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Soviet Union [USSR] The Period of the Purges
The complete subjugation of the party to Stalin, its leader,
paralleled the subordination of industry and agriculture to the
state. After squelching Bukharin and the "right-wing deviationists"
in 1929 and 1930, Stalin's position was assured. To secure his
absolute control over the party, however, Stalin began to purge
from party ranks those leaders and their followers whose loyalty he
doubted.
The period of Stalin's purges began in December 1934 when
Sergei Kirov, a popular Leningrad party chief who advocated a
moderate policy toward the peasants, was assassinated. Although
details remain murky, many Western historians believe that Stalin
instigated the murder to rid himself of a potential opponent. In
any event, in the resultant mass purge of the local Leningrad
party, thousands were deported to camps in Siberia. Zinov'ev and
Kamenev, Stalin's former political partners, received prison
sentences for their alleged role in Kirov's murder. At the same
time, the
NKVD (see Glossary), the secret police, stepped up
surveillance through its agents and informers and claimed to
uncover anti-Soviet conspiracies among prominent long-term party
members. At three publicized show trials held in Moscow between
1936 and 1938, dozens of these Old Bolsheviks, including Zinov'ev,
Kamenev, and Bukharin, confessed to improbable crimes against the
Soviet state and were executed. (The last of Stalin's old enemies,
Trotsky, who had supposedly masterminded the conspiracies against
Stalin from abroad, was murdered in Mexico in 1940, presumably by
the NKVD.) Coincident with the show trials against the original
leadership of the party, unpublicized purges swept through the
ranks of younger leaders in party, government, industrial
management, and cultural affairs. Party purges in the non-Russian
republics were particularly severe. The Ezhovshchina ("era of
Ezhov," named for NKVD chief Nikolai Ezhov) ravaged the military as
well, leading to the execution or incarceration of about half the
entire military officer corps. The secret police also terrorized
the general populace, with untold numbers of common people punished
for spurious crimes. By the time the purges subsided in 1938,
millions of Soviet leaders, officials, and other citizens had been
executed, imprisoned, or exiled.
The reasons for this period of widespread purges remain
unclear. Western historians variously hypothesize that Stalin
created the terror out of a desire to goad the population to carry
out his intensive modernization program, or to atomize society to
preclude dissent, or simply out of brutal paranoia. Whatever the
causes, the purges must be viewed as a counterproductive episode
that weakened the Soviet state.
In 1936, just as the purges were intensifying the
Great Terror (see Glossary), Stalin approved a new Soviet constitution to
replace that of 1924. Hailed as "the most democratic constitution
in the world," the 1936 document stipulated free and secret
elections based on universal suffrage and guaranteed the citizenry
a range of civil and economic rights. But in practice the freedoms
implied by these rights were denied by provisions elsewhere in the
constitution that indicated that the basic structure of Soviet
society could not be changed and that the party retained all
political power
(see Soviet Union USSR - Early Soviet Constitutions
, ch. 8).
The power of the party, in turn, now was concentrated in the
persons of Stalin and his handpicked Politburo. Symbolic of the
lack of influence of the party rank and file,
party congresses (see Glossary) met less and less
frequently. State power, far from
"withering away" after the revolution as Karl Marx had predicted,
instead grew in strength. Stalin's personal dictatorship found
reflection in the adulation that surrounded him; the reverence
accorded Stalin in Soviet society gradually eclipsed that given to
Lenin.
Data as of May 1989
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