Soviet history - The Purge.

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THE PURGE


Lenin and Dzerzhinskii, not Stalin, organized the first Soviet institutions of police coercion and terror. It happened not long a after the October Revolution. During the Civil War the Cheka made widespread use of torture and execution squads to deal with counter-revolutionaries, speculators, liberal and socialist politicians, and other alleged "enemies of the people."

A large number of such ''enemies'' were placed in concentration camps or executed between 1918 and 1920. Under NEP such drastic methods were no longer required, but the Soviet authorities still relied on the secret police, which was known as the GPU between 1922 and 1923 and the OGPU between 1923 and 1934. The secret police was used to prevent priests, non-Bolshevik socialists, White Guardists, and dispossessed landowners and bourgeois from trying to regain for themselves some of the influence over Russian affairs that they had just lost in the course of the Revolution and the Civil War.

In addition, the Soviet state refused to tolerate work stoppages or violations of its economic regulations by kulaks, private traders, and entrepreneurs. A considerable number of such kulaks, Nepmen, and ''instigators'' of discontent among workers were arrested and put in concentration (i.e., ''corrective labor'') camps during the twenties.

The decision to collectivize agriculture and to hasten industrialization in the late twenties almost necessarily led to rapid expansion of the secret police and prison camp apparatus. The most immediate problem of police control naturally concerned the peasantry, which desperately resisted collectivization. The Soviet state not only used police intimidation, class warfare, and the army to deal with particularly serious cases of peasant resistance to collectivization but it also deported millions of members of peasant families (especially those labeled as kulaks) to forced settlements and concentration camps. As early as 1930 the rapidly growing prison-camp population required the creation of a special Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps headed by G. G. Iagoda, who had worked for the secret police since the Civil War and was soon to become the chairman of the NKVD.

The technical intelligentsia also posed a problem, for in the late twenties a large proportion of them still questioned the wisdom of forced industrialization. It was apparently in an effort to cow and intimidate such technical experts that the Soviet secret police staged the first of its famous ''show trials'' during the early years of rapid industrialization. In these trials, the first of which took place in 1928, a number of Russian and foreign engineers and technical specialists were tried, convicted, and, in many instances, executed for having allegedly attempted to ''wreck'' and sabotage the First Five-Year Plan under the orders of French, Polish, German, or British capitalists.

In almost all cases the accused were convicted not on the basis of evidence but on that of confessions obtained through torture, continuous interrogations over extended periods of time, and threatened reprisals against the wives and children of the accused. It seems to have been especially the experience gained in the course of these trials that enabled the Soviet secret police to perfect the torture and inquisitorial methods that it was to use so effectively in the ''Great Purge'' of the second part of the thirties.

At the beginning of the thirties Stalin still had not achieved complete control over the secret police as a reliable instrument of his own personal dictatorship. Thus in 1932, when Old Bolshevik M. N. Riutin circulated in party circles a 200-page anti-Stalin document demanding the abandonment of forced collectivization, the reduction of investment in industry, and the removal of Stalin, "the grave digger of the Revolution and of Russia," from his post at the head of the party, Stalin failed in his efforts to have Riutin shot. Indeed, the matter was referred by the secret police to higher party authorities, and Stalin experienced the humiliation of being unable to obtain a Politburo majority in favor of Riutin's execution. At the beginning of 1933 he experienced another setback when he could not obtain from the Politburo approval of the death penalty for A. P. Smirnov, a party member since 1896, for having advocated ideas similar to those of Riutin among a small number of old Bolshevik workers in Moscow. Both episodes illustrated that there were limits beyond which many normally pro-Stalin police officials and Politburo members still were not willing to go.

The years 1933-1934 were relatively quiet and peaceful one in a decade of Soviet history generally characterized by brutal police terror and radical social and economic change. For Stalin the most trying year of that decade was certainly 1932, when the outcome of his desperate struggle with the peasantry was still uncertain and when Nadezhda Allilueva, his second wife, committed suicide after having dared to criticize him for the suffering collectivization had caused countless Soviet peasants. However, senior-level party leaders, including his former left-wing and right-wing opponents, sided with Stalin and against the peasants, while hundreds of thousands of less prominent Communists, especially Ukrainians and members of other national minorities who had shown insufficient zeal during the collectivization campaign, were expelled from the party during 1933 and the first months of 1934.

As for the peasants themselves, their will to resist Collectivization was broken after millions of them died during the terrible and man-made famine of the winter 1932-1933. Having won this major battle, certain party leaders decided that the extreme and often cruel methods employed during the period of the First Five-Year Plan were no longer necessary. In the Politburo a ''liberal'' faction appears to have spoken out in favor of easing pressures on the population and forgiving some of the sins of opposition leaders.

In mid-1933 Zinoviev and Kamenev were allowed to return from Siberia, where they had been sent in 1932 in connection with the Riutin affair, and (as they had already done on previous occasions) to confess their various errors. At the Seventeenth Party Congress early in 1934, party members forgot many of their previous differences and united in extravagant praise of Stalin's leadership; but a majority of those present endorsed Ordzhonikidze's proposal that the party should scale down the rate of economic growth projected for the Second Five Year Plan. Such a reduction in the rate of industrial growth was clearly contrary to the wishes of Stalin, who, as early as 1931, had warned against the dangers of Russia's backwardness:

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"We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we will be crushed."


The brief period of relaxed tension and good feeling ended abruptly in December 1934 with the murder of S. M. Kirov, the head of the Leningrad party organization and a full member of the Politburo since 1930. Kirov, a brilliant orator and an extremely popular figure in party circles, reportedly had supported Politburo ''liberals'' in opposing Riutin's execution and favoring a reduction of the tempo of industrialization. Stalin may well have ...

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