10.102- Dizzy WIth Success

Hey. Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Admit is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah? Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 10.102, dizzy with success. After the troika of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev ousted Trotsky from the inner circle of the communist party, Joseph Stalin immediately turned in a line with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky to oust his erstwhile allies, Zinovyev and Kamenev. We ended last week with the defeat of the United Opposition at the 1927. And this week, Stalin's little Politburo quadrille will continue without interruption. As soon as he dispatched Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, Stalin turned on a dime and iced out Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. This latest turn, however, would be about more than just power games inside that thin stratum of the communist ruling class. Ditching the right wing of the party, Stalin will storm to the left and force through economic and social reform so massive, they transcended the meaning of the word reform. This would turn out to be nothing less than a full blown social revolution. A revolution from above to fulfill in a matter of years what friends and enemies, allies and rivals, supporters and critics, believers and skeptics, all thought would take a generation if not a century or more to accomplish. Transforming Russia from a land of backward peasants into an advanced industrial superpower. Before 1917, Russian agriculture was famously, infamously backward. Peasant communes owned land collectively, but doled it out to individual families in strips. A single family's allotment of land was not even contiguous, but instead spread out all over the place. A strip here, a strip over there. It was grossly inefficient. And this is to say nothing of the fact that the methods, tools, and habits of Russian peasants had changed very little over the centuries. A medieval peasant would have felt right at home in most Russian villages in the early twentieth century. Grain was sown and reaped by hand with the help of some scraggly farm animals. Now granting a few exceptions here and there, the industrial revolution had just not come to Russian agriculture. Their production per acre was among the worst in the world. Most peasants never rose above farming for bare subsistence, and if they did, it was only to meet taxes and obligations imposed by the czar in the landed aristocracy. The grain surpluses that fed the hungry cities and gave the czar a little something to sell on the international market mostly came from noble estates, where land was consolidated and worked by hired rural laborers, specifically to produce crops for the market. The leaders of Russia had always been well aware of the sorry state of their economic productivity. Going all the way …