2.2.3 Political Transformation: Terror, Propaganda, Censorship

Question 1

great terror starts which year

Answer 1

1937

Question 2

Why the terror?

Answer 2

• assisting in maintaining full control
• not simply violence but political (on party unity, show trials, etc)
• roots in civil war era - CHEKA

Question 3

How central was terror to regime Q

Answer 3

“central to Lenin’s revolution”

Orlando Figes

Question 4

1937-1938 how many ppl arrested for crimes against state

Answer 4

1.3 million

Question 5

Gulag labour camp population grows by how much 1937-1938

Answer 5

700k

Question 6

how much does party grow 1923-1925, who’s it dominated by

Answer 6

^500k, Stalin installs sycophants, flushes out old bolsheviks

Question 7

Stalin’s goal for kulaks Q

Answer 7

“liquidate the kulaks as a class”

stalin

Question 8

service - impact of terror etc

Answer 8

“Great Terror… left no-one in doubt about the consequences of overt disobediences”

Robert Service

Question 9

4 paragraphs for essay on impact

Answer 9

1. Eliminated Stalin’s political enemies within the party
2. Concentrated power in Stalin’s hands
3. Ensured atmosphere of fear/compliance amongst population
4. but other factors also contributed –> cult of personality, censorship/prop, etc

Question 10

probs most important show trial getting rid of important people

Answer 10

Trial of the Sixteen (Zinoviev + Kamenev + others found complicit in 1934 murder of Bolshevik Sergei Kirov), as part of Moscow Trials

Question 11

informers

Answer 11

• suspicion on everyone, encouraged to dob on neighbours
• “informers were everywhere” - Orlando Figes

Question 12

service elegant quote

Answer 12

“The Great Terror… was not a thunderclap in a cloudless sky but the worsening of a storm that was already raging”

Robert Service

Question 13

Types of propaganda

Answer 13

• social realism in art - romanticising agriculture
• veneration of Lenin + stalin
• ‘short course’ book published 1938 - falsified history, school history overemphasises Stalin’s role in 1917 revolution
• Stakhanovites movement

Question 14

Types of censorship

Answer 14

• all aspects of media state-controlled + regulated
• western ideas, trotskyite writings, religion, life outside USSR censored
• personal communication
• Stalin having photos retouched to include himself in photos w/ Lenin AND remove people he’d had assassinated