Transcript Slide 1

Stalin and the Great Purge
Stalin “Man of Steel”
• Ruthless and calculating, Stalin knew how to
feign peace until the moment was right
• With him, there was no restraint to use violence
• Unlike flamboyant Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin was
silent, observant and quietly deadly
• He was one to settle the score no matter how
many years passed:
– Every embarrassment would eventually be avenged
Polish-Soviet War 1920
• City of Lviv contested between Poland and Ukraine for
centuries, it remained Polish-dominated.
• After the Civil War, the Bolsheviks immediately pressed on to
dominate central Europe: first was Poland
• Stalin wanted Lviv
but Lenin &
Trotsky felt that
Warsaw was the
priority.
• While Trotsky
attacked Warsaw,
Stalin refused to
leave Lviv
Trotsky with Soviet Red Army forces in Poland
Polish-Soviet War 1920
• Because of Stalin’s actions, the Red Army was defeated in both
cities. Stalin was blamed and resigned his military commission.
• Trotsky openly criticized Stalin and was bitterly opposed to his
hard-line tactics to the point where it irritated Lenin
• Later in his career, Stalin was to compensate for the disaster of
1920:
– He would ensure the death of Trotsky,
– secure Lviv in the Nazi-Soviet pact,
– execute Polish veterans of the Polish-Soviet War in the Katyn
massacre;
– ensure the failure of the Warsaw Uprising with a loss of around
250,000 Polish lives;
– establish the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe;
– at Yalta, demand that Lviv be ceded by Poland to the Soviet Union.
Lenin’s Successor?
Invasion of Caucasus
• To compensate for his failure, Stalin engaged in ruthless
campaign to ‘Sovietize’ Caucasus
• Democratic Republic of Georgia (DRG) was a Menshevik
government located on Black Sea between Russia and
Turkey
• Declared its independence in 1918, strong nationalism
• Treaty of Moscow 1920 provided Soviet recognition of
DRG independence in exchange for agreement that
Georgia would not harbor forces hostile to Soviet
Russia. It was a ruse.
• Despite the treaty, invasion was both intended and
planned; Stalin obtained permission from Lenin to
invade his homeland on Feb 14, 1921
Invasion of Caucasus
• In Moscow, there was disagreement on this decision
– Trotsky described it as “premature intervention”
claiming Caucasus could carry out their own revolution
– Some Bolsheviks wanted revenge because of the
Menshevik anti-Bolshevik propaganda
• Claiming Georgia violated the treaty by arresting
Georgian Bolsheviks and aiding armed rebels, the
Red Army invaded under the guise of being rebels
not under command of Moscow.
• Appeals by the Georgian Premier to the West went
largely unheeded and unnoticed in the headlines.
The Georgian Mensheviks were silenced.
History Repeats Itself
• Modern Georgian politicians and some
observers have repeatedly drawn parallels
between the 1921 events and Russia’s policy
towards Georgia and Western Europe’s
reluctance to confront Russia over Georgia in
the 2000s, especially during the August 2008
war
Georgia Affair
• By now it was clear Stalin had his own agenda
• This contributed to final break between Lenin & Stalin
• Lenin figured Ordzhonikidze and Stalin were guilty of
imposing of Soviet Russian nationalism upon nonRussian nationalities.
• In Dec 1922, he
considered Stalin and his
forceful centralizing policy
increasingly dangerous &
decided to dissociate
himself at once from his
protégé.
• Lenin’s health declining,
he suffered stroke in 1922
Reorganization in 1922
•
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
– Under Bolsheviks, ‘Soviet’ extended into hierarchy of government. Soviets exist at many levels but at the
national level equates to the government
•
Communist Party
– Final product of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, consisted almost exclusively of Bolsheviks
•
Congress of Communist Party
– Gathering of all delegates of the Communist Party. Frequency varied: almost annually in 1920’s
– According to Party Statute, it is ruling body but in reality rubber-stamped what the Central Committee
dictated
•
Central Committee
– Responsible for directing Party activity between congresses
– Members were elected during Party Congress, served 5 years
•
Politburo
– Main body of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Most influential members of Central Committee
– originally consisted of 5 full members: Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai
Krestinsky. The expanded Politburo (added Rykov, Bucharin and Tomsky) in 1924
•
General Secretary
– Intended as an administrative position for the Communist Party, under Stalin, became analogous to the
leader of the Communist Party and the USSR
•
NKVD and GPU started off as the Cheka, the secret police for internal security. This function
then was delegated to the GPU which had the authority to undertake quick non-judicial
trials and executions, in order to "protect the revolution". GPU was subset of NKVD which
includes local police, military intelligence functions GRU and labor camps GuLAG
Stalin’s Rise to Power
• Lenin appointed Stalin General Secretary of Central
Committee in 1922 in a move to isolate Trotsky
• He later regretted that fateful decision and wrote his
testament intending to have Stalin removed
• Another besetting stroke prevented him from carrying
out Lenin’s testament and Stalin became Lenin’s selfappointed intermediary
• Stalin allied with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev in
the politburo against Trotsky
• After Lenin’s death January 21, 1924, Stalin turned on
Zinoviev and Kamenev and allied with Nikolai Bucharin
Stalin’s Rise to Power
• Trotsky, Kamenev, &
Zinoviev were ejected
from the Central
Committee and then
expelled from the Party
• Kamenev & Zinoviev
were later exonerated
but Trotsky was exiled
from the Soviet Union
never to return
• Continuing his agenda,
Stalin pushed for rapid
industrialization and
centralization of the
economy. Bukharin
criticized these policies
and advocated return to
Lenin’s NEP. Stalin
swayed the politburo in
his favor and ousted
Bukharin in 1929.
A “New Era”
• 1929 was described by Stalin as
“the year of the great turning
point.”
• The economic crisis was worldwide
– Conditions for the laborer were little
different under the Bolsheviks
– Kulaks were wealthier farmers who
were allowed private property under
NEP
• Unrest and strikes and mass
demonstrations started
Dekulakization
• Stalin’s policy of “Dekulakization”
pitted the peasants against them,
resulted in deportation and
execution
• Who exactly was a Kulak was
subject to the whim of Soviet
authorities
• 5 million kulaks deported
• 1 million were killed
• Land was absorbed by the state
and formed collective farms
“kolhozi”
Beginning of Sorrows
• Impact on agrarian production and livestock
was so profound, it nearly bankrupted the
Soviet Union
• Stalin’s rigid censorship kept it from the masses
• Stalin's own wife committed suicide in protest
• Dealt a shocking blow, he offered politburo his
resignation but
• Molotov sprang to his feet shouting, “Stop it!
Stop it! You have the Party’s confidence”
Holodomor (Murder by Hunger)
• Despite bumper crop 1932, Ukraine SSR suffered horrible famine
as result of economic & trade policies of Stalin
– Deaths range from 2.6 million to 10 million
• Soviet propaganda denied Holodomor, free world liberals passed it
off as unfortunate consequence of industrialization
• Evidence suggest it was result of Stalin’s desire to retaliate against
Ukrainian nationalism & remove the cultural identity Ukrainians
enjoy
• March 2008, Ukraine and 19 other governments recognize it as
‘genocide’
• October 2008, European Parliament called it “crime against
humanity”
– November 13, 2009 Pres. Obama established Ukrainian Holodomor
Remembrance Day. In which he said that "remembering the victims of
the man-made catastrophe of Holodomor provides us an opportunity to
reflect upon the plight of all those who have suffered the consequences
of extremism and tyranny around the world".
The Great Purge
• !7th Party Congress vote for Politburo shows Kirov
most popular member, Stalin least popular.
• With the assassination of politburo member Sergei
Kirov in 1934, Stalin grew paranoid
• Set in motion a search for conspirators throughout
Russia
• The Cheka (later GPU) arrested members of the
Central Committee and his own body guard
– A simple condemnation of “enemy of the people”
• A giant wave of arrests spread across the country
– Some 8-9 million Russians were tried in the field by
Cheka agents
– Two million were “guilty” of trumped-up charges and
executed
The Great Purge
• The Red Army was not exempt:
• According to well-informed sources, 75 percent of the
members of the Supreme War Council, three out of five
marshals, thirteen out of fifteen generals, sixty-two out
of eighty-five corps commanders, 110 out of 195
divisional commanders and 229 out of 406 brigade
commanders were liquidated during 1937 and 1938.
Perhaps 85 percent of the upper echelon (from
colonel on up) and ten percent of the lower echelons
(all together twenty thousand officers) were arrested.
Of the six thousand high ranking officers alone, 1,500
were executed. The others disappeared, at least
temporarily, into prison and labor camps.”11
The Great Purge
• The Great Purge was in the most literal sense, a massacre.1
• The perpetuation of “dead wood” constantly presents the
Party a bureaucratic problem which it has solved in the
past with periodic purges or Chistka2. Chistka (Чистка)
means “housecleaning” is a permanent feature of
Communist life.3
• All told, a minimum of around 10 million deaths—6
million from famine and 4 million from other causes—are
attributable to Stalin’s regime, with a number of recent
historians suggesting a likely total of around 20 million,
citing much higher victim totals from executions, gulags,
deportations and other causes12. By 1942 an additional 10
million Russians were in slave labor camps.
Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
• As pretext of protecting Communist Party members from
fascist aggression: but the Soviets used it for training and
received payment too!
• Comintern “volunteers” fought in Spanish Civil War
– 30,000 from 53 countries
• Stalin supplied arms secretly in violation of LON “NonIntervention Agreement” he signed
– Soviet volunteers operated the tanks, aircraft
• The Republic had to pay for Soviet arms with the official
gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, in an affair that would
become a frequent subject of Francoist propaganda
afterward The cost to the Republic of Spain of Soviet arms
was more than US $500 million, two-thirds of the gold
reserves that Spain had at the beginning of the war.
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
• With Nazi war clouds looming on the horizon, Stalin
hastily abandoned the purges. Stalin carefully
weighed the consequences of alignment with
Britain and France against Hitler’s war machine and
concluded that the Soviet Union was in no position
to enter into war with Germany.
• Furthermore, by allowing the Western allies to
wear themselves down against Hitler, the Soviet
Union could play both sides of the conflict, recoup
its losses and be in a better position for world
dominance.
• In 1939, the Soviet Union entered into a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany known as the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
• Touted publicly as a “peace agreement”,
the Soviet foreign minister Molotov and
the German foreign minister Ribbentrop
secretly plotted to divide central Europe.
• On September 1, 1939, the Germans
invaded the agreed portion of Poland
starting World War II. Later the Soviets
occupied the assigned portion of Eastern
Poland as well as ceding the Baltic states
of Latvia, Estonia and most of the
Lithuania into the Soviet Socialist
Republics.
• In so doing the Soviets blatantly violated
Litvinov’s Pact signed in 1929 by the
Soviet Union, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and
Romania in which those countries
promised not to use force to settle their
disputes.
World War II Operation Barbarossa
• Despite Churchill’s
warning of impending
attack by the Germans,
Stalin refused to take him
seriously, convinced that
that the Germans would
not turn on Russia until
they had defeated
Britain.
• On June 22, 1941, Hitler
unexpectedly invaded
the Soviet Union by
launching Operation
Barbarossa.
World War II Operation Barbarossa
• Largest military campaign in history
involving 4.5 million axis troops,
600,000 vehicles
• The Soviets were by no means weak:
in 1941 had 5.7 million troops in
addition to having a larger number of
superior tanks (T-34)
• By the end of 1941, the Germans had
advanced to within 20 miles of the
Moscow and inflicted over 4.3
million casualties in the Soviet
military.
• Despite this ended in failure due to
bad weather, poor logistics and
underestimation of strength of
Soviet forces
World War II and Lend-Lease
• Stalin told British diplomats he wanted mutual assistance and
recognition that after the war that the Soviet Union would
retain the states it had taken during the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact.
• Churchill wisely refused the latter request but agreed to
mutual aid.
• June 1941, the Soviet Union was included in the Lend-Lease
Act during which 400,000 trucks, 2,000 locomotives, 11,000 rail
cars, 18,700 aircraft and tons of telephone cable, ammunition,
aluminum, canned rations and clothing were supplied to Russia
• By 1945 fully two-thirds of Soviet Army trucks were US made.
• Hitler cited the Lend-Lease Act as the single reason for
declaring war on the United States on December 11, 194114.
• By the end of World War II Soviet military losses topped 14.7
million killed, captured or missing while civilian deaths reached
20 million13
American and British sailors
braved the Nazi Luftwaffe &
U-boats at the cost of over 85
merchant ships and 15
escorts.