Stalin And Opposition to 1932

• Stalin extended the Terror and class warfare to enforce collectivisation through the destruction of kulaks and maintain his Five Year Plans. He sent ‘bourgeoisie managers’ specialists and engineers to labour camps on charges of sabotage.
• The Shakhty show trials in 1928 involved 53 engineers in the coal mine accused of counter revolutionary activity. Indicated Stalin’s determination to find a scapegoat for the chaos of his own economic policies by arresting hundreds of ‘bourgeois specialists’.
• Critics of the Gosplan were removed. The Gosplan was the State General Planning Commission established in 1921 to advise on the NEP.
• Industry Party’ show trial of November 1930 involved a group of industrialists being accused of sabotage and the 1933 Metro-Vickers trial involved British specialists being found guilty of ‘wrecking’.
• In 1929 Soviet prisons couldn’t cope with the number of prisoners so Genrikh Yagoda was commissioned to investigate ways to use the prisoners.
• Yagoda created a series of new camps of around 50 000 prisoners each in remote areas where there was much diamonds gold oil coal and timber. They were called gulags.
• By employing economies of scale it was believed these gulags would help economic growth while ‘correcting’ prisoners. Camps were put under the authority of the OGPU and then the NKVD in 1934 when they housed a million people.
• The White Sea Canal was a gulag project joining the Baltic Sea and the White Sea which was dug cheaply with axes saws and hammers in freezing conditions.
• The Whie Sea Canal project used 100 000 prisoners in 1932 but 25 000 died in the 1931-32 winter. It had a grand opening in 1933 but couldn’t be used as it was only 12 feet deep.