Essay On The Great Purges

Stalin like Hitler “used propaganda, censorship, and terror to force his will on the Soviet people. Government newspapers glorified work and Stalin himself. Secret police spied on citizens, and anyone who refused to praise Stalin and the state faced severe punishment, even death” (“The Soviet”, n.d.).

The following paper will be an analysis of "The Great Terror," that is, the arrest and often execution of millions of Russian and Russian minorities from 1936 to 1938, carried out by the Soviet secret police, known as, and hereafter referred to as the NKVD. The analysis will use Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg's, a Russian professor and writer who was arrested early into the purges and experienced, as well as survived, it in its entirety, memoir a Journey Into the Whirlwind as a primary source. More specifically, it will focus on Ginzburg's arrest and

Stalin’s brutality and reign of terror forced Russian society to change for the better. BBC’s documentary, “Stalin: Inside the Terror” gave me a better understanding of Russian industrialization and Stalinism and explored the connections between Stalin and his way of government, and the deciding factors to make him dictator of Russia. Both factors contributed to my learning during these last few weeks in History.

“GULAG” (main administration of the camps) was set up in 1930 and became a terrible symbol of the totalitarian communist regime. However, state repressions in Russia have existed for a long a time. In the 19th century, the czar authorities exiled more than a million people to Siberia. Many famous revolutionists, including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were sent there.

This “Apparatus of Terror” involved the NVKD taking people and starting these “Purges” because Stalin did not want to share power with Zinoviev and Kamenev after Lenin’s death. The assassination of the party head at Leningrad led Stalin to ask the Politburo() for support and after it was granted, the purges started().Stalin also believed that the Bolshevik Party() was also a threat to his authority and power, so he began taking these people that he thought were traitors to the cause. These people were called “Trotskyites”. The “Trotskyites” were put into prisons that were run by the NKVD. In these prisons they were tortured physically, and psychologically to gain intel about other

Stalin began to rule with an authoritarian approach forcing fearful citizens to disclose harmful information about their family members in order to remain protected. “[Stalin] had

When people hear the name Joseph Stalin, they automatically associate it to a brutal and ruthless political dictator of the Soviet Union who managed to send more Russian to either their deaths or to forced labor camps than Hitler did with the Jews. Most individuals knew very little about Stalin’s early days, his rise to power, and his rule over the Soviet Union. Surprising as it may be, Joseph Stalin carried out much more than administer a violent and autocratic dictatorship. During his rule, he transformed the Soviet Union from an undeveloped, primitive, and a relatively economic backward nation that was trying to recuperate from the ramifications of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 into a military juggernaut that rivaled the United States

The purges also saw a huge loss of original Bolshevik party members who had taken part in the original revolutions of February and October. It could be argued that the replacement of these individuals, among others, strengthened the party as it reduced threats to Stalin by removing prominent leading members and therefore potential rallying points for other dissidents. Lionel Kochan is of the opinion that `Stalin's purges did of course reveal the existence of widespread dissatisfaction and opportunist sentiment'. If this is true and there was real factional threat in the Communist party, then the purging of dissidents at a time when disunity could be fatal could be seen as strengthening the party and government and through them, the country. Repressed by the ideas of denouncement and the threat of arrest the party was united by fear, this had the added, beneficial effect of deterring outbreaks of resentment at the violence. This is perhaps not the best unifying factor, however, it insured obedience. This effect and the now open positions at the top would have been a strengthening factor for Stalin's position as he could select the individuals who would suit him; he

The greatest corruption that was presented by the Soviet Union was the Great Purge. The Great Purge was a period of time between 1936 and 1938. During this period, Stalin ordered a large scale purge of all the communist party leaders that he felt were a threat to his uprising. Not only did Stalin banish some of his party leaders, but he also ordered for the increase in imprisonments, police surveillance and unnecessary executions. This event is investigated in the novel when the hens refuse to give their eggs to the pigs. Napoleon tries to resolve this conflict by torturing the hens by starving them. Several of the hens die, and the rest of the surviving hens concede to Napoleon. Soon after, during a meeting Napoleon orders his dogs to drag

In a philosophical sense, one of the main goals the communism forged by Josef Stalin in the late 1920s was to cleanse the workers’ state of “social evils.” However, in an effort to carry out this cleanse, Stalin strictly censored the media from covering not only crime, but any and all negative aspects of the Soviet society. Stalin even had the compilers of the 1937 census arrested. Due to Stalin’s strict media censorship it proved difficult to gain accurate information about poverty in the Soviet Union. By preventing the documentation of anything that Stalin deemed to be unfit of his Soviet society, the imbalance of Soviet communism between the rich and poor continued.

From the 1920’s up until his death Joseph Stalin was the leader of Russia. What ensued under Stalin’s reign didn’t evoke emotions of love for country within the Russian people. Under Stalin the people lived in constant fear because of an epidemic within their own country, genocide of Stalin’s own people by Stalin himself. From 1934 up until 1939 a period of mass fear swept over Russia and at the helm Stalin with his (helpers?) of mass killings, the NKVD which are the internal police. Russia has always had a form ‘state security service’ commonly thought of now as “the secret police”, but in 1929 under the direction of Stalin the NKVD was formed and though it may have a new name it still held the infamous fear and practices of its

Response question: What was Stalin's motivation in starting the purge? What were the results? Stalin, Joseph Stalin was a dictator but more importantly he was the leader of the Soviet Union until the mid 1920's until he died in 53'. The purge went on for many reasons and lasted for a total of two years (1936-1938) 30 million is the estimate of how many victims had died from the Great Purge and documents records show that 680,000 people were executed.

Stalin then moved all through the government exiling people who stood in his way. Stalin drew himself into paranoia during his dictatorship arresting people and executing them based on his belief they were against him. Stalin turned the country into a labor force country, and this led to starvation and death. Stalin also wanted to ensure rapid

These purges allowed him to remove any political opponents to himself or the party. He has been judged very harshly but a number of historians, including Steve Phillips judge that ‘enormous human costs of the policy and Stalin’s personal manipulation of policy to his own advantage’5 where some of the reasons as to why he is viewed in such a bad light, others see what he did as necessary. Martin McCauley wrote that ‘the future is built on the bones of the past’6 taking a more Marxist view of the long term result being of greater importance than the short term impacts. There are also questions over Stalin’s objectives, as at times they seemed contradictory, ‘economically Stalin was building Socialism, but politically he was destroying it’7. A number of historians contest this and consider Stalin to be a product of his time rather than a genuine key individual, ‘Stalin’s rise to power was not based on human qualities; it resulted from the functioning of an inhuman machine, the bureaucracy’8 . Stalin and Lenin took very different stances; Lenin followed Socialism in one country whilst Stalin wanted international socialism. Stalin was also far more brutal than Lenin. My judgment is that the turning point in this period (1916-17) was Lenin dissolving the Constituent Assembly as it was the true rejection of

Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” got the answer. Stalin’s totalitarian system is the one criticized in the book. Rubashov the protagonist, a loyal member of No.1’s party, shows how the system controls one’s mind. To begin, Rubashov lost his freedom to the party during under his unconsciousness, the process is so slow and so smooth that he became oblivious to it; Rubashov became loyal. Under Stalin’s system, once you have been engaged in the Party, there is no turning back, you are meant to be loyal for the rest of your life. What’s ironic about the Party is that one must sacrifices for the Party in any case, but the Party will not sacrifices for one. The good of the Party is all that matters, nothing else but No.1. Moreover, considering the fact that Stalin is always anxious about people planning to murder him, therefore when he feels threats to his life, the threats will eventually disappear mysteriously. In Stalinism, the people of the Party develops a habit of loyalty to No.1. Since the leader is convinced that his people won’t betray him, therefore this comes useful when one needs to “sacrifice”. The loyalty that is developed in one makes freedom vanish, they no longer have the choice of life. Exactly the case of Rubashov, after all he has done for the Party, he gets accused for something he did not do. For instance, this is always the case in Stalinism to make people disappear, they would suddenly be accused