Propaganda, Purges & The Totalitarian State

Stalin’s Show Trials

Factors in Stalin’s Show Trials

• Collectivisation

• Economic Modernisation

• Leon Trotsky

• The Ryutin Platform

• ‘Old Bolsheviks’

• Kirov

Stalin’s Route to Power

• The original, surviving members of the October Revolution of 1917, including Lenin & Stalin.

• Would present an obstacle to Stalin’s revisionism of his minor role in the October Revolution of 1917.

• Stalin targeted these Old Bolsheviks as traitors who sought to undermine the Communist Revolution.

• Most of these, particularly Trotsky, advocated International Communism, while Stalin advocated ‘Socialism in One Country’.

• Grigory Zinoviev

• Lev Kamenev

• Nikolai Bukharin

• Genrikh Yagoda

• Karl Radek

• Sergey Kirov

• Vyacheslav Molotov

The ‘Old Bolsheviks’

Leon Trotsky:

Shadow of the Revolutionary

• Commander of Red Guards in October Revolution 1917

• Founder of the Red Army

• Very capable organiser & public orator

• Considered the natural successor to Lenin

“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”

• Due to opposition to collectivisation, Stalin introduced forced collectivisation by 1929.

• Kulaks slaughtered their animals in protest and in some cases burnt their grain. Famines resulted in 1932-33. Roughly five million people died.

• In response, Stalin attempted to eradicate the Kulaks, sending out requisition squads who either killed the Kulaks or sent them to prison in the Gulags.

• Roughly five million Kulaks had been dispossessed and/ or imprisoned by 1935.

• An attempt to end private ownership of land by peasants and introduce large, collectively-owned farms in which machinery, labour & profits were shared. In some cases, collective farms were state-owned, where farmers were paid a wage similar to workers in a factory.

• Opposed bitterly by the ‘Kulaks’: peasant land owners.

• ‘Kulaks’ were an inconsistency with Communism – a wealthy, land-owning class in a Communist State. They were created by Lenin’s New Economic Policy of 1921. Many communists supported the forced eradication of these private land owners.

Collectivisation:an Ideological & Economic Imperative

The Five - Year Plans: Economic Miracle at a Price

INDUSTRIAL AIMS: AGRICULTURAL AIMS

SERGEI KIROV

• Leader of the Communist Party in Leningrad

• Loyal supporter of Stalin

• Supported Stalin’s policies of Collectivisation and even the readication of the Kulaks.

• Very popular member of the Communist Party who was elected to the Central Committee in 1934.

• Crucially, Kirov was in favour of a more relaxed style of Communism, even including certain dissidents in the Politburo.

Assassinated in 1934, probably by order of Stalin, who feared

his growing popularity & influence throughout the Communist movement.

• Origin: The ‘Cheka’ (1917 Revolution)

• State police founded in 1934 from reorganisation by Stalin to be both regular police force and state security apparatus

• The NKVD, from 1934 onwards, were given a wide mandate & enormous power, including control of fire services, security of borders, civil acts & responsibily for the operation of ‘Gulags’

• Chief state instrument of Stalin’s purges and the Show Trials

• Prominent leaders of the NKVD: Yagoda, Yezhov & Beria

Nkvd:Peoples’ Commissariat for internal affairs

• Director of the NKVD, 1934 – 1936

• Responsible for the deaths of 7 – 10 million Ukranians during forced seizures of grain supplies under the regulations of Collectivisation

• Organised the Trial of the Sixteen (1936), including the arrest, detention and interrogation of the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ e.g. Kamenev, Zinoviev.

• Replaced by Yezhov in September 1936 when Stalin accused him of being ‘’unable’’ to expose the true extent of the ‘Trotskyite conspiracy’.

• Was put on Trial in 1938 (Trial of the Twenty-One), found guilty and shot.

Genrikh YagodaDirector of NKVD (1934-1936)

ANDREI VYSHINSKYProsecutor-General

Trial of the

‘Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre’

The 1st Show Trial:

The Trial of the sixteen:(1936)

• Zinoviev

• Kamenev

• 14 other leading ‘Old Bolsheviks’

• Accused of murdering Sergei Kirov

• Accused of plotting to murder Stalin

• Accused of working with Trotskyites in an effort to undermine Communism in USSR

Trial of the Sixteen(1936)

Charges The Accused

Verdict: All guilty & sentenced to be shot

Trial of the SixteenThe ‘Influence’ of Trotsky

• Each of the Sixteen defendants took turns to denounce themselves, pleading guilty, incriminating themselves under the false pretense that their lives would be spared once they had publicised Trotsky’s anti-Soviet conspiracy.

“I am guilty of this that after Trotsky, I was the second organizer of the Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc which set itself the aim of murdering Stalin, Voroshilov and a number of other leaders of the party

and the government.”

- Grigory Zinoviev (1936)

Trial of

The 2nd Show Trial:

The Trial of the sixteen:(1937)

Trial of

The 3rd Show Trial:

The Trial of the sixteen:(1938)