Formation of the U.S.S.R. Stalin gains power

Formation of the U.S.S.R. In December 1922, the Communist government established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). Byelorussia, Transcaucasia, and Ukraine joined with Russia to make up the union's first four republics.

During the 1920's, three other union republics were established -Tadzhikistan (now spelled Tajikistan), Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. In 1936, Transcaucasia was divided into Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. Kazakhstan and Kirghiz (now called Kyrgyzstan) also became union republics in 1936.

Stalin gains power. Lenin became seriously ill in 1922. A struggle for power developed among members of the Politburo. Leon Trotsky ranked after Lenin in power. But the next two most important members of the Politburo—Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev—joined forces to oppose Trotsky. They chose Joseph Stalin to be their partner, greatly strengthening his position as general secretary of the party.

Stalin's influence in the party grew rapidly. As general secretary, he had the support of the local party secretaries, whose careers were dependent on his approval. Stalin defeated his rivals one by one. Trotsky lost power in 1925. Stalin then helped to expel from the party his own former partners, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Stalin's economic program, the First Five-Year Plan, was introduced in 1928. By 1929, Stalin had become dictator of the Soviet Union.

Stalin's policies. The First Five-Year Plan had two major goals. First, most private enterprises would be taken over by the government. The NEP compromise would end. Second, the production of such heavy-industry products as chemicals, construction materials, machine tools, and steel would be expanded rapidly under highly centralized control.

A crisis in grain deliveries to the cities threatened to sink the First Five-Year Plan. Stalin forced the peasants into collective farms called kolkhozy, where they had to give most of their products to the government at low prices. These products were needed to supply raw materials to industry, to feed the people of the growing manufacturing centers, and to pay for imported machinery. The peasants opposed being forced to join collective farms, and destroyed much of their livestock and crops in protest. As punishment, Stalin had millions of peasants killed or exiled to prison labor camps in Siberia and the Aral-Caspian Lowland during the early 1930's.

In 1932 and 1933, a famine killed 5 million to 7 million people in Ukraine and in the Volga and Kuban regions of western Russia. The famine resulted from a government policy that forcibly took food from the farmers. Farm production lagged and the people's diets suffered, but Soviet industries expanded rapidly.

Many Soviet citizens opposed Stalin's policies during the mid-1930's. In order to crush opposition, Stalin began a program of terror that was called the Great Purge. Secret police, the forerunners of the KGB, arrested millions of people. Neighbors and even family members spied on one another. Fear spread throughout the country. Stalin eliminated all real or suspected threats to his power by having the prisoners shot or sent to labor camps.

Adolf Hitler had become dictator of Germany in 1933, and one of his stated goals was to destroy Communism. But Hitler did not want enemies toward both the west and the east. In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a nonaggression pact, an agreement that neither nation would attack the other. The two countries agreed secretly to divide Poland between themselves.