Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, also known as the Great Terror of 1936-8, was the most manic part of a decade of state oppression in the USSR. The purges saw the arrest of around 8 million Soviet citizens and around 800,000 executions. Anyone could be suspected of being an 'enemy of the state,' but specific groups targeted included leaders within the Communist Party, officers in the military, wealthier farmers, intellectuals, scientists, nationalists, and religious leaders. Still today, the motivations, scale, and consequences of the Great Purge continue to cause debate. As the historian G. L. Freeze notes: "The Great Purges…of 1936-8 seem to have been so arbitrary in victimization, so elusive in motivation as to defy explanation" (127).
Stalinism: Total Control
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) established himself as the successor of Vladimir Lenin and leader of the USSR after the latter's death in 1924 and a protracted leadership struggle within the ruling Communist Party. Stalin championed above all patriotism, patriarchy, hierarchy, conservatism, and state power. These ideals were to be 'protected' by purges of any and all opposition, and promoted by state-sponsored propaganda (which ranged from school textbooks to show trials), and the creation of an all-powerful bureaucracy.
Stalin was an adept political manipulator, but he seems to have suffered from a fear, real or imagined, that his position was constantly under threat from rival leaders and certain sections of the Soviet population. Completely ruthless in his methods, Stalin was determined to hold on to power and to extend the tentacles of his totalitarian regime into every aspect of Soviet life, both public and private. The compliant tools Stalin used for his purges included various organs and branches of the Communist Party (both national and local in all states), the secret police – the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), led by Nikolai Ezhov, and a vast state bureaucracy. Many Russians called the period of state repression in the 1930s after Ezhov himself, the Ezhovshchina.
Stalin, therefore, used various tools to exploit the particular situation in the USSR at the time, as here explained by historian D. R. Shearer:
The mechanisms of power, the policies of repression and policing and the bureaucratic apparatus of dictatorship that we know as Stalinism were unanticipated by Marxist-Leninist ideology or practice. Stalinism grew out of a unique combination of circumstances – a weak governing state, an increasingly hostile international context and a series of unforeseen crises, both domestic and external…Stalin's personality gave to his dictatorship its despotic and uniquely vicious character…
(Suny, 216)
The purges of Soviet society by the state apparatus were aided and abetted by millions of citizens convinced by propaganda that, firstly, the preservation of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution required a brutal treatment of enemies and, secondly, that there were indeed enemies of the state to be dealt with. Traditional class, religious, and nationalist rivalries were exploited. Those who would go along with almost anything for their own career advancement and those simply with grievances against their competitors and superiors also helped to ensure that there was a persistent atmosphere of suspicion, denunciation, and victimisation across the USSR.
Eliminating Political Rivals
Stalin first went after rivals to his own position, that is, prominent members of the Communist Party, an elite group often collectively called the nomenklatura. A much-repeated strategy was to hold show trials where key figures were accused of disloyalty to the regime. 1936 saw the show trials of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, amongst others. Included in the prosecution's accusations against those on trial was a desire to kill Stalin. 14 men who had once been prominent Bolsheviks were found guilty and shot.
The next year, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a hero of the Russian Civil War (1917-22) who unwisely made his disdain for Stalin public, was executed. Stalin went on to ruthlessly pursue suspect officers of the Red Army. "Most commanding officers down to the level of corps commanders were executed; altogether, more than twenty thousand officers were discharged" (Suny, 236). The Soviet Navy was treated in a similar fashion, with all serving admirals executed and thousands of officers arrested.
Also in 1937, prominent Communists like Karl Radek and Georgy Pyatakov were accused of a dizzy cocktail of crimes such as plotting against Stalin, random acts of terrorism and sabotage against the state, and espionage for a host of foreign powers. Again, all were found guilty, and most were shot.
1938 brought the show trials of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and several other once-prominent Communist Party leaders. All were accused, once again, of a tediously long but imaginative list of improbable crimes against the state; Bukharin even had the accusation that he had wanted to murder Lenin thrown in. All were found guilty, and most were shot in their prison cells.
Thus, through the show trials, Stalin eliminated any possible rival – past, present, or future – to his claim as leader of the Communist Revolution. Much later access to official records has revealed that the vast majority of the show trials were set up using fabricated evidence and confessions acquired under torture of one kind or another. Nearly all of the guilty verdicts in the show trials of this period were annulled in 1988 and 1989.
Many other members of the Communist Party were much more quietly eliminated during the Great Purge. Prominent figures in the Communist Party apparatus across the USSR simply disappeared, shot or imprisoned who knew where; no official commentary was ever made. Around 70% of the party's ruling Central Committee were executed. Only 59 of the nearly 2,000 delegates who attended the Communist Party Congress in 1934 were present at the 1939 Congress. Stalin was nothing if not thorough, and he did not stop at physically eliminating his rivals. The purged had their publications, if they had any, destroyed and banned, and they were airbrushed out of photographic records and removed from official paintings, too. Stalin was literally rewriting Soviet history, casting shadows on the records of former heroes and sowing seeds of doubt as to the revolutionary virtue of anyone except himself.
A War on the Masses
Stalin effectively went to war against sections of his own people, a policy he directly acknowledged by frequently using military metaphors in his public speeches and Communist Party publications. The first victims of oppression came following Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture and the imposition of Stalin's five-year plans for Industry in the early 1930s. Farmers who directly resisted Stalin's collectivisation or those workers who had failed to meet the targets found themselves interred in forced labour camps. Even such trivial misdemeanours as absenteeism or being late for work could result in being sent to a labour camp.
Stalin further indulged his paranoia through the mid-1930s when anyone remotely suspected of opposing his vision of life in the USSR was targeted. Executions by order of tribunals rocketed from 1,118 in 1936 to 353,074 in 1937 and 328,618 in 1938. The next year, 1939, executions fell back to 2,552.
All manner of people were arrested and imprisoned during the Great Terror, particularly those most likely to oppose a repressive regime: intellectuals, economists, scientists, engineers, artists of all kinds, nationalists (particularly those from Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states), Christian and Jewish religious leaders, those identified as kulaks (wealthier farmers), and anyone deemed a follower of a rival ideology (especially capitalism and fascism). Civilians with roots in other countries, the 'diaspora nations', such as people who had themselves moved from or had parents from Greece, Korea, and China amongst others, were considered a possible threat and so were also victims of the Great Purge. It is important to note, too, that often the partners and children of suspects were also detained; even brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends of someone accused could find themselves going through the unpleasant and often deadly state process of arrest and interrogation. Torture, even of children, was a common method to find 'evidence' of wrongdoing.
In short, very few Soviet people of any class or any age could regard themselves as safe from arrest and then imprisonment or execution. Mass graves across the USSR tell their own tragic tale. "Repression was a never-ending spiral: arrest was followed by interrogation and torture, which did not end until the accused confessed and named 'accomplices'" (Freeze, 377). The secret police had to meet targets for the number of arrests they made, or they themselves could be accused of being enemies of the state in its relentless pursuit of nobody quite knew what.
Those arrested who were not executed very often found themselves deported to labour camps known as gulags, although this, too, could be a delayed death sentence given the harsh conditions and poor food rations therein. The name of Stalin's gulag system derives from the Russian acronym for the administrative body charged with managing the labour camps: the Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps. The gulag system began operation in 1930, but it was built upon an existing, although much smaller, system of camps which had been in use since the Russian Civil War. Stalin greatly extended the labour camp system, where millions died of starvation and overwork. "The GULAG population sentenced for 'counter-revolutionary offences' was 12.6 per cent in 1936 and 33.1 per cent in 1940" (Freeze, 369).
Yet another aspect of the Great Purge was to remove literature deemed compromising to Stalin's rule or, as noted, the works by now-disgraced authors. Thousands of book titles were removed to closed-off rooms or banished entirely from public libraries. The same measures were applied to art, films, and music. Anyone caught in possession of such banned works, which ranged from the political writings of the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky to American jazz music, risked arrest or worse.
Consequences of the Great Purge
The consequence of the Great Terror most important to Stalin, of course, was that he still had an iron grip on power and had eliminated any credible rival. The state greatly increased its control over all aspects of Soviet life. Other consequences, besides the obvious horrors of beatings, executions, and internment of millions in the gulags, included the total disruption of industry and agriculture, and of the Red Army.
Such were the excesses of the Great Terror that even Stalin realised the cycle of fear and persecution could not continue. In a speech in October 1937, Stalin noted that state workers had perhaps been a little too zealous in weeding out Soviet society's enemies. The man at the top of the NKVD, Ezhov, was removed to the more benign role of Minister of Water Transport – later he would be executed, too. In a speech at the March 1939 Party Congress, Stalin promised that the "mass cleansings," although they had been absolutely necessary, were now at an end. There were even some releases and rehabilitations from the gulags. The damage, though, had been done. The Great Terror had not been the first purge in the USSR or Russia, and it would not be the last.
The terror then subsided, but this was perhaps more to do with Stalin's belief that a war in Europe seemed likely rather than any generosity towards his own people. Firstly, the disruption was immense to Soviet industry and, in particular, to its ability to make arms. The USSR had made a leap forward in terms of general industrialisation, but the obsession with plans and targets also led to widespread corruption, shoddy goods, and huge wastage. Massive state intervention also created the need for expensive surveillance. Removing managers and engineers from the workforce had been greatly detrimental to efficiency.
The economic historian A. Nove gives the following summary of the effects of the Great Purge on the industrial workforce:
The purge swept away…managers, technicians, statisticians, planners, even foremen. Everywhere there were said to be spies, wreckers, and diversionists. There was a grave shortage of qualified personnel, so the deportation of many thousands of engineers and technologists to distant concentration camps represented a severe loss. But perhaps equally serious was the psychological effect of this terror on the survivors. With any error or accident likely to be attributable to treasonable activities, the simplest thing to do was avoid responsibility, to seek approval from superiors for any act, to obey mechanically any order received, regardless of local conditions.
(McGill, 78)
Another grave consequence of the Great Purge was that the Red Army had been severely weakened by the removal of its officers, not only in terms of experience, knowledge, and morale, but in other ways, too. Tukhachevsky, for example, had been a champion of mechanised warfare, but his removal and those with similar modern ideas meant that the Red Army was well behind its rivals in terms of aircraft and tank production. The Red Army came off second best to Finnish forces in the Winter War of 1939-40, and it was certainly not prepared for such developments as Germany's blitzkrieg tactics, which combined highly mobile air and land attacks. The Soviet armed forces, and the Soviet people, would have to absorb a great deal of punishment following Germany's attack in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 before industry was revitalised and a serious fightback could be launched.
Stalin continued to use terror tactics against his people and armed forces throughout the Second World War (1939-45), and this remained a tool of totalitarianism in those territories occupied and held after that conflict, when a raft of European states were forcibly included into the USSR. Stalin's gulag system even outlived the dictator, surviving until 1960.
