The Great Terror

The Great Terror: A Reassessment (2008 edition) by Robert Conquest, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Kronstadt Shipyard Strike

In March 1921 the Communist Party used force to put down a revolt of the proletariat (sailors and workers) at the Kronstadt shipyard. After the rebellion was put down, lower Party committees were no longer elected but rather appointed. Lenin said that the Communist Part had the right to oppose the will of the majority of the proletariat, because the proletariat were too ignorant to understand their own interests.

Mensheviks

After the Bolsheviks gained power, they outlawed the Menshevik Party and the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Thinking for Oneself

Lenin’s widow, Nadya Krupskaya, said that truth is that which corresponds to reality, and that people should think for themselves. Nikolai Bukharin complained that this obviated the need for the Communist Party.

Scapegoats

There was a need for scapegoats for the failures of central planning. So supply chain mistakes were blamed on foreign agents working for Japan, Germany and the exiled Trotsky. Railway accidents and accidental fires and explosions in coal mines and fertilizer works were given as evidence that such sabotage existed. Innocent engineers were tortured to confess to imaginary acts of sabotage.

Moscow Show Trials

The general accusation of the Moscow Show Trials (1936-1938) was that, under the direction of the exiled Leon Trotsky, many Bolshevik leaders were attempting a coup against the current Bolshevik leadership, in particular, against Joseph Stalin. Those put on trial were accused of being “enemies of the people”, spies, Rightists and Trotskyites. Foreign reporters were present at the trials. In each of the show trials, all the accused were innocent, but convicted by confessions obtained by torture. One reason that almost none of the victims recanted their testimony when allowed to speak in the courtroom with the foreign press present, was that they were broken men. Stalin intentionally dragged out their torture for weeks or months, to destroy their will to rebel. Another reason the accused did not defy Stalin, was because they feared ostracism. They could not imagine a life outside the Communist Party.

Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky

In 1937 the NKVD obtained the help of the Nazi SD to forge a dossier of letters between the German High Command and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, showing a plot by the Red Army to overthrow Stalin. Under torture, the forger Franz Putzig confessed that he had fabricated the documents. The forged evidence was not actually used at Tukhachevsky’s trial. At his trial, Tukhachevsky of was accused of being a German spy and planning a military coup d’état against Moscow. Tukhachevsky and his fellow Red Army reformer Iona E. Yakir were executed in June, 1937. Why did Stalin go after Tukhachevsky? The reason is that Stalin had held a grudge against him. Earlier, in 1920, during the Russian Civil War, Joseph Stalin had crossed paths with Mikhail Tukhachevsky. Trotsky had ordered Stalin to send Budenny’s First Cavalry Army to help Tukhachevsky take Warsaw. But Stalin disobeyed this order. Consequently, Tukhachevsky was defeated by the Poles. Stalin was upset for being blamed for the defeat at Warsaw, so after he gained power, he rewrote the history books to blame Tukhachevsky instead.

Soviet Navy

Romuald Adamovich Muklevich, Director of Naval Construction, was arrested in May 1937 and tortured to confess, even though he had done good work building the Soviet Navy. Naval officers were viewed with suspicion, because they had opportunities for contacts with foreigners. 

Critics of Stalin

In June 1932, Martemyan N. Ryutin criticized Stalin’s policies in the Ukraine in a document  that he circulated by hand among some Party officials. Stalin interpreted it as a call for his violent overthrow. In 1932 September, Ryutin was arrested and expelled from the Communist Party. At the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Osip Aaronovitch Piatnitsky and Grigory Naumovich Kaminsky spoke out against Stalin’s purges. Yezhov accused Pyatnitsky of being an agent of the Tsarist police, and Pyatnitsky was later arrested and shot. Kaminsky, the People’s Commissar for Health, was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1938.

Meyerhold and His Wife Zinaida

In June, 1939 Vsevolod Meyerhold, director of the Meyerhold Theater, was arrested. The NKVD tortured Vsevolod Meyerhold. In particular, NKVD assistant interrogator Boris Rodos urinated into the mouth of Meyerhold. In July 1939 actress Zinaida Raikh, Meyerhold’s wife, was found dead with her eyes cut out. In February 1940 Meyerhold himself was shot.