7 - Genocide in Stalinist Russia and Ukraine, 1930–1938

Summary

The mass killing that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was part and parcel of the interlocking Bolshevik projects of state building and the refashioning of society. The process of radically transforming the social, economic and political life of Russia had already begun already under Vladimir Ilich Lenin during the Great October Revolution, starting in 1917, and cost millions of lives, most during the protracted civil war and international interventions of 1918–21. But the genocide of Soviet citizens in the 1930s was directly related to Josef Stalin’s ascendance to power during what has been called the ‘Stalin Revolution’, or the ‘Second Revolution’, which centred on crash programmes of forced industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation inaugurated in 1928. Simultaneously, Stalin consolidated his dictatorial power. By 1930, writes Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘the Stalinization of the Politburo was completed’ and Stalin was ‘confirmed as the sole leader of the Politburo’.