The Purges of the 1930s: The Great Terror and Its Consequences (AQA A Level History: Component 1: Breadth study): Revision Note

Summary

• The Great Purges (1936-38) were Stalin's campaign of mass arrest, show trials and executions across Soviet society

• The murder of Sergei Kirov in December 1934 gave Stalin the pretext to launch the Terror

• Three Moscow show trials destroyed the Old Bolsheviks

  • Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed in 1936

  • Bukharin was executed in 1938

• The army was hit hard

  • Three of five marshals were removed

  • Around half the officer corps were removed

• The Yezhovshchina spread terror to ordinary citizens through quotas, denunciations and the NKVD

• By 1939, Stalin held unchallenged personal power

  • Millions had been arrested, imprisoned or killed

• Historians debate whether Stalin’s terror continued Leninist repression or transformed it into something new

  • Brown stresses continuity with the one-party dictatorship Lenin created

  • Thurston argues Stalin’s terror was reactive, fear-driven and less controlled than it appeared

Causes of the purges: why did Stalin launch the Great Terror?

Stalin's insecurity: the crisis of 1932

• By 1932, Stalin's position was less secure than it appeared

  • His wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, took her own life in November 1932

  • Famine and strikes brought open criticism of the Five-Year Plan and Stalin's leadership

• The Ryutin Affair showed opposition reaching into the Party elite

  • Martemyan Ryutin circulated an appeal calling for Stalin's removal

  • Stalin reportedly wanted Ryutin executed

    • He was overruled by the Politburo

The 17th Party Congress, 1934

• At the 1934 Congress, Stalin declared that the opposition had been defeated

  • He received around 150 negative votes in the Central Committee

  • Only three negative votes were officially recorded

• Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Party leader, appeared popular

  • He received a lengthy ovation

  • He was associated with a more moderate line

• Some within the Party wanted to ease pressure after collectivisation

  • Loyalists such as Molotov and Kaganovich firmly backed Stalin

The trigger: the Kirov murder, December 1934

• Kirov was shot dead in Leningrad on 1 December 1934

  • His killer, Leonid Nikolayev, was officially described as a disgruntled Party member acting alone

  • Some historians argue that Stalin may have ordered the attack to justify the purges

  • Stalin officially blamed a "Trotskyite conspiracy"

• A decree issued the next day gave the NKVD wider powers

  • It allowed suspects to be arrested and shot quickly

  • Around 6,500 people were arrested under this decree in December 1934

  • This opened the way to the wider Terror that followed

Stalin's deeper aims

• The Terror served Stalin's political purposes

  • It removed potential rivals

  • It targeted anyone linked to past opposition

  • It used the idea of a "sharpening class struggle" to justify hunting hidden enemies

• It also enforced obedience

  • Fear spread across the Party and the state

  • Opposition became extremely dangerous

What groups were targeted in the purges?

The Old Bolsheviks: the three Moscow show trials

• Public show trials destroyed Lenin's original revolutionary elite

  • Charges were based on fabricated conspiracies with the exiled Trotsky

The Red Army

• Between May and June 1937, Stalin turned on the army's high command

  • Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other senior commanders were shot for "espionage"

  • Of 767 high command officers, 512 were executed

• The purge removed much of the military leadership

  • Three of five marshals, all eight admirals and all eleven war commissars were removed

• Historians agree this was linked to Stalin's growing paranoia

  • It left the USSR without a capable high command shortly before the German invasion of June 1941

The Party, minorities and ordinary citizens

• The Terror spread beyond the Party leadership and the army

  • Around 70% of the 1934 Central Committee were arrested and shot

  • An estimated 1,108 of 1,966 delegates to the 1934 Congress were arrested

• Minority nationalities suffered heavily

  • Around 350,000 were tried

    • This included 140,000 Poles

• Professional and technical groups were also targeted

  • Managers, engineers and scientists lost their posts

  • Many were executed

• The NKVD itself was purged

  • Yagoda was tried

  • More than 23,000 officers were tried

• Relatives and colleagues of the accused were also arrested, exiled or shot

The Great Terror (Yezhovshchina), 1936–1938

From the Party to the people

• From 1936, the Terror widened from the elite into mass repression

  • This period is known as the Great Terror

  • It is also known as the Yezhovshchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, NKVD chief from September 1936

• Yezhov replaced Yagoda

  • Yagoda was accused of not pursuing the "conspiracy" hard enough

The quota system, 1937

• In July 1937, a Politburo order set arrest quotas for each region

  • Local NKVD officers had to find a set number of "anti-Soviet elements"

  • Targets now included artists, scientists, managers and administrators

Denunciation and fear

• Citizens were urged to denounce the "hidden enemies"

  • People watched colleagues, friends and even family members for "oppositional thoughts"

  • Arrests became continuous and random

  • People feared a knock at their door

• Victims were shot or sent to the Gulag

The end of Terror, 1938-1939

• The pace slowed after late 1938

  • The Terror began to damage the state

  • Industry and administration had lost too many skilled people

  • Stalin made Yezhov the scapegoat for "excessive zeal"

• Lavrentiy Beria replaced Yezhov as NKVD chief

• The 18th Party Congress in 1939 declared the "mass cleansings" over

  • Around 1.5 million cases were reviewed

  • Over 450,000 convictions were quashed

  • An estimated 327,000 people were released from the gulags

Political consequences of the purges

Stalin's unchallenged power

• By 1939, Stalin held supreme personal power

  • His old rivals and the Old Bolsheviks had been destroyed

  • Almost no one with a stronger claim to lead than Stalin remained

• Trotsky, the last major rival, was murdered in Mexico in 1940

  • He was reportedly killed with an ice pick to the head

A weakened state on the eve of war

• The army had lost much of its experienced leadership

  • This left the USSR exposed when Germany invaded in 1941

• Industry and administration had lost skilled managers and specialists

  • This particularly affected munitions

A society reshaped by fear

• Terror changed how ordinary people behaved

  • People obeyed because punishment was certain but unpredictable

  • Many felt they were always being watched

Faith in Stalin preserved

• Yezhov, not Stalin, was blamed for the suffering

  • The release of prisoners helped restore faith in Stalin and the system

  • Stalin emerged with near-total control over the Party and the population

How different was Stalin’s use of terror to Lenin’s?

• This type of question asks you to compare two phases of communist terror

• Both used the secret police to crush opposition

  • They differed in scale, target and purpose

Stalin's terror continued on from Lenin

• Lenin created the machinery and the logic of terror

  • He established the Cheka

  • He launched the Red Terror in 1918

  • He built the one-party state and banned factions in 1921

• These tools later helped Stalin

  • Stalin used them during the show trials

  • The NKVD grew directly out of Lenin’s Cheka

  • On this view, the difference from Lenin was one of scale, not kind

Key historian

• Brown supports a continuity argument

  • Terror was built into the one-party dictatorship created under Lenin

  • However, Stalin took it much further

Stalin's terror completely transformed Lenin's

• Stalin's terror was different in scale, target and nature

  • Lenin's terror hit class enemies during a Civil War emergency

  • Stalin turned inward on loyal communists and the army in peacetime

  • The scale was far greater, reaching hundreds and thousands of deaths

• It may also have been less controlled than Lenin's terror

  • On this reading, it became an arbitrary system, not a precise tool

Key historian

• Thurston gives a revisionist view

  • Stalin’s terror was not a controlled instrument like Lenin’s Red Terror

  • It was a reactive system that escaped full control