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7/23/2019 Foreign Threat During Stalin's 1937 Terror: Soviet Union Final Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/foreign-threat-during-stalins-1937-terror-soviet-union-final-paper 1/12
By: Kathleen FitzgeraldTerry Martin/Eren Tasar
January 16, 2007
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Under the Stalin-ruled Soviet Union, the winter of 1932-33 proved to
be a time of “severe economic dislocation both in industry as well as
agriculture.”1 Ironically, at the same time that the Soviets struggled to
support and preserve their own production of goods, news of Adolph
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany exacerbated the already anxious
1 Suny, p. 258.
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Bolsheviks who did not feel the nation could properly fight the Germans,
considering their own devastated economy.2 In order to prevent the Soviet
citizens from growing tired of toiling under Communism and turning to the
new German fascism that loomed on the political horizon, the Communist
Party slowly shifted to more moderate social and economic policies. By
lowering required production rates for the Second Five-Year [Agricultural
Production] Plan, reducing the state’s high number of arrests and
deportations, and enthusiastically proclaiming the Soviet’s 1933 harvest as
fecund and prosperous, the Soviet leadership created enthusiasm among
the people and increased the populous’ loyalty to Stalin by once again
making it seem as though “there were no one to take [Stalin’s] place, that
any change of leadership would be extremely dangerous.” 3
The Soviet state held onto this premise of an economically thriving
nation until December 1, 1934, when Sergei Kirov’s murder “changed the
atmosphere in the Soviet Union from the prevailing moderation to a frenzy
of mass terror suddenly and unexpectedly.”4 Rumors of Stalin’s possible
involvement in Kirov’s murder immediately swirled around the populous, but
the government shifted that focus back toward those oppositionists who
otherwise allegedly planned Kirov’s assassination and were thought to be
planning other “active military uprisings” in conjunction with foreign nations
2 Suny, p. 258.3 Suny, p. 258.4 Suny, p. 260.
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like Germany and Japan.5 Infuriated by the fact that true and loyal Soviets
were likely “surrounded by imagined enemies and real hostilities throughout
Soviet society,’ Joseph Stalin chose to execute a great purge, whereby
those people suspected of disloyalty to the state would be removed from
positions of power and participation in the party itself.6
Unlike the state purge of 1929 during which government officials
forcibly stripped purportedly oppositionist Academy of Science members of
their titles, or 1926’s purge of the German-populated Shakhty engineering
company which lost a group of German engineers during the pro-Soviet
purge, the Terror of 1937 remained so successful at terrorizing suspects
that the movement’s leaders even exceeded the goal execution and exile
quotas (72,950 and 177,500 respectively). Further differentiating the earlier
purges from 1937’s Great Terror is the fact that unlike the earlier attempts
which only targeted party members, the terror targeted many outside the
party—military, intelligentsia, and common peasants—in addition to
murdering political leadership.7 In regards to the terror of 1937, the
question remains “why?”. Why would Stalin and his powerful comrades in
the Politburo incorporate concentration camps, GULag exiles, firing squads,
and interrogation tortures into the purported “purging” of the nation from
those who were responsible for events like Kirov’s murder and “wrecking?”.
5 McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 105.6 Suny, p. 257.7 Getty, p. 38. Consequently, the Terror of 1937 qualifies as a “terror” rather than a “purge.”Suny, p. 264.
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After all, in the Soviet Union of 1937, “there [was] nothing to indicate that
officials perceived a growing threat from [internal] social disorder, or a
threat in any significant way greater than in previous years.”8
Diverging from the accepted pattern of the previous purges, the
Terror of 1937 occurred during first: a time when the threat of global war
from international forces like the Germans or Japanese felt imminent (and
rightly so considering WWII occurred just two years later); and second: in
which “[Soviet] leaders were convinced that oppositionists, working with
foreign agents, were actively organizing socially disaffected populations
into a fifth column force [within the Soviet army].”9 More than he did in any
previous purges, the inherently aggressive Stalin adopted a truly war-like
mentality to dealing with all anti-Bolshevik oppositionists: having studied
the “rear-guard uprisings against the Republican regime in Spain
during that country’s civil war,” Joseph Stalin felt as though
insurgents and foreign powers (e.g. Germany and Japan) were slowly
closing in on his rule just as they had done in Spain, and the only way
to keep those anti-Soviet forces controlled within the Soviet Union
was to violently attack before those forces could sufficiently barrage
the Soviet Union in the unavoidable war.10
- -
8 McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 104.9 McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 112.10 McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 105.
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Unlike the domestic purge issues which were dealt with during the
earlier, more bureaucratic Soviet purges of 1926 and 1929, the terror of
1937 responded to an internal and foreign, more war-like threats from
Germany and Japan, both countries that appeared headed straight for war
in the mid-1930s. In the early purges, such as 1918’s clean-cut purge of
the Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries from the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK), the dominant Bolsheviks
rallied behind Lenin’s cry, “Those who are not with us are against us,” and
were able to easily take control and remove people affiliated with the other
political parties from office.11 Similarly, in 1929’s major purge of the Soviet
oppositionists in the Academy of Sciences, Bolshevik bureaucrats faced
little more than pockets of mild protestors among the Soviet scientists.12
During the years between these two relatively easy purges, however, the
year 1926-1927 provided “a cascade of events … [which] stirred the
deepest sources of Soviet paranoia about the West.”13 In 1926, the Soviets
had been allowing the Germans to train secretly on Soviet soil, but the
Germans refused to reciprocate by helping the Soviets build a modern
weapons industry in the USSR.14 Growing “suspicious of Western
intentions,” the Soviet foreign ministers began escalating the “rhetoric of
fear” during the summer of 1926 by talking about the “capitalist
11 Suny, p. 69.12 Suny, p. 211.13 Suny, p. 164.14 Suny, p. 164.
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encirclement and the danger of war, more specific [than] threats of military
attack.”15 With a “panicked sense of impending war” corroborated by the
anti-Soviet, Nationalist movements in Georgia, Ukraine, and Poland that
fueled the assassination of the Soviet minister to Poland, the Soviets began
to see internal monarchists and not Western nations as the pressing threat.
As a result, the Bolsheviks dealt with the quietly subversive counter-
revolutionary forces within their homeland first. By arresting a group of
Shakhty engineers, the Bolsheviks enacted their first retaliation against
internal groups like the Shakhty who had essentially already declared war
on the Bolshevik Revolution by thwarting production.16 Extracting
similarities among the various purges of the 1920s, one sees that when the
Soviets experienced a “moment of perceived domestic and foreign crisis,”
as they did with the 1926 purge and resultant Shakhty Trial, the Bolshevik
leaders and the party were more likely to take aggressive action like
arresting workers for subversion than when the threat existed within state-
controlled entity like the Academy of Sciences or the VTsIK.17 Although the
Soviet approach remained aggressive to a certain degree in the instances
in which the state was “attacked” from one side—either internally or
externally but not both—the most combustible Soviet approach consistently
occurred whenever Stalin and the state perceived that they were fighting a
15 Suny, p. 164-165.16 Suny, p. 165.17 Suny, p. 165.
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two-front battle. Similarly, in 1937, when Stalin sensed the shadow of a
looming Nazi Party eyeing the Soviet Union and worried about in-party,
Nazi-sympathizing wreckers to damage the Soviet cause, the traditionally
aggressive Soviet approach became devastatingly violent. The result was
the Great Terror.
In the years preceding the Great Terror, it became evident that
Western nations would soon infringe upon and probably someday attack
Soviet-controlled lands. After Sergei Kirov’s murder at the end of 1934,
and Hitler’s overtly imperialistic occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, Stalin
“foresaw the coming war [WWII] and wanted to guarantee that there would
be no fifth column behind the Soviet line and that his orders would be
carried out unquestionably by a totally loyal staff.”18 Ever since the Soviet-
German fighting during WWI, Joseph Stalin had never particularly trusted
the West, instead believing that a Western country (probably Germany)
would attempt to use subterfuge to convince a cohort to attack the Soviet
force from within its ranks. Additionally, records show the president of
Czechoslovakia, Eduard Benes, fueled Stalin’s paranoia by channeling
supposedly covert anti-Soviet information retrieved from German diplomats
that implicated many of Stalin’s highest officials in an alleged German-anti-
Soviet alliance. Unfortunately for Stalin, these documents were actually
forged; however, that did not prevent Stalin from believing in them and
18 Getty, p. 3.
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killing “more Soviet generals than would be killed in World War II. Fifteen
out of the 16 army commanders, 60 of the 67corps commanders, and 136
of the 199 divisional commanders were executed.”19 This resulted in “the
grandest of the show trials, with its fabricated plots and forced confessions,
[and] warned the Soviet people that their country was the target of vicious
forces conspiring internally and from abroad.”20
Throughout the trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were both
accused of soliciting and encouraging the murder of Sergei Kirov, the
imprisoned defendants suffered under the NKVD’s traditionally brutal
interrogation process. Although Zinoviev and Kamenev eventually struck a
deal and confessed, Bukharin refused to do so. In response to Bukharin’s
pleas of innocence, Stalin spoke words which essentially served to agitate
the masses into fearing Nazi-Bolshevik alliances even within the upper
echelons of the Bolshevik party. Responding to Bukharin, Stalin says,
“Trotsky and his pupils Zinoviev and Karmenev had at one time worked with
Lenin and now these people have made an agreement with Hitler.”21 With
this type of inflammatory language, Stalin excited the people’s thirst for
revenge against likely traitors, and this meant that Bukharin’s case only
lasted through March 1938, at which point he was executed alongside
comrade Aleksei Rykov and former police chief Iagoda.22
19 Suny, p. 264.20 Suny, p. 263.21 Suny, p. 263.22 Suny, p. 263.
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Not only did Stalin’s language choice incite many of the already
inflamed militarists to war against the remaining, anti-Soviet cliques, but it
was “a language that tied socially suspect populations to active military
uprisings. This was a threat more dangerous than that of social disorder.”23
The language being used in 1937 was “consistent with Stalin’s rising
concern about the prospects of land, and the domestic consequences of
war.”24 He even described the countryside as a ‘haven’ for oppositionists
when he said:
Through passportization and clearing operations in the mid-1930s, groups which the regime deemed anti-Soviet had beensent into exile or had been driven out of the regime cities andborder areas had taken refuge in non-regime towns and in thecountryside. There they had stayed. whie many others hadfled exile and camps, or had been released.25
Similarly, another of Stalin’s public comments also created an atmosphere
of suffocative fear for those who heard it. During the Kirov murder
hearings, Stalin felt the need to call Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Kamenev
“traitors,” “spies,” and “saboteurs,” even claiming those three men “plotted
with the Grman Gestapo to overthrow the [Soviet] party leadership in a
bloody coup that was timed to coincide with the invasion of the USSR by
one or more fascist states.”26 As a result of the language of rebellion and
the paranoid beliefs (ideas fed to the masses by propagandists like the
Czechoslovakian president) that the “threat of war” was real, the more
23 Suny, p. 105.24 Suny, p. 105.25 McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 106.26 Getty, p. 1.
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‘foreign’ residents of Soviet Union who had “national or ethnic ties beyond
the borders” gradually became dangerous outsiders.27 This simply led to
the deportation of non-Soviet nationalists in the two years immediately
preceding the Great Terror. A recently published secret memorandum
reflects this Soviet fear of foreigners when its author, L.N. Bel’skii, writes,
“It has been established…that the overwhelming majority of foreigners
living in the Soviet Union provide the organizing basis for spying and
diversionary activities.”28 Therefore, “the repressions of the late 1930s
combined with a merging xenophobia among Soviet leaders with traditional
fears of political opposition and social disorder” served as the so-called
ingredients for 1937’s Great Terror during which the party members utilized
repressive violence as a means of rooting out those latently subversive
persons who threatened to leave the Soviet state vulnerable to foreign
threats.29
The inculcated fear of the outsider eventually translated into a fear of
the entirety of one’s surroundings, which in turn created a fear-fueled war
zone in which Stalin led a “whirlwind of 1937 and 1938 [during which] the
party and state were decapitated.”30 This whirlwind targeted the political
leadership, army, and the intelligentsia so strongly that by 1939, 60 percent
of those who had been party members in 1933 had been driven out by the
27 McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 112.28 McLoughlin and McDermott, p. 112.29 McLoughlin and McDermot, p. 112.30 Getty, p. 2.
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party; civil war heroes like Marshal Tukhachevskii and most of the Red
Army leaders were arrested and shot for treason, and other free thinkers
who dared to contradict or question the state were exiled to the GULag.31
Although most scholars agree that the Great Purges were systematically
planned by Stalin, it is quite difficult to ascertain the transition between
purge and terror during which a total of 177,500 people were exiled and
72,950 were executed.32 When one examines this period in Soviet history
using a larger scope, however, it elucidates the fact that in this one-party
system, the single male leader, Joseph Stalin, exerted an immense impact
on the course programs like the Great Terror took. With the opening of the
incomplete Soviet archives in recent years, new information about the
leader of this terrifying period come to the foreground. Operating using a
binary warlike mentality in which a person was either an enemy of the
Soviet state or a friend, Joseph Stalin translated his fear of opposition (both
latent within the Soviet community and from outside the nation) into a
dogmatic rule during which ‘war preparations were under way” even if that
war consumed an entire continent.33
31 Suny, p. 265.
Getty, p. 2.32 Suny, p. 264.33 Suny, p. 267.
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