Editorials & Other Articles

One was ideological--needed to nationalize things, centralize power.

But another was because the Party's power-base was workers and the urban population, which had more easily been made dependent on the government. (Lenin backed off mandatory creches, apts. without kitchens, that sort of thing, although he opened some of the most deadly and profitable penal colonies to dispose of enemies that he really couldn't abide.)

The urban workers, factory workers, needed the food. Stalin obliged. Shored up his blue-collar support and party faithful with stacks of dead kulaks and other agrarian workers. It was a poly-fer. Centralize the state, maintain party and worker loyalty, keep the party-faithful and party-dependent alive, get rid of pesky landholders who were nearly self-sufficient and didn't need the State. (If you were autonomous under Stalin, that was anomalous and short-lived.)

The CP USA had no problem with it. Nor did they have a problem with the alliance he had with Hitler--until he switched course. Then, like a herd of sheep school of fish they immediately swiveled.