2. For a discussion of Leninism, see Sec. 2 Ch. 5 of the VOC Curriculum.

3. Leon Trotsky, “The First Revolution,” in Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence, Marxists Internet Archive, 2009, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/stalin/ch03.htm.

4. Geoffrey Roberts, “Joseph Stalin: Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm,” The Irish Times, September 20, 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/joseph-stalin-bloody-tyrant-and-bookworm-1.2798051.

5. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Suny: Stalin as True Believer,” Association for Slavic, East European, and Asian Studies, January 14, 2020, https://www.aseees.org/news-events/aseees-blog-feed/suny-stalin-true-believer.

6. The latest scholarly consensus concludes that deaths caused by communism under Stalin run about 20 million and could be much higher.

7. Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 16ff.

8. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 31.

9. Ibid, 43.

10. Service, 23-4; Montefiori, 47.

11. Service, 40ff.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 73.

15. Robin Gillham, “Stalin vs. Trotsky: the Soviet Union at a Crossroads,” The Collector, accessed March 8, 2023, https://www.thecollector.com/leon-trotsky-joseph-stalin/.  See also Montefiore, 151-3.

16. Service, 90.

17. Service, 93.

18. Keith Gessen, “How Stalin became Stalinist,” New Yorker, November 6, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/06/how-stalin-became-stalinist.

19. Gessen, ibid.

20. Gillham, op. cit.

21. Lenin, “Letter to the Congress,” Marxists Internet Archive, accessed March 8, 2023, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/index.htm.  For more information on Lenin’s decline and death, see Sec. 2, Ch. 5 of the VOC Curriculum.

22. For Stalin appointing supporters to positions of power, see Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 34-35.  For Stalin cultivating himself as the most deserving successor to Lenin, see Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1994), 263-264.

23. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), 84.

24. Jason Dawsey, “Trotsky’s Struggles against Stalin,” The National WWII Museum, accessed March 8, 2023, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/trotskys-struggle-against-stalin.

25. Service, 276-83.

26. Lynne Viola, “The Peasant Nightmare: Visions of Apocalypse in the Soviet Countryside,” The Journal of Modern History 62, no. 4 (December 1990): 751, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1881062.

27. Service, 258.

28. Josef Stalin, “Speech on Agrarian Policy, December 27, 1929,” Hanover College, accessed March 8, 2023, https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111stalin.html.

29. M. Lewin, “Who Was the Soviet Kulak?” Soviet Studies 18, no. 2 (October, 1966): 195, https://www.jstor.org/stable/149521. See also Michael Reiman, About Russia, Its Revolutions, Its Development, and Its Present (Peter Lang AG, 2016), 78, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2t4dn7.7.

30. See Lynne Viola, “The Campaign to Eliminate the Kulak as a Class, Winter 1929-30: A Reevaluation of the Legislation,” Slavic Review 45, no. 3 (Autumn, 1986): 503-524, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2499054.

31. Reiman, 76.

32. Service, 267.

33. Reiman, 75-6.

34. Josef Stalin, The Provisional Revolutionary Government and Social-Democracy (Moscow, Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1953), 7,  https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/vghLAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1.

35. Lewis Siegelbaum, “Collectivization,” 17 Moments in Soviet History: Online Archive of Primary Sources, Michigan State University, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/collectivization/.

36. Service, 265-266.

37. Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: Biography of a Dictator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 113.

38. Service, 271.

39. Massimo Livi-Bacci, “On the Human Costs of Collectivization in the Soviet Union,” Population and Development Review 19, no. 4 (December 1993): 745, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2938412. For social disruption in villages, see Viola, 752 ff.

40. Livi-Bacci, 745.

41. Ibid, 756-7.

42. Josef Stalin, “Dizzy with Success,” Marxists Internet Archive, accessed March 8, 2023, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm. See also, Stalin, “The Results of the First Five-Year Plan. Report Delivered at the Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the CPSU, January 7, 1933.-Work in the Rural Districts. Speech Delivered at the Joint Plenum… January 11, 1933,” Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1933/01/07.htm.

43. Joshua Keefe, “Stalin and the Drive to Industrialize the Soviet Union,” Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse 1, no. 10 (2009): 1. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=1684.

44. “Revelations from the Russian Archives: Internal Workings of the Soviet Union,” Library of Congress, June 17, 1992, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/gdclccn.92221784.

45. Stephen Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 100.

46. Nikita Krushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Krushchev (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2004), 56.

47. Bodan Musial, “The ‘Polish Operation’ of the NKVD: Against the Polish Minority in the Soviet Union,” Journal of Contemporary History 48, no. 1 (January 2013): 103, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23488338.

48. Service, 316.

49. Stephen Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 414. See also Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: Biography of a Dictator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 117.

50. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 83, 209, and 222.

51. Josef Stalin, “Speech on Agrarian Policy, December 27, 1929,” Hanover College, accessed March 8, 2023, https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111stalin.html.

52. For more on the role of American journalists, see Sec. 3, Ch. 7 of the VOC Curriculum.

53. See Jonathan Haslam, “Political Opposition to Stalin and the Origins of the Terror in Russia, 1932-1936,” The Historical Journal 29, no. 2 (June 1986): 395-418, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2639068. In 1930, French communist Boris Souvarine wrote, “…We have a plan that implies building up industry at the expense of agriculture and at the cost of the deprivation, suffering, and the enslavement of 150 million human beings sacrificed to an ill-founded hypothesis. Communism will be discredited for a quarter of a century, and the Bolshevik party in all its tendencies will bear the responsibility for it in the presence of the proletariat, and before history.” Marxists Internet Archive, accessed March 23, 2023, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/souvar/works/1930/02/fiveyearplan.htm.

54. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 275-315.  See also Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 198. Courtois relates that 3 marshals, 13 army generals, 8 admirals, 50 army corps generals, 154 division generals, 16 army commissars, and 25 army corps commissars were killed during Stalin’s purges.

55. Richard Pipes, “’Death Solves All Problems,’ He Said,” review of Stalin: Breaker of Nations, by Robert Conquest, New York Times, November 10, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/10/books/death-solves-all-problems-he-said.html.

56. Figes, 113.

57. Musial, 99.

58. Ibid, 109.

59. Hiroaki Kuromia, “Why the Destruction of Orthodox Priests in the Soviet Union, 1937-38?” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, Bd. 55, H. 1 (2007): 87, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41051811.

60. Robert Chandler, “’To Overcome Evil’: Andrey Platanov and the Moscow Show Trials,” New England Review (1990-) 34, no. 3/4 (2014): 148, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24242913. Conquest, 121.

61. Conquest, 121.

62. Steven Rosefielde, Red Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2010), 67.  Rosefielde estimates that Gulag camps added 1.6 million to Stalin’s death toll. See also Stephen Wheatcroft, “Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data-Not the Last Word,” Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 2 (1999): 320, https://www.jstor.org/stable/153614. Wheatcroft also estimates that 1.6 million people died in gulag camps.

63. Vitalii Shentalinskii, The KGB’s Literary Archive (London: Harvill Press, 1995), 25.

64. The actual numbers are likely to be much higher, due to the lack, loss, and outright manipulation of Soviet records. See Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 186. J. Arch Getty, Gabor Rittersporn, and Victor Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (1993): 1017-1049 claim that from 1934-53, 1,053,829 citizens died in the Soviet camps, a number not including labor colonies.  Michael Ellman, in “Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments,” estimates that the number rises to 1.7 million gulag deaths if labor colonies are included. For total number of citizens placed in the Gulags see Stephen Wheatcroft, “Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data-Not the Last Word,” Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 2 (1999): 320, https://doi.org/10.1080/09668139999056. Wheatcroft estimates that 14 million Soviet citizens passed though the Gulag from 1930-1953.  Roy Medvedev has put the overall number of dead under Stalin around 20 million; see Bill Keller, “Major Soviet Paper Says 20 Million died as Victims of Stalin,” The New York Times, February 4, 1989, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/04/world/major-soviet-paper-says-20-million-died-as-victims-of-stalin.html. We may never know the exact count of Stalin’s victims.

65. Marek Tuszynski, “Soviet War Crimes against Poland during the Second World War and its Aftermath: A Review of the Factual Record and Outstanding Questions,” The Polish Review 44, no. 2 (1999): 183-216, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25779119.

66. Service, 405. For more on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Katyn Massacre see Sec. 4, Ch. 8 of the VOC Curriculum.

67. Mark Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1945-1953,” Stalin Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe (Budapest-NY: Central European University Press, 2009), 57, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7829/j.ctt1281tc.6.

68. Josef Stalin, “Speech at Celebration Meeting of the Moscow Soviet of Working People’s Deputies and Moscow Party and Public Organizations, November 6, 1941,” Marxists Internet Archive, accessed March 27, 2023, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1941/11/06.htm.

69. John Graham Royde-Smith, “Operation Barbarossa,” Britannica, accessed March 27, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/event/Operation-Barbarossa.

70. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004), 353-59.

71. Courtois, 198.

72. Ibid, 359-68.

73. “Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Failure in the Soviet Union,” Imperial War Museums, accessed March 28, 2023, https://www.iwm.org.uk.

74. Jean Lopez, World War II Infographics (NY: Thames and Hudson, 2019), 149.

75. Karol Wolek, “A Post-war War. The years of 1944-1963 in Poland,” The Warsaw Institute Review, Oct. 1, 2018, https://warsawinstitute.org/post-war-war-years-1944-1963-poland/.

76. Max Kuhelj Bugaric, “The Birth of the Cold War,” UCLA Historical Journal 25, no. 1 (2014), accessed March 2, 2023, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5n76j21d.

77. Kramer, 68 ff.

78. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 242-244.  For examples of restrictions the new communist governments set in place, see General Assembly, Report of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary, United Nations no. 18, New York (1957): 18.   http://mek.oszk.hu/01200/01274/01274.pdf. For more on Soviet imperialism, see Sec. 4 of the VOC Curriculum.

79. “Stalin Collects,” The New York Times, October 3, 1939, accessed January 2022, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1939/10/03/94714462.html?pageNumber=18.