EzekielOfJerusalem
Banned
Let's say that Stalin keeps to the initial ideological purposes of the Great Purge, rather than consolidate all power solely under himself. What then?
What if Stalin only purged Trotskyites and didn't let mass psychosis/tattling set in?
- Thread starter EzekielOfJerusalem
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Yeah. While I suppose there are ways he could’ve purged less, the inclination of the party was always towards at least some purging.
I doubt it. By this point Stalin's power was beyond question and all his rivals had been sidelined, exiled, or shot.
Are you suggesting he purges the left opposition but not the right opposition?
Left Opposition - Wikipedia
Right Opposition - Wikipedia
The specialists trials were demanded by the party, the Ural-Siberian method was tail-ended by the party, the Bukharin purges were demanded by the party, the mass incarceration of the working class and peasantry was demanded by the party, the purges of the party and army were demanded by the party.
If Stalin looks like a strong leader in the 30s it was because he was chasing the sentiment of regional party branches in order to lead a process that was inherent in early nomenklatura rule. The mob runs past then a single man trying to catch up “slow down! I am your leader.”
This isn’t Zhadanovishchina, and even Zhadanov was reacting to the anti Leningrad sentiment which, strangely, was the dominant sentiment in the mass of the party.
Comrade card file thrived and flourished because he bothered to telephone, telegram and write the people who had the numbers on the ground in the local groups.
I have already cited Fitzpatrick whose work is thoroughly post archival.
While there was an element of bottom-up guidance of the Great Purge, I disagree that Stalin was not the final arbiter. He was, at the end of the day. The Great Purge ballooned from the bottom up because it was so easy for low-ranking operatives to extract confessions and lurid tales of grand conspiracies, but that does not mean Stalin wasn't the unquestioned head of state.
EzekielOfJerusalem
Banned
Yes, basically. Stalin would still hunt the White Army remnants, but the old Social Democrats, Kadets, and even NazBol Black Hundreds could still have a place in this Stalin's system.Are you suggesting he purges the left opposition but not the right opposition?
Left Opposition - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Right Opposition - Wikipedia
Your theory of state function does not accord with the historiography. I'm going to stick to historians, particularly post-archival ones. I've sighted the seminal one on the topic, I strongly encourage you to read her works. Cheers.
There are plenty of credible historians who disagree with Fitzpatrick's very specific interpretation of Stalinism. You're acting as if her scholarship is the end-all-be-all of Sovietology, which it is not.
There were no purposes to the Great Purge. It was a spontaneous process, unplanned and unguided.
It is exactly what Stalin wanted to do and failed to achieve. Extent of the Great Purge was not planned by Stalin and he lacked the means to control it.
Basically, the Purge was setup by Stalin and his supporters relaxing the requirements for successive prosecution by changing laws and introducing extra-judicial bodies to expedite convictions. And they used these tools to get rid of the people they considered either potentially dangerous or their known enemies.
The issue was that not only Stalin and his clique were able to use these tools and had enemies or ambitions. So the whole system of the Soviet law enforcement/repressive apparatus was overloaded by people settling their own scores within this new and very accessible framework. While Stalin himself had no way of telling are these people pursue legitimate enemies of the state (from Stalin's point of view at least) or are they doing their own thing. And so this orgy of violence continued for quite a bit.
Stalin actually had to regain control over Soviet law enforcement to stop all of that.
Contrary to the popular belief Great Purge was Great not because Stalin wanted it to be, but because it spiraled out of his control very quickly.
AlgarveChuro
Banned
Communism always fails. If it wasn't Stalin it would have been another bastard taking control to continue shifting blame for the fact the Glorious Workers Paradise isn't here yet.
Alcsentre Calanice
Gone Fishin'
There's actually a conversation to be had why the Party abandoned large-scale terror after Stalin's death.
That's just a buzzword. That the head of state like Stalin exercised considerable control over his repression apparatus is undeniable. The notion that despots cannot be extremely powerful is ludicrous. What next? Hitler had no power and he was merely the puppet of an increasingly radicalized extermination apparatus? Constructivist interpretations of totalitarian regimes are entirely compatible with the comprehension that certain figures at the top can hold immense power.
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Largely disagree on these points, the Terror was very much Stalin's personal initiative. The idea that the Terror was "demanded" by Party leaders is most prominently endorsed by Getty, a well-regarded historian who I nevertheless think misses the forest for the trees. He combines two points:
1. Regional Party leaders were unhappy with the loosening of electoral restrictions included in the '36 "Stalin Constitution", and expressed concerns about "enemies" interfering at various Party Plenums.
2. Yezhov - NKVD chief in '37 - and Stalin both expressed a desire to move on from "mass operations" even in Spring '37. That is, shifting from mass arrests based on someone's biography (class origins, prior convictions, etc.) to arrests of "real" enemies based on agent reports and police investigations which actually identify a crime.
These are both true, but Getty infers too much from them. He then argues that the June report from the NKVD chief in western Siberia, Mironov, about a counterrevolutionary conspiracy in the region was used along with concerns by Party leaders about electoral influence to pressure Stalin into authorizing the expansion of repression to a wide swathe of the population. This occurred first as the authorization of a Troika in Western Siberia in June and then a broader operation by Troikas across the USSR on July 2nd:
A similar NKVD circular was issued by Yezhov on July 3rd. This precipitated a month-long exchange of information between the Party, NKVD, and Stalin's office about the number of criminals, "kulaks", and other enemies to be arrested or shot. Many new categories were added to the list of those to be repressed. On July 30th, NKVD Order 00447 was sent to Stalin and approved the next day without comment or edits. It listed the targets of the operation as follows:
Those arrested would be judged by extrajudicial Troikas without legal counsel, in absentia, and without the right to appeal. The investigative procedure was:
Stalin explicitly authorized torture that same month - the document has never been found, but a telegram from Stalin from January '39 and other evidence confirms its existence. How all "criminal connections" were to be "revealed" was obvious to the workers of the UNKVD.
Was this series of orders from Stalin motivated by "pressure" from regional Party leaders, as Getty argues? Out of 58 regional Party leaders who had attended the February-March '37 plenum - very powerful men - 24 had already been removed from their posts at Stalin's personal initiative, to invariably be arrested and executed. Regarding Mironov's June report, which Getty attributes to the West Siberia Party Secretary Eikhe, we know that it was written at the explicit direction of Yezhov on June 2nd. Stalin had been receiving reports on the case for months.
While regional secretaries could and did lobby Stalin and bargain with him, '37 was the nadir of their power relative to his. That he was "pressured" by regional leaders to do something he didn't want, rather than receiving "signals" which agreed with what he wanted to do (and emerged at his explicit direction) has stronger evidentiary support.
On Getty's other point, that Stalin and Yezhov wanted to restrict mass operations and the course of Summer '37 contradicted their plans, I would argue that he stresses contradiction where there was none.
Stalin understood that the repression which his state could execute was imprecise and could capture innocents . He explicitly stated this in a speech to officer cadets in June '37, noting that even if 95% of denunciations were incorrect the correct 5% made the "vigilance" worth it. Yezhov stated something similar - "when you chop wood, chips fly".
Creating a stronger secret police which used modern investigative techniques and surveillance to catch "real" enemies was the goal. But even after Stalin's May '33 circular restraining the political police and criticizing excesses during collectivization, he continued to dial extrajudicial mass repression up and down when he believed it was necessary. For example, in Fall '34 reports of harvest difficulties in Western Siberia led him to approve a Troika for Eikhe on Molotov's suggestion.
As ordinary crime surged in Soviet cities, Police Troikas were created in '35 which arrested and extrajudicially convicted 250,000 "socially dangerous elements" in '35-36. In March 1935, the Politburo ordered the NKVD in a number of urban centers:
Even during periods of relative "moderation" in the 30s, Stalin was willing to pursue both professionalization and mass repression as the circumstances called for it. As he and Yezhov pushed for more modern NKVD practices in Spring '37, for example, they were also preparing the mass expulsion of families of political prisoners from Moscow in May-June '37.
Shearer's Stalin's Police and Hagenloh's Policing Stalin's Socialism go into great detail about the continuities in Soviet policing leading up to the Great Terror. While it was exceptional in terms of its scale and deadliness, it did not depart from how Stalin had previously practiced repression. The danger of war on the horizon led Stalin to pursue a mass social cleansing across the country of broad categories of "enemies" and deviants - the inclusion of criminals was not a mistake, and in many cities they were the majority of the victims of the Terror.
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Yeah, pretty much. What people don't really realize is that the purges never really stopped after 1938 - not even during the war - they just became more selective. This also made them less debilitating. Whether they could've been less mass purging and more selective purging is - in the end - a part of the point that is at contention in this thread.
Terror was always a core tool of the Soviet leadership all the way until Gorbachev. But mass terror was not. Rather, you had spasms of mass terror in the first two decades (during the Civil War, during collectivization, and of course during the Great Purges), punctuated and followed by a pattern of far less bloody mechanisms of terror.
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