Political repression in the Soviet Union: Difference between revisions

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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 [[ethnic cleansing|ethnically cleansed]] territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas, see [[Involuntary settlements 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 [[ethnic cleansing|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 [[Eastern Front (World War II)#Operation Barbarossa: Summer 1941|invading Axis forces]] at all costs and led the war with extreme brutality, including against his own soldiers.<ref name="Merridale, Ivan's War">Catherine Merridale, ''Ivan's War, the Red Army 1939-1945'', London: Faber and Faber, 2005, ISBN 0-5712-1808-3</ref><ref name="Not so friendly">[http://www.rmc.ca/academic/conference/iuscanada/papers/goette_sovietpaper.pdf ''Not-So-Friendly Fire''], Queen’s University, Canada</ref> 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.<ref>[http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/glantz2/glantz2.asp CSI Report No. 11]: Soviet Defensive Tactics at Kursk</ref> 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.<ref>David Glantz, Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941 (2001) ISBN 0-7524-1979-X </ref><ref>David Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (1998) ISBN 0-7006-0879-6</ref><ref>[http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/reviewsw63.htm Review of "Stumbling Colossus"] </ref><ref name="Merridale, Ivan's War">Catherine Merridale, ''Ivan's War, the Red Army 1939-1945'', London: Faber and Faber, 2005, ISBN 0-5712-1808-3</ref> 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:
[[Order № 270|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.<ref name="Not so friendly" /><ref>[http://www.hrono.ru/dokum/194_dok/19410816.html Order No 270 in Russian language on hrono.ru] </ref><ref name="Merridale, Ivan's War" />


==Post-Stalin era (1953-1991)==
==Post-Stalin era (1953-1991)==

Revision as of 10:08, 4 November 2008

See also: Category:Victims of Soviet repressions

Throughout different periods of the Soviet history millions of people fell victims of political repressions. Early on the theoretical basis of the repressions was the Marxist view at 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.

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

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

Loss of life

The exact number of victims may never be known and remains a matter of debate 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 [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Democide and ethnic cleansing

Entire nations and ethnic groups 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 (see sybirak) and Kazakhstan. Population transfer in the Soviet Union led to millions of deaths due to the inflicted hardships.[10]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 by confiscating all food and blocking the migration of starving population by the government of the Soviet Union. [10]. The overall number of the 1932-1933 famine victims Soviet-wide is estimated as 6-7 million[11] or 6-8 million.[12]

Red Terror

Main article: Red Terror

Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. The Red Terror was officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended in about October 1918. However Sergei Melgunov applies this term to repressions for the whole period of the Russian Civil War, 1918-1922.[13][7]


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.[14] As peasantry, with exception of the poorest part, resisted the collectivization policy, the Soviet government resorted to the harsh measures to force the farmers to collectivize. In his conversation with Winston Churchill Stalin gave his estimate of the number of "kulaks" who were repressed for resisting collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported.[15][16]

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.[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.[17] 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.


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[19]. A number of notable dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Andrei Sakharov, were sent to internal or external exile.

See also

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. ^ Ponton, G. (1994) The Soviet Era.
  5. ^ Tsaplin, V.V. (1989) Statistika zherty naseleniya v 30e gody.
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ a b Bibliography: Courtois et al. The Black Book of Communism
  8. ^ Davies, Norman. Europe: A History, Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN 0-06-097468-0.
  9. ^ Bibliography: Rummel.
  10. ^ a b Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505180-7.
  11. ^ С. Уиткрофт (Stephen G. Wheatcroft), "О демографических свидетельствах трагедии советской деревни в 1931—1933 гг." (On demographic evidence of the tragedy of the Soviet village in 1931-1833), "Трагедия советской деревни: Коллективизация и раскулачивание 1927-1939 гг.: Документы и материалы. Том 3. Конец 1930-1933 гг.", Российская политическая энциклопедия, 2001, ISBN 5-8243-0225-1, с. 885, Приложение № 2
  12. ^ "Ukraine", Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008.
  13. ^ Serge Petrovich Melgunov, Red Terror in Russia, Hyperion Pr (1975), ISBN 0-883-55187-X
  14. ^ Davies, R.W., The Soviet Collective Farms, 1929-1930, Macmillan, London (1980), p. 1.
  15. ^ Valentin Berezhkov, "Kak ya stal perevodchikom Stalina", Moscow, DEM, 1993, ISBN 5-85207-044-0. p. 317
  16. ^ Stanislav Kulchytsky, "How many of us perished in Holodomor in 1933", Zerkalo Nedeli, November 23-29, 2002.
  17. ^ a b Orlando Figes The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, 2007, ISBN 0-08050-7461-9, pages 227-315.
  18. ^ Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. By Robert Gellately. 2007. Knopf. 720 pages ISBN 1400040051
  19. ^ The Soviet Case: Prelude to a Global Consensus on Psychiatry and Human Rights. Human Rights Watch. 2005
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