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Stalin's Purges

  • Thread starter Thread starter BH
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BH said:
Let me play devil's advocate here and ya'll feel free to tear me up.

I have read a lot of you say that there was no real evidence, proof, ect offered at these trials. What if this was done, not so much because the people tried were actually innocent and Stalin was just being mean and wanting to get rid of threats to his own power, but perhaps they were guilty and the Communists putting them on trial did not want the evidence presented clearly because then those spies and sabatours still loose could get an idea how much the NKVD, police, ect knew about them and their possible connections and personel.

I am not saying this was the case, just food for thought. And food for thought can always be brain vomited back out. (P
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It goes beyond a lack of evidence for real crimes. Stalin made mere intellectual thought a crime. Some charges were not about spying for other nations or organized political opposition, but merely engaging in rational academic thought about facts that contradicted the lies that Stalin used to rationalize his general brutality against the populace.

That disdain for reasoned thought and willingness to attack it for selfish immoral ends, makes it likely that even when the charges were more serious, at least some of the disregard for real evidence of these serious crimes was not simply (as you hypothesize) an pragmatic strategy against real threats, but a disregard for who was a real threat and willingness to knowingly kill innocents to cower any potential threats into submission.
 
ronburgundy said:
BH said:
Let me play devil's advocate here and ya'll feel free to tear me up.

I have read a lot of you say that there was no real evidence, proof, ect offered at these trials. What if this was done, not so much because the people tried were actually innocent and Stalin was just being mean and wanting to get rid of threats to his own power, but perhaps they were guilty and the Communists putting them on trial did not want the evidence presented clearly because then those spies and sabatours still loose could get an idea how much the NKVD, police, ect knew about them and their possible connections and personel.

I am not saying this was the case, just food for thought. And food for thought can always be brain vomited back out. (P
Click to expand...

It goes beyond a lack of evidence for real crimes. Stalin made mere intellectual thought a crime. Some charges were not about spying for other nations or organized political opposition, but merely engaging in rational academic thought about facts that contradicted the lies that Stalin used to rationalize his general brutality against the populace.

That disdain for reasoned thought and willingness to attack it for selfish immoral ends, makes it likely that even when the charges were more serious, at least some of the disregard for real evidence of these serious crimes was not simply (as you hypothesize) an pragmatic strategy against real threats, but a disregard for who was a real threat and willingness to knowingly kill innocents to cower any potential threats into submission.
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There are two points about the purges that are not raised in any of the foregoing posts

1. To a great extent they were a purge of Old Bolsheviks, which in this context was a code word for Jews, partly reflecting Stalin's antisemitism, and partly his fear that these *cosmopolitans* and other deviationists from the Stalin party line, cosmopolitans being another code word for Jews, would align with Trotsky's (another Jewish Old Bolshevik, though not so *Old* in this case) views of continuous World revolution, as opposed to revolution/communism in one country.

2. The Red Army purges 1937-39 (NOT in the 1940's) were at first designed to destroy the Red Army's commander under Trotsky, General Tuhachevsky and his generals and Commisars on the Northern front in the Polish-Soviet war 1920-21, who blamed their defeat in that war on the disobedience of orders by Stalin, a Commisar on the Southern front and so by his generals, Budyonny, Voroshilov and Timoshenko, all of whom survived to show their incompetence in the war in Finland in 1940 and the initial stages of the German invasion of 1941.

The defeat by Poland meant the end of the dream of the communist revolution's spread to, or imposition in, Germany and Southern and Western Europe in 1920, followed by its only partial success in 1945.

And further, --- http://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?7416-Stalin-s-Purges/page3&highlight=stalin's+purges

3. With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Joseph Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenin's original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.

Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities) such as Poles, ethnic Germans, Koreans, etc. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed.[33] Many Americans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union during the worst of the Great Depression were executed; others were sent to prison camps or gulags.[55][56] Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed to a story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.

In light of revelations from Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and 328,612 in 1938) were executed in the course of the terror,[57] with the great mass of victims merely "ordinary" Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, and beggars
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Anybody really interested in Stalin's purges probably will want to get a copy of this book, one of the first full blown examinations of the history of Stalin's craziness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Terror

The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties is a book by British historian Robert Conquest, published in 1968.[1] It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. Conquest's title was in turn an allusion to the period that was called Reign of Terror (French: la Terreur, and, from June to July 1794, la Grande Terreur -the Great Terror-) during the French Revolution.[2]

A revised version of the book, called The Great Terror: A Reassessment, was printed in 1990 after Conquest was able to amend the text, having consulted recently opened Soviet archives.

One of the first books by a Western writer to discuss the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, it was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the Khrushchev Thaw in the period 1956–1964. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s. Lastly it was based on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the census.
 
4321lynx said:
3. With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Joseph Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenin's original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.

Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities) such as Poles, ethnic Germans, Koreans, etc. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed.[33] Many Americans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union during the worst of the Great Depression were executed; others were sent to prison camps or gulags.[55][56] Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed to a story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.

In light of revelations from Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and 328,612 in 1938) were executed in the course of the terror,[57] with the great mass of victims merely "ordinary" Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, and beggars
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Does that 700,00 include those whose died in transit, died in the camps from neglect, malnutrition etc. or just those who got a bullet in the skull?
 
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