Davison History Department

The Purges

 

Stalin’s power in the USSR grew to such an extent that his people could not even think of opposing him. Yet Stalin remained paranoid that people were out to get him and take his power. Before 1934 Stalin had accused some engineers of sabotage in the Donbass mining region. Several former Mensheviks were also put on trial. There was little evidence in either case. However it was in 1934 that the Purges really began.

 

Petrograd had been renamed Leningrad after Lenin died in 1924. Kirov was the leader of the Leningrad Communist Party. He was popular and had disagreed with Stalin before. At the 1934 Party Conference the members voted for the new Politburo. Stalin’s name was not called out first. Kirov’s was.  Stalin felt very threatened by this and worried that other leaders were more popular than him.

 

In 1934 Kirov was murdered.  Stalin was the chief mourner at the funeral. Many historians suspect that Stalin ordered the murder himself. Stalin then used Kirov’s murder as an excuse to say that his life was in danger and that “enemies of the people” were everywhere and must be cleared from the USSR. Within a few months the NKVD had arrested 40,000 people in Leningrad alone.

 

The purges began to accelerate. First there were the “Show Trials” of the old Bolsheviks: Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936 and Bukharin in 1938. They were public trials open to the media. They confessed to false charges under torture from the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. They admitted to being enemies of and traitors to the USSR and were shot. Around 500,000 other party members were arrested for “anti soviet activities” and shot or sent to labour camps (gulags). In 1940 Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico by Stalin’s agents.

 

After the Communist Party Stalin turned to the Army. Around 25,000 officers (1/5) were purged, including the supreme commander of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky.

 

The purges then extended to university lecturers, teachers, miners, engineers, factory managers and ordinary workers. It is said that every family in the USSR lost someone. Children had to fend for themselves without their parents, wives divorced husbands in order to survive.  One of the most frightening aspects was the unpredictability. Arrests took place in the middle of the night (the NKVD vans were nicknamed “black ravens”) and victims were not told what they were accused of. They were given days of psychological and physical torture until they broke and confessed to anything.  Even children were threatened and the death penalty age was reduced to 12 years. People lived in fear and terror. They would inform on each other to avoid arrest themselves. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents.  Even something as simple as being the first person to stop clapping after a speech by Stalin was cause for arrest.

Millions of people disappeared. By 1937 an estimated 18 million people had been transported to labour camps. 10 million died. The people were kept in camps for between 10 and 25 years and were used to build Stalin’s big projects such as canals and dams.

 

The purges seriously weakened the USSR because it killed or removed so many able and skilled people. Factories were in chaos as their managers disappeared overnight and it was the same in schools and universities and hospitals. When Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941 one of it’s major weaknesses was the lack of experienced, good quality officers. Stain also destroyed independent thinking. Everyone spared knew their lived depended on thinking exactly as Stalin wanted them to. The terror and long term impact haunted generations.