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Main article: Collectivisation in the USSR
Stalin's regime moved to force collectivisation of agriculture. The theory behind collectivisation was that it would replace the small-scale un-mechanised and inefficient farms with large-scale mechanised farms that would produce food far more efficiently.
Collectivisation meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivisation also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants (but not all; the poorest peasants actually saw their living standards increase), and it faced widespread and often violent resistance among the peasantry.
In the first years of collectivisation, agricultural production actually dropped. Stalin blamed this unexpected drop on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivisation. Therefore those defined as "kulaks", "kulak helpers" and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.
The two-stage progress of the collectivisation, interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial "Dizzy with success" (Pravda, March 30, 1930), is a prime example of his ability for tactical retreats .
Many historians agree that the disruption caused by forced collectivisation was largely responsible for major famines which caused up to 5 million deaths in 1932-33, particularly in Ukraine and the lower Volga region.
Main article: Suppressed research in the Soviet Union.
Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control, along with art, literature and everything else. On the positive side, there was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains due to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic, the most notable examples being " bourgeois pseudosciences", genetics and cybernetics.
In the late 1940s, there were also attempts to suppress special and general relativity, as well as quantum mechanics on the grounds of idealism. However, top Soviet physicists made it clear that without using these theories, they would be unable to create a nuclear bomb.
Linguistics was the only area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovievich Marr , who argued that language is a class construction and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, felt he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work discussing linguistics is a small essay called Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics [1]. Although there are no great theoretical contributions or insights that have come from it, neither are there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics, and his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics.Scientific research in nearly all areas was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to labor camps (including Lev Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938-1939), or executed (like Lev Shubnikov , who was shot in 1937). They were persecuted for their (real or imaginary) dissident views, and seldom for "politically incorrect" research.
Nevertheless, great progress was made in some areas of science and technology under Stalin. It gave ground for famous achievements of the Soviet science in the fifties, such as developing the BESM-1 computer in 1953 and launching Sputnik in 1957. Indeed, many politicians in the United States began to fear after the " Sputnik crisis" that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet Union in science and in public education.
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