Stalin’s Purges (Political)

1. Stalin’s Purges (Political)

2. Under Stalin, terror was all pervading. Its intensity varied from time to time, but it was an ever present reality throughout his dictatorship • Terror against the Peasants, esp. the Kulaks, during Collectivization • Terror against the Workers, during Industrialization • Terror – against his own Communist Party, and the Red Army (and others) – known as the Purges

3. Stalin’s Motivation for the Purges? 1. Personality • He was deeply suspicious by nature: always believed he was under threat from actual or potential enemies: paranoia • Vengeful nature – desire to eliminate anyone who had ever disagreed with him, or who might oppose him. Tucker says that he was a “venomous and terrible hater.” • “Stalin was a man of despotic disposition” (Tucker)

4. 2. Revolution from Above • Nove and Solzhenitsyn argue that any Revolution from above, which involved so much coercion, and hardships, leads to the fear of revenge and therefore invites the desire to liquidate enemies, real and imagined, within and without • Absence of a mandate, of public approval through vote / election – leads to fear, suspicion • Purges are a permanent condition of Totalitarian States (Document)

5. 3. Desire for total Control / Power • Though in control, Stalin was not yet the dictator he wanted to be: he still didn’t feel totally in charge: he still feared the Right - Kirov, and esp. Bukharin, who was very popular • He felt that in the party there was still the sense that leadership should be “collective,” as Lenin seemed to indicate

6. 4. Tradition of Terror in Russia / Precedents. • Under Czars: Okhrana • Under Lenin / Cheka; tens of thousands of anti- Communists had been imprisoned, tortured, assassinated in a reign of terror by the Cheka esp. after attempted assassination and during the Civil War 5. His Mind? • his behavior was so unbalanced it has to cast doubts on his sanity (Tucker)

7. But Terror / Purges under Lenin were: • 1. During times of exceptional circumstances, such as Civil War: But Stalin’s purges took place when threats to the CP had been removed and Communist rule was firmly in place • 2. Lenin applied terror to the opponents of the CP, not to CP members; But Stalin applied it to loyal party members who had committed no real crimes • 3. The scale of imprisonment and execution was much larger under Stalin than Lenin

8. Phases • Ryutin Purges: 1932-1933 • Post Kirov Purges: 1934-1936 • Great Purge: 1937-1939 • War and Post War Purges: 1941-1953

9. Ryutin Purges • In 1932 a group of Right Wing Communists called the Ryutin group criticized Stalin, describing him as “an evil genius who had brought the revolution to the verge of destruction.” • He and his supporters were put on public trial and expelled from the party. • Prelude to the first major purge of the CP by Stalin. Between 1933-1933, almost a million members - over a third of the party - were expelled on the grounds that they were Ryutiniters.

10. At this stage, the Purges were not as violent and deadly as in later yrs • Usually involved expulsion, which meant loss of job in the Party, which meant eviction from Party accommodation, denial of access to health care, vacation homes, cars, party stores for them and their families • For some, the threat of expulsion was enough to persuade them to conform to the official party line: the alternative was misery

11. Post Kirov Purges of 1934-1936 • Pretext was the alleged assassination of Kirov, the secretary of the Leningrad Soviet, in the office of the headquarters of the Party • Kirov was a very popular figure in the party, elected to the Politburo in 1934, was known to be unhappy with the speed and scale of industrialization, opposed Ryutin Purges of CP members. • Stalin felt that if organized opposition to him was to come from within the Party it would most likely come from him.

12. Stalin may have ordered the assassination – was accused of so doing by Khrushchev in 1956 when he began the process of de-Stalinization. • Conquest believes that Stalin arranged the opportunity for the assassin to strike, by instructing the NKVD guarding the building to admit the assassin … “There is no doubt that it is the correct explanation..” (Conquest p.44)

13. Conquest, The Great Terror: believes that the killing, arranged by Stalin, had enormous consequences: • “The killing has every right to be called the crime of the century. Over the next four years hundreds of Russians, including the most prominent political leaders of the Revolution, were shot for direct responsibility for the assassination, and – literally – millions of others went to their deaths for complicity in one or other part of the vast conspiracy which allegedly lay behind it. Kirov’s death, in fact, was the keystone of the entire edifice of terror and suffering by which Stalin secured his grip on the Soviet peoples.”

14. The official Stalin / Party line was that he was assassinated by associates of Zinoviev and Kamenev– who later in 1936 were accused of having ordered the killing – and their friend in exile, Trotsky. • In 1938 the official view evolved into accusing Zinoviev and Kamenev and Trotsky, who were supposedly facilitated by Yagoda, head of the NKVD.

15. J. Arch Getty suggests that Stalin may have been guilty, but that the evidence against him consists of only “unverified facts, rumors, and conjectures.” • He says that whatever the truth, the murder worked to Stalin’s advantage • Thompson’s explanation: pg. 311

16. “In this atmosphere of reduced tension, the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party opened in Moscow in January 1934 on the tenth anniversary of Stalin’s “Oath-to-Lenin” speech (see Chapter 5). Delegates – loyal cronies and forgiven opponents alike – praised Stalin extravagantly. The vozhd’s own report to the congress adopted a fairly moderate tone and contained no omen of the firestorm that he would soon unleash against the Party. The congress proved to be the swan song for the prerevolutionary Old Bolsheviks. Twenty-five percent of the nearly 2,000 delegates had joined the Party before 1912, and 80 percent had become members before 1921 (although only 10 percent of all Party members fell into that category). Dubbed at the time “The Congress of Victors” by Pravda because of the triumphs of the First Five Year Plan, the Seventeenth Congress turned out to be “The Congess of Victims,” for 1,108 of the delegates would be purged during the next four years.

17. Although we can only speculate, three events at the congress may have inflamed Stalin’s suspicions, aroused his jealousy, and pushed him once more toward political retaliation. A group of regional and republic Party secretaries apparently met secretly and decided that, with the crises of industrialization and collectivization ebbing, it was now possible to act on Lenin’s 1923 recommendation that the Party move Stalin from the post of general secretary to another position. They allegedly approached Kirov as Stalin’s potential successor, news of which undoubtedly reached Stalin’s ears. After his address to the congress, Kirov also received a warmer and noisier ovation than had Stalin. Finally, when secret ballots for election to the Party Central Committee were counted, Kirov also received a warmer and noisier ovation than had Stalin. Finally, when secret ballots for election to the Party Central Committee were counted, Stalin’s name was reportedly crossed off a substantial number of voting cards; the vozhd’ received one of the highest negative votes, far more than Kirov. He angrily ordered the results doctored to show only three ballots against him

18. How deeply this “betrayal” affected Stalin is hard to judge. Scraps of evidence indicate that throughout the remainder of 1934 Stalin and Kirov continued to lock horns over policy – over ration levels in Leningrad, over the role of machine-tractor stations in agriculture, and over the date when Kirov, recently elected a full national Party secretary, should move to Moscow. Perhaps these spats were simply normal disagreements, or perhaps the reflected Stalin’s growing fear of Kirov as a rival. In any case, on the evening of December 1, 1934, an assassin killed Kirov in the corridors of the Smolny Institute, Party headquarters in Leningrad. The gunman, a disappointed job-seeker and general misfit, seemed to have acted alone. Nevertheless, persuasive circumstantial evidence shows that the secret police (NKVD) not only permitted him access to Kirov but perhaps urged him to act. Whether Stalin engineered the murder remains unproven, but because the NKVD officers involved had come from Moscow recently and reported to agency chief Genrikh Yagoda, a protégé of Stalin, it is hard to believe that the assassination of the number-two leader of the Party could have been arranged without Stalin’s knowledge, even if he did not initiate the plan…”

19. Stalin was quick to take advantage of the opportunity the assassination provided – under the guise of exacting retribution for the murder, he started the Purge of the CP. • He claimed the murder was organized by a wide circle of Trotskyites, and Leftists, who must be rounded up and imprisoned or executed. (Document: Victor Serge)

20. No Party members, whatever their rank or revolutionary pedigree, were safe. Not just expelled from party, but in this Purge they were also exiled, sent to Gulags, imprisoned, and executed (more sever than Ryutin Purge) • Stalin also talked of a plot from the former Right faction: angry that his head of secret police / NKVD, Yagoda, had not come up with evidence against Bukharin, Rykov etc…replaced him with Yezhov.

21. Kamanev and Zinoviev were put on trial. Stalin used the public trial method – Show Trials. • Why public trials? Why not secret trials followed by executions? He wanted to show the public that he was responding to a large scale conspiracy, that it was a genuine, real, conspiracy against him - to prove that there was a genuine need for a Purge

22. The accused confessed to all sorts of crimes, crimes they had not committed. • These were achieved through promises of leniency, threats to their families, the application of psychological and physical torture (no food, sleep, non stop questioning, beating). • Victims were often forced to reveal the names of other supposed conspirators, again on the promise of leniency. Their trial led to the trials of those they had informed on, which led to other trials and other denunciations …. The whole process had a snowballing effect…..gathering momentum as it went along

23. 1937 Great Purge • More intense Purges, began with new Show Trials under Yezhov, the new NKVD Chief. • Marked the height of the Terror: more widespread and more severe punishments • Touched the middle and lower ranks of the CP, and extended beyond the Party: one in every 18 of the population was arrested during this Purge. Almost every family suffered at least one loss.

24. In 1937 the NKVD arrested thousands of lesser party officials and newer members (as well as high ranking members) – also union officials, managers, intellectuals, army officers, ordinary citizens – total of 8m arrests (the midnight knock), many disappeared forever – executed, died in gulags • Of the 1,996 delegates who attended the 17th Party Congress of 1934, 1,108 were executed by 1938. Of the 139 members of the Central Committee members elected at that Congress all but 41 of them were put to death during the purges. • The one time heroes of the Rev of 1917 and the Civil War were arrested, tried, executed as enemies of the state.

25. foreign communists living in the USSR were rounded up, imprisoned and executed • the legal and academic professions were esp. purged • The charges were not just anti party activities but also spying for Nazi Germany • Among those tried and executed was Yagoda the former head of the NKVD responsible for the earlier purges

26. Thousands of Show Trials; trial of Bukharin is most famous (Document) (Thompson pg. 315-316) • Leonard Shapiro describes these events as “Stalin’s victory over the Party.” From this point on, the Soviet Communist Party was entirely under his control. It ceased, in effect, to have a separate existence. Stalin had become the Party. After these purges Stalin increased his grip over Soviet bureaucracy, appointing supporters to all the key positions. All talk about removing Stalin from the leadership now ended.

27. “Across from the defendants sat the state prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, and his staff. Three military judges presided from a rostrum in the center. At the opposite end of the hall loomed a raise and recessed gallery, where orchestras had once entertained the nobility. Shrouded by a gauze curtain, a hulking mustached man frequently watched the proceedings from this vantage point. Observers identified the figure as Stalin, but they had no way of knowing that a direct connection to his private office in the Kremlin permitted the Soviet dictator to listen to testimony there as well….

28. Stalin had good reason to follow the progress of the case closely. Doubtless he understood that Bukharin, his most troublesome thorn over the past eight years, would try to turn the trial against him and his policies. Stalin and his NKVD thugs had obtained Bukharin’s cooperation, three months after the latter’s arrest, only by threatening to harm Bukharin’s young wife and small child. For almost nine months, interrogators under Stalin’s guidance had shaped and polished Bukharin’s “confession.” With his family held hostage, Bukharin was not likely to repudiate his statement in court. The danger remained, however, that Bukharin would try indirectly to indict Stalin’s policies. Stalin judged the risk worthwhile, for the trial of Bukharin became the capstone of the dictator’s effort to discredit Old Bolshevik views forever and to rid the party permanently of antagonistic elements.

29. To a few keen observers, the duel between Bukharin and his boss provided a dramatic undercurrent to the proceedings. Entitled “The Case of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites,” the indictment depicted an all-encompassing criminal conspiracy of past, present, and potential oppositionists of every political coloration. These villains, the prosecutor averred, dedicated themselves not only to the customary “wrecking,” sabotage, and terrorism but also to treason, dismemberment of the Soviet Union, murder of prominent Communists, and lèsemajesté – attempts to kill the vozhd’. • In response to these outlandish charges, Bukharin was precise, logical, and defiant, appearing in the words of an American correspondent “an earnest man completely unafraid but merely trying to get his story straight before the world.” Tactically, Bukharin outwitted Stalin by agreeing to the overall charge but denying any knowledge of specific acts – thereby undermining his whole “confession.”

30. Replaced by 1.5 million new members: Malia calls them the thirty-something products: products of the Second Revolution of the 1930s, “ the upwardly mobile yuppies, so to speak.” • This new generation would be more loyal to Stalin. Stalin wiped out the potential threat of the old timers. • The Purges reflect the full development to a totalitarian state – one which always fought some enemy, real or imagined.

31. Constitution: The irony was that in 1936 the USSR had adopted a new Constitution (adopted by a plebiscite), written chiefly by Bukharin, which declared that: • Socialism had been established and there were no longer any classes in Soviet society: all exploitation having ended, there were now only strata of workers and peasants, working in harmony for the mutual good of all • The basic civil rights of freedom of expression, speech, assembly, and worship were guaranteed • Voting for everyone over 18 • Elections every 4 yrs: candidates nominated by voters, then voted on (in practice no choice)

32. Stalin labeled it the “Stalin Constitution”, called it the most democratic of all Constitutions in the world • In practice, Stalin was violating every aspect of it • Lynch: No where was the fraudulent nature of Stalinism as a system of govt. more clearly evident than in the Constitution of 1936 – it was issued when the purges were at their height – the contrast between its democratic claims and the reality of the situation in the USSR could not have been greater.

33. It was written to • Deflect attention from the Purges • Impress internationally: Stalin wanted an anti-Nazi alliance with the West

34. Purge of the Army • In 1937 the Soviet military came under threat / suspicion • For Stalin to complete his control over the USSR he felt the need to curtail the independence of the army and make it subservient to him. • He began by ordering a number of transfers to break up potential pockets of opposition / resistance to his attacks.

35. Next the new NKVD leader, Vyshinksy, announced, in May 1937, that “a gigantic conspiracy” had been uncovered in the Red Army. • Marshal Tukhachevsky, the popular and talented Chief of General Staff, was arrested along with seven other generals, all of whom had been heroes of the Civil War • on the grounds that speed was essential to prevent a military coup, the trial was held immediately and in secret – the charge was treason – Tukhachevsky was accused of having spied for Germany and Japan.

36. So-called documentary evidence, supposedly from the Germans, was produced as proof. The outcome was inevitable - confession, condemned, and shot. • Execution of Tukhachevsky was the signal for an even greater bloodletting – to prevent any chance of a military reaction, a wholesale destruction of the Red Army establishment was undertaken.

37. In the following 18 months • all 11 War Commissars were removed from office: • three of the five marshals of the USSR were dismissed • 75 of the 80 man Supreme Military Council were executed: • 14 of the 16 army commanders, • nearly two thirds of the 280 divisional commanders, were removed: • half of the commissioned officer corps, 35,000 in total, were either imprisoned or shot.

38. It was reported that in some army camps officers were taken away by the truck load for execution. • The Soviet Navy was also purged – all serving admirals of the fleet were shot and thousands of naval officers were imprisoned in labor camps. • The Soviet Air Force was similarly decimated – only one of its senior commanders surviving the purge.

39. Tucker: “The purge of the armed forces was complete by 1939, leaving all three parts seriously undermanned and staffed by inexperienced or incompetent replacements. Given the defense needs of the USSR, a theme constantly stressed by Stalin himself, the deliberate crippling of the Soviet military is the aspect of the purges that most defies logic. It is the strongest evidence in support of the contention that Stalin had lost touch with reality.”

40. Tucker: “In the headlong rush to uncover more and more conspiracies, to search out more and more culprits, interrogators themselves became victims and joined those they had condemned in execution cells and labor camps. Concepts such as innocence and guilt, truth and falsehood, seemed to lose all meaning during the Purges. The mass of the population were frightened and bewildered. Fear had the effect of destroying moral values and traditional loyalties. The one aim was survival, even at the cost of betrayal; relative, brother, sister incriminated each other, husband and wife too.”

41. The horror according to Thompson was not so much the killings and imprisonments but that the terror “spawned a chilling atmosphere of suspicion and fear that permeated a generation of Russians and non-Russians alike”

42. The Last Purges, 1941-1953 • Purges continued into and after wartime • Stalin blamed military failures on internal sabotage and persecuted those deemed responsible – neither the war or its outcome lessened his vindictiveness. • He emerged from the war harder in attitude towards the Soviet people, despite their heroic efforts, and more suspicious of the outside world, despite the anti Nazi alliance

43. At end of war, the army was purged again on a large scale, justified by the fact that many soldiers had deserted in the early years of the war • Huge purge of returned prisoners of war, returning from allied countries: some of these Soviet soldiers had fought with Germans against the USSR, and didn’t want to go back to the USSR

44. Also mass execution of Soviet prisoners of war who had been in German POW camps – Stalin said he did not trust them – felt that their survival somehow indicated that they had collaborated in some way with their captors. • They went from German POW camps to Soviet labor camps and many from there to execution. • Stalin insisted that the new Soviet satellites of East Europe also use his method of purges and terror to eliminate their internal enemies: Purges, terror became the norm in the satellites.

45. Never satisfied, in 1947 he dispensed with the Central Committee and the Politburo, thus removing even the semblance of limitation upon his authority • In 1949 he initiated another purge, the Leningrad Purge - leading party and city officials were arrested and shot. • Soviet Jews were the next target – he ordered what amounted to a pogrom – anti Semitism had for long been a factor in the Soviet Union.

46. In 1953 he announced that some Jewish doctors had been part of a plot to murder him, thus beginning a purge of the Soviet medical profession comparable to the pre war devastation of the Red Army – (most were spared by his death in March). • Death Toll: • Soviet historian Volkogonov puts the toll at 21.5m between 1929-1953 – collect, ind, purges - not including the war dead

47. Extent of Stalin’s Control over Purges • There is no doubt that Stalin was the architect of the terror. • But in recent yrs historians have begun to look beyond him in assessing the responsibility for the purges. • Russian archives reveal that Stalinism was not as monolithic a system of govt. as has been traditionally assumed. • He initiated the Purges but how they were carried out depended on the local party organization.

48. Historians such as J. Arch Getty argue that the purges came from below as much as from above. • He argues that the Purges begun by Stalin were sustained in their ferocity by the lower rank officials in govt. and party eager to replace their superiors, whom they regarded as a conservative elite. • Thus the dynamic of the purges was provided by the ruthless ambition of those on the lower rungs of the Party who were seeking preferment and position.

49. It was certainly true that Stalin had no difficulty in finding eager subordinates to organize the purges – calls them “willing collaborators” (Arch-Getty) • The common characteristic of those who led Stalin’s campaigns was their unswerving personal loyalty to him, a loyalty that overcame any scruples they might have had regarding the nature of their work. • They were an unsavory group of individuals whose marked lack of cultural refinement or moral sensibility added to the detestation and terror in which they were held by their victims.

50. Revisionist historians don’t put all the blame on Stalin – they say that some of his fears were justified. Also that his fears and suspicions were shared by many in the party and the general public, who supported the purges – he found large numbers of willing collaborators for crime as well as achievement. • Thompson’s views, pg. 317 – self serving underlings