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Stalinist repressions: what was it? Stalinist repressions Stalinist repressions of the 30s

The issue of repressions in the 1930s is of fundamental importance not only for understanding the history of Russian socialism and its essence as a social system, but also for assessing the role of Stalin in the history of Russia. This issue plays a key role in accusations not only of Stalinism, but, in fact, of the entire Soviet regime.

Today, the assessment of "Stalinist terror" has become a touchstone in our country, a milestone in relation to the past and future of Russia. Do you condemn? Decisively and irrevocably? - Democrat and common man! Do you have doubts? - Stalinist!

Let's try to deal with a simple question: did Stalin organize the "Great Terror"? Maybe there are other reasons for terror, about which common people - liberals prefer to remain silent?

So. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to create an ideological elite of a new type, but these attempts stalled from the very beginning. Mainly because the new "people's" elite believed that with its revolutionary struggle it fully deserved the right to enjoy the benefits that the anti-people "elite" had just by birthright. A new nomenclature quickly settled in the noble mansions, and even the old servant remained in place, they only began to call her a servant. This phenomenon was very broad and received the name "kombarstvo".

Even the right measures proved to be ineffective, thanks to the massive sabotage of the new elite. I am inclined to attribute the introduction of the so-called "party maximum" to the correct measures - the prohibition of party members to receive a salary greater than the salary of a highly qualified worker.

That is, a non-partisan director of a plant could receive a salary of 2,000 rubles, and a communist director only 500 rubles, and not a penny more. Thus, Lenin sought to avoid an influx of careerists into the party, who use it as a springboard in order to quickly break through to the grain positions. However, this measure was half-hearted without the simultaneous destruction of the system of privileges attached to any position.

By the way, V.I. Lenin in every possible way resisted the reckless increase in the number of party members, which was then taken up in the CPSU, starting with Khrushchev. In his work "Childhood Illness of Leftism in Communism" he wrote: "We are afraid of the excessive expansion of the party, because careerists and crooks inevitably strive to attach themselves to the government party, who deserve only to be shot."

Moreover, in the conditions of the post-war shortage of consumer goods, material goods were not so much bought as distributed. Any power performs the function of distribution, and if so, then the one who distributes, he uses the distributed. Especially the self-employed careerists and crooks. Therefore, the next step was to renew the upper floors of the party.

Stalin stated this in his usual cautious manner at the 17th Congress of the CPSU (b) (March 1934). In his Reporting Report, the Secretary General described a certain type of workers hindering the party and the country: “... These are people with renowned merits in the past, people who believe that party and Soviet laws were written not for them, but for fools. These are the very people who do not consider it their duty to comply with the decisions of party bodies ... What do they count on, violating party and Soviet laws? They hope that the Soviet government will not dare to touch them because of their old merits. These arrogant nobles think that they are irreplaceable and that they can violate the decisions of the governing bodies with impunity ... ”.

The results of the first five-year plan showed that the old Bolshevik-Leninists, with all their revolutionary achievements, are unable to cope with the scale of the reconstructed economy. Not burdened with professional skills, poorly educated (Yezhov wrote in his autobiography: education is incomplete primary), washed away with the blood of the Civil War, they could not “straddle” the complex industrial realities.

Formally, the real power at the local level belonged to the Soviets, since the party legally did not have any power. But the party bosses were elected chairmen of the Soviets, and, in fact, appointed themselves to these positions, since the elections were held on a non-alternative basis, that is, they were not elections. And then Stalin undertakes a very risky maneuver - he proposes to establish real and not nominal Soviet power in the country, that is, to hold secret general elections in party organizations and councils of all levels on an alternative basis. Stalin tried to get rid of the party regional barons, as they say, in an amicable way, through elections, and really alternative ones.

Considering the Soviet practice, this sounds rather unusual, nevertheless, it is so. He hoped that the majority of this public, without support from above, would not overcome the popular filter. In addition, according to the new constitution, it was planned to nominate candidates to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR not only from the CPSU (b), but also from public organizations and groups of citizens.

What happened next? On December 5, 1936, the new Constitution of the USSR was adopted, the most democratic constitution of that time in the whole world, even according to the admission of ardent critics of the USSR. For the first time in the history of Russia, secret alternative elections were to be held. By secret ballot. Despite the fact that the party elite tried to put a spoke in the wheel even in the period when the draft constitution was being drawn up, Stalin managed to see it through to the end.

The regional party elite understood perfectly well that with the help of these new elections to the new Supreme Soviet, Stalin plans to carry out a peaceful rotation of the entire ruling element. And there were about 250 thousand of them. By the way, the NKVD was counting on about the same number of investigations.

They understood, but what to do? I don't want to part with my chairs. And they perfectly understood one more circumstance - in the previous period they had done such a thing, especially during the Civil War and collectivization, that the people would not only not choose them with great pleasure, but would also break their head off. Many high regional party secretaries had their hands covered in blood. During the period of collectivization, there was complete arbitrariness in the regions. In one of the regions, Khatayevich, this nice man, actually declared a civil war in the course of collectivization in his particular region. As a result, Stalin was forced to threaten him that he would shoot him outright if he did not stop mocking people. Do you think that comrades Eikhe, Postyshev, Kosior and Khrushchev were better, were less "nice"? Of course, the people remembered all this in 1937, and after the elections, these bloodsuckers would have gone to the forest.

Stalin did indeed plan such a peaceful rotation operation, he openly told the American correspondent Howard Roy about this in March 1936. He said that these elections would be a good whip in the hands of the people for the change of leading cadres, and he just said so - “a whip”. Will yesterday's "gods" of their counties tolerate the whip?

The Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), held in June 1936, directly aimed the party leadership at new times. When discussing the draft of the new constitution, A. Zhdanov expressed himself completely unequivocally in his extensive report: “The new electoral system ... will give a powerful impetus to the improvement of the work of Soviet bodies, the elimination of bureaucratic bodies, the elimination of bureaucratic shortcomings and distortions in the work of our Soviet organizations. And these disadvantages, as you know, are very significant. Our party bodies must be ready for the electoral struggle ... ". And further he said that these elections would be a serious, serious test of Soviet workers, because secret ballot gives ample opportunities to avert candidates unwanted and objectionable to the masses, that party bodies are obliged to distinguish such criticism from hostile activity, that non-party candidates should be treated with all support. and attention, because, delicately speaking, there are several times more of them than party members.

Zhdanov's report publicly voiced the terms "internal party democracy", "democratic centralism", "democratic elections." And demands were made: to prohibit "nominating" candidates without elections, to prohibit voting with a "list" at party meetings, to provide "an unlimited right to reject nominated candidates by party members and an unlimited right to criticize these candidates." The last phrase was entirely related to the elections of purely party bodies, where for a long time there was not a shadow of democracy. But, as we can see, general elections to Soviet and party bodies have not been forgotten either.

Stalin and his people demand democracy! And if this is not democracy, then explain to me what, then, is considered a democracy ?!

And how do the party nobles who gathered at the plenum - the first secretaries of regional committees, regional committees, and the Central Committee of national communist parties - react to Zhdanov's report? And they ignore it all! Because such innovations are by no means to the taste of the very old Leninist guard, which has not yet been destroyed by Stalin, but is sitting at the plenum in all its grandeur and splendor.

Because the vaunted "Leninist Guard" is a bunch of small satraps. They are accustomed to living in their estates as barons, single-handedly to dispose of the life and death of people.

The debate on Zhdanov's report was practically disrupted.

Despite Stalin's direct calls for a serious and detailed discussion of the reforms, the old guard with paranoid persistence turns to more pleasant and understandable topics: terror, terror, terror! What the hell are reforms ?! There are more pressing tasks: beat the hidden enemy, burn it, catch it, reveal it! People's Commissars, first secretaries - all talk about the same thing: how recklessly and on a large scale they reveal the enemies of the people, how they intend to raise this campaign to cosmic heights ...

Stalin is losing patience. When another speaker appears on the podium, without waiting for him to open his mouth, he ironically throws: - Have you identified all the enemies or still remain? The orator, first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional committee, Kabakov, (another future “innocent victim of the Stalinist terror”) ignores irony and habitually rattles about the fact that the electoral activity of the masses, so that you know, is “quite often used by hostile elements for counter-revolutionary work ".

They are incurable !!! They just can't do otherwise! They don't need reforms, secret ballot, or multiple candidates on the ballot. Foaming at the mouth, they defend the old system, where there is no democracy, but only the "boyar will" ...
Molotov is on the podium. He says sensible, sensible things: it is necessary to identify the real enemies and pests, and not to throw mud at all, without exception, "captains of production." It is necessary to learn, finally, to distinguish the guilty from the innocent. It is necessary to reform the bloated bureaucratic apparatus, IT IS NECESSARY TO EVALUATE PEOPLE ON THEIR BUSINESS QUALITIES AND NOT TO PLACE PAST MISTAKES IN THE LINE. And the party boyars are all about the same thing: to look for and catch enemies with all their ardor! Root out deeper, plant more! For a change, they enthusiastically and loudly begin to drown each other: Kudryavtsev - Postysheva, Andreev - Sheboldaeva, Polonsky - Shvernik, Khrushchev - Yakovleva.

Molotov, unable to bear it, says in plain text:

In a number of cases, listening to the speakers, it was possible to come to the conclusion that our resolutions and our reports passed the speakers' ears ...

The bull's eye! They didn't just pass - they whistled ... Most of those gathered in the hall do not know how to work or reform. But they perfectly know how to catch and identify enemies, they adore this occupation and cannot imagine life without it.

It does not seem strange to you that this "executioner" Stalin, downright imposed democracy, and his future "innocent victims" from this democracy were running like the devil from incense. Moreover, they demanded repression, and more.

In short, it was not the “tyrant Stalin,” but the “cosmopolitan Leninist party guard,” who ruled the show at the June 1936 plenum, who buried all attempts at a democratic thaw. She did not give Stalin the opportunity to get rid of them, as they say, GOODLY, through elections.

However, the party nomenclature reared up and carried out a massive attack on the leader in order to persuade him to postpone free elections until the end of the struggle against the counter-revolutionary element.

Regional party bosses, members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), began to whip up passions, referring to the recently disclosed conspiracies of the Trotskyists and the military: they say, you just have to give such an opportunity as former white officers and nobles, hidden kulak imperfections, clergymen and Trotskyist saboteurs rush into politics ...

They demanded not only to curtail any plans for democratization, but also to strengthen emergency measures, and even to introduce special quotas for massive repression in the regions - they say, in order to finish off those Trotskyists who escaped punishment. The party nomenklatura demanded powers to repress these enemies, and it knocked out these powers for itself. And right there, the small-town party barons, who made up the majority in the Central Committee, frightened for their leadership positions, begin repressions, first of all, against those honest communists who could become competitors in future elections by secret ballot.

The nature of the repressions against honest communists was such that the composition of some district and regional committees changed two or three times in a year. Communists at party conferences refused to be members of city committees and regional committees. They understood that after a while you could end up in the camp. And this is at best ...

In 1937, about 100 thousand people were expelled from the party (in the first half of the year 24 thousand and in the second - 76 thousand). The district and regional committees accumulated about 65 thousand appeals, which there was no one and had no time to consider, since the party was engaged in the process of exposure and expulsion.

At the January 1938 plenum of the Central Committee, Malenkov, who made a report on this issue, said that in some areas the Party Control Commission had reinstated from 50 to 75% of those expelled and convicted.

Moreover, at the June 1937 Plenum of the Central Committee, the nomenklatura, mainly from among the first secretaries, actually gave Stalin an ultimatum to Stalin and his Politburo: either he approves the lists of those subject to repression submitted "from below", or he himself will be removed.

The party nomenklatura at this plenum demanded powers for repression. And Stalin was forced to give them permission, but he acted very cunningly - he gave them a short time, five days. Of these five days, one day is Sunday. He hoped that they would not meet in such a short time.

But it turns out that these scoundrels already had lists. They simply took the lists of formerly imprisoned, and sometimes not imprisoned, kulaks, former white officers and nobles, Trotskyists-saboteurs, priests and just ordinary citizens classified as alien class elements. Literally on the second day telegrams were sent from the field: the first were Comrades Khrushchev and Eikhe.

Then Nikita Khrushchev was the first to rehabilitate his friend Robert Eikhe, who was shot justly for all his cruelties in 1939, in 1954.

There was no longer any talk of ballots with several candidates at the Plenum: the plans for reform boiled down solely to the fact that candidates for the elections would be nominated "jointly" by communists and non-party people. And from now on there will be one single candidate in each ballot paper - for the sake of repelling intrigues. And in addition - another wordy verbiage about the need to identify the masses of entrenched enemies.

Stalin had one more mistake. He honestly believed that N.I. Yezhov is a man of his team. After all, for so many years they worked together in the Central Committee, shoulder to shoulder. And Yezhov has long been the best friend of Evdokimov, an ardent Trotskyist. For 1937 -38. troikas in the Rostov region, where Evdokimov was the first secretary of the regional committee, 12 445 people were shot, more than 90 thousand were repressed. These are the numbers that the Memorial Society carved in one of the Rostov parks on the monument to the victims of ... Stalin's (?!) repressions. Subsequently, when Evdokimov was shot, the check found that in the Rostov region lay motionless and had not considered more than 18.5 thousand appeals. And how many were not written! The best party cadres, experienced business executives, and the intelligentsia were being destroyed ... Was he the only one like that?

Interesting in this regard are the memoirs of the famous poet Nikolai Zabolotsky: “A strange belief was ripening in my head that we were in the hands of the Nazis, who had found a way to destroy Soviet people under our noses, acting in the very center of the Soviet punitive system. I told this guess of mine to an old party member who was sitting with me, and with horror in his eyes he confessed to me that he himself thought the same, but did not dare to hint at anyone about it. And indeed, how else could we explain all the horrors that happened to us ... ".

But back to Nikolai Yezhov. By 1937, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G. Yagoda staffed the NKVD with scum, obvious traitors and those who replaced their work with hack. N. Yezhov, who replaced him, followed the hacks on the occasion and when cleaning the country from the "fifth column" in order to distinguish himself, he closed his eyes to the fact that the NKVD investigators brought hundreds of thousands of hack cases against people, most of them completely innocent. (For example, generals A. Gorbatov and K. Rokossovsky were imprisoned.)

And the flywheel of the “great terror” with its notorious extrajudicial triplets and limits on the highest measure began to spin. Fortunately, this flywheel quickly grinded those who initiated the process itself, and Stalin's merit is that he made the most of the opportunities to clean up all kinds of crap from the highest echelons of power.

Not Stalin, but Robert Indrikovich Eikhe proposed the creation of extrajudicial execution bodies, the famous "troikas" of the "Stolypin" type, consisting of the first secretary, the local prosecutor and the head of the NKVD (city, region, region, republic). Stalin was against it. But the Politburo gave a voice. Well, and in the fact that a year later it was just such a troika that leaned Comrade Eikhe against the wall, in my deep conviction, there is nothing but sad justice.

The party elite enthusiastically joined the massacre!

Let's take a closer look at him himself, at the repressed regional party baron. And, in fact, what were they like, both in business and in moral, and in a purely human sense? What were they worth as people and specialists? ONLY PUSH YOUR NOSE FIRST, I MENTALLY RECOMMEND. In short, party members, military men, scientists, writers, composers, musicians and everyone else, up to the noble rabbit breeders and Komsomol members, eagerly devoured each other. Those who sincerely believed that they were obliged to exterminate their enemies, who settled scores. So there is no need to chat about whether the NKVD beat on the noble face of this or that "innocently injured figure" or not.

The regional party nomenclature achieved the most important thing: after all, in the conditions of mass terror free elections are impossible. Stalin was never able to carry them out. The end of a short thaw. Stalin never pushed through his reform bloc. True, at that plenum, he said remarkable words: “Party organizations will be freed from economic work, although this will not happen immediately. This takes time. "

But, again, back to Yezhov. Nikolai Ivanovich was a new man in the "organs", he started well, but quickly fell under the influence of his deputy: Frinovsky (former head of the Special Department of the First Cavalry Army). He taught the new People's Commissar the basics of Chekist work right "in production". The basics were extremely simple: the more enemies of the people we catch, the better. You can and should beat, but beat and drink is even more fun.

Drunk with vodka, blood and impunity, the People's Commissar soon openly "swam".

He did not particularly hide his new views from those around him. “What are you afraid of? - he said at one of the banquets. - After all, all power is in our hands. Whom we want - we execute, whom we want - we have mercy: - After all, we are everything. It is necessary that everyone, starting with the secretary of the regional committee, walk under you. "

If the secretary of the regional committee was supposed to walk under the head of the regional department of the NKVD, then who, one wonders, was supposed to walk under Yezhov? With such cadres and such views, the NKVD became mortally dangerous both for the authorities and for the country.

It is difficult to say when the Kremlin became aware of what was happening. Probably sometime in the first half of 1938. But to realize - realized, but how to curb the monster? It is clear that the People's Commissariat of the NKVD had become mortally dangerous by that time, and it had to be "normalized". But how? What, to raise the troops, to bring all the Chekists into the courtyards of the administrations and put them in a line against the wall? There is no other way, for, having barely sensed the danger, they would simply sweep away the power.

After all, the same NKVD was in charge of the Kremlin's security, so the members of the Politburo would have died without even having time to understand anything. After that, a dozen “blood washed” would be put in their places, and the whole country would turn into one large West Siberian region with Robert Eikhe at its head. The peoples of the USSR would have perceived the arrival of Hitler's troops as happiness.

There was only one way out - to put his man in the NKVD. Moreover, a person of such a level of loyalty, courage and professionalism, so that he could, on the one hand, cope with the management of the NKVD, and on the other hand, stop the monster. Stalin hardly had a large selection of such people. Well, at least one was found. But what - Beria Lavrenty Pavlovich.

Elena Prudnikova is a journalist and writer who has devoted several books to researching the activities of L.P. Beria and I.V. Stalin, in one of the TV programs she said that Lenin, Stalin, Beria are three titans whom the Lord God in His great mercy sent to Russia, because, apparently, he still needed Russia. I hope that she is Russia and in our time He will soon need it.

In general, the term "Stalinist repressions" is speculative, because it was not Stalin who initiated them. The unanimous opinion of one section of the liberal perestroika and current ideologues that Stalin thus strengthened his power by physically eliminating opponents is easy to explain. These gimmicks simply judge others by themselves: they, having such an opportunity, will readily devour everyone in whom they see danger.

It is not for nothing that Alexander Sytin, a political scientist, Doctor of Historical Sciences, a prominent neoliberal, in one of the recent TV programs with V. Solovyov, argued that in Russia it is necessary to create a Dictatorship of TEN PERCENTAGE OF A LIBERAL MINORITY, which then will definitely lead the peoples of Russia into a bright capitalist tomorrow. He was modestly silent about the cost of this approach.

Another part of these gentlemen believes that allegedly Stalin, who wanted to finally become the Lord God on Soviet soil, decided to deal with everyone who doubted his genius in the slightest degree. And, above all, with those who worked together with Lenin October revolution... They say that this is why almost the entire "Leninist guard", and at the same time the top of the Red Army, who were accused of a conspiracy against Stalin that never existed, innocently went under the ax. However, upon closer examination of these events, many questions arise that cast doubt on this version. In principle, thinking historians have had doubts for a long time. And doubts were sown not by some Stalinist historians, but by those eyewitnesses who themselves disliked the "father of all Soviet peoples."

For example, in the West, at one time, the memoirs of the former Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Orlov (Leiba Feldbin), who fled our country at the end of the 30s, having taken a huge amount of state dollars, were published. Orlov, who knew well the "inner kitchen" of his native NKVD, directly wrote that a coup d'etat was being prepared in the Soviet Union. Among the conspirators, he said, were both representatives of the leadership of the NKVD and the Red Army in the person of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the commander of the Kiev military district Iona Yakir. Stalin became aware of the conspiracy, who took very harsh retaliatory actions ...

And in the 1980s, the archives of the main enemy of Joseph Vissarionovich, Leon Trotsky, were declassified in the United States. From these documents it became clear that Trotsky had an extensive underground network in the Soviet Union. Living abroad, Lev Davidovich demanded from his people decisive actions to destabilize the situation in the Soviet Union, up to the organization of mass terrorist actions.

In the 90s, already our archives opened access to the protocols of interrogations of the repressed leaders of the anti-Stalinist opposition. By the nature of these materials, by the abundance of facts and evidence presented in them, today's independent experts have made three important conclusions.

First, the overall picture of a broad conspiracy against Stalin looks very, very convincing. Such testimony could not have been somehow directed or faked to please the "father of nations." Especially in the part where it was about the military plans of the conspirators. Here is what the well-known publicist historian Sergei Kremlev said about this: “Take and read the testimony of Tukhachevsky, given to him after his arrest. The confessions themselves in the conspiracy are accompanied by a deep analysis of the military-political situation in the USSR in the mid-30s, with detailed calculations on the general situation in the country, with our mobilization, economic and other capabilities.

The question is whether such testimony could have been invented by an ordinary NKVD investigator who was in charge of the Marshal's case and who allegedly set out to falsify Tukhachevsky's testimony ?! No, these testimonies, and voluntarily, could only be given by a knowledgeable person no less than the level of the Deputy People's Commissar of Defense, which was Tukhachevsky. "

Secondly, the very manner of the conspirators' handwritten confessions, their handwriting spoke of what their people wrote themselves, in fact, voluntarily, without physical pressure from the investigators. This destroyed the myth that the testimony was rudely knocked out by the force of "Stalin's executioners", although this was the case.

Thirdly, Western Sovietologists and the émigré public, having no access to archival materials, had to actually suck out their judgments about the scale of the repressions from their fingers. At best, they were content with interviews with dissidents, who either themselves in the past went through imprisonment, or cited the stories of those who went through the Gulag.

The upper bar in assessing the number of "victims of communism" was set by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who announced 110 million victims in an interview with Spanish television in 1976. The ceiling of 110 million announced by Solzhenitsyn was systematically reduced to 12.5 million people of the Memorial society. However, following the results of 10 years of work, Memorial managed to collect data on only 2.6 million victims of repression, which is close to the figure announced by the Zemskovs almost 20 years ago - 4 million people.

After the opening of the archives, the West did not believe that the number of repressed was much less than the same R. Conquest or A. Solzhenitsyn indicated. In total, according to archival data, for the period from 1921 to 1953, 3,777,380 were convicted, of which 642,980 were sentenced to capital punishment. Subsequently, this figure was increased to 4,060,306 people at the expense of 282,926 who were shot according to paragraphs. 2 and 3 st. 59 (especially dangerous banditry) and art. 193 - 24 (military espionage). They included Basmachi, Bandera, Baltic "forest brothers" and other especially dangerous, bloody bandits, spies and saboteurs, washed in blood. There is more human blood on them than there is water in the Volga. And they are also considered "innocent victims of Stalinist repressions." And Stalin is accused of all this. (Let me remind you that until 1928, Stalin was not the autocratic leader of the USSR. But HE GOT FULL POWER OVER THE PARTY, ARMY AND NKVD ONLY FROM THE END OF 1938).

At first glance, these figures are scary. But only for the first time. Let's compare. On June 28, 1990, an interview with the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR appeared in central newspapers, where he said: “We are literally being swept by a wave of criminality. Over the past 30 years, 38 MILLION OF OUR RESIDENTS have been under trial, investigation, in prisons and colonies. This is a terrible figure! Every ninth ... ".

So. A crowd of Western journalists arrived in the USSR in 1990. The goal is to familiarize yourself with open archives. They examined the archives of the NKVD - they did not believe it. They demanded the archives of the People's Commissariat of Railways. We got acquainted - it turned out four million. They did not believe it. They demanded the archives of the People's Commissariat of Food. We got acquainted - it turned out 4 million repressed. We got acquainted with the clothing content of the camps. It turned out - 4 million repressed. Do you think that after this, articles with the correct figures of repression were sent in batches in the Western media. Nothing of the kind. There they still write and talk about tens of millions of victims of repression.

I would like to note that an analysis of the process called "mass repressions" shows that this phenomenon is extremely multi-layered. There are real cases there: about conspiracies and espionage, political trials over die-hard oppositionists, cases of crimes of presumptuous masters of regions and partisan officials who "floated" from power. But there are also many falsified cases: settling scores in the corridors of power, squabbling at work, communal squabbles, literary rivalries, scientific competition, persecution of clergy who supported the kulaks during collectivization, squabbles of artists, musicians and composers.

The issue of repressions in the thirties of the last century is of fundamental importance not only for understanding the history of Russian socialism and its essence as a social system, but also for assessing the role of Stalin in the history of Russia.

This issue plays a key role in accusations not only of Stalinism, but, in fact, of the entire Soviet regime. Today, the assessment of "Stalinist terror" has become a touchstone in our country, a milestone in relation to the past and future of Russia. Do you condemn? Decisively and irrevocably? - Democrat and common man! Do you have doubts? - Stalinist!

Let's try to deal with a simple question: did Stalin organize the "Great Terror"? Maybe there are other reasons for terror, about which common people - liberals prefer to remain silent?

A new nomenclature quickly settled in the noble mansions, and even the old servant remained in place, they only began to call her a servant. This phenomenon was very broad and received the name "kombarstvo".

That is, a non-partisan director of a plant could receive a salary of 2,000 rubles, and a communist director only 500 rubles, and not a penny more.

Thus, Lenin sought to avoid an influx of careerists into the party, who use it as a springboard in order to quickly break through to the grain places. However, this measure was half-hearted without the simultaneous destruction of the system of privileges attached to any position.

By the way. VI Lenin in every possible way resisted the reckless increase in the number of party members, which was then taken up in the CPSU, starting with Khrushchev. In his work "Childhood Illness of Leftism in Communism" he wrote: "We are afraid of the excessive expansion of the party, because careerists and crooks inevitably strive to attach themselves to the government party, who deserve only to be shot."

Therefore, the next step was to renew the upper floors of the party.

Stalin stated this in his usual cautious manner at the 17th Congress of the CPSU (b) (March 1934).

In his Reporting Report, the Secretary General described a certain type of workers hindering the party and the country: “... These are people with renowned merits in the past, people who believe that party and Soviet laws were written not for them, but for fools. These are the very people who do not consider it their duty to comply with the decisions of party bodies ...

What are they counting on by violating party and Soviet laws? They hope that the Soviet government will not dare to touch them because of their old merits. These arrogant nobles think that they are irreplaceable and that they can violate the decisions of the governing bodies with impunity ... ”.

And then Stalin undertakes a very risky maneuver - he proposes to establish real and not nominal Soviet power in the country, that is, to hold secret general elections in party organizations and councils of all levels on an alternative basis.

Stalin tried to get rid of the party regional barons, as they say, in an amicable way, through elections, and really alternative ones. Considering the Soviet practice, this sounds rather unusual, nevertheless, it is so. He hoped that the majority of this public, without support from above, would not overcome the popular filter.

In addition, according to the new constitution, it was planned to nominate candidates to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR not only from the CPSU (b), but also from public organizations and groups of citizens.

Despite the fact that the party elite tried to put a spoke in the wheel even in the period when the draft constitution was being drawn up, Stalin managed to see it through to the end.

The regional party elite understood perfectly well that with the help of these new elections to the new Supreme Council, Stalin plans to carry out a peaceful rotation of the entire ruling element. And there were about 250 thousand of them. By the way, the NKVD was counting on about the same number of investigations.

During the period of collectivization, there was complete arbitrariness in the regions. In one of the regions, Khatayevich, this nice man, actually declared a civil war in the course of collectivization in his particular region.

As a result, Stalin was forced to threaten him that he would shoot him outright if he did not stop mocking people. Do you think that comrades Eikhe, Postyshev, Kosior and Khrushchev were better, were less "nice"? Of course, the people remembered all this in 1937, and after the elections these bloodsuckers would have gone to the forest.

And these disadvantages, as you know, are very significant. Our party bodies must be ready for the electoral struggle ... ". And further he said that these elections would be a serious, serious test of Soviet workers, because secret ballot gives ample opportunities to avert candidates unwanted and objectionable to the masses, that party bodies are obliged to distinguish such criticism from hostile activity, that non-party candidates should be treated with all support. and attention, because, delicately speaking, there are several times more of them than party members.

The last phrase was entirely related to the elections of purely party bodies, where for a long time there was not a shadow of democracy. But, as we can see, general elections to Soviet and party bodies have not been forgotten either.

Stalin and his people demand democracy! And if this is not democracy, then explain to me what, then, is considered a democracy ?!

And how do the party nobles who gathered at the plenum, the first secretaries of regional committees, regional committees, and the Central Committee of national communist parties, react to Zhdanov's report? And they ignore it all! Because such innovations are by no means to the taste of the very old Leninist guard, which has not yet been destroyed by Stalin, but is sitting at the plenum in all its grandeur and splendor.

Because the vaunted "Leninist Guard" is a bunch of small satraps. They are accustomed to living in their estates as barons, single-handedly to dispose of the life and death of people. The debate on Zhdanov's report was practically disrupted.

There are more pressing tasks: beat the hidden enemy, burn it, catch it, reveal it! People's Commissars, first secretaries - all talk about the same thing: how recklessly and on a large scale they reveal the enemies of the people, how they intend to raise this campaign to cosmic heights ...

Molotov is on the podium. He says sensible, sensible things: it is necessary to identify the real enemies and pests, and not to throw mud at all, without exception, "captains of production." It is necessary to learn, finally, to distinguish the guilty from the innocent.

It is necessary to reform the bloated bureaucratic apparatus, IT IS NECESSARY TO EVALUATE PEOPLE ON THEIR BUSINESS QUALITIES AND NOT TO PLACE PAST MISTAKES IN THE LINE. And the party boyars are all about the same thing: to look for and catch enemies with all their ardor! Root out deeper, plant more! For a change, they enthusiastically and loudly begin to drown each other: Kudryavtsev - Postysheva, Andreev - Sheboldaeva, Polonsky - Shvernik, Khrushchev - Yakovleva.

Molotov, unable to bear it, says in plain text:

- In a number of cases, listening to the speakers, one could come to the conclusion that our resolutions and our reports passed the speakers' ears ...

Bull's eye! They didn't just pass - they whistled ... Most of those gathered in the hall do not know how to work or reform. But they perfectly know how to catch and identify enemies, they adore this occupation and cannot imagine life without it.

Stalin's authority was so great that the party barons did not dare to openly protest, and in 1936 the Constitution of the USSR was adopted, the so-called Stalinist Constitution, which provided for the transition to real Soviet democracy. However, the party nomenclature reared up and carried out a massive attack on the leader in order to persuade him to postpone free elections until the end of the struggle against the counter-revolutionary element.

Regional party bosses, members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), began to whip up passions, referring to the recently disclosed conspiracies of the Trotskyists and the military: they say, you just need to give such an opportunity as hidden kulak undead, clergy, former white officers and nobles, Trotskyists-saboteurs rush into politics ...

And right there, the small-town party barons, who made up the majority in the Central Committee, frightened for their leadership positions, begin repressions, first of all, against those honest communists who could become competitors in future elections by secret ballot.

But it turns out that these scoundrels already had lists. They simply took the lists of those who had served earlier, and sometimes not in prison, kulaks, former white officers and nobles, Trotskyists-saboteurs, priests and just ordinary citizens classified as alien class elements.

Literally on the second day telegrams were sent from the field - the first comrades Khrushchev and Eikhe. Then Nikita Khrushchev was the first to rehabilitate his friend Robert Eikhe, who in 1939 was justly shot for all his cruelties, in 1954.

And in addition - another wordy verbiage about the need to identify the masses of entrenched enemies.

Stalin had one more mistake. He sincerely believed that N.I. Ezhov was a man of his team. After all, for so many years they worked together in the Central Committee, shoulder to shoulder. And Yezhov has long been the best friend of Evdokimov, an ardent Trotskyist.

For 1937–38. troikas in the Rostov region, where Evdokimov was the first secretary of the regional committee, 12 445 people were shot, more than 90 thousand were repressed. These are the numbers that the Memorial Society carved in one of the Rostov parks on the monument to the victims of ... Stalin's (?!) Repressions.

Subsequently, when Evdokimov was shot, the check found that in the Rostov region lay motionless and had not considered more than 18.5 thousand appeals. And how many were not written! The best party cadres, experienced business executives, the intelligentsia were destroyed ... But what, he was the only one.

I told this guess of mine to an old party member who was sitting with me, and with horror in his eyes he confessed to me that he himself thought the same, but did not dare to hint at anyone about it. Indeed, how else could we explain all the horrors that happened to us ... "

But back to Nikolai Yezhov. By 1937, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G. Yagoda staffed the NKVD with scum, obvious traitors and those who replaced their work with hack. N. Yezhov, who replaced him, followed the hacks on the occasion and when clearing the country from the "fifth column" in order to distinguish himself, he closed his eyes to the fact that the NKVD investigators brought hundreds of thousands of hack cases against people, most of them completely innocent. (For example, generals A. Gorbatov and K. Rokossovsky were imprisoned.)

And the flywheel of the “great terror” with its notorious extrajudicial triplets and limits on the highest measure began to spin. Fortunately, this flywheel quickly grinded those who initiated the process itself, and Stalin's merit was that he made the most of the opportunities to cleanse the higher echelons of power from all kinds of bastards.

Not Stalin, but Robert Indrikovich Eikhe proposed the creation of extrajudicial reprisals bodies, the famous "troikas" of the Stolypin type, consisting of the first secretary, the local prosecutor and the head of the NKVD (city, region, region, republic). Stalin was against it. But the Politburo gave a voice.

Well, and in the fact that a year later it was just such a troika that leaned Comrade Eikhe against the wall, in my deep conviction, there is nothing but sad justice. The party elite enthusiastically joined the massacre!

In short, party members, military men, scientists, writers, composers, musicians and everyone else, up to the noble rabbit breeders and Komsomol members, enthusiastically devoured each other (four million denunciations were written in 1937-38). Those who sincerely believed that they were obliged to exterminate their enemies, who settled scores. So there is no need to chat about whether the NKVD beat on the noble face of this or that "innocently injured figure" or not.

The regional party nomenclature has achieved the most important thing: after all, in conditions of mass terror, free elections are not possible. Stalin was never able to carry them out. The end of a short thaw. Stalin never pushed through his reform bloc. True, at that plenum, he said remarkable words: “Party organizations will be freed from economic work, although this will not happen immediately. This takes time. "

But, again, back to N.I. Yezhov. Nikolai Ivanovich was a new man in the "organs", he started well, but quickly fell under the influence of his deputy: Frinovsky (former head of the Special Department of the First Cavalry Army). He taught the new People's Commissar the basics of Chekist work right "in production". The basics were extremely simple: the more enemies of the people we catch, the better. You can and should beat, but beat and drink is even more fun.

Drunk with vodka, blood and impunity, the People's Commissar soon openly "swam". He did not particularly hide his new views from those around him. “What are you afraid of? - he said at one of the banquets. - After all, all power is in our hands. Whom we want - we execute, whom we want - we have mercy: - After all, we are everything. It is necessary that everyone, starting with the secretary of the regional committee, walk under you. "

But how? What, to raise the troops, to bring all the Chekists into the courtyards of the administrations and put them in a line against the wall? There is no other way, for, having barely sensed the danger, they would simply sweep away the power.

The same NKVD was in charge of the Kremlin's security, so the members of the Politburo would have died without even having time to understand anything. After that, a dozen “blood washed” would be put in their places, and the whole country would turn into one large West Siberian region with Robert Eikhe at its head. THE ARRIVAL OF HITLER'S TROOPS WOULD BE ACCEPTED BY THE PEOPLES OF THE USSR AS HAPPINESS.

The first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, a former Chekist, a talented manager, in no way a party talker, a man of action. And how it appears! Four hours "tyrant" Stalin and Malenkov persuade Yezhov to take Lavrenty Pavlovich as First Deputy. Four o'clock!!!

Yezhov is being pressed slowly - Beria is slowly taking over the management of the People's Commissariat of State Security, slowly placing loyal people in key posts, the same young, energetic, smart, businesslike, not at all like the former snickering barons.

Elena Prudnikova is a journalist and writer who devoted several books to researching the activities of L.P. Beria, in one of the TV programs she said that Lenin, Stalin, Beria are three titans whom the Lord God in His great mercy sent Russia, because apparently He still needed Russia. I hope that she is Russia and in our time He will soon need it.

These gimmicks simply judge others by themselves: they, having such an opportunity, will readily devour everyone in whom they see danger. It is not for nothing that Alexander Sytin, a political scientist, Doctor of Historical Sciences, a prominent neoliberal, in one of the recent TV programs with V. Solovyov, argued that in Russia it is necessary to CREATE A DICTATORSHIP OF TEN PERCENTAGE OF A LIBERAL MINORITY, which then will definitely lead the peoples of Russia into a bright capitalist tomorrow.

They say that this is why almost the entire "Leninist guard", and at the same time the top of the Red Army, who were accused of a conspiracy against Stalin that never existed, innocently went under the ax. However, upon closer examination of these events, many questions arise that cast doubt on this version.

In principle, thinking historians have had doubts for a long time. And doubts were sown not by some Stalinist historians, but by those eyewitnesses who themselves disliked the "father of all Soviet peoples."

For example, in the West, at one time, the memoirs of the former Soviet intelligence agent Alexander Orlov (Leiba Feldbin), who fled our country at the end of the 30s, having taken a huge amount of state dollars, were published. Orlov, who knew well the "inner kitchen" of his native NKVD, wrote directly that a coup d'etat was being prepared in the Soviet Union.

Among the conspirators, he said, were both representatives of the leadership of the NKVD and the Red Army in the person of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the commander of the Kiev military district Iona Yakir. Stalin became aware of the conspiracy, who took very harsh retaliatory actions ...

Living abroad, Lev Davidovich demanded from his people decisive action to destabilize the situation in the Soviet Union, up to the organization of mass terrorist actions.

First, the overall picture of a broad conspiracy against Stalin looks very, very convincing. Such testimony could not have been somehow directed or faked to please the “father of nations”. Especially in the part where it was about the military plans of the conspirators.

Here is what the well-known publicist historian Sergei Kremlev said about this: “Take and read the testimony of Tukhachevsky, given to him after his arrest. The confessions themselves in the conspiracy are accompanied by a deep analysis of the military-political situation in the USSR in the mid-30s, with detailed calculations on the general situation in the country, with our mobilization, economic and other capabilities.

Third. Western Sovietologists and the émigré public, having no access to archival materials, had to actually suck out their opinions about the scale of the repressions from their fingers. At best, they were content with interviews with dissidents, who either themselves in the past went through imprisonment, or cited the stories of those who went through the Gulag.

The upper bar in assessing the number of "victims of communism" was set by A. Solzhenitsyn, who declared 110 million victims in an interview with Spanish television in 1976. The ceiling of 110 million announced by Solzhenitsyn was systematically reduced to 12.5 million people of the Memorial society.

However, following the results of 10 years of work, Memorial managed to collect data on only 2.6 million victims of repression, which is close to the figure announced by the Zemskovs almost 20 years ago - 4 million people.

After the opening of the archives, the West did not believe that the number of repressed was much less than the same R. Conquest indicated. In total, according to archival data, for the period from 1921 to 1953, 3,777,380 were convicted, of which 642,980 were sentenced to capital punishment.

Subsequently, this figure was increased to 4,060,306 people at the expense of 282,926 who were shot according to paragraphs. 2 and 3 st. 59 (especially dangerous banditry) and art. 193 24 (military espionage and sabotage). Where blood-washed Basmachi, Bandera, Baltic "forest brothers" and other especially dangerous, bloody bandits, spies and saboteurs entered. There is more human blood on them than there is water in the Volga. And they are also considered innocent victims of Stalin's repression. And Stalin is accused of all this.

(Let me remind you that until 1928, Stalin was not the autocratic leader of the USSR. But HE GOT FULL POWER OVER THE PARTY, ARMY AND NKVD ONLY FROM THE END OF 1938).

So. A crowd of Western journalists arrived in the USSR in 1990. The goal is to familiarize yourself with open archives. We got acquainted with the archives of the NKVD - they did not believe it. They demanded the archives of the People's Commissariat of Railways. We got acquainted - it turned out 4 million. They did not believe it. They demanded the archives of the People's Commissariat of Food. We got acquainted - it turned out 4 million repressed. We got acquainted with the clothing content of the camps. It turned out - 4 million repressed.

Do you think that after this, articles with the correct figures of repression were sent in batches in the Western media. Nothing of the kind. There they still write and talk about tens of millions of victims of repression.

But there are also many falsified cases: settling scores in the corridors of power, squabbling at work, communal squabbles, literary rivalries, scientific competition, persecution of clergy who supported the kulaks during collectivization, squabbles of artists, musicians and composers.

BUT THERE IS CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY - meanness of investigators and meanness of reporters. But what was never found was the cases concocted at the behest of the Kremlin. There are opposite examples - when, at the behest of Stalin, someone was taken out from under the execution, or even freed altogether.

There is one more thing to be understood. The term "repression" is a medical term (suppression, blocking) and was introduced specifically to remove the question of guilt. Imprisoned in the late 30s - that means, innocent, as "repressed".

In addition, the term "repression" was introduced into circulation for its use initially with the aim of imparting an appropriate moral coloring to the entire Stalinist period without going into details.

The events of the 1930s showed that the main problem for the Soviet regime was the party and state "apparatus", which consisted to a large extent of unprincipled, illiterate and greedy co-servants, leading party members-chatterboxes attracted by the greasy smell of revolutionary plunder.

Such an apparatus was extremely ineffective and uncontrollable, which was like death for a totalitarian Soviet state, in which everything depended on the apparatus.

Since then, Stalin made repression an important institution of government and a means of keeping the "apparatus" in check. Naturally, the apparatus became the main target of these repressions. Moreover, repression has become an important instrument of state building. Stalin assumed that a workable bureaucracy could be made of a corrupted Soviet apparatus only after SEVERAL STAGES of repression.

The liberals will say that this is the whole of Stalin, that he could not have lived without repression, without persecuting honest people. But here is what the American intelligence officer John Scott reported to the US State Department about who was repressed. He found these repressions in the Urals in 1937.

“The director of the construction company, who was building new houses for the workers of the plant, was not satisfied with his salary, which was one thousand rubles a month, and his two-room apartment. Therefore, he built himself a separate house. The house had five rooms, and he was able to furnish it well: he hung up silk curtains, put up a piano, covered the floor with carpets, etc.

Then he began to drive around the city in a car at a time (this happened in early 1937), when there were few private cars in the city. At the same time, the annual construction plan was fulfilled by his office by only about sixty percent. At meetings and in the newspapers, he was constantly asked questions about the reasons for such poor performance. He replied that there were no building materials, there was not enough manpower, etc.

An investigation began, during which it turned out that the director was appropriating state funds and selling construction materials to nearby state farms at speculative prices. It was also discovered that in the construction office there are people whom he specially paid to carry out his "affairs".

An open trial, which lasted for several days, took place, during which all these people were tried. They talked a lot about him in Magnitogorsk. In his accusatory speech at the trial, the prosecutor spoke not about theft or bribery, but about sabotage. The director was accused of sabotaging the construction of housing for workers. He was convicted after fully admitting his guilt and then shot. "

But the reaction of the Soviet people to the 1937 purge and their position at that time. “Often the workers even rejoice when they arrest some 'important bird', a leader whom they, for some reason, disliked. Workers are also very free to express critical thoughts both in meetings and in private conversations.

I have heard them use the strongest language when talking about bureaucracy and poor performance by individuals or organizations. ... in the Soviet Union, the situation was somewhat different in that the NKVD in its work to protect the country from the intrigues of foreign agents, spies and the offensive of the old bourgeoisie counted on support and assistance from the population and basically received them.

Well, and: “... During the purges, thousands of bureaucrats trembled for their places. Officials and administrative employees who previously came to work at ten o'clock and left at half past five and only shrugged their shoulders in response to complaints, difficulties and failures, now sat at work from sunrise to sunset, they began to worry about the successes and failures of their leaders. them enterprises, and they actually began to fight for the fulfillment of the plan, economy and for good living conditions for their subordinates, although earlier this did not bother them at all ”.

Readers interested in this question are aware of the continuous groans of the liberals that during the years of the purge "the best people", the most intelligent and capable, perished. Scott also hints at this all the time, but, nevertheless, as it were, he sums up: “After the purges, the administrative apparatus of the entire plant was almost one hundred percent young Soviet engineers.

Practically no specialists remained from among the prisoners, and foreign specialists actually disappeared. However, by 1939, most of the divisions, such as the Railways Administration and the mill's coke plant, were performing better than ever. "

In the course of the party purges and repressions, all the prominent party barons drinking away the gold reserves of Russia, bathing in champagne with prostitutes, seizing the noble and merchant palaces for personal use, all the disheveled, crap revolutionaries disappeared like smoke. And this is JUST.

But clearing the snickering scoundrels from the high offices is half the battle, it was also necessary to replace them with worthy people. It is very curious how this problem was solved in the NKVD. Firstly, a man was placed at the head of the department, who were alien to the communist party, who had no connections with the capital's party top, but a proven professional - Lavrenty Beria.

The latter, secondly, ruthlessly cleared out the Chekists who had compromised themselves, and thirdly, carried out a radical reduction in staff, sending people who were seemingly not mean, but unfit for professional work, to retire or to work in other departments. And, finally, a Komsomol call was announced to the NKVD, when completely inexperienced guys came to the authorities to replace deserved pensioners or shot scoundrels.

But ... the main criterion for their selection was an impeccable reputation. If in the characteristics from the place of study, work, place of residence, on the Komsomol or party line there were at least some hints of their unreliability, a tendency to selfishness, laziness, then no one invited them to work in the NKVD.

So, here is a very important point to which you should pay attention - the team is formed not on the basis of past merits, professional data of applicants, personal acquaintance and ethnicity, and not even on the basis of the desires of applicants, but solely on the basis of their moral and psychological characteristics.

Professionalism is a profitable business, but in order to punish any bastard, a person must be completely unmarried. Well, clean hands, a cold head and a warm heart - this is all about the youth of the Beria call. The fact is that it was at the end of the 1930s that the NKVD became a truly effective special service, and not only in the matter of internal cleansing.

Soviet counterintelligence with a devastating score outplayed German intelligence during the war - and this is the great merit of those very Beria Komsomol members who came to the authorities three years before the start of the war.

Purge 1937-1939 played a positive role - now not a single chief felt his impunity, the untouchables were gone. Fear did not add intelligence to the nomenclature, but at least warned it against outright meanness.

Unfortunately, immediately after the end of the big purge, the world war that began in 1939 did not allow holding alternative elections. And again, the issue of democratization was put on the agenda by Joseph Vissarionovich in 1952, shortly before his death. But after Stalin's death, Khrushchev returned the leadership of the entire country to the party. And not only.

Almost immediately after Stalin's death, a network of special distributors and special rations appeared, through which the new elites realized their advantageous position. But in addition to formal privileges, a system of informal privileges quickly emerged. Which is very important.

Since we have already touched upon the activities of our dear Nikita Sergeevich, we will talk about it in a little more detail. With a light hand or the tongue of Ilya Ehrenburg, the period of Khrushchev's rule was called the "thaw". Let's see, what did Khrushchev do during the "Great Terror"?

The February-March plenum of the Central Committee of 1937 is underway. It is believed that the great terror began with him. Here is Nikita Sergeevich's speech at this plenum: “... We need to destroy these scoundrels. Destroying a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, we are doing the work of millions. Therefore, it is necessary that the hand does not flinch, it is necessary to step over the corpses of enemies for the good of the people. "

But how did Khrushchev act as the First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee and the Regional Committee of the CPSU (b)? In 1937-1938. out of 38 top leaders of the Moscow City Conservatory, only 3 survived, out of 146 party secretaries - 136 were repressed. The mind does not understand where in the Moscow region he managed to find 20,000 kulaks who fell under repression. In total, in 1937-1938 he personally repressed 55,741 people.

But maybe, speaking at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev was worried that innocent ordinary people were shot? Yes, Khrushchev did not care about the arrests and executions of ordinary people. His entire report at the 20th Congress was devoted to accusations of Stalin that he imprisoned and shot prominent Bolsheviks and marshals. Those. elite.

Khrushchev in his report did not even mention the repressed ordinary people. What kind of people should he worry, "women are still giving birth", but the cosmopolitan elite Lapotnik Khrushchev was oh, what a pity.

What were the motivations for the appearance of the revelatory report at the 20th Party Congress?

Firstly, without trampling on his predecessor in the mud, it was unthinkable to hope for Khrushchev's recognition as a leader after Stalin. Not! Even after his death, Stalin remained a competitor for Khrushchev, who had to be humiliated and destroyed by any means. Kicking a dead lion, as it turned out, is a pleasure - it does not give back.

The second motive was the desire of Khrushchev to return the party to the management of the economic activities of the state. Lead everyone, for nothing, not answering and not obeying anyone

The third motive, and perhaps the most important, was the terrible fear of the remnants of the "Leninist guard" for what they had done. After all, they all had blood, as Khrushchev himself put it, up to the elbows. Khrushchev and people like him wanted not only to rule the country, but also to have guarantees that they would never be dragged on the rack, no matter what they did while in leadership positions.

The XX Congress of the CPSU gave them such guarantees in the form of an indulgence for the release of all sins, both past and future. The whole mystery of Khrushchev and his associates is not worth a damn: it is an INCREDIBLE ANIMAL FEAR AND A PAINFUL THIRST FOR POWER SITTING IN THEIR SOULS.

The first thing that strikes the de-Stalinizers is a complete disregard for the principles of historicism, which, it seems, everyone was taught in the Soviet school. No historical figure can be judged by the standards of our modern era. He should be judged by the standards of his era - and not otherwise. In jurisprudence they say about it like this: "the law has no retroactive effect." That is, the ban introduced this year cannot apply to last year's acts.

Here, the historicism of assessments is also necessary: you cannot judge a person of one era by the standards of another era (especially that new era that he created with his work and genius). For the beginning of the 20th century, the horrors in the situation of the peasantry were so commonplace that many contemporaries practically did not notice them.

The famine did not start with Stalin, it ended with Stalin. It seemed like forever - but the current liberal reforms are again pulling us into that swamp, from which we seem to have already scrambled out ...

The principle of historicism also requires the recognition that Stalin had a completely different intensity of political struggle than in subsequent times. It is one thing to maintain the existence of the system (although Gorbachev did not cope with this either), and it is another thing to create a new system on the ruins of a country ravaged by the civil war.

The resistance energy in the second case is several times greater than in the first.

It must be understood that many of those killed under Stalin themselves were going to quite seriously kill him, and if he hesitated even for a minute, he himself would have received a bullet in the forehead. The struggle for power in the era of Stalin had a completely different acuteness than it is now: it was the era of the revolutionary "Praetorian Guard" - accustomed to rebellion and ready to change emperors like gloves.

Trotsky, Rykov, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and a whole crowd of people, accustomed to murder, like peeling potatoes, claimed the supremacy ...

For any terror, not only the ruler is responsible to history, but also his opponents, as well as society as a whole. When the outstanding historian L. Gumilyov was asked under Gorbachev if he was angry with Stalin, under whom he was in prison, he answered: “But it was not Stalin who imprisoned me, but colleagues in the department” ...

Well, God bless him with Khrushchev and the XX Congress of the CPSU. Let's talk about what the liberal media are constantly rattling about, let's talk about Stalin's guilt.

Liberals have charged Stalin with the executions of about 700 thousand people in 30 years. The liberals have a simple logic - all the victims of Stalinism. All 700 thousand.

Those. at this time there could be no murderers, no bandits, no sadists, no molesters, no swindlers, no traitors, no saboteurs, etc. All victims for political reasons, all crystal honest and decent people.

Meanwhile, the CIA analytical center "Rand Corporation", relying on demographic data and archival documents, calculated the number of repressed in the Stalin era. It turned out that less than 700 thousand people were shot from 1921 to 1953. Stalin, on the other hand, had real power somewhere from 1927-29.

At the same time, no more than a quarter of cases are sentenced to political article 58. By the way, the same proportion was observed among the inmates of labor camps.

“Do you like it when you destroy your people in the name of a great goal?” - continue the liberals. I will answer. The people - no, BANDITS, THIEVES, AND MORAL MONSTERS - YES. BUT I DON'T LIKE ANYMORE WHEN OWN PEOPLE DESTROY IN THE NAME OF FILLING THEIR POCKETS WITH BABL, hiding behind beautiful liberal-democratic slogans.

Academician Tatiana Zaslavskaya, a big supporter of reforms who was part of the Yeltsin administration at that time, admitted after a decade and a half that only three years of shock therapy in Russia alone, middle-aged men died 8 million (!!!). Yes, Stalin stands aside and nervously smokes a pipe. Not finalized.

However, your words about Stalin's innocence to the reprisals against honest people are not convincing, the LIBERALS continue. Even if this is allowed, then in this case he was simply obliged, firstly, to honestly and openly confess to all the people in the committed lawlessness, secondly, to rehabilitate the unjustly victims and, thirdly, to take measures to prevent such lawlessness in the future. None of this has been done.

Again a lie. Dear. You just do not know the history of the USSR.

As for, firstly and secondly, the December 1938 plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the year openly admitted the lawlessness committed against honest communists and non-party people, adopting a special resolution on this, which was published, by the way, in all central newspapers.

The plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, noting "provocations on an all-Union scale," demanded: To expose the careerists striving to excel ... in repression. To expose a skillfully disguised enemy ... striving to kill our Bolshevik cadres by means of repressive measures, sowing uncertainty and excessive suspicion in our ranks. "

It was also openly, throughout the country, about the harm caused by unreasonable repressions at the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) held in 1939.

Immediately after the December 1938 Central Committee plenum, thousands of illegally repressed people began to return from places of detention, including prominent military leaders. All of them were officially rehabilitated, and Stalin personally apologized to some of them.

Well, and thirdly, I have already said that the NKVD apparatus was almost the most affected by the repressions, and a significant part was brought to justice precisely for abuse of office, for reprisals against honest people.

What liberals don't talk about is the rehabilitation of innocent victims.

Immediately at the December Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1938, they began to review criminal cases and release them from the camps. It was released: in 1939 - 230 thousand, in 1940 - 180 thousand, until June 1941 another 65 thousand.

What the liberals are not talking about yet. About how they fought the consequences of the Great Terror. With the arrival of Beria L.P. In November 1938, 7372 operational officers, or 22.9% of their payroll, were dismissed from the state security bodies for the post of People's Commissar of the NKVD in November 1938, of which 937 were imprisoned.

And since the end of 1938, the country's leadership has succeeded in bringing to court more than 63 thousand workers of the NKVD, who committed falsifications and created far-fetched, fake counter-revolutionary cases, OUT OF WHICH EIGHT THOUSANDS WERE SHOT.

I will give just one example from the article by Yu.I. Mukhina: "Minutes No. 17 of the Meeting of the VKP (b) Commission on Court Cases"

In this article Mukhin Yu.I. writes: “I was told that this type of documents was never laid out on the Web due to the fact that free access to them was very quickly prohibited in the archive. And the document is interesting, and you can learn something interesting from it ... ”.

There are many interesting things. But most importantly, from the article it is clear why the NKVD officers were shot, after L.P. Beria came to the post of People's Commissar of the NKVD. Read on. The names of those shot on the slides are shaded.

Note: You can view the slide in full size by clicking on the picture and selecting the "Original" link.

P R O T O K O L No. 17

Meetings of the Commission of the CPSU (b) on court cases

dated February 23, 1940

Chaired by M. I. Kalinin.

Present: Comrades: MF Shklyar, MI Ponkratyev, VN Merkulov

1. Listened

G ... Sergei Ivanovich, M ... Fyodor Pavlovich by the decision of the military tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Moscow military district of December 14-15, 1939 sentenced to death under Art. 193-17 paragraph b of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for making unjustified arrests of command and Red Army personnel, actively falsifying investigative cases, conducting them with provocative methods and creating fictitious C / R organizations, as a result of which a number of people were shot at the fictitious materials.

Resolved:

Agree with the use of execution to G. ... S.I. and M ... F.P.

17. We listened. And ... Fyodor Afanasevich by the decision of the military tribunal of the troops of the NKVD of the Leningrad Military District of July 19-25, 1939 was sentenced to death under Art. 193-17 paragraph b of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for being an employee of the NKVD, carried out massive illegal arrests of citizens of railway transport workers, falsified interrogation protocols and created artificial C / R cases, as a result of which more than 230 people were sentenced to death and to various terms of imprisonment for more than 100 people, and 69 of the latter have been released at this time.

Resolved:

Agree with the use of execution against A. ... F.A.

Have you read it? Well, and how do you like the dear Fyodor Afanasevich? One (one !!!) investigator-forger brought 236 people to execution. And what, he was the only one, how many such villains were there? I gave the figure above. That Stalin personally set tasks for these Fyodors and Sergei to destroy honest people?

By the way. These 8000 executed NKVD investigators are also included in the lists of "MEMORIAL" as victims of "Stalinist repressions".

What are the conclusions?

Conclusion N1. To judge Stalin's time only by repression is the same as to judge the activities of the head physician of a hospital only by the hospital morgue - there will always be corpses there.

If you approach with such a yardstick, then every doctor is a bloody ghoul and murderer, i.e. deliberately ignore the fact that the team of doctors has successfully healed and extended the life of thousands of patients and blame them only for a small percentage of deaths due to some inevitable mistakes in diagnoses or deaths during serious operations.

The authority of Jesus Christ with that of Stalin is not comparable.

But even in the teachings of Jesus, people only see what they want to see. Studying the history of world civilization one has to observe how wars, chauvinism, "Aryan theory", serfdom, and Jewish pogroms were substantiated by the Christian doctrine.

This is not to mention the executions "without the shedding of blood" - that is, the burning of heretics. How much blood was shed during the crusades and wars of religion? So, maybe because of this, prohibit the teachings of our Creator? Just like today, some umyrs propose to ban the communist ideology.

If we examine the mortality chart of the population of the USSR, with all our will, it is impossible to find traces of "cruel" repressions, not because they did not exist, but because their scale is exaggerated.

What is the purpose of this exaggeration and whipping? The aim is to inoculate Russians with a guilt complex similar to that of the Germans after the defeat in World War II. The "pay and repent" complex.

But the great ancient Chinese thinker and philosopher Confucius, who lived 500 years before our era, even then said: “Beware of those who want to impute guilt to you. For they yearn for power over you. "

Do we need it? Judge for yourself. When the first time Khrushchev stunned all the so-called. the truth about the Stalinist repressions, the authority of the USSR in the world immediately collapsed to the delight of the enemies. There was a split in the world communist movement. We fell out with great China, and tens of millions of people in the world quit the communist parties.

Eurocommunism appeared, which denies not only Stalinism, but also, which is terrible, the Stalinist economy. The myth of the 20th Congress created distorted ideas about Stalin and his time, deceived and psychologically disarmed millions of people when the question of the fate of the country was being decided.

When Gorbachev did it for the second time, not only the socialist bloc collapsed, but our Motherland, the USSR, collapsed.

Now the team of Putin V.V. does this for the third time: again he speaks only of repressions and other "crimes" of the Stalinist regime. What this leads to is clearly seen in the Zyuganov-Makarov dialogue. They are told about development, new industrialization, and they immediately begin to shift the arrows to repression. That is, they immediately cut off a constructive dialogue, turning it into a quarrel, a civil war of meanings and ideas.

Conclusion N2. Why do they need it? To prevent the restoration of a strong and great Russia. It is more convenient for them to rule a weak and fragmented country, where people will tear each other by the hair at the mention of the name of Stalin or Lenin. So it is more convenient for them to rob and deceive us. The divide and conquer policy is as old as the world. Moreover, they can always dump from Russia to where their stolen capital is kept, where children, wives and mistresses live.

Conclusion N3. Why do the patriots of Russia need this? It's just that we and our children don't have another country. Think about it first before you start cursing for the repression and so on of our history. After all, we have nowhere to blame and retreat. As our victorious ancestors said in similar cases: behind Moscow and beyond the Volga there is no land for us!

Only after the return of socialism to Russia should one be vigilant and remember Stalin's warning that as the socialist state is being built, the class struggle intensifies, that is, there is a threat of degeneration. And so it happened, and some of the first to degenerate certain segments of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Central Committee of the Komsomol and the KGB.

These "professional revolutionaries" imagined themselves to be precisely the "Leninist guard". And they came to the revolution from hard labor and emigration. And it was they who filled all the leading cabinets of the Soviet government, since the beginning of the 20s. And they were the backbone of the Comintern. And it was they who did not need a strong and strong Russia, except perhaps as a source of financing for the "world revolution." By the way, the squabble in the leadership of the USSR after Lenin's death, in which the very "fiery revolutionaries" fought openly in order to have the right to be considered "the most loyal Leninist", also says a lot.

And yes, it was at the end of the 20s that the party was divided into destroyers and creators, after which the latter tried to clean up the first ...

If Stalin were a "real revolutionary" you and I would not even be born on our long-suffering land. There would have long been a desert inhabited by "white blacks", as Trotsky and his associates dreamed of, who were deservedly punished by Stalin in the thirties.
Going towards the intended goal, Stalin gradually, step by step, took power away from the Leninists-Trotskyists and handed it over to his comrades-in-arms, who did not always understand the ultimate Autocratic goal of Stalin's deeds, but fully accepted the tasks of reviving the country and turning it into a mighty Power.
This is about his sovereign Stalinist deeds written by the Russian historian, philosopher, religious thinker and publicist Georgy Petrovich Fedotov, expelled from Russia by the Trotskyists:

“The huge boulders that have crushed Russia for seventeen years with their weight have melted and are crumbling one after another. This is a real counter-revolution carried out from above. Since it does not affect either the political or the social system, it can be called an everyday counter-revolution. Everyday and at the same time spiritual, ideological ... the right of young men to love and girls to a family, the right of parents to children and a decent school, the right to a "happy life", to a Christmas tree (the Trotskyists and a Christmas tree were banned) and to some minimum rite - an old rite that adorned life, means for Russia an uprising from the dead "...

November 7. Happy Counter-Revolution Day, comrades! (PavelCV) November 7, 1927 was the first day of Stalin's counter-revolution from above, leading to changes and upheavals comparable to the events of 1917. It was on this day, which fell on a round date - the tenth anniversary of the events of the autumn of 1917, that the term "Great October Socialist Revolution" was first officially used and introduced. How everything will look on the blog:

| PavelCV The question of the repressions of the thirties of the last century is of fundamental importance not only for understanding the history of Russian socialism and its essence as a social system, but also for assessing the role of Stalin in the history of Russia

Let's try to deal with a simple question: did Stalin organize the "Great Terror"? Maybe there are other reasons for terror, about which common people - liberals prefer to remain silent?

Stalin and his people demand democracy! And if this is not democracy, then explain to me what, then, is considered a democracy ?!

Because the vaunted "Leninist Guard" is a bunch of small satraps. They are accustomed to living in their estates as barons, single-handedly to dispose of the life and death of people.

The debate on Zhdanov's report was practically disrupted.

Molotov, unable to bear it, says in plain text:

In a number of cases, listening to the speakers, it was possible to come to the conclusion that our resolutions and our reports passed the speakers' ears ...

Then Nikita Khrushchev was the first to rehabilitate his friend Robert Eikhe, who was shot justly for all his cruelties in 1939, in 1954.

The party elite enthusiastically joined the massacre!

The regional party nomenclature has achieved the most important thing: after all, in conditions of mass terror, free elections are impossible. Stalin was never able to carry them out. The end of a short thaw. Stalin never pushed through his reform bloc. True, at that plenum, he said remarkable words: “Party organizations will be freed from economic work, although this will not happen immediately. This takes time. "

Drunk with vodka, blood and impunity, the People's Commissar soon openly "swam".

Another part of these gentlemen believes that allegedly Stalin, who wanted to finally become the Lord God on Soviet soil, decided to deal with everyone who doubted his genius in the slightest degree. And, above all, with those who, together with Lenin, created the October Revolution. They say that this is why almost the entire "Leninist guard", and at the same time the top of the Red Army, who were accused of a conspiracy against Stalin that never existed, innocently went under the ax. However, upon closer examination of these events, many questions arise that cast doubt on this version. In principle, thinking historians have had doubts for a long time. And doubts were sown not by some Stalinist historians, but by those eyewitnesses who themselves disliked the "father of all Soviet peoples."

In the modern history of the Fatherland, under Stalinist repression understand the mass persecution for political and other reasons of the citizens of the USSR from 1927 to 1953 (the period of the leadership of the Soviet Union by I.V. Stalin). Then the repressive policy was considered in the context of the necessary measures for the implementation of socialist construction in the USSR, in the interests of the broad working people.

In the general meaning of the concept repression(from Lat. repressio - constraint, suppression) is a system of punitive sanctions applied by the authorities to reduce or eliminate the threat to the existing state system and public order. The threat can be expressed both in open actions and speeches, and in the latent opposition of opponents of the regime.

Repression in the fundamental theory of Marxism-Leninism was not envisaged as an element of building a new society. Therefore, the goals of the Stalinist repressions are visible only after the fact:

Isolation and elimination of opponents of Soviet power and their henchmen.

The desire to shift responsibility to political opponents for failed projects and other obvious failures of industrialization, collectivization and cultural revolution.

The need to replace the old party-Soviet elite, which has shown its inconsistency in solving the problems of industrialization and socialist construction.

Concentrate all power in the hands of one party leader.

Use forced labor of prisoners in the construction of industrial facilities in places with an acute shortage of labor resources.

Preconditions for repression

With the establishment of Soviet power in November 1917, the political struggle in Russia did not end, but moved into the plane of the Bolsheviks struggle against any opposition. Clear preconditions for future massive repressions have emerged:

In early January 1918, the Constituent Assembly was dispersed, active supporters of the All-Russian Forum were repressed.

In July 1918, the bloc with the Left Social Revolutionaries collapsed, and a one-party dictatorship of the CPSU (b) was established.

Since September 1918, the policy of "war communism" began to tighten the regime of Soviet power, accompanied by the "red terror".

In 1921 were created revolutionary tribunals both directly in the Cheka (then the NKVD) and the Supreme (general jurisdiction).

In 1922, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission was reorganized into the State Political Administration (GPU, since 1923 - OGPU), chaired by Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky.

The XII party conference of the CPSU (b), held in August 1922, recognized all parties and political organizations that opposed the Bolsheviks anti-Soviet(anti-state). On this basis, they were subject to defeat.

In 1922, by a resolution of the GPU, they were expelled to " philosophical steamer"From the RSFSR to the West, a number of prominent scientists, specialists and art workers.

The struggle for power in the 1920s and 1930s, in the conditions of forced industrialization and collectivization, was conducted with the use of political repression.

Political repression- These are measures of state coercion, which include different types of restrictions and punishments. In the Soviet Union, political repression was used against individuals and even social groups.

Reasons for repression

In modern historiography, political repression is associated with the period when the supreme power was associated with the name of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (1926 - 1953). The event line predetermined the causal series of repressions, conventionally designated as Stalinist:

First, to create conditions for the concentration of power in one hand, eliminating everyone who claimed the first role in the party-state administration.

Secondly, it was necessary to remove the obstacles on the path of colossal transformations, put up by the opposition and outright enemies.

Third, to isolate and eliminate the "fifth column" on the eve of formidable military upheavals and aggravation of hostility with the Western world.

Fourthly, to demonstrate to the people the will and determination in solving grandiose tasks.

Thus, repressions objectively become the most important policy tool of the Soviet state, regardless of the desires and personal aspirations of specific figures.

I. V. Stalin's political competitors

After the death of V.I. Lenin, a situation arose in the Soviet establishment of a competitive struggle for the first role in government. At the very top of power, a stable group of political competitors, members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks) has formed:

General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) I. V. Stalin.
Leonid Trotsky, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council and People's Commissariat for Military Affairs.
Chairman of the Comintern and head of the Leningrad Party organization G. Ye. Zinoviev.
LB Kamenev, who was at the head of the Moscow Party organization.
NI Bukharin, chief ideologist and editor of the party newspaper Pravda.

All of them took an active part in the intrigues of the second half of the 20s and early 30s of the XX century, which ultimately led Stalin to absolute power in the USSR. This struggle was “not for life, but for death,” therefore all sentiment was excluded.

The course of the main events of the Stalinist repressions

First stage

The 1920s are the path to the sole power of I. V. Stalin.

	Political moments	Main events, participants and result
	Liquidation of the open Trotskyist opposition	JV Stalin, in alliance with GE Zinoviev and LB Kamenev, sought to remove Leonid Trotsky from all posts and began political persecutions against his prominent followers.
	Confrontation with the "new opposition" (1925) and the defeat of the "united opposition" (1926-1927)	JV Stalin, in alliance with N.I.Bukharin and A.I. LD Trotsky completely lost his political influence (he was exiled in 1928 to Kazakhstan, and in 1929 he was expelled from the USSR).
	Removal from political power of the "right opposition"	For speaking out against forced industrialization and for preserving the NEP, N. I. Bukharin and A. I. Rykov lost their posts and were expelled from the CPSU (b). It was decided to exclude from the party everyone who has ever supported the opposition.

At this stage, JV Stalin skillfully used the differences and political ambitions of competitors, and his post as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to seize absolute power.

Second phase

Strengthening the unlimited regime of Stalin's personal power.

	Political processes
	The case of the economic counter-revolution in Donbass (Shakhty case).	Accusation of a group of leaders and engineers of the Donbass coal industry of sabotage and sabotage.
	Process of the "Industrial Party"	The case of sabotage and sabotage in industry.
	The Chayanov-Kondratyev case	The trial of the counter-revolutionary activities of the kulaks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in agriculture
	The case of the "Union Bureau of Mensheviks"	Repressions against a group of old members of the RSDLP.
	The assassination of Sergei Kirov	The reason for the deployment of repressions against opponents of Stalin.
"Great terror"(the term was put into use by R. Conquest) is a period of large-scale repressions and persecutions against Soviet and party cadres, military personnel, industry specialists, intelligentsia and other persons disloyal to the existing government from 1936 to 1938.
August 1936	The trial of the "united Trotskyite-Zinoviev opposition"	Convicted to VMN G. E. Zinoviev and L., B. Kamenev and L. D. Trotsky (in absentia).
January 1937	Trial of members of the "united Trotskyite-Zinoviev opposition"	G. L. Pyatakov, K. B. Radek and others were convicted.
	The first trial of the "anti-Soviet Trotskyist military organization"	Convicted M.N. Tukhachevsky, I.P. Uborevich, I.E. Yakir and others.
	Right-wing opposition trials	N.I.Bukharin, A.I. Rykov and others were repressed.
	Second cycle of "military conspiracy" courts	A. I. Egorov, V. K. Blucher and others were subjected to repression. In total, over 19 thousand people were dismissed from the RKKA for cases related to the "military conspiracy". (more than 9 thousand people were restored), 9.5 thousand people were arrested. (later recovered almost 1.5 thousand people).

As a result, by 1940, the regime of unlimited power and the personality cult of I. V. Stalin had been established.

Third stage

Repressions in the post-war years.

	Political processes
August 1946	Resolution of the organizing bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) "On the magazines" Zvezda "and" Leningrad ""	Persecution of cultural and art workers.
		Repressed Soviet and statesmen, former and current leaders of the Leningrad organizations of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and Soviet power.
	The case of the "Jewish anti-fascist committee"	Fighting "cosmopolitanism"
	Doctors' case process	The accusation of prominent doctors of involvement in the deaths of Soviet and party leaders.

The above list of processes during the period of Stalinist repressions does not fully reflect the picture of the tragic time, only key cases have been recorded. On the other hand, there is a tendency towards an excessive exaggeration of the number of victims, and this makes the attitude towards the times of Stalinism far from unambiguous.

The results of the Stalinist repressions

JV Stalin's sole power was established.
A tough totalitarian regime was established.
Over 2 million people, opponents of Soviet power, overt, hidden, and often innocent, were subjected to massive repressions.
The state system of forced labor camps, the GULAG, was created.
Labor relations have tightened. The forced and low-paid labor of the GULAG prisoners was widely used.
The old party-Soviet elite was radically replaced by young technocrats.
The fear of openly expressing one's own opinion was entrenched in Soviet society.
The declared rights and freedoms of the citizens of the USSR were not implemented in practice.

The period of Stalinist repressions remained in Russian history one of the darkest and most controversial pages.

"Thaw". Rethinking the Stalinist period. Rehabilitation

The situation that developed in the USSR after the death of Stalin with the "light hand" of I. Ehrenburg was called " thaw". In addition to the revitalization of public life, the thaw led to rethinking achievements and shortcomings Stalinist period Soviet history:

Achievements were questioned.
The flaws bulged out and multiplied.

A large-scale process of rehabilitation of victims of political repression has been launched.

Rehabilitation- This is the removal of false accusations, release from punishment and the return of an honest name.

Partial rehabilitation was carried out at the initiative of L.P. Beria at the end of the 30s. He repeated the infamous 1953 amnesty. For a year, N. S. Khrushchev amnestied collaborators and war criminals. Companies for the rehabilitation of victims of Stalinist repression took place from 1954 to 1961. and in 1962-1982. In the late 1980s, the rehabilitation process was resumed.

Since 1991 the Law “ On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression».

Since 1990, the Russian Federation has celebrated Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression.

In 2009, A. Solzhenitsyn's novel “ GULAG Archipelago"Is still perceived ambiguously.

Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation

Federal state educational institution

Higher professional education

"ST. PETERSBURG STATE UNIVERSITY OF CULTURE AND ARTS"

Library and Information Faculty

Department of Contemporary History of the Fatherland

Course: Contemporary History of the Fatherland

Massive political repression in the 30s. Attempts to resist the Stalinist regime.

Performer: V. I. Meerovich

Correspondence student of BIF

262 groups

Teacher: Sherstnev V.P.

Fight against "sabotage"

Introduction

Political repressions of the 20-50s The twentieth century left a big imprint on Russian history... These were the years of arbitrariness, lawless violence. Historians assess this period of Stalin's domination in different ways. Some of them call it a "black spot in history", others call it a necessary measure to strengthen and increase the power of the Soviet state.

The very concept of "repression" in translation from Latin means "suppression, punitive measure, punishment". In other words, suppression by punishment.

At the moment, political repression is one of the topical topics, since it has affected almost many residents of our country. Recently, terrible secrets of that time have very often surfaced, thereby increasing the importance of this problem.

Versions about the reasons for the mass repressions

When analyzing the formation of the mechanism of mass repression in the 1930s, the following factors should be taken into account.

The transition to the policy of collectivization of agriculture, industrialization and the cultural revolution, which required significant material investments or the attraction of free labor (it is indicated, for example, that grandiose plans for the development and creation of an industrial base in the regions of the north of the European part of Russia, Siberia and the Far East required the displacement of huge human masses.

Preparations for war with Germany, where the Nazis who came to power proclaimed the destruction of communist ideology as their goal.

To solve these problems, it was necessary to mobilize the efforts of the entire population of the country and provide absolute support for state policy, and for this, to neutralize potential political opposition, on which the enemy could rely.

At the same time, at the legislative level, the supremacy of the interests of society and the proletarian state was proclaimed in relation to the interests of the individual and a more severe punishment for any damage caused to the state, in comparison with similar crimes against the individual.

The policy of collectivization and accelerated industrialization led to a sharp drop in the standard of living of the population and to massive hunger. Stalin and his entourage understood that this increased the number of dissatisfied with the regime and tried to portray "saboteurs" and saboteurs - "enemies of the people" responsible for all economic difficulties, as well as accidents in industry and transport, mismanagement, etc. According to Russian researchers, demonstrative repressions made it possible to explain the hardships of life by the presence of an internal enemy.

Stalinist repression dispossession collectivization

As the researchers point out, the period of mass repressions was also predetermined by "the restoration and active use of the system of political investigation" and the strengthening of the authoritarian power of I. Stalin, who moved from discussions with political opponents on the choice of the country's development path to declaring them "enemies of the people, a gang of professional wreckers. spies, saboteurs, murderers ", which was perceived by the state security authorities, the prosecutor's office and the court as a prerequisite for action.

Ideological basis for repression

The ideological basis of the Stalinist repressions was formed during the years of the civil war. Stalin himself formulated a new approach at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) in July 1928.

It cannot be imagined that the socialist forms will develop, ousting the enemies of the working class, and the enemies will retreat silently, making way for our advancement, that then we will move forward again, and they will retreat back again, and then "unexpectedly" all without exception social groups, both kulaks and the poor, both workers and capitalists, will find themselves "suddenly", "imperceptibly", without struggle and unrest, in a socialist society.

It has never happened and never will be that the moribund classes voluntarily surrendered their positions without trying to organize resistance. It has never happened and never will be that the advance of the working class towards socialism under a class society could do without struggle and unrest. On the contrary, the advance towards socialism cannot but lead to resistance of the exploiting elements to this advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to an inevitable intensification of the class struggle.

Dispossession

In the course of the forcible collectivization of agriculture, carried out in the USSR in 1928-1932, one of the directions of state policy was the suppression of anti-Soviet actions of the peasants and the associated "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" - "dispossession", which assumed the violent and arbitrary deprivation of wealthy peasants, using hired labor, all means of production, land and civil rights, and eviction to remote areas of the country. Thus, the state destroyed the main social group of the rural population, capable of organizing and financially supporting the resistance to the measures being taken.

Almost any peasant could get into the lists of kulaks drawn up locally. The scale of resistance to collectivization was such that it captured not only the kulaks, but also many middle peasants who opposed collectivization. The ideological feature of this period was the widespread use of the term "podkulachnik", which made it possible to repress any peasant population in general, including farm laborers.

The peasants' protests against collectivization, against high taxes and the forced confiscation of "surplus" grain were expressed in its concealment, arson and even murder of rural party and Soviet activists, which was regarded by the state as a manifestation of "kulak counter-revolution".

On January 30, 1930, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) adopted a resolution "On measures to eliminate kulak farms in areas of complete collectivization." According to this ruling, fists were divided into three categories:

The heads of the kulak families of the 1st category were arrested, and the cases of their actions were transferred to the special forces consisting of representatives of the OGPU, regional committees (regional committees) of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the prosecutor's office. Family members of 1st category kulaks and 2nd category kulaks were subject to eviction to remote areas of the USSR or remote areas of a given region (territory, republic) for special settlement. The kulaks, assigned to the third category, settled within the region on new lands specially allotted for them outside the collective farm massifs.

On February 2, 1930, the USSR OGPU issued order No. 44/21, which provided for the immediate elimination of the "counterrevolutionary kulak activists", especially "cadres of active counterrevolutionary and insurgent organizations and groups" and "the most vicious, double-headed loners."

Families of those arrested, imprisoned in concentration camps or sentenced to death were subject to expulsion to the remote northern regions of the USSR.

The order also provided for the mass eviction of the richest kulaks, i.e. former landowners, semi-landowners, "local kulak authorities" and "the entire kulak cadre, from which the counterrevolutionary activists are formed," "kulak anti-Soviet activists," "churchmen and sectarians," as well as their families in the remote northern regions of the USSR. And also the priority campaigns for the eviction of kulaks and their families in the following regions of the USSR.

In this regard, the OGPU bodies were entrusted with the task of organizing the resettlement of the dispossessed and their labor use at the place of their new residence, suppressing the unrest of the dispossessed in special settlements, searching for those who fled from the places of exile. A special task force under the leadership of the head of the Secret Operations Directorate E.G. Evdokimova. Spontaneous disturbances of the peasants on the ground were suppressed instantly. Only in the summer of 1931 was it required to involve army units to reinforce the OGPU troops while suppressing large unrest of special settlers in the Urals and Western Siberia.

In total, in 1930-1931, as indicated in the certificate of the Department for Special Settlers of the GULAG of the OGPU, 381,026 families with a total number of 1,803,392 people were sent to special resettlement. For 1932-1940. 489 822 dispossessed persons arrived in the special settlements.

Fight against "sabotage"

Solving the problem of forced industrialization required not only huge investments, but also the creation of numerous technical personnel. The bulk of the workers, however, were yesterday's illiterate peasants who did not have sufficient qualifications to work with complex equipment. The Soviet state also depended heavily on the technical intelligentsia inherited from tsarist times. These specialists were often rather skeptical about communist slogans.

The Communist Party, which grew up during the civil war, perceived all the disruptions that arose during industrialization as deliberate sabotage, resulting in a campaign against so-called "sabotage". A number of sabotage and sabotage trials have brought forward, for example, the following charges:

Sabotaging the observation of solar eclipses (Pulkovo case);

Preparation of incorrect reports on the financial situation of the USSR, which led to the undermining of its international authority (the case of the Labor Peasant Party);

Sabotage on the instructions of foreign intelligence services through insufficient development of textile factories, creating imbalances in semi-finished products, which should have entailed undermining the economy of the USSR and general discontent (the case of the Industrial Party);

Spoilage of seed material by contaminating it, deliberate sabotage in the mechanization of agriculture through insufficient supply of spare parts (the case of the Labor Peasant Party);

Uneven distribution of goods by regions on the instructions of foreign intelligence services, which led to the formation of surpluses in some places and a deficit in others (the case of the Menshevik "Union Bureau").

Likewise, the clergy, people of the liberal professions, small entrepreneurs, traders and artisans were victims of the "anti-capitalist revolution" that began in the 1930s. The population of the cities was henceforth included in the category of "the working class, the builder of socialism," however, the working class also underwent repression, which, in accordance with the dominant ideology, turned into an end in itself, hindering the active movement of society towards progress.

For four years, from 1928 to 1931, 138,000 industrial and administrative specialists were excluded from the life of society, 23,000 of them were written off under the first category ("enemies of the Soviet regime") and deprived of their civil rights. The persecution of specialists took on enormous proportions at enterprises, where they were forced to unreasonably increase production output, which led to an increase in the number of accidents, rejects, and machine breakdowns. From January 1930 to June 1931, 48% of Donbass engineers were fired or arrested: 4,500 "saboteur specialists" were "exposed" in the first quarter of 1931 in the transport sector alone. Setting goals that obviously cannot be achieved, leading to non-fulfillment of plans, a strong drop in labor productivity and work discipline, to a complete disregard of economic laws, ended up disrupting the work of enterprises for a long time.

The crisis took shape on a grand scale, and the party leadership was forced to take some “corrective measures.” On July 10, 1931, the Politburo decided to limit the persecution of specialists who had become victims of a hunt announced on them in 1928. The necessary measures were taken: several thousand engineers and technicians were immediately released, mainly in the metallurgical and coal industries, discrimination in access to higher education for children of the intelligentsia was stopped, and the OPTU was prohibited from arresting specialists without the consent of the corresponding People's Commissariat.

From the end of 1928 to the end of 1932, Soviet cities were inundated with peasants, whose number was close to 12 million - these were those who fled from collectivization and dispossession. Three and a half million migrants have appeared in Moscow and Leningrad alone. Among them there were many enterprising peasants who preferred flight from the countryside to self-dispossession or joining collective farms. In 1930-1931, countless construction sites swallowed up this very unpretentious workforce. But starting in 1932, the authorities began to fear a continuous and uncontrolled flow of population, which turned cities into a kind of villages, while the authorities needed to make them a showcase of a new socialist society; population migration threatened this entire elaborate food ration system since 1929, in which the number of “eligible” food ration cards increased from 26 million at the beginning of 1930 to nearly 40 by the end of 1932. Migration turned factories into huge nomad camps. According to the authorities, "newcomers from the village can cause negative phenomena and destroy production with an abundance of truants, a decline in labor discipline, hooliganism, an increase in marriage, the development of crime and alcoholism."

In the spring of 1934, the government took repressive measures against street children and hooligans, whose number in cities increased significantly during the period of famine, dispossession and exacerbation of social relations. according to the law, sanctions against adolescents who have reached 12 years of age convicted of robbery, violence, bodily harm, self-harm and murder. " A few days later, the government sent a secret instruction to the prosecutor's office specifying the criminal measures that should be applied to adolescents, in particular, it said that any measures should be applied, "including the highest measure of social protection," in other words, the death penalty. Thus, the previous paragraphs of the Criminal Code, which prohibited the sentencing of minors to death, were abolished.

Mass terror

On July 30, 1937, NKVD order No. 00447 "On the operation to repress former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements" was adopted.

According to this order, the categories of persons subject to repression were determined:

A) Former kulaks (previously repressed, hiding from repression, fleeing from camps, exile and labor settlements, as well as fleeing from dispossession to cities);

B) Former repressed "churchmen and sectarians";

C) Former active participants in anti-Soviet armed uprisings;

D) Former members of anti-Soviet political parties (Social Revolutionaries, Georgian Mensheviks, Armenian Dashnaks, Azerbaijani Musavatists, Ittihadists, etc.);

E) Former active "participants in bandit uprisings";

F) Former White Guards, "punishers", "repatriates" ("re-emigrants"), etc .;

G) Criminals.

All the repressed fell into two categories:

1) "the most hostile elements" were subject to immediate arrest and, upon consideration of their cases in troikas, to execution;

2) "less active, but still hostile elements" were subject to arrest and imprisonment in camps or prisons for a term of 8 to 10 years.

By order of the NKVD, "operative troikas" were formed at the level of republics and regions to expedite the consideration of thousands of cases. The troika usually consisted of: the chairman - the local head of the NKVD, members - the local prosecutor and the first secretary of the regional, regional or republican committee of the CPSU (b).

For each region of the Soviet Union, limits were set for both categories.

Some of the repressions were carried out against persons who had already been convicted and were in the camps. For them, the limits of the "first category" were allocated (10 thousand people) and also triplets were formed.

The order established repression in relation to family members of the sentenced:

Families "whose members are capable of active anti-Soviet actions" were subject to expulsion to camps or labor settlements.

Families of the executed, living in the border zone, were subject to resettlement outside the border zone within the republics, territories and regions.

The families of the executed, living in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi, Baku, Rostov-on-Don, Taganrog and in the regions of Sochi, Gagra and Sukhumi, were subject to eviction to other regions of their choice, with the exception of the border regions.

All families of the repressed were subject to registration and systematic observation.

The duration of the "kulak operation" (as it was sometimes called in the documents of the NKVD, since the former kulaks constituted the majority of the repressed) were extended several times, and the limits were revised. So, on January 31, 1938, by a resolution of the Politburo, additional limits of 57,200 people were allocated for 22 regions, including 48 thousand for the "first category"; on February 1, the Politburo approves an additional limit for the camps of the Far East at 12 thousand people. "first category", February 17 - an additional limit for Ukraine of 30 thousand for both categories, July 31 - for the Far East (15 thousand for the "first category", 5 thousand for the second), August 29 - 3 thousand for Chita region.

In total, during the operation, 818 thousand people were convicted in threes, of whom 436 thousand were sentenced to death.

Former employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway, accused of spying for Japan, were also repressed.

On May 21, 1938, by order of the NKVD, "militia troikas" were formed, which had the right to sentence "socially dangerous elements" to exile or imprisonment for 3-5 years without trial. These troikas delivered various sentences to 400 thousand people. The category of persons under consideration included criminals - repeat offenders and buyers of stolen goods.

Repression of foreigners and ethnic minorities

On March 9, 1936, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) issued a decree "On measures to protect the USSR from the penetration of espionage, terrorist and sabotage elements." In accordance with it, the entry into the country of political emigrants was complicated and a commission was created to "purge" international organizations on the territory of the USSR.

On July 25, 1937, Yezhov signed and put into effect Order No. 00439, by which he ordered the local organs of the NKVD, within 5 days, to arrest all German subjects, including political emigrants who worked or previously worked at military factories and factories with defense workshops. as well as on railway transport, and in the course of the investigation into their cases "to seek an exhaustive opening of the German intelligence agents that have not yet been exposed." local organizations of the "Polish Troop Organization" and complete it within 3 months. 103,489 people were convicted in these cases, including 84,471 people sentenced to death.

August 17, 1937 - an order to conduct a "Romanian operation" against emigrants and defectors from Romania to Moldova and Ukraine. 8292 people were convicted, including 5439 people sentenced to death.

November 30, 1937 - NKVD directive on carrying out an operation against Latvian defectors, activists of Latvian clubs and societies. 21 300 people were convicted, of which 16 575 people. shot.

December 11, 1937 - NKVD directive on operations against the Greeks. 12 557 people were convicted, of which 10 545 people. sentenced to death.

December 14, 1937 - NKVD directive on the spread of repression along the "Latvian line" to Estonians, Lithuanians, Finns, and also Bulgarians. 9,735 people were convicted on the "Estonian line", including 7998 people were sentenced to execution, 11,066 people were convicted on the "Finnish line", 9,078 of them were sentenced to execution;

January 29, 1938 - NKVD directive on the "Iranian operation". Convicted 13,297 people, of whom 2,046 were sentenced to death. February 1, 1938 - NKVD directive on the "national operation" against Bulgarians and Macedonians. February 16, 1938 - NKVD directive on arrests along the "Afghan line". Convicted 1,557 people, of whom 366 were sentenced to death. March 23, 1938 - Resolution of the Politburo on cleansing the defense industry of persons belonging to nationalities against whom repressions are being carried out. June 24, 1938 - directive of the People's Commissariat of Defense on the dismissal from the Red Army of military personnel of nationalities not represented on the territory of the USSR.

On November 17, 1938, by a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the activities of all emergency bodies were terminated, arrests were allowed only with the approval of a court or prosecutor. By the directive of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Beria of December 22, 1938, all sentences of the emergency authorities were declared invalid if they were not carried out or declared convicted before November 17.

The Stalinist repressions had several goals: they destroyed possible opposition, created an atmosphere of universal fear and unquestioning obedience to the will of the leader, ensured the rotation of personnel through the promotion of young people, weakened social tension, blaming the difficulties of life on the "enemies of the people", provided labor force to the Main Administration of the camps ( GULAG).

By September 1938, the main task of the repression had been completed. Repressions have already begun to threaten a new generation of party-KGB leaders who came forward during the repression. In July-September, a mass shooting of previously arrested party functionaries, communists, military leaders, NKVD officers, intellectuals and other citizens was carried out, this was the beginning of the end of the terror. In October 1938, all bodies for extrajudicial sentencing were dissolved (with the exception of the Special Meeting under the NKVD, as it received after Beria's arrival in the NKVD).

Conclusion

Mass repressions, arbitrariness and lawlessness, which were committed by the Stalinist leadership on behalf of the revolution, the party, the people, were a heavy legacy of the past.

The desecration of the honor and life of compatriots, begun in the mid-1920s, continued with the most severe consistency for several decades. Thousands of people were subjected to moral and physical torture, many of them were exterminated. The lives of their families and loved ones were turned into a hopeless streak of humiliation and suffering. Stalin and his entourage appropriated practically unlimited power, depriving the Soviet people of the freedoms that were granted to them during the years of the revolution. Mass repressions were carried out for the most part through extrajudicial reprisals through the so-called special meetings, collegia, "troikas" and "deuces". However, even in the courts elementary norms of legal proceedings were violated.

The restoration of justice, begun by the 20th Congress of the CPSU, was carried out inconsistently and, in fact, ceased in the second half of the 60s.

Thousands of court cases have yet to be brought up. The stain of injustice has not yet been removed from the Soviet people who innocently suffered during the forced collectivization, subjected to imprisonment, evicted with their families to remote areas without a livelihood, without the right to vote, even without declaring a term of imprisonment.

List of used literature

2) Aralovets N.A. Losses of the population of Soviet society in the 1930s: problems, sources, methods of study in national historiography // Otechestvennaya istoriya. 1995. No. 1. P.135-146

3) www.wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia

4) Lyskov D.Yu. "Stalinist repressions". Great lie of the XX century, 2009 .-- 288 p.