Stalin’s Meat Grinder in the Great Terror
Various scholars estimated that 20 million and perhaps up to 40 million people were killed between 1924 and 1953 during the communist dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. His victims included Russians, Tatars, Poles, Czechs, Cossacks, Chechens, and Turks as well as every other nationality that came within the grasp of the Red Soviet Empire.
Stalin not only exterminated purported “enemies of the peoples” but also came close to liquidating the entire slate of communist Bolshevik leaders, including those who had been his or Lenin’s comrades during the 1917 Russian Revolution. In fact, Stalin probably killed more communists from every nationality than his fascist and Western democratic enemies combined during peacetime.
“We will destroy every enemy, even if he is an Old Bolshevik, we will destroy his kin, his family. Anyone who by his actions or thoughts encroaches on the unity of the socialist state, we shall destroy relentlessly.” Joseph Stalin, November 1937.
Purging the Old Bolsheviks
Sovietologists remind us that after the kangaroo trials, Stalin began a purge and had Bolshevik leaders like Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev, and Ivan Smirnov accused of being “leftist Trotskyites,” arrested, psychologically tortured, and then shot in 1936 by his dreaded secret police, the NKVD, a precursor to the KGB.
Later in 1936, the “right-wing” communists, Bukharin and his followers, Rykov, Nikolay Krestinsky, and Christian Rakovsky, came next. They were arrested and executed as members of the “rightist Trotskyite Bloc.”
Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the military leader of the Bolshevik organization that “stormed” the Winter Palace during the October Revolution and brutally suppressed the Tambov Rebellion (1920-1921), was purged in 1938 and executed.
Mariya Spiridonova was one of the leaders of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party (Left SR). This radical revolutionary faction represented the peasants. On July 4, 1918, at the Fifth All-Russian Soviet Congress dominated by the Bolsheviks, Mariya Spiridonova, a 32-year-old woman with dark hair and wearing pince-nez, rose to the podium and attacked the Bolsheviks with words of fire:
I accuse you of betraying the peasants, of making use of them for your own ends. In Lenin’s philosophy, you are only dung—only manure. When the peasants, the Bolshevik peasants, the Left SR peasants, and the non-party peasants are alike humiliated, oppressed and crushed—crushed as peasants—in my hand you will find the same pistol…
The British secret agents, Bruce Lockhart and Sidney Reilly, were at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow where the Congress had convened. When the expected Left SR uprising against the Bolsheviks failed, Spiridonova awaited her fate calmly and with composed resolve. She was arrested and jailed in the summer of 1918. Twenty Left SR hostages were shot. Spiridonova was sent to the Gulag. The rest of her Left SR comrades—like the Kadets and Mensheviks—were hunted down and virtually exterminated by Lenin and Stalin.
Spiridinova was persecuted for years, arrested, harshly interrogated, released, re-arrested, sentenced and resentenced repeatedly, sent to various labor camps and settlements in the Gulag and in exile. Finally, she was executed in 1941, three months after the German invasion of the USSR in the Medvedevsky Forest massacre by order of Stalin.
NKVD General Pavel Sudoplatov was the chief of “Special Tasks” or “wet affairs” (assassinations) for the NKVD. He was personally tasked by Stalin to arrange the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City. Aware of the “wet affair skills” of his trusted lieutenant, Leonid Eitingon, Sudoplatov decided to tap him for the assignment. Eitingon had served “with distinction” in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Nevertheless, Stalin had been purging the NKVD leaders serving abroad and Eitingon had not only been arrested but also come close to being executed. Sudoplatov fished him out of prison for the “special task” of arranging Trotsky’s assassination, which Eitingon successfully accomplished with the help of his Spanish-communist mistress, Caridad Mercader and her son, Ramón.
In 1940, after stalking Trotsky for some time and finally befriending him, the Spanish communist and NKVD agent, Ramón Mercader, assassinated Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico City.
Purging the Military
Scholars of Russian military history are familiar with events surrounding the purge, trial, and execution in 1937 of the most capable and distinguished general in the Red Army, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Marshall of the Soviet Union.
According to Stalin and the NKVD, Tukhachevsky was a member of the Trostkyite-Bukharinite-Fascist counterrevolutionary conspiracy and, therefore, a traitor to the motherland. Along with Tukhachevsky, 40,000 Red Army personnel were eliminated during the Terror of 1937-1938.
Almost the entire Defense Council of the Red Army, would be shot within six months after the trial and execution of Tukhachevsky. Only one general did not break under interrogation, General Vasily Blyukher, who died in prison after being repeatedly tortured.
Stalin’s security police eliminated 45 percent of the army and navy command as well as political staff from the positions of Brigade commander through the officer ranks. When World War II came two years later and the German Panzers rolled over the western expanse of the USSR, the Red Army was not ready. It had been decapitated.
Purging the Security Services
Stalin also routinely purged the security services (that is, the secret police). Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD, was purged and executed in 1936 for not being efficient enough in persecuting and prosecuting purported enemies of the state, namely the old Bolsheviks, including his failure to promptly falsify evidence to convict the “right-wing” Bolshevik leader, Nikolai Bukharin. Yagoda’s successor was the blood-drenched, dwarfish Nikolai Yezhov.
The “right-wing” communists were arrested in 1936 by Yagoda, and Bukharin Rykov, Krestinsky, Rakovsky were executed for being members of the “rightist Trotskyite Bloc.” Their final persecutor was Nikolai Yezhov, who presided over the Great Terror and Purges of 1937-1938, a period that is sometimes referred to as the “Yezhovina,” as if Yezhov, and not Stalin, was chiefly responsible. Yezhov would also be arrested, purged by Stalin, and executed a couple of years later in 1940.
Martyn Latsis was a Bolshevik and an assistant to Felik Dzerzhinsky, “Iron Felix,” the founder and director of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police authorized by Lenin to spread terror and eliminate enemies of the people without bourgeoise moral prejudices. During Lenin’s Red Terror of 1918, Comrade Latsis ordered the extermination of White Russian suspects and prisoners in the Crimea. He exhorted:
We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We aren’t looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question that we ask is—to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education, or profession. These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of Red Terror.
But for Latsis, the chickens came home to roost. During Stalin’s Great Terror, Latsis was purged and executed in 1938
Viktor Abakumov was the former SMERSH (“Death to Spies”) commander during World War II and then NKVD Chief. He was arrested during the Doctors’ Plot affair; purged, imprisoned, and tortured. He was executed in 1954 during Khrushchev’s reign.
Purging Other “Enemies of the People”
Stalin also Purged the Great Illegals and the Foreign Intelligence Services operating abroad, the international communists (his arm of retribution reached everywhere), the Intelligentsia, etc., but those who suffered the most were the Kulaks and the proletariat for whom he was purportedly seeking justice and punishing spies and wreckers of the Soviet state.
One must never forget that during the Great Terror of 1936-1938, also known as the Great Purge, when old Bolsheviks and communist party functionaries were eliminated by Stalin, the Soviet state continued to grind down upon the very citizens the Revolution had sworn to liberate and protect.
Millions of kulaks and Russian peasants were exterminated during the forced establishment of collective farms. Peasants fought requisition and collectivization by slaughtering farm animals, hoarding, or burning crops. Stalin’s militia and secret police fought back by drowning, shooting, and starving some peasants, while others were sent to the Gulag to be used as slave labor in the construction of the White Sea and Volga canals or in timber and lumber projects in the tundra and taiga. The average lifespan of the peasant or worker (the proletariat in chains) was barely three months in the labor camps.
Likewise, millions of workers (the sanctified proletariat) denounced each other in the suspicious, paranoid atmosphere of Stalinist Russia. Many of them heard the dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night and were quickly whisked away in the “Black Marias” of the feared NKVD secret police, or were directly removed from the assembly or workplace, taken to the Gulag, and summarily shot as “wreckers,” spies, saboteurs, and enemies of the people.
Russia needs to come to terms with its Stalinist and communist past, reject the lies, and face the stern and sobering reality of past repression, mass terror, and mass extermination of citizens for the principles of false equality, the deceptive brotherhood of workers, and other lies of communism.
This article is excerpted from Dr. Faria’s book, Stalin, Mao, Communism, and the 21st Century Aftermath in Russia and China (2024)
