Red Star over the Black Sea by James H. Meyer

Author:James H. Meyer [Meyer, James H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780192698964
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2023-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

The charges against the defendants were mind-boggling. They had allegedly plotted and carried out the assassination of Kirov on December 1, 1934 and planned the assassination of Stalin and his leading associates—all under the direct instructions of Trotsky. This, despite their well-known Marxist convictions concerning the untenability of terrorism as an agency of social change. Further, they had conspired with Fascist powers, notably Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan, to dismember the Soviet Union, in exchange for the material services rendered by the Gestapo…

Despite the enormity of these offenses, all the defendants in the dock confessed to them with eagerness and at times went beyond the excoriations of the prosecutor in defaming themselves. This spectacular exercise in self-incrimination, unaccompanied by any expression of defiance or asseveration of basic principles, was unprecedented in the history of any previous Bolshevik political trial.7

The first of the Moscow show trials, which took place in August 1936, ended with the execution of all sixteen of those accused. Included among those who were shot at this time were well-known and once-powerful figures like former Comintern head Grigory Zinoviev.8 A subsequent trial focused upon the alleged treason of the German communist Karl Radek, whom Şevket Süreyya had once been so excited to catch a glimpse of at the Hotel Luxe.9 Among seventeen communists put on trial in 1937, thirteen were found guilty and executed, while Radek and three others were sentenced to forced labor in prison camps. In 1939, Radek was murdered in the camp where he was serving out his term.

The year 1937 marked the height of the purges.10 It was in this year that roughly half of the USSR’s 60,000-strong officer corps were pushed out of their positions under charges of disloyalty. Fifteen of sixteen army commanders were executed, as were 136 of 199 division commanders. Among the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress in 1934, 1,108 would be arrested in the coming years, and during the years 1937–38 alone the official number of individuals executed in the USSR was 681,692. By the end of the 1930s, 1,360,000 Soviet citizens were in labor camps, within which 90,595 Soviets died in 1938. Estimates for the total number of state-sponsored murders in the 1930s—including those from famines resulting from forced collectivization and other forms of state violence—range between 10 and 11 million.11 This in a country with a total population of about 160 million in 1937.

While Turkey did not experience anything close to the level of mass terror taking place in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the political climate in Ankara was likewise becoming more authoritarian and reliant upon force. The first major blow that the Kemalist regime struck against the country’s political freedoms had taken place in 1925, as a pretext for fighting the Sheikh Sait rebellion. Since that time, there had been less and less room for political debate in parliament and in the Turkish press at large. While Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is often remembered as a modernizer who dragged Turkey into the

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