By: Kathleen Fitzgerald

Terry Martin/Eren Tasar

January 16, 2007
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Under the Stalin-ruled Soviet Union, the winter of 1932-33 proved to

be a time of “severe economic dislocation both in industry as well as

agriculture.”1 Ironically, at the same time that the Soviets struggled to

support and preserve their own production of goods, news of Adolph

Hitler’s rise to power in Germany exacerbated the already anxious

1
Suny, p. 258.
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Bolsheviks who did not feel the nation could properly fight the Germans,

considering their own devastated economy. 2 In order to prevent the Soviet

citizens from growing tired of toiling under Communism and turning to the

new German fascism that loomed on the political horizon, the Communist

Party slowly shifted to more moderate social and economic policies. By

lowering required production rates for the Second Five-Year [Agricultural

Production] Plan, reducing the state’s high number of arrests and

deportations, and enthusiastically proclaiming the Soviet’s 1933 harvest as

fecund and prosperous, the Soviet leadership created enthusiasm among

the people and increased the populous’ loyalty to Stalin by once again

making it seem as though “there were no one to take [Stalin’s] place, that

any change of leadership would be extremely dangerous.” 3

The Soviet state held onto this premise of an economically thriving

nation until December 1, 1934, when Sergei Kirov’s murder “changed the

atmosphere in the Soviet Union from the prevailing moderation to a frenzy

of mass terror suddenly and unexpectedly.” 4 Rumors of Stalin’s possible

involvement in Kirov’s murder immediately swirled around the populous, but

the government shifted that focus back toward those oppositionists who

otherwise allegedly planned Kirov’s assassination and were thought to be

planning other “active military uprisings” in conjunction with foreign nations

2
Suny, p. 258.
3
Suny, p. 258.
4
Suny, p. 260.
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like Germany and Japan. 5 Infuriated by the fact that true and loyal Soviets

were likely “surrounded by imagined enemies and real hostilities throughout

Soviet society,’ Joseph Stalin chose to execute a great purge, whereby

those people suspected of disloyalty to the state would be removed from

positions of power and participation in the party itself. 6

Unlike the state purge of 1929 during which government officials

forcibly stripped purportedly oppositionist Academy of Science members of

their titles, or 1926’s purge of the German-populated Shakhty engineering

company which lost a group of German engineers during the pro-Soviet

purge, the Terror of 1937 remained so successful at terrorizing suspects

that the movement’s leaders even exceeded the goal execution and exile

quotas (72,950 and 177,500 respectively). Further differentiating the earlier

purges from 1937’s Great Terror is the fact that unlike the earlier attempts

which only targeted party members, the terror targeted many outside the

party—military, intelligentsia, and common peasants—in addition to

murdering political leadership. 7 In regards to the terror of 1937, the

question remains “why?”. Why would Stalin and his powerful comrades in

the Politburo incorporate concentration camps, GULag exiles, firing squads,

and interrogation tortures into the purported “purging” of the nation from

those who were responsible for events like Kirov’s murder and “wrecking?”.

5
McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 105.
6
Suny, p. 257.
7
Getty, p. 38. Consequently, the Terror of 1937 qualifies as a “terror” rather than a “purge.”
Suny, p. 264.
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After all, in the Soviet Union of 1937, “there [was] nothing to indicate that

officials perceived a growing threat from [internal] social disorder, or a

threat in any significant way greater than in previous years.” 8

Diverging from the accepted pattern of the previous purges, the

Terror of 1937 occurred during first: a time when the threat of global war

from international forces like the Germans or Japanese felt imminent (and

rightly so considering WWII occurred just two years later); and second: in

which “[Soviet] leaders were convinced that oppositionists, working with

foreign agents, were actively organizing socially disaffected populations

into a fifth column force [within the Soviet army].” 9 More than he did in any

previous purges, the inherently aggressive Stalin adopted a truly war-like

mentality to dealing with all anti-Bolshevik oppositionists: having studied

the “rear-guard uprisings against the Republican regime in Spain

during that country’s civil war,” Joseph Stalin felt as though

insurgents and foreign powers (e.g. Germany and Japan) were slowly

closing in on his rule just as they had done in Spain, and the only way

to keep those anti-Soviet forces controlled within the Soviet Union

was to violently attack before those forces could sufficiently barrage

the Soviet Union in the unavoidable war. 10

- -

8
McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 104.
9
McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 112.
10
McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 105.
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Unlike the domestic purge issues which were dealt with during the

earlier, more bureaucratic Soviet purges of 1926 and 1929, the terror of

1937 responded to an internal and foreign, more war-like threats from

Germany and Japan, both countries that appeared headed straight for war

in the mid-1930s. In the early purges, such as 1918’s clean-cut purge of

the Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries from the All-Russian

Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK), the dominant Bolsheviks

rallied behind Lenin’s cry, “Those who are not with us are against us,” and

were able to easily take control and remove people affiliated with the other

political parties from office.11 Similarly, in 1929’s major purge of the Soviet

oppositionists in the Academy of Sciences, Bolshevik bureaucrats faced

little more than pockets of mild protestors among the Soviet scientists. 12

During the years between these two relatively easy purges, however, the

year 1926-1927 provided “a cascade of events … [which] stirred the

deepest sources of Soviet paranoia about the West.” 13 In 1926, the Soviets

had been allowing the Germans to train secretly on Soviet soil, but the

Germans refused to reciprocate by helping the Soviets build a modern

weapons industry in the USSR.14 Growing “suspicious of Western

intentions,” the Soviet foreign ministers began escalating the “rhetoric of

fear” during the summer of 1926 by talking about the “capitalist

11
Suny, p. 69.
12
Suny, p. 211.
13
Suny, p. 164.
14
Suny, p. 164.
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encirclement and the danger of war, more specific [than] threats of military

attack.” 15 With a “panicked sense of impending war” corroborated by the

anti-Soviet, Nationalist movements in Georgia, Ukraine, and Poland that

fueled the assassination of the Soviet minister to Poland, the Soviets began

to see internal monarchists and not Western nations as the pressing threat.

As a result, the Bolsheviks dealt with the quietly subversive counter-

revolutionary forces within their homeland first. By arresting a group of

Shakhty engineers, the Bolsheviks enacted their first retaliation against

internal groups like the Shakhty who had essentially already declared war

on the Bolshevik Revolution by thwarting production.16 Extracting

similarities among the various purges of the 1920s, one sees that when the

Soviets experienced a “moment of perceived domestic and foreign crisis,”

as they did with the 1926 purge and resultant Shakhty Trial, the Bolshevik

leaders and the party were more likely to take aggressive action like

arresting workers for subversion than when the threat existed within state-

controlled entity like the Academy of Sciences or the VTsIK. 17 Although the

Soviet approach remained aggressive to a certain degree in the instances

in which the state was “attacked” from one side—either internally or

externally but not both—the most combustible Soviet approach consistently

occurred whenever Stalin and the state perceived that they were fighting a

15
Suny, p. 164-165.
16
Suny, p. 165.
17
Suny, p. 165.
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two-front battle. Similarly, in 1937, when Stalin sensed the shadow of a

looming Nazi Party eyeing the Soviet Union and worried about in-party,

Nazi-sympathizing wreckers to damage the Soviet cause, the traditionally

aggressive Soviet approach became devastatingly violent. The result was

the Great Terror.

In the years preceding the Great Terror, it became evident that

Western nations would soon infringe upon and probably someday attack

Soviet-controlled lands. After Sergei Kirov’s murder at the end of 1934,

and Hitler’s overtly imperialistic occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, Stalin

“foresaw the coming war [WWII] and wanted to guarantee that there would

be no fifth column behind the Soviet line and that his orders would be

carried out unquestionably by a totally loyal staff.” 18 Ever since the Soviet-

German fighting during WWI, Joseph Stalin had never particularly trusted

the West, instead believing that a Western country (probably Germany)

would attempt to use subterfuge to convince a cohort to attack the Soviet

force from within its ranks. Additionally, records show the president of

Czechoslovakia, Eduard Benes, fueled Stalin’s paranoia by channeling

supposedly covert anti-Soviet information retrieved from German diplomats

that implicated many of Stalin’s highest officials in an alleged German-anti-

Soviet alliance. Unfortunately for Stalin, these documents were actually

forged; however, that did not prevent Stalin from believing in them and

18
Getty, p. 3.
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killing “more Soviet generals than would be killed in World War II. Fifteen

out of the 16 army commanders, 60 of the 67corps commanders, and 136

of the 199 divisional commanders were executed.” 19 This resulted in “the

grandest of the show trials, with its fabricated plots and forced confessions,

[and] warned the Soviet people that their country was the target of vicious

forces conspiring internally and from abroad.” 20

Throughout the trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were both

accused of soliciting and encouraging the murder of Sergei Kirov, the

imprisoned defendants suffered under the NKVD’s traditionally brutal

interrogation process. Although Zinoviev and Kamenev eventually struck a

deal and confessed, Bukharin refused to do so. In response to Bukharin’s

pleas of innocence, Stalin spoke words which essentially served to agitate

the masses into fearing Nazi-Bolshevik alliances even within the upper

echelons of the Bolshevik party. Responding to Bukharin, Stalin says,

“Trotsky and his pupils Zinoviev and Karmenev had at one time worked with

Lenin and now these people have made an agreement with Hitler.” 21 With

this type of inflammatory language, Stalin excited the people’s thirst for

revenge against likely traitors, and this meant that Bukharin’s case only

lasted through March 1938, at which point he was executed alongside

comrade Aleksei Rykov and former police chief Iagoda. 22

19
Suny, p. 264.
20
Suny, p. 263.
21
Suny, p. 263.
22
Suny, p. 263.
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Not only did Stalin’s language choice incite many of the already

inflamed militarists to war against the remaining, anti-Soviet cliques, but it

was “a language that tied socially suspect populations to active military

uprisings. This was a threat more dangerous than that of social disorder.” 23

The language being used in 1937 was “consistent with Stalin’s rising

concern about the prospects of land, and the domestic consequences of

war.”24 He even described the countryside as a ‘haven’ for oppositionists

when he said:

Through passportization and clearing operations in the mid-

1930s, groups which the regime deemed anti-Soviet had been
sent into exile or had been driven out of the regime cities and
border areas had taken refuge in non-regime towns and in the
countryside. There they had stayed. whie many others had
fled exile and camps, or had been released. 25

Similarly, another of Stalin’s public comments also created an atmosphere

of suffocative fear for those who heard it. During the Kirov murder

hearings, Stalin felt the need to call Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Kamenev

“traitors,” “spies,” and “saboteurs,” even claiming those three men “plotted

with the Grman Gestapo to overthrow the [Soviet] party leadership in a

bloody coup that was timed to coincide with the invasion of the USSR by

one or more fascist states.” 26 As a result of the language of rebellion and

the paranoid beliefs (ideas fed to the masses by propagandists like the

Czechoslovakian president) that the “threat of war” was real, the more
23
Suny, p. 105.
24
Suny, p. 105.
25
McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 106.
26
Getty, p. 1.
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‘foreign’ residents of Soviet Union who had “national or ethnic ties beyond

the borders” gradually became dangerous outsiders. 27 This simply led to

the deportation of non-Soviet nationalists in the two years immediately

preceding the Great Terror. A recently published secret memorandum

reflects this Soviet fear of foreigners when its author, L.N. Bel’skii, writes,

“It has been established…that the overwhelming majority of foreigners

living in the Soviet Union provide the organizing basis for spying and

diversionary activities.”28 Therefore, “the repressions of the late 1930s

combined with a merging xenophobia among Soviet leaders with traditional

fears of political opposition and social disorder” served as the so-called

ingredients for 1937’s Great Terror during which the party members utilized

repressive violence as a means of rooting out those latently subversive

persons who threatened to leave the Soviet state vulnerable to foreign

threats. 29

The inculcated fear of the outsider eventually translated into a fear of

the entirety of one’s surroundings, which in turn created a fear-fueled war

zone in which Stalin led a “whirlwind of 1937 and 1938 [during which] the

party and state were decapitated.” 30 This whirlwind targeted the political

leadership, army, and the intelligentsia so strongly that by 1939, 60 percent

of those who had been party members in 1933 had been driven out by the

27
McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 112.
28
McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 112.
29
McLoughlin and McDermot, p. 112.
30
Getty, p. 2.
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party; civil war heroes like Marshal Tukhachevskii and most of the Red

Army leaders were arrested and shot for treason, and other free thinkers

who dared to contradict or question the state were exiled to the GULag. 31

Although most scholars agree that the Great Purges were systematically

planned by Stalin, it is quite difficult to ascertain the transition between

purge and terror during which a total of 177,500 people were exiled and

72,950 were executed. 32 When one examines this period in Soviet history

using a larger scope, however, it elucidates the fact that in this one-party

system, the single male leader, Joseph Stalin, exerted an immense impact

on the course programs like the Great Terror took. With the opening of the

incomplete Soviet archives in recent years, new information about the

leader of this terrifying period come to the foreground. Operating using a

binary warlike mentality in which a person was either an enemy of the

Soviet state or a friend, Joseph Stalin translated his fear of opposition (both

latent within the Soviet community and from outside the nation) into a

dogmatic rule during which ‘war preparations were under way” even if that

war consumed an entire continent. 33

31
Suny, p. 265.
Getty, p. 2.
32
Suny, p. 264.
33
Suny, p. 267.