The Great Terror

The origins of the Terror 

Andrei Vyshinsky, 
chief prosecutor at the show trials.

See here for a comprehensive account.

‘The party can never be mistaken’, said Rubashov. ‘You and I can make a mistake. Not the Party. The Party, comrade, is more than you and I and a thousand others like you and I. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in history. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows toward her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. History knows her way. She makes no mistakes. He who had not absolute faith in History does not belong in the party’s ranks.’ Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)

The Great Terror: an overview

By 1928 Stalin had defeated the Left Opposition. Trotsky was in exile and his former supporters, Zinoviev and Kamenev, had been humiliated. With his triumph, the atmosphere in the Soviet Union changed from one of relative toleration to one of fear. Stalinist leadership exercised a monopoly control over the press and radio. No voice was raised in public to criticise the leader or to contradict him on a statement of fact (even when he asserted, for example, that living standards were rising in the winter of 1932-3). Stalin and his associates were mounting a huge cultural revolution that aimed to refashion society from top to bottom. This involved waging war on customary ideas such as religion. It was important to manipulate public opinion, and the unmasking of traitors and wreckers provided a suffering population with a target for hatred. It also provided a convenient explanation for the many mistakes involved in the Five Year Plans. 

Stalin had none of Hitler's gifts as a performer. He also faced a bigger problem that Hitler in that he had to communicate with a much larger country, with lower standards of education. One way of communicating was to use show trials as a form of political theatre built round confessions extracted beforehand with the aid of physical and psychological torture. These trials were given maximum publicity by press and radio, including the international press, who were often deceived.

Stalin was paranoid but he had much to be paranoid about. There were many who hated him: Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, nationalists, the religious and up to three million émigrés, who longed for the collapse of the Soviet Union. The collectivisation of agriculture was to add many more.

The estimated number of victims of his purges ranges between 180,000 and a million. However there is much dispute about the figures and there will never be a precise number. (What, for example, about the children of the 'enemies of the people' who died in the state-run orphanages, or the elderly parents who died for lack of care?) It has been estimated that one in three families lost a member during this period. 


The ‘Right Opposition'

Nikolai Bukharin,  one of the most celebrated 
of Stalin's victims
(executed, 1938).

After his victory over the Left, Stalin turned to his former allies, the ‘Rightists’, the supporters of NEP within the Politburo: Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky, chairman of the Soviet trade unions. Bukharin was the editor of Izvestiya, head of the Comintern, and the party’s Marxist theoretician. Stalin had treated him as his political equal. However, in July 1928 Bukharin took the politically disastrous step of opening secret discussions with some of the defeated Left Opposition leaders. Kamenev later informed the police of the meeting, including the fact that Bukharin called Stalin, 

Genghis Khan, an unscrupulous intriguer who sacrifices everything else to the preservation of power. 

The industrial trials

An early sign of what was to follow can be seen in the first of the show trials, held between May and July 1928 when fifty-three engineers and ‘industrial specialists’, including several foreigners working in the north Caucasus town of Shakhty, were charged with deliberate sabotage. This was the first of a series of show trials of bourgeois experts in which the prosecution alleged intervention by foreign capitalist powers and the accused confessed their guilt and offered circumstantial accounts of their conspiracies. 

Collectivisation and industrialisation

'Come and join our kolkhoz!'
Soviet poster from the 1930s

The end of NEP

The period 1929-32 saw an industrialisation drive accompanied by the collectivisation of agriculture – at first voluntary and then forced. The essence of the policy – the abandonment of NEP – was popular with many party members. Stalin was able to play on the disillusionment with NEP and the restlessness of the party’s youth, nostalgic for the heroic days of the civil war. But this meant destroying a policy that had generated some economic development and relative political freedom. 

The collectivisation of agriculture

At the 15th Party Conference in December 1927, the leadership was developing what was to become the 1st Five Year Plan for industry. For this policy to succeed there would have to be a guaranteed supply of grain, which would have to come from the labour of the peasants. They numbered about 108 million people and were still more than 92 per cent of the population. During the period of NEP many of the better-off peasants had flourished. About 5.9 million were classed as rich peasants (kulaks: the Russian for ‘fist’). 

In 1929 the First Five Year Plan was introduced. It involved the voluntary entry of peasants into collective farms (kolkhozes) within five years. By the end of the year about 4.5 million had joined.

The war on the kulaks

However, Stalin was impatient with what he saw as the slow pace of voluntary collectivisation. A much greater transformation was underway, the enforced mass collectivisation that has been described by some historians as the second Soviet revolution. This was class warfare: the party had to control the countryside and the peasant had to be subordinate to the industrial worker.

On January 1930 the Politburo decreed that kulak property was to be confiscated and their land transferred to the kolkhoz. To break the kulaks’ resistance the regime revived the old tsarist tradition of the administrative deportation order, and 25,000 party activists descended on the villages to enforce these decrees.


By July 1930 over 320,000 households had been subjected to dekulakisation. Entire families were uprooted. Some were shot. Between 1930 and 1933 over two million were exiled to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other underpopulated regions, where they lived out the rest of their lives as ‘special exiles’, forbidden to leave their villages. A further 100,000 were sent to the Gulag.

However, the new giant farms proved unworkable because they lacked machinery. When the much-heralded tractors finally arrived, they often broke down. There were no spare parts and no-one knew how to repair them. On 2 March 1930 Stalin published in Pravda an article entitled (incredibly) ‘Dizzy with Success’ in which he backtracked on the collectivisation policy and reintroduced the voluntary principle. The result was that, given the choice, peasants deserted the collective farms in droves. The policy therefore had to be renewed - and this time the compulsion was here to stay.

Collectivisation enforced

The old village community, the mir, was abolished and its place taken by the kolkhoz administration, headed by the appointed Chairman, replacing the peasants’ traditional leadership that had been removed by deportation. By 1932, 62 per cent of peasant households had been collectivised. By 1937, it was 381,000 households (93 per cent).

Stalin triumphant

Stalin survives

With Lenin dead, his Testament was the ‘smoking gun’. Would it destroy Stalin?

At the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924, Lenin's widow, Krupskaya presented the Central Committee with a sealed packed containing the Testament. It was a dangerous moment for Stalin, but Zinoviev and Kamenev were prepared to back him and Trotsky was afraid of appearing divisive - committing the supreme Soviet sin of 'factionalism'. Kamenev hinted that the Testament was a product of Lenin's senility.

Our dear Ilyich's sickness prevented him at times from being fair.

He thus helped save the man who was to destroy him.

The fall of Trotsky

In October 1924 Trotsky published Lessons of October, arguing for ‘permanent revolution’ and 'world revolution'. Stalin responded with the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’, the view that the Soviet Union could build socialism on its own without needing to export it. In the following year, Zinoviev and Kamenev once more unwittingly laid the foundations of their destruction. Having supported Stalin in 1924, they became uncomfortable with his apparent support for a market economy and came to believe that Trotsky's warnings were correct. In 1926 they allied with Trotsky and formed what was known as the 'Left Opposition'

But Stalin's years of building up a patronage network were now bearing fruit. By the end of 1928 all three 'Leftists' (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev) had been expelled from the party. In mid-January 1929 Trotsky was dispatched to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan on the Chinese frontier. In 1929 he was deported to Turkey. Just before his departure he called on Communists throughout the world to struggle against Stalin.

After this Trotsky was erased from the records. Photographs were doctored and Eisenstein was ordered to leave him out of his film October.

Lenin's speech. An image edited
after Stalin's rise to remove Trotsky.
Public domain.

Zinoviev and Kamenev had recanted and were now back in favour - apparently. But, apart from Stalin, the man of the moment seemed to be Nikolai Bukharin President of the Comintern from 1926. He was a supporter of Lenin’s New Economic Policy and his call to the kulaks to enrich themselves was a startling departure from Bolshevik orthodoxy.

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin
Stalin's friend until destroyed by Stalin.
Public domain.

In 1929 Stalin's birthday was celebrated throughout the Soviet Union. This was the start of what was to be one of the most extraordinary personality cults in history.

After the Revolution (1): the establishment of Bolshevik power

Problems 

On 25 October 1917, Soviet power extended little beyond Petrograd, but in the following days the Bolsheviks gained control, through the soviets of most towns in northern and central Russia. By the beginning of 1918 they controlled urban Russia, but they faced formidable problems. How was peace with Germany to be achieved? What was the attitude of the peasantry to Lenin's government? How were the Bolsheviks to cope with the forces of separatism within the now defunct Russian Empire? How were they to run the country with banks and civil servants on strike? In early 1918 Russia was on the brink of catastrophe. 

The suppression of the Constituent Assembly 

The Tauride Palace, the meeting place of
the Constituent Assembly.

The regime's opponents found it difficult to mount coordinated action, and were waiting for the Constituent Assembly, which was to become the legal, elected authority. Though the Bolsheviks despised the form of democracy represented by the Assembly, they could not renege on their promise to convene it.

Voting for the Assembly began in mid-November and lasted for two weeks. All citizens aged twenty or over were eligible to vote. Voting took place over the entire territory of Russia, apart from the area under enemy occupation. Voters turned out in impressive numbers, with 44 million votes cast (out of a population recorded in the 1910 census of 160.7 million). Most people knew it was, in effect, a referendum on the Bolshevik regime.  

When the votes were counted, the peasants' party, the Socialist Revolutionaries received 16 million votes (38 per cent). But because the ballot papers had not distinguished between the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who supported the Bolsheviks, and the Right Socialist Revolutionaries, who did not, it was not clear how far these votes represented support for the regime. The Mensheviks won three per cent, the Kadets five per cent and the Ukrainian SRs 12 per cent (though this was largely a vote for national independence). The Bolsheviks performed relatively well, winning 10m votes (24 per cent), most of them cast by the soldiers and sailors of the industrial north. In Petrograd and Moscow they won a majority, but in the agricultural south, they did very badly.  Of the 715 members elected to the Constituent Assembly, the SRs had 370 seats, the Bolsheviks 175, the Kadets seventeen and the Mensheviks fifteen.

The election was thus a victory for the Left, but the Bolsheviks, who had not done well enough to form a government.

After the Revolution (2): the New Economic Policy and the rise of Stalin

Stalin confers with an ailing Lenin
at Gorki in September 1922.

The failure of War Communism

By the end of 1920 War Communism had reached such an extreme that all enterprises that employed more than five people had been nationalised and over 60 per cent of these factories had officially instituted ‘workers’ control’. In the rural areas, large estates were dismantled and the number of farms belonging to the wealthier peasants (kulaks) was reduced. The result of these policies was a steep decline in productivity and an intensification of class warfare.

The New Economic Policy

In March 1921 the Tenth Party Congress, in effect, abandoned the central planks of War Communism, replacing it with the New Economic Policy. Pleasants were allowed to sell their surplus through the free market and a limited amount of private enterprise returned to industry.  NEP was a gigantic gamble, a tactical retreat from economic orthodoxy. Agricultural and industrial production increased, and by 1927 wages and grain production were back to tsarist levels.  For the first time, financial relief was provided for the unemployed. In the new climate, small-time 'nepmen' tried to increase their profits - they and their fur-coated wives becoming deeply unpopular in the process. The most dramatic project of the NEP era is seen in the massive state electrification programme. This was accompanied by the building of  hospitals, theatres, cinemas and libraries. 

Economically, therefore, NEP was a success. But politically, it was a failure, leaving many Communists deeply disillusioned. 

Stalin

Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhughashvili) was born in Gori, Georgia, on 6 December 1878, the son of a cobbler and his wife. In 1888 he entered the Gori Church School to train as a priest. In 1894 he entered the Tiflis (Tbilisi) Spiritual Seminary, where he became an atheist with revolutionary leanings and consistently misbehaved. In May 1899 he left suddenly just before taking his final exam. He was already a member of a Marxist revolutionary group, and had taken the name Koba from a favourite poem. Stalin’s appearance was unremarkable. He was 5 feet 4 inches, stocky, had yellow-grey eyes, a face pockmarked from smallpox in his youth, and one arm longer than another. He never lost his Georgian accent and unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Trotsky, he was an uninspiring public speaker. 

Stalin in 1902, when his 
revolutionary pseudonym
was Koba

Revolutionary

In April 1902 he was arrested and imprisoned. In the autumn of 1903 he was dispatched to Siberia, but he escaped in early 1904. By this time the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks had taken place and he identified with the Bolsheviks. In December 1905 he was in Finland, where he met Lenin for the first time. The following years were spent in terrorism and also in raising money through criminal activities such as protection rackets and extortion - something that was only revealed by Khrushchev in 1956.  On 16 July 1906 he secretly married a seamstress, Kato (Ketevan Svanidze, and in March 1907 their son, Yacov, was born. After Kato's death in November 1907 he had virtually no contact with him. (He was shot by the Germans in 1943.)  In the same year Dzhughashvili was imprisoned a second time, but he escaped in 1909.