Although the purging of Stalin’s political opponents was partially due to Stalin’s paranoia, it was also, as I have already mentioned, due to his fear of opposition. He needed a free hand if his policies were to work. However, his fear of being ousted from power was not necessarily unfounded. In 1934, at the 17th annual party conference a vote of the party membership decided to replace Stalin with Kirov. There were only 3 votes against Kirov, but 292 votes against Stalin. The result was that 289 votes were burned so only there were only 3 votes against each candidate. However, Stalin could not tolerate this popularity and rivalry. He needed absolute power. The result was that Nickolyev, the husband of Kirov’s secretary, murdered Kirov in December of 1934 under orders from the secret police. Kirov was given a state funeral, but Stalin set about consolidating his power by forcibly removing all those who voted against him. In this way Stalin was paranoid, he was neither willing to share nor delegate power, this was the motivation behind the centralisation of power, he wanted his power to be undiluted and absolute. Stalin’s greatest fear was being ousted from his position of power before his death. The result was that he held Russia in an ‘iron grip’. Another example of his fear of losing power was the purging of the army. In early 1937, the Germans forged a letter from Tukhachevsky, the chief of staff in the Soviet army, to friends in Germany, telling of plans to overthrow Stalin’s regime. These documents were well planted by the Germans and found by Stalin. Stalin then became extremely fearful for his own personal safety and his loosing power. The result was the purging of the entire Russian army including the 11 Commissars for defence and 75 of the 80 members of the Supreme Military Council were executed, along with all 8 admirals and half of all the officer corps. The result was a severely weakened Russian army just before the commencement of the Second World War.
The difficulty is whether or not Stalin’s fear of loosing power can be described as a form of paranoia. It is clear that in so many of the actions which historians have attributed to Stalin’s paranoia, Stalin was at least partially justified in reacting in the way he did. For example, Stalin’s obsessive fear of Trotsky was at least in part justified by the legitimacy of Trotsky’s claim to the Russian leadership. The eventual murder of Trotsky by means of an ice pick through the head, though considered by many to be brutal and unnecessary as Trotsky was no longer a threat to the regime in South America, did prevent Trotsky informing the world of what was really going on in Russia and consequently, may have prevented outside intervention.
Stalin was clearly paranoid about his power within Russia being compromised or removed from him by others in the way that he had removed power from Bucharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev along with the other old Bolsheviks. In this way after the Kirov threat was removed it seems that he became determined not to let any other party member come close to gaining a similar influence and gaining a position from where it was conceivably possible to oust him from power. In this way it can be said that events contributed to the repeated purging of those who posed a potential threat to his leadership either by means of past claims (the old Bolsheviks) or those whom appeared to oppose him and his policies. However, Stalin became so paranoid about those around him attempting to remove him from power that any hint of opposition led in many cases to over cautious purging. Repeatedly he purged the secret police force, and the mass purges of the army in 1937 showed how paranoid Stalin really was about losing power to a military or political threat from within the party. He was not willing to allow any other party to compromise his supreme power in anyway for fear of losing his power.
In conclusion, it seems that Stalin’s complex character makes it difficult to highlight any single factor to which one could contribute the great purges. Certainly, his paranoia played some part as many of the purges were unnecessary to achieve the goal of removing the threat to his power. However, in many cases, although Stalin can be described as over-zealous in his purging, the actions taken were necessary in order to maintain power. The purges of many ordinary people can also be attributed to the search for a scapegoat to avoid the blame falling on Stalin.
Stalin’s purges did achieve his aim by enabling Russia to become a world Superpower, however, there was a high cost. Many of the purges were extremely widespread and in my opinion, many of these deaths could be described as unnecessary and could be attributed to Stalin’s paranoia. However, in most cases, the purges had a motive, this was either maintenance of supreme power or else finding somebody to blame for the failure to realise his targets. In this way, Stalin’s paranoia was only partially to blame for the purges. His desire to maintain power and achieve near impossible targets to a greater degree led to the purges of the Russian people under Stalin.
The Purges- what happened?
The most prominent elements of Stalin's Purges, for most researchers, were the intensive campaigns waged within key Soviet institutions and sectors like the Communist Party, the Army, the NKVD (secret police), and scientists and engineers. In December 1934, the popular Leningrad party leader, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated, allegedly on Stalin's orders. This provided the spark for the escalating series of purges that Stalin launched almost immediately, under emergency "security" legislation "stating that in cases involving people accused of terrorist acts, investing authorities were to speed up their work, judicial authorities were not to allow appeals for clemency or other delays in which the sentence was death, and the NKVD was to execute those sentenced to death immediately." Nikolai Bukharin,
Purge victim
The "Old Bolshevik" elite was targeted in three key "show trials" between 1936 and 1938, in which leaders such as Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Grigori Zinoviev were accused of complicity in Kirov's murder and conspiring with Trotskyite and "rightist" elements to undermine communism in the USSR. The evidence presented against the accused was almost nonexistent, convictions relying on confessions extracted through torture and threats against family members. But convictions there were, and most of the Bolshevik "old guard" was sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment. "Dumfounded, the world watched three plays in a row, three wide-ranging and expensive dramatic productions in which the powerful leaders of the fearless Communist Party, who had turned the entire world upside down and terrified it, now marched forth like doleful, obedient goats and bleated out everything they had been ordered to, vomited all over themselves, cringingly abased themselves and their convictions, and confessed to crimes they could not in any wise have committed."
When the "Old Bolsheviks" had been consigned to oblivion, their successors and replacements quickly followed them into the void: "The new generation of Stalinist careerists, who had adapted themselves completely to the new system, still found themselves arrested. ... They were succeeded by younger but similar characters, who again often fell quickly. The purging of the army, meanwhile, saw about 35,000 military officers shot or imprisoned. The destruction of the officer corps, and in particular the execution of the brilliant chief-of-staff Marshal Tukhachevsky, is considered one of the major reasons for the spectacular Nazi successes in the early months of the German in 1941.)
But the impetus to "cleanse" the social body rapidly spilled beyond these elite boundaries, and the greatest impact of the Purge was felt in the wider society -- where millions of ordinary Soviet citizens assisted in "unmasking" their compatriots. Frank Smitha describes this mass hysteria well, writing that
A society that is intense in its struggle for change has a flip side to its idealism: intolerance. People saw enemies everywhere, enemies who wanted to destroy the revolution and diminish the results of their hard work and accomplishments, enemies who wanted to restore capitalism for selfish reasons against the collective interests of the nation. If those at the top of the Communist Party and an old revolutionary like Trotsky could join the enemy, what about lesser people? In factories and offices, mass meetings were held in which people were urged to be vigilant against sabotage. It was up to common folks to make the distinction between incompetence and intentional wrecking [i.e., sabotage], and any mishap might be blamed on wrecking. Denunciations became common. Neighbours denounced neighbours. Denunciations were a good way of striking against people one did not like, including one's parents, a way of eliminating people blocking one's promotion, and ... a means of proving one's patriotism. Many realized that some innocent people were being victimized, and the saying went around that "when you chop wood the chips fly." As with Lenin, it was believed that some who were innocent would have to be victimized if all of the guilty were to be apprehended.
The campaigns were further fuelled by the "denunciation quotas" established under the authority of Nikolai Yezhov, who took over as head of the NKVD in September 1936 and immediately widened the scope of secret-police persecutions. Relatives of those accused and arrested, including wives and children down to the age of twelve, were themselves often condemned under the "counter-terrorism" legislation: "Wives of enemies of the people" was one of four categories of those sentenced to execution or long prison terms. Women accounted for only a small minority of those executed and incarcerated on political grounds (perhaps 2 percent of the former and 5 percent of the latter). Conquest notes that "Women on the whole seem to have survived [incarceration] much better than men," although "in the mixed[-sex] camps, noncriminal [i.e., political-prisoner] women were frequently mass-raped by urkas [male criminals], or had to sell themselves for bread, or to get protection from camp officials.") But wives spared arrest or state-sanctioned murder nonetheless encountered extreme hardship. "For the wives ... life was very bad," writes Conquest. "... All reports agree that the women lost their jobs, their rooms, and their permits, had to sell possessions, and had to live on occasional work or on the few relatives who might help them. Ignorant of their husbands' fate, they faced a worsening future.
Figures of deaths due to purges
The main evidence for the gendercidal impact of the "Great Terror" lies in the Soviet census of 1959. In a fascinating addendum to the original edition of his work on the Purge period, The Great Terror, Robert Conquest uses the census figures to argue that the Soviet population "was some 20 million lower than Western observers had expected after making allowance for war losses." "But the main point," he notes, "arises from a consideration of the figures for males and females in the different age groups." He then unveils a striking table indicating that whereas age cohorts up to 25-29 displayed the usual 51-to-49 percent split of women to men, from 30-34 the gap widened to 55 to 45 percent. Thereafter, the disparity became massive, reflecting the generations of males caught up in the purges and the Great Patriotic War. From 35-39, women outnumbered men by 61 to 39 percent; from 40-54, the figure was 62 to 38 percent; in the 55-59 age group, 67 to 33 percent; from 60-69, 65 to 35 percent; and 70 or older, 68 to 32 percent.
Arrests, 1937-1938 - about 7 million
Executed - about 1 million
Died in camps - about 2 million
In prison, late 1938 - about 1 million
In camps, late 1938 - about 8 million
The aftermath
The impetus of the Purge waned at the end of 1938, by which time "the snowball system [of accusations] had reached a stage where half the urban population were down on the NKVD lists," and the proportion of the entire Soviet population arrested had reached one in every twenty. "One can virtually say that every other family in the country on average must have had one of its members in jail," proportions that were "far higher among the educated classes. ... Even from Stalin's point of view, the whole thing had become impossible. ... To have gone on would have been impossible economically, politically, and even physically, in that interrogators, prisons, and camps, already grotesquely overloaded, could not have managed it. And meanwhile, the work of the mass Purge had been done. The country was crushed." Stalin now eased the pressure, dismissing Yezhov from his post (he would subsequently be executed) and declaring that "grave mistakes" had occurred, though on balance the results of the Purge "were beneficial."
But "terror was ... by no means abandoned as an instrument of political rule; indeed, four of the six executed members of Stalin's Politburo perished between 1939 and 1941." And overall, instead of subsiding, the Great Terror simply changed its choice of targets. After the Germans and Soviets divided up Poland between them in September 1939, nearly half a million Poles (almost exclusively male) and 200,000 Polish prisoners-of-war were sent to camps, where the vast majority died. When the tables turned and the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin pulled back, releasing many surviving prisoners to serve in the armed forces. But those hoping that the end of the Second World War, in which the USSR played the major role in defeating the Nazis and their allies, would mean a liberalization of society were sadly disillusioned. Instead, Stalin allowed his old paranoia to surface anew. Returning were sent to the labour camps as suspected "traitors," and fresh "plots" were discovered that swelled the camps' population to some 12 million people by the time Stalin finally died in March 1953.
The man who emerged as Soviet leader after a brief interregnum following Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev, acted swiftly to dismantle much of Stalin's legacy. Most of the camp inmates were released, and after Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, many of the prominent victims of the Purge were posthumously rehabilitated. But the Khrushchev "thaw" ended even before his fall from power in 1964, and the subsequent regime of Leonid Brezhnev staged a limited rehabilitation of Stalin himself. The Nobel Prize-winning writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose massive work The Gulag Archipelago (published abroad) did so much to bring the horrors of Stalinism to light, was exiled for his pains in the 1970s. Only with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 did Stalin's legacy begin to be seriously investigated and re-examined -- a process that led to a spiralling series of revelations, each more horrific than the last. With the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet scholars like Edvard Radzinsky and Dmitri Volkogonov have published prominent exposés of Stalinist rule, based on newly-opened archives. And the estimates of the death toll arrived at by Robert Conquest and others, long denounced as craven exaggerations, have been shown instead to be, if anything, understated.
