Stalin’s rise to power and dictatorship, 1924-41 Flashcards
What were the strengths and weaknesses of Stalin as a contender?
The struggle for power 1924-28.
Ideology: Believed in ‘Socialism in One Country’: that the USSR could become a socialist state on its own.
Strengths:
- position as General Secretary: power to appoint supporters to key party jobs
- appearance of moderation: no extreme views, always respectful to rivals. Kept private opinions to himself.
Weaknesses
- Lenin’s testament criticised his rudeness and lust for power
- Seen as boring, unlike many key rivals
What were the strengths and weaknesses of Trotsky as a contender?
The struggle for power 1924-28.
Ideology: Believed in ‘Permanent Revolution’: that communism needed revolutions to spread from country to country. Believed in rapid industrialisation rather than NEP.
Strengths
- brilliant speaker
- Lenin’s close comrade through revolution and civil war
- his victory and leadership key to Red victory in Civil War
Weaknesses
- arrogant and bossy
- Menshevik until 1917, unlike others, who were long-standing Bolsheviks
- lack of supporters outside the military
What were the strengths and weaknesses of Zinoview and Kamenev as a contender?
The struggle for power 1924-28.
Strengths
- workers closely together, strengthened them both
- Zinoview was party boss in Petrograd, Kamenev in Moscow
- worked closely with Stalin to run the party and weaken Trotsky after Lenin’s death
Weaknesses
- the only 2 senior bolsheviks to oppose to Lenin’s plan to seize power in October 1917
- power was limited to Petrograd and Moscow, while Stalin controlled the party
What were the strengths and weaknesses of Bukharin as a contender?
The struggle for power 1924-28.
Strengths:
- very popular within the party
- excellent writer and theorist: editor of Pravda (party newspaper)
Weaknesses:
- argued strongly against Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which was later used against him
- the main supporter of NEP, which many Bolsheviks viewed as capitalist
What were the key steps Stalin took to become a leader?
- He made sure that he took the lead role at Lenin’s funeral, which Trotsky was too ill to attend (Stalin also told him the wrong date)
- Stalin then worked with Kamenev and Zinoviev (with Bukharin’s support) to undermine Trotsky. But when Kamenev and Zinoviev then opposed Bukharin, Stalin criticised them for trying to split the party
- Economic difficulties in 1927-28 put pressure on NEP, which Bukharin supported. Stalin switched to arguing for rapid industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture. Stalin won the party’s support and Bukharin lost his influence
What is timeline for the purges?
1831 - Ex-Mensheviks shot as ‘wreckers’
1933 - 18% of party members expelled as unsuitable or disloyal
1934 - Kirov murdered
1936 - First show trials: 16 senior party members including Zinoviev and Kamenev
1937 - Show trial of 17 more senior party members: all were found guilty. NKVD (secret police) begin mass arrests. Purge of the military.
1938 - Last great show trial; Bukharin shot. Purge spreads to NKVD.
1941 - The purges had sent around 8 million people to labour camps
Why was Kirov assissinated?
- Stalin’s policies in farming and industry caused big problems in the Soviet Union
- By 1930s, the party started to criticise Stalin. Even Kirov, one of his closest allies, called for a policy change
- Stalin suspected Kirov wanted to take the leadership from him. He was assassinated in December 1934.
- Stalin claimed that a huge conspiracy, led by Trotsky, was responsible
- After Kirov’s death, Stalin purged the party of potential rivals - these purges spread to the whole of Soviet society
What were the reasons for the purges?
Economic problems
- accidents and economic under-performance blamed on imaginary ‘wreckers’
Stalin’s fear of Kirov
- Kirov became very popular. Do Stalin order Kirov’s assassination, and then use it to remove rivals?
Stalin’s paranoia
- he had to make it to the top, but then became paranoid about any possible rivals to power
Following Lenin’s example
- The Red Terror during the Civil War was a precedent for the purges
What was the nature of the purges?
Attack on party and gov
- after the purges linked to Kirov, arrests focused on party members and gov staff accused of not following orders
Forced confessions
- Those arrested were beaten until they confessed to any crime they had been accused of. But many never knew why they had been arrested
Mass terror (Yezhov)
- The NKVD had targets for the arrests.
- They forced those arrested to name others. Under Yezhiv’s leadership of the NKVD (1937-38), no one was safe
Use of Gulags
- The Gulag was the state system of labour camps. By 1941 there were 8 million in the camps, with perhaps a further million in prisons
What were the consequences of the purges?
1- Stalin dominant: His purges terrified everyone else into obedience. No one dared to question his leadership
2- ‘Old Leninists’ destroyed: the Bolsheviks who had built the Communist Party with Lenin were dead. No one now could challenge Stalin. New party members all owed their position to him.
3- Chaos in government and the economy: the loss of so many experienced managers, administrators and specialists left the gov and industry with a serious shortage of skills
4- Weakened armed forces: there was no evidence of any military plot against Stalin, but the purge of the military killed off most of Stalin’s experiences officers. Soldiers arrested by NKVD often accused their officers in turn. The loss of military leadership and experience seriously weakened the armed forces and was to prove a significant setback when Germany invaded Russia in 1941
What existing Bolshevik systems did Stalin make use of for his purges?
- Secret Police - he used the OGPU, a new version of the Cheka (later known as the NKVD and then the KGB)
- Gulags - these labour camps were a new version of the Bolsheviks’ prison camps
- the secret police used terror to get confessions
- people were arrested in the middle of the night, tortured and deprived of sleep, and their families and friends were threatened, until they signed confessions to made-up crimes
- Terror - Stalin’s terror was similar to the climate of fear in the civil war
These systems were descendants of tsarist secret police and labour camps, too.
What was the work of the NKVD during the terror in the 1930s?
Roles included
- intimidation - scaring people into conforming to the system
- arresting people
- forcing confessions through repeated interrogation (the ‘conveyor system’)
- running prisons
- execution people
From 1935 - 3-man teams of NKVD officers decided whether people were innocent of the charges against them, or guilty. There was no other legal process.
After the initial purged linked to Kirov’s murder in 1934, the head of the NKVD was executed for not having acted faster to track down enemies. After that, the NKVD were given quotas of ‘enemies of the people’ to find. Mass arrests of innocent people followed.
What were the conditions like in the Gulags?
- prisoners were used as slave labourers (‘white coal’) to extract resources and build infrastructure for the Soviet Union
- the people sent to Gulags were from all parts of Soviet society
- inmates had only thin uniforms, miserable food and shacks to live in. They endured long hours of hard physical labour. The death toll was very high: perhaps 2 million people
- camps were spread right across the USSR, including many in northern and eastern parts of the Soviet Union, where winters were severe
What were the reasons for and the importance of the show trials of 1936 - 38?
- only high-profile leading party members (like Zinoviev and Kamenev) had show trials
- public declarations of guilt were meant to make the Soviet people believe the country really was under attack by enemies of the people
- these enemies could then be blamed for all the Soviet Union’s problems
They were important as they justified all the mass arrests.
- ordinary people were convicted that enemies were everywhere
- they also gave ordinary workers the power to denounce their managers and people they did not like to the NKVD
