4)Stalin:Controlling the USSR

Dec 1932-5

over 20%

“Well, Soviet cows are such disgusting creatures…You Commune of Satan You seized everything”

Nadezda Allilueva committed suicide in Nov 1932 due to her opposition to collectivisation

• 1932, former Moscow party secretary, Ryutin circulated to the Central committee a 200 page document criticizing Stalin for his ‘personal dictatorship’.
• He urged Stalin’s removal. Stalin wanted death penalty for Ryutin but other members of the Politburo (Kirov) opposed him. Stalin was still subject to the majority of the Politburo.

old Bolshevik A. P. Smirnov charged with forming opposition group to moderate industrialization, making trade unions more independent and bringing OGPU (secret police) under party control. Stalin wanted death penalty or to imprison them – but the majority of the Politburo wouldn’t support

“The fundamental difficulties are behind us”

292 for him; 3 against him.

Secretary of Equal Rank

Kaganovich and Molotov

Dec 1934

Leonid Nikolayev

• Nikolayev was expelled in Mar 1934 for breach of discipline but lator reinstated. He developed a hatred of the party bureaucracy
• His wife Milde Draule, secretary at party headquarters, may have had an affair with Kirov
• Diary in his briefcase showed he had planned the murder: it was ‘a personal act of desperation and dissatisfaction…as a protest against the unjust attitude’

• They may have thought that Stalin wanted Kirov murdered
• Kirov wanted to relax the terror, but NKVD didn’t want this and didn’t want Kirov to replace Stalin
• They didn’t intend Nikolayev to kill Kirov but intended to stop him before he could carry out the attack and use the attempted assassination as justification for their continuing role against enemies of the state

• Police didn't detain Nikolayev 3 times and release him. He was stopped once, but it wasn't suspicious
• he hadn't received gun from Leningrad NKVD officer but had owned it since 1918
• His diary at the Smolny, showed indicated he'd acted alone
• Files didn't implicate involvement of Stalin nor NKVD

• “he [Yagoda] could have brought Stalin’s entire house down with a single remark…such a risk would appear to be unacceptable for a complicit Stalin…"
• The Stalinists seemed unprepared for the assassination, it took them more than 18 months to frame their targets

• Nikolayev wrote NKVD a letter saying 'I hate Kirov' and the NKVD organised the murder "For four months the NKVD prepared me and convinced me that it was necessary for the Party and the country", Nikolayev said
• When Stalin found out Kirov was replacing him as General Secretary, Kirov realized Stalin's threat. "When he came back from the Seventeenth Congress he told his friends and family: ‘My head is now on the block.’ I had all these testimonies from his friends and family and now they have been destroyed”

• 1934
• Kirov's Leningrad party was purge - 100,000 arrested.
• Thousands more outside party were accused of being Trotskyites involved in Kirov murder and murder of other leaders
• Kamenev and Zinoviev arrested and put on trial in Jan 1935
• Stalin sent out a Central Committee circular in June 1936 on the ‘terrorist activities of the Trotskyist counter-revolutionary bloc’. Trotskyites put on trial in Aug 1936 with 14 other previous members of oppositionist groups.

• Jan 1937
• Karl Radek (Trotskyite), and Pyatakov (deputy in the commissariat of heavy industry)

• March 1938.
• Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda (and other old Bolsheviks)

“a simple friendship with a sworn counter-revolutionary is hardly possible. It is my suspicion that Comrade Bukharin was aware of Busygin’s work”

Vyshinsky

“They sacrificed honour as well as life to defend the hated regime of Stalin”

Sep 1939, the show trials ended. Nicolai Yezhov replaced Yagoda - criticised for not finding enemies fast enough.

1937-8

• ‘I have never seen a more repellent personality than Yezhov’s’
• 'Iron hedgehod'
• 'Bloodthirsty Dwarf'

1936, Stalin constitution promised democracy and freedom. But in 1937, a resolution condemning 'Anti-Soviet elements' was passed

• 250,000 including scientists, artists, writers and
• musicians, managers and administrators.

‘arrests had begun among the historians’.

a scientist accused of supposedly organized ‘counter-revolutionary astronomers’ group’.

“Secretaries defended themselves...full-blown spy scare. Panic stricken local party officials...”

1000

"An avalanche of monstrous charges…and random arrests overwhelmed swathes of the population"

“People hoped to gain leniency for themselves or their families by cooperating with the NKVD”

• “In one district in Kiev, 69 persons were denounced by one man, in another 100.
• In Odessa a single Communist denounced 230 people.
• In Poltava, a party member denounced his entire organisation”

28% to be shot, whilst the rest sentenced to 10 years of labour camp.

"how many people were executed in Georgia? I can tell you he said 80,000…we overfulfilled our plan”

• His confession had blood stains on it - forced confession.
• Revenge. Tukhachevsky was an old general who, along with other old party members put difficulties in Stalin's path.
• W.G. Krivitsky “He felt no certainty now that they would continue to recognize his totalitarian authority”

• looked more voluntary
• “I personally prefer a half confession in the defendant’s own handwriting to a full confession in the investigator’s writing”.

• Continuous standing until legs were swollen
• Deprivation of sleep with all-day interrogations in Lubyanka
• 'parilka' or sweat room, hundreds of people standing in a small room with no ventilation
• 'conveyer belt' - victims ran round and round with agents questioning and bullying them

end of 1938. though central committee and officers purged into 1939.

Beria

• Michael Lynch - "Paranoid Megalomaniac"
• Alan Bullock - "hostile world peopled with jealous and treacherous enemies "

Stalin thought he was a "genius marked out to play a unique historical role."

"more concerned with strengthening his own personal power...plunged the Soviet Union into misery"

Rose Cohen, founding member of the British Communist party was victim to the purges

• Stalin had "to get rid of his imagined enemies"
• "'Better that ten innocent people should suffer that one spy get away' was the motto of the secret police"

• Stalin needed to eliminate those who "knew in its heart of hearts that Stalin was not the Lenin of today
• By the end of the thirties… most of its members had joined since 1929.”

“the authoritarianism of the Russian Communist Party was not a historical accident…Lenin was an absolutist. Stalin inherited and continued that tradition.”

Julian Reed-Purvis

• “destroy the men who represented the potentiality of alternative government”
• “improvement in the economic conditions…He certainly had no need for so many scapegoats”

“too often the political history of the Stalin period has merely been the story of Stalin’s supposed activities”

• “the subconscious temptation to seek scapegoats became
• irresistible.”

• “take pre-emptive measures against any ‘fifth column’ operating against him in the case of war”
• “in order to sustain his mode of industrialization" he needed to keep sites "constantly supplied with slave labour”

3182 and 30 lists

• Statues of him dignify the façade of every public building…
• In shops they sell million upon million of images of him
• in every home there is at least one portrait of him

• 1924-9 - Origins of Cult (humanity, collective)
• 1929-33 - Cult Underway with the Depression (strong, cold, distant, portraits with other figures)
• 1933-9 - Cult fully established (godly, the vozhd, monumental)
• Post 1945 - Height of Cult (equal/superior of Lenin, godly solitude)

• ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today’ is a commonly used phrase.
• renaming of Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad in 1925, similar to Leningrad

350

• “O’er the earth the rising sun sheds a warmer light,
• Since it looked on Stalin’s face it has grown more light”
• he relates the Sun's superiority with Stalin, godly symbolism

1938

In 1939, exhibition entitled “Stalin and the Soviet people”

‘Stalin is everywhere present and watching over you; he understands your hopes and has your best interests at heart.’

• 34m in the USSR.
• 2 m elsewhere

Cover of Ogonyyok magazine, dec 1949

• At a provincial meeting, there was an ovation when Stalin’s name was mentioned and no one dared to sit down first. When one old man could stand no longer and sat down, his name was taken and he was arrested the next day
• When a speech of Stalin’s published on a series of gramophone records, one side of one of the records consisted entirely of applause.

• A leaflet ridiculing the supreme soviet: where the ‘people’s elect’ were allowed to shout “Hurray” a thousand times in honour of the vozhd and his stooge.
• An anonymous letter from a Communist supporter complained: “Everything is Stalin, Stalin, Stalin…so much noise in people’s heads that it is very possible that it will have the opposite effect”

“All my children had and are having education...he, along with Lenin opened the way for us simple people”

“Dear comrade Stalin! Our beloved vozhd, teacher and friend of the whole happy Soviet country”

• Alexander Avdeyenko states:
• “radio told us that Stalin was the greatest man on earth…Man wants to believe in something great”

• Pavel Litvinov states:
• “Stalin was like a god for us. We just believed he was an absolutely perfect individual…he was thinking about us, about each of us. That was how we felt.”

• In M. Izakvosky’s “Song about Stalin”:
• "About the dearest person
• About our sun, about the truth of nations,
• About our Stalin let’s sing a song”