ABSTRACT
The ‘revolution from above’ launched at the end of the 1920s is often considered as completing the October 1917 revolution. In foreign policy, agriculture, industry and culture policies were radicalised, sometimes with disastrous consequences. A new type of Stalinist conservatism emerged that was traditional in its tastes, repressive in its social attitudes and nationalistic in its tone. Stalin’s personal predominance was firmly established at the time of his fiftieth birthday in 1929, and thereafter his rule was marked by an extreme form of the ‘cult of the personality’. Issues of military security came to the fore after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Stalin’s personal pre-eminence took increasingly morbid forms as mass terror was launched on the country, peaking with the ‘Yezhovshchina’ (named after the head of the NKVD at the time, Nikolai Yezhov) in 1937. The inner logic, if any, of the great purges is still disputed. With the West suffering the effects of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, for the Soviet Union the 1930s were the grandest and the most terrible of years.
