Great Purge

And then they kind of have, like...

It's as though it's a sports chat show, and they're talking about the New York Yankees, only it's the Great Terror.

Or it's Robespierre.

If you took

There becomes this battle over his successor, Trotsky and Stalin.

Eventually Stalin wins out on that, and then Stalin just ramps up, uh, you know, with his, with his, his Great Terror, his purges.

Tens of millions of people die.

His use of the Gulag.

Within months, he was shot dead in circumstances that were never properly investigated.

So did Stalin order the killing, or did he exploit it to unleash what we now know as the Great Terror? And after purging his army and ignoring repeated warnings of a German invasion, how did he use that same machinery of fear to stop the Soviet Union from collapsing? Hello, and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.

And me, William Durrant-Paul.

Now, in this episode, we are going to be talking a, a little less about who Stalin was and a little more about what he actually did with all of the power that he spent 30 years accumulating.

And so as you, as you said, he was to be murdered.

The great mystery is was Stalin actively implicated in his murder, or did other people see the way the wind was blowing and decided to take it into their own hands? We just don't know.

It's a mystery that's gone on ev- ever since it took place, and we don't know, but the consequences were to prove remarkable, uh, grim and gruesome because this would unleash the Great Terror.

Yeah, I mean, just, just before we get into just the, the, the mechanisms of, of the murder as well, we should say that, you know, Stalin is a p- paranoid nut by this point, and Kirov is, you know, he's a better-looking man.

especially on the early history of Yugoslav communism and party history, debates on the national question, Balkan federalism, among other things.

He is the author of Before Tito, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia During the Great Purge, 1936-40, and two upcoming English language books, publications, as I understand it, The Iconoclast, The Selected Works of Kostina Wakwicz, and The National Question, which I guess should be out soon.

You can answer that in a second.

And a reworking of your dissertation, which I don't know if it'll be the same title, but Sickle Without Hammer, Revolution, Development, and Nation-Building in the Balkans, 1900s to 1930s.

They both deal with the same subject, but different topics.

different operations in in soviet russia so um the first article that i read was the myth that jews were the ethnic group most persecuted by the soviet regime the great terror and national operations what why do people think that the what has caused people to believe that jews were the most persecuted group by the soviets

uh well for the 37 38 i think it's because there is a even a book by a person that used to be a good historian, and then she's completely sold out out of Canada, Lynn Viola.

She wrote a very good book on dekulakization, the deportation of kulaks to special settlement areas, particularly in the far north in the Arctic Circle, called The Unknown Gulag.

They were 1.8% of the total population, about 5.5% of the Communist Party.

But under Yagoda and Yezhov, the NKVD, they were between almost 40%, I think it was 38.5%, and 20% up until the purged by Beria of them in November 38, of the top 100 or so NKVD officers, including, as I said, Yagoda himself, number one man, Leplevsky, number one man for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Boris Berman, number one man for the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, Genrikh Lyushkov, the Far Eastern cry, head of the Gulag from 1930 to 1938, the three men, Kogan, Matvei Berman, who was the brother of Boris Berman, he was in power as head of the Gulag from 1932 to 1937, and then Israel Plinner.

So you really have, during the 1930s, when you have de-Gulagization, the Holodomor, and, of course, the Great Terror in 37 and 38, complete with national operations against diaspora groups, but not Jews, because they didn't have an independent homeland at that time, about 250,000, and the largest group being the Poles and second, Germans, and then coming up, Latvians.

What was the justification for basically for the extermination of Poles and Germans and Latvians?

So he was a totalitarian dictator from the 1920s to 1950s.

And he has this period in the 1930s where there's a great terror.

And basically everything that he's doing in the 1930s is to ensure that he can keep his power.

So he is purging people left, right and centre.