Stalin and the attacks
Dec 11 | Collective article from TheJournal team
We started doing an article about the Soviet regime, this article is about Stalin's repression.
1928-1932: Collectivization and Dekulakization
1929-1933: The start of mass collectivization, leading to:
Dekulakization - confiscation of property and deportation of "kulaks" to remote areas or to camps.
Here's a clipping from wikipedia
Dekulakization (Russian: раскулачивание, romanized: raskulachivaniye; Ukrainian: розкуркулення, romanized: rozkurkulennya) was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of supposed kulaks (wealthy peasants) and their families. Redistribution of farmland started in 1917 and lasted until 1933, but was most active in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929, portraying kulaks as class enemies of the Soviet Union.
More than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930–1931. The campaign had the stated purpose of fighting counter-revolution and of building socialism in the countryside. This policy, carried out simultaneously with collectivization in the Soviet Union, effectively brought all agriculture and all the labourers in Soviet Russia under state control.
The Holodomor (1932-1933) in Ukraine, caused by grain and food requisitioning.
Clipping from wikipedia
The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was directed at Ukrainians and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position, held for example by historian Andrea Graziosi, is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish Ukrainians for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their nationalist sentiments.
Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in the USSR and was subject to unreasonably high grain quotas compared to the rest of the USSR. This caused Ukraine to be hit particularly hard by the famine. Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials vary greatly. A joint statement to the United Nations signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7 to 10 million died. However, current scholarship estimates a range significantly lower with 3.5 to 5 million victims. The famine's widespread impact on Ukraine persists to this day.
Public discussion of the famine was banned in the Soviet Union until the glasnost period initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 33 other UN member states, the European Parliament, and 35 of the 50 states of the United States as a genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. In 2008, the Russian State Duma condemned the Soviet regime "that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals".
1930s: "Purges" in the Party and Society
1930-1931: The beginning of the "Shakhty Trial" and other court cases against engineers and technical specialists accused of sabotage.
Excerpt from the article about Shakhty Trial from wikipedia
The Shakhty Trial (Russian: Ша́хтинское де́ло) was the first important Soviet show trial since the case of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1922. Fifty-three engineers and managers from the North Caucasus town of Shakhty were arrested in 1928 after being accused of conspiring to sabotage the Soviet economy with the former owners of the coal mines. The trial was conducted on May 18, 1928, in House of Trade Unions, Moscow. Thirty-four of the accused received prison terms, while eleven were sentenced to death (with six being executed; the rest received commutations). The remainder were acquitted or received suspended sentences.
1934: The assassination of Sergei Kirov, followed by:
Mass arrests among Leningrad party cadres.
The "troika" law - expedited judicial proceedings allowing death sentences without appeal.
Excerpt from the article about Sergei Kirov on Wikipedia
Sergei Mironovich Kirov (né Kostrikov; 27 March 1886 – 1 December 1934) was a Russian and Soviet politician and Bolshevik revolutionary. Kirov was an early revolutionary in the Russian Empire and a member of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Kirov became an Old Bolshevik and personal friend to Joseph Stalin, rising through the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ranks to become head of the party in Leningrad and a member of the Politburo.
On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed by Leonid Nikolaev at his offices in the Smolny Institute. Nikolaev and several alleged accomplices were convicted in a show trial and executed less than 30 days later. Kirov's assassination was used by Stalin as a reason for starting the Moscow trials and the Great Purge.
1936-1938: The Great Purge
1936: Start of the Moscow Trials:
The Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial (August 1936).
The Pyatakov-Sokolnikov Trial (January 1937).
1937:
NKVD Order No. 00447 - setting quotas for arrests and executions of "counter-revolutionaries".
Military purge - arrests and executions of many military leaders, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937).
National operations by the NKVD targeting various ethnic groups.
1938: The peak of the terror:
Continued mass arrests and executions.
The Bukharin-Rykov Trial (March 1938) - the last of the major show trials.
The Great Purge article from wikipedia.
The Great Purge, or the Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор, romanized: Bol'shoy terror), also known as the Year of '37 (37-й год, Tridtsat' sed'moy god) and the Yezhovshchina (Ежовщина [ɪˈʐofɕːɪnə], lit. 'period of Yezhov'), was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 and 1938. It sought to consolidate Joseph Stalin's power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and aimed at removing the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky within the Soviet Union. The term great purge was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror, whose title was an allusion to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.
The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. Starting in 1936, the NKVD under chief Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks, government officials, and regional party bosses. Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned or executed by the NKVD. Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, wealthy peasants —especially those lending out money or wealth (kulaks)—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries began affecting civilian life. The purge reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938 under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov, hence the name Yezhovshchina. The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party, often by direct orders of the politburo headed by Stalin. Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups). They were executed by shooting or sent to the Gulag labor camps. The NKVD targeted certain ethnic minorities such as the Volga Germans, and Soviet citizens of Polish origin, who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression. Throughout the purge, the NKVD sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear, and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions during its mass operations.
In 1938, Stalin reversed his stance on the purges, criticized the NKVD for carrying out mass executions, and oversaw the execution of Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, who headed the NKVD during the purge years. Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge (1936–1938) to be roughly 700,000-1.2 million. Despite the end of the Great Purge, the widespread surveillance and atmosphere of mistrust continued for decades. Similar purges took place in Mongolia and Xinjiang. While the Soviet government desired to put Trotsky on trial during the purge, his exile prevented this. Trotsky survived the purge, though he would be assassinated in 1940 by the NKVD on the orders of Stalin.
1939-1941: Continued Repressions
1939: The army continues to be purged of "unreliable elements".
1940: The assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico.
Clipping from wikipedia
Lev Davidovich Bronstein[b] (7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution, Russian Civil War, and establishment of the Soviet Union. Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were widely considered the two most prominent Soviet figures, and Trotsky was "de facto" second-in-command during the early years of the Russian Soviet Republic. Ideologically a Marxist and Leninist, his thought and writings inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Trotsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898. He was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia, but in 1902 escaped to London, where he met Lenin and wrote for the party's newspaper Iskra. Trotsky sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks after the party's 1903 schism, but declared himself non-factional in 1904. During the failed 1905 Revolution, Trotsky returned to Russia and was elected chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. He was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and spent time in London, Vienna, Switzerland, Paris, and New York. After the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew the tsar, Trotsky returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played an important role in the October Revolution that overthrew the Provisional Government.
In Lenin's first government, Trotsky was appointed as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs (Foreign Minister) and led negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I. From 1918 to 1925, he served as the People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs (Defence Minister); he founded the Red Army and led it to victory in the Russian Civil War. He was an honorary president of the Third International. In 1922, Trotsky and Lenin formed an alliance against the growing Soviet bureaucracy; Lenin proposed that Trotsky become his Deputy Chairman and preside over economic management, but he declined. Trotsky led the party's Left Opposition, which opposed the concessions of the New Economic Policy. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky was the most prominent critic of Joseph Stalin, but was outmaneuvered by him and lost his positions: he was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and the party in 1927, internally exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937.
In exile, Trotsky wrote polemically against Stalinism, supporting proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country". Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution" posited that the socialist revolution could only survive if spread to advanced capitalist countries. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union had become a "degenerated workers' state" due to its isolation, and called for an end to Stalin's dictatorship. He founded the Fourth International in 1938 as an alternative to the Comintern. In 1936, Trotsky was sentenced to death in absentia at the first of the Moscow show trials, and in 1940, was assassinated at his home in Mexico City by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.
Written out of Soviet history under Stalin, Trotsky was one of the few of Stalin's rivals who was never politically rehabilitated by later leaders. In the West, Trotsky emerged as a hero of the anti-Stalinist left for his defense of a more democratic, internationalist form of socialism against Stalinist totalitarianism, and for his intellectual contributions to Marxism. While some of his wartime actions have proved controversial, such as his ideological defence of the Red Terror and suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, scholarship ranks Trotsky's leadership of the Red Army highly among historical figures, and he is credited for his major involvement with the military, economic, cultural and political development of the Soviet Union.
World War II (1941-1945)
1941: Order No. 270 - surrender to the enemy was equated with treason, families of POWs faced repression.
wikipedia clipping
Order No. 270 (Russian: Приказ № 270, romanized: Prikaz No. 270), entitled "On the responsibility of military personnel for surrendering and leaving weapons to the enemy" (Об ответственности военнослужащих за сдачу в плен и оставление врагу оружия, Ob otvetstvennosti voyennosluzhashchikh za sdachu v plen i ostavleniye vragu oruzhiya) issued on 16 August 1941, by Joseph Stalin during the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, ordered Red Army personnel to "fight to the last", virtually banned commanders from surrendering, and set out severe penalties for senior officers and deserters regarded as derelicting their duties. Order 270 is widely regarded as the basis of subsequent, often controversial Soviet policies regarding prisoners of war.
1942: Order No. 227 ("Not a step back") - introduction of blocking detachments and punishment for retreat.
wikipedia clipping
rder No. 227 (Russian: Приказ № 227, romanized: Prikaz No. 227) was an order issued on 28 July 1942 by Joseph Stalin, who was acting as the People's Commissar of Defence. It is known for its line "Not a step back!" (Ни шагу назад!, Ni shagu nazad!), which became the primary slogan of the Soviet press in summer 1942.
Order No. 227 established that each front must create one to three penal battalions (Russian: штрафной батальон, romanized: shtrafnoy batalyon, lit. 'penalty battalion', commonly known as штрафбат, shtrafbat) of up to 800 middle-ranking commanders and high-ranking commanders accused of disciplinary problems, which were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front lines. From 1942 to 1945, a total of 422,700 Red Army personnel were sentenced to penal battalions as a result of courts-martial. The order also directed that each army must create "blocking detachments" at the rear that would shoot "panic-mongers and cowards". In the first three months, blocking detachments shot 1,000 penal troops and sent 24,000 to penal battalions. By October 1942, the idea of regular blocking detachments was unofficially dropped.
Intended to galvanise the morale of the hard-pressed Red Army and emphasize patriotism, it had a generally detrimental effect and was not consistently implemented by commanders who viewed diverting troops to create blocking detachments as a waste of manpower. On 29 October 1944, blocking detachments were officially disbanded by Stalin's order No. 349 citing the changed situation at the front.
1941-1945: Deportation of peoples suspected of collaboration or disloyalty.
Wikipedia clipping about the deportation of the Kolmyks
Deportation of the Kalmyks, codename Operation Ulusy (Russian: Операция «Улусы») was the Soviet deportation of more than 93,000 people of Kalmyk nationality, and non-Kalmyk women with Kalmyk husbands, on 28–31 December 1943. Families and individuals were forcibly relocated in cattle wagons to special settlements for forced labor in Siberia. Kalmyk women married to non-Kalmyk men were exempted from the deportations. The government's official reason for the deportation was an accusation of Axis collaboration during World War II based on the approximately 5,000 Kalmyks who fought in the Nazi-affiliated Kalmykian Cavalry Corps. The government refused to acknowledge that more than 23,000 Kalmyks served in the Red Army and fought against Axis forces at the same time.
NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria and his deputy commissar Ivan Serov implemented the forced relocation on direct orders from Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. Up to 10,000 servicemen from the NKVD-NKGB troops participated in the deportation. It was part of the Soviet forced settlement program and population transfers that affected several million Soviet citizens from ethnic minority groups between the 1930s and the 1950s. The specific targeting of Kalmyks was based on a number of factors, including the group's alleged anti-communist sentiment and Buddhist culture.
The deportation contributed to more than 16,000 deaths, resulting in a 17% mortality rate for the deported population. The Kalmyks were rehabilitated in 1956 after Nikita Khrushchev became the new Soviet Premier and undertook a process of de-Stalinization. In 1957, the Kalmyks were released from special settlements and allowed to return to their home region, which was formalized as the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. By 1959, more than 60% of the remaining Kalmyks had returned home. The loss of life and socioeconomic upheaval of the deportations, however, had a profound impact on the Kalmyks that is still felt today. On 14 November 1989 the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union declared all of Stalin's deportations "illegal and criminal". Contemporary historical analyses consider these deportations an example of persecution and a crime against humanity.
Post-War Years (1945-1953)
1945-1946: Continued deportations and repressions against peoples who were deported during the war, as well as against POWs returned from Germany.
1948-1953: Campaigns against "rootless cosmopolitans" and Jewish doctors, known as the "Doctors' Plot".
Stalin's Death and Its Aftermath:
1953: Stalin's death leads to the beginning of de-Stalinization:
The Leningrad Affair starts to be reviewed.
Amnesty for some prisoners, including those convicted under political charges.