So thankfully I wrote a paper on this very subject 2 years or so ago. If anyone knows how to copy and paste so that end notes appear that would make it a lot easier. You can tell when I made a reference cause there's a space before the period but ugh there's some good sources.
Papers have never been my strongest suit so go easy on me (yah right
) And this paper isn't exactly on subject but it does talk about it and has multiple sources that side with my viewpoint.
Engineering Genocide in the Twentieth Century:
The Great Purge
By Ben Monroe
Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, and Kim Jong-Il all pale in comparison to the machine of terror that gripped Soviet Russia in the late thirties as part of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. This effect of the Purge or Great Terror, as it is sometimes called, is still felt to this day.
"No event in the last 60 years experienced more vicissitudes in Russian public attention than the Great Purge." The Purge gripped the nation in fear as estimates from three million to eight million perished in a wide sweeping reform that swept over the Soviet Nation . The vast majority of these crimes were committed under Article 58.10 of the Soviet law code, which vaguely said any anti-Soviet activity was a crime . Many of the atrocities did not begin to come into light until 1956 when Comrade Khrushchev partially condemned Stalin . Khrushchev's passionate speech to the secret 20th Communist Party Congress lasted for over four hours and spoke loudly against the crimes of the past in hope of a brighter more "Lenin" Soviet Union. This was a hugely unpopular speech as word of its secret content spread far and wide. Stalin was a man so zealously worshiped that even the children whose parents were brutally murdered worshiped him .
Most of the information we have about this dark era of history before the fall of the Soviet Union comes from only a few sources. Historian and author Anne Applebaum has said that the Great Terror of 1937-1938 was not the largest amount of deaths since more people had died in 1948 of all those who had formerly been arrested and sent to the Gulags and before Stalin's death a purge of Jews occurred. However it was in 1937 that the Gulags changed from normal prison camps to death camps .
The chiefs of the previous secret police would have to be replaced to make this new Purge to the scale that Stalin wanted. This began with Genrikh Yagoda, who led the Soviet Secret Police, and most of his staff and former Gulag commanders .
One of such account of life in a Gulag and in the prisons of the Soviets is from Alexander Dolgun, an American who worked at the American Embassy in Moscow when he was abducted by the secret police . The story begins in 1948 after the Great Purge but the basic apparatus of fear is still in place .
A twenty-two-year-old American Embassy file clerk was out for an innocent stroll one day to meet his friend for lunch. Someone who claims to know him stops him. Bewildered by this, the American begins to talk to the agent wondering what he wants. The man identified himself as MGB, the current incarnation of the secret police. "Oh don't worry, it's nothing important, we'd just like to talk to you for five minutes at the ministry," the agent said nonchalantly. Rightfully suspicious the American's face gives away his fear. The agent once again tells him to relax. After all, the American hadn't done anything wrong, and had no reason to think he may be picked up as a suspect.
As Alexander Dolgun and millions like him found out later that didn't matter, the Secret Police picked up who they saw fit. The American's gut told him to run; the embassy was only two blocks from there, he could make it. As he tensed and looked out to the street for a safe getaway another agent came up behind him and handcuffed him. "Well! Here's luck! Here comes my friend with his car. We can take a drive and have a little chat," the agent replies to the American's surprise as a car pulls up. Just like that, Alexander Dolgun's life went from being a "free" citizen in the Soviet Union to being put under the foot of the most oppressive secret police outside of the Gestapo since Ivan the Terrible centuries earlier.
The agents in the car were very comforting and soft-spoken to Dolgun. The prisoner began to feel at ease. In Alexander's case he felt he was going to be offered a deal to spy for the Russians and be back in time to meet his friend for lunch. The Soviets stopped the car in front of a huge building in the southeast corner of the Dzerzhinsky Square. Before the revolution of 1917, this massive building had been the Government Insurance Hotel. The name Gos Strakh had been the short name for Strakhkassa, which means "insurance office". However strakh can also mean "fright", which turned the name into Gos Strakh or the Government Fright. This changed into Gos Uzhas , which meant, "Government Terror" during the time of the Great Purge . It was most commonly known as the Lubyanka, and by whatever name it was called it still swallowed untold millions.
Often large groups would disappear together. One list of arrested personnel for the year 1937, in just one province of Russia, included a group of 420 'Trotskyite' conspirators, 120 'right-wingers', over 2,000 'Japanese cossacks', 1,500 'officers from the Czar era', 250 'Polish spies', 95 'Japanese spies', around 3,300 kulaks, and almost 1,400 criminals. All these arrests took place in one report period for one small province. These don't include the individual arrests but only groups who were arrested and tried together . Others, such as the Koreans, were forcibly removed from Russia in 1937 during the Great Terror. Soviets feared Koreans could serve as Japanese spies so they were removed. Ethnic Germans that had lived in Russia for generations shared a similar fate as World War Two approached and an engagement with the Germans seemed likely .
Alexander Dolgun's captors continuously told him that it would be over very quickly and was put into a small cell. Still hanging on the hope that it was some sort of elaborate deal to get him to spy on America, he waited patiently in his cell, his anger slowly dying down. While in the Lubyanka, all effort to keep the prisoner at ease is given. This made the prisoner easier to control and less likely to cause problems. To Alexander, water was never denied and he was promptly taken to the bathroom whenever he needed to relieve himself while he waited to get it all settled. . Sometime in the evening the prisoner was led to interrogation, depriving him of sleep. This was when the cold truth of reality began to settle in for Alexander Dolgun, that this wasn't some elaborate plan to get him to spy on his country. While the exact specifics of the charges and the information collected would never be given to Alexander Dolgun, he was still charged with spying on the Soviet Union. The type and severity of his spy charges would change over the course of his imprisonment; the sheer amount of information compiled by the spy machine of the Russians was always impressive. The secret police had organized a large folder with circumstantial evidence and other questionable activity tailored specifically to the suspect so that guilt was never questioned. The questions began simply enough by the interrogators. Simple biographical questions were asked of the young American and others in his predicament. These were checked against the files that the secret police had kept and Dolgun signed at the end of every interrogation to check for any discrepancies. The same interrogator would ask him questions sometimes eighteen hours per day with only a brief rest for the interrogator, while the prisoner was forced to stay awake. Before long the prisoner would be transferred to a Soviet Champagne truck and hurled into a small cage to transport to another prison .
The next link in the giant chain of Soviet terror was Lefortovo, a huge prison resembling a 'K' in shape with one large section and two smaller ones branching off. This was a more permanent building to house the political prisoners of Russia. The sheer scope and size of the Great Terror demanded satellite prisons from the Lubyanka where interrogation may continue. The rooms were a pitch-tar black with its own sink and faucet and a small toilet, but no toilet paper. On the wall of Dolgun's cell was a small poem that was scratched into the black surface that the dismal 25-watt light bulb showed. It read:
Who enters here do not lose hope.
Who leaves do not rejoice.
Who has not been will be here yet.
Who has been here will not forget .
Having been told that it would all be taken care of shortly by the politely-mannered guards, Dolgun, like many, still saw this as a short adventure that would be washed away soon . The prisoner would be in charge of cleaning the cell routinely and was not allowed to talk to him or herself, depriving the subject of a small bit of sanity . The prisoner was also not allowed to sleep during the day since it was against the rules to do so in Soviet prisons. This was the chief weapon of the secret police. Sleep deprivation sowed confusion in their enemies by making the desire to sleep so strongly the prisoner would agree to anything. This was used cruelly and effectively by the Soviets .
Initially, the reasoning for these torture and detention techniques for the Soviets were to build an Utopia where, within a single generation, all the "backwardness" of Russia can be removed and placed with the leadership of Comrade Joseph Stalin. This was to prevent defeats such as what happened by the "Mongol khans, Turkish beys, Swedish feudal lords, Polish and Lithuanian gentry, British and French Capitalists, Japan barons" and now the United States. It was this "backwardness" that weeding out the political undesirables through interrogation was meant to do .
Little things were the keys to surviving this horrible experience for Alexander Dolgun and countless others like him. Traveling to the interrogation room and getting a glimpse of the clock on the wall to see what time of day it was, keeping a tally-mark calendar, and signing his name in different ways were what Dolgun held onto in his early days .
The secret police would spend as long as it took to break a subject. Time was on the state's side. The secret police knew many names throughout the time of the Soviet Union, from OGPU to the NKVD of the Great Purge to the MGB and the KGB, the letters changed little in the efficiency of the State. Throughout all the years they were called the Organi which means the "Organs". And so the "organs" of the terror beast that rampaged Russia was the secret police . Beatings were common and even recommended by Stalin to deal with suspects of crimes against the State. Former prisoner Vsevelod Meyerhold described his ordeal in a letter of complaint that was preserved:
The investigators began to use force on me, a sick 65-year old man. I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above, with considerable force For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling hot water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. They beat my back with the same rubber strap and punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height
One time my body was shaking so uncontrollably that the guard escorting me back from such an interrogation asked: "Have you got malaria?" When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after eighteen hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour's time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever ."
Dolgun had to find a way to survive, as many did, in the Soviet justice system. It was all too easy for a prisoner to fall into despair and end up killed. Hope was all he had. Telling his interrogator, "I won't break before you do, you bastard!" . Dolgun would use every chance he had to thwart his interrogator. One way he kept his sanity was to 'walk across Russia to freedom' as he called it. Instead of only pacing in his cell he counted his steps after measuring their width and walked from Moscow to France in his imagination before he quit after reaching the Gulags. However, he soon found how large the Soviet system was and how all-inclusive it was as this passage taken from Dolgun's story shows:
"People adored Stalin. People want to love infinite power so that it will love them back. People knew that under Stalin millions disappeared in the middle of the night, but most of them said, "It must be for the best." My wife's mother was married to a KGB officer. When she first heard my story, she said privately to Irene, even though she hated her husband and had been deserted by him years before, "Well, Alex must have done something terrible or they never would have taken him!" It took her a long time to see things differently ."
One pilot that Alexander Dolgun met, while in the Gulags, had a horrible nightmare where Comrade Stalin was going to be assassinated. Distressed, he told his wife and some friends from work. One of those 'friends' turned him in for anti-Soviet behavior under Article 58.10. He received twenty-five years in the work camps for "attempting to assassinate Stalin" and "an attempt to see an anti-Soviet dream." Plus another five years in exile and five years of no civil rights. His wife received a smaller sentence for not turning him in . Other lists of charges that could be brought up to arrest people included telling or hearing a joke about Premier Stalin, showing up late to work, being named by someone else as a 'co-conspirator', owning more cows than the surrounding neighbors, or even stealing office supplies . Unlike the Nazis of Germany, the NKVD of the Russians targeted people not just upon their race but on an assortment of qualifications. With no set target all portions of the population lived in constant fear . What initially began as a purge to eliminate threats and maintain the party's purity, became a terror designed to keep the entire population in line through the use of fear.
Often times Alexander Dolgun would sneak a few spare minutes of sleep when the interrogator would drift to sleep during their long nights of questioning together. Since interrogators worked eighteen hours a day catching the man sleeping came often enough that Dolgun was able to get the few minutes he needed to keep sanity. Other times when the interrogator would ask him a question he would say, "Let me think on that," and close his eyes stealing a minute or two of sleep . The interrogator's work took breaks occasionally when he would go home to see his wife or mistress, allowing Dolgun a few full nights' rests but the American never caught up on sleep .
A common way for prisoners to communicate with one another when they were not allowed to was a prisoner Morse code. It was based on the 31-letter Russian alphabet, minus a seldom-used one, and a chart that would break down each beat. It was in this way prisoners could communicate through walls and plumbing. This often gave prisoners a little bit of hope in the loneliness of isolated cells. The code looked something like this when laid down in the chart that formed:
1,1 1,2 1,3 1,4 1,5 1,6
2,1 2,2 2,3 2,4 2,5 2,6
3,1 3,2 3,3 3,4 3,5 3,6
4,1 4,2 4,3 4,4 4,5 4,6
5,1 5,2 5,3 5,4 5,5 5,6
Each number would correspond with a letter in the Russian alphabet so that 1,1 would mean 'A' and 1,6 would mean 'E' and so on . The prisoners would have to be careful not to get caught by the guards because that meant Harsh Punishment. For a maximum of twenty-one days, or fifty-two days as Dolgun received, the punishment was dreaded. No heater and pitch darkness with very little to eat one could easily go insane, freeze to death, or go hungry .
If a prisoner proved too difficult to break at Lefortovo they would often be transferred. In the case of Alexander Dolgun, he was transferred to Sukhanovka. The place was the most dangerous of all the prisons. If the prisoner was lucky and survived interrogation, he may have his Article 58 withdrawn under the Article 206, which was termination of interrogation, and given an Article 7.35 for being a socially dangerous element, a very relaxed punishment which often only is five years of exile or less. This was often as close as a prisoner would come to being declared innocent because the State was never wrong. Assuming the prisoner went to Sukhanovka he would find himself in a small closet as a waiting room for several days being forced to stand the whole time with very little sleep .
High visible targets such as Nikolai Bukharin, a very important political figure in pre-Stalin Soviet Union, were not immune from the purges either. After his political defeat to control Russia, Bukharin continued to voice opposition to Stalin in letters. This was common practice for members of the Politburo. Finally in the early part of the thirties, Bukharin withdrew from Soviet politics all together. He stopped attending the Central Committee, which he was a member of, and he stopped writing about politics. Later after the fiftieth anniversary of Marx's death Bukharin wrote a one hundred page paper on 'Marx's Teachings and its Historical Influence". It was only at the end did he mention Stalin who 'had contributed a number of new theoretical generalizations which are now a guiding force in the complex practical work of the Party' . It was in July 1936 when Bukharin requested a two-month leave of absence to spend time at his dacha, a vacation home, with his family. While he was away, the trial of previous Party leaders began connecting Bukharin, and Rykov and Tomsky, with the Trotskyist-Zinovietist conspirators. Tomsky commited suicide when he heard about this news but Bukharin, hunting miles away from civilization, hadn't heard anything until the very last day of the trial. Bukharin sent urgent letters to Stalin and Yagoda asking them to hold off the verdict so he could argue the accusations. The following day, Bukharin heard that the others had been executed. Bukharin raced back to Moscow hoping to convince Comrade Stalin of his innocence, only to discover the Premier was unreachable. Transcripts from the confessions reached Bukharin as he attempted to find someone in the Politburo to hear his case, but no one did. Bukharin was finally summoned, not to the Lubyanka, but to the Kremlin to speak face to face with people who pointed him out as their leader of a counter-revolutionary terrorist center. Distraught, Bukharin attempted to commit suicide, but could not complete the act. Finally on December 7th 1936, Bukharin got his wish of refuting claims that the witnesses said against him. His judges were Stalin, Andreev, Zhdanov, Ordzhonikidze, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Molotov. The hearing ended with no change and Bukharin's odd predicament continued unabated. Finally on the 27th of February 1937, Bukharin was arrested and sent to the Lubyanka. There he would eventually die .
If the prisoner made it through the interrogations he would then be sent to the Gulag camp system. Each camp was different in its purpose, but they all were all work camps designed to produce materials, be it minerals or lumber, cheaply for the mother country.
The Gulag culture was setup with convicts on one side and politicals on the other. The professional criminals went by the name 'Urki' or "coloreds". They were a tough patriotic group who's only crime, they saw, was getting caught. Their entire bodies were often covered in tattoos leaving only their hands and their heads free. This made them easy to see in a crowd. Many of them were very fond of Stalin. The Urki stuck together and ruled the prison camps being able to bribe guards and steal from the politicals or 'fascists' as they called them. The politicals were in a different situation, since they were the most common and the least organized. The prisoner Captain Grigori Orlov explained it one way to Dolgun, "Every political is convinced of his own innocence and convinced of every other political's guilt. They have no street experience in cooperating for survival. They are thrown into confusion by their imprisonment. They distrust each other. They are completely incapable of organizing, you see. So they are the perfect victims for the urki. When they were outside, the urki practiced their trade on a suspicious, distrusting, disorganized society of 'civilians.' Inside they do the same thing."
The guards and administrators in the Gulags shared the same hierarchy as the prisoners. Where in Nazi Germany the SS guards were racially different than the prisoners; the guards for the Gulags were often the same race and often just a wrong word or dream away from being a prisoner themselves . It was not completely unusual for a prisoner to be promoted to being a guard after being a fit and good prisoner. In some cases these guards who were former prisoners made up half the population of a camp's guards. It was also not unusual for this new guard to have sexual relations with other prisoners or 'co-habited' as the slang was . The female prisoners were often prostituted out to the guards and male prisoners for easy work assignments and extra food .
The man behind this complex system of interrogations, prisons, and Gulogs was Premier Joseph Stalin. Stalin's father was a Georgian, but with the diversity of forty languages spoke in the area where Stalin grew up, the Caucasus, it is impossible to determine the exact ethnicity of Stalin . Stalin originally went to school to become a priest of the Greek Orthodox Church in Russia. It was here that he became a revolutionary. The turbulent environment of late Czarist Russia meant that many of the schools, including seminary schools were constantly exposed to encounters with radical organizations and people. Eventually he would rise in the Bolshevik movement to lead all of the Soviet Union .
Hopes of reinvigorating the revolution were abound when Stalin took command of the Soviet Union but quickly these hopes turned into very real fears and dangers. Stalin brought about vast changes in the country's infrastructure with his collectivization policies. Goods to purchase weren't available and many thousands starved in massive famines that struck the Caucasus, the Ukraine, and other regions of the country. Sewage systems backed up around the country as sanitary systems collapsed and disease spread. Apartments became too overcrowded as the dreams of high minded communal workers was replaced with the human need for privacy causing a breakdown in production and efficiency and resentment, but still Stalin drove on . The "kulaks" class of landowning peasants was the most targeted by these collectivization projects the most. Stalin took Trotsky's Five-Year Plan and forcibly applied it with threats of sentencing those who did not agree to the Gulags or death
Stalin had a very hands-off approach when it came to ordering people to do terrible things. His party stalwarts had to be vigilant to see the true meaning behind his words. For example in 1917, before the revolution, when asked if the sailors marching should bring their weapons to an upcoming political demonstration, Joseph Stalin answered back, "We scribblers always carry our weapons-our pens- with us wherever we go. As to your weapons, comrade, you can be the best judges of that." This kind of talk to other party members earned him a sort of cunning reputation in the Communist Party, which helped his career climb .
His cunning showed again after the death of Lenin, who had originally established the Soviet Union and led the revolution to overthrow the Czars of Russia. Stalin took the idea of religion and the near gospel appreciation of Karl Marx and applied it to a Leninist-style Church. In this new history and ideology, Lenin was infallible and to doubt the word of Lenin was to commit a crime. This turned the movement from a purely political ideology to one of faith that was mandatory for all Russians to follow. Lenin in a very real sense became a god to the average Russian. Every god needs an archenemy and so Trotsky, the chief political adversary of Stalin before he came to power and main scapegoat during the great purges, became the devil to this new religion. Lenin's new godlike persona reached far and wide in the Soviet Union, the Soviets even renaming Petrograd into Leningrad in appreciation. Lenin himself, after his death, was mummified and displayed in Red Square where his faithful followers could pay homage and respect to the fallen leader. Elsewhere the bodies of fallen Saints had been dug up and placed in a special anti-religious museum to show the lack of power other religions had and that indeed their Saints did rot whereas Comrade Lenin's never would. This made the Soviet Union's government even more legitimate since it had a near religious backing to it. It also made Stalin the son of a god in a sense, by making him the heir to a god he must have special powers as well . Since Stalin was the heir to a godlike figure, "(To follow Stalin) without questioning became a routine of Soviet political life. The guilt of the victims amounted, in substance, to having menaced the unity of the party by holding minority opinions. It was thus that the Caucasian had turned the party mysticism into a guarantee of his everlasting infallibility! "
At a Kremlin banquet on November 8, 1932, Stalin had an argument with his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, during the meal. The fight disrupted "the mood" of the party and several days later his wife committed suicide. With Stalin's dark malicious ways and taste for subtlety, it is all too possible that he murdered his wife but the truth is not known for sure. In either case the death made many feel sympathetic to their Comrade Stalin and leader .
Towards the end of Stalin's life he became increasing deranged and unstable. In 1952 the NKVD uncovered a 'Zionist-American Conspiracy' which connected to the 'Doctors' Plot' and the uncovering of the 'Georgian-Mingrelian Conspiracy' which wanted Georgia to break away from Russia. When Stalin died many thought that it could have been an assassination, and for good reason. The doctors were slow to respond in coming to Stalin's aid. So slow that they did not arrive until the next day. A full day to arrive to the aid of the leader of a super power was unlikely at best, conspiracy at worse. The reports of Stalin's location and time of death had also been falsified and misreported. It was said that he died in the Kremlin when in fact he died at his vacation home. These facts about Stalin's whereabouts and circumstances surrounding his death have led many to suspect foul play. The most startling piece of evidence showing the possibility of Stalin's death was that during the delay for doctors to arrive, several powerful political factions formed that divided the political power of the country. On one side of these factions there was Malenkov and Beria and on the other side there was Khrushchev and Bulganin. The very same Khruschev that attacked Stalin's near god-like persona in 1956. The fact that the two factions had negotiated power before the doctors arrived, added together with the fact that the doctors took so long to arrive and falsifications were made, makes Stalins' death a possible assassination and coup .
Twentieth century has known many wars and acts of genocide. Subsequent dictators and leaders of 'Peoples' Movements' hold two people in high regard. One is Adolph Hitler of Nazi Germany and the other is Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. While Hitler's reign of terror ended and was relatively short and directed at other races and nationalities, Stalin's was directed at his own people and lasted much longer. Stalin's legacy is one of terror and death. His heavy handed ruling set the pace for future Communist rulers to work from in an attempt to be more moderate. His secret police became the envy of many a dictator since. His crimes killed millions. It is all these things that make Stalin's Lubyanka and his Great Terror a low point in humanity that should never be forgotten.
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