Stalin’s Dictatorship: Terror, the Secret Police and the Gulag (AQA A Level History: Component 1: Breadth study): Revision Note

Summary

• A totalitarian state seeks total control

  • Stalin built one using ideology, the police, propaganda and terror

• The secret police kept one purpose under changing names: Cheka, GPU, OGPU, then NKVD by 1934

• The Gulag grew into a vast camp network

  • It held around one million prisoners by 1934

• Show trials used forced confessions and fixed verdicts to display the Party's power

• Three NKVD chiefs ran the terror in turn

  • Yagoda and Yezhov were later destroyed by the system they helped run

• Historians debate whether terror was driven mainly by Stalin’s personal dictatorship or by the one-party system Lenin built

  • Volkogonov argues terror flowed from Stalin’s personal command

  • Figes argues terror grew from the Leninist tradition Stalin inherited

Stalin and totalitarianism: how total was his control?

What is totalitarianism?

• In general, a totalitarian state tries to control every part of life, not just government

  • It controls politics through a single ruling party

  • It controls ideas through one official ideology

  • It treats rival parties, independent organisations and criticisms as threats

• In Stalin's Russia, this meant total control by the Communist Party

  • The only accepted ideology was Marxism-Leninism, as Stalin interpreted it

  • Opposition was treated as betrayal, not normal political disagreement

  • Public life, private life, culture, education and the economy were all expected to serve the state

The pillars of Stalin's control

• Stalin's dictatorship rested on connected tools:

  • The secret police used surveillance and removed suspects

  • Propaganda and the cult of personality presented Stalin as an infallible leader

  • The Gulag and fear of arrest enforced obedience through terror

How total was it?

• By the late 1930s, Stalin's power was personal, not institutional

  • Orders flowed from him through the Party, police and army

  • By 1939, the Party could no longer control him

• However, control was never complete

  • Local bureaucracy was inefficient

  • Local officials could slow down central demands

  • In the Ryutin affair of 1932, Stalin reportedly wanted Ryutin executed, but the Politburo did not approve this

    • This suggests Stalin’s control was not yet absolute in the early 1930s

The development of the Soviet secret police: Cheka to NKVD

• The secret police was the core instrument of Soviet control from 1917

  • It changed names often

  • Its purpose stayed the same: protecting the Party

How the secret police evolved

• Merging the police into the NKVD in 1934 tightened Stalin's control

  • Policing, state security and the camps now sat under one body

  • The NKVD became the main engine of terror in the 1930s

• After 1941, the secret police continued under new names

  • It became the NKGB

  • Then the MGB

  • From 1954, the KGB

The Gulag system: forced labour camps in the Soviet Union

What was the Gulag?

• The Gulag was the network of Soviet forced labour camps

  • The name is an acronym for the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps

  • It was a system of thousands of camps, not a single place

How the system grew

• Camps began under the Cheka

  • They were used to hold "class enemies"

• By 1929, the camps were filling with the regime's 'enemies'

  • Kulaks and NEPmen, swept up by collectivisation and dekulakisation

  • "Wreckers", saboteurs and "bourgeois specialists"

  • Political opponents

  • Ordinary criminals

• Yagoda built new camps of around 60,000 prisoners each

  • Many were in Siberia and the north

  • Prisoners mined timber, gold, nickel, coal and oil

  • By 1934, the camps held around one million people

Purpose and conditions

• The Gulag both punished enemies and supplied unpaid labour

  • Prisoners built major projects such as the White Sea Canal

  • Conditions were severe

    • Hunger, disease, cold and high death rates were common

Show trials in the USSR: justice or performance?

• A show trial was a public trial staged for propaganda

  • Stalin used them to remove his opponents publicly

  • Confessions came from torture, threats and holding their families ransom

  • Verdicts were often fixed in advance and reported widely in the press

The major show trials

• The trials projected Party unity and authority

  • Confessions to impossible crimes 'proved' that enemies were everywhere

  • The public format turned terror into political theatre

The roles of Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria

• Three men led the NKVD in turn

  • Each shaped terror differently

The three chiefs at a glance

Genrikh Yagoda (1934-36)

• Yagoda was a career secret policeman

  • He had been in the Cheka from 1920

  • He became deputy head of the OGPU

  • He ran the labour camps from 1930 and built the early Gulag network

• As NKVD chief he organised the first Moscow show trial in 1936

  • He was also linked to the murder of the Party leader Sergei Kirov in 1934

• Stalin judged him too soft and replaced him with Yezhov

  • Yagoda was arrested in 1937 as a "Trotskyist conspirator"

  • He was shot in 1938

Nikolai Yezhov (1936-38)

• Yezhov led the NKVD at the height of the terror

  • This period became known as the Yezhovshchina

  • He pushed the secret police to its most intensive activity

• Interrogations became constant

  • Officers worked in shifts so questioning never stopped

• By late 1938, Stalin blamed him for the terror's "excesses"

  • He was removed

  • He was arrested and executed, like Yagoda before him

Lavrenty Beria (from 1938)

• Beria took over in 1938

  • He ended the most violent phase of terror

  • He reorganised the secret police to make it more disciplined

• He hugely expanded the Gulag during the war and also after 1941

  • He also ran wartime deportations of whole groups of people

  • This included the Chechens in 1944

• Beria's power was the most far-reaching of the three

  • It still depended on Stalin's favour

  • He outlasted Stalin

  • He was arrested and executed by his colleagues in 1953

What their fate shows

• Even those who ran the terror were not safe from it

  • Both Yagoda and Yezhov were destroyed

  • Each chief survived only as long as Stalin's favour

Who was responsible for terror in the USSR?

• Historians disagree over responsibility for Soviet terror

  • Was Stalin himself mainly responsible?

  • Or was terror driven by the system he inherited and led?

Stalin's personal dictatorship drove the terror

• Terror became a tool of one man's rule

  • By the late 1930s, Stalin’s power was personal and unchecked

  • He could aim the secret police at anyone he chose

• The NKVD chiefs served and fell at Stalin's command

  • Yagoda and Yezhov were destroyed once they had served their purpose

Key historian

• Volkogonov, a Soviet general with archive access, sees terror flowing downwards from Stalin

  • The phrase “the dictator’s will” places personal responsibility at the centre

The system Lenin built drove the terror

• The machinery of terror existed before Stalin

  • The secret police, one-party rule and the Red Terror all began under Lenin

• Stalin expanded a system already built for coercion

  • His methods continued the Leninist tradition rather than breaking it

Key historian

• Figes places Stalin within a longer Bolshevik story

  • On this reading, responsibility is shared with the system Lenin created

  • Stalin used and expanded that system, rather than inventing terror alone