Figure 1.--
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Figure 1.-- |
Stalin organized a series of show trials in which priminent officials and military officers were forced to admit to ludicrous accounts of treason. Soviet citizens were encouraged to denounce their neigbors. Many did in an effort to improve their chances of survival. Stalin consolidated his personal power by eliminating opponents, suppressing any vestige of independent thought. A biographer reports that Stalin ruled by the Big Lie "not only by terror but also by falsification". Stalin used torture to extract false confessions creating what has become known as the Great Terror. [Conquest] Stlalin turned the Soviet Union into a police state in which Soviet citizens lacked even the most basic civil liberties. Workers were completely at the disposition of the state. Stalin ordered purges in which millios lost their jobs, homes, freedom, and often their lives. Most important Blosheviks that had led the Revolution were arrested and show trails organized in which the tortured defendents confessed to traechery and traeason (1936-38). Most were executed. Only a few Bolsehevik leaders, men like Molotov who were close to Stalin, survived.
Stalin organized a series of show trials in which priminent officials and military officers were forced to admit to ludicrous accounts of treason.
Soviet citizens were encouraged to denounce their neigbors. Many did in an effort to improve their chances of survival.
Stalin consolidated his personal power by eliminating opponents, suppressing any vestige of independent thought. A biographer reports that Stalin ruled by the Big Lie "not only by terror but also by falsification". Stalin used torture to extract false confessions creating what has become known as the Great Terror. [Conquest] Stlalin turned the Soviet Union into a police state in which Soviet citizens lacked even the most basic civil liberties. Workers were completely at the disposition of the state.
Stalin ordered purges in which millios lost their jobs, homes, freedom, and often their lives. Most important Blosheviks that had led the Revolution were arrested and show trails organized in which the tortured defendents confessed to traechery and traeason (1936-38). Most were executed. Only a few Bolsehevik leaders, men like Molotov who were close to Stalin, survived.
Nikolai Yezhov was born in St. Petersburg during 1895. He was a small man, only 5 feet tall and had a crippled leg. He acquired the nicknam the "Dwarf". Yezhov joined the Bolsheviks after the February Revolution which deposed the Tsar. In the Civil War which followed he fought with the Red Army. After the Civil War he attached himself to Stalin by 1927 was a trusted associate. Yezhov who became looked on with horror was know by his associates popular and well liked. He was even known as a gentle man. [Montefiore] Stalin chose Yezhov to replace the old Bolshevik Genrikh Yagoda to head the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) (September 1936). Stalin ordered him to prepare a sensational action to arrest the mportant Soviet officials who held reservations about Stalin's leadership. Yezhov organized the arrest and show trials of Nickolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Krestinsky and Christian Rakovsky (1937). They were charged with plotting with Stalin's arch enemy Leon Trotsky against Stalin. Yezhov also had Yagoda arrested and tried with the other old Bolsheviks. They confessed to all charges against them. They were all found guilty and were eventually executed. The NKVD under Lagoda developed effective techniques for breaking prisioners down. They were beaten, kept awake, and their families threatened. Most signed what ever confessions were put before them. They were then shot or disappeared into the Gulag. The show trials were only the visible aspect of the Greatv Terror eported in the press. Yezhov proposed Order 00447 to the Soviet Politboro. When it approved it autorized arrest quotas for every region of the Soviet Union. Massive numbers of men and women were arrested, some were deported, others were shot or sentenced to long terms in the Gulag. An estimated 1.5 million people were arrested and 0.7 million shot. The Russians today refer to the Great Terror as "Yezhovshchina" or the "Yezhov affair". Yezhov's position in the NKVD lasted only briefly. Stalin became suspicious of him and replaced with Lavrenti Beria (December 1938). Like Yagoda, Yezhov was then arrested. He was probably executed in 1939, although no public announcement was mae. Beria was one of the few who knew and remembered.
Lavrenty Beria is one of the true evil figures in the history of the 20th century. Stalin appointed Beria head of the NKVD (1938). Beria as NKVD chief became Stalin's chief administrator to continue the Terror. Beria was involved in all aspects of the Terror. He is known to have even participated in the torturing of those arrested. He personally organized mass operations such as the murder of the Polish officers in the Katyn Forrest. Like Himmler, Beria was a gifted administrator and organizers. Stalin gave him other key assignments such as building an atomic bomb. By all accounts he was a loving father and granfather. His attributes as a husband, however, were very different. He is known to have kidnapped countless women off the streets of Moscow and raped them. In the end when he learned that Stalin was about to have him arrested, he poisoned Stalin. Beria was no fool. He knew what Stalin did with NKVD chiefs who possessed so much knowledge of his apalling acts. His Politboro colleagues knowing him all to well, before he could effectively use the NKVD to place himself in power, had him tried and executed for actions comitted while head of the KNVD.
Millions were caught up in the Great Terror and were killed, died from, abuse and mistreatment in the Gulag, or had their lives ruined. Countless children lost their parents. Some individual cases provide a window into Stalin's character.
Broka Poskrebysheva was one of the rate individuals who dared to struggle against the Terror. She was a beautiful woman and dressed fassionably--standing out in the rather dour women who were married to Soviet leaders. And like the others who did, she paid a terrible price. she was the glamerous wife of one of Stalin's key aides--Alexander Poskrebysheva. He was Stalin's chef de cabinent or principal administrative assistant. Broka was devestated when her brother was arrested (1937). She must have appealed to her husband. The two were close, but it is unclear how much he dared tell her about Stalin. Surely he advised her not to approach Stalin on the matter, bu no one knows. She went to Stalin to plead personally for her beloved brother. Stalin hated this. The appeals had no affect, but no action was taken against her. Broka did not give up. She then called NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria and asked to speak with him about her brother. This leads us to believe that Poskrebysheva did not dare to speak with his wife about the realities of Soviet leaders--especially Beria. Or perhaps she was just overcome by grief. After the call she was arrested and never seen by her family again. Poskrebysheva pleaded with Stalin who is reoorted to have told him, "Don't worry, we'll find you another wife." She was later shot in 1941. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the story is how Poskrebysheva continued to loyally work for Stalin and even remained friendly with Beria. Once Beria hugged their dauhter Natalya and told her, "You're going to be as beautiful as your mother." Poskrebysheva is said have ushered Natalya away from Beria and sent her out to play, [Montefiore] Of course Natalya still had a father. Often both mother and fathers were caught up in the Terror and children lost both their parents.
Molotov was perhap's Stalin's closest advisers or as close as one got to Stalin. Molotov was very close to his wife. Stalin had her arrested and she spent years in exile. His devotion to his wife does not appear to have diminished his ability to loyaly serve Stalin. Stlain was, however, apparently preparing to move against his perhaps most consistently loyal aide. Accounts suggest that at the time of Stalin's death he was preparing to have Molotov himself arrested.
executed
Kalinin was the President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. His wife was in exile for years while he worked closely with Stalin.
The NKVD's operating oprinciple was that those who associated with suspected individuals or those actually arrested were the most likely to be security risks themselves. This meant that husband or wives, family members, and associated were suspect. It also mean that in many families, both the father and mother were arrested. This left large numbers of children orphans. Many were taken in by families. Many others had to be cared for by state orphanges. Our information on this aspect of the Terror is incomplete, but it is a topic we hope to persue.
Stalin did not create concentration camps. This was begun under Lenin. The approach was initially corrective labor. Stalin fundamentally changed the systems. The increasing numbers of arrests under the Stalinist Terror were used to fill an ever expanding number of camps throughout the country. The focus changed from corrective labor to slave labor. Not only did the arrests terrorize the Soviet people, but it provided a slave labor force which could be put to work on large scale projects decided on in the Five Year Plans. Many liked the Northern Canal resulted in enormois loss of life for pootly conceived projects. An estimated 18 million people are believed to have passed through the Soviet Gulag.
The literature of the Holocaust has provided a great deal of information about the individuals who executed Hitler's orders. A surprising conclusion is how ordinary they were and how despite their horrigic actions, they were normal husbands and wifes. Many of their children remember tender times at home with their fathers. Until recently very little was known about the perpetrators of the Great Terror other than Stalin. Sinece the disolution of the Soviet Union, a wealth of documents have become avaiable to scholars. Researchers have interviewed the children and grand children of the Stalin's important aides. Here British biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore has greatly added to our understanding of the men who carried out the Great Terror. Like their German counterparts, one can not help but be struck by their normality. The Soviet Terror is even more difficult than the Holocaust to understand. There are countless instances in history where those preceived as different (nationality, etnicity, or religion) have been subjected to unbelieveable cruelty. In the Soviet Terror the horror was visited in the Russian people themselves. Not only other Russians, but in countless casses family members--including the families of Stalin's own aides and ministers. One is at a lost to explain this. A unavoidable conclusion is that such criminality is possible anywhere. It is often thought that the Holocaust and Great Terror are somehow the result of defects in German and Russian character. The normality of the perpetrators and the ability to enduce them to even accept the arrest of family members suggest that such behavior is all to human and in the right mixture of deopraved leadership, absence of the rule of law, and appropriate historical circumstances that such erruption of horror are possible in any country.
Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Knopf), 785p.
