Joseph Stalin's Tsarist Ambitions

The October Revolution of 1917 supposedly swept away the last vestiges of Tsarist Russia and left a clean slate on which the Bolsheviks could rebuild a new Russia in their image. However, Stalin effectively reversed that. His reign bore a striking likeness to his imperial predecessors both in tone and substance, such as his policies toward the peasantry. As our recent DBQ aptly noted, the 'rural question' was the defining issue in the 19th century for Russia. Stalin answered it once and for all by collectivizing ownership of land and effectively eliminating the peasantry as an independent social entity.

Moreover, Stalin's cultural presence in Soviet Russia resembled a tsarist one as well. He became the patriarch of the Russian people, much like the traditional view of the tsar, and invoked nationalist rhetoric that could easily have been lifted from one of Catherine the Great's speeches had she been a demagogue. Soviet Russia under Stalin also espoused conservative social mores in areas of family relations and social freedoms, such as by nearly outlawing abortion in 1936 and criminalizing homosexuality. For all its transformative power, modernism couldn't seem to change some basic aspects of Russia's political culture.