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POINTS TO CONSIDER
With his defeat by 1929 of the Left and Right Bolsheviks,
Stalin had achieved personal power in the Soviet Union. He went on to consolidate that power to the point of absolute control by a series of purges that continued until his death in 1953. In the chapter these are examined as:
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The early purges
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The post-Kirov purges 1934-6
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The Great Purge 1936-9
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The later purges 1941-53
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The purges as a study in Stalin’s use of power

I. The Early Purges (What form did the early purges take?)
A. Stalin spent his life consolidating & extending his authority
B. Stalin’s purges began in 1932
1. They were not unprecedented.
a) “anti-Bolshevik” purges & public trials.
2. In 1932 was the trial of the Ryutin group a) This was the prelude to the 1 st major purge of the CPSU by Stalin.
C. Between 1933 & 34, nearly one million members,
(over 1/3 of the total membership), were excluded from the Party on the grounds that they were
“Ryutinites.”

D. Nature of the purges
1. Not violent @ first. a) Procedure @ 1 st was to have members hand in their
Party cards for checking. @ this point suspect individuals wouldn't get their card back. b) The threat of expulsion was enough to force members to conform to official Party policy.
2. Under this system, it became very hard to mount effective opposition. a) people such as Ryutin made Stalin believe organized resistance to him was still possible.
3. 1934 is when Stalin began to systematically terrorize colleagues & Party members. a) It is not clear why he initiated such a terror b) Purges became a permanent condition of Soviet life

(In what sense did the post-Kirov purges mark “Stalin’s victory over the Party”?)
A. Some strong evidence says it might have been planned by Stalin himself.
B. The murder definitely worked to Stalin’s advantage
1. Kirov was highly popular, handsome, & had made an impression on the 17 th Party Congress in 1934.
2. He was elected to the Politburo
3. He was known to be unhappy w/ the speed & scale of Stalin’s industrialization drive
4. He was also apposed to extreme measures being used as discipline on Party members.
5. If opposition to Stalin arouse within the Party, it would most definitely be around Kirov.
6. With his death the threat was removed.

C. Stalin quick to exploited the situation:
1. “Decree against terrorist acts”a) A fresh purge of the party had begun under the guise of looking for Kirov’s murder. b) Stalin claimed assassination was a plot by a wide group of Trotskyites & Leftists.
c) Led to a large scale round-up of suspected conspirators.
D. Party membership (What was the relationship between the growth in Party membership & the purges?)
1. Stalin’s successful purge in 1934 was made a great deal easier by the major shift in the party.
2. “Stalin Enrollment” recruited a higher proportion of skilled workers and industrial managers. a) this brought in large numbers of members who joined the party to advance their own careers.
b) New members were loyal to Stalin & were eager to support the purging of anti-Stalinist elements. c) They remained loyal to Stalin for the open jobs from purges

D. Victims (Who were the victims of the post-Kirov purge?)
1. No Party members, whatever their rank or revolutionary pedigree, were safe.
2. Arbitrary arrest & summary execution became the norm.
3. Khrushchev said the Decree against terrorist was a euphemism for mass murder. You can see this by looking at the fate of the representatives of the party Congress of 1934: a) Of the 1996 delegates who attended, 1108 were executed during the next 3 years.
b) Out of the 139 Central Committee members elected @ the gathering all but 41 of them were put to death during the purges.
c) This was Stalin’s victory over the party. From this point on they were completely under his control.

III. The Great Purge 1936-39 (Was there any logic to the Great
Purge?)
A. Stalin declared the USSR in a “state of siege.” He called for greater vigilance in unmasking the enemies within.
1. In 1936 his terrorizing began to affect the entire population.
a) It was most dramatic in the show trials of
Stalin’s former Bolshevik colleagues.
name b) because it was so high ranking it got the of “Great Purges.”
B. Stalin’s terror program breaks down conveniently into three sections:
1. The purge of the Party
2. The purge of the armed services
3. The purge of the people.

C. The purge of the Party (Why was there so little resistance from the Party members who were purged?)
1. The purge of the Left a) A secret letter in 1936 was sent from CPSU headquarters, warning local Party branches of terrorist conspiracy. i) It instructed Party leaders to begin to root out suspected agents and sympathizers. ii) Kamenev & Zinoviev were put on public trial iii) Both men pleaded guilty & read confessions in court b) Why did they confess? the i) during de-Stalinisation it was discovered they were subjected to mental & physical torture. ii) Their confession made it hard for other victims to plead their own innocence iii) It made innocent victims confess false charges in court & go to their death begging the Party’s forgiveness.
iv) Stalin did not need public trials to purge. By making the victims confess in court he could show the scale of conspiracy & the need for the purges to continue.

2. The purging of the Right a) Kamenev & Zinoviev & 14 other High level Bolsheviks confessions set up the next major strike. The attack on the Right deviationist. b) Bukharin, Rykov, & Tomsky were put under observation c) Stalin replaced Yagoda w/ Yezhov (whose name was to become a byword for terror) in order to get the convictions he needed.
3. The “Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre” a) @ a 1937 show trial, 17 Communists were charged w/ spying for the Germans. b) Radek (a favorite of Lenin) confessed & told on his comrades including Bukharin.
i) Yezhov now had the evidence they needed ii) In 1938, the 3 rd of the major show trials started. Bukharin &
Rykov were put on trial w/ 18 others including Yagoda. They were charged with several crimes including sabotage & spying. they iii) The fact that Yagoda was one of the 18 showed how fast were starting to consume their own.

D. The Stalin Constitution 1936
1. Stalin described it as “The most democratic in the world”
2. In a effort to offset the Nazi menace to the USSR. Stalin was pushing for the formation of “ popular fronts” between communists parties & the various Left-wing groups in Europe.
3. Among the things claimed in the Constitution were that: a) Socialism had been established & there were no longer any
“classes” in Soviet society.
b) The basic civil rights of freedom of expression, assembly, & worship were guaranteed.
4. The true character of his Constitution is not what it said, but what it did not say: a) role of the party was not mentioned b) Parties power was not defined/ therefore not restricted!
c) The Party would remain the instrument through which Stalin would exercise his total control of the USSR.
d) The contrast between the Constitution’s democratic claims
& the reality in the USSR could not have been greater.

E. The purge of the armed forces (Why did Stalin regard the leaders of the
Soviet armed forces as a threat to his power?)
1. In order for Stalin’s control to be complete he needed the military under his control.
2. Stalin took the 1 st step of organizing a large # of transfers within the higher ranks in order to lesson the possibility of centers of resistance being formed when the attack came.
3. When this was done, Vyshinksy announced a “gigantic conspiracy” had been uncovered in the Red Army.
a) 8 Generals were arrested on the grounds that speed was essential to prevent a military coup : i) The trial was held in secret ii) They were charged w/ treason iii) Tukhachevsky (the most popular) was accused of spying for Germany & Japan. Evidence was provided by
Germany @ the request of the NKVD as proof. b) The outcome was predetermined & inevitable.

C. Tukhachevsky’s execution 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.
D. In the following 18 months:
1. All 11 War Commissars were removed from office.
2. 3 of the 5 Marshals of the Soviet Union were dismissed.
3. 75 of the 80-man Supreme Military Council were killed
4. 14 of the 16 army commanders, & nearly 2/3 of the 280 divisional commanders were removed.
5. ½ of the commissioned officer corps, 35,000 in total, were either imprisoned or shot.
6. In the Navy, all the serving admirals of the fleet were shot & thousands of naval officers were sent to labor camps.
7. In the Air Force, only 1 of its senior commanders survived the purges. a) The purges left all 3 services seriously undermanned & staffed by inexperienced or incompetent replacements.
b) These purges were the strongest evidence that Stalin had lost touch with reality.

F. The purge of the people (Why did the purges continue?)
1. They were used to enforce the FYPs, and keep the regions and nationalities into total subordination of
Stalin.
2. The show trials were repeated in all parts of Russia.
3. This was accompanied by a wide-ranging purge of the legal & academic professions.
4. Polish & German revolutionary exiles were rounded up in scores, & many of them were imprisoned or executed.
G. Mass repression
1. Terror was elevated into a method of government
2. In terms of #s, the greatest impact the purges had was on the middle & lower ranks of Soviet society.
3. This was not an accidental outcome.
a) From 1937-8 Yezhov deliberately followed a policy of mass repression

b) The Yezhovschina involved NKVD squads going into a rang of selected localities, arresting & dragging off hundreds of inhabitants to be executed. i) Killings carried out in specially prepared NKVD zones
H. Quotas
1. Quotas of victims to be arrested were laid down like industrial production targets. i) People no longer regarded as individuals ii) No appeal against sentence/ death sentence must be “carried out immediately” iii) innocence & guilt lost all meaning
2. Terror of ordinary people was to frighten the USSR’s national minorities into abandoning any thoughts of challenging Moscow’s control & force full acceptance of the industrial program.
i) Brother turned in brother, husband turned in wife, etc… Why?