To answer an implicit question and “narrow it down” a bit, there is no way to explain away a huge part of the Stalinist repression as materially necessary. Many repressions were cultural, paranoid, in many ways only to be expected of a country coming out of a traumatic civil war (it’s happened elsewhere… there was nothing personally “Stalin” about this). This does not excuse them… but it does explain them.
The Bolsheviks / Reds under the Lenin and Trotsky duumvirate won the civil war by being saner and more inclusive than their White (=’conservative’) enemies. Truth be told, some excellent men of pre-war Russia were in the White government(s)… but they had no way to restrain or control their White brothers-in-arms. Even the “South Russian” government of Denikin, relatively the most disciplined of White armies, could not or would not restrain its soldiers from launching pogroms on local Jews.
I recall reading a paper on how the tsardom had sought to keep the army loyal by keeping officers “apolitical”. Officers didn’t read the papers, or generally put much trust in talking. It was an ultra macho culture of dueling and patriotism, which was almost childishly under-equipped to understand politics. With the ancient regime withering around them, the dregs of the iron boot reverted to a reactionary Christian monarchism… actually several steps back from what Tsardom had actually been (because unlike the military, the aristocracy did read… White reaction was a caricature of the Tsardom through its executioners’ eyes).
The mixture of the existing local support for “workers’ soviets” in all major cities, co-opting experienced military officers of the ancien regime by Trotsky’s Red Army, and adopting a pro-peasant economic policy in the NEP that essentially met the demands of the masses won the war for the Bolsheviks. However, it created a diverse and inclusive state that was (under Trotsky’s revolutionary direction) a far cry from Tsarist autocracy (one part of the old state left out of the new consensus was the Church… perhaps that was for the best), *or* a functioning constitutional democracy. It was essentially a brief truce until the shape of the state was actually decided in a working form. Something had to give. What “gave” was tolerance: under Stalin, all the wink-and-nod tolerances—to foreigners, ideological communists, military officers, bourgeois artists and expressions of “non-proletarian” (i.e. liberal, decadent) culture—were revoked.
This exact same model of wartime tolerance and peacetime cleanup has been followed in way too many regimes to name. Using a diverse coalition to take power and knocking off those useless to you after taking over is a textbook tactic (in democracy as well as autocracy). To look at it through the lens of economic practicality misses the point. Upping steel production in the Urals didn’t need art made in St. Petersburg to show “the robust and jolly Soviet worker loving his work” instead of the “morose lazy bourgeois, thinking only of himself.” But it was a statement about how the new, puritanical system would work. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
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