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Date Posted: 00:05:39 06/12/03 Thu
Author: Mr John D Clare
Subject: Why did Stalin carry out the Purges
In reply to: 's message, "Purges" on 23:05:49 06/11/03 Wed

There is a little on this on <a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://www.johndclare.net/Russ12.htm">http://www.johndclare.net/Russ12.htm</a>

There is a sense in which Stalin's Terror can be explained (like Hitler) simply by saying that he was a monster - one website calls him: 'A leader whose callous disregard for human life was matched only by his consuming paranoia' (<a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html)">http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html)</a>

But I don't think the terror WAS just madness and evil bloodlust. Many writers see a method behind Stalin's use of Terror, as a way to get what he wanted:
- to force in his schemes
- to make people work harder
- to destroy any opposition - political (eg Trotskyites, but also kulaks)
- to secure his own sole power

But, MOST OF ALL, I think that the key is to see Terror as totslly tied into the modernisation of Russia. The idea in Stalin's mind was that the success of the Revolution - to be achieved through his schemes (collectivisation and the 5-year Plans) - was SO important that nothing must be allowed to stop it. Anyone or anything who tried to stop what Stalin was doing, therefore, had to be eliminated. In a backward country, this involved not just active political opponents of Stalin, but traditionalists and people who simply dragged their feet because they didn;t like the new changes. It didn't matter - if they were undermining Stalin's policies/wishes, they were an enemy of the Revolution.

On January 7, 1933, Stalin delivered a speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The last section of the speech was titled “The Five-Year Plan in Four Years in the light of the Struggle Against the Remnants of the Hostile Classes.” He said that collectivization and the 5-year Plan had upset the “anti-Soviet elements” - private manufacturers, traders, kulaks, priests, tsarist officials, “chauvinist bourgeois intellectuals”, etc. But, he went on: "these "have-beens" have wormed their way into our plants and factories, into our government offices and trading organizations, into our railway and water transport enterprises, and, principally, into the collective farms and state farms. They have crept into these places and taken cover there, donning the mask of "workers" and "peasants," and some of them have even managed to worm their way into the Party."
What he was saying that everywhere - 'across the face of the Soviet Union' there were people trying to wreck the revolution. It was a classic 'conspiracy' theory to explain his failures.

But - if the wreckers were everywhere - how were they to be stopped? Stalin explained how in a speech in March 1937 to the central committee of the CPSU:
"A few words about wreckers, diversionists, spies, etc. It is now clear for all, I think, that the present-day wreckers and diversionists have turned into a gang of professional wreckers, diversionists, spies and murderers, devoid of principles and ideas. Of course, these gentlemen will have to be smashed and ruthlessly uprooted as enemies of the working class, as traitors to our country."

Can you see the logic?
That was the cause of the Terror.

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