Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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What Stalin says of world affairs makes news wherever he says it. To a war-haunted Europe, the Soviet Union has ceased to be the home of Soviets, of Five-Year Plans and collective farms, of propaganda campaigns and celebrations over the building of blast furnaces-it has become a potential enemy or ally for a gigantic struggle in the making. Imperceptibly, as the menace of war loomed bigger, outside interest in new ways of Russian life ebbed, interest in the Red Army grew...
...comes, the strength, stability, efficiency of the Soviet Union's new institutions may count far more than her planes and tanks, more than her standing army of more than two million. It will be a test of the theories of Lenin as well as of the practices of Stalin, of the hold that socialism-or of a social structure that calls itself socialist-has on the loyalties of 170,126,000 people. What has it given them? How firmly would they unite to defend it? After the purges and crises, after the Five-Year Plans, how much enthusiasm remains...
Significant to the Soviet regime is that Stalin has chosen the Supreme Council as his sounding board. Since 1930 he has spoken often: to Communist Party Congresses, to graduates of the Red Army academies, to the public on the opening of the Moscow subway. In dry, prosaic, unemotional speeches, packed with phrases like "the idiotic disease of political carelessness," and with schoolteacherish questions and answers ("What is the essence of this attitude? The essence of this attitude is. . . .") Stalin has lectured Young Communists, delegates of the Third International, Stakhanovites, collective farmers, shock troopers, school children. But this is his first...
...bureaucratic apparatus that translates policy to the 170,126,000. Their Presidium of 37 members elected at a joint session is theoretically the highest executive organ of State power, the interpreter of laws, donor of decorations, holder of the right of pardon. They form into the body of soviet law measures initiated, approved, determined by the Communist Party-though Party decrees are theoretically binding only on Party members. They are the shadow of the Party, moving when the Party moves. Bigger than military questions is the problem of how much their moves mean to the 23,000,000 industrial...
Industry. There were 10,000,000 industrial workers in Russia before the Revolution. There were only 1,500,000 more after ten years of Soviet rule. But as the First Five-Year Plan gave way to the Second, the Second, less publicized, to the Third, as Stalingrad grew on the Volga, Sverdlovsk on the site of the Tsar's execution, industrial life moved as swiftly as the political life of the State. The 37,000 plants that were nationalized by the end of 1920-two-thirds of them employing fewer than 15 men each-gave...