Terror and Control

WHAT WAS THE NKVD?

• It was the secret police of the Soviets

• Controled everything mostly with toture and deaths.

• When things were discussed at the Politburo (the executive committee for a number of communist political parties), Stalin told that the one who criticize him should be arrested and executed

• Evidential standards were very low: an evidence that wasn't really proved an was given by an anonymous informer was considered enough to allow an arrest.

International operations, kidnappings, assassinations, investigations ,conducted mass deportations to unpopulated regions of the country, guarded state borders

ActivitiesDomestic control , ran the Gulag system of forced labor camps, conducted espionage and political assassinations, spread Stalinist communist ideas in other countries.

Gulag• Tasks of the Five-Year Plans too

big and ambitious.

• Not enough workers.

• Prison camps became labor camps, prisoners became slaves.

Prisoners working on Belomor Canal, slave labor in 1930´s

• Special Dpt. Of Secret Police was set up in 1930 to run labor camps.

• This is Gulag, Chief Administration of Camps.

• The prisoners were called zeks.

• The prisoners grew from start of 5 Year Plans from 30,000 to 8 million in 1938.

• Some of the camps had really bad conditions, one of them was the Kolyma camps.

Prisoners in the Kolyma camps. Winter -40 degrees.

a. To rid (a nation or political party,

for example) of people considered

undesirable.b. To get rid of (people

considered undesirable).

Political repression

It lasted for 2 years, from 1936 to 1938. The most harsh times were from

1937 to 1938.This period of time was called Yezhovshchina.

Show Trials• Were public trials and were given maximum

publicity and the press was invited.

• They were held at Moscow, the Soviet Union’s

capital city at that time, from 1936 to 1938.

• The defendants were first arrested by the

NKVD.

• The crimes that were judged were related to

conspiracy, terrorism and spying.

• The veredicts were predetermined and the

confessions obtained through torture and

threats against the families.

Stalin, Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev

Trial of the Sixteen• The first of the show trials.

• It was held in the House of the Trade

Unions from August 19 to 24, 1936.

• They were accused of involvement in

a conspiracy lorganised by Trotsky to

overthrow the Government.

• Only one defendant didn’t confess to

the accusations made against him.

• All of them were shot the day after.

Trial of the Seventeen• Held in January 1937

• It involved 17 lesser figures.

• 13 were shot and the rest were sent to labour

camps.

• Karl Radek was spared as he implicated others,

such as Bukharin and Rykov.

• Western observers that attended to the trials

thought they were fair.

Trial of the Generals

Trial of the Twenty-one• Last and biggest of the trials, it was held

in March 1938.

• The accused confessed to being

members of a “Trotskyist-Rightist bloc”.

• All were found guilty and shot.

• The confessions often sounded absurd

and only few people believed everything

about them.

• It involved the last group of old

bolsheviks.

1918

1912 1991

Ordinary Soviet’s

Censorship

On Stalin’s dictatorship1928- 1953

Did you know?The soviet goverment erased any trace of

existance of people that were imprisioned, sent to exile or executed by deleting them from photos, books destroying films and in

the most extreme cases by killing their entire family.

• Soviets destroyed pre-revoloutionary,foreign books and journals from

libraries. The KGB(Comitee for State Security) were the only ones who kept

some of these banned texts which were said to contain old and politically

incorrect material.

• Many civilians destroyed books themselves because they feared they could

be persecuted for having a banned book.

Censoring Texts

•If someone wrote about Stalin in a negative way they could be executed.

Censoring(and altering) Images

Did you know?The man on the far right was Nikolai

Yezhov when he was water commissar. After he got fired,

arrested and shot, this image was manipulated to erase any trace of

his existance.

•The goverment tried to erase people that were purged from their history by removing them from not only texts but posters and photos too.

Trotsky No Trotsky

Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Artemy Khalatov

No Trotsky, Lev Kamenev or Artemy Khalatov

Original Sings Edited Signs

Alexander Malchenko No Alexander Malchenko

Censoring other things.

•Stalin ordered to destroy churches, and around 40 thousand christian

churches and 25 thousand mosques(Islam temples) were shut down.

Religion

Newspapers•Newspapers were controled by the

goverment and any who dared to write an

article against Stalin would be imprisioned,

exiled or executed according to who bad it

was.