Social Realism                                             

Social realism is any art form that brings attention to the way the working class and the poor lived and worked.

Social realism is often confused with Socialist realism, which is usually posters of patriotism, pictures praising Stalin and industrial landscape pictures.

http://www.ehow.com/video_4755767_what-social-realism.html

Command Economy

In a command economy the government regulates the supply and price of anything in the realm of the economy. The government also decides which goods and services are produced and how they're distributed. Stalin instituted a command economy in Russia in order to have complete rule over the people.

Collective Farming

Collective farms were farms that were controlled by the government. In 1928 Russia hundreds of people worked on the farms making food for the government. The people who worked on the farms resisted Stalin with a passion and killed their livestock and destroyed crops to hurt the government. Stalin in turn forced people onto smaller farms and shipped people off to Siberia. Generally these types of farms failed because of constant changes in demands on the global market and a famine hit Russia in the 30's.

The Kulaks

The Kulaks were a class of wealthy peasants. They resisted Stalin and his control over Russia. On January 30, 1930 the Russian government approved the extermination of the entire class of kulaks. Stalin saw them as rebels even though they never really fought back. The death toll of Stalin's extermination of the kulaks is fuzzy at best with estimates of 700,000 deaths to as many as 6 million! Overall the kulak class was eliminated from Russian society and never came back.

The Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of repressive measures in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. This involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants Red Army leadership, and unaffiliated persons in an atmosphere of widespread surveillance and suspicion of "saboteurs." Proportionately, most of the victims of the Great Purge were Old Bolsheviks.
In the Western world, Robert Conquests 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase. Conquest's title was in turn inspired by the period of terror (French: la Terreur) during the French Revolution.

Joseph Stalin

One of the most powerful and murderous dictators in history, Stalin was the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century. His regime of terror caused the death and suffering of tens of millions, but he also oversaw the war machine that played a key role in the defeat of Nazism.
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was born on 18 December 1879 in Gori, Georgia, which was then part of the Russian empire. His father was a cobbler and Stalin grew up in modest circumstances. He studied at a theological seminary where he began to read Marxist literature. He never graduated, instead devoting his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. He spent the next 15 years as an activist and on a number of occasions was arrested and exiled to Siberia.
Stalin was not one of the decisive players in the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, but he soon rose through the ranks of the party. In 1922, he was made general secretary of the Communist Party, a post not considered particularly significant at the time but which gave him control over appointments and thus allowed him to build up a base of support. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin promoted himself as his political heir and gradually outmanoeuvred his rivals. By the late 1920s, Stalin was effectively the dictator of the Soviet Union.
His forced collectivisation of agriculture cost millions of lives, while his programme of rapid industrialisation achieved huge increases in Soviet productivity and economic growth but at great cost. Moreover, the population suffered immensely during the Great Terror of the 1930s, during which Stalin purged the party of 'enemies of the people', resulting in the execution of thousands and the exile of millions to the gulag system of slave labour camps.
These purges severely depleted the Red Army, and despite repeated warnings, Stalin was ill prepared for Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. His political future, and that of the Soviet Union, hung in the balance, but Stalin recovered to lead his country to victory. The human cost was enormous, but was not a consideration for him.
After World War Two, the Soviet Union entered the nuclear age and ruled over an empire which included most of eastern Europe. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin died of a stroke on 5 March 1953.
Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for more than two decades, instituting a reign of terror while modernizing Russia and helping to defeat Nazism.

Totalitarianism in Russia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKkVHpMGV90

What is Totalitarianism?

Totalitarianism is a form of government that theoretically permits no individual freedom and seeks to demean all aspects of an individual's life to the authority of the government. In the 1920s the term totalitarianism was used to describe Italy's government. Some totalitarian leaders include Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Stalin in Russia.  

This represents what totalitarianism stands for.