What were the reasons for the Great Terror in the USSR under Stalin PDF

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What were the reasons for the Great Terror in the USSR under Stalin?

The use of terror was one of the most important and most effective ways that Stalin used to gain control and to make sure everything was going along according to how Stalin wanted it to go. There are many reasons for why the purges, or the so called Great Terror occurred. It can to some extent be explained by Stalin’s own personality but there were also things such as party problems, economic difficulties, social instability the, position of the NKVD and of course, external threats.

Stalin was a man of a strong personality, on which his cult of personality was built. Stalin was insecure about his role as a leader because he knew that there were still even in the 1930’s, people who opposed him. Some of these people had even chosen someone else who they supported such as Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov. This was a great distress to Stalin and it lead to him becoming paranoid. The opposition grew due to the harsh economic policies and Stalin grew steadily more worried as suggestions of his removal started cropping up. One man who was particularly against Stalin and his ways was a man called Ryutin and Stalin wanted to have him executed, something which the Politburo refused to support. The fact that Stalin was denied something which he wanted told him that there was too much opposition left against him. Sergei Kirov started gaining more and more support during the early 1930’s and Stalin started viewing the younger popular man as a threat to his power and therefore had him murdered. After the murder of Kirov, Stalin had found himself an excuse to get rid of opposition. He started purging all kinds of different groups in Soviet. He conducted purges of engineers and managers who were not filling their quota. He purged his own party to ensure that there were no disloyal people in the party. He killed many people in the military and especially targeted officers. He ordered executions of ‘counter revolutionaries, kulaks and Trotskyites’. He also gave put orders that a specific number of people had to be arrested as enemies of the state whether they were that or not. He held show trials of old Bolsheviks in which most confessed to their crimes. There is no way of knowing why for certain but it does seem likely that it was because it was their biggest chance of survival or to save their families from being killed, as they had most likely had to receive threats before the trial. But Stalin’s personality was not the only problem. There were growing issues in the party as the there was no real control or unity. J. Arch Getty argues that one issue was that the local parties were usually marked by sloth and inertia. They also usually did not want to “find” kulaks, as these were useful men to have in the society. The lower levels within the party were encouraged to criticize those higher up which lead to that accusations got out of hand and that there was no unity. There were also economic problems where the five year plans were falling behind schedule. There was a downturn of the economy in 1936 due to a bad harvest, technical difficulties and Stalin’s poor management. The leadership therefor had to find scapegoats to blame the low production figures on and these were mainly found amongst managers and workers. The bad economy also worsened other aspects of life in the Soviet.

Due to the failures of the economy, there was now a very unstable social situation. Due to the new work opportunities during the Five-Year-Plans, many people has urbanized and the cities were now overcrowded and there were not enough facilities and services for everyone there. The people in the cities as well as in the country side was losing their faith in the party and became hostile. The government were, according to M. Lewin, worried about their loss of control in what he calls the ‘quicksand society’. They therefor resorted to terror and scare tactics to keep criticism down and to make sure that everyone just kept working. They even launched a campaign which encouraged people to criticize officials to deflect criticism from themselves. The position of the NKVD who were a form of “law enforcement” organization which was closely tied to the Cheka (the secret police) also affected the purges very much. In some areas, the NKVD became like the mafia and ruled their own little territories and it has been argued that they used the purges as a way of gaining their own control and doing what they pleased. They became so important that they were soon a leading institution in Soviet. That they seemed to wanted to fulfil the targets set for them is likely to have increased the numbers of victims. As well as being scared of the secret police and the NKVD, the people also feared what would happen if they were arrested. Many were sent to Gulag, which was slave labor camps. The conditions were horrible and many died there, but they were primarily sent there as slave labor. Stalin needed free workforce to buy in western technology that might be needed in an upcoming war. The biggest external threat at the time came from Germany and the threat became only bigger after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Hitler was anti-communist and he was looking for lebensraum for his people. Stalin felt threatened by him and a possible war. This increased pressured on the heavy industry to produce armaments. So now a people who were already unwilling and suffering from a failed economy were to be pushed even harder and the most efficient way of doing this was to scare them with the purges. Deutscher also argues that the purges were also meant for removing any lingering opposition which might otherwise have interfered with his war plans. To come to a conclusion of the purges is difficult. But it can at least be said that there is substantial evidence for that there actually were many reasons for Stalin to carry out the purges. The situation in the country was becoming desperate and he was losing control over the people and he knew that he had to act fast and scaring people into obedience is more effective than many other things. But it is likely that the main contributor to the purges was Stalin’s own personality and that he was so paranoid of other people opposing him that he actually executed people who in reality were loyal to him....