Victims of mass repressions. Stalinist repressions: what was it

Mass repressions in the USSR were carried out in the period 1927-1953. These repressions are directly associated with the name of Joseph Stalin, who during these years led the country. Social and political persecution in the USSR began after the end of the last stage of the civil war. These phenomena began to gain momentum in the second half of the 1930s and did not slow down during the Second World War, as well as after its end. Today we will talk about what the social and political repressions of the Soviet Union were, consider what phenomena underlie those events, and also what consequences this led to.

They say: a whole people cannot be suppressed without end. Lie! Can! We see how our people have become devastated, run wild, and indifference descended on them not only to the fate of the country, not only to the fate of their neighbor, but even to their own fate and the fate of children. Indifference, the last saving reaction of the body, has become our defining feature . That is why the popularity of vodka is unprecedented even in Russia. This is a terrible indifference, when a person sees his life not punctured, not with a broken corner, but so hopelessly fragmented, so up and down filthy, that only for the sake of alcoholic oblivion is it still worth living. Now, if vodka were banned, a revolution would immediately break out in our country.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Reasons for repression:

• Forcing the population to work on a non-economic basis. A lot of work had to be done in the country, but there was not enough money for everything. The ideology formed new thinking and perception, and also had to motivate people to work practically for free.
• Strengthening personal power. For the new ideology, an idol was needed, a person who was unquestioningly trusted. After the assassination of Lenin, this post was vacant. Stalin had to take this place.
• Strengthening the exhaustion of a totalitarian society.

If you try to find the beginning of repression in the union, then the starting point, of course, should be 1927. This year was marked by the fact that mass executions began in the country, with the so-called pests, as well as saboteurs. The motive of these events should be sought in the relations between the USSR and Great Britain. So, at the beginning of 1927, the Soviet Union was involved in a major international scandal, when the country was openly accused of trying to transfer the seat of the Soviet revolution to London. In response to these events, Great Britain severed all relations with the USSR, both political and economic. Domestically, this step was presented as a preparation by London new wave interventions. At one of the party meetings, Stalin declared that the country "needs to destroy all remnants of imperialism and all supporters of the White Guard movement." Stalin had an excellent reason for this on June 7, 1927. On this day, the political representative of the USSR, Voikov, was killed in Poland.

As a result, terror began. For example, on the night of June 10, 20 people who contacted the empire were shot. They were representatives of ancient noble families. In total, in June 27, more than 9 thousand people were arrested, who were accused of treason, aiding imperialism and other things that sound menacing, but are very difficult to prove. Most of those arrested were sent to prison.

Pest control

After that, a number of major cases began in the USSR, which were aimed at combating sabotage and sabotage. The wave of these repressions was based on the fact that in most large companies that operated inside the Soviet Union, senior positions were occupied by people from imperial Russia. Of course, most of these people did not feel sympathy for the new government. Therefore, the Soviet regime was looking for pretexts by which this intelligentsia could be removed from leadership positions and, if possible, destroyed. The problem was that it needed a weighty and legal basis. Such grounds were found in a number of lawsuits that swept through the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

Among the most clear examples such cases are as follows:

• Shakhty business. In 1928, repressions in the USSR affected miners from Donbass. A show trial was staged from this case. The entire leadership of Donbass, as well as 53 engineers, were accused of espionage with an attempt to sabotage the new state. As a result of the trial, 3 people were shot, 4 were acquitted, the rest received prison terms from 1 to 10 years. It was a precedent - society enthusiastically accepted the repressions against the enemies of the people ... In 2000, the Russian prosecutor's office rehabilitated all the participants in the Shakhty case, in view of the lack of corpus delicti.
• Pulkovo case. In June 1936, a large solar eclipse. The Pulkovo Observatory appealed to the world community to attract personnel to study this phenomenon, as well as to obtain the necessary foreign equipment. As a result, the organization was accused of espionage. The number of victims is classified.
• The case of the industrial party. The defendants in this case were those whom the Soviet authorities called bourgeois. This process took place in 1930. The defendants were accused of trying to disrupt industrialization in the country.
• The case of the peasant party. The Socialist-Revolutionary organization is widely known, under the name of the Chayanov and Kondratiev groups. In 1930, representatives of this organization were accused of trying to disrupt industrialization and interfering in agricultural affairs.
• Union Bureau. The Union Bureau case was opened in 1931. The defendants were representatives of the Mensheviks. They were accused of undermining the creation and implementation economic activity within the country, as well as in relations with foreign intelligence.

At that moment, a massive ideological struggle was taking place in the USSR. The new regime tried with all its might to explain its position to the population, as well as to justify its actions. But Stalin understood that ideology alone could not bring order to the country and could not allow him to retain power. Therefore, along with ideology, repressions began in the USSR. Above, we have already given some examples of cases from which repressions began. These cases have always called big questions, and today, when documents on many of them have been declassified, it becomes absolutely clear that most of the accusations were unfounded. It is no coincidence that the Russian prosecutor's office, having examined the documents of the Shakhtinsk case, rehabilitated all participants in the process. And this despite the fact that in 1928 none of the party leadership of the country had any idea about the innocence of these people. Why did this happen? This was due to the fact that, under the guise of repression, as a rule, everyone who did not agree with the new regime was destroyed.

The events of the 1920s were only the beginning, the main events were ahead.

Socio-political meaning of mass repressions

A new massive wave of repression within the country unfolded at the beginning of 1930. At that moment, the struggle began not only with political competitors, but also with the so-called kulaks. In fact, a new blow of the Soviet power against the rich began, and this blow caught not only wealthy people, but also the middle peasants and even the poor. One of the stages of delivering this blow was dispossession. Within the framework of this material, we will not dwell on the issues of dispossession, since this issue has already been studied in detail in the corresponding article on the site.

Party composition and governing bodies in repression

A new wave of political repressions in the USSR began at the end of 1934. At that time, there was a significant change in the structure of the administrative apparatus within the country. In particular, on July 10, 1934, the special services were reorganized. On this day, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR was created. This department is known by the acronym NKVD. This division included the following services:

• Headquarters state security. It was one of the main bodies that dealt with almost all cases.
• Main Directorate of Workers' and Peasants' Militia. This is an analogue of the modern police, with all the functions and responsibilities.
• Main Directorate of the Border Service. The department was engaged in border and customs affairs.
• Headquarters of the camps. This department is now widely known under the acronym GULAG.
• Main Fire Department.

In addition, in November 1934, a special department was created, which was called the "Special Meeting". This department received broad powers to combat the enemies of the people. In fact, this department could, without the presence of the accused, the prosecutor and the lawyer, send people into exile or to the Gulag for up to 5 years. Of course, this applied only to the enemies of the people, but the problem is that no one really knew how to define this enemy. That is why the Special Meeting had unique functions, since virtually any person could be declared an enemy of the people. Any person could be sent into exile for 5 years on one simple suspicion.

Mass repressions in the USSR

The events of December 1, 1934 became the reason for mass repressions. Then Sergei Mironovich Kirov was killed in Leningrad. As a result of these events, a special procedure for judicial proceedings was approved in the country. In fact, we are talking about accelerated litigation. Under the simplified system of proceedings, all cases where people were accused of terrorism and complicity in terrorism were transferred. Again, the problem was that this category included almost all people who fell under repression. Above, we have already talked about a number of high-profile cases that characterize the repressions in the USSR, where it is clearly seen that all people, one way or another, were accused of aiding terrorism. The specificity of the simplified system of proceedings was that the sentence had to be pronounced within 10 days. The defendant received the summons the day before the trial. The trial itself took place without the participation of prosecutors and lawyers. At the conclusion of the proceedings, any request for clemency was prohibited. If in the course of the proceedings a person was sentenced to death, then this measure of punishment was executed immediately.

Political repression, purge of the party

Stalin staged active repression within the Bolshevik Party itself. One of the illustrative examples of repression that affected the Bolsheviks happened on January 14, 1936. On this day, the replacement of party documents was announced. This step has long been discussed and was not unexpected. But when replacing documents, new certificates were not awarded to all party members, but only to those who "deserved trust." Thus began the purge of the party. According to official data, when new party documents were issued, 18% of the Bolsheviks were expelled from the party. These were the people to whom the repressions were applied, first of all. And we are talking about only one of the waves of these purges. In total, the cleaning of the batch was carried out in several stages:

• In 1933. 250 people were expelled from the top leadership of the party.
• In 1934-1935, 20,000 people were expelled from the Bolshevik Party.

Stalin actively destroyed people who could claim power, who had power. To demonstrate this fact, it is only necessary to say that of all the members of the Politburo of 1917, only Stalin survived after the purge (4 members were shot, and Trotsky was expelled from the party and expelled from the country). In total, there were 6 members of the Politburo at that time. In the period between the revolution and the death of Lenin, a new Politburo of 7 people was assembled. By the end of the purge, only Molotov and Kalinin survived. In 1934, the next congress of the VKP(b) party took place. The congress was attended by 1934 people. 1108 of them were arrested. Most were shot.

The assassination of Kirov aggravated the wave of repressions, and Stalin himself addressed a statement to party members about the need for the final extermination of all enemies of the people. As a result, the Criminal Code of the USSR was amended. These changes stipulated that all cases of political prisoners were considered in an expedited manner without attorneys for prosecutors within 10 days. The executions were carried out immediately. In 1936, a political trial took place over the opposition. In fact, Lenin's closest associates, Zinoviev and Kamenev, ended up in the dock. They were accused of murdering Kirov, as well as an attempt on Stalin's life. A new stage of political repressions against the Leninist guards began. This time, Bukharin was subjected to repressions, as well as the head of the government, Rykov. The socio-political meaning of repression in this sense was associated with the strengthening of the personality cult.

Repression in the army

Beginning in June 1937, repressions in the USSR affected the army. In June, the first trial took place over the high command of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army (RKKA), including the commander-in-chief, Marshal Tukhachevsky. The leadership of the army was accused of attempting a coup. According to the prosecutors, the coup was to take place on May 15, 1937. The defendants were found guilty and most of them were shot. Tukhachevsky was also shot.

An interesting fact is that out of the 8 members of the trial who sentenced Tukhachevsky to death, later five were themselves repressed and shot. However, from that time on, repressions began in the army, which affected the entire leadership. As a result of such events, 3 marshals of the Soviet Union, 3 army commanders of the 1st rank, 10 army commanders of the 2nd rank, 50 corps commanders, 154 division commanders, 16 army commissars, 25 corps commissars, 58 divisional commissars, 401 regimental commanders were repressed. In total, 40 thousand people were subjected to repressions in the Red Army. It was 40 thousand leaders of the army. As a result, more than 90% of the command staff was destroyed.

Strengthening repression

Beginning in 1937, the wave of repressions in the USSR began to intensify. The reason was order No. 00447 of the NKVD of the USSR of July 30, 1937. This document declared the immediate repression of all anti-Soviet elements, namely:

• Former kulaks. All those whom the Soviet government called kulaks, but who escaped punishment, or were in labor camps or in exile, were subject to repression.
• All representatives of religion. Anyone who had anything to do with religion was subject to repression.
• Participants in anti-Soviet actions. Under such participants, everyone who had ever acted actively or passively against the Soviet regime was involved. In fact, this category included those who new power did not support.
• Anti-Soviet politicians. Inside the country, all those who were not members of the Bolshevik Party were called anti-Soviet politicians.
• The White Guards.
• People with a criminal record. People who had a criminal record were automatically considered enemies of the Soviet regime.

• hostile elements. Any person who was called a hostile element was sentenced to be shot.
• Inactive elements. The rest, who were not sentenced to death, were sent to camps or prisons for a term of 8 to 10 years.

All cases were now dealt with in an even more expedited manner, where most cases were dealt with en masse. According to the same order of the NKVD, repressions applied not only to convicts, but also to their families. In particular, the following punishments were applied to the families of the repressed:

• Families of those who were repressed for active anti-Soviet actions. All members of such families were sent to camps and labor camps.
• The families of the repressed, who lived in the border zone, were subject to resettlement inland. Often special settlements were formed for them.
• The family of the repressed, who lived in major cities THE USSR. Such people were also resettled inland.

In 1940, a secret department of the NKVD was created. This department dealt with the destruction political opponents Soviet power, located abroad. The first victim of this department was Trotsky, who was killed in Mexico in August 1940. In the future, this secret department was engaged in the destruction of members of the White Guard movement, as well as representatives of the imperialist emigration of Russia.

In the future, repressions continued, although their main events had already passed. In fact, repressions in the USSR continued until 1953.

The results of repression

In total, from 1930 to 1953, 3,800,000 people were repressed on charges of counter-revolution. Of these, 749,421 people were shot ... And this is only according to official information ... And how many more people died without trial or investigation, whose names and surnames are not included in the list?

Monument to the victims of Stalinist repressions .

Moscow. Lyubyanskaya Square. The stone for the monument was taken from the territory of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp. Installed October 30, 1990.

Repression is a punitive punishment government bodies in order to protect the state system, public order. Often, repressions are carried out for political reasons against those who threaten society with their actions, speeches, publications in the media.

During the reign of Stalin, mass repressions were carried out

(late 1920s to early 1950s)

Repressions were seen as a necessary measure in the interests of the people and the building of socialism in the USSR. This was noted in « short course history of the CPSU (b)", which was reprinted in 1938-1952.

Goals:

Destruction of opponents and their supporters

Intimidate the population

Shift responsibility for failures in politics to "enemies of the people"

Establishment of the autocratic rule of Stalin

The use of free labor of prisoners in the construction of production facilities during the period of forced industrialization

The repressions were the result of the fight against the opposition which began in December 1917.

July 1918 - the bloc of the Left SRs is put to an end, establishment of a one-party system.

September 1918 - the implementation of the policy of "war communism", the beginning of the "red terror", the tightening of the regime.

1921 - creation of revolutionary tribunals ® Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, Cheka ® NKVD.

Establishment of the State Political Administration ( GPU). Chairman - F.E. Dzerzhinsky. November 1923 - GPU ® United GPU under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. Previous - F.E. Dzerzhinsky, since 1926 - V.R. Menzhinsky.

August 1922 XIIconference of the RCP (b)- all anti-Bolshevik movements are recognized as anti-Soviet, i.e. anti-state, therefore they are subject to defeat.

1922 - Resolution of the GPU on the expulsion from the country of a number of prominent scientists, writers, specialists National economy. Berdyaev, Rozanov, Frank, Pitirim Sorokin - "philosophical ship"

Main events

1 period: 1920s

Stalin's competitors I.V..(since 1922 - General Secretary)

Trotsky L.D..- People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council

Zinoviev G.E.- Head of the Leningrad party organization, chairman of the Comintern since 1919.

Kamenev L.B. - head of the Moscow party organization

Bukharin N.I.- editor of the newspaper "Pravda", the main party ideologist after the death of Lenin V.I.

All of them are members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b).

2 period: 1930s

3 period: post-war years

Such is far from full list political processes, as a result of which many prominent scientists, political and military figures of the country were convicted.

The results of the policy of repression:

Conviction on political grounds, charges of “sabotage, espionage. Relations with foreign intelligence2 more than a pier. Man.

For long years - period the reign of Stalin I.V. - a rigid totalitarian regime, there was a violation of the Constitution, an encroachment on life, deprivation of freedoms and rights of the people.

The appearance in society of fear, fear of expressing one's opinion.

Strengthening the autocratic rule of Stalin I.V.

The use of numerous free labor in the construction of industrial facilities, etc. So the White Sea-Baltic Canal was built by the forces of prisoners of the GULAG ( Government controlled camps) in 1933

Stalinist repressions are one of the darkest and most scary pages Soviet history.

Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation - this is the release, the removal of charges, the restoration of an honest name

The process of rehabilitation began already in the late 1930s, when Beria became the head of the NKVD instead of Yezhov. But it was a small amount of of people.

1953 - Beria, having come to power, conducts a large-scale amnesty. But most of the approximately 1 million 200 thousand people are convicted of criminal offenses.

In 1954-1955, the next mass amnesty took place. Approximately 88,200 thousand people were released - citizens convicted of collaborating with the invaders during the Great Patriotic War.

Rehabilitation took place in 1954-1961 and in 1962-1983.

Under Gorbachev M.S. rehabilitation resumed in the 1980s, with more than 844,700 people rehabilitated.

On October 18, 1991, the Law " On the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions” Until 2004, more than 630 thousand people were rehabilitated. Some of the repressed (for example, many leaders of the NKVD, persons involved in terror and committed non-political criminal offenses) were recognized as not subject to rehabilitation - in total, more than 970 thousand applications for rehabilitation were considered.

September 9, 2009 novel Alexander Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago" made mandatory school curriculum in literature for high school students.

Monuments to the victims of Stalinist repressions

Estimates of the number of victims of Stalin's repressions differ dramatically. Some call numbers in the tens of millions of people, others are limited to hundreds of thousands. Which of them is closer to the truth?

Who is guilty?

Today our society is almost equally divided into Stalinists and anti-Stalinists. The former draw attention to the positive transformations that took place in the country during the Stalin era, the latter urge not to forget about the huge numbers of victims of the repressions of the Stalinist regime.
However, almost all Stalinists recognize the fact of repressions, however, they note their limited nature and even justify them with political necessity. Moreover, they often do not associate repressions with the name of Stalin.
Historian Nikolay Kopesov writes that in the majority of investigative cases on those repressed in 1937-1938 there were no resolutions of Stalin - everywhere there were sentences of Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria. According to the Stalinists, this is evidence that the heads of the punitive organs were engaged in arbitrariness and, in confirmation, they quote Yezhov: “Who we want, we execute, whom we want, we have mercy.”
For that part of the Russian public that sees Stalin as the ideologist of repression, these are just particulars that confirm the rule. Yagoda, Yezhov and many other arbiters of human destinies themselves became victims of terror. Who but Stalin was behind all this? they ask rhetorically.
Doctor of Historical Sciences, chief specialist of the State Archives of the Russian Federation Oleg Khlevnyuk notes that despite the fact that Stalin's signature was not on many hit lists, it was he who sanctioned almost all mass political repressions.

Who got hurt?

Even more significant in the controversy surrounding the Stalinist repressions was the question of the victims. Who and in what capacity suffered during the period of Stalinism? Many researchers note that the very concept of “victims of repression” is rather vague. Historiography has not worked out clear definitions on this matter.
Undoubtedly, convicts, imprisoned in prisons and camps, shot, deported, deprived of property should be counted among the victims of the actions of the authorities. But what about, for example, those who were subjected to "hard interrogations" and then released? Should there be a separation between criminal and political prisoners? In what category should we classify the “nonsense” caught in petty single thefts and equated with state criminals?
The deportees deserve special attention. To what category do they belong - repressed or administratively deported? It is even more difficult to decide on those who fled without waiting for dispossession or deportation. They were sometimes caught, but someone was lucky enough to start a new life.

Such different numbers

Uncertainty in the issue of who is responsible for the repressions, in identifying the categories of victims and the period for which the victims of repressions should be counted lead to completely different figures. The most impressive figures came from the economist Ivan Kurganov (referenced by Solzhenitsyn in his novel The Gulag Archipelago), who calculated that between 1917 and 1959, 110 million people became victims of the internal war of the Soviet regime against its own people.
This number of Kurgans includes the victims of famine, collectivization, peasant exile, camps, executions, civil war, as well as "the neglectful and slovenly conduct of the Second World War."
Even if such calculations are correct, can these figures be considered a reflection of Stalin's repressions? The economist, in fact, answers this question himself, using the expression "victims of the internal war of the Soviet regime." It is worth noting that Kurganov counted only the dead. It is difficult to imagine what figure could have appeared if the economist had taken into account all the victims of the Soviet regime in the specified period.
The figures cited by the head of the human rights society "Memorial" Arseniy Roginsky are more realistic. He writes: “On the scale of everything Soviet Union 12.5 million people are considered victims of political repression,” but adds that in a broad sense, up to 30 million people can be considered repressed.
The leaders of the Yabloko movement, Elena Kriven and Oleg Naumov, counted all categories of victims of the Stalinist regime, including those who died in the camps from diseases and difficult conditions labour, the dispossessed, the victims of hunger, who suffered from unreasonably cruel decrees and received excessively severe punishment for petty offenses due to the repressive nature of the legislation. The final figure is 39 million.
Researcher Ivan Gladilin notes on this occasion that if the number of victims of repression has been counted since 1921, this means that it is not Stalin who is responsible for a significant part of the crimes, but the “Lenin Guard”, which immediately after the October Revolution unleashed terror against the White Guards , clergy and kulaks.

How to count?

Estimates of the number of victims of repression vary greatly depending on the method of counting. If we take into account those convicted only under political articles, then according to the data of the regional departments of the KGB of the USSR, given in 1988, the Soviet authorities (VChK, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB) arrested 4,308,487 people, of which 835,194 were shot.
Employees of the "Memorial" society, when counting the victims of political trials, are close to these figures, although their figures are still noticeably higher - 4.5-4.8 million were convicted, of which 1.1 million were shot. If we consider everyone who went through the Gulag system as victims of the Stalinist regime, then this figure, according to various estimates, will range from 15 to 18 million people.
Very often, Stalinist repressions are associated exclusively with the concept of the "Great Terror", which peaked in 1937-1938. According to the commission headed by academician Pyotr Pospelov to establish the causes of mass repressions, the following figures were announced: 1,548,366 people were arrested on charges of anti-Soviet activities, of which 681,692 thousand were sentenced to capital punishment.
One of the most authoritative experts on the demographic aspects of political repression in the USSR, historian Viktor Zemskov, names a smaller number of those convicted during the years of the Great Terror - 1,344,923 people, although his data coincides with the number of those who were shot.
If the dispossessed kulaks are included in the number of those subjected to repressions in Stalin's time, then the figure will grow by at least 4 million people. Such a number of dispossessed is given by the same Zemskov. The Yabloko party agrees with this, noting that about 600,000 of them died in exile.
The victims of Stalinist repressions were also representatives of some peoples who were subjected to forcible deportation - Germans, Poles, Finns, Karachays, Kalmyks, Armenians, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars. Many historians agree that total number about 6 million people were deported, while about 1.2 million people did not live to see the end of the journey.

Trust or not?

The above figures are mostly based on the reports of the OGPU, NKVD, MGB. However, not all documents of the punitive departments have been preserved, many of them were purposefully destroyed, many are still in the public domain.
It should be recognized that historians are very dependent on statistics collected by various special agencies. But the difficulty is that even the available information reflects only the officially repressed, and therefore, by definition, cannot be complete. Moreover, it is possible to verify it from primary sources only in the rarest cases.
Acute lack of reliable and complete information often provoked both the Stalinists and their opponents to name radically different figures from each other in favor of their position. “If the “rights” exaggerated the scale of the repressions, then the “lefts”, partly from dubious youth, having found much more modest figures in the archives, were in a hurry to make them public and did not always ask themselves whether everything was reflected - and could be reflected - in the archives ", - notes the historian Nikolai Koposov.
It can be stated that estimates of the scale of Stalinist repressions based on the sources available to us can be very approximate. Documents stored in the federal archives would be a good help for modern researchers, but many of them have been re-classified. A country with such a history will jealously guard the secrets of its past.

The Sakharov Center hosted a discussion "Stalin's terror: mechanisms and legal assessment", organized jointly with the Free Historical Society. Leading researcher at the HSE International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences Oleg Khlevnyuk and Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Memorial Center Nikita Petrov took part in the discussion. Lenta.ru recorded the main theses of their speeches.

Oleg Khlevnyuk:

Historians have long been deciding whether the Stalinist repressions were necessary from the point of view of elementary expediency. Most experts are inclined to believe that such methods are not needed for the progressive development of the country.

There is a point of view according to which terror has become a kind of response to the crisis in the country (in particular, the economic one). I believe that Stalin decided on repression on such a scale precisely because in the USSR by that time everything was relatively good. After the completely disastrous first five-year plan, the policy of the second five-year plan was more balanced and successful. As a result, the country entered the so-called three good years(1934-1936), which were marked by successful rates of industrial growth, the abolition of the rationing system, the emergence of new incentives for work and relative stabilization in the countryside.

It was terror that plunged the country's economy and the social well-being of society into a new crisis. If there had been no Stalin, then there would have been not only mass repressions (at least in 1937-1938), but also collectivization in the form in which we know it.

Terror or fight against the enemies of the people?

From the very beginning, the Soviet authorities did not try to hide the terror. The government of the USSR tried to make the trials as public as possible not only within the country, but also in the international arena: transcripts of court sessions were published in the main European languages.

The attitude towards terror was not unambiguous from the very beginning. For example, the American ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davis, believed that enemies of the people really got into the dock. At the same time, the Left defended the innocence of their fellow Old Bolsheviks.

Later, experts began to pay attention to the fact that terror was a broader process, embracing not only the top of the Bolsheviks - after all, people of intellectual labor also fell into its millstones. But at that time, due to the lack of sources of information, there were no clear ideas about how all this was happening, who was being arrested and why.

Some Western historians continued to defend the theory of the significance of terror, while revisionist historians said that terror is a spontaneous, rather random phenomenon, to which Stalin himself had nothing to do. Some wrote that the number of those arrested was low and numbered in the thousands.

When the archives were opened, more accurate figures became known, departmental statistics from the NKVD and the MGB appeared, in which arrests and convictions were recorded. The statistics of the Gulag contained figures on the number of prisoners in the camps, mortality, and even national composition prisoners.

It turned out that this Stalinist system was extremely centralized. We saw how, in full accordance with the planned nature of the state, mass repressions were planned. At the same time, it was not routine political arrests that determined the true scope of the Stalinist terror. He expressed himself in big waves- two of them are connected with collectivization and the Great Terror.

In 1930, it was decided to launch an operation against the peasant kulaks. The relevant lists were prepared on the ground, the NKVD issued orders on the course of the operation, the Politburo approved them. They were performed with certain excesses, but everything happened within the framework of this centralized model. Until 1937, the mechanics of repression was worked out, and in 1937-1938 it was applied in the most complete and detailed form.

Prerequisites and basis of repression

Nikita Petrov:

All the necessary laws on the judiciary were adopted in the country in the 1920s. The most important can be considered the law of December 1, 1934, which deprived the accused of the right to defense and cassation appeal against the verdict. It provided for the consideration of cases in the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court in a simplified manner: with closed doors, in the absence of the prosecutor and defenders, with the execution of the death sentence within 24 hours after its pronouncement.

According to this law, all cases received by the Military Collegium in 1937-1938 were considered. Then about 37 thousand people were convicted, of which 25 thousand were sentenced to death.

Khlevniuk:

The Stalinist system was designed to suppress and instill fear. The Soviet society of that time needed forced labor. They played their role and different kind campaigns - for example, elections. However, there was a certain unified impulse that gave a special acceleration to all these factors precisely in 1937-38: the threat of war was already quite obvious at that time.

Stalin considered it very important not only to build up military power, but also ensuring the unity of the rear, which involved the destruction of the internal enemy. Therefore, the idea arose of getting rid of all those who could stab in the back. The documents leading to this conclusion are the numerous statements of Stalin himself, as well as the orders on the basis of which the terror was carried out.

Enemies of the regime fought out of court

Petrov:

The decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of July 2, 1937, signed by Stalin, marked the beginning of the “kulak operation”. In the preamble to the document, the regions were asked to set quotas for future extrajudicial sentences for execution by firing squad and imprisonment of those arrested in camps, as well as to propose compositions of "troikas" for sentencing.

Khlevniuk:

The mechanics of operations in 1937-1938 were similar to those applied in 1930, but it is important to note here that by 1937 there were already records of the NKVD on various enemies of the people and suspicious elements. The center decided to liquidate or isolate these accounting contingents from society.

The limits on arrests set in the plans were in fact not limits at all, but minimum requirements, so the NKVD officials set a course to exceed these plans. It was even necessary for them, because internal instructions oriented them to identify not single individuals, but unreliable groups. The authorities believed that a lone enemy is not an enemy.

This led to the constant exceeding of the original limits. Requests for the need for additional arrests were sent to Moscow, which regularly satisfied them. A significant part of the norms was approved personally by Stalin, the other - personally by Yezhov. Some were changed by decision of the Politburo.

Petrov:

It was decided once and for all to put an end to any hostile activity. It was this phrase that was inserted into the preamble of the NKVD order No. Central Asia and in the Far East.

There were meetings in the center, the heads of the NKVD came to Yezhov. He told them that if an extra thousand people were injured during this operation, then there would be no big trouble in this. Most likely, Yezhov did not say this himself - we recognize here signs of Stalin's great style. The leader regularly had new ideas. There is his letter to Yezhov, in which he writes about the need to extend the operation and gives instructions (in particular, regarding the Socialist-Revolutionaries).

The attention of the system then turned to the so-called counter-revolutionary national elements. About 15 operations were carried out against counter-revolutionaries - Poles, Germans, Balts, Bulgarians, Iranians, Afghans, former workers of the CER - all these people were suspected of espionage in favor of those states to which they were ethnically close.

Each operation is characterized by a special mechanism of action. The repression of the kulaks did not become the invention of the bicycle: "troikas" as an instrument of extrajudicial reprisals were tested back in the days of civil war. According to the correspondence of the top leadership of the OGPU, it is clear that in 1924, when the unrest of the Moscow students took place, the mechanics of terror had already been perfected. “We need to assemble the “troika”, as it was always in troubled times,” one functionary writes to another. "Troika" is an ideology and partly a symbol of the Soviet repressive organs.

The mechanism of national operations was different - they used the so-called deuce. No limits were set for them.

Similar things happened when the Stalinist execution lists were approved: their fate was decided by a narrow group of people - Stalin and his inner circle. In these lists there are personal notes of the leader. For example, opposite the name of Mikhail Baranov, head of the Sanitary Directorate of the Red Army, he writes "beat-beat." In another case, Molotov wrote “VMN” (capital punishment) opposite one of the female surnames.

There are documents according to which Mikoyan, who left for Armenia as an emissary of terror, asked to shoot an additional 700 people, and Yezhov believed that this figure should be increased to 1500. Stalin agreed with the latter on this issue, because Yezhov knows better. When Stalin was asked to give an additional limit on the execution of 300 people, he easily wrote "500".

There is a debatable question about why limits were set for the "kulak operation", but not for, for example, national ones. I think that if the “kulak operation” had no boundaries, then terror could become absolute, because too many people fit the category of “anti-Soviet element”. In national operations, clearer criteria were established: people with connections in other countries who arrived from abroad were repressed. Stalin believed that here the circle of people was more or less understandable and delineated.

Mass operations were centralized

A corresponding propaganda campaign was carried out. The enemies of the people, who had made their way into the NKVD, and slanderers were accused of unleashing terror. Interestingly, the idea of ​​denunciations as a reason for repression is not documented. The NKVD in the course of mass operations functioned according to completely different algorithms, and if they reacted to denunciations there, it was quite selective and random. Basically, they worked according to pre-prepared lists.

Stalin's repressions occupy one of the central places in the study of the history of the Soviet period.

Briefly describing this period, we can say that it was a cruel time, accompanied by mass repressions and dispossession.

What is repression - definition

Repression is a punitive measure that was used by the authorities state power in relation to people trying to "undermine" the formed regime. To a greater extent, it is a method of political violence.

During the Stalinist repressions, even those who had nothing to do with politics or the political system were destroyed. All those who were objectionable to the ruler were punished.

Lists of the repressed in the 30s

The period of 1937-1938 was the peak of repression. Historians called it the "Great Terror". Regardless of their origin, sphere of activity, during the 1930s, a huge number of people were arrested, deported, shot, and their property was confiscated in favor of the state.

All instructions on a single “crime” were given personally to I.V. Stalin. It was he who decided where a person was going and what he could take with him.

Until 1991, in Russia there was no information on the number of repressed and executed in full. But then the period of perestroika began, and this is the time when everything secret became clear. After the lists were declassified, after the historians did a lot of work in the archives and counted the data, truthful information was provided to the public - the numbers were simply frightening.

Do you know that: According to official statistics, more than 3 million people were repressed.

Thanks to the help of volunteers, lists of victims in 1937 were prepared. Only after that did the relatives find out where their family was. native person and what happened to him. But to a greater extent, they did not find anything comforting, since almost every life of the repressed ended in execution.

If you need to clarify information about a repressed relative, you can use the site http://lists.memo.ru/index2.htm. On it by name you can find all the information of interest. Almost all the repressed were rehabilitated posthumously, which has always been a great joy for their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The number of victims of Stalinist repressions according to official data

On February 1, 1954, a memorandum was prepared in the name of N. S. Khrushchev, in which the exact data of the dead and injured were spelled out. The number is simply shocking - 3,777,380 people.

The number of repressed and executed is striking in its scale. So there are officially confirmed data that were announced during the “Khrushchev thaw”. Article 58 was political, and about 700,000 people were sentenced to death under it alone.

And how many people died in the Gulag camps, where not only political prisoners were exiled, but also everyone who was not pleasing to Stalin's government.

In 1937-1938 alone, more than 1,200,000 people were sent to the Gulag (according to Academician Sakharov). And only about 50 thousand were able to return home during the “thaw”.

Victims of political repression - who are they?

victims political repression in the days of Stalin, anyone could become.

The most frequently repressed the following categories citizens:

• Peasants. Those who were members of the "green movement" were especially punished. The kulaks who did not want to join the collective farms and who wanted to achieve everything on their own farms were sent into exile, while all the acquired farming was confiscated from them in full. And now the wealthy peasants were becoming poor.
• The military is a separate layer of society. Ever since the Civil War, Stalin did not treat them very well. Fearing a military coup, the leader of the country repressed talented military leaders, thereby securing himself and his regime. But, despite the fact that he secured himself, Stalin quickly reduced the country's defense capability, depriving it of talented military personnel.
• All the sentences were turned into reality by the NKVD officers. But their repression was not bypassed. Among the employees of the people's commissariat who followed all the instructions, there were those who were shot. Such people's commissars as Yezhov, Yagoda became one of the victims of Stalin's instructions.
• Even those who had something to do with religion were subjected to repression. God did not exist at that time, and belief in him "shattered" the established regime.

In addition to the listed categories of citizens, residents living on the territory of the Union republics suffered. Entire nations were repressed. So, Chechens were simply put into freight cars and sent into exile. At the same time, no one thought about the safety of the family. The father could be planted in one place, the mother in another, and the children in a third. No one knew about his family and where they were.

Reasons for the repressions of the 30s

By the time Stalin came to power, a difficult economic situation had developed in the country.

The reasons for the start of repressions are considered to be:

1. Savings at the national level, it was required to force the population to work for free. There was a lot of work, and there was nothing to pay for it.
2. After Lenin was killed, the leader's seat was free. The people needed a leader, whom the population would follow unquestioningly.
3. It was necessary to create a totalitarian society in which the word of the leader should be law. At the same time, the measures used by the leader were cruel, but they did not allow organizing a new revolution.

How were the repressions in the USSR

Stalin's repressions were a terrible time when everyone was ready to testify against a neighbor, even fictitious, if only nothing happened to his family.

The whole horror of the process is captured in the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago": “A sharp night call, a knock on the door, and several operatives enter the apartment. And behind them is a frightened neighbor who had to become understood. He sits all night, and only in the morning puts his painting under terrible and untrue testimony.

The procedure is terrible, treacherous, but thus understood, perhaps he will save his family, but no, it was he who became the next to whom they would come to a new night.

Most often, all the testimony given by political prisoners was falsified. People were brutally beaten, thereby obtaining the information that was needed. At the same time, torture was personally sanctioned by Stalin.

The most famous cases, about which there is a huge amount of information:

• Pulkovo case. In the summer of 1936, there was supposed to be a solar eclipse across the country. The observatory offered to use foreign equipment in order to capture the natural phenomenon. As a result, all members of the Pulkovo Observatory were accused of having links with foreigners. Until now, data on the victims and repressed are classified.
• The case of the industrial party - the Soviet bourgeoisie received the accusation. They were accused of disrupting industrialization processes.
• Doctors business. Charges were received by doctors who allegedly killed Soviet leaders.

The actions taken by the government were brutal. No one understood guilt. If a person was included in the list, then he was guilty and no evidence was required for this.

The results of Stalin's repressions

Stalinism and its repressions are probably one of the most terrible pages in the history of our state. The repressions lasted for almost 20 years, and during this time a huge number of innocent people suffered. Even after the Second World War, repressive measures did not stop.

Stalinist repressions did not benefit society, but only helped the authorities establish a totalitarian regime, from which our country could not get rid of for a long time. And the residents were afraid to express their opinion. There wasn't anyone who didn't like it. I liked everything - even to work for the good of the country practically for free.

The totalitarian regime made it possible to build such facilities as: BAM, the construction of which was carried out by the forces of the GULAG.

A terrible time, but it cannot be erased from history, since it was during these years that the country withstood the Second World War and was able to restore the destroyed cities.