- Soviet political repression
Soviet political repressions was a "de facto" and "de jure" system of prosecution of people who were or perceived to be enemies of the
Soviet system . From the beginning its theoretical basis were the theory ofMarxism about theclass struggle and the resulting notion of thedictatorship of the proletariat . Its legal basis was formalized into the Article 58 in the code ofRSFSR and similar articles for other Soviet republics.The term "
repression ", "terror ", and other strong words were normal working terms with respect to the internal politics of the early Soviet state, reflecting the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed apply ruthless force to suppress the resistance of thesocial class es which Marxism considered antagonistic to the class ofproletariat . This phraseology was gradually abolished afterdestalinization , but the system of persecution for political views and activities remained until thedissolution of the Soviet Union .The numerous victims of
extrajudicial punishment were called the enemies of the people. The punishment by the state includedsummary execution s,torture , sending innocent people toGulag , involuntary settlement, and stripping of citizen's rights. Usually, all members of a family, including children, were punished as "traitor of Motherland family members". The repressions have been conducted byCheka ,OGPU andNKVD in several consecutive waves known asRed Terror , Collectivisation,Great Purge ,Doctor's Plot , and others. Thesecret police forces conducted massacres of prisoners at numerous occasions. The repressions were practiced inSoviet republics and at the territories "liberated" bySoviet Army duringWorld War II , includingBaltic States andEastern Europe [Anton Antonov-Ovseenko "Beria " (Russian) Moscow, AST, 1999. [http://fictionbook.ru/author/antonov_ovseenko_anton/beriya/antonov_ovseenko_beriya.html Russian text online] ] .State repression led to uprisings, which were brutally suppressed by military force, like the
Tambov rebellion ,Kronstadt rebellion , orVorkuta Uprising . During Tambov rebellion,Bolshevik military forces widely usedchemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels. [http://gulag.ipvnews.org/article20061017.php B.V.Sennikov. "Tambov rebellion and liquidation of peasants in Russia"] , Publisher: Posev, 2004, ISBN 5-85824-152-2 [http://www.rusk.ru/vst.php?idar=321701 Full text in Russian] ] Most prominent citizens of villages were often taken ashostages and executed if the resistance fighters did not surrender. [Courtois, Stephane; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis & Kramer, Mark (1999). "TheBlack Book of Communism : Crimes, Terror, Repression".Harvard University Press . ISBN 0-674-07608-7 ]Loss of life
According to the
Guiness Book of Records , 66.7 million people were killed in the Soviet Union by state persecution from October 1917 through 1959 - under Lenin, Stalin, and KhrushevYevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. "The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia - Past, Present, and Future"] , 1994. ISBN 0-374-18104-7, page 107. ] . However the exact number of victims may never be known and remains a matter of debates among historians. The result depends on the period of time and the criteria and methods used for the estimates. For example, the number of victims under Joseph Stalin's regime vary from 8 to 61 million Ponton, G. (1994) "The Soviet Era."] Tsaplin, V.V. (1989) "Statistika zherty naseleniya v 30e gody."] Nove, Alec. "Victims of Stalinism: How Many?", in "Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives" (edited byJ. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning),Cambridge University Press , 1993. ISBN 0-521-44670-8.] Bibliography: Courtois et al. The Black Book of Communism ] Davies, Norman. "Europe: A History", Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN 0-06-097468-0.] Bibliography: Rummel.]Ethnic cleansing and genocide
Entire nations have been collectively punished by the Soviet Government for alleged collaboration with the enemy during
World War II . At least nine of distinct ethnic-linguistic groups, including ethnic Germans, ethnicGreeks , ethnic Poles,Crimean Tatars ,Balkars , Chechens, and Kalmyks, were deported to remote unpopulated areas ofSiberia andKazakhstan . The ethnicity-targeted population transfers in the Soviet Union led to millions of deaths due to the inflicted hardships.Robert Conquest (1986) "The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine."Oxford University Press . ISBN 0-19-505180-7. ] Koreans and Romanians were also deported.Mass operations of the NKVD were needed todeport hundreds of thousands of people.The deaths of millions of people during the
Soviet famine of 1932-1933 was caused intentionally by confiscating all food and blocking the migration of starving population by the Soviet government. . The overall number ofpeasant s who died in 1930–1937 fromhunger and [repressions during collectivisation (including inKavkaz andKazakhstan ) was at least 14.5 million. More than a million of people died earlier during otherdroughts and famines in Russia and the USSR .Red Terror
Red Terror in
Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests andexecution s conducted by theBolshevik government. InSoviet historiography , the Red Terror is described as officially announced onSeptember 2 ,1918 byYakov Sverdlov and ended in about October 1918. However many historians, beginning withSergei Melgunov , apply this term to repressions for the whole period of theRussian Civil War , 1918-1922. Serge Petrovich Melgunov, "Red Terror in Russia", Hyperion Pr (1975), ISBN 0-883-55187-X]Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a multi-party war that occurred within the former
Russian Empire after theRussian provisional government collapsed and theBolshevik party assumed power in Petrograd (St. Petersburg).Collectivization
Collectivization in the
Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land and labour intocollective farm s ( _ru. колхо́з, "kolkhoz ", plural "kolkhozy"). The Soviet leaders were confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis in agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927 and was becoming more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program. [Davies, R.W., "The Soviet Collective Farms, 1929-1930," Macmillan, London (1980), p. 1.]Great Terror
The Great Purge ( _ru. Большая чистка, transliterated "Bolshaya chistka") was a series of campaigns of
political repression andpersecution in theSoviet Union orchestrated byJoseph Stalin in 1937-1938.Orlando Figes "The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia", 2007, ISBN 0-08050-7461-9, pages 227-315.] Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. By Robert Gellately. 2007. Knopf. 720 pages ISBN 1400040051] Also described as a "Soviet holocaust" by several authors, [Alan Wood, "Stalin and Stalinism", Routledge 1990, ISBN 0415037212, page 37] [Ian Kershaw, Moshe Lewin, "Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison", Cambridge University Press 1997, ISBN 0521565219, page 300] [Leo Kuper, "Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century", Yale University Press 1982, ISBN 0300031203] it involved thepurge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , repression of peasants, deportations ofethnic minorities , and the persecution of unaffiliated persons, characterized by widespread police surveillance, widespread suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and killings. Estimates of the number of deaths associated with the Great Purge run from the official figure of 681,692 to nearly 2 million.Population transfers
Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "
anti-Soviet " categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers ", deportations of nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas, seeInvoluntary settlements in the Soviet Union .World War II and aftermath
From 1941 on,
Stalin was willing to strike back against the at all costs and led the war with extreme brutality, including against his own soldiers. Catherine Merridale, "Ivan's War, the Red Army 1939-1945", London: Faber and Faber, 2005, ISBN 0-5712-1808-3] [http://www.rmc.ca/academic/conference/iuscanada/papers/goette_sovietpaper.pdf "Not-So-Friendly Fire"] , Queen’s University, Canada] The Red Army took much higher casualties than any other military force during World War II, in part because of high manpower attrition and inadequate time for training. [ [http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/glantz2/glantz2.asp CSI Report No. 11] : Soviet Defensive Tactics at Kursk] Faced with badly equippedinfantry units barely capable of standing up againstmachine guns ,tanks andartillery , the tactics of Soviet commanders were often based on mass infantry attacks, inflicting heavy losses on their own troops. This tactic was also used for clearing minefields, which were ‘attacked’ by waves of infantry soldiers in order to clear them. [David Glantz, Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941 (2001) ISBN 0-7524-1979-X ] [David Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (1998) ISBN 0-7006-0879-6] [ [http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/reviewsw63.htm Review of "Stumbling Colossus"] ] Catherine Merridale, "Ivan's War, the Red Army 1939-1945", London: Faber and Faber, 2005, ISBN 0-5712-1808-3] In accordance with the orders of Soviet High Command, retreating soldiers or even soldiers who hesitated to advance faced being shot by rearguardSMERSH units:
Stalin’s order No 270 of August 16, 1941, states that in case of retreat or surrender, all officers involved were to be shot on the spot and all enlisted men threatened with total annihilation as well as possible reprisals against their families. [http://www.rmc.ca/academic/conference/iuscanada/papers/goette_sovietpaper.pdf "Not-So-Friendly Fire"] , Queen’s University, Canada] . [ [http://www.hrono.ru/dokum/194_dok/19410816.html Order No 270 in Russian language on hrono.ru] ] Catherine Merridale, "Ivan's War, the Red Army 1939-1945", London: Faber and Faber, 2005, ISBN 0-5712-1808-3]Post-Stalin era (1953-1991)
After Stalin's death, the suppression of dissent was dramatically reduced and took new forms. The internal critics of the system were convicted for
anti-Soviet agitation ,Anti-Soviet slander , or as "social parasites". Others were labeled as mentally ill, havingsluggishly progressing schizophrenia and incarcerated in "psikhushka s", i.e.mental hospital s used by the Soviet authorities as prisons [http://hrw.org/reports/2002/china02/china0802-02.htm#P397_91143 The Soviet Case: Prelude to a Global Consensus on Psychiatry and Human Rights. Human Rights Watch. 2005] ] . A number of notable dissidents, includingAleksandr Solzhenitsyn ,Vladimir Bukovsky , andAndrei Sakharov , were sent to internal or external exile.References
ee also
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rehabilitation (Soviet)
*Human rights in the Soviet Union
*Soviet political system
*Soviet law For other articles on the topic see:
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