What was the impact of the purges, show trials and ‘the terror’ on the Communist Party and Soviet society?
The Great Terror had a profound effect upon the Communist Party and on Soviet society as a whole. It transformed Russia from a one party state to a totalitarian dictatorship, with Stalin as its unchallenged ruler.
When the Terror began in 1936, it was primarily directed against members of the ruling Communist Party. Although no one had challenged Stalin’s power, the general secretary knew he had critics within the ruling clique, mainly because of his poor handling of collectivization and because his misguided foreign policy had helped Hitler come to power in German. This growing opposition became evident at the 17th Party Congress in 1934 when Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Party boss, received more votes than Stalin himself in the election for members of the Central Committee.
It will probably never be known whether Stalin was behind Kirov’s murder, but he certainly used it to his advantage, blaming not Kirov’s enemies but his own supporters for killing him. In the months that followed, hundreds of senior Party members were shot at Stalin’s behest.
Stalin now set about eliminating all those who might threaten his power. He started with the ‘Oppositionists’ (like Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky), then began purging those among his supporters who had questioned his policies at some stage in the past (like Pyatikov and Radek). Finally, he launched a full-scale attack on the Party at all levels, eliminating Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Rykov and lesser Party functionaries whose loyalty was questionable.
Large numbers of Party members were purged during the Great Terror, mainly because Stalin could not be sure who his ‘enemies’ were. These purges decimated the Party, with 90 percent of the members of regional and city committees being shot or deported to the camps between 1937 and ’38. Each district was required to arrest a fixed number of Trotskyites, spies and saboteurs, and then to shoot them or deport them to the camps. Party secretaries knew they could be liquidated themselves if they failed to meet their quotas, so they were very keen to comply. If a sufficient number of Party members could not be found, then ordinary workers were arrested.
The worst hit region was the Ukraine, where Stalin eliminated virtually all Party members and destroyed it as a functioning entity. As Alan Bullock has said, the Ukraine became “little more than an NKVD fief where even the formalities of Party and Soviet activity were barely gone though, until it could be reconstructed from the ground up.”
Moscow was also singled out for special attention by Stalin. He purged every institution in the city, signing the death warrants of 40,000 people personally. When a department or factory head was purged (as most were), most of his subordinates would be purged too. Even foreign communists who had come to live and work in the Soviet Union were purged.
The purges created a climate of fear, mistrust and submissiveness amongst Party members, sapping them of their willingness to question Stalin’s rule. The Party now operated according to purely centralist principles, instead of ‘democratic centralist’ ones (as had occurred during the Leninist period). As a result, it lost its dominant position in Russian society, and was reduced to merely a rubber stamp for Stalin’s decisions. Its role was usurped by Stalin’s Secretariat, the NKVD and the bureaucracy.
This process was augmented by the elimination of virtually all the Old Bolsheviks – those who had been party members during or before the Revolution, and remembered the way things had worked under Lenin. Stalin’s version of history was now the only one that mattered.
The Terror also had devastating effects on Soviet society. Managers, doctors, scientists, artists, workers – all were subjected to the dead hand of Stalin’s secret police. Even the NKVD itself was purged.
In human terms, the cost was staggering. Robert Conquest estimates the number killed to have been 18 million between 1930 and 1939 – with 8 million dying in 1937-38 alone.
Stalin’s aim was to intimidate the population into total submission – to enforce an “unquestioning obedience to his will”, as Bullock has described it – and in this he was devastatingly successful. Fear permeated every level of society, and trust all but disappeared. People were left with little choice but to accept Stalin’s claims that a giant conspiracy was taking place against himself and the Revolution – particularly since so many senior Communists were confessing to this (most only doing so to avoid their families being shot). As such, many people did not blame Stalin for the Terror. In fact, large numbers supported him, and believed that the ‘traitors’, ‘spies’ and ‘saboteurs’ deserved to die. Others blamed Stalin’s secret police chiefs – Yagoda and Yezhov – believing that the dictator himself would have put an end to the killing if only he had known about it.
One of the great ironies of Soviet society in the 1930s was that, while socialism was supposed to encourage collective behavior (that is, people working together as a whole), the Terror had precisely the opposite effect. As Bullock has put it, “the Terror was an always individual experience, which struck silently and unpredictably … and this difference explains why … there was no organised resistance. For anyone living in such a situation will convince themselves that the best way to avoid trouble is to know nothing about what happens next door, to hear none of the cries in the middle of the night, to avert one’s eyes at the railway station, not to ask why a colleague suddenly fails to appear to work.”
The Great Terror effectively destroyed the social and political system Lenin had introduced following the Revolution. It decimated the party and eliminated it as the dominant institution within the USSR. It also reduced the general population to the status of vassals, whose livelihoods and lives depended on the whim of the great dictator.