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STALIN’S TERROR
By Bill Fawcett
This is not the best way to make big government smaller.
In Russia, the numerous purges committed by Joseph Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, are known as Stalin’s Terror. It is an accurate name. One of the major goals of the purges was to instill terror in every Russian. There is no question they achieved this. Stalin’s systematized purges, which began in 1930, mostly targeted people who might resist the forced industrialization of cities or the collectivization of farms. The Kulaks, farm owners in Ukraine, suffered greatly in these first purges. Hundreds of thousands were executed or banished to Siberia. The assassination of one of Stalin’s political rivals, Sergey Kirov, provided Stalin with an excuse to purge anyone who might even potentially oppose his rule. Tens of thousands died or were worked to death in the camps. Stalin likely ordered Kirov’s assassination personally, but that did not stop him from using it for his personal advantage. On the pretext they were involved in their leader’s death, he purged Kirov’s allies and even potential supporters.
By 1938, almost everyone in Russia feared the NKVD and Stalin. His control was total. The Russian dictator only had one potential worry. Even before the Nazis took power in Germany, he was acting on the assumption that Russia would have to defend itself from a Western invasion (again). Communist theory and Karl Marx specifically named the highly industrialized nations such as France, Britain, and Germany as ideal places for communism to take root. So, he expected a massive invasion by Germany or the industrialized Western nations, bent on ending the threat of communism. In 1941, he was proven to be right.
Having spent a decade building up the Red Army, at some point Stalin realized that it was the only organization that was powerful and developed enough to threaten his absolute control. This he simply could not tolerate. So, in 1937, the NKVD conveniently discovered that many of the Red Army’s commanders were plotting against the dictator. Although the records and statements of high-ranking officers offer no evidence for these allegations, and the real issue was simply that they represented a source of power potentially greater than Stalin’s own, the NKVD was ordered to destroy the officer corps and bring the rank and file of the Red Army under his control. The commander in chief of the army and his seven top generals “confessed” to impossible plots at show trials and were shot. In 1938 and 1939, the purge spread. When the military purge ended, those executed, mostly by firing squad, included three marshals, 14 of the 16 men commanding armies, 65 of the 67 officers commanding corps, 136 of the 199 officers commanding divisions, and 221 of the 397 lower-ranked officers who commanded brigades. On all levels, nearly 35,000 trained officers were shot or imprisoned. To show any initiative, or even real competence, was enough to land an officer before a firing squad.
Stalin’s Terror did not end with the destruction of his officer corps. All levels of society were subjected to it. The NKVD maintained their terror tactics, ordering executions or exile to work camps, even if no one was guilty. The important thing was to keep the masses fearful and subservient, not to impose justice. Its officers were actually given quotas of how many had to be killed and imprisoned. Everyone was encouraged to turn in their neighbors, friends, or even their parents. As the army was decimated, pressure on civilians rose until Stalin had to back down somewhat. But for the Red Army, the damage was done. Its poor showing against tiny Finland in 1939, and again in 1941, when Germany invaded, can be at least partly blamed on the lack of experience and the conditioned lack of initiative that resulted from the military purge. Only the least threatening, and so least competent, officers survived—not the kind of men who could have blunted the panzers in Operation Barbarossa.
Had Joseph Stalin left his army intact, it would have had the skill and flexibility to resist the Blitzkrieg. The later successes of the reconstituted Red Army, from 1942 on, demonstrate this. It might have helped prevent the loss of millions of civilian and military lives. Russia would have been less shattered by WWII. Then again, with an intact and well-trained Red Army, Communist Russia under the paranoid and sociopathic Joseph Stalin might have been a much greater threat in the early years of the Cold War—if that war had stayed cold. Or would a less desperate Russia have moderated its behavior much earlier, with democracy actually working, as was once hoped for in the 1990s, thus avoiding the current return to a strong-man dictatorship?