the different experiences of individuals and groups in the period to 1945

Question 1

Tsar

Answer 1

• Ruled by FEAR and FAVOUR
• October Manifesto > Fundamental Laws > Electoral changes
• Suppression of political rivals/extremists (imprisonment or exile)

Question 2

Lenin

Answer 2

• Lenin abolished all other political parties, established concentration camps, formed Russia into the USSR and in December 2017 formed the Cheka (All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter Revolution and Sabotage)
• The Cheka had specific duties which included:
  o To persecute and break up all acts of counter-revolution and sabotage all over Russia, no matter what their origin
  o To bring more the Revolutionary Tribunal all counter-revolutionists and saboteurs and to work out a plan for fighting them
  o Monitor press, strikers, saboteurs, subversives and counter-revolutionaries
• The Cheka was reorganised and renamed on many occasions
  o GPU (State Political Organisation) in 1922 – Felix Dzerzhinsky
  o OGPU (Unified State Political Organisation) in 1923 – Felix Dzerzhinsky (later Genrikh Yagoda)
  o NKVD (The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) 1934 – Genrikh Yagoda; Nikolai Yezhov; Laurenty Beria
• Red Terror triggered by the attempt on Lenin’s life by SR Fanya Kaplan
• A decree was passed which allowed for the creation of concentration camps to imprison ‘class enemies’ and authorised the Cheka to execute ‘anyone involved in White Guard organisations, conspiracies and rebellions’
• Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who had been imprisoned in a house in Yekaterinberg, were executed by local Cheka authorities in the basement
• This was symbol that there was no turning back (and ended any hope of those who wanted to reinstate the Tsar)
• Lenin encouraged class warfare and targeted Kulaks and the former wealthy/middle classes known as the ‘former people’
• The Bolsheviks relied heavily upon visual propaganda to communicate their message because much of their audience was illiterate
  o Though literacy data for 1917 is unavailable, just twenty years earlier 83 percent of the rural population was illiterate, as was 55 percent of the urban population
  o Though vast numbers of townspeople and peasants could not decode the written word, most Russians could decode images with ease because of the highly iconic culture of the Orthodox Church
  o Posters and cartoons communicated effectively through pictures, which made them ideal mediums for the Bolsheviks to spread their message of revolution
  o The first political posters came off the presses in August 1918. During the course of the Civil War, about 3,100 posters were produced by more than 450 organizations and institutions. These posters were printed by the millions
  o Litizdat, a poster publisher under the Political Directorate of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Russian Union of Federated Socialist Republics, printed about 7.5 million posters and other propaganda material between 1919-1922
  o Gosizdat, the state publishing house, printed 3.2 million copies in 1920 alone
  o American journalist Albert Rhys Williams visited the Soviet Union in 1923 and remarked, “The visitor to Russia is struck by the multitudes of posters—in factories and barracks, on walls and railway-cars, on telegraph poles—everywhere.”

Question 3

Stalin

Answer 3

• The Great Terror, a retrospective term, refers to the paroxysm of state-organized bloodshed that overwhelmed the Communist Party and Soviet society during the years 1936-38
• Also known as the Great Purges or Ezhovshchina (after the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Nikolai Ezhov, who oversaw the process before himself becoming one of its casualties)
• Once of the first acts of Stalin’s terror was in March 1928 when the NKVD (Stalin’s secret police) announced they had found foreign spies in the Shakhty mines who were plotting to stop the mines reaching their targets. Fifty-five people were arrested. For the next two months, newspapers, cinemas and billboards all denounced these ‘wreckers’ and demanded that they be punished. There was no evidence to convict them, but they all confessed to being enemies of the people and 49 were sent to prison camps, five were shot and one was acquitted

Question 4

Show Trials

Answer 4

• First trials held in August 1936 when Kamenev and Zinoviev (and fourteen others) were arrested and publicly accused of being complicit in Kirov’s assassination and of plotting to kill Stalin and other members of the Politburo – they were subsequently found guilty and executed on 24 August
• In September, Stalin replaced Yagoda with Ezhov as head of the NKVD and blamed him for failing to expose the traitors – he too was subsequently arrested and executed in the third of the show trials in 1938
• In January 1937, a second show trial took placed were several old Bolsheviks were accused of a range of terrorist acts – who subsequently all implicated Bukharin
• The third and final show trial took place in March 1938 and Bukharin, Yagoda and others were accused of plotting to kill Lenin, among other crimes – all were executed immediately
• ‘Confessions’ were extracted after NKVD torture sessions and most defendants were warned that their families would be harmed if they did not confess

Question 5

Denunciations

Answer 5

• People who were accused of a crime were almost always found guilty and family members were often arrested later
• Denunciations of personal enemies was common, as people took advantage of the situation to settle grudges
• Neighbours informed on each other and children informed on their parents
• Robert Conquest “The terror of 1936-38 was an almost uniquely devastating blow inflicted by a government on its own population, and the charges against the millions of victims were almost without exception entirely false”

Question 6

Purges (or Ezhovschina)

Answer 6

• In April 1938 several generals were arrested and accused of plotting with foreign powers, particularly Germany including Marshall Tukhanchevsky (his confession has since been identified as having bloodstains on it)
• The purges extended to all ranks of the military
• Stalin feared a military plot against him and by the time Germany invaded in 1939, most of the Soviet Union’s experienced military men were dead
• The same fate befell provincial party secretaries, party and state personnel among the national minorities, industrial managers, and other officials
• The process fed upon itself, as the accused under severe physical and psychological pressure from their interrogators, named names and confessed to outlandish crimes. Millions of others became involved in the frenzied search for “enemies of the people”
• In addition, the Politburo ordered Ezhov on July 3, 1937 to conduct “mass operations” to round up recidivist criminals, ex-kulaks, and other “anti-Soviet elements” who were prosecuted by three-person tribunals (Ezhov actually established quotas in each district for the number of arrests)
• In December 1938, Ezhov was replaced by Beria and in February 1940 shot
• At the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 Stalin acknowledged that while the purge had achieved its primary purpose, aspects of it had gone too far
• In August 1940, an NKVD agent, Ramon Mercader, attacked Trotsky with an ice-pick in his hideout in Mexico – enemy (Mercader’s mother was awarded a medal for her son’s efforts and when he was released in the 1960s he was awarded the Order of Lenin)
• Stalin “It cannot be said that the cleansings were not accompanied by grave mistakes. There were, unfortunately, more mistakes than might have been expected. Undoubtedly, we shall have no further need to resort to the method of mass cleansings. Nevertheless, the cleansings of 1933-1936 were unavoidable and their results, on the whole, beneficial”

Question 7

Cult of personality

Answer 7

• Stalin’s control of the Communist Party and the Soviet state were incontestable, and at his behest historians rewrote party history to make him a central figure
• Although this implied no distortion of the truth for recent history, it demanded gross distortion of historical fact for the years of the Bolshevik underground, the Revolution, and the Civil War
• The Short Course of the History of the Communist Party, an ostensibly objective work written by a collective of historians, was published in October 1938, and was soon a basic text of Stalinism that sold forty million copies throughout the world
• The idealised figure of Stalin represented in mass culture also spoke to a perceived need for vigorous leadership in Soviet society
• Thus Stalin often appeared in a magnetic aura of charisma that went far beyond his political role, leaving many of the Soviet citizens lucky enough to meet him mesmerised
• Stalin’s image and his representation to Soviet society had evolved over time, from Lenin’s disciple, to heir and then leader in his own right – equal to Lenin, to a god-like leader (evident in artwork, propaganda and through the falsification of images)

Question 8

Gulag (Main Directorate for Labour Camps)

Answer 8

• The Soviet system of forced labour camps was first established in 1919 under Lenin and the Cheka, but it was not until the early 1930s that the camp population reached significant numbers
• The gulag was a system of hundreds of forced labour camps, plus transit camps and prisons, which held criminals. Increasingly gulag prisoners were political prisoners - people who were opposed to Stalin, people accused of failing to meet their work targets and peasants sent there during the collectivisation of agriculture
• From 1929-32 the numbers of people in the gulag increased greatly, coinciding with collectivisation. It is estimated that there may have been 5-7 million people in these camps at any one time. In later years the camps also held victims of Stalin’s purges, ranging from high officials to intellectuals to ordinary people, as well as World War 2 prisoners
• Gulag prisoners were a useful supply of workers for large projects in remote and inhospitable places in the USSR. For example, the Belomor Canal, which connects the White Sea with the Baltic, was almost entirely constructed by hand, using 250,000 prisoners. Prisoners also worked in mines or cut timber
• They were not paid. They were underfed, housed in poor conditions and worked long hours in a difficult climate. They could be executed if they refused to work. It is possible that around 10% of prisoners in the gulag died each year