ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on power relations and political process during the first two decades of Soviet rule and delineates the sociopolitical dynamics of the Stalin revolution in the late 1920s and 1930s. It also focuses on state-society interactions, three-way power contests, and top and bottom versus the middle power-restructuring phenomena during these years. The chapter explores the manifestation of these processes over the course of the Stalin revolution and in the Stalin system that was consolidated in its wake. Stalinism was not simply a preordained scheme imposed on Russian society from on high; Stalinist power restructuring was a manifestation of the societal tensions, structural upheavals, and new demands of the day. During the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks sought to mobilize resources by imposing stringent controls on the economy, polity, and society through the policies of War Communism. War Communism was driven by pragmatic and ideological concerns.
