The following lyrics from an issue of Pravda in is an example of the propaganda the Communist party employed during the Great Purge. Lenoe, Matthew E. The Kirov Murder and Soviet History. This book by historian Matthew Lenoe assembles multiple investigations and official documents of the Kirov murder, which set the Great Purge in motion.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin and the Kirov Murder. It is an excellent source for basic background information on the subject. Accessed May 2, Nikolai Bukharin, member of the Soviet politburo and Central Commitee and editor-in-chief of Pravda newspaper was the central victim of the Moscow show trials. The following transcript involves Bukharin defending his allegiance to the Soviet cause and his condemnation of terror.
Let me relate to you how I explained this matter. Comrade Mikoian says the following: On the most basic question, he, Bukharin, has differences of opinion with the party: In essence, he stuck to his old positions.
This is untrue. In no way have I stuck to my previous positions — not on industrialization, not on collectivization, [and] not on village restructuring in general. But with regards to stimuli in agriculture, this question was not clear to me until the matter came round to the legislation on Soviet trade. I consider the entire problem, as a whole, was resolved after the introduction of laws on Soviet trade. Prior to this, this problem, very important but not all-embracing, was not clear to me.
When this matter became pertinent to product turnover in [illegible] and Soviet…. I would like to make one more remark. I do bear responsibility for this. But the question involves the degree of responsibility; it is a matter of the quality of this responsibility. I bear responsibility for this fact.
However, it is necessary to establish the degree and nature of this responsibility. I am not shifting responsibility from myself; more than anyone else, I accept the gravity of this responsibility. However, I would like to say that the measure of responsibility, the characterization of this responsibility, is absolutely specific in nature, and it should be expressed as I have expressed it here. This is an obvious lie. How could Kulikov offer two versions in answer to this absolutely and exceptionally terrible question?
Regarding the Riutinskii platform. It was presented by Ezhov as one of the top-priority issues requiring deliberation. This included the threat to arrest and execute members of the prisoner's family if they did not confess. The interrogation went on for several days and nights and eventually they became so exhausted and disoriented that they signed confessions agreeing that they had been attempting to overthrow the government. They were accused of working with Leon Trotsky in an attempt to overthrow the Soviet government with the objective of restoring capitalism.
Robin Page Arnot , a leading figure in the British Communist Party , wrote: "A second Moscow trial, held in January , revealed the wider ramifications of the conspiracy. The volume of evidence brought forward at this trial was sufficient to convince the most sceptical that these men, in conjunction with Trotsky and with the Fascist Powers, had carried through a series of abominable crimes involving loss of life and wreckage on a very considerable scale.
Edvard Radzinsky , the author of Stalin has pointed out: "After they saw that Piatakov was ready to collaborate in any way required, they gave him a more complicated role.
In the trials he joined the defendants, those whom he had meant to blacken. He was arrested, but was at first recalcitrant. Ordzhonikidze in person urged him to accept the role assigned to him in exchange for his life. No one was so well qualified as Piatakov to destroy Trotsky, his former god and now the Party's worst enemy, in the eyes of the country and the whole world.
He finally agreed I to do it as a matter of 'the highest expediency,' and began rehearsals with the interrogators. One of the journalists covering the trial, Lion Feuchtwanger , commented: "Those who faced the court could not possibly be thought of as tormented and desperate beings. In appearance the accused were well-groomed and well-dressed men with relaxed and unconstrained manners. They drank tea, and there were newspapers sticking out of their pockets Altogether, it looked more like a debate The impression created was that the accused, the prosecutor, and the judges were all inspired by the same single - I almost said sporting - objective, to explain all that had happened with the maximum precision.
If a theatrical producer had been called on to stage such a trial he would probably have needed several rehearsals to achieve that sort of teamwork among the accused. Yuri Piatakov and twelve of the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death.
Karl Radek and Grigori Sokolnikov were sentenced to ten years. Feuchtwanger commented that Radek "gave the condemned men a guilty smile, as though embarrassed by his luck. But what transpired surpassed all my expectations of human baseness. It was all there, terrorism, intervention, the Gestapo, theft, sabotage, subversion All out of careerism, greed, and the love of pleasure, the desire to have mistresses, to travel abroad, together with some sort of nebulous prospect of seizing power by a palace revolution.
Where was their elementary feeling of patriotism, of love for their motherland? These moral freaks deserved their fate My soul is ablaze with anger and hatred. Their execution will not satisfy me.
I should like to torture them, break them on the wheel, burn them alive for all the vile things they have done. He argued that since November , that agents working for Nazi Germany had infiltrated the ranks of the Soviet leadership, while Trotsky, like an exiled monarch, was the leader of the conspiracy to overthrow Stalin.
Duranty went on to claim that this conspiracy had involved many men in the highest echelons of government. But now "their Trojan horse was broken, and its occupants destroyed. James William Crowl , the author of Angels in Stalin's Paradise has argued: "Although Louis Fischer reserved judgment on the trials, Duranty vigorously defended them.
According to him, Trotsky had created a spy network at the very time that Germany and Japan were spreading their own spy organizations in Russia. He explained that the two groups shared a hatred for Stalin, and fascist agents had cooperated with the Trotskyites in Kirov's assassination.
The show-trials, Duranty insisted, had revealed the Trotskyite-fascist link beyond question. The trials showed just as clearly, he argued on 14th July, , that Stalin's arrest of thousands of these agents had spared the country from a wave of assassinations. Duranty charged that those who worried about the rights of the defendants or claimed that their confessions had been gained by drugs or torture, only served the interests of Germany and Japan. The next show trials took place in March, , and involved twenty-one leading members of the party.
They were accused of being involved with Leon Trotsky in a plot against Joseph Stalin and with spying for foreign powers. They were all found guilty and were either executed or died in labour camps. Stalin now decided to purge the Red Army. Some historians believe that Stalin was telling the truth when he claimed that he had evidence that the army was planning a military coup at this time. Leopold Trepper , head of the Soviet spy ring in Germany, believed that the evidence was planted by a double agent who worked for both Stalin and Hitler.
Trepper's theory is that the "chiefs of Nazi counter-espionage" led by Reinhard Heydrich , took "advantage of the paranoia raging in the Soviet Union," by supplying information that led to Stalin executing his top military leaders. In June, , Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other top Red Army commanders were charged with conspiracy with Germany.
All eight were convicted and executed. All told, 30, members of the armed forces were executed. This included fifty per cent of all army officers. The last stage of the terror was the purging of the NKVD. Stalin wanted to make sure that those who knew too much about the purges would also be killed. Stalin announced to the country that "fascist elements" had taken over the security forces which had resulted in innocent people being executed.
He appointed Lavrenti Beria as the new head of the Secret Police and he was instructed to find out who was responsible. After his investigations, Beria arranged the executions of all the senior figures in the organization.
Walter Duranty always underestimated the number killed during the Great Purge. As Sally J. Taylor , the author of Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty has pointed out: "As for the number of resulting casualties from the Great Purge, Duranty's estimates, which encompassed the years from to , fell considerably short of other sources, a fact he himself admitted.
Whereas the number of Party members arrested is usually put at just above one million, Duranty's own estimate was half this figure, and he neglected to mention that of those exiled into the forced labor camps of the GULAG, only a small percentage ever regained their freedom, as few as 50, by some estimates. As to those actually executed, reliable sources range from some , to one million, while Duranty maintained that only about 30, to 40, had been killed.
It is said Comrade Trotsky wanted democracy to come from below, and the Central Committee wanted to introduce it from above. Of what use is it to elect an Executive Committee if the decisions of the Party Congress can be effectively carried through without the election of such a committee?
And this is what the proposals amounts to. It finds its echo amongst many industrialists in this country and also amongst reformist Labour leaders. The industrialists plead for more ballots, more referendums, impervious to the fact that they are simply transferring the Parliamentarism of the Labour Party to the industrial arena.
Stalin decided to arrange for the assassination of Kirov and to lay the crime at the door of the former leaders of the opposition and thus with one blow do away with Lenin's former comrades. Stalin came to the conclusion that, if he could prove that Zinoviev and Kamenev and other leaders of the opposition had shed the blood of Kirov, "the beloved son of the party", a member of the Politburo, he then would be justified in demanding blood for blood.
Much was said in the Moscow trial about my alleged "hatred" for Stalin. Much was said in the Moscow trial about it, as one of the motives of my politics. Toward the greedy caste of upstarts which oppresses the people "in the name of socialism" I have nothing but irreducible hostility, hatred if you like.
But in this feeling there is nothing personal. I have followed too closely all the stages of the degeneration of the revolution and the almost automatic usurpation of its conquests; I have sought too stubbornly and meticulously the explanation for these phenomena in objective conditions for me to concentrate my thoughts and feelings on one specific person. My standing does not allow me to identity the real stature of the man with the giant shadow it casts on the screen of the bureaucracy.
I believe I am right in saying I have never rated Stalin so highly as to be able to hate him. I would like to repeat that I am fully and utterly guilty. It is futile to think the trial was staged and the charges trumped up.
Some commentators, writing at a long distance from the scene, profess doubt that the executed men Zinoviev and Kamenev were guilty. Very likely there was a plot. How could these old Bolsheviks who went through the jails and exiles of Czarism, who were the heroes of the civil war, the leaders of industry, the builders of the party, diplomats, turn out at the moment of "the complete victory of socialism" to be saboteurs, allies of fascism, organizer of espionage, agents of capitalist restoration?
Who can believe such accusations? How can anyone be made to believe them. And why is Stalin compelled to tie up the fate of his personal rule with these monstrous, impossible, nightmarish juridical trials?
First and foremost, I must reaffirm the conclusion I had previously drawn that the ruling tops feel themselves more and more shaky. The degree of repression is always in proportion to the magnitude of the danger. The omnipotence of the soviet bureaucracy, its privileges, its lavish mode of life, are not cloaked by any tradition, any ideology, any legal norms.
The ruling caste is unable, however, to punish the opposition for its real thoughts and actions. The unremitting repressions are precisely for the purpose of preventing the masses from the real program of Trotskyism, which demands first of all more equality and more freedom for the masses.
Unless we are the "gullible idiots" who Trotsky says would have to people the world if the charges made against the sixteen men just tried and shot in Moscow, were to be believed, we must conclude that the very indictment and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and the fourteen others constitute in actuality the most crushing indictment yet made of the Stalin regime itself. The real accused in the trial were not on the defendants' bench before the Military Tribunal.
They were and they remain the usurping masters of the Kremlin - concocters of a hideous frame-up. The official indictment charges a widespread assassination conspiracy, carried on these five years or more, directed against the head of the Communist party and the government, organized with the direct connivance of the Hitler regime, and aimed at the establishment of a Fascist dictatorship in Russia.
Leon Trotsky, organizer and leader, together with Lenin, of the October Revolution, and founder of the Comintern. Zinoviev: 35 years of his life in the Bolshevik party; Lenin's closest collaborator in exile and nominated by him as first chairman of the Communist International; chairman of the Petrograd Soviet for years; member of the Central Committee and the Political Bureau of the C.
Kamenev: also 35 years spent in the Bolshevik party; chairman of the Political Bureau in Lenin's absence; chairman of the Moscow Soviet; chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense; Lenin's literary executor.
Smirnov: head of the famous Fifth Army during the civil war; called the "Lenin of Siberia;" a member of the Bolshevik party for decades. Yevdokimov: official party orator at Lenin's funeral; leader of the Leningrad party organization for many years; member of the Central Committee at the time Kirov died. Ter-Vaganian: theoretical leader of the Armenian communists; founder and first editor of the party's review, "Under the Banner of Marxism.
Mrachkovsky: defender of Ekaterinoslav from the interventionist Czechs and the White troop during the civil war. Sokolnikov: Soviet ambassador to England; creator of the "chervonetz," the first stable Soviet currency. Tomsky: head of the Russian trade union center for years; old worker-Bolshevik; member of the Central Committee and Political Bureau for years.
Bukharin: for years one of the most prominent theoreticians of the Bolsheviks; chairman of the Comintern after Zinoviev; editor of official government organ, Isvestia. General Schmidt; head of one of the first Red Cavalry brigades in the Ukraine and one of the country's liberators from the White forces. Heads of banking institutions; chiefs of industrial trusts; heads of educational and scientific institutions; party secretaries from one end of the land to the other; authors Selivanovsky, Serebriakova, Katayev, Friedland, Tarassov-Rodiondv ; editors of party papers; high government officials Prof.
Now to charge, as has been done, all these men and women, plus hundreds and perhaps thousands of others, with having engaged to one extent or another, in an assassination plot, is equivalent, at the very outset and on the face of the matter, to an involuntary admission by the accusing bureaucracy. That its much-vaunted popularity and the universality of its support among the population, is fantastically exaggerated.
That it has created such a regime in the party and the country as a whole, that the very creators of the Bolshevik party and revolution, its most notable and valiant defenders in the crucial and decisive early years, could find no normal way of expressing their dissatisfaction or opposition to the ruling bureaucracy and found that the only way of fighting the latter was the way chosen, for example, by the Nihilists in their struggle against Czarist despotism, namely, conspiracy and individual terrorism.
That the "classless socialist society irrevocably" established by Stalin is so inferior to Fascist barbarism on the political, economic and cultural fields, that hundreds of men whose whole lives were prominently devoted to the cause of the proletariat and its emancipation, decided to discard everything achieved by 19 years of the Russian Revolution in favor of a Nazi regime.
It was a mass execution of Polish nationals, prompted by Lavrenty Beria's proposal to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps. This official document was approved and signed by the Soviet Politburo, including its leader, Joseph Stalin. The number of victims of Katyn is estimated at about 22, Of the total killed, about 8, were officers taken prisoner during the Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6, were police officers, with the rest being Polish intelligentsia arrested for allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers and priests.
Written by Ekaterina Gracheva, RT correspondent. All rights reserved. On this day. Foreigners in Russia. Repressed people in construction of White Sea Canal. GULAG prisoners. Rezhim Rezhim is a word with many meanings in Russian. It denotes a set of rules or procedures to be followed in various areas of life. Samogon Russia is synonymous with Vodka, but travel out of the cities and down to the back woods and a different drink challenges Vodka as the tipple of choice.
Understanding the druzhina is key to figuring out how Russian princes lived, fought and controlled their domains throughout the Middle Ages. The GULAG The system of Soviet labour camps, which are sometimes likened to the Nazi concentration camps because of their cruel and life exterminating conditions. Medovukha Medovukha is a honey-based alcoholic drink — stronger and stouter than beer and weaker than wine. It consists of honey and yeast.
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