Early opposition to Stalin
Cards (23)
- •Many of these were sent to labour camps.
- •55 engineers and managers in the town of Shakhty were arrested and accused of plotting with former owners of coal mines who had been exiled from the Soviet Union after the revolution.•They were accused of trying to sabotage the Soviet economy and Stalin used this as a scapegoat for the shortage of food and goods that was causing some resentment.
- •5 of the accused were executed, 44 received long prison sentences and some were pardoned for confessing and implicating other plotters.
- •After the trial, there was an “industrial terror”. Hundreds of “bourgeois plotters” lost their jobs or their lives and critics within Gosplan were removed.
- •All of the accused were convicted.
- •Ultimately, they received light sentences with 2 receiving short prison sentences and the rest being expelled from the country.
- Stalin’s class warfare was so successful that by 1929, the Soviet prisons were full or kulaks, bourgeois specialists, wreckers, saboteurs, spies and other “opponents”. Genrikh Yagoda was tasked with finding a solution:
- •Yagoda proposed an extension of Lenin’s corrective labour camps and building the Gulags (an acronym for Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies).•The Gulags would be located in remote areas of the north and Siberia where there were diamonds, gold, platinum, oil, nickel, coal and timber.
- •The Gulags would hold approximately 50,000 people each and would cost very little per capita to create and maintain. •The idea was that the prison population would be put to good use and would contribute to economic growth. •The Gulags were put under the control of the OGPU and then under the NKVD from 1934. •By 1934, they housed a million people.
- •Roughly 100,000 prisoners were put to work on the project and about 25,000 of them died during the winter of 1931-32. It was opened by Stalin in a big blaze of publicity in 1933 but it was only 12 feet deep and proved pretty useless for larger ships.
- 1932 had seen famine in the countryside and a spate of workers’ strikes in the towns along with criticism of the 5 Year Plan and Stalin’s leadership. In November 1932, Stalin’s wife Nadezhda committed suicide and left a note criticising Stalin’s policies and showing sympathy for his enemies. Figes said this “unhinged” Stalin and he believed that even those closest to him could be betraying him behind his back.
- Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin’s old opponent, was re-elected to the Central Committee in June 1930; the same year that some of those who had supported Stalin in the leadership struggle against Bukharin had been expelled for criticising the way collectivisation was being carried out.
- Ryutin had even sent an “appeal”, signed by a number of prominent communists, to the Central Committee urging Stalin’s removal. Ryutin and his circle were arrested and Stalin called for their immediate execution but he was over-ruled by the Politburo, particularly Sergei Kirov (the Leningrad Party Secretary).
- This shows the precariousness of Stalin’s position at this point. 24 of the Party were expelled and exiled from Moscow and several other “old Bolsheviks”, including Zinoviev and Kamenev were also expelled and exiled, simply for knowing of the group’s existence. Ryutin was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was shot on Stalin’s orders in 1937.
- Nadezhda’s suicide, plus the Ryutin affair, definitely “unhinged” him. In April 1933, Stalin announced a general purge of the Party and over the next 2 years he conducted a paranoid struggle in which over 18% of the Party were branded “Ryutinites” and purged. Most were relatively new Party members who Stalin called “careerists”.
- At the 17th Party Congress in 1934, which coincided with the 10th anniversary of Lenin’s death, Stalin announced that the “anti-Leninist opposition” (which really meant those who oppposed him) was defeated. Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky, Karl Radek (a former Trotsky supporter) and others who had challenged Stalin in the leadership struggle, all admitted their “errors” to give the impression of unity at the top.
- However, in the elections to the Central Committee, Stalin received about 150 negative votes (although only 3 were officially recorded). There was a split between those who wanted to maintain the pace of industrialisation, and others (including Kirov) who spoke about stopping forcible grain seizures and increasing workers’ rations.
- Only 2 of the Politburo (Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich) firmly supported Stalin and Kirov received a standing ovation after his speech. Also during the Congress, the title of “General Secretary” was removed and Stalin was called “Secretary of Equal Rank”. This may have been good for Stalin because it spread the responsibility for the economic crisis, but it also implied that he was no more important than the other secretaries.
- Kirov was then murdered in December 1934. He was shot in the neck by Leonid Nikolayev as he approached his office in the Leningrad Party HQ. When questioned, Nikolayev claimed that the NKVD”knew” all about the murder. Kirov’s bodyguard and some NKVD men were mysteriously killed in a car accident before they could give evidence in the trial and some leading NKVD men were sentenced for failure to protect Kirov, but their terms were short and treatment was lenient.
- In January 1935, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 17 others were arrested and accused of terrorism and sentenced to between 5 and 10 years in prison. About 843 former associates of Zinoviev were arrested and during 1935, 11,000 “former people” were arrested, exiled or placed in camps and 250,000 Party members were expelled as “anti-Leninists”.
- There was a purge of Kremlin employees (from cleaners to librarians” to uncover reputed “foreign spies”. Abel Yenukidze, chairman of the Central Committee and a high-ranking communist, was expelled for helping “oppositionists” find employment in the Kremlin. Stalin’s old civil war comrade, Grigory Ordzhonikidze, also died in mysterious circumstances.