Interesting look at some of the details and examining the potential causes of the particular timing of the purges and show trials.
Excerpt:
The circumstances surrounding the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the leader of the Communist Party in Leningrad, remains disputed. Some historians such as Robert Conquest have argued that General Secretary Joseph Stalin was behind the killing, often relying on circumstantial evidence such as the fact that officials like the Ukrainian Grigory Petrovsky and the Georgian Sergo Ordzhonikidze were supportive of Kirov heading a collective leadership, thereby potentially posing a threat to Stalin.^2^ Ultimately, the motives are to a certain degree irrelevant. Rather, the murder of Kirov permitted a rapid acceleration of the state’s effort at suppression of perceived enemies. On the night of 1 December 1934, the very same evening as Kirov’s death, the Soviet government swiftly passed an anti-terrorism law. This legislation in turn severely limited civil and judicial rights, mandated that investigations had to be completed within 10 days and that the accused were only to be informed of their trial 24 hours in advance with no legal aid, and that appeals were not to be allowed and that death sentences had to be carried out immediately.^3^
The enactment of new laws on the back of the Kirov murder in turn laid the foundation for what would become the Terror. While it did not reach its peak until 1937, arrests and trials were already beginning to take place. As early as 1935, in the newly created milieu, old leaders from the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition were imprisoned, though not executed.^4^ While it can be argued that because many of those arrested were not killed it was technically not part of the Terror, the fact of the matter is that the processes cannot be cleanly separated. Some, like Old Bolshevik Avel Yenukidze, were merely demoted and reassigned in 1935, yet he was in fact later executed in 1937. Ultimately, the killing of Kirov and the immediate passage of new judicial mechanisms meant that the framework became rapidly more intense. As such, a decree from 7 April 1935 extended all penalties, including execution, to 12 year olds.^5^ This radicalization was not meant to necessarily target children but rather pressure Stalin’s opponents such as figures like Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, both of whom had children.
It is hereby necessary to address what may appear to be a discrepancy. Though the Terror can trace its immediate origins to late 1934 and early 1935, it remains the case that 1935-6 witnessed a decrease in state coercion. Andrey Vyshinsky, who was the prosecutor in Moscow Show Trials and served as Procurator General of the Soviet Union, admitted to Stalin and Molotov in a letter from April 1936 that 30-35% of convictions for agitations and counterrevolutionary activities (roughly 800 cases examined) were ‘incorrect.’^6^ This was in keeping with his calls for greater reforms to legal procedures more generally. However, this, along with the declining incarceration rate for political crimes in those years, signify a quantitative decrease, not a qualitative change. Critiques such as that by Vyshinsky, which also included attacks on NKVD practices and calls for greater tolerance of ordinary citizens’ criticisms as long as it didn’t attack fundamental policy, may represent an internal political struggle. Namely, it is very well possible that this criticism was voiced in order to enhance the standing of his own agency; one way would be to limit the power of police and in turn strengthen judicial powers.
Unintended Side Effect of Industrialisation
The work edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown convincingly that the timing of the Terror is intimately intertwined with the pressures that surrounded the Second Five Year Plan. In short, managers were unable to keep up with the exact targets in the Second Five Year Plan, despite being less intense than those of the First Plan. This in turn resulted in the falsification of records as self-protective measures in order to hide issues they were facing. The unraveling of these coverups beginning in 1936 resulted in a crackdown on what Moscow perceived to be a large-scale ‘conspiracy.’
This can be seen when examining individual factories or cities like Sverdlovsk where an attempt to cover shortfalls can account for part of the state’s persecution of regional party elites. The year 1936 emerged as a crucial point in time, since it saw a slight economic downturn, which in turn led to state authorities investigating, in turn producing a cycle of arrests and denunciations. The causes for the initial decline have multiple roots, including bad weather that hurt agriculture, a decline in new capital investment, and the labor force already being stretched to the limit while problems from previous years were accumulating.^7^ Similarly, in the case of more industrialized areas, shortages in raw materials prevented machine-building factories from keeping up production, which in turn affected other industries. With the 1936 investment plan being raised 9.5% over 1935 despite the target for cost being reduced by 11%, systematic coverups became harder to conceal.^8^
In general, Moscow cared more about cracking down when production was down, thereby making 1936 a particularly sensitive year and consequently causing the Terror to occur during the latter half of the 1930s. This obsession with clamping down during economic downturns was built into the Soviet system. For example, the Commissions for Party and Soviet Control was created as a response to failures of grain collection yet by the time it was set up in 1934, the worst of the famine was over and crackdowns were not as intense as they otherwise might have been.^9^
Action, Reaction
If the Terror is to be defined as a period of state persecution, as led by the police and the NKVD, then it is important to remember that these agencies were often reacting to events rather than initiating them. This was especially true for accidents that took place in the workplace. According to a typist for the railroad workers’ union in Simferopol, if “there was a train accident, sabotage had to be traced, and a wrecker had to be found.”^10^ The fact that arrests were often massively concentrated in one particular place (e.g. an office or a factory) suggests that this was not about causing fear, especially if a majority were arrested. For example, in the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, 70% of journalists and writers and 80% of party and government leaders were arrested.^11^ As a result, in some places for some professions, there were little to no arrests –i.e. it could not have been intended to cause widespread fear. Consequently, some of these mass arrests should be understood as not part of a systematic campaign under a single banner of ‘the Terror’ but rather locally produced sudden explosions of underlying tensions.
This is similarly true when examined on a macro-scale. For example, despite similar climate and topography, Kazakhstan was far more affected than Uzbekistan. As such, when attributing a cause, it is necessary to define it at times more narrowly, i.e. why did the Stalinist Terror happen when it did in a specific location? In some cases, it was not so much that it was a Stalinist Terror as opposed to simply local officials going to extremes. In the case of Turkmenistan, by the beginning of September 1937, sleep deprivation and beatings were common with detentions becoming even more arbitrary, such as men arrested for having long beards.^12^ The fact that this was later condemned in an internal memo by Stalin in September 1939 highlights the fact that local terrors could at times have local causes that would not elucidate the situation for the entirety of the Soviet Union.