How did Russia’s leaders use terror to consolidate their power between 1918 and 1939?
Terror was a key element of Bolshevik policy from the earliest days of the Revolution. It reached its peak under Stalin in the mid 1930s, but the purges of those years would not have been possible without the apparatus built by Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky.
The earliest use of terror occurred in the weeks and months after the November Revolution. When strikes and protests erupted against the Bolsheviks, Lenin ordered the leaders arrested and closed their printing presses. He then delayed the opening of the Constituent Assembly, arrested and intimidated its members, and finally closed its doors indefinitely.
Civil War soon broke out, and Lenin quickly realised that terror would be necessary if the Bolsheviks were to retain power. Once-cherished principles such as freedom of speech and the right to vote were abandoned in preference to policies which might defeat the Revolution’s enemies. The Cadet party was banned, and all opposition newspapers were closed.
The most extreme measure Lenin took was to reestablish a secret police force in December 1917. This organisation was known as the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (or Cheka), and was controlled by Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Lenin also established a system of Revolutionary Tribunals, to deal with enemies of the regime. To get convicted, a person only had to be accused of counter-revolutionary activities. Such activities included simply being opposed to the regime.
Following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the left Socialist Revolutionaries began a terrorist campaign against the government, and this was ruthlessly suppressed. The SR leaders were arrested and their party disbanded. The Menshevik Party was banned in mid 1918. Russia was now a one party state.
The Cheka’s activities were stepped up in August of that year, following an attempt on the Lenin’s life. Hundreds were shot – many for simply being ‘class enemies’. As the Civil War intensified, so too did the Cheka’s repression. Groups subjected to mass execution included Left Socialist Revolutionaries, former army officers, prosperous farmers (“kulaks”), priests, lawyers, doctors and members of pre-revolutionary governments. Even some workers were shot. By 1924, the organisation was estimated to have caused the death of up to a quarter of a million people. Many others were sent to prisons or concentration camps. The government’s enemies were completely wiped out.
Finally, in February 1921, the Kronstadt Rebellion was crushed, and thousands of its participants shot and buried in mass graves. It was the last example of organized opposition to the regime.
The mid and late 1920s were a period of political relaxation, but that lull was not to last. No sooner had Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals in the Politburo and established his primacy, than he began using the secret police (now renamed the NKVD) to enforce his will. He realised the importance of providing the people with scapegoats – enemies they could blame for the nation’s (and therefore their own) problems. Beginning with the trial of fifty engineers for sabotage at the Shakhty mines in 1928, Stalin unleashed a wage of repression – aimed at diverting attention from his own failures, and preparing people for the bloodletting that was to come. In 1930, he purged the so-called ‘Industrial party’; the following year, he turned on the ‘Union Bureau’. All the while, he honed his killers in the campaign against the kulaks, during the collectivisation process. Seven million people starved to death during this era, and millions of others were sent to labour camps.
Up until 1934, terror had been reserved for use against supposed enemies of the Party (‘class enemies’). Now Stalin turned his killers on the Party itself.
The great purges were sparked by the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, but motivated by Stalin’s fear that he might be deposed in consequence of his poor handling of collectivisation and of Soviet foreign policy. Stalin unleashed a series of spectacular show trials, aimed at discrediting and eliminating his rivals within the Central Committee.
In the first of these trials, in 1936, Stalin eliminated the so-called ‘Oppositionists’ – those Old Bolsheviks who had opposed him in the 1920s (men like Kamenev and Zinoviev). The second set of trials, in 1937, was aimed at Stalin’s own allies – those who had sought a policy of relaxation and reconciliation at the 1934 Party Congress (such as Pyatikov and Radek), contrary to Stalin’s wishes. The intention was to demonstrate that Stalin would brook no opposition, even among his own allies.
The final set of trials, in 1938, eliminated all the remaining members of Lenin’s original party (men like Bukharin and Rykov). It was accompanied by a full-scale assault on every institution in the Soviet Union: the party, the army, the bureaucracy, the cultural organisations, the industrial enterprises, even the secret police. The historian Robert Conquest estimates that as many as 18 million people died during the purges of the 1930s.
By 1939, Stalin’s power was complete – enforced by the terror of the NKVD. Russia had become a totalitarian regime.
Hence, it can be seen that terror was an integral part of the Bolsheviks strategy to deal with their political opponents. Joseph Stalin only took it to its logical extreme, during the purges of the 1930s. As the historian Orlando Figes has concluded, “On the one hand it seems clear that the basic elements of the Stalinist regime – the one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of personality – were all in place by 1924 … On the other hand, there were fundamental differences between Lenin’s regime and that of Stalin. Fewer people were murdered for a start. And, despite the ban on factions, the Party still made room for comradely debate.”