IB History Political Impact of the Purges and Great Terror Up to 1941 Notes

The Great Terror Completed Stalin's Consolidation at Enormous Human and Military Cost

The Three Moscow Trials (1936-1938)

1. Three major public show trials were held in Moscow between 1936 and 1938, each targeting a different circle of the old Bolshevik leadership. The trials were open to Western journalists and foreign diplomats, intended to demonstrate to the world that genuine conspiracies against the Soviet state had been uncovered. The confessions delivered in open court by the defendants made a powerful impression on some foreign observers who did not understand the conditions under which they had been obtained.
2. The first trial (August 1936) targeted the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite United Centre": Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen others. They were charged with planning assassinations and organizing terrorism on Trotsky's instructions from abroad. All confessed. All were executed within hours of the verdict. The second trial (January 1937) targeted the "Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre": Karl Radek, Grigory Pyatakov, and fifteen others, charged with sabotage, espionage, and terrorism. Thirteen were executed. Radek received ten years but died in the Gulag. The third trial (March 1938) was the most prominent: Bukharin, former Prime Minister Alexei Rykov, and nineteen others. Bukharin confessed to leading a "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" engaged in espionage, sabotage, and planning the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. He and most co-defendants were executed.
   1. Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky conducted all three trials, treating confession itself as decisive proof and using abusive courtroom language against the defendants. Genrikh Yagoda, the former NKVD chief who had overseen the first trial, was himself among the accused in the third.

The Purge of the Red Army and Mass Operations

1. The show trials were only one part of the Great Terror. In June 1937, the terror turned on the military. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other senior generals were arrested, tried in secret, and executed on charges of military conspiracy and espionage for Germany and Japan. In the following months, about 35,000 Red Army officers were arrested. Many were shot, others imprisoned in the Gulag. By some estimates, around 35% of the officer corps was removed.
   1. Simultaneously, the NKVD conducted "mass operations" against the general population: Order No. 00447 (July 1937) targeted "former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements" with numerical quotas for executions and imprisonments assigned to each region. NKVD officials competed to exceed their quotas. Order No. 00485 targeted ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union. Similar orders targeted Germans, Latvians, Finns, and other national minorities. The mass operations killed around 750,000 people in 1937-1938, making the Great Terror the deadliest two years in Soviet peacetime history.

The Scale of Elite Destruction

1. Of the Central Committee elected at the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, the "Congress of Victors," a large majority of members were later arrested and shot, and most of the roughly 2,000 delegates who attended the Congress itself eventually became victims of the Terror.
   1. Vacancies left by purged party secretaries, industrial managers, diplomats, and planners were filled rapidly by younger officials, tying an entire new generation's advancement directly to the Terror that had created their opportunities.

The Yezhovshchina and Its End

1. Nikolai Yezhov headed the NKVD from 1936 and oversaw the Terror's most intense phase so closely that the period became known as the Yezhovshchina. His officers relied on sleep deprivation, beatings, threats, and fabricated evidence to extract confessions, and investigators themselves faced arrest if they failed to produce results or later became politically inconvenient.
   1. By 1938, mass arrests had disrupted administration, industry, transport, and military command so badly that Stalin replaced Yezhov with Lavrentiy Beria, blaming Yezhov and corrupt investigators personally for the "excesses" without questioning Stalin's own leadership. Yezhov was himself arrested and executed in 1940.

Paper 3 preparation