nadya
Online Pitch Deck
The World of the Story and Mood Boards
In 1929 the Soviet Union was not quite the totalitarian hell it was to become. The exile of Trotsky in January 1928 and then his expulsion from the USSR to Turkey in February 1929, effectively marked the coming to power of Stalin's regime but even so there was still relatively public opposition to his leadership and the structures of dictatorship such as the KGB and Gulag system were still to mature. It was the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32), that cemented Stalin's power and required the full development of the totalitarian industrial complex in order to enforce the plan.
In 1929 there was still hope that communism would bring a better life and still genuine idealism. Sure there were shortages in the shops and outspoken critics were starting to be arrested but this was only incrementally worse that what had gone on since 1917.
The cultural isolation of the post-war years was also not completely in place yet. The Iron Curtain had not yet been drawn and fashion and music in 1920's USSR was influenced by fashion and music in the rest of the world, with Jazz dominating music and the adaption and adaptation of the fashion of the 'flappers'.
Stalin was already beginning to impose himself on the writers and artists of the USSR but it was the suicide of Mayakovsky in 1930 that marked the full implementation of the tyranny of 'social realism' and the end of any pretence at free thought either in the arts or anywhere else.
The years in which the events of this series take place, 1929-1932, were a pivotal turning point in Soviet history. It was during this period that the foundations were laid that allowed for 'the terror' of the late thirties and the complete police state of the post-war years. Perhaps if things had gone differently for Nadya Allilueva things might have gone differently for the USSR.
Information about the style and genre of the series can be found here
Art, Fashion & Literature
Moscow 1929-32
The Kremlin and Apartments
Propaganda Posters
The Gulag Archipelago
The Lubyanka
The Lubyanka was the headquarters of the secret police of the USSR, who were known variously as the Cheka, the NKVD, the OGPU and eventually the KGB. The basement of the Lubyanka was notorious for the torture of dissidents and summary executions by gunfire took place in the inner yard.
Famine in Ukraine 1930/32 - "The Holodomor"
Stalin's policy of rapid industrialisation of the USSR was premised on the ability to sell Ukrainian grain to the West in order to generate foreign currency with which to buy the most up to date industrial equipment and technical expertise from the West.
To achieve this grain 'surplus' Stalin set out to put all agriculture across the USSR under state control. The Kulaks were Ukrainian peasants who owned their own land. These were merely 'small holdings' in Western terms, officially over 8 acres defined you as a Kulak but peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres eventually were branded as Kulaks. Together the Kulaks were responsible for a significant percentage of Ukrainian grain production.
The workers on large farms owned by aristocratic, often distant landowners were happy to 'collectivise' but unsurprisingly the Kulaks resisted having their land taken under state control and their grain 'stolen' as they saw it. Some started refusing to cooperate with the Soviet authorities and tried to continue selling their grain when ad where they saw fit.
In response Stalin launched a 'class war on the Kulaks with the publicly stated aim of "liquidating the Kulaks as a class". As a result these peasants were frequently murdered in local campaigns of violence, while others were formally executed after they were convicted of being Kulaks. Over the next several years Stalin took so much grain out of the Ukraine that the Ukrainians themselves were left to starve.
The resulting famine, called the Holodomor in Ukraine. Entire villages died of starvation. There were reports of canibalism and murders committed over a single potato. In the cities such as Kiev and Kharkiv people dropped dead of hunger on the street and their emaciated bodies were simply left to rot where they fell. Historians estimate that at least 4 million Ukrainians died between 1929 and 1932 as a result of Stalin's policies in the Ukraine.
