Soviet political repressions
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Mask of Sorrow monument in the Russian Far Eastern city of Magadan, in memory of the Gulag prisoners that died in the Dalstroi labor camps
Mask of Sorrow monument in the Russian Far Eastern city of Magadan, in memory of the Gulag prisoners that died in the Dalstroi labor camps

Soviet political repressions was a de facto and de jure system of prosecution of people who were or perceived to be enemies of the Soviet system. From the beginning its theoretical basis were the theory of Marxism about the class struggle and the resulting notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its legal basis was formalized into the Article 58 in the code of RSFSR and similar articles for other Soviet republics.

The term "repression", "terror", and other strong words were normal working terms with respect to the internal politics of the early Soviet state, reflecting the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed apply ruthless force to suppress the resistance of the social classes which Marxism considered antagonistic to the class of proletariat. This phraseology was gradually abolished after destalinization, but the system of persecution for political views and activities remained until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The numerous victims of extrajudicial punishment were called the enemies of the people. The punishment by the state included summary executions, torture, sending innocent people to Gulag, involuntary settlement, and stripping of citizen's rights. Usually, all members of a family, including children, were punished as "traitor of Motherland family members". The repressions have been conducted by Cheka, OGPU and NKVD in several consecutive waves known as Red Terror, Collectivisation, Great Purge, Doctor's Plot, and others. The secret police forces conducted massacres of prisoners at numerous occasions. The repressions were practiced in Soviet republics and at the territories "liberated" by Soviet Army during World War II, including Baltic States and Eastern Europe [1].

State repression led to uprisings, which were brutally suppressed by military force, like the Tambov rebellion, Kronstadt rebellion, or Vorkuta Uprising. During Tambov rebellion, Bolshevik military forces widely used chemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels.[2] Most prominent citizens of villages were often taken as hostages and executed if the resistance fighters did not surrender. [3]

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Loss of life

According to the Guiness Book of Records, 66.7 million people were killed in the Soviet Union by state persecution from October 1917 through 1959 - under Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushev [4]. However the exact number of victims may never be known and remains a matter of debates among historians. The result depends on the period of time and the criteria and methods used for the estimates. For example, the number of victims under Joseph Stalin's regime vary from 8 to 61 million [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

Ethnic cleansing and genocide

A victim of holodomor (Ukrainian famine, 1933)
A victim of holodomor (Ukrainian famine, 1933)

Entire nations have been collectively punished by the Soviet Government for alleged collaboration with the enemy during World War II. At least nine of distinct ethnic-linguistic groups, including ethnic Germans, ethnic Greeks, ethnic Poles, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Chechens, and Kalmyks, were deported to remote unpopulated areas of Siberia and Kazakhstan. The ethnicity-targeted population transfers in the Soviet Union led to millions of deaths due to the inflicted hardships.[11]Koreans and Romanians were also deported. Mass operations of the NKVD were needed to deport hundreds of thousands of people.

The deaths of millions of people during the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 was caused intentionally by confiscating all food and blocking the migration of starving population by the Soviet government. [11]. The overall number of peasants who died in 1930–1937 from hunger and [[repressions during collectivisation (including in Kavkaz and Kazakhstan) was at least 14.5 million.[11] More than a million of people died earlier during other droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR.

Red Terror

Main article: Red Terror

Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended in about October 1918. However many historians, beginning with Sergei Melgunov, apply this term to repressions for the whole period of the Russian Civil War, 1918-1922.[12][8]

Russian Civil War

Main article: Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed and the Bolshevik party assumed power in Petrograd (St. Petersburg).

Collectivization

Main article: Collectivization in the USSR

Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms (Russian: колхо́з, kolkhoz, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leaders were confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis in agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927 and was becoming more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program.[13]

Great Terror

Main article: Great Terror

The Great Purge (Russian: Большая чистка, transliterated Bolshaya chistka) was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1937-1938.[14][15] Also described as a "Soviet holocaust" by several authors,[16][17][18] it involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of peasants, deportations of ethnic minorities, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons, characterized by widespread police surveillance, widespread suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and killings.[14] Estimates of the number of deaths associated with the Great Purge run from the official figure of 681,692 to nearly 2 million.

Population transfers

Main article: Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers", deportations of nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas, see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.

World War II and aftermath

From 1941 on, Stalin was willing to strike back against the invading Axis forces at all costs and led the war with extreme brutality, including against his own soldiers.[19][20] The Red Army took much higher casualties than any other military force during World War II, in part because of high manpower attrition and inadequate time for training.[21] Faced with badly equipped infantry units barely capable of standing up against machine guns, tanks and artillery, the tactics of Soviet commanders were often based on mass infantry attacks, inflicting heavy losses on their own troops. This tactic was also used for clearing minefields, which were ‘attacked’ by waves of infantry soldiers in order to clear them.[22][23][24][19] In accordance with the orders of Soviet High Command, retreating soldiers or even soldiers who hesitated to advance faced being shot by rearguard SMERSH units: Stalin’s order No 270 of August 16, 1941, states that in case of retreat or surrender, all officers involved were to be shot on the spot and all enlisted men threatened with total annihilation as well as possible reprisals against their families.[20].[25][19]

Post-Stalin era (1953-1991)

After Stalin's death, the suppression of dissent was dramatically reduced and took new forms. The internal critics of the system were convicted for anti-Soviet agitation, Anti-Soviet slander, or as "social parasites". Others were labeled as mentally ill, having sluggishly progressing schizophrenia and incarcerated in "psikhushkas", i.e. mental hospitals used by the Soviet authorities as prisons[26]. A number of notable dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Andrei Sakharov, were sent to internal or external exile.

References

  1. ^ Anton Antonov-Ovseenko Beria (Russian) Moscow, AST, 1999. Russian text online
  2. ^ B.V.Sennikov. Tambov rebellion and liquidation of peasants in Russia, Publisher: Posev, 2004, ISBN 5-85824-152-2 Full text in Russian
  3. ^ Courtois, Stephane; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis & Kramer, Mark (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-07608-7
  4. ^ Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia - Past, Present, and Future, 1994. ISBN 0-374-18104-7, page 107.
  5. ^ Ponton, G. (1994) The Soviet Era.
  6. ^ Tsaplin, V.V. (1989) Statistika zherty naseleniya v 30e gody.
  7. ^ Nove, Alec. Victims of Stalinism: How Many?, in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (edited by J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning), Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-44670-8.
  8. ^ a b Bibliography: Courtois et al. The Black Book of Communism
  9. ^ Davies, Norman. Europe: A History, Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN 0-06-097468-0.
  10. ^ Bibliography: Rummel.
  11. ^ a b c Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505180-7.
  12. ^ Serge Petrovich Melgunov, Red Terror in Russia, Hyperion Pr (1975), ISBN 0-883-55187-X
  13. ^ Davies, R.W., The Soviet Collective Farms, 1929-1930, Macmillan, London (1980), p. 1.
  14. ^ a b Orlando Figes The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, 2007, ISBN 0-08050-7461-9, pages 227-315.
  15. ^ Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. By Robert Gellately. 2007. Knopf. 720 pages ISBN 1400040051
  16. ^ Alan Wood, Stalin and Stalinism, Routledge 1990, ISBN 0415037212, page 37
  17. ^ Ian Kershaw, Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, Cambridge University Press 1997, ISBN 0521565219, page 300
  18. ^ Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press 1982, ISBN 0300031203
  19. ^ a b c Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War, the Red Army 1939-1945, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, ISBN 0-5712-1808-3
  20. ^ a b Not-So-Friendly Fire, Queen’s University, Canada
  21. ^ CSI Report No. 11: Soviet Defensive Tactics at Kursk
  22. ^ David Glantz, Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941 (2001) ISBN 0-7524-1979-X
  23. ^ David Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (1998) ISBN 0-7006-0879-6
  24. ^ Review of "Stumbling Colossus"
  25. ^ Order No 270 in Russian language on hrono.ru
  26. ^ The Soviet Case: Prelude to a Global Consensus on Psychiatry and Human Rights. Human Rights Watch. 2005

See also

For other articles on the topic see:

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