I know of no other country where a man can breathe so freely.
The song, Wide is my motherland, was written and composed in 1936.
The lyrics are ironic if you consider that it was written in a time where the population
of gulags, concentration camps, reached upwards of one million, where there was widespread
anxiety and fear and members of the Communist party, civil servants, workers, soldiers and
intellectuals were at risk of being arrested by the secret police, the NKVD under Yagoda,
in order to be sent to a gulag… or worse.
Over a million people died during the Great Purge instigated by Stalin.
Prominent old Soviet officials, generals and officers in the army and intellectuals were
tortured until they confessed to crimes they, often, had not committed.
And as a spoiler: almost everyone I have talked about in previous videos and this video was
shot.
Former ally of Stalin?
Shot.
Former ally of Stalin aiding him in opposing other allies?
Shot.
The judges presiding over the show trials?
Shot.
The man responsible for shooting the former allies and judges?
Shot.
The man responsible for shooting the man that was responsible for shooting the former allies
and judges?
Shot.
Yes, it was brutal.
-intro-
“I demand the mad dogs be shot… all of them!”
Vyshinsky, the state prosecutor of the Moscow Trial in 1936, told the three judges of the
Supreme Court of the Soviet Union that the sixteen accused in front of him ought to be
sentenced to death.
All of them confessed to terrorist activities and conspiracy to eliminate the Soviet leaders.
The judges agreed with Vyshinsky’s request: all sixteen were sentenced to death.
The Russian people were stunned when they heard what these traitors were guilty of.
The world…. was surprised.
Among these accused men were prominent communists such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, two Bolshevists
leaders from 1917.
After nearly twenty years it seemed that the revolution started to devour its own children.
We remember Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev from part 1 and 2, first allying themselves
with Stalin in order to oust Trotsky.
In turn, Stalin turned on them and allied himself with Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov, whom
he would later turn against as well.
This show trial would be followed by two more, one in 1937 and one in 1938 - however these
show trials merely indicated the top of the iceberg.
Between 1936 and 1938 most of the old-Bolshevist leaders disappeared in a storm of terror,
the ranks of the party were decimated and the industry, arts, education, army and even
the secret police, that carried out the orders, were not safe.
Kirov’s Murder
Between 1933 and 1934 the party, numbering three and a half million members, was purged
of a million members.
Stalin must have been wondering whether the dissatisfied and moderates were secretly making
plans to replace him with the young, very popular, Sergei Kirov, currently fourth in
the Soviet hierarchy.
Stalin had been planning a great purge for some time, assigning key positions to loyal
followers and confidants.
On the first of December 1934, Kirov was shot on a street in Leningrad by Leonid Nikolayev.
There is a near historical consensus that Stalin knew about, if not orchestrated the
assassination.
The assassination of Kirov was the excuse Stalin needed… to initiate the Great Purge.
Nikolayev and thirteen supposed accomplices stood trial.
The trial did not take long, and all of them were executed shortly after.
103 other men taken into custody that, as far as could be traced did not have anything
to do with Kirov’s murder, were put against a wall and shot as well.
This… was just the beginning
The Purges Commence
January 1935, shortly after Kirov’s murder, Zinoviev and Kamenev, together with seventeen
others were publicly accused of murder.
They were acquitted but forced to confess their moral and political responsibility.
In secret, they were sentenced again and sentenced to long prison sentences.
The murderers of Kirov were found… and operating resistance cells were exposed throughout the
entire Soviet Union.
Stalin turned on those that he deemed too soft or distracting him from hunting dissenting
party members.
Avel Yenukidze, member of the Central Committee and prominent Soviet politician, was labelled
a political degenerate for being too soft.
He was arrested and shot in October 1937.
Maxim Gorky, founder of the art style “socialist realism” and a great Soviet writer, in his
attempts to reconcile Stalin with Zinovjev, died under suspicious circumstances a few
months later.
In January 1936 all members of the party had to renew their membership party cards to root
out passive members.
But then Trotsky published another article, in which he stated his most loyal supporters
were inside the Soviet Union.
In July a secret party directive briefed members about “Terrorist activities of the Trotsky
- Zinovjev counterrevolutionary block” and called for extreme vigilance.
Three weeks later, Zinoviev and Kamenev appeared before their judges.
They were accused of plotting to murder Stalin, acting on Trotsky’s orders.
Kamenev confessed he had spent ten years fighting against the party, the government and against
Stalin personally.
The fact that both men would be executed, was clear from the beginning of the trial.
During the trial, the court alluded to bringing accusations against Radek, the gifted editor
in chief of the Izvestia, a Soviet newspaper, Bukharin, Tomsky and others.
Tomsky, leader of the labour unions and ally of Bucharin, chose suicide rather than interrogation
by the NKVD.
This act was seen as evidence of his guilt.
Others, such as Bucharin, were arrested but released due to lack of evidence.
Jagoda and his secret police seemed to not be able to get all these supposed conspirators
eliminated.
Stalin and Zhdanov were on holiday to the coast of the Black Sea when Stalin sent a
telegram to Moscow.
“We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be appointed to
head the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs.
Yagoda has obviously proved unequal to the task of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinovievite
bloc."
The next day Yagoda was demoted and Yezhov, Stalin’s man, arrived with 200 men.
Many of the former interrogators were arrested, the purging machine started grinding faster
and more vigorously.
The radicalisation of the Purges
January 1937, the second large show trial commenced.
A few months beforehand, Radek and the industrial leader Pyatakov openly denounced the followers
of Trotsky as vipers and vultures, now they were standing trial, accused of membership
of these Trotsky-ites, along with fifteen other “We demand the vermin and all their
followers be mercilessly exterminated ”, is an excerpt of what Vyshinsky, the
prosecutor, said during the trial.
The accused would have met with Trotsky-agents at the Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen.
The fact that this Hotel burned down before world war one, was of no importance.
Radek and three others were sentenced to long prison terms, Pyatakov and the others were
shot.
Ordzhonikidze, who attempted to save Pyatakov, was driven to suicide.
Especially the death of Ordzhonikidze was a shock, as he was one of the more likeable
Soviet officials.
Schlögers book Moscow 1937 dedicates multiple pages to diary excerpts from politicians and
people in the Soviet Union, reacting to the news of his death.
In March, during a plenary meeting of the Central Committee, Stalin made it clear he
wanted more purges.
Bukharin and Rykov, being arrested earlier, were expelled from the party.
Jagoda, once head of the secret police, now was “exposed” as a tsarist spy, a thief
and a swindler” and subsequently arrested.
The party, the government and the secret police would not be the only victims of this purge,
however.
Stalin explicitly stated that the military staff ought to be purged.
During the second show trial Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the most skilled commanders
of the Red Army was already mentioned.
The case against the army was thoroughly prepared.
“Betrayal” in the army
An army is a dangerous victim of a purge, but the methods that this purge was conducted
were marked by precision and psychological attack.
Many high-ranking officers were suddenly transferred in January 1937, isolating them from their
troops.
In June, a giant conspiracy within the Red Army was revealed and Tukhachevsky, along
with eight other generals, were tried and executed.
The judges sentencing them were terrified, five out of eight of them would be executed
eventually.
Tukhachevsky’s entire family was either executed or sent to Gulags.
In the book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, written by Simon Montefiore, it is mentioned
how Tukhachevsky’s confession is sprayed with brown liquid, which turned out to be
dried blood.
The case against the eight generals was based on falsified documents, provided by the German
Sicherheitsdienst under Reinhard Heydrich, who thought they were fooling Stalin.
Among the falsified intel were documents with signatures of Tukhachevsky, von Seeckt and
Trotsky.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the archives show that Stalin conceived this plot in order
to get rid of the generals in a credible manner.
Believing war was imminent, due to the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany, Stalin wanted absolute
control of the army.
The NKVD would show up unannounced at military bases, filled their van with officers and
drove off.
Entire battalions disappeared.
Within two years three out of five Marshals, 14 out of 15 army commanders, 167 out of 280
army corps and division commanders, all 16 army commissars and 25 out of 28 army corps
commissars were eliminated.
Merely one admiral out of nine survived the purges.
Books written in the 60s and 70s claim that nearly one-third of the entire officer apparatus
was purged, however, they underestimated the size of the Red Army, in reality, the percentage
was far less due to the amount of lower ranking soldiers.
The normal man
Not all victims were conspirators against the regime.
Khrushchev would later declare that many “honest communists” were among them, even the ones
placed in high positions by Stalin himself, actively fighting the Trotskyists.
The loyal Genrich Eiche was stunned when he was arrested by “a government that he had
always fought for”, he would be exiled.
Pavel Postyshev, a Stalinist, fanatical anti-Trotskyist and one of the principal architects of the
Ukraine famine of 1932-1933, the Holodomor, questioned the necessity of the execution
of so many.
This would lead to him being arrested, accused of being a Trotskyist, and executed.
Even the conformist Rudzutaks, who never opposed the Party’s line in the slightest and is
recorded as exclaiming that even considering if Stalin was subject to re-election was betrayal
of the party, was tried and executed.
Not a single part of the country was skipped.
Ukraine had three party leaders eliminated between 1933 and 1938.
Nearly half of the local party secretaries met the same fate... just in 1938 (!). Thirteen
of the Ukrainian Politburo members that were elected in April 1937, were all dead in June
1938.
In Georgia, 87 percent of the local party secretaries were replaced between 1937 and
1939, not counting thousands of civil servants, a prime minister and his deputy, professors
of the local university and prominent members when it came to the arts.
Central-Asia, Belarus, Karelia and many others places of Russia saw the same thoroughness
of the purges.
Communist leaders that sought their refuge in the Soviet Union were not spared.
Bela Kun from Hungary, Remele and Neumann from Germany and several leading Polish communists
were purged.
The NKVD even reached Spain, where generals, journalists and diplomats became victims during
the Spanish civil war from 1936 to 1939; even Antonov Ovseyenko who was in charge of the
purge of the Revolutionary Socialist Party in Catalonia and stormed the Winter Palace
during the October revolution in 1917, was himself arrested and executed.
Similar operations were executed in other branches of the Soviet body - the reason:
attempting to eliminate a generation of officials that remembered Trotsky as a revolutionary
hero, to eliminate men that grew up within the European tradition and the men that used
their brain - in order to end all criticism and to remove everyone that stood in the way
of absolute obedience to Stalin.
(Gallery of prominent purge victims over next bit of text)
Class vigilance increased and a large number of “enemies of the people” were exposed.
People jumped to the opportunity to get rid of superiors in order to advance their own
career and to get back at old enemies.
Once the class-instinct had spoken, no evidence was required.
Khrushchev would later state that once Stalin said someone was guilty, one had to assume
he was guilty and an enemy of the people.
Once people appeared on these lists, all hope was lost.
The use of psychological and physical interrogation methods was encouraged as a “justified and
fitting method to interrogate the notorious and stubborn enemies of the people”.
The secret police managed to break even the strongest of men, forcing people to incriminate
innocent others, family, colleagues and friends.
The population of prison camps exceeded ten million and anyone was suspect.
Solzhenitsyn has described the prison camps in harrowing detail in the Gulag Archipelago,
bringing to light the crimes against humanity that were being committed in the Soviet Union.
The Final Show Trial
March 1938.
The last show trial commenced.
Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda and eighteen others listened in silence to Vyshinsky and his accusations.
Vyshinsky was a former Menshevist himself and narrowly escaped a purge during the ‘20s.
The twenty-one men on trial were “fascist provocateurs”.
One of the accused, Krestinsky, former secretary of the Communist Party, refused to admit guilt
during the trial.
The next day, after a night in prison with Yeshov’s men, he retracted his statement
and confessed.
The accusations went back all the way to 1917.
Bukharin was accused of planning to murder Lenin, Yagoda would have wanted to poison
Gorky and occupy the Kremlin.
Chernov, the former commissar of agriculture, was accused of ‘mistakes’ during collectivisation.
He admitted to aiming for a high mortality rate among cattle.
All men, except for three, were sentenced to death and executed.
The three others were sentenced to hard labour in the Gulag, where all of them were murdered,
most likely by NKVD officers.
At the 17th party congress in 1934, one-hundred-and-thirty-nine members of the Central Committee were elected.
The following party congress in 1939 saw only forty-one of them alive.
Half of the members of the 1932 Politburo were dead, of the original fifteen members
of the Bolshevik government four died of natural causes and nine were executed - Trotsky would
be assassinated in Mexico in 1940; Stalin was the only one left.
In 1938, Lavrentiy Beria became Yezhovs deputy, replacing him in 1939.
Yezhov recognized the precursors to an imminent arrest.
His wife committed suicide, one of his protegés, Alexandr Uspensky was arrested and executed.
Yezhov drowned himself in alcoholism and rarely showed up at work.
Yezhov would be arrested in early 1939 and executed a year later, after a secret trial
in a prison and not after dragging many people down in his fall.
Ironically, Yezhov designed the prison himself, with the floor slightly sloping downward in
order for the blood to be easily washed off.
Stalin showed no remorse at the 18th party congress, stating that the purges were inevitable
and the results were mainly positive.
The purges cost over a million people their lives, but they shaped a social and administrative
revolution - no one dared oppose Stalin.
Recap
A quick recap will be given in the title screen at the end of the video and in the description.
A lot of information was given in this video but there is a lot more information to be
given surrounding this topic.
I attempted to cover the most striking and notable events in chronological order.
I have made two videos previous to this one, about the power struggle within the Communist
party between Trotsky and Stalin and the years leading up to the Great Purge.
You can watch those on my channel.
If you have any questions surrounding this topic feel free to leave a comment.
Thank you very much for watching this video.
Until next Friday!