13. The Great Terror¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 13: The Great Terror¶
The Great Terror of 1937–38 was the mechanism through which the Stalinist bureaucracy consolidated itself as the ruling stratum, annihilating all actual and potential opposition. Nearly four million political arrests were made, with 700,000 to 800,000 executions concentrated in those two years. The entire older generation of Bolsheviks was exterminated alongside the best elements of the new. Stalin’s March 1937 report called for replacing the entire party apparatus with an obedient generation for whom hierarchy was inviolable and questioning impermissible; the term “Old Bolshevik” was duly dropped. The purges coincided with industrialisation, serving to remove those who remembered 1917 and could contradict the official history praising Stalin, to eliminate those who might oppose anti-Marxist policies, and to re-establish the family as a conservative bulwark while recruiting women workers. The Short Course, drafted by Stalin personally, reduced party history to lies and banned alternative accounts such as John Reed’s. Teachers were evaluated by certification commissions concerned with political background; reasons for dismissal included “not worthy of political trust” or having relatives arrested. Literature and arts were brought to heel, with popular authors assigned “co-authors” who demanded rewrites, and Writers’ Union squads removing criticised works from bookshops.
Stalin’s 1936 Constitution, hailed as the most democratic in the world, was in fact a step backward from the dictatorship of the proletariat toward bourgeois political rule. Trotsky argued it dissolved the workers into an atomised population, liquidating the class basis of the soviets. The constitution reinforced the bureaucracy, restored ranks and decorations, and widened inequality, creating the political premises for a new possessing class. The purges offered rapid advancement to young, aspiring technocrats, generating a generation of cynical, unthinking functionaries. In the Red Army, Stalin exploited friction between senior Civil War veterans and younger academy-trained officers; 90 per cent of generals and 80 per cent of colonels were arrested. NKVD Order 00447 (30 July 1937) split those liable to punitive measures into two categories: the most active to be shot, the less active to receive eight to ten years in camp or prison. Regional targets were set, totalling roughly 70,000 in the first category and 200,000 in the second, with individuals moved between categories to balance the books. The order led to over 1.5 million arrests and 236,000 executions, decided by extra-judicial NKVD Troikas that could process several hundred cases in a single morning. Order 00486 (15 August 1937) specified that wives of convicted ‘traitors’ and ‘right-Trotskyist spies’ were to be arrested with their husbands and detained for no less than five to eight years, regardless of their beliefs or prior activities. Between 24,000 and 34,000 women were executed in 1937–38, 4 to 5 per cent of total executions. Children of ‘enemies’ were sent to orphanages; between August 1937 and May 1938, the NKVD sent 15,347 such children to orphanages. A decree of 7 April 1935 allowed children as young as twelve to be subject to all measures of criminal punishment, including the death penalty. By late 1938, the Terror had removed potential threats and restocked the elite with loyalists, but production fell sharply as workers avoided responsibility. The Central Committee blamed “excesses” on Yezhov and NKVD personnel, not the system; Beria then arrested and shot most NKVD leaders. The Terror killed over three times as many Communists as the Civil War, constituting a class struggle for the extermination of the Bolshevik Party. Immediately afterward, Stalin removed workers’ right to quit, cut wages by 14 per cent, and ordered a 25 per cent productivity increase.