When Josef Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union in 1927, he began to establish a totalitarian dictatorship. Driven by constant persecution mania and fear of surveillance, he had potential political opponents as well as various minorities persecuted and interned. The true extent of these persecutions only came to light after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The period from 1936 to 1938 in particular – known today as the “Great Terror” – is regarded as the tragic climax.
Stalin’s path to the top
Born on December 18, 1878 in Gori, Georgia, Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – as he was known until he adopted the martial name “Stalin” in 1912 – suffered in his childhood under his drinking and violent father. Despite this, he showed charisma and intelligence at an early age, which led to him being accepted at a church school. This is worth mentioning because, as the son of a shoemaker, this school was generally not open to him. Although Dzhugashvili regularly got into fights, he left school at the top of his class in 1894 and was recommended to attend the Orthodox seminary in Tbilisi, the most important higher education institution in Georgia at the time. https://militaeraktuell.at/bundesheer-pioniere-d-bruecke-in-traiskirchen/ It was there that he first came into contact with Marxist ideas. In 1898, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (SDAPR) and left the seminary. He quickly became radicalized, distanced himself from his moderate comrades-in-arms – the so-called Mensheviks – and added intrigues and smear campaigns to his repertoire. In 1902, the now 23-year-old Josef was arrested for the first time, and several more arrests were to follow. In 1907, Dzhugashvili and 20 other people attacked an armored car belonging to the Russian state bank in Tbilisi. According to official figures, five people were killed in the attack; today it is estimated that around 40 were killed. He had first come into contact with Lenin two years earlier. Politically, however, the two did not always see eye to eye.
In 1913, he was arrested again and subsequently exiled to Eastern Siberia. It was not until 1917 that Stalin – as he was now known – left the region for Petrograd, where he arrived shortly after the February Revolution. After an unsuccessful coup attempt in the summer of 1917, the Bolsheviks, as the grouping around Lenin and Stalin was called, were persecuted and forced underground. However, as early as October, the October Revolution succeeded in overthrowing them and Lenin was able to seize power. In the civil war that followed, the Bolsheviks were able to hold on to power. From this point onwards, Stalin, who was one of Lenin’s strongest allies despite their political differences, was also part of Russia’s leadership. After Lenin’s withdrawal from politics due to illness in December 1922, a leadership trio around Josef Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev took over. The other two men quickly became opponents within the party and were forced out of the party by Stalin in 1926. However, Stalin’s toughest opponent when he took power was Leon Trotsky. However, Stalin succeeded in expelling Trotsky from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1927, making him the de facto autocrat. From his 50th birthday in December 1929 – he had his actual date of birth, December 18, 1878, postponed by one year – Stalin had himself officially dubbed “leader”.
Terror as a tried and tested means
Already in the period after the October Revolution of 1917, terror was legitimized as a political tool by Lenin and the CPSU. In 1917, the WeCheKA – the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution, Speculation and Sabotage – was founded. This organization was replaced by the Secret Police of the Soviet Union (GPU) in 1922. In 1934, the GPU was succeeded by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). The most deadly measure of mass terror in Lenin’s time is now considered to be the ruthless policy of collecting taxes in kind from the peasants. According to estimates, this led to around five million deaths from starvation in the winter of 1921 and 1922. Show trials were also held time and again, including in 1922 when one against 34 Social Revolutionaries ended with death sentences for eleven defendants.
Joseph Stalin “perfected” this strategic terror apparatus after his seizure of power. He introduced a system that had already existed during the civil war: In the course of dekulakization – a kulak was understood to be a wealthy peasant – a committee of three people, the so-called troikas, decided out of court who was to be interned as a “kulak” or shot if they resisted, who was to be deported to distant and inhospitable areas after their property was confiscated, and who was to be resettled within their region of origin. The troikas consisted of the first secretary of the party committee of the CPSU, the local representative of the secret police and the chairman of the executive committee of the respective soviet. A soviet was understood to be a powerless local parliament. Just one year after Stalin came to power, he also had politically “unreliable” and oppositional people persecuted, interned in gulags and often murdered. The category of politically “unreliable” also often included Stalin’s party colleagues, who were eliminated under the pretext of planning a conspiracy. Whether Stalin merely invented these accusations or actually believed them due to his paranoia is disputed today. In addition, from 1928 the peasants were again forced to hand over food, even if they were not in a position to do so. The last of their supplies were stolen, as was the necessary supply of seed grain. This meant that they no longer had any for the next sowing. As a result, in 1932 and 1933 there was a huge, deliberately induced famine in what is now Ukraine, Kazakhstan and southern Russia. In Ukraine, this is known today as the “Holodomor”. According to some estimates, over seven million people died of starvation during this period. https://militaeraktuell.at/rheinmetall-raeumt-kampfmittel-in-der-ostsee/
“Great terror”
However, these measures reached their tragic climax in the period from 1936 to 1938, known as the “Great Terror”, which was triggered by the murder of Sergei Kirov, the First Secretary of the Leningrad party organization, by a Leningrad worker in December 1934. The background to this has not been clarified to this day – some claim that Stalin was involved. In any case, he saw his constantly repeated claim of a conspiracy against the leadership of the state and party confirmed and used this for a wave of repression. A wave of arrests ensued, during which Kamenev and Zinoviev, his former party colleagues, were also arrested. In the so-called Kirov Law, it was decided that from then on, people accused of terrorism could be shot in shortened trials and without the right to appeal. In December of the same year, 6,501 people were executed in Leningrad in response to the murder. In the aftermath of the Kirov murder, ethnic cleansing also took place, mainly targeting Finns, Germans and Poles. These people were often deported to what is now Kazakhstan. In July 1936, a letter from the Central Committee of the CPSU, co-authored by Stalin himself, was sent to all party organizations in the republics and autonomous regions of the Soviet Union. It warned against “enemies of the people”. This concept of the “enemy of the people” became fundamental to the “Great Terror” that was now beginning, as this term was used to remove the legitimacy of any criticism or opposition: Anyone who raised their voice against the leadership of the state and the party was considered an enemy and had to be wiped out. One advantage from Stalin’s point of view was that, in contrast to the previously used concept of the class enemy, members of the Communist Party could also be persecuted. In some cases, ordinary citizens were arrested in the street in order to fulfill the quota of “counter-revolutionary elements to be eradicated”.
Also in the summer of 1936, in August to be precise, the first of ultimately three sensational Moscow show trials took place. Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had already been sentenced to ten years in prison in a secret trial, were given the death penalty. Immediately after the verdict was announced, the sentence was carried out and the two were executed. In the three trials – the other two were in January 1937 and March 1938 – only three of the 54 defendants, many of whom were political celebrities, were not executed but sentenced to long periods in the camps. All three were never to return from the camps. The chief prosecutor in all three trials was Andrei Vyshinsky, who can be seen in the video during his plea in March 1938.
In addition to the three major trials, numerous smaller ones took place, in which the political, military and administrative elites were often in the dock. The CPSU and the Red Army were not exempt from these “purges”. It was not uncommon for far more than half of the people responsible to be arrested and, increasingly, executed. Of the 139 deputies of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 98 became victims of terror. Of the 1,966 members of the XVII Party Congress, there were 1,106. This sad rate was even higher for commanders in the army: three out of five marshals, 13 out of 15 army commanders, eight out of nine admirals, 50 out of 57 corps generals and 154 out of 186 division generals. In addition, there were numerous other mass operations, ethnic cleansing and repressive measures against the local population. Worth mentioning is a second wave of purges at the beginning of 1948, which was mainly directed against Jews in the Soviet Union, who were denounced as “rootless cosmopolitans”. As a result of this campaign, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and numerous Yiddish intellectuals were executed in Moscow prisons, known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. The wave of purges culminated in the so-called doctors’ conspiracy – according to Stalin, doctors of Jewish origin were planning to overthrow the Soviet leadership – and ended with Stalin’s death in March 1953.
Victim estimates
Due to the fact that these events were not known to the rest of the world for a long time and the archives were only gradually made accessible after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is very difficult to estimate the number of victims. They vary widely, ranging from one million to 60 million. However, there is agreement on one thing: the data is incomplete, as no accurate data was collected at the time for some groups of victims. In today’s literature, there is often talk of around 1.5 million people being arrested, of whom around 700,000 were executed. However, this does not include the many millions who died of starvation as a result of the deliberately accepted famine in 1932 and 1933.
The Russian writer Wadim Erlikman estimated 9 million victims, whereby, according to him, 1.5 million were executed, 5 million died in the Gulag, 1.7 million lost their lives during deportation and one million prisoners of war and German civilians perished. Stalin’s biographer, Soviet Colonel General Dmitri Volkogonov, estimated the number of those who fell victim to the “purges” between 1929 and 1953 to be as high as 22 million. Gunnar Heinsohn, a German sociologist, on the other hand, estimated at least 20 million victims.
View of Stalin – then and now
In the months and years following Stalin’s death, the process of “de-Stalinization” began. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, distanced himself from Stalin at the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 when he criticized the crimes he had committed against other communists. However, he did not criticize the dictatorial system itself. The conditions in the labor camps were also improved. However, just a few months later, in November of the same year, the Moscow leadership made the limits of this process clear with the suppression of the Hungarian People’s Uprising. In the early 1960s, the name Stalin disappeared from the public eye, Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd and monuments were removed. Years later, under Mikhail Gorbachev, a more comprehensive criticism of Stalin began, which went far beyond the criticism during the period of de-Stalinization.
Today, Stalin is viewed much more positively again in Russia, not least due to the glorification of the Great Patriotic War – the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Irina Scherbakowa, founding member of the International Society for Historical Enlightenment, Human Rights and Social Welfare “Memorial”, criticized this rise to “superstardom”. Numerous Stalin memorials were rebuilt in the 2000s and 2010s. The current Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sees Stalin as a determined statesman who united the Soviet Union and defeated fascism, also plays a decisive role in this. While only 28% viewed Stalin positively in a 2012 survey, this figure had risen to 46% in 2017 and even 70% in 2019. If you believe Sherbakova, this is mainly due to information from television and propaganda, which have detached public opinion from historical facts. Since 2006, a commemorative event has been held annually on 29 October by “Memorial” – the organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 – at which the names of victims of Stalin’s repression are read out for twelve hours.
