Stalin's repressions: what it was.

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

Today, the assessment of “Stalin’s terror” has become in our country a touchstone, a password, a milestone in relation to the past and future of Russia. Are you judging? Determined and irrevocable? - A democrat and a common man! Any doubts? - Stalinist!

Let's try to figure out a simple question: did Stalin organize the “Great Terror”? Perhaps there are other causes of terror that common people - liberals - prefer to remain silent about?

So. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to create a new type of ideological elite, but these attempts stalled from the very beginning. Mainly because the new “people’s” elite believed that through their revolutionary struggle they had fully earned the right to enjoy the benefits that the anti-people “elite” had simply by birthright. In the noble mansions, the new nomenclature quickly became accustomed, and even the old servants remained in place, they only began to be called servants. This phenomenon was very widespread and was called “combarism”.

Even the right measures turned out to be ineffective, thanks to the massive sabotage of the new elite. I am inclined to include the introduction of the so-called “party maximum” as the right measures - a ban on party members receiving a salary greater than the salary of a highly qualified worker.

That is, a non-party director of a plant could receive a salary of 2,000 rubles, and a communist director only 500 rubles, and not a penny more. In this way, Lenin sought to avoid the influx of careerists into the party, who use it as a springboard to quickly get into the bread-and-butter positions. However, this measure was half-hearted without simultaneously destroying the system of privileges attached to any position.

By the way, V.I. Lenin strongly opposed the reckless growth in the number of party members, which is what the CPSU later did, starting with Khrushchev. In his work “The Infantile Disease of Leftism in Communism” he wrote: “ We are afraid of excessive expansion of the party, because careerists and scoundrels who deserve only to be shot inevitably try to join the government party».

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

Stalin announced this in his characteristic cautious manner at the 17th Congress of the CPSU(b) (March 1934). In his Report, the Secretary General described a certain type of workers who interfere with the party and the country: “... These are people with well-known merits in the past, people who believe that party and Soviet laws were written not for them, but for fools. These are the same people who do not consider it their duty to carry out the decisions of party bodies... What do they count 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 governing bodies with impunity...».

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

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

Considering Soviet practice, this sounds quite unusual, but nevertheless it is true. He hoped that the majority of this public would not overcome the popular filter without support from above. Moreover, according to the new constitution, it was planned to nominate candidates to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR not only from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), but also from public organizations and groups of citizens.

What happened next? On December 5, 1936, a new Constitution of the USSR was adopted, the most democratic constitution of that time in the whole world, even according to ardent critics of the USSR. For the first time in Russian history, secret alternative elections were to take place. By secret ballot. Despite the fact that the party elite tried to put a spoke in the wheels even during the period when the draft constitution was being created, Stalin managed to bring the matter to an 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 approximately 250 thousand of them. By the way, the NKVD was counting on approximately this 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 with great pleasure would not only not have chosen them, but would also have broken their heads. Many high-ranking regional party secretaries had blood on their hands up to their elbows. During the period of collectivization, the regions had complete self-government. In one of the regions, Khataevich, this nice man, actually declared a civil war during collectivization in his particular region. As a result, Stalin was forced to threaten him that he would shoot him immediately if he did not stop mocking people. Do you think that comrades Eikhe, Postyshev, Kosior and Khrushchev were better, less “nice”? Of course, the people remembered all this in 1937, and after the elections these bloodsuckers would have gone into the woods.

Stalin really planned such a peaceful rotation operation; he openly told an American correspondent about this in March 1936, Howard Roy. He said that these elections would be a good whip in the hands of the people to change leadership 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 of Bolsheviks, held in June 1936, directly aimed the party leadership at new times. When discussing the draft of the new constitution, A. Zhdanov, in his extensive report, spoke absolutely unequivocally: “ The new electoral system... will give a powerful impetus to improving the work of Soviet bodies, eliminating bureaucratic bodies, eliminating bureaucratic shortcomings and distortions in the work of our Soviet organizations. And these shortcomings, as you know, are very significant. Our party bodies must be prepared for the electoral struggle..." And he went on to say that these elections will be a serious, serious test of Soviet workers, because secret voting provides ample opportunities to reject candidates who are undesirable and undesirable to the masses, that party bodies are obliged to distinguish such criticism from HOSTILE ACTIVITIES, that non-party candidates should be treated with all support and attention, because, to put it delicately, there are several times more of them than party members.

In Zhdanov’s report, the terms “intra-party democracy,” “democratic centralism,” and “democratic elections” were publicly voiced. And demands were put forward: to prohibit the “nomination” of candidates without elections, to prohibit voting by “list” at party meetings, to ensure “the unlimited right of party members to challenge nominated candidates and the unlimited right to criticize these candidates.” The last phrase entirely referred to the elections of purely party bodies, where long ago there was not a shadow of democracy. But, as we see, the general elections to Soviet and party bodies have not been forgotten.

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

And how do the party dignitaries 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 all this! Because such innovations are by no means to the taste of that same “Leninist old guard”, which has not yet been destroyed by Stalin, but sits at the plenum in all its grandeur and splendor. Because the vaunted “Leninist Guard” is a bunch of petty satraps. They are accustomed to living in their estates as barons, with sole control over the life and death of people.

The debate on Zhdanov's report was practically disrupted.

Despite Stalin's direct calls to discuss reforms seriously and in detail, the old guard with paranoid persistence turns to more pleasant and understandable topics: terror, terror, terror! What the hell kind of reforms?! There are more pressing tasks: hit the hidden enemy, burn, catch, reveal! People's Commissars, first secretaries - everyone talks about the same thing: how passionately and on a large scale they identify the enemies of the people, how they intend to raise this campaign to cosmic heights...

Stalin is losing patience. When the next speaker appears on the podium, without waiting for him to open his mouth, he ironically throws out: “Have all the enemies been identified or are there still some left?” The speaker, first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional committee Kabakov, (another future “innocent victim of Stalin’s terror”) misses the irony and habitually rants about the fact that the electoral activity of the masses, so you know, is just “ Quite often used by hostile elements for counter-revolutionary work».

They are incurable!!! They simply don’t know any other way! They don't need reforms, secret ballots, or multiple candidates on the ballot. They foam at the mouth and defend the old system, where there is no democracy, but only “boyar will”...
On the podium is Molotov. He says sensible, sensible things: it is necessary to identify real enemies and saboteurs, and not throw mud at all “captains of production” without exception. We must finally learn to distinguish the GUILTY from the INNOCENT. It is necessary to reform the bloated bureaucratic apparatus, IT IS NEEDED TO EVALUATE PEOPLE BY THEIR BUSINESS QUALITIES AND NOT PUT 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 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, openly says:
– In a number of cases, listening to the speakers, one could come to the conclusion that our resolutions and our reports went over the ears of the speakers...
Exactly! They didn’t just pass, they whistled... Most of those gathered in the hall know neither how to work nor how to reform. But they are excellent at catching and identifying enemies, they adore this activity and cannot imagine life without it.

Don’t you think it’s strange that this “executioner” Stalin directly imposed democracy, and his future “innocent victims” ran away from this democracy like the devil from incense. Moreover, they demanded repression, and more.

In short, it was not the “tyrant Stalin”, but precisely the “cosmopolitan Leninist party guard” who ruled the roost 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, IN A GOOD WAY, through elections.

Stalin's authority was so great that the party barons did not dare to openly protest, and in 1936 the Constitution of the USSR, nicknamed Stalin's, was adopted, which provided for a transition to real Soviet democracy.

However, the party nomenklatura reared up and carried out a massive attack on the leader in order to convince him to postpone the holding of free elections until the fight against the counter-revolutionary element was completed.

Regional party bosses, members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), began to stir up passions, referring to recently discovered conspiracies of Trotskyists and the military: they say, as soon as such an opportunity is given, former white officers and nobles, hidden kulak underdogs, clergy and Trotskyist saboteurs will rush into politics .

They demanded not only that any plans for democratization be curtailed, but also that emergency measures be strengthened, and even the introduction of special quotas for mass repressions 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 wrested these powers for itself. And then the small-town party barons, who made up the majority in the Central Committee, feared for their leadership positions, began repression, 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 join city and regional committees. They understood that after a while they might end up in a camp. And this is at best...

During 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). About 65 thousand appeals accumulated in district and regional committees, which there was no one and no time to consider, since the party was engaged in the process of exposure and exclusion.

At the January plenum of the Central Committee of 1938, Malenkov, who made a report on this issue, said that in some areas the Party Control Commission 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 and his Politburo an ultimatum: 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 period of time, five days. Of these five days, one day is Sunday. He expected that they would not make it in such a short time.

But it turns out that these scoundrels already had lists. They simply took lists of previously imprisoned, and sometimes not imprisoned, kulaks, former white officers and nobles, Trotskyist saboteurs, priests and simply ordinary citizens classified as class alien elements. Literally on the second day telegrams arrived from the localities: the first were Comrades Khrushchev and Eiche.

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

There was no longer any talk of ballot papers with several candidates at the Plenum: the reform plans boiled down solely to the fact that candidates for the elections would be nominated “jointly” by communists and non-party members. And from now on there will be only one candidate on each ballot - in order to repel the machinations. And in addition - another long-winded verbiage about the need to identify the masses of entrenched enemies.

Stalin also made another mistake. He sincerely believed that N.I. Yezhov is a man of his team. After all, they worked together in the Central Committee for so many years, shoulder to shoulder. And Yezhov had 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, shot 12,445 people, more than 90 thousand were repressed. These are the numbers carved by the Memorial Society in one of the Rostov parks on the monument to the victims of... Stalinist (?!) repressions. Subsequently, when Evdokimov was shot, an audit found that in the Rostov region more than 18.5 thousand appeals lay motionless and had not been considered. And how many of them were not written! The best party cadres, experienced business executives, and intelligentsia were destroyed... Was he the only one?

Interesting in this regard are the memoirs of the famous poet Nikolai Zabolotsky: “ A strange confidence was ripening in my head that we were in the hands of fascists, who, under the noses of our government, had found a way to destroy Soviet people, 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 thing, but did not dare to mention it to anyone. And really, how else could we explain all the horrors that happened to us?.».

But let's return to Nikolai Yezhov. By 1937, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G. Yagoda staffed the NKVD with scum, obvious traitors and those who replaced their work with hack work. N. Yezhov, who replaced him, followed the lead of the hacks and, while cleaning the country from the “fifth column”, in order to distinguish himself, he turned a blind eye to the fact that the NKVD investigators opened hundreds of thousands of hacky cases against people, most of them completely innocent. (For example, generals A. Gorbatov and K. Rokossovsky were sent to prison.)

And the flywheel of the “Great Terror” began to spin, with its notorious extrajudicial threes and limits on capital punishment. Fortunately, this flywheel quickly crushed those who initiated the process itself, and Stalin’s merit is that he made the most of the opportunities to cleanse the highest echelons of power of all kinds of crap.

It was not Stalin, but Robert Indrikovich Eikhe who proposed creating extrajudicial killing bodies, the famous “troikas”, similar to the “Stolypin” ones, 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 voted. Well, the fact that a year later it was just such a troika that pushed Comrade Eikhe against the wall is, in my deep conviction, nothing but sad justice.

The party leadership literally joined in the massacre with gusto!

Let’s take a closer look at himself, at the repressed regional party baron. And, in fact, what were they like, both in business, and in moral, and in purely human terms? What were they worth as people and specialists? JUST PLUG YOUR NOSE FIRST, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND IT. In short, party members, military men, scientists, writers, composers, musicians and everyone else, right down to noble rabbit breeders and Komsomol members, ate each other with gusto. Those who sincerely believed that they were obliged to exterminate their enemies, those who settled scores. So there is no need to chat about whether the NKVD beat the noble face of this or that “innocently injured figure” or not.

The regional party nomenklatura has achieved the most important thing: after all, in conditions of mass terror, free elections are impossible. Stalin was never able to carry them through. The end of a short thaw. Stalin never pushed through his bloc of reforms. 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 let’s return to Yezhov again. Nikolai Ivanovich was a new person in the “authorities”, he started out 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 security service work directly “on the job.” The basics were extremely simple: the more enemies of the people we catch, the better. You can and should hit, but hitting and drinking is even more fun.
Drunk on vodka, blood and impunity, the People's Commissar soon openly “swimmed.”
He did not particularly hide his new views from those around him. " What do you have to fear? - he said at one of the banquets. - After all, all the power is in our hands. Whoever we want, we execute, whoever we want, we pardon: - After all, we are everything. You need everyone, starting from the regional committee secretary, to follow 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 personnel and such views, the NKVD became mortally dangerous both for the authorities and for the country.

It is difficult to say when the Kremlin began to realize what was happening. Probably sometime in the first half of 1938. But to realize - they 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, raise the troops, take all the security officers into the courtyards of the departments and line them up against the wall? There is no other way, because, as soon as they sensed danger, they would simply sweep away the power.

After all, the same NKVD was in charge of guarding the Kremlin, so the members of the Politburo would have died without even having time to understand anything. After which a dozen “blood-washed” would be put in their place, and the whole country would turn into one large West Siberian region with Robert Eiche 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 your man in the NKVD. Moreover, a person of such a level of loyalty, courage and professionalism that he could, on the one hand, cope with the control of the NKVD, and on the other, stop the monster. Stalin hardly had a large choice of such people. Well, at least one was found. But what kind of person is 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 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 Stalin did not initiate them. The unanimous opinion of one part of the liberal perestroika and current ideologists that Stalin thus strengthened his power by physically eliminating his opponents is easily explainable. These idiots simply judge others by themselves: given the opportunity, they will readily devour anyone they see as a danger.

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

Another part of these gentlemen believes that Stalin, who wanted to finally turn into the Lord God on Soviet soil, decided to deal with everyone who doubted his genius in the slightest. And, above all, with those who, together with Lenin, created the October Revolution. They say that this is why almost the entire “Leninist Guard” innocently went under the ax, and at the same time the top of the Red Army, who were accused of a never-existent conspiracy against Stalin. 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 did not like the “father of all Soviet peoples.”

For example, the West once published the memoirs of the former Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Orlov (Leiba Feldbin), who fled our country in the late 30s, taking a huge amount of government dollars. Orlov, who knew well the “inner workings” of his native NKVD, directly wrote that a coup was being prepared in the Soviet Union. Among the conspirators, according to him, 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 Kyiv Military District, Jonah Yakir. Stalin became aware of the conspiracy, and took very tough retaliatory actions...

And in the 80s, the archives of Joseph Vissarionovich’s most important opponent, 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 action to destabilize the situation in the Soviet Union, even to the point of organizing mass terrorist actions.
In the 90s, our archives already opened access to interrogation protocols of repressed leaders of the anti-Stalinist opposition. Based on the nature of these materials and the abundance of facts and evidence contained in them, today’s independent experts have made three important conclusions.

Firstly, the overall picture of a broad conspiracy against Stalin looks very, very convincing. It was impossible to somehow stage-manage or falsify such testimony to please the “father of nations.” Especially in the part where it was about the military plans of the conspirators. Here is what the famous historian and publicist Sergei Kremlev said about this: “Take and read the testimony of Tukhachevsky, given by him after his arrest. The confessions of the conspiracy themselves 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 arises: could such testimony be 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, this testimony, and voluntarily, could only be given by a knowledgeable person no less than the level of Deputy People’s Commissar of Defense, which is what Tukhachevsky was.”

Secondly, the very manner of the conspirators’ handwritten confessions, their handwriting indicated that their people wrote themselves, in fact voluntarily, without physical pressure from the investigators. This destroyed the myth that testimony was brutally extracted by the force of “Stalin’s executioners,” although this also happened.

Thirdly, Western Sovietologists and the émigré public, without access to archival materials, had to actually make their judgments about the scale of repression out of thin air. At best, they contented themselves with interviews with dissidents who had either been imprisoned in the past or cited stories of those who had been through the Gulag.

The highest bar in estimating the number of “victims of communism” was set by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who stated in an interview with Spanish television in 1976 about 110 million victims. The ceiling of 110 million voiced 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 very close to the figure announced by Zemskov almost 20 years ago - 4 million people.

After the opening of the archives, the West did not believe that the number of those repressed was significantly less than that indicated by the same R. Conquest or A. Solzhenitsyn. In total, according to archival data, for the period from 1921 to 1953, 3,777,380 people were convicted, of which 642,980 people were sentenced to capital punishment. Subsequently, this figure was increased to 4,060,306 people due to 282,926 executed according to paragraphs. 2 and 3 tbsp. 59 (especially dangerous banditry) and Art. 193 - 24 (military espionage). This included the Basmachi, Bandera, washed in blood, the Baltic “forest brothers” and other especially dangerous, bloody bandits, spies and saboteurs. There is more human blood on them than water in the Volga. And they are also considered “innocent victims of Stalin’s repressions.” And Stalin is blamed for all this. (Let me remind you that until 1928, Stalin was not the sole leader of the USSR. AND HE RECEIVED FULL POWER OVER THE PARTY, ARMY AND NKVD ONLY SINCE THE END OF 1938).

The given figures are scary at first glance. But only for the first one. 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 overwhelmed by a wave of criminality. Over the past 30 years, 38 MILLION OF OUR FELLOW CITIZENS have been on trial, under investigation, in prisons and colonies. This is a terrible number! Every ninth..."

So. A crowd of Western journalists arrived in the USSR in 1990. The goal is to familiarize yourself with open archives. They studied the archives of the NKVD - they didn’t believe it. The archives of the People's Commissariat of Railways were requested. We looked it up and it turned out to be four million. We didn’t believe it. The archives of the People's Commissariat of Food were requested. We got acquainted and it turned out that there were 4 million repressed people. We got acquainted with the clothing allowances of the camps. The result was 4 million repressed. Do you think that after this the Western media published batches of articles with the correct numbers of repressions? Nothing like that. 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 repression” shows that this phenomenon is extremely multi-layered. There are real cases there: about conspiracies and espionage, political trials of die-hard oppositionists, cases about the crimes of presumptuous regional owners and party officials who have “floated” from power. But there are also many falsified cases: settling scores in the corridors of power, cheating in the service, communal squabbles, literary rivalry, scientific competition, persecution of clergy who supported the kulaks during collectivization, squabbles between artists, musicians and composers.

AND THERE IS CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY - THE MEANNESS OF INVESTIGATORS AND THE MEANNESS OF INFORMERS (four million denunciations were written in 1937-38). But what was never discovered were the cases concocted at the direction of the Kremlin. There are opposite examples - when, by the will of Stalin, someone was taken out from execution, or even completely released.

One more thing should be understood. The term “repression” is a medical term (suppression, blocking) and was introduced specifically to remove the question of guilt. He was imprisoned in the late 30s, which means he is innocent, since he was “repressed.” In addition, the term “repression” was introduced for use initially with the aim of giving 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 government was the party and state “apparatus,” which consisted to a large extent of unprincipled, illiterate and greedy co-workers, leading party chatterboxes attracted by the rich smell of revolutionary robbery. Such an apparatus was extremely ineffective and uncontrollable, which was like death for the totalitarian Soviet state, in which everything depended on the apparatus.

It was from then on that Stalin made repression an important institution of government and a means of keeping the “apparatus” in check. Naturally, the apparatus became the main object of these repressions. Moreover, repression has become an important tool of state building.

Stalin assumed that the corrupted Soviet apparatus could be transformed into an efficient bureaucracy only after SEVERAL STAGES of repression. Liberals will say that this is what Stalin is all about, that he could not live without repression, without persecuting honest people. But this is what American intelligence officer John Scott reported to the US State Department about who was being repressed. He witnessed these repressions in the Urals in 1937.

“The director of a construction office, who was involved in the construction of new houses for the workers of the plant, was not satisfied with his salary, which amounted to a thousand rubles a month, and his two-room apartment. So he built himself a separate house. The house had five rooms, and he was able to furnish it well: he hung silk curtains, installed a piano, covered the floor with carpets, etc. He then began driving around the city in a car at a time (this was in early 1937) when there were few private cars in the city. At the same time, his office completed the annual construction work plan by only about sixty percent. At meetings and in newspapers he was constantly asked questions about the reasons for such poor performance. He replied that there were no building materials, not enough labor, etc.

An investigation began, during which it became clear that the director was embezzling state funds and selling building materials to nearby collective and state farms at speculative prices. It was also discovered that in the construction office there were people whom he specially paid in order to carry out his “business”.
An open trial took place, lasting several days, at which all these people were tried. They talked a lot about him in Magnitogorsk. In his indictment 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.”

And here is the reaction of the Soviet people to the purge of 1937 and their position at that time. “Often workers even rejoice when they arrest some “big bird,” a leader whom they for some reason dislike. Workers are also very free to express critical thoughts, both in meetings and in private conversations. I have heard them use strong 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 machinations of foreign agents, spies and the advance of the old bourgeoisie, counted on the support and assistance of the population and basically received it.”

Well, and: “...During the purges, thousands of bureaucrats trembled for their jobs. Officials and administrative employees, who previously came to work at ten o'clock and left at half past four 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 those in charge. them enterprises, and they actually began to fight for the implementation of the plan, savings and good living conditions for their subordinates, although before this did not bother them at all.”

Readers interested in this issue are aware of the continuous groans of liberals that during the years of purge, “the best people,” the smartest and most capable, died. Scott also hints at this all the time, but still, as it were, sums it up: “After the purges, the administrative apparatus of the management of the entire plant was almost one hundred percent young Soviet engineers. There are practically no specialists left from among the prisoners and foreign specialists have virtually disappeared. However, by 1939, most departments, such as the Railroad Administration and the plant's coking plant, were performing better than ever before."

During the party purges and repressions, all the prominent party barons, drinking away Russia's gold reserves, bathing with prostitutes in champagne, seizing noble and merchant palaces for personal use, all the disheveled, drugged-up revolutionaries disappeared like smoke. And this is FAIR.

But clearing out the snickering scoundrels from high offices is half the battle; it was also necessary to replace them with worthy people. It is very interesting how this problem was solved in the NKVD.

Firstly, a man was put at the head of the department, who was alien to the kombarism, who had no connections with the capital’s party leadership, but was a proven professional in the field - Lavrenty Beria.

The latter, secondly, mercilessly cleared out the security officers who had compromised themselves,
thirdly, he carried out a radical staff reduction, sending people who seemed to be not vile, but unfit for the profession, to retire or to work in other departments.

And finally, the Komsomol conscription to the NKVD was announced, when completely inexperienced guys came to the authorities to replace honored pensioners or executed scoundrels. But... the main criterion for their selection was an impeccable reputation. If in the characteristics from their place of study, work, place of residence, on the Komsomol or party line there were at least some hints of their unreliability, tendency to selfishness, laziness, then no one invited them to work in the NKVD.

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

Professionalism is a gain, but in order to punish all kinds of bastards, a person must be completely clean. Well, yes, clean hands, a cool head and a warm heart - this is all about the youth of Beria’s call. The fact is that it was at the end of the 30s that the NKVD became a truly effective intelligence service, and not only in the matter of internal cleansing.

Soviet counterintelligence decisively outplayed German intelligence during the war - and this is a 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 boss felt his impunity; there were no more untouchables. Fear did not add intelligence to the nomenklatura, but at least it warned it against outright meanness.

Unfortunately, immediately after the end of the great 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, without answering for anything. And not only.

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

Since we touched on the activities of our dear Nikita Sergeevich, let’s talk about it in a little more detail. With the light hand or language of Ilya Erenburg, the period of Khrushchev’s reign was called the “thaw”. Let's see, what did Khrushchev do before the thaw, during the “Great Terror”?

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

But how did Khrushchev act as First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee and Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks? In 1937-1938 out of 38 senior leaders of the Moscow City Committee, only three people survived, out of 146 party secretaries, 136 were repressed. Where he found 22,000 kulaks in the Moscow region in 1937 cannot be explained to a sober head. In total for 1937-1938 only in Moscow and the Moscow region. he personally repressed 55,741 people.

But perhaps, speaking at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev was worried that innocent ordinary people were shot? Yes, Khrushchev didn’t give a damn about the arrests and executions of ordinary people. His entire report at the 20th Congress was devoted to accusations against Stalin that he imprisoned and shot prominent Bolsheviks and marshals. Those. elite. Khrushchev in his report did not even remember the repressed ordinary people. Why should he worry about the people, “the women are still giving birth,” but the cosmopolitan elite, the Lapotnik Khrushchev, was oh, what a pity.

What were the motives for the appearance of the revealing report at the 20th Party Congress?

Firstly, without trampling his predecessor into the mud, it was unthinkable to hope for Khrushchev’s recognition as a leader after Stalin. No! 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 turns out, is a pleasure—it doesn’t give you back.

The second incentive was Khrushchev’s desire to return the party to managing the economic activities of the state. To lead everyone, for nothing, without answering and obeying no one.

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, all of their hands, as Khrushchev himself put it, were up to the elbows in blood. Khrushchev and others 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 20th Congress of the CPSU gave them such guarantees in the form of an indulgence for remission of all sins, both past and future. The whole mystery of Khrushchev and his associates is not worth a damn: it is the Irrepressible ANIMAL FEAR SITTING IN THEIR SOULS AND THE PATHIOUS THIRST FOR POWER.

The first thing that strikes the de-Stalinizers is their complete disregard for the principles of historicism, which everyone seemed to have been taught in Soviet schools. No historical figure can be assessed by the standards of our contemporary era. He must be judged by the standards of his era - and nothing else. In jurisprudence they say this: “the law has no retroactive force.” That is, the ban introduced this year cannot apply to last year’s actions.

Here, historicism of assessments is also necessary: ​​one cannot judge a person of one era by the standards of another era (especially the new era that he created with his work and genius). At 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 begin with Stalin, it ended with Stalin. It seemed like forever - but the current liberal reforms are again dragging us into that swamp from which we seem to have already climbed out...

The principle of historicism also requires recognizing 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 failed to cope with this too), and another thing to create a new system on the ruins of a country destroyed by civil war. The resistance energy in the second case is several times greater than in the first.

You must understand that many of those executed under Stalin themselves were quite seriously planning to kill him, and if he had 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 severity than 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 who were as accustomed to murder as to peeling potatoes laid claim to supremacy.

For any terror, not only the ruler, but also his opponents, as well as society as a whole, are responsible to history. When the outstanding historian L. Gumilyov, already under Gorbachev, was asked if he held a grudge against Stalin, under whom he was imprisoned, he answered: “ But it wasn’t Stalin who imprisoned me, but my colleagues in the department»…

Well, God bless him with Khrushchev and the 20th Congress. Let's talk about what the liberal media constantly talk about, let's talk about Stalin's guilt.
Liberals accuse Stalin of executing about 700 thousand people over 30 years. The logic of liberals is simple - all are 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, even the CIA analytical center Rand Corporation, based on demographic data and archival documents, calculated the number of people repressed during the Stalin era. This center claims that less than 700 thousand people were executed from 1921 to 1953. At the same time, no more than a quarter of the cases were sentenced under the political article 58. By the way, the same proportion was observed among prisoners in labor camps.

“Do you like it when your people are destroyed in the name of a great goal?” the liberals continue. I will answer. THE PEOPLE - NO, BUT BANDITS, THIEVES AND MORAL MORDERS - YES. But I no longer LIKE it when their own people are destroyed in the name of filling their pockets with dough, hiding behind beautiful liberal-democratic slogans.

Academician Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a big supporter of reforms who was part of President Yeltsin’s administration at that time, admitted a decade and a half later that in just three years of shock therapy in Russia, 8 million (!!!) middle-aged men alone died. Yes, Stalin stands aside and nervously smokes his pipe. Didn't finish it.

However, your words about Stalin’s non-involvement in reprisals against honest people do not convince, the LIBERALS continue. Even if we admit this, then in this case he was simply obliged, firstly, to honestly and openly admit to all the people the lawlessness committed against innocent people, secondly, to rehabilitate the unjustly victims and, thirdly, to take measures to prevent similar lawlessness in the future. None of this was done.

Again a lie. Dear. You simply don’t know the history of the USSR.

As for first and second, the December Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1938 openly recognized the lawlessness committed against honest communists and non-party members, adopting a special resolution on this matter, 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 careerists seeking to distinguish themselves... through repression. To expose a skillfully disguised enemy... seeking to kill our Bolshevik cadres through repressive measures, sowing uncertainty and excessive suspicion in our ranks.”

The harm caused by unjustified repressions was also openly discussed throughout the country at the XVIII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) held in 1939. Immediately after the December Plenum of the Central Committee in 1938, thousands of illegally repressed people, including prominent military leaders, began to return from places of imprisonment. All of them were officially rehabilitated, and Stalin apologized to some of them personally.

Well, and regarding, thirdly, I have already said that the NKVD apparatus suffered perhaps the most from the repressions, and a significant part was brought to justice precisely for abuse of official position, for reprisals against honest people.

What are liberals not talking about? About the rehabilitation of innocent victims.
Immediately after the December Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1938, they began to revise
criminal cases and release from camps. It was produced: in 1939 - 330 thousand,
in 1940 - 180 thousand, until June 1941 another 65 thousand.

What liberals aren't talking about yet. About how they fought the consequences of the Great Terror.
With the arrival of Beria L.P. to the post of People's Commissar of the NKVD in November 1938, 7,372 operational employees, or 22.9% of their payroll, were dismissed from the state security agencies in 1939, of which 937 were imprisoned. And since the end of 1938, the country's leadership succeeded in bringing to trial more than 63 thousand NKVD workers who committed falsifications and created far-fetched, fake counter-revolutionary cases, OF WHICH EIGHT THOUSAND WERE SHOOT.

I will give just one example from the article by Yu.I. Mukhina: “Minutes No. 17 of the Meeting of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Commission on Judicial Cases.” There are more than 60 photographs presented there. I will show a piece of one of them in the form of a table. (http://a7825585.hostink.ru/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=752.)

In this article Mukhin Yu.I. writes: " I was told that this type of document was never posted on the Internet due to the fact that free access to them was very quickly prohibited in the archive. But the document is interesting, and you can glean something interesting from it...».

There are a lot of interesting things. But most importantly, the article shows why the NKVD officers were shot after L.P. came to the post of People's Commissar of the NKVD. Beria. Read. The names of those executed are shaded in the photographs.

Top secret
P R O T O C O L No. 17
Meetings of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Commission on Judicial Cases
dated February 23, 1940
Chaired by Comrade M.I. Kalinin.
Present: t.t.: Shklyar M.F., Ponkratiev M.I., Merkulov V.N.

1. Listened
G... Sergei Ivanovich, M... Fedor Pavlovich, by a resolution of the military tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Moscow Military District dated December 14-15, 1939, were sentenced to death under Art. 193-17 p. b of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for making unfounded arrests of command and Red Army personnel, actively falsifying investigative cases, conducting them with provocative methods and creating fictitious K/R organizations, as a result of which a number of people were shot according to the fictitious ones they created materials.
It was decided.
Agrees with the use of execution against G... S.I. and M... F.P.

17. Listened
A... Fedor Afanasyevich, by a resolution of the military tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Leningrad Military District dated July 19-25, 1939, was sentenced to death under Art. 193-17 p.b of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for the fact that, being an employee of the NKVD, he made massive illegal arrests of citizens, railway transport workers, falsified interrogation reports and created artificial criminal investigation cases, as a result of which over 230 people were sentenced to death and for various more than 100 people have been sentenced to imprisonment, and 69 of the latter have been released at this time.
Decided
Agree with the use of execution against A... F.A.

Have you read it? Well, how do you like it, dear Fyodor Afanasyevich? One (one!!!) investigator-falsifier brought 236 people to death. Was he the only one like that? How many such scoundrels were there? I gave the figure above. That Stalin personally set tasks for these Fedors and Sergei to exterminate innocent people? What conclusions arise?

Conclusion N1. Judging the Stalin era only by repressions is the same as judging the activities of the head physician of a hospital only by the hospital morgue - there will always be corpses there. If we approach this yardstick, then every doctor is a bloody ghoul and a murderer, i.e. deliberately ignore the fact that a team of doctors has successfully cured and prolonged the lives of thousands of patients and blame them only for a small percentage of those who died due to some inevitable diagnostic errors or who died during difficult operations.

The authority of Jesus Christ is not comparable to Stalin’s. 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, the “Aryan theory”, serfdom, and Jewish pogroms were justified by Christian teaching. This is not to mention executions “without shedding blood” - that is, the burning of heretics. How much blood was shed during the Crusades and religious wars? So, maybe because of this we should ban the teachings of our Creator? Just like today some idiots propose to ban communist ideology.

If we look at the graph of the mortality rate of the population of the USSR, no matter how hard we try, we cannot find traces of “cruel” repressions, not because they did not happen, but because their scale is exaggerated. What is the purpose of this exaggeration and hype? The goal is to instill in Russians a guilt complex similar to the guilt complex of the Germans after their defeat in World War II. The “pay and repent” complex. But the great ancient Chinese thinker and philosopher Confucius, who lived 500 years BC, even then said: “ Beware of those who want to make you feel guilty. For they crave power over you».

Do we need this? Judge for yourself. When the first time Khrushchev stunned all the so-called. truth about Stalin’s repressions, the authority of the USSR in the world immediately collapsed to the delight of its 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 LEFT THE COMMUNIST PARTIES. Eurocommunism appeared, denying not only Stalinism, but also, scary, 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 this for the second time, not only did the socialist bloc collapse, but our Motherland, the USSR, collapsed.

Now Putin’s team is doing this for the third time: again they are talking only about repressions and other “crimes” of the Stalinist regime. What this leads to is clearly visible in the “Zyuganov-Makarov” dialogue. They are told about development, new industrialization, but they immediately begin to turn the dial on repression. That is, they immediately break off a constructive dialogue, turning it into a quarrel, a Civil War of meanings and ideas.

Conclusion N2. Why do they need this? 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 pull each other by the hair at the mention of the name Stalin or Lenin. This makes it easier for them to rob and deceive us. The policy of “divide and rule” is as old as time. Moreover, they can always leave Russia to where their stolen capital is stored and their children, wives and mistresses live.

Conclusion N3. Why do Russian patriots need this? It’s just that we and our children don’t have another country. Think about this first before you start cursing our history for repressions and other things. After all, we have nowhere to go 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, taking into account all the advantages and disadvantages of the USSR, you need to be vigilant and remember Stalin’s warning that as the socialist state is built, the class struggle intensifies, i.e. there is a threat of degeneration. And so it happened, and certain segments of the CPSU Central Committee, the Komsomol Central Committee and the KGB were among the first to degenerate. The Stalinist party inquisition was not completed properly.

I do not agree with those researchers who explain the causes of the “Great Terror” mainly by the foreign policy concerns of the Stalinist clique. According to the observations of a number of scientists, domestic political factors played a primary role in unleashing and carrying out terror. Authorities during the purges of 1937-1938. also successfully solved their election problems. Despite the formal permission in the Constitution of 1936 and the electoral legislation of 1937 for “former” people to be elected to the councils, none of the former “kulaks”, priests, NEPmen, etc. was not elected. A kind of “mobilization project” was implemented in the spiritual and ideological spheres of Soviet society. Therefore, all potential critics and opponents of the authorities were doomed to silence for a long time. People from a religious environment, with their heightened sense of conscience, duty and justice, due to these qualities, fell into the “risk group”. They became one of the main objects of the “witch hunt” by the Stalinist regime, which used medieval methods, and yielded an abundant bloody harvest.

The theme of terror 1937-1938. contains a number of little-studied and completely unstudied issues that can be resolved only if there is a massive and complete opening of the KGB, judicial, party and other archives and a change in the very procedure for working with researchers in the departmental archives of the country, where the main sets of documents on the topic covered are stored.

Stalin and People's Commissar Yezhov

I will dwell on the role of Stalin in the events under consideration, around which there has been a lot of speculation and even falsification in recent years. We saw this recently in the crudely put together pseudo-documentary fake of NTV “Stalin with us”, where Stalin’s role in the terror of 1937, contrary to documents and facts, turned out to be grossly distorted and downplayed as much as possible. In other words, from the initiator and organizer of mass terror, the creators of this film turned him into an ordinary “terrorist” who surrendered under the pressure of the regional party bosses - it turns out that they simply forced him to participate in repressions in order to prevent him from his cherished goal of being a secret “democrat” organize the first democratic elections in the country's history. I note that this strange version, which belongs to the field of non-scientific fiction, has no convincing basis and no documentary evidence.

Facts and documents tell a different story. Firstly, it was Stalin who developed and publicly announced the theoretical and ideological foundations of the terror occurring in the country. Not a word was said about this in the lying and fake NTV film. Already at the plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on July 9, 1928, Stalin voiced the “theory” of the intensification of the class struggle as socialism advanced, which became the basis for Stalin’s further great leap forward in politics and economics, the curtailment of the NEP, forced dispossession and driving of people into Stalin’s collective farms, a frontal attack on religion and churches, the destruction of all remnants of private property relations in both the city and the countryside. You and I know the facts that many millions of people became victims of this fully criminal Stalinist policy (the policy of the Stalinist group in the country's leadership), that the Russian, Russian village had a truly broken backbone, from which it never recovered . And in 1937, the same Stalin, at the February-March plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, formulated the ideological foundations of the new future planned by him and his terror group. He immediately updates two theories. The first is the already mentioned theory of the intensification of the class struggle as socialism advances - in order to destroy hundreds of thousands of “formers” as imaginary “conspirators”, it is certainly useful. And the second is the theory of a united front of enemies based on a program for the restoration of capitalism. This was a universal pretext to unite everyone with everyone in one cauldron of repressions and imaginary “conspiracies” - from Leninists and “Trotskyists” who did not accept any religion to Orthodox priests, from “fiery revolutionaries” to former nobles, “kulaks” and tsarist officials. All of them, according to Stalin, are “remnants of the exploiting classes,” all of them united to give the Soviet government a decisive battle. Stalin's words at the plenum were not some kind of declarations, they became precisely programmatic guidelines for punitive forces and terror enthusiasts at all levels - party, security service and judicial.

Yes, Stalin is an ideologist and theorist of terror, this is undoubtedly true, but he is also its outstanding practitioner and organizer. Great and undeniable, confirmed by documents, is his role as the leading member of the Politburo in the organization of special punitive “troikas” of the NKVD who carried out everyday terror - the extermination of many hundreds of thousands of legally innocent people and sending them to camps on fabricated false charges and within the framework approved by Stalin from above and the limits extended by him by his special resolutions at the request of party and security chiefs from the localities. It seems that this type of state-terrorist activity of Stalin in the language of law can be defined as incitement to mass murder. He carried out similar actions since the second half of the 1920s, starting with the initiation of the so-called. “Voikovsky stream” of 1927 and continuing with campaigns for “dekulakization”, repressions for “disruption of grain procurements” in 1932-33, “for ears of corn”, etc.

Materials for special folders of the Politburo provide a broad picture of the joint terrorist “creativity” of local leaders, on the one hand, and Stalin and other members of the Politburo, on the other. Stalin also approved the criminal orders of the NKVD for the so-called “national operations”, which involved about half of the victims of the “Great Terror”. His order to Yezhov “It would be necessary to press down the gentlemen of the church” had a practical refraction in the form of intensified repression of the clergy, the mass extermination of spiritual shepherds and the episcopate, which Yezhov already reported with figures and facts to Stalin at the end of November 1937 - as “achievements” in this region, and about what his department plans to do next to defeat the so-called “church counter-revolution.” Just one fact: it was the Politburo and Stalin on February 17, 1938 that allocated for Ukraine the largest additional limit for the entire period of the “kulak operation” - 30 thousand people. According to an archival document, Stalin personally edited the text of this Politburo resolution and signed “For. I. Stalin”, followed by Molotov and Voroshilov. Within the framework of this limit, in February-May 1938, there was a mass extermination of Ukrainian clergy. Stalin and other leaders approved the lists of those subject to trial by the Military Collegium. Of these, the overwhelming majority were in the “1st category”, that is, doomed to extermination, and a small part in the “2nd category” were sent to a camp. In total, such lists were found for 40 thousand people, but it is clear that these lists are incomplete, and there were more of them. It is a mistake to think that only old Bolsheviks and party nomenklatura were on these lists, although there were quite a few of them there too. Many valuable workers in various fields of industry, scientists, and specialists were mentioned there. Both the hierarch of the Russian Church Pitirim (Krylov) and a number of cultural figures - writers M.E. - were on the execution lists approved by Stalin. Koltsov, I.E. Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Artyom Vesely, director V.E. Meyerhold, peasant poets Pavel Vasiliev and Sergei Klychkov and others. It can be argued that Stalin personally gave the orders for their murders.

Stalin's directives from the era of terror of 1937-1938, written in the margins of reports to him from the Chekist chiefs, I think, also speak about the spiritual appearance of the Soviet leader, who was passionately carried away at that time by purges and murders. In a number of cases, Stalin personally orders new arrests of persons in interrogation reports and reports sent to him, expands the range of repressions and directs them to specific addresses. He uses such expressions addressed to Yezhov, Frinovsky and others - “arrest” such and such, “use execution on everyone”, “go through” such and such republics with a “broom”, “we need to re-arrest all the Ogiz scum ”, “cleanse from all evil spirits”, “download and clean out all the Polish spy dirt”, “deal with” so and so after the elections. “Scum”, “dirt”, “evil spirits”, “bastard”, “toadstool”, etc. Stalin used the vocabulary in relation to the PEOPLE he massacred.

There are documents where the leader himself in his resolutions uses the words “espionage” and “rebel groups” in quotation marks, thereby showing that he is aware of the fictitious nature of these accusations and still gives orders for the repression of those involved in these “cases.” Stalin personally authorized the massive use of beatings and torture in the dungeons of punitive agencies in 1937, confirmed this permission for the future in 1939, and also in a number of specific cases in a number of his resolutions directly ordered the beating and torture of individual prisoners (“Shake it out of him,” “beat with all your might”, “press”, “interrogate hard”, “beat” and so on). Stalin’s state terrorism also affected his personnel policy in the state security apparatus of the Soviet state - during his reign, he instilled and supported in the KGB agencies a whole generation of sadists, executioners and falsifiers of fake “cases”. Some of these performers were removed after completing certain tasks, but those who replaced them turned out to be the same in their inclinations and moral qualities. As part of the recently published investigative materials of Beria and his associates shows, the “Berievites” who replaced the “Yezhovites” in the authorities were no better than their predecessors.

Stalin’s remark in a speech in the Kremlin on November 7, 1937 about the destruction of “enemies of the people” is also expressive: “ we exterminate their entire family". By “eradication of the clan” of “enemies of the people,” the leader obviously meant the brutal repressions he unleashed against the relatives of the repressed, including the Politburo resolution of July 5, 1937, personally edited by him, on the imprisonment in camps of “all wives of convicted traitors to the motherland” ( so-called “Trotskyists” and “right-wingers”) for a period of at least 5-8 years; their children under 15 were placed in orphanages. This order for the wives of the “conspirators” was established for the future. Those. after the arrest of the husband (as a “Trotskyist” or “rightist”), his wife was automatically sent to a camp. Stalin's edit on this document was that the leader forwarded the proposed “5 years” of camps for the wives of “enemies of the people” to “ five-8 years" He also added a clarification regarding children sent to orphanages: “ up to 15 years of age" And at the end of the sentence the same merciless blue pencil added: “ As for children over 15 years of age, the issue must be decided individually" To the cities outside of which orphans are subject to placement in orphanages of the People's Commissariat of Education, Stalin added after “Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, Tiflis, Minsk” - “ coastal towns, border towns" Thus, the main sovereign executioner with a pencil increased the unfortunate lot of tens of thousands of innocent women, and also extended the orphanage’s “happy childhoods” for orphans who became orphans by his own will.

A characteristic feature of Stalin’s terror is the conscious and steady expansion of the very circle of participants in crimes, the involvement of huge masses of people in the processes of “trials”, executions, approval of reprisals, the inflating of mass executioner and denunciation enthusiasm, the desire to give repression the appearance of a “national” action. At the same time, the Stalinist leadership seemed to want to drown its guilt in the guilt of the masses, to overshadow its own plans with popular impulses (the fight against bureaucracy, “pests”, etc.). It was logical for the authorities to strive to maximize the number of people involved in crimes, so that the main leaders’ own role in the terror would not seem so significant against this background. Hence the instigation of numerous “rallies” and letters in newspapers demanding reprisals against “enemies of the people”, the organization of local meetings with defamation of people for lack of vigilance towards such “enemies”. Thus, the installation “ tie with blood" In this sense, Stalin’s cipher telegram to A.A. is characteristic. Zhdanov about the upcoming “case” of Leningrad responsible workers dated October 13, 1937: “let the plenum (Leningrad regional committee of the CPSU (b) - I.K.) speak out and let the plenum itself make a decision on the arrest, so that it feels its responsibility in this matter . It will be better this way" . In 1937, Stalin considered the organization of widespread show trials of “pests” in agriculture to be important for mobilizing collective farmers “around the work of defeating the enemies of the people in agriculture.”

During the terror, in order to achieve his goals, Stalin deliberately incited mass psychosis and spy mania among the population. Thus, he personally corrected the article “On some methods and techniques of foreign intelligence services,” published in Pravda on May 17, 1937, with detailed instructions for Soviet people on how to behave in order to expose the sophisticated and vile methods of “double-dealers” and “spies”, how to keep an eye on each other and how to inform on each other. During the years of the “Great Terror”, Stalin’s encrypted telegrams went to places. So, on November 29, 1937, the leader proposed to hold open party meetings for the next anniversary of Kirov’s death, “mobilizing party members for the merciless uprooting” of “enemies of the people.” In December 1937, Stalin called for the 20th anniversary of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD to be celebrated by holding various party, Komsomol, Soviet meetings with conversations and reports explaining the role of “organs” in the fight against “enemies of the people”