As a form of criminality could be seen slave labors. People accused of being kulaks, saboteurs or enemies of the state were sent to a host of new labor camps. Prisoners who were usually sentenced to ten or 25 years, rarely lived for more than two years because food supplies, illnesses were terrible and camp discipline fatal. In the course of the 1930s the government used increasingly harsh methods to impose discipline. In the case of mishaps, which in the atmosphere of the 1930s was a serious matter indeed. E.g. workers were administratively punished, at times even losing their ration cards, a punishment that was likely to mean starvation.3 No one stopped Stalin’s policy which thanks to slaves provided the growth in economy in such a short time.
Because of violence Stalin was able to make use of this power to consolidate his control at the top of the party structure. In the first year of ruling Stalin expelled Trotsky from the party and deported from Russia. Stalin then hired some assassins who found Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940 and murdered him with an . He, starting from 1934, began to systematic terrorizing of colleagues and Party members. Criminality was his tool to keep the power. Anyone considered a threat to Stalin’s authority was destroyed. In 1933-4 nearly one million Party members were purged. The purges rarely involved imprisonment or execution. Stalin still felt that people were going against him. In the Great Purge, Stalin went after and killed anyone that proposed any kind of threat to him. In the end, almost 800,000 people were killed.4
The next clear evidence was the fact of show trials. In August 1936 Kamenev and Zinoviev and 14 others were put on public trial charged into involvement in Kirov’s murder and with conspiring against the government. In fact Stalin used the excuse of Kirov’s murder to move against his enemies. Kirov was murdered from Stalin’s order because he was a popular figure and thus a potential rival. “Kirov’s assassination was followed by thousands of arrests and hundreds of executions. In the following period of terror, mass murder was carried out on different levels. The most spectacular were the trials of ex-leaders of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin’s comrades. With a few exceptions, the entire leadership of the revolution was exterminated.”5 It is only example of creating such situations. Using show trials Stalin was intend on revealing the scale of the conspiracy against his, thus proving the need for the purging to continue. Stalin, it seems, ordered the destruction of his closest comrades
by a nod of the head.
The mass terror was seen everywhere – generals of the army were murdered, delegates of Party Congress, the greatest impact of the purges was on the middle and lower ranks of society. Suspects were usually arrested in the middle of the night and tortured until they confessed to bogus crimes.6 Stalin’s policy was a mass murder on an extraordinary scale, “The so-called Great Terror, symbolized by the show trials of Old Bolsheviks in August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938, destroyed all semblance of opposition to Stalin and left him supreme at the apex of the party. He was now the unchallenged leader of the country, the vozhd...”.7
Stalin was nearly blamed for murdering his wife. There have been rumors, but the truth is still not known.8 If not, there is another version proving Stalin’s cruelty – that his wife committed suicide blaming him for the catastrophe he had brought to the USSR.
Stalin’s orders were so brutal that “violence and terror had already become part of Soviet life”.9 Criminality was a way of defense against a plot to overthrow the leader created by Stalin himself. He found it very useful and easy way of terrorizing people into obeying orders and providing a source of slave labors. The killing did not take pace behind his back. Stalin personally checked and signed execution lists. Rightly we are often tempted to regard the history of the post-1953 period as a long recuperation from the ravages of tyranny, because in fact his ruling was the ruling of criminality.
Words:996
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Alan Farmer, Modern European history 1890 – 1990, London 2008,124
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James R. Miller, Encyclopedia of Russian history, New York, 2004, 479
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Peter Kenez, A history of the Soviet Union from the beginning to the end, New York, 2006, 113
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James R. Miller, Encyclopedia of Russian history, New York, 2004, 1248
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Peter Kenez, A history of the Soviet Union from the beginning to the end, New York, 2006, 106
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Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, Part three: His life, his death, 16
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James R. Miller, Encyclopedia of Russian history, New York, 2004, 1457
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James R. Miller, Encyclopedia of Russian history, New York, 2004, 1564
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Peter Kenez, A history of the Soviet Union from the beginning to the end, New York, 2006, 105
Bibliography:
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Farmer Alan, Modern European history 1890 – 1990, London 2008
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Hamburg Gary, TTC, Lecture 9:Stalin and the Great terror
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Kenez Peter, A history of the Soviet Union from the beginning to the end, New York, 2006
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Miller James R, Encyclopedia of Russian history, New York, 2004
