00:03I'm professor of European history
00:00:04at the University of Warwick.
00:00:06And I want to talk to you about Stalin,
00:00:08one of the most powerful and important characters
00:00:11in the 20th century.
00:00:13One of the most influential.
00:00:15One of the most controversial.
00:00:16One of the most paradoxical.
00:00:18And I want to cut through some of the stories about Stalin
00:00:20to try to focus particularly on what seems to me to be
00:00:24ways of approaching him.
00:00:28I'm not going to go into great detail about who he is
00:00:29or what he did.
00:00:32I'm going to talk about his career in general.
00:00:33We're going to start at the beginning.
00:00:37And I want to talk about his early years.
00:00:40Now, before I do that, I want to point out
00:00:42that the legacy of Stalin, the image of Stalin,
00:00:45the picture of Stalin that we've got
00:00:50is dominated by what we might call Cold War ideas.
00:00:53And ironically, by Trotsky's ideas.
00:00:59The vision that traditionally we have about Stalin
00:01:03is that he's a fairly ignorant, uneducated, megalomaniac,
00:01:06possibly psychopathic dictator, who had a lust for power
00:01:12and didn't have a great deal of talent.
00:01:17Now, I'm not going to defend Stalin,
00:01:19and it's not my purpose to do so.
00:01:21But a few years ago, and we're only
00:01:23a hundred years from the revolution,
00:01:26so there's been a lot of rethinking.
00:01:28A scholar called Lars Lih said it
00:01:30was important to turn to the historical Lenin.
00:01:32The Lenin of reality.
00:01:37The Lenin of history to get away from the myths,
00:01:38from the ideologies, surrounding him
00:01:40from the political encrustation.
00:01:43And I think it's equally true that we
00:01:47have to try to do that now with Stalin
00:01:48to really understand why Stalin did the things that he did,
00:01:50what they mean, and what he was doing.
00:01:56And I think the guide through this
00:02:02is to think about who he was.
00:02:04If you look at, for instance, Simon Montefiore's book
00:02:09on Stalin, he has at the back nine categories
00:02:13of what Stalin was.
00:02:17A terrorist, bank robber, dictator, and so on
00:02:19and so forth.
00:02:25But what he doesn't have is a category, which I think
00:02:27is the most important of all, which
00:02:29is that Stalin was a revolutionary.
00:02:31And that he saw things through the optic
00:02:34of being a revolutionary who was led
00:02:36by the ideas of obviously Marx.
00:02:39And I think as we'll see as we develop
00:02:44this theme he was also very much saw himself
00:02:47as the true heir of Lenin.
00:02:52And he associated himself very much with Lenin,
00:02:54and his rise to power was very much to do with his links
00:02:56to Lenin.
00:02:59But I want to start for a few minutes going back
00:03:01to his very early career.
00:03:03The part that very few people talk about.
00:03:06Sometimes as Montefiore does they
00:03:09talk about his part in the in the big Tiflis bank
00:03:13robbery of 1906 when a very large number
00:03:17of millions of rubles were stolen for party purposes
00:03:21by the Bolsheviks.
00:03:27Stalin didn't have a great part in that robbery actually.
00:03:29He knew it was going on, but he wasn't actually
00:03:33one of the robbers.
00:03:36And the other thing which is often talked about
00:03:38is that he was an informer for the secret police--
00:03:40Tsarist secret police.
00:03:46Nobody's ever found any evidence for this,
00:03:48which is in the nature of these things usually taken
00:03:49to be proof.
00:03:53If you haven't got any evidence, there you are.
00:03:55It was very carefully hidden so it must be true.
00:03:57But I want to put those kind of things aside.
00:04:01And remember that he came to revolution.
00:04:03He came into radicalism when he was a late teenager.
00:04:06He was very much a lover of his own country.
00:04:12Would it surprise you to know that his first publications
00:04:16were actually poems?
00:04:20Romantic poems about springtime in the province of Georgia
00:04:21where he came from.
00:04:26And pictures of the scenery, the landscapes,
00:04:28the flowers, and so on and so forth.
00:04:33And as a young teenager who was pushed
00:04:36by his mother and his local priest
00:04:40because he was actually quite an intelligent kid,
00:04:43he became a student at the theological academy.
00:04:48This often leads to people saying,
00:04:53was he on the way to becoming a priest?
00:04:54The answer to that is no, he was not.
00:04:56Because the theological academy was the only higher education
00:04:58academy in Georgia.
00:05:03So any pupil of any quality would go to that place.
00:05:04And it was full of people who became radicals.
00:05:09But one thing in particular pushed radicalization
00:05:12in Stalin's day.
00:05:16And that was that there was a policy
00:05:18of so-called russification going on from the capital, St.
00:05:20Petersburg, where the strategy of the declining
00:05:25autocratic government was to try to use the Russian church,
00:05:29Russian language to swamp the nationalism of minority.
00:05:34Nationalities like the Georgians who
00:05:38were a small group in a very, very large pool
00:05:40of the Russian Empire.
00:05:43Now, the most offensive element of this
00:05:45was that almost overnight the Georgian language
00:05:52was relegated to second place.
00:05:56This caused a lot of radicalism, and a lot of people
00:05:58came into the movement, including Stalin.
00:06:00And this was one of the first things which
00:06:03began to radicalize Stalin.
00:06:05He began to join political associations,
00:06:07and he became an important activist
00:06:11in worker organizations in South Russia.
00:06:16So he became an organizer of workers.
00:06:19The capital of Georgia, Tiflis, was
00:06:24one of the few industrial centers
00:06:27in the south of the Russian Empire.
00:06:29And in particular, it was a railway junction.
00:06:32And the largest enterprise-- was one
00:06:35of the largest enterprises-- was the railway depot.
00:06:37And Stalin began by organizing railway workers there, going
00:06:41to meetings, attending, getting unions organized,
00:06:45trying to improve working conditions for railway workers.
00:06:50But then he expanded further into the wider elements--
00:06:54wider parts of South Russia.
00:06:59And particularly after the revolution of 1905,
00:07:01he became an organizer in the oil fields of the Caspian
00:07:05in Baku.
00:07:10And here he encountered some of the most exploitative
00:07:12capitalism on the planet at that time.
00:07:16The oil fields were owned by British companies.
00:07:19But the conditions under which the workers worked
00:07:22were terrible.
00:07:26The hours were long.
00:07:28The wages were low.
00:07:29Accidents were frequent.
00:07:30There was no social security.
00:07:32If you had an accident, if one of the machines trapped
00:07:34your finger or your arm or at worst case you died,
00:07:36compensation was nil.
00:07:40If you're injured, you just lost your job.
00:07:42So you were an invalid for the rest of your life.
00:07:44Stalin was fighting against conditions like that.
00:07:47And the employers down there--
00:07:50the owners were-- distant owners were British,
00:07:53but there were local agents and managers,
00:07:56were absolutely ruthless.
00:07:58And they used to even take out contracts
00:07:59to shoot Union organizers.
00:08:02It was a kind of wild west kind of scenario.
00:08:04Some of the Union leaders had guns themselves.
00:08:08And sometimes industrial disputes ended up in shootouts.
00:08:11Stalin was in the thick of this producing newspapers.
00:08:16I don't think there's any evidence he actually
00:08:20fired a gun himself in anger.
00:08:23But he was organizing, producing newspapers, propaganda,
00:08:25and he was actually calling for a degree of moderation
00:08:29that the employers in Baku in the south
00:08:31should become moderate employers like they
00:08:35were in Western Europe.
00:08:41That they should accept trade unions.
00:08:42Accept collective bargaining.
00:08:44And accept that-- he was not urging
00:08:46the overthrow of capitalism directly
00:08:51at that particular point in time.
00:08:53So the point I want to make here is that here is Stalin.
00:08:55He was actually arrested, went to jail
00:09:00several times, escaped several times
00:09:02showing his commitment to revolution.
00:09:05And that was the important first stage.
00:09:08You wouldn't do this if you were the things he's supposed to be.
00:09:12A psychopath, a despot, hungry for power.
00:09:17The last thing you do if you were hungry for power
00:09:21was join working-class movements in South Russia in 1905, 1906,
00:09:231908, and so on.
00:09:32So from very early on he showed commitment to revolution.
00:09:35
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Read, C. (2019, January 22). Russia – The Rise and Reign of Stalin, 1878-1938 - Early Life, 1878-1912 [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/russia-the-rise-and-reign-of-stalin-1878-1938/industrialization-1928-38
MLA style
Read, C. "Russia – The Rise and Reign of Stalin, 1878-1938 – Early Life, 1878-1912." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 22 Jan 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/russia-the-rise-and-reign-of-stalin-1878-1938/industrialization-1928-38