The Shaping of Popular Consent: A Comparative Study of the Sovie ...

In the US, the Great Depression (which began on Tuesday 29 October, 1929) shattered the American economy.³⁷ In 1930, 1,345 banks collapsed. In 1931, the figure increased to 2,298.³⁸ Unemployment stood at twenty five per cent.³⁹ In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated as President of the United States and created the New Deal, the umbrella term for the series of executive initiatives and legislative reforms designed to relieve the hardships brought about by the depression. Key features of the New Deal were massive industrial and relief projects. These included the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which utilised relief workers to build hydro-electric dams to provide electricity for the American south, and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a pseudo military group which hired unemployed citizens to work on rural conservation schemes, such as the production of irrigation systems and the fighting of forest fires.

In the Soviet Union, the year 1929 marked the beginning of the full ascension of the Stalinist ideology. Lenin’s New Economic Policy was decapitated and in its place were introduced centralised industrial and agricultural projects of Herculean proportions. Indeed, collectivisation⁴⁰ was introduced in 1929 and the first Five Year Plan (FYP) (1928-1932) began to hit its stride. Despite countryside resistance to collectivisation and the violence and disruption which accompanied it, the Soviet state increased its grain collections from 10.8 million tons in 1928-9 to 22.8 million tons in 1931-32.⁴¹ The official statistics of the first FYP claimed that factories and mines had doubled their production since 1928. This was an exaggeration but, according to Alec Nove, even sceptical estimates put the annual expansion in industrial output at ten per cent between the years 1929-1941.⁴² Therefore, during the 1930s the people of the US were burdened with the strains of depression and the people of the USSR were burdened with the strains of forced collectivisation, rapid growth and re-alignment. Thus, if the leaders of either the United States or the Soviet Union were to make any systematic public appeals to loyalty there was no more useful time to do so than during this decade.