) and the forced entrance of the rest into state-controlled " collective farms, nationalization of all industry and commerce, the regulation and manipulation of all financial instruments for capital accumulation by the government regardless of the people's impoverishment, and the centralization of all social activity. Top leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky, who urged restraint and more realistic procedures, were swept out of office. Despite the death of millions from famine and goods shortages that these measures caused, Stalin pursued the program relentlessly, meeting resistance and criticism with mass deportations, executions, and show trials of alleged saboteurs. The enormous tensions engendered by this extraordinary drive, coupled with a growing desire for normalization, produced considerable dissatisfaction that may have led to a secret movement within the party to replace Stalin with Sergei Kirov, a secretary of the central committee and party leader in Leningrad. The murder of Kirov, in December 1934, began a period of purging and terror that lasted until 1939 and was marked by the execution of virtually the entire political and military elite and the incarceration in forced labor camps of millions of Soviet citizens. In this way Stalin, with the help of the secret police, established his personal dictatorship over the party and the country. The establishment of totalitarian political control was coupled with retrenchment in the social and economic realm, in which Stalin instituted better methods of industrial management, a system of incentives and differential wages and prices, the reestablishment of traditional procedures in the armed forces, more moderate general guidelines in the arts and sciences, and a revival of the family as the basic social unit. In the face of the growing threats from Nazi Germany and Japan, Stalin reverted increasingly to traditional forms of foreign policy, seeking dip...
