Transcript The Great Purge

The Great Terror
Stalin’s ‘cleansing’ of the USSR
during the 1930s
The importance of the ‘Kirov
Purge’
 The extent of Stalin’s involvement in
Kirov’s murder will never be known
for certain, but the purges which
followed it were certainly the
fulfilment of his wishes
 Stalin was able to replace a huge
amount of people whom he considered
unreliable, and replace them with
more pliant Stalinists
New faces
 Yagoda, as head of the NKVD, was responsible
for the purges which followed Kirov’s death
 The new party boss in Moscow was Nikita
Khrushchev, an ardent Stalinist
 Andrei Vyshinsky was appointed State
prosecutor
 All of these men were eager to serve Stalin,
appreciative of their new positions of power
in a country where competition for jobs was
very fierce
‘No one is safe’
 One of the features of the Kirov
Purge was the eminent status of many
of the victims
 Kamenev and Zinoviev, for example,
were both arrested
 This established the idea that no
one, whatever their rank in the
Party, was safe
 The laws given to Yagoda meant that
the NKVD had the power to arrest
whoever they liked
The Purge of the Party
 One might expect that now Stalin’s
position was more secure, the
oppression would stop
 In the event, the absolute opposite
occurred
 One time heroes of the revolution
were arrested and imprisoned
 Most were branded with the label
‘Trotskyite’ even if they had no link
at all to Trotsky
The trial of Kamenev and
Zinoviev
 Both men were put on public trial in
Moscow, charged with the murder of
Kirov, and plotting to overthrow the
Soviet State
 Both men pleaded guilty, and read
their confessions out in court
 They were executed along with 14
other men accused of terrorist
activities
Why did they confess?
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It still remains a little unclear why they
confessed – they were, after all, tough
Bolsheviks, who had risked their lives in the
revolution
Most likely, they had been physically and
psychologically tortured, and were utterly
demoralized to be faced with public accusation and
disgrace
Also, their families had probably been threatened,
and they knew they would suffer if they didn’t
confess
Another theory is that they were so loyal to the
Party that they were ready to die to serve it.
According to historian Leonard Schapiro: ‘The
loyalty of these men to the idea of The Party was
in the last resort the main reason for Stalin’s
victory’
What was the significance of
the Kamenev/Zinoviev trial?
 The trial set an important precedent:
if great men in the Party were
willing to confess, weaker ones would
be much easier to break
 It helped to create an atmosphere of
fear, in which those accused begged
forgiveness, and admitted their
crimes in public
 Confessions led to more arrests, as
others were often incriminated in
statements given by the victims
A temporary setback for Stalin
 It did not all go exactly according to plan,
however
 In September, Bukharin and Rykov were both
acquitted in charges arising out of the
earlier trials
 Blaming Yagoda, Stalin replaced him as the
head of the NKVD with Yezhov, an even more
ruthless man. Yagoda now found himself in a
very dangerous position
 This indicates how the terror could consume
all those who were involved in it, as the
accusers turned into the accused
The Purge of the army
 It is unlikely that Stalin’s
control of the Party would have
been sufficient to allow him
complete control over the USSR
 The army, as an independent
force, would always pose a
threat to his authority
 So, in 1937, he began to attack
its structure
Stage one: weakening the army
 First, Stalin prepared the
ground for his attack on the
army
 He did this by organizing a
large number of transfers of
senior officers
 This broke up any groups which
could have united against him
Stage 2: the trials
 Then he had Vyshinsky announce that ‘a
gigantic conspiracy’ had been uncovered in
the Red Army
 The most prominent victim was Marshal
Tukhachevsky, the Chief of General Staff
 The trial was secret, to avoid any army coup,
and quick
 The president of the court was Marshal
Voroshilov, a committed Stalinist, and
jealous rival of Tukhachevsky
 The outcome was inevitable: Tukhachevsky and
seven other generals, all of whom had been
heroes of the civil war were found guilty,
and shot
Stage 3: Destruction
 To prevent any reaction from the
military, the structure of the Red
Army was then utterly destroyed
 3 of the 5 Marshals of the army were
removed, 75 of the 80 man Supreme
military council were executed, and
two thrids of the 280 divisional
commanders were removed
 In total, 35,000 commissioned
officers were imprisoned or shot
 The navy and the airforce both
suffered the same fate
Effects of the military purge
 Of all the elements of the great terror, the
military purges are the ones which are
hardest to understand
 All three services were severely undermanned,
and now staffed by inexperienced officers
 The Soviet Union was crippled in terms of its
defence against foreign powers – going
against everything Stalin had said he stood
for
 This is the strongest piece of evidence that
Stalin was completely out of touch with
reality
The final show trials
 The last series of show trials
occurred throughout 1938
 Bukharin, Tomsky, and Yagoda were
among the victims
 At one point, Bukharin tried to
defend himself, but he was silenced
by Vyshinsky’s shouts
 In total, 21 prominent Party members
were tried and exectuted during the
last round of trials
The Bukharin irony
 Bukharin had actually been the principal
draftsman of the new constitution of 1936
 Stalin had described this as ‘the most
democratic in the world’
 It had claimed that socialism in the USSR had
brought an end to classes and to exploitation
 It supposedly guaranteed the rights of
freedom of expression, assembly, and worship
 However, nowhere did it define the powers of
the Party – Stalin had unlimited powers,
because his powers were not defined by any
legal document
The Purges and the People
 The effects of the Purges were not limited to
the Party and the army: all areas of Soviet
life were affected by them
 The constant state of fear that they
engendered conditioned the character and
behaviour of everyone
 Also, ordinary people were targeted directly:
one in eighteen of the population were
arrested during the purges
 Almost every family in the USSR suffered the
loss of at least one of its members
 The mass of the population were
disorientated, afraid, and incapable of
resisting the terror which characterised
Stalin’s regime
Conclusions I
 Isaac Deutscher: Stalin knew ‘that the older
generation of revolutionaries would always
look upon him as a falsifier of first truths,
and usurper. He now appealed to the young
generation which knew little or nothing about
the pristine ideas of Bolshevism and was
unwilling to be bothered about them.’
 Leonard Schapiro: ‘Every man in the Politburo
was a tried and proven follower of the
leader, who could be relied upon to support
him through every twist and turn of policy.
Below the Politburo nothing counted’
Conclusions II
 David Christian: Stalin had ‘the support, in
particular, of younger party members,
industrial managers, and government and poice
officials who benefitted from the changes of
the 1930s.’
 From the Literary Gazette, Moscow, 1988:
Stalin’s policies involved ‘the special
sadism, the sophisticated barbarism, whereby
the nearest relatives were forced to
incriminate each other – brother to slander
brother, husband to blacken wife’.