Atlas / Organisations / Stalinism
Stalinism
Socialism in one country · 1928–1953 · USSR · Communist · Held state power · coding confidence high
Each axis runs from −10 to +10, with zero a genuine mixed or balanced position rather than an absence of opinion. A score describes a stated position and a governing record; it is not a judgement of merit. What each score means →
Core principles
Forced industrialisation and collectivisation under a single leader identified with the party, the state and history itself.
Economic model
Total state ownership, five-year plans, collectivised agriculture, forced labour camps as an economic sector.
Organisation of powers
One party, one leader, no independent courts, press, unions or civil society; mass terror against the party itself.
Reading note
Culturally it reversed the Bolshevik position — restoring the family, criminalising abortion and homosexuality, promoting Russian nationalism — while pushing economics and authority to their limits.
Check a claim about Stalinism. The interactive atlas measures the distance between any two organisations across all six axes and shows which ones carry the disagreement.
Open in the atlasThe evidence for every score
All six cells are sourced. A rationale explains what the score is measuring and each artefact is something a third party can check without taking anyone's word for it.
EC · Economic organisation · scored −10
Private ownership of productive assets was eliminated outright and allocation was set by physical plan targets rather than prices.
- Documented act or statuteThe first Five-Year Plan from 1928 placed all industry under state ownership and central targets.
- Documented act or statuteCollectivisation from 1929 abolished private farming; roughly a quarter of a million households were deported as kulaks.
CU · Social and cultural order · scored +03
Coded positive despite Bolshevik origins because the regime reversed its own cultural programme after 1934.
- Documented act or statuteAbortion was recriminalised in 1936 and divorce made difficult; the 1936 constitution celebrated the family.
- Documented act or statuteMale homosexuality was recriminalised in 1934.
- ScholarshipRussian national history and military tradition were rehabilitated in schooling from the mid-1930s.
AU · Organisation of power · scored +10
The party itself was destroyed as an autonomous body, which places this above ordinary one-party rule.
- Documented act or statuteOf the 1934 Central Committee, roughly two-thirds were shot within four years.
- Documented act or statuteFactions had been banned inside the party since 1921; by 1937 mere association was capital.
SC · Scale of decision · scored +10
The most centralised state then in existence, with republics nominally federal and actually administered from Moscow.
- Documented act or statuteGosplan set physical output targets for the entire union economy from Moscow.
- Documented act or statuteThe 1936 constitution granted republics a formal right of secession that had no mechanism and was never exercised.
ID · Rule of membership · scored +03
Coded slightly positive rather than universalist because of the deportation of entire nationalities.
- Documented act or statuteEight nationalities including Chechens, Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans were deported wholesale between 1941 and 1944.
- Documented act or statuteThe 1952–53 campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitans' targeted Soviet Jews explicitly.
CH · Method and tempo · scored +08
Coded high but below the Bolshevik score: this was transformation by state administrative violence rather than by insurrection.
- Documented act or statuteCollectivisation and the industrialisation drive were imposed by decree and armed requisition between 1929 and 1933.
- ScholarshipThe 1932–33 famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan followed grain procurement quotas maintained during crop failure.
Where it came from, and what came after
- is a continuation ofBolsheviks
The same party apparatus, with its founding generation largely executed by 1938.
- becameSoviet Bureaucratic Socialism
The same state and party, with mass terror abandoned after 1953.
Nearest organisations by measured distance
Straight-line separation across all six axes, out of a maximum of 49.0. Proximity means similarity of stated position, not endorsement and not resemblance in outcome.
Countries
Arguments this entry is used in
Claims in circulation that turn on where this organisation sits. Each gives the strongest case for it, the strongest case against, and the measurement.
- Were the Nazis socialists?claim check
- Are the far left and far right the same? Horseshoe theory, measuredclaim check
Cite this page
Scores are revised on evidence, so a citation should carry the version it refers to. Version 4.3.1 is current; the revision log records every change.
Free to quote and reproduce with attribution. This is a synthesis rather than a peer-reviewed dataset — where an authoritative figure is needed, cite the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the Manifesto Project or V-Dem.