Stalin, the five year plans and the Gulags by Nick Shepley

Author:Nick Shepley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: USSR, Soviet, Stalin, Five Year Plans, World War Two, Gulags, Labour Camps, Purges
ISBN: 9781783330874
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Terror

As we have already seen, terror was a facet of Soviet life long before the most bloody purges and executions on the late 1930s. Terror was integral to the Soviet conception of society and had been a feature of Bolshevik rule since 1918, the first Red Terror that took place during the Russian Civil War took much of its inspiration from the French Revolutionary Jacobin Terror of 1793-4. Both terrors were brought about during the pressures of civil war, though the Jacobin terror had been more spontaneous than its Bolshevik equivalent. Lenin’s terror had a far greater element of premeditation to it than Robespierre’s, he had written extensively prior to the revolution that a period of class terror would be essential in order to establish a dictatorship of the prolateriat. In the event Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat became a dictatorship over the proletariat, and it was terror that would help achieve this.

The assassination of Moshe Uritsky in 1918 and the attempted assassination of Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on the same day gave Dzerzhinsky and his Chekists the excuse they needed for a long planned waves of arrests and murders. The Cheka were, under the new constitution, obliged to refer alleged class enemies, saboteurs, spies and counter revolutionaries to a revolutionary tribunal to establish guilt. As the terror radicalised and grew, they became judge, jury and executioner combined, dispensing swift revolutionary justice where they found enemies of the people.

Members of suspect classes, the bourgeoisie, white collar professionals, teachers, lawyers, engineers, businessmen and financiers, doctors, artists, writers and civil servants were conscripted to form humiliating public manual labour to purge them of their corrupting ways. More often this kind of treatment was designed to garner support for the Bolsheviks amongst the workers and peasants who were otherwise disengaged from politics in general. Demonstrating to them that the new revolution had a practical daily purpose of belittling people who might perviously have looked down upon them sent out a powerful message of class affinity between the party and it’s core support base, the working class.

Those who were not humiliated, or who did not lose their homes, possessions or wealth were frequently arrested and held for ransom until family relatives could find huge sums to bail them from prison. This had the dual purpose of raising badly needed funds for the newly impoverished Bolshevik regime, and also helped to bankrupt an entire class of people, who, went Leninist logic, would begin to think and feel far more proletarian without savings or capital. It was these resources, after all, that led certain people to behave as capitalists, argued Marx, and deprived of them, thought Lenin, with sufficient encouragement from the state, they would become model Soviet citizens.

After the end of the civil war there was some relaxation in the terror, but those victims of the terror that still lived and were incarcerated on the Solovetsky Islands did not regain their freedom and the attrition rate amongst them, as we have seen, rapidly increased due to hunger, cold, illness and sadism.

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