1929-1941 terror

• Collectivization

  
  

  • Lenin believed peasants should voluntarily enter collectives, but in 1929 there no tractors + peasants didn’t want collectivisation
  • first victims peasants – resisted collectivisation. scapegoat = the ‘kulaks’.focusing mythical group Stalin could turn the coercion of peasants into a class war pretending only rich peasants were resisting to justify (rural)

  - Arrested to prove did exist

  - Class warfare ideologically pure, socialling countryside to increase CONTROL
• The party, greatest victims great terror mid/late 30s
• Violence + deprivation of 1st 5YP

  1. Division within Party

  2. Dissent within Party

  3. Ryutin Affair as 1934 17th Party Congress, Kirov shot opp
• Stalin paranoid

  Sickly suspicious (Khrushchev successor)
• Stalin feared possibility of conspiracy
• To be a Party intellectual in the thirties was virtually a sentence of death! - Alec Nove
• Factory managers + officials ran black market to obtain necessary supplies for production targets: Investigated from the centre = looked like sabotage
• Stalin frustrated = large number of the victims were white collar officials, managers, local Party leaders
• • Purge of the Red Army was because in the event of war the Army

  could run an efficient, coherent coup if things were going badly.

   instead NKVD

  = increase Stalin’s power and control but acc worse for WW2
• Why bloodbath whole society

  • Guilt by association

   

  • resolving petty jealousies, ideological reasons, evidence of zealotry, fear not conform.

   

  • Soviet economy depend = Gulag (forced labour camos) = OGPU/NKVD specific targets of number ppl arrest

   

  • Anyone with specialist or professional skills was suspected of 

  bourgeois sympathies and suspect, hence the ‘specialist baiting’. 

   

  • momentum
• Military Purges


  • Thousands of officers, including high-ranking commanders, were executed or sent to labor camps
  • These purges weakened Soviet military leadership and morale
• Moscow Trials


  • A series of show trials took place in the late 1930s
  • Targeting former Bolshevik leaders such as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Rykov
• Mandelstam's Poem


  • In 1934, poet Mandelstam composed a satirical poem about Stalin, referring to him as the "murderer of peasants"
  • In 1938, Mandelstam was sent to a labor camp in Siberia
• Downfall

  • Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, was arrested in 1938
  • Accused of conspiring against the state
  • Illustrating that no one was safe from Stalin's purges
• Trotsky's Expulsion and Assassination

  • Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929
  • Assassinated in Mexico City in 1940
  • Allowing Stalin to gain complete control over the Soviet Union