inated by the Bolsheviks and their doctrine of Marxism Leninism. When Lenin died in 1924, there was an immediate struggle for power, with Josef Stalin as the eventual successor. During the 1930s, the Soviet population was rapidly pushed into the twentieth century by brutal policies of collectivization, industrialization, and a series of purges called "The Great Terror." Through a system of labor camps called GULAGS, the Stalinist regime commandeered countless millions of Soviets to build dams, canals, and mines in what might have otherwise been undeveloped or slowly developed under a more benevolent system. During the 1930s, the government also decided to press its limited developed resources into industrialization, and thus neglected the needs of the bulk of its people. In World War II, the Soviet Union suffered the loss of untold millions, and then, in 1956, was told that Stalinism "was an unfortunate mistake."2 Although the country has advanced to the status of a
modern, industrialized power, its population has weathered a series of unprecedented catastrophes, perhaps culminating in the current policies of glasnost and peristroika and the precarious position of the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Soviet Union is divided into fifteen Soviet Socialist Re
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