The Great Purge or Great Terror (Russian: ?????????????? ) was a political suppression campaign in the Soviet Union that occurred from 1936 to 1938. This involved the massive cleansing of the Communist Party and government officials, the suppression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, widespread police surveillance, the "saboteur", "counter-revolutionary" suspicion ", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. In Russian historiography, the most intense cleansing period, 1937-1938, is called Yezhovshchina (Russian: ??????? ; literally, "Yezhov phenomenon", generally translated as "times Yezhov" or "Yezhov deeds"), after Nikolai Yezhov, Soviet secret police chief, NKVD, who himself was later killed in the purge. Modern historical studies estimate the total number of deaths of Stalinism's oppression (execution and death camp) in 1937-1938 as 950,000 - 1,200,000.
In the Western world, Robert Conquest's 1968 book The Great Terror popularized the phrase. The Conquest title in turn is an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (France: la Terreur , and, from June to July 1794, la Grande Terreur , the Great Terror).
Video Great Purge
Introduction
The term "oppression" was officially used to describe the prosecution of people who were considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the then Soviet leadership, Joseph Stalin. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove the disagreeable people from the Communist Party and to consolidate Stalin's authority. Much of the public's attention focused on cleansing certain parts of the Communist Party leadership, as well as government bureaucrats and armed forces leaders, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affect many other categories of society: intellectuals, peasants, and especially those labeled as "too rich for a farmer" (kulaks), and professionals. A series of NKVD operations affect a number of national minorities, accused of being a "fifth column" community. A number of cleansing was officially described as the abolition of the possibility of sabotage and espionage, by the Polish Military Organization and, consequently, many victims of cleaning were ordinary Soviet citizens of Polish origin.
According to Nikita Khrushchev's speech in 1956, "In the Cult of Personality and the Consequences," and more recent findings, numerous allegations, especially those presented in Moscow show the courts, based on forced confessions, often obtained through torture, and on loose interpretation Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, which deals with counter-revolutionary crime. Since the legal process, as defined by the prevailing Soviet law, is often largely replaced by a summary process by NKVD Troikas.
Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes (espionage, vandalism, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracy to prepare for insurrection and coup); they were quickly executed by shooting, or sent to the Gulag Forced Labor Camp. Many died in hunger labor camps, illness, exposure, and overwork. Other methods of sending victims are used experimentally. Several secret police, for example, stabbed people to death in groups at the rear of a specially tailored airtight van.
The Great Purge began under the leadership of NKVD Genrikh Yagoda, but the culmination of the campaign took place when the NKVD was led by Nikolai Yezhov, from September 1936 to August 1938, hence the name of Yezhovshchina . The campaign was conducted in line with the general line, and often by direct order, from the Party Politburo led by Stalin.
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From 1930 onwards, the Party and police officials were concerned about "social chaos" caused by the aggravated collectivization of farmers and the famine of 1932-1933, as well as the migration of millions of peasants into large and uncontrolled cities. The threat of war enhances Stalin's perception of marginal and political populations suspected of being a potential source of rebellion in the case of the invasion. He began planning the preventive elimination of the recruited candidate for the "fifth column of the destroyer, terrorist and spy" myth. (Hagenloh, 2000; Shearer, 2003).
The term "purge" in Soviet political slang is an abbreviation of the expression of the Party's cleansing. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled about 400,000 people. But from 1936 to 1953, the term changed its meaning, since being expelled from the Party meant almost arrest, imprisonment, and frequent executions.
Political cleansing was primarily an attempt by Stalin to eliminate the challenges of past and potential opposition groups, including the left and right wing led by Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, respectively. After the Civil War and the reconstruction of the Soviet economy in the late 1920s, the Bolshevik veterans no longer considered the need for a wartime "temporary" dictatorship, which had passed from Lenin to Stalin. Stalin's opponents on both sides of the political spectrum denounce him as undemocratic and weak on bureaucratic corruption. Current opposition to leadership may have garnered enormous support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries that the state offers to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seems to defend Stalin's suspicions. He imposed a ban on party factions and banned members of the opposing parties, effectively ending democratic centralism.
In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and Stalin in particular, is the only dispenser of ideology. This demands the abolition of all Marxists with different views, especially among the prestigious revolutionary "long guard". When the purges began, the government (through NKVD) shot Bolshevik heroes, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and BÃÆ'Ã… © la Kun, as well as the majority of the Lenin Politburo, due to disagreements in policy. The NKVD attacks the supporters, friends, and relatives of these "heretical" Marxists, whether they live in Russia or not. The NKVD family almost wiped out the Trotsky family before killing him in Mexico; the NKVD agent RamÃÆ'³n Mercader was part of the homicide taskforce united by Special Agent Pavel Sudoplatov, under Stalin's personal orders.
In 1934, Stalin used Sergey Kirov's murder as a pretext for launching the Great Purge, in which about one million people were killed (see ç§ Number of executed persons). Some historians later believe that Stalin arranged murder, or at least there was enough evidence to reach such a conclusion. Kirov was a loyal supporter of Stalin, but Stalin might see him as a potential competitor because of his popularity among moderates. The 1934 Party Congress voted Kirov to the central committee with only three opposing votes, the fewest candidates, while Stalin received 292 opposing votes. After the killing of Kirov, the NKVD accused the former opposition, a group that continues to grow according to their determination, with the killing of Kirov as well as a list of other abuses, including betrayal, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.
Another justification for cleaning is to remove the possibility of a "fifth column" in case of war. Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, participants in repression as members of the Politburo, maintained this justification during the purge; they each signed many lists of deaths. Stalin believes the war is imminent, threatened by an openly hostile Germany and expansionist Japan. The Soviet press describes the country as being threatened from within by fascist spies. From the October Revolution and beyond, Lenin has used oppression against Bolshevik enemies perceived as a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating social control, especially during the so-called Red Terror campaign. This policy continued and intensified under Stalin, an increasing period of oppression including the deportation of kulak opposed to collectivization, and severe famine in Ukraine. The hallmark of the Great Purge is that, for the first time, members of the ruling party are included on a large scale as victims of repression. Because of the scale of terror, the main victims of the purge are Communist Party members and holders of office. The cleaning of the Party was accompanied by the cleaning of the whole community. The following events are used for the demarcation period.
- The first Moscow experiment, 1936.
- 1937, introduction of NKVD troikas for the implementation of "revolutionary justice".
- 1937, part of Article 58-14 on "counter-revolutionary sabotage".
Moscow Exam
First and Second Moscow Exam
Between 1936 and 1938, three enormous Moscow Exams from former senior Communist Party leaders were held, where they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist forces to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders, tear apart the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. These trials were widely publicized and covered by the outside world, fascinated by the spectacle of Lenin's closest associate who admitted the most outrageous crime and begged the death penalty.
- The first trial consisted of 16 members called the "Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc", held in August 1936, where the main defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of the leaders the most prominent party. Among other allegations, they were charged with the murder of Sergey Kirov and planned to kill Stalin. After admitting the allegations, all were sentenced to death and executed.
- The second trial in January 1937 involved 17 smaller figures known as the "anti-Soviet Trotskyite center" which included Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov, and was accused of plotting with Trotsky, who was said to have conspired with Germany. Thirteen defendants were finally executed by shooting. The rest received punishment at the forced labor camp where they soon died.
- There was also a secret hearing before a military court of a group of Red Army commanders, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, in June 1937.
Some Western observers who attended the trial said that they were fair and that the defendant's defects had been fixed. They base this judgment on the accusations of the defendants, freely given in open courts, with no clear evidence that they have been extracted with torture or drugs. The British lawyer and MP Prisoner DN Pritt, for example, wrote: "Once again the more vulnerable socialists are overcome by doubts and anxieties," but "again we can be sure that when smoke has shifted from the battlefield the controversy will be realized that the accusations true, true confession and prosecution done fairly ".
It is now recognized that recognition is only given after great psychological distress and torture has been applied to the defendants. From accounts of former OGPU officials Alexander Orlov and others, the methods used to extract recognition are known: tortures such as repeated beatings, simulated drownings, keeping prisoners standing or going to bed for days, and threats to arrest and execute detainee families. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After several months of such interrogations, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.
Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition of "confessing", the immediate assurances of the Politburo that their lives and their families and followers would be spared. The offer was received, but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Yezhov were present. Stalin claimed that they were the "commissions" endorsed by the Politburo and assured that the death penalty would not be done. After the trial, Stalin not only broke his promise to avoid the defendants, he most of their families were arrested and shot.
Dewey Commission
In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Accusations Charged against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Court, commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was established in the United States by Trotsky's supporters, to establish the truth about the trial. The commission is headed by renowned American philosopher and educator John Dewey. Although the trial was clearly conducted with the intent to prove Trotsky's innocence, they brought light evidence stipulating that some of the specific allegations made in the trial could not be correct.
For example, Georgy Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission stipulates that no flights have occurred. Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov, claimed to take part in the Sergei Kirov killing in December 1934, when he was imprisoned for one year.
The Dewey Commission then published its findings in a 422-page book titled Not Guilty . His conclusion confirms the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Court. In summary, the commission wrote: "Independent extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:
- That the execution of the Moscow Exam is to convince the unreasonable person that no attempt is made to verify the truth.
- That while recognition should be entitled to the most serious consideration, the confession itself contains such inherent inability to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, regardless of all the means used to obtain it.
- That Trotsky never instructed any of the defendants or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, planned or attempted to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union.
The Commission concluded: "Therefore we found the Moscow Court as a frame-up."
Implications of the Kananis
In the second trial, Karl Radek provided (or more accurately forced to provide) the pretext for greater clearance to arrive on a large scale with his testimony that there was "a separate third-party organization from cadres who passed through the [Trotsky] school" and " Trotsky, quarter-Trotsky, eighth-Trotsky, the people who helped us, did not know the terrorist organization but sympathized with us, people of liberalism, from Fronde against the Party, gave us this help. "
By the "third organization" he means the last remaining opposition group called the Rightists, led by Bukharin, which he implies by saying:
I feel guilty for one more thing: even after acknowledging my mistake and exposing the organization, I vehemently refused to give evidence of Bukharin. I know that Bukharin's situation is as hopeless as mine, because our mistake, if not juridically, is essentially the same. But we are close friends, and the intellectual friendship is stronger than any other friendship. I know that Bukharin is in the same state of upheaval as me. That's why I do not want to hand over the hands and feet attached to the Commissariat of the People of the Country. As with our other cadres, I want Bukharin to put his arm down.
Third Moscow Experiment
The third and final test, in March 1938, known as The Trial of the Twenty-One, was the most famous of Soviet demonstration trials, because of the people involved and the scope of the accusations that tied all the loose threads from previous trials. Intended to be the culmination of previous trials, it included 21 defendants allegedly belonging to the so-called "Rightist Blocks and Trotskyites", headed by Nikolai Bukharin, former chairman of the Communist International, former prime minister Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky and Genrikh Yagoda, recently humiliated the head of NKVD.
The fact that Yagoda is one of the defendants shows his own cleansing speed. It is now suspected that Bukharin and others tried to kill Lenin and Stalin from 1918, killing Maxim Gorky with poison, splitting the US and surrendering his territory to Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, and other senseless accusations.
Even previously sympathetic observers who undermined previous trials found it harder to swallow these new accusations when they became more unreasonable, and the cleansing expanded to include almost all Old Bolshevik leaders alive except for Stalin. There is no other crime of Stalin's years that so captivates Western intellectuals as the experiment and execution of Bukharin, who is an internationally established Marxist theorist. For some of the leading communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, Bukharin's trial marked their last pause with communism, and even transformed the first three into a persistent anti-Communist eventually. To them, Bukharin's recognition symbolizes the destruction of communism, which not only destroys his son but also requires them to commit self-destruction and individual abnormalities.
Preparations for the trial, which took more than a year, were postponed at an early stage because of the reluctance of some party members to denounce their colleagues. It was at this point that Stalin personally intervened to speed up the process and replace the Yagoda with Nikolai Yezhov.
Bukharin Recognition
On the first day of the trial, Krestinsky provoked a sensation when he rejected his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all charges. However, he changed his defense the next day after a "special act", which left his left shoulder dislocated among other things.
Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin had never been tortured, but it is now known that his interrogators were given orders, "beats were allowed," and were under great pressure to issue confessions from the "star" defendant. Bukharin initially survived for three months, but the threat to his young wife and baby boy, combined with "physical influence methods" drove him down. But when he reads his confession altered and personally corrected by Stalin, he withdraws his entire confession. The examination starts all over again, with a team of double interrogators.
The confession of Bukharin in particular is subject to much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's famous novel The Darkness of the Day and the philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror . His confession is somewhat different from the others in that while he pleads guilty to "total crime", he refuses knowledge when it comes to a particular crime. Some astute observers note that he will only allow what is written in confession and refuse to go any further.
The result is a strange mixture of confessional confession (a "degenerate fascist" who works for "the restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticism of the trial. After refuting several charges against him, an observer noted that Bukharin "began to destroy or rather show that he could easily destroy the whole case." He went on to say that "the accused's accusation is unimportant.The confession of the accused is the principle of medieval jurisprudence" in a trial solely based on confession, he concludes his final plea with the words: "The greatness of my Crime can not be measured especially in the new stage struggle of the Soviet Union. "Perhaps this trial becomes the last serious lesson, and may the great power of the Soviet Union become clear to all."
Romain Rolland and others wrote a letter to Stalin to ask for forgiveness for Nikolai Bukharin, but all the main defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others (who were killed in the NKVD massacre of prisoners in 1941). Despite his promise to save his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, was sent to a forced labor camp, but he survived to see her husband rehabilitated by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.
Army cleansing
The removal of the Red Army and the Maritime Maritime Fleet removed three of the five marshals (equivalent to five-star generals), 13 of the 15 army commanders (equivalent to three- and four-star generals), eight of the nine admirals (clearance fell into the Navy, exploiting their chances of foreign contact), 50 of the 57 army commanders, 154 of the 186 division commanders, 16 of the 16 army commands, and 25 of the 28 army commissioner corps.
Originally estimated 25-50% Red Army officers had been cleared; the actual figure is now known to be in the area of ​​3.7-7.7%. This mismatch is the result of a systematic estimate of the actual number of Red Army officer corps, and it is ignored that the vast majority of those cleansed are simply expelled from the Party. Thirty percent of officers cleared in 1937-1939 were allowed back into service.
The clearance of the army was claimed to be supported by documents forged by the Germans (said to have correspondence between Marshal Tukhachevsky and the German high commando). The claim was not supported by the fact, because by the time the document was supposed to be made, two of the eight in the Tukhachevsky group had been imprisoned, and by the time the document was said to reach Stalin the cleaning process had already taken place. However, the actual evidence introduced in the trial was obtained from forced confession.
Wider cleaning
Eventually almost all the Bolsheviks who had played an important role during the Russian Revolution of 1917, or in the Lenin Soviet government, were executed. Of the original six members of the Politburo during the October Revolution of 1917 that lived up to the Great Purge, Stalin himself was the only one who remained in the Soviet Union, alive. Four of the other five were executed. The fifth, Leon Trotsky, had been forced into exile outside the Soviet Union in 1929, but was assassinated in Mexico by Soviet agent RamÃÆ'³n Mercader in 1940. Of the seven members elected to the Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin's death in 1924, four were executed , one (Tomsky) committed suicide and two (Molotov and Kalinin) live.
However, the trials and executions of former Bolshevik leaders, while being the most visible part, are only a small part of the purge. A series of documents found in the archives of the Central Committee in 1992 by Vladimir Bukovsky show that there are quotas for arrest and execution as for all other activities in a planned economy.
Intelligentsia
In the 1920s and 1930s, 2,000 writers, intellectuals and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps. After the sunspot development study was considered not Marxist, twenty-seven astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938. The Meteorological Office was brutally demolished as early as 1933 for failing to predict the weather that was harmful to plants. But the number of victims is very high among the authors. Those killed during Great Hygiene include:
- Poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested for chanting his famous anti-Stalin poem Stalin Epigram into his circle of friends in 1934. After intervention by Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Pasternak (Stalin wrote in Bukharin's letter with false anger : "Who gave them the right to arrest Mandelstam?"), Stalin instructed NKVD to "isolate but preserve" him, and Mandelstam "only" was exiled to Cherdyn for three years, but this proved to be a temporary reprieve. In May 1938, he was immediately arrested again for "counter-revolutionary activity". On August 2, 1938, Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps and died on December 27, 1938 at a transit camp near Vladivostok. Pasternak himself was almost cleansed, but Stalin was said to have passed the Pasternak name from the list, saying "Do not touch these cloud dwellers."
- The writer Isaac Babel was arrested in May 1939, and according to his confession paper (which contained blood stains) he "confessed" to become a member of the Trotskyist organization and was recruited by French writer Andrà © à © Malraux to spy on France. In the last interrogation, he retracted his confession and wrote a letter to the prosecutor's office stating that he had involved innocent people, but to no avail. Babylon was tried before the NKVD troika and was punished for simultaneously spying for France, Austria, and Leon Trotsky, as well as "membership in a terrorist organization." On January 27, 1940, he was shot in Butyrka prison.
- The author Boris Pilnyak was arrested on October 28, 1937 for counter-revolutionary activities, spies and terrorism. One report stated that "he held a secret meeting with (AndrÃÆ'Â ©) Gide, and gave him information about the situation in the Soviet Union.there is no doubt that Gide used this information in his book that attacked the Soviet Union." Pilnyak was tried on 21 April 1938. In a process that lasted 15 minutes, he was sentenced to death and executed shortly thereafter.
- The theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested in 1939 and shot in February 1940 for "spying" on Japanese and British intelligence. His wife, actress Zinaida Raikh, was murdered in her apartment. In a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov of 13 January 1940, Meyerhold wrote:
On July 2, 1937, Stalin sent a secret letter to all the heads of the regional Party (with copies to the NKVD regional head) ordering them to present, within five days, the estimated number of kulaks and "criminals" to be captured, executed, or sent to the camp. Produced on a daily basis, these figures are almost identical to those of "suspects" who are already under police surveillance, although the criteria used to distribute "kulaks and criminal elements" between the two categories are unclear.
On July 30, 1937, NKVD Order no. 00447 issued, directed against "ex kulak" and "other anti-Soviet elements" (such as former Tsar regime officials, former members of political parties other than communist parties, etc.). They will be executed or sent to the Gulag prison camps outside the law, under NKVD's troika decision.
The following categories are systematically tracked: "ex-kulaks" were previously deported to "special settlements" in the unfriendly parts of the country (Siberia, Urals, Kazakhstan, Far North), former tsar civil servants, former White Army officers, participants in peasant rebellions, clerical members, eligible persons, former non-bolshevik party members, ordinary criminals, such as thieves, known to the police and other "dangerous social elements". However, many are caught randomly in police sweeping, or as a result of cancellations or simply because they happen to be relatives, friends or just acquaintances of people who have been arrested. Many railroad workers, workers, peasants and engineers were arrested during Operation Kulak simply because they experienced the misfortune of working in, or near, important strategic factories, railway or building sites, where, as a result of panic rhythms and plan, many work accidents have occurred in previous years. In 1937-1938, the NKVD reopened these cases and systematically regarded them as "sabotage" or "destroyers" (Werth, 2009).
Orthodox priests, including active parishes, were nearly destroyed: 85% of the 35,000 clerical members were arrested. Also vulnerable to repression are the so-called "special settlers" (spetzpereselentsy) that are under the supervision of permanent police and a large pool of potential "enemies" to be exploited. At least 100,000 of them are captured in the course of the Great Terror.
One "sub-operation" targeted "the most violent and stubborn anti-Soviet elements" in the Gulag prison camps; they are all "to put in the first category" - who was shot. Order number. 00447 decided 10,000 executions for this contingent, but at least three times more shot in a secret mass operation, the majority in March-April 1938 (Junge and Binner, 2003).
Immediately after Operation Kulak was launched (August 5, 1937), the regional parties and NKVD bosses, eager to show their spirits, demanded an increase in quotas. As such, the quota increases. But this is not only the result of the demands from below. The largest new allowances were distributed by Stalin and Yezhov on their own initiative: on October 15, 1937, for example, the Politburo passed a secret resolution that increased the number of "going to be pressured" by 120,000 (63,000 "in the first category" and 57,000 "in the second category"); on 31 January 1938, Stalin ordered a further increase of 57,200, 48,000 of which would be executed.
Police organize cleaning and markup of markets or train stations where marginal and other social outcasts may be found. To make more and more arrests, NKVD State Security personnel - about 25,000 officers - equipped by ordinary police, sometimes by members of the Civil Party or Komsomol (Young Communist League).
Each local NKVD unit has a "minimal job" capture to do, as well as acknowledgment to extract "unmask the conspiracy." The NKVD used uninterrupted interrogations for days and a merciless beating to force prisoners to acknowledge their "counter-revolutionary" crimes. To speed up the procedure, prisoners are often forced to sign blank pages of pre-printed interrogations in which the interrogator then typed the confession.
After interrogation, the files were sent to NKVD troikas, which ratified the verdict without the presence of the defendant. During the half-day session, the troika passed several hundred cases, giving the death penalty or sentence to the Gulag labor camp. Immediate execution. Executions are carried out at night, either in prisons or in remote areas run by the NKVD and located as a rule on the outskirts of major cities.
Operation Kulak was the largest single suppression campaign in 1937-1938, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed, more than half the number of known executions.
Campaigns targeting citizenship
A series of NKVD mass operations were carried out from 1937 to 1938 until the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 by targeting certain nationalities within the Soviet Union, based on the direction of NKVD against the so-called diversionary elements, in accordance with the notion of "hostile capitalist surroundings" as defined by Nikolai Yezhov. The Polish NKVD operation is the largest of its kind. More than 111,000 Poles arrested were executed. Their wives and children were handled by NKVD Order No. 00486. Women were sentenced to hard labor for 5 or 10 years. Their little children are placed in an orphanage. All property is confiscated. Extensible families deliberately have nothing to live on, which usually seal their fate as well, affecting up to 200,000-250,000 people against a Polish background depending on the size of their family. National NKVD operations are performed on a quota system using album procedures. Officials were mandated to capture and execute a certain number of so-called "counter-revolutionaries," compiled by the administration using various statistics but also telephone books with non-Russian-sounding names. The Polish operation claimed the largest number of NKVD victims: 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions according to records. Snyder estimates that at least eighty-five thousand of them are Polish. The rest are 'suspected' of being Polish, without further investigation.
Western ÃÆ' Â © migrÃÆ' Â © victim
Victims of terror included American immigrants to the Soviet Union who had emigrated at the height of the Great Depression to seek employment. At the height of Terror, American immigrants besieged the US embassy, ​​pleading for passports so they could leave the Soviet Union. They were rejected by embassy officials, only to be caught on the sidewalk outside by staking out the NKVD agents. Many were later shot dead at Butovo Field near Scherbinka, south of Moscow. In addition, 141 Finnish American Communists of Finland were executed and buried in Sandarmokh. 127 Finnish Canadians were also shot and buried there.
Mongolian Great Purge
During the 1930s, Stalin sent an NKVD operator to the People's Republic of Mongolia, forming a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika, and began executing tens of thousands of people accused of having links to "pro-Japanese spies." Long Buddhas became the majority of victims, with 18,000 people killed in terror. The other victims were nobles and political and academic figures, along with some regular workers and shepherds. Mass graves containing hundreds of Buddhist monks and executed civilians have been discovered recently in 2003.
Xinjiang Great Purge
The pro-Soviet leader Sheng Shicai of China's Xinjiang province launched its own cleansing in 1937 to coincide with the Great Stalin Cleansing. The Xinjiang War (1937) broke out in the midst of purge. Sheng received help from NKVD. Sheng and Soviet accused the existence of a large conspiracy Trotskyist and "Trotskyite Fascist plot" to destroy the Soviet Union. Soviet Consul General Garegin Apresoff, General Ma Hushan, Ma Shaowu, Mahmud Sijan, official leader of Xinjiang province, Huang Han-chang and Hoja-Niyaz were among 435 suspected conspirators in the plot. Xinjiang is under virtual Soviet control. Stalin opposes the Chinese Communist Party.
Large Cleansing Timeline
The Great Purge of 1936-1938 can be divided into four periods:
- October 1936 - February 1937
- Reforming the security organization, adopting an official plan to clean the elites.
- March 1937 - June 1937
- Cleans the elites; adopted a plan for mass repression against the "social base" of potential aggressors, ranging from cleansing the "elite" of the opposition.
- July 1937 - October 1938
- Mass repression of the "kulak", "dangerous" ethnic minorities, members of the opposition family, military officers, saboteurs in agriculture and industry.
- November 1938 - 1939
- Stopping mass operations, eliminating many execution organs of extrajudicial executions, repression of some organizers of mass repression.
Large Cleanup End
In the summer of 1938 Yezhov was released from his post as head of the NKVD and eventually tried and executed. Lavrentiy Beria, a fellow Georgian and Stalinist believer, succeeded him as the head of NKVD. On November 17, 1938, a joint decree of the Soviet Command of the USSR and the VKP Central Committee (b) (Decision on Arrest, Prosecutorial Oversight, and Investigation Course) and NKVD's undersigned orders by Beria, canceled most of the NKVD's orders from systematic oppression and delays execution of death sentence. The decision marked the end of a massive Soviet purge.
Nevertheless, the practice of mass arrest and exile continued until Stalin's death in 1953. Political executions also continued, but, with the exception of Katyn and other NKVD massacres during World War II, on a much smaller scale. One notable example is the "Night of the Murdered Poets", in which at least thirteen leading Yiddish authors were executed on 12 August 1952. Historians such as Michael Parrish argue that when the Great Terror ended in 1938, the smaller terror continued in 1940- an. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (a Soviet Army officer who was in prison for a decade in the Gulag system) was present at The Gulag Archipelago the most holistic view of the timeline all Leninist and Stalinist Cleaning (1918 -1956), where the 1936-38 purge may be the one that gets the most attention from people in positions to record its magnitude for posterity - the intellectuals - by directly targeting them, while some other waves from the ongoing purge stream , such as collusion and decadence 1928-33, as great and equally unfair, but more successfully swallowed into oblivion in the popular memories of Soviet society (who are still alive). For example, in a passage like Solzhenitsyn mentions 1938 and says that 1948 is in some ways hardly better.
In some cases, the high-ranking military command captured under Yezhov was later executed under Beria. Some examples include Marshal of the Soviet Union Alexander Yegorov, captured in April 1938 and shot (or died of torture) in February 1939 (his wife, G. A. Yegorova, shot in August 1938); Army commander Ivan Fedko, was arrested July 1938 and shot in February 1939; Flagman Konstantin Dushenov, captured in May 1938 and shot in February 1940; Komkor G. I. Bondar, was arrested in August 1938 and shot in March 1939. All of the above mentioned have been posthumously rehabilitated.
When relatives of those who had been executed in 1937-1938 asked about their fate, they were told by NKVD that their captured family had been sentenced to "ten years without correspondence right" (?????????? ???? ?????????). When this ten year period passed in 1947-48 but the arrested did not show up, the relatives asked the MGB about their fate again and this time was told that the arrested died in prison.
Western reaction
Although the trials of former Soviet leaders were widely publicized, hundreds of thousands of arrests and other executions were not. It became famous in the West simply because some former gulag prisoners reached the West with their stories. Foreign correspondents not only from the West fail to report on purge, but in many Western countries (mainly France), attempts are made to silence or discredit these witnesses; according to Robert Conquest, Jean-Paul Sartre took the position that evidence of camps should be ignored so that the French proletariat will not be discouraged. A series of legal actions occur where definitive proof is presented which establishes the validity of the testimony of former labor camp camp prisoners.
According to Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror: Stalin's Cleansing of the Thirty , in connection with the trials of former leaders, some Western observers can not see through the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence. , especially Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Russian speaker; US Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, who reported, "evidence... without a doubt to justify the verdict of treason" and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the author of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. While "the Communist Party everywhere only sends Soviet lines", some of the most critical reports also come from the left, especially the Manchester Guardian . American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker also reported on the execution. He called them in 1941 the "great cleansing", and described how for four years they influenced the "fourth or fifth top, for a conservative estimate, the Party itself, the Army, Navy and Air Force leaders and then from the new Bolshevik intelligentsia , chief technician, manager, supervisor, scientist ". Knickerbocker also writes about the deculsion: "This is a conservative estimate to say that about 5,000,000 [kulaks]... die at once, or in years."
Evidence and research results began to emerge after Stalin's death. This reveals the magnitude of the whole cleaning. The first of these sources is the revelation of Nikita Khrushchev, which specifically affects American editors of the United States Communist Party newspaper, The Daily Worker, who, following in the footsteps of The New York Times i>, publishes a complete Secret Speech.
Rehabilitation
The Great Purge was denounced by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev following Stalin's death. In his secret speech to the 20th CPSU congress in February 1956 (published one month later), Khrushchev referred to the purge as a "abuse of power" by Stalin which caused great harm to the state. In the same speech, he acknowledged that many victims were innocent and punished on the basis of false confessions abused by torture. To take a position was politically useful to Khrushchev, as he was at that time involved in a power struggle with rivals who had been linked to the Cleanup, called the Anti-Party Group. New lines in Great Purges undermined their strength, and helped propel him to the Chair of the Council of Ministers. Starting from 1954, some of these convictions were canceled. Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other generals found guilty in the Red Army General Court were found not guilty ("rehabilitated") in 1957. Former members of the Politburo of Yan Rudzutak and Stanislav Kosior and many lower-level victims were also found innocent in the 1950s. Nikolai Bukharin and others convicted in the Moscow Court were not rehabilitated until late 1988. Leon Trotsky, considered a major player in the Russian Revolution and a major contributor to Marxist Theory was never rehabilitated by the Soviet Union. Books Rehabilitation: The Political Process of the 1930s 50s (????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? 30-50-? ?????) ( 1991) contains a large number of newly presented archival material: transcripts of interrogations, letters of prisoners, and photographs. This material shows in detail how many trials are made.
Number of executed people
The best estimate of deaths caused by Soviet repression during the Great Purge ranged from 950,000 to 1.2 million, including death in custody and those who died shortly after being released from Gulag, as a result of their treatment there. This estimate summarizes the results of comparative analysis of archival documents and, therefore, considers the previous argument that official Soviet archival data can downplay actual, incomplete or unreliable deaths. The usual counterfeiting practices to reduce the execution rate are to disguise the execution with a ten-year sentence without correspondence right. All the corpses identified from the mass graves in Vinnitsa and Kuropaty are individuals who have received this sentence. The lower numbers roughly confirm 1968 Conquest's original estimate of 700,000 "laws" of execution and in the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of The Great Terror, Conquest claims that he has been "right on an important issue- - those numbers are deadly: about a million. "
Another earlier study estimated 1.42 million unnatural deaths were brought in by the Great Cleansing during 1937-1938 based on demographic studies on unnatural deaths in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Stalin's role
Historians with archival access have confirmed that Stalin is deeply involved in terror. The Russian historian Oleg V. Khlevniuk states "... theories of the element, the spontaneous nature of terror, of the loss of central control over the course of mass repression, and of the role of regional leaders in initiating terror are not supported at all." by historical record. "Stalin personally directed Yezhov to torture those who did not make the right confession.In one instance, he told Yezhov," Is not it time to blackmail this man and force him to report his dirty little business? In another case, while reviewing one of Yezhov's lists, he added the name MI Baranov, "beat, defeat!" In some cases, Stalin will personally help Yezhov torture prisoners Witnesses say his hands often bloodstained.
In addition to authorizing improved interrogation techniques, Stalin also signed 357 lists in 1937 and 1938 that certified the execution of about 40,000 people, and about 90% of these were confirmed to have been shot. While reviewing such a list, Stalin reportedly muttered to everyone in particular: "Who will remember all these riffs in ten or twenty years? Nobody Who remembers the present names of the boys Ivan the Terrible is free from "no one." Stalin's alleged statements are comparable to Hitler's infamous counsel to his generals in 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?"
Stephen G. Wheatcroft argues that while 'intended death' caused by Hitler was 'murder', which caused Stalin to belong to the category of 'execution'. He elaborates:
Stalin undoubtedly caused many innocent people to be executed, but it seems that he thought many of them were guilty of crimes against the state and felt that the execution of others would serve as a deterrent to the guilty. He signed the papers and insisted on the documentation. Hitler, on the other hand, wanted to get rid of Jews and communists simply because they were Jews and communists. He does not worry about pretending in legality. He was careful not to sign anything on the matter and was equally insistent without any documentation.
Soviet inquiry commission
At least two Soviet commissions investigate the trial of the show after Stalin's death. The first was led by Molotov and included Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Suslov, Furtseva, Shvernik, Aristov, Pospelov, and Rudenko. They were given the task of investigating materials about Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky, and others. The Commission worked from 1956-1957. While stating that the allegations against Tukhachevsky et al. had to be abandoned, failing to completely rehabilitate victims of three Moscow trials, although the final report did contain the recognition that the allegations had not been proven during trials and "evidence" had been generated by lies, extortion, and "use of physical influence". Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev and others are still seen as political opponents, and although the accusations against them are clearly wrong, they can not be rehabilitated because "for years they led the anti-Soviet struggle against the building of socialism in the Soviet Union."
The second commission worked mostly from 1961 to 1963 and was headed by Shvernik ("Shvernik Commission"). These include Shelepin, Serdyuk, Mironov, Rudenko, and Semichastny. The hard work produced two major reports, detailing the experimental-counterfeiting counterfeiting mechanism against Bukharin, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky, and many others. The Commission based its findings largely based on the testimony of eyewitnesses of former NKVD workers and victims of repression, and many documents. The Commission recommends to rehabilitate any defendant with the exception of Radek and Yagoda, as Radek's material requires further examination, and Yagoda is a criminal and one of the court forgery (although most of the charges against him should also be imposed, he is not a "spy" ). The Commission states:
Stalin committed a very serious crime against the Communist party, the socialist state, the Soviet people and the revolutionary movement throughout the world... Together with Stalin, the responsibility for misuse of the law, unwarranted mass repression and the deaths of innocent thousands of innocent people also lies Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov....
Mass graves and warnings
In the late 1980s, with the establishment of the Memorial Society and similar organizations in the Soviet Union it became possible not only to talk about the Great Terror, but also to start searching for the location of the 1937-1938 murders and identifying those buried there..
In 1988, for example, mass graves in Kurapaty in Belarus were the scene of clashes between protesters and police. In 1990, a large stone was brought from the former Solovki prison camp in the White Sea, and was set up next to the KGB headquarters in Moscow as a warning to all "victims of political repression" since 1917.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many mass graves filled with executed terror victims were found and converted into warning sites. Some, such as the Bykivnia murder field near Kiev, are said to contain up to 200,000 corpses.
In 2007, a site like that, the range of Butovo firearms near Moscow, was transformed into a sacred place for victims of Stalinism. Between August 1937 and October 1938, more than 20,000 people were shot and buried there.
Pada 30 Oktober 2017, Presiden Vladimir Putin membuka Wall of Sorrow, pengakuan resmi namun kontroversial atas kejahatan rezim Soviet.
Interpretasi historis
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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