Stalin's Terror

Stalin’s Dictatorship

Summary

The most famous aspect of Stalin's Russia was the Terror – opponents eliminated, millions executed, whole nations deported, and what one historian labelled a 'genocide' against the Church.

This grew from his paranoia and his desire to be absolute autocrat, and was enforced via the NKVD and public 'show trials'.

It developed into a terrifying system of labour camps – 'the GULAG' – and a centrally-enforced 'cult of Stalin-worship'.

Background

Before you start to study this webpage, you might do well to glance back at the page on Bolshevik Russia – particularly the sections on the so-called 'War Communism' and the CHEKA.

When Stalin came to power c.1928, Russia already had one of the most centralised governments in the world, backed up with violence and terror. What you are about to study was ON TOP OF that totalitarianism.

In 1936, the USSR adopted a new Constitution – the 'Stalin Constitution'. At the time, it was hailed by Soviet leaders as the most democratic in the world. Ironically, by the end of 1938, many of those involved in drafting the document, along with millions of others, had been imprisoned or executed...

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

Old Bitesize - simple intro (pdf)

How did Stalin control the Soviet Union? - good list from AskWinston

The Purges - useful information from AskWinston

And they all confessed - detailed

The GULAG - in more detail

The Cult of Stalin - in more detail

YouTube

The Great Purge - History Matters

Cult of personality

- BBC debate-podcast on Stalin

Executed in Stalin’s Great Terror in Georgia - BBC Witness History

Old textbook accounts of Soviet Government under Stalin

PJ Larkin, Revolution in Russia (1965)

Reed Brett, European History (1967)

Norman Lowe (1982)

Reasons for the Terror

[Why Unnecessary Purges?]

1. Whole country

Stalin believed that Russia had to be united as a 'sovietised' society – with him as leader – if it was to be strong.

2. Urgency

Stalin believed Russia had 10 years to catch up with the western world before Germany invaded (and he was correct).

3. Paranoia

Stalin became increasingly paranoid (seeing plots everywhere) and power-mad (he demanded continuous praise and applause). In 1935, his wife killed herself.

Features of the Terror

[Stalin The Gross Oppressor Ruins Communism]

1. Secret Police - CHEKA/ OGPU/ NKVD

Terrifying powers of arrest under §58 of the Criminal Code on counter-revolution; you could be arrested as a Counter-Revolutionary just for damaging public property, or failing to report someone who had damaged public property.
After 1930, the secret police did away with the courts, and 'troikas' (of 3 OGPU/NKVD officers) convicted suspects without trials, lawyers, or even them being present.

Source A

Nobody knew what tomorrow would bring. People were afraid to talk to one another or meet, especially families in which the father or mother had already been ‘isolated'.

The rare individuals foolhardy enough to stand up for those arrested would themselves be automatically nominated for 'isolation’.

Yelena Sidorkina
Yelena was from an ethinic minority group in central USSR. A lifelong Communist, in 1937 – when she was herself arrested – she was editor of a local newspaper.

2. The Great Purge, 1936-38

Stalin had begun the Purges in 1929, when the kulaks resisted collectivistion, but they resumed in earnest after 1934 when Kirov, a rival to Stalin, was murdered; although he had probably ordered the assassination, Stalin used it as a chance to arrest thousands of his opponents.

The 'Great Purge' – sometimes called the ‘Yezhovshchina’ after Nikolai Yezhov (nicknamed ‘the Bloody Dwarf’), who was head of the NKVD 1936-38 – took place in 1936-38. Officially, there were 680,000 executions, plus 116,000 deaths in the GULAG, but estimates suggest at least 1 million.

The 'Great Purge' targeted:

Political Opponents

Stalin’s political opponents were put on ‘Show Trials’, where they pleaded guilty to impossible charges of treason (e.g. Zinoviev and Kamenev 1936/ Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky 1938).
Thousands of long-serving, totally-loyal Communists were arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned or executed.

The Army

In 1937, after a secret trial, Marshal Tukhachevsky, Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, and 7 leading generals were shot. In 1938-39, all the admirals and half the Army’s leading officers were executed or imprisoned.

The Church (see also below)

Hundreds of churches destroyed; 85,000 Orthodox priests shot in 1937 alone.

Ethnic groups (see also below)

In 1937-38, national operations were one of the Great Terror’s largest campaigns.

Ordinary people

Were denounced/ arrested. 18 million Russians were sent to the GULAG (the system of labour camps), where millions of them died. People lived in fear. Meanwhile, ‘apparatchiks’ (party members loyal to Stalin) got all the new flats, jobs, holidays etc.

Source B

The first accounts of Kirov’s death said that Nicolayev, the murderer, was working for foreign countries. Next came a series of official reports showing that followers of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and other old Bolsheviks were linked to Nicolayev. The number of people who were accused of being involved in Kirov’s murder rose almost hourly. Anyone who had ever raised a doubt about Stalin’s policies was accused. Hundreds of suspects were executed without a trial. These purges were acts of revenge against enemies of the Party.

From I Choose Freedom, a memoir by Victor Kravchenko (1947).

Source C

I plead guilty to being one of the leaders of this 'Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites.' I plead guilty to the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization, whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took part in, any particular act...

For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For you ask yourself: "If you must die, what are you dying for?"

Nikolai Bukharin's Last Plea to the court in 1938.

Did You Know

A study of 2018 found that Russians living in places that were more repressed during the Purges are (still) less likely to vote even today.

Another study, published in 2022, found that people living in areas near to former GULAG camps still even today have a greater mistrust of state institutions (e.g. police, courts, council), have less trust in their neighbours, and are less likely to get involved in clubs or organisations.

3. GULAG- main article here

GULAG Camps in the former USSR 1923-60

Initially intended by Lenin to be a means of political re-education, Stalin used the GULAG as an instrument of political repression and social cleansing ('sovietisation'); as an economic system of forced labour; and perhaps to raise his prestige.
More than 400 'corrective-labour camps' spread across the USSR.
18 million zeks (prisoners) 1923-61.
At least 1½ million deaths, plus untold numbers in the associated 'free' villages of 'exiles'.
Deadly conditions, including up-to-20-hour shifts, with starvation 'eat-as-you-work' rations; sub-zero cold as a killer of body and soul; epidemics; brutal guards; danger from criminals; and informants.
Killed hope, friendship & humanity; reduced humans to beasts in three weeks.

The most famous description of Stalin's Terror is The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent 11 years in imprisonment and exile. His books describes "the entire apparatus of Soviet repression – the secret police operations, the labor camps and prisons, the uprooting or extermination of whole populations".

Did You Know

The name 'GULAG' is an acronym for the Russian Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey, meaning 'Main Directorate of [Forced Labour] Camps'' - ie the ministry, not the camps ... which is why you must always write the word in capitals. It was Solzhenitsyn, noticing the ugliness/menace of the name, who applied it to the whole network.

The Bolsheviks called the camps: kontslagerya ('containment camps') until 1930, when they were officially renamed: ispravitelno-trudovye lagerya (ITL), or ‘corrective-labour camps’.

4. Orthodox Church– attacked:

Communists believe that religion is ‘the opiate of the masses’, distracting people from pure Communism. At the 1928 Party Congress, Stalin criticised the failure of its campaign against religions and in 1932 called for an ‘atheist 5-Year Plan’.
The 1929 Law on Religious Associations forbade any religious meeting, and ithe calendar was changed to force people to work on Sunday.
In the 12 years to 1940, the number of Orthodox Churches fell from nearly 30,000 to fewer than 500; all the monasteries closed by a special branch of the NKVD.
Orthodox teachers and scholars were arrested and sent to the GULAG. Religious leaders imprisoned/executed – at least 200,000 monks, nuns and priests killed, more than 85,000 Orthodox priests shot in 1937 alone.
Church revenues were taxed at 81%, impoverishing the priests.
A propaganda war was carried on, including blaming the Church for the famine of 1932-3 and inventing scandals, crimes and treasons.
Party members and Trade Unionists were pressured to join the 'League of the Militant Godless'.
You could be arrested simply for criticising Patriarch Sergei, Head of the Orthodox Church (who was unconditionally loyal to the Soviet Union).

5. Russification/ persecution of ethnic minorities

The Soviet Union was multi-ethnic, with 4 million Kazakhs, 4m Uzbeks, 3m Tatars, 2½m Jews, 1¼m Germans and 183 other nationalities.
At first, the Bolshevik policy towards the nationalities was Korenizatsiya (that local societies could be “socialist in content but national in form”), and they allowed non-Russians in leadership, and the use of non-Russian languages in government, courts, schools, and media.
From 1929, however, resistance to collectivisation led to purges in the Ukraine, where nearly 500 academics were convicted of belonging to the fictitious ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’ and sentenced to the GULAG. Ukrainian newspapers, and schools and teacher-training colleges were closed. Historians now doubt that the 'Holodomor' – the famine of 1932-33 which killed 5 million Ukrainians – was intentional, but once it set in, starvation was weaponized to punish and suppress Ukrainian nationalism.
Historians have suggested four reasons leading Stalin to begin ‘uprooting’ ethnic minorities in 1937-38:
- he believed that there were massive spy rings in the USSR, and that ethnic minorities were colluding with the western nations to destroy the USSR;
- he said that ethnic languages were “a Chinese wall” between the Soviet peoples, hindering their sblizhenie (‘coming together’) in a socialist society;
- displacing populations weakened the potential for uprisings;
- the historian Terry Martin (1998) saw it as ‘ethnic cleansing’; Eric Weitz (2002) as racism/genocide.
In 1937-38, the NKVD deported entire nationalities to Siberia for alleged collaboration with Nazi Germany, including the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars. A quarter million people were executed (including 111,000 Soviet Poles and 57,000 Soviet Germans).
In 1938, Russian became a required subject in every school.
In 1939-40 Stalin ruled that the ethnic groups in Soviet Asia must use the Russian (’Cyrillic) alphabet, and Russian spellings.
During the war, a million people were removed from the Caucasus and Crimea for resettlement in Central Asia.
Some historians see the Soviet Union as a colonial empire, and "more a prison-house of nations than the old Empire had ever been."

6. Cult of Stalin- main article here

Propaganda everywhere – pictures, statues, continuous praise and applause.
Places named after him.
Mothers taught their children that Stalin was ‘the wisest man of the age’.
History books and photographs were changed to make him the hero of the Revolution, and purged people were erased (e.g. Trotsky).
Censorship of anything that might reflect badly on Stalin and did not portray the USSR in a good light ('Socialist Realism').

Source D

At the end of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone leapt to his feet.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop – after all, NKVD men were in the hall waiting to see who quit first. And in that obscure hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on – 6, 7, 8 minutes! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed of heart attacks!

Aware of the falsity of the situation, after 11 minutes, the director of the paper factory sat down in his seat.

And, oh, a miracle took place! Everyone else stopped dead and sat down.

That, however, was how they found who the independent people were. And that was how they set about eliminating them. They easily pasted 10 years in a labour camp on him

Solzhenitsyn, writing about a Communist Party meeting in 1938.

Consider:

1. 'The worst aspect of the Terror was not the deaths, but the stultifying effect it had on the everyday life of ordinary people'. Using Source A, discuss this claim with a friend.

2. An amazing aspect of the Show Trials was that the accused often pleaded guilty to crimes they could not possibly have done. Using Source C, talk with a friend about why Bukharin might have done this.

AQA-style Questions

Edexcel-style Questions