Focus Questions: What were the purges and the Terror?
Why did Stalin carry out the Terror?
What impact did it have on the USSR?
The use of terror was not new in the Soviet Union. After the 1917 Revolution there had been the killings and atrocities of the Civil War. After the Civil War members of other political parties were imprisoned or killed by the Communists as Russia became a one-party state. The Soviet secret police, far more efficient than the Tsarist secret police, were constantly rounding up real or suspected opponents of the Soviet system. Stalin had also used terror, exile and death as weapons against the kulaks during collectivisation.
There was, however, a difference between the violence of earlier times and the purges. The victims of earlier violence were anti-communist, while the victims of the purges were often leading communists. Various explanations have been forward for Stalin’s purges. Some historians believe he suffered from a persecution complex or that once the campaign started it was difficult to stop it snowballing. Others have concluded that the mass arrests and deportations to labour camps were the only way that Stalin could find a labour force to work in the more inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union.
After 1921 there was a ban on factions within the Communist party. A faction was a group of Communist Party members who disagreed with the official policy. Arguments continued, of course, but Party members who stepped out of line were often ‘purged’. This meant that they were sacked form the Party and lost the privileges which went with membership.
After Stalin came into power at the end of the 1920’s, the word ‘purge’ took on a new and more frightening meaning. It could now mean not only dismissal from the Party, but imprisonment or death. As early as 1928, 15 mining engineers at Shakty were executed after being put on trial, accused of sabotaging or wrecking the first Five Year Plan.
What became known as Stalin’s Terror really began in 1934. That year, at a Congress of leading Party members, Sergei Kirov showed himself to be very popular. He was head of the Communist Party organisation in Leningrad. It was rumoured that many in the Party wanted Kirov to replace Stalin as leader. Later that year Kirov was assassinated at his headquarters. His assassin was killed, but there was a strong suspicion that Stalin had arranged Kirov’s murder in order to get rid of a younger rival.
Whatever the truth, Kirov’s murder was used by Stalin as an excuse to begin more extreme purges. Many people, both within and outside the party and including both well-known and ordinary people, were arrested. Most of the top officers in the Red Army were accused of spying for Nazi Germany. Even Tukhachevsky, the Commander-in-Chief and hero of the Civil War, was accused of being a traitor. The army was completely purged. Half the entire officer corps was shot. Those at the top were particularly badly hit.
Members of the secret police were also charged with treason. In 1936, Yagoda, Head of the NKVD, was removed from his post and eventually shot. Yezhov, his successor, only lasted two years before he too was probably killed. Many lower-ranking NKVA men were accused of deliberately not rounding up enough traitors and were also executed. .
Famous Communists were often persuaded or tortured into confessing to all sorts of ‘crimes’ such as sabotage, working as agents for Trotsky or spying for Germany. Then they confessed to their crimes in public show trials before being found guilty and shot. The biggest show trials were held in 1936 and 1938 and were well publicised. The victims included Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, who had all been close to Lenin and rivals of Stalin in the 1920’s. They were accused of a secret conspiracy organised by Trotsky to overthrow the government. Of all the leading Bolsheviks, only the exiled Trotsky survived the Great Terror. He was murdered in Mexico in 1940.
Ordinary victims of the purges disappeared much more quietly. They were killed or sent to labour camps. A special department of the secret police was set up in 1930 to run the labour camps. Its name was Gulag, the Chief Administration of Camps. The numbers of prisoners in the camps grew from about 30,000 at the start of the first Five Year Plan to around 2 million by 1932. By 1937 the number had grown to 6 million, and by 1938 to 8 million.
In 1935 one million people in Moscow and Leningrad alone were executed. Million of others followed them. Over 40,000,000 people were arrested in the years 1936-53. Some 24,000,000 of them were executed or died in labour camps. Stalin signed many death warrants himself. Stalin appeared in complete control and, when he felt more secure in 1939, he relaxed the terror.
While some people may have been guilty of the crimes they were accused of, most were innocent. The purges created a sense of hysteria. People were encouraged to accuse others in order to demonstrate their own loyalty to the Party. Children were even encouraged to inform on their parents if they seemed unenthusiastic about what Stalin was doing. Some people accused others in order to get jobs. Even to know a foreign language could get you arrested as an ‘enemy spy’. If someone was arrested, their families and friends automatically became suspects also.
“The Zinoviev trial was an act of murder performed by Stalin. From the start the rigging of the trial was closely planned by Stalin in person. He had many ways of making his victims talk. Held in isolation for months or even years on end, deprived of sleep, beaten night and day, the defendants were usually more than half broken already when confronted with the signed confessions of associates previously brainwashed. Stalin would shout that Zinoviev and Kamenev were to be ‘given the works’ until they came crawling on their bellies with confessions in their teeth. Zinoviev was influenced by threats to his family, being also subjected to the physical ordeal of a cell deliberately overheated in the height of summer … The dictator did, however, give his personal word that neither Zinoviev nor Kamenev would be executed if they would stand on trial on his terms. It was on the basis of his lying assurance that the two chief victims finally went to their doom".
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