ABSTRACT
Lenin died prematurely in 1924 and by 1929, after a series of internal power struggles, Josef Stalin emerged as the leading political figure within the USSR. He proceeded to consolidate his power base within the Party bureaucracy (apparatchiki ) and modernise the Soviet Union as rapidly as possible under the slogan 'socialism in one country'. He introduced the collectivisation of agriculture and the forced industrialisation of industry through a series of five-year economic plans, and utilised terror, a labour-camp system (gulags) filled by periodic purges (chistka, or cleansing), orchestrated show trials and a 'cult of personality' as means of maintaining and expanding Soviet power. Stalin dominated the Soviet Union, creating a state command-control centrally planned economy, state monopolies of politics (a single-party system) and the media, and enforcing CPSU control of the military and police.
