Soviet political repressions
Encyclopedia
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union
millions of people became victims of political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution
. Culminating during the Stalin era, it still existed during the "Khrushchev Thaw
", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents
during the Brezhnev stagnation
, and didn't cease to exist during Mikhail Gorbachev
's perestroika
. Its heritage still influences the life of modern Russia
and other former Soviet states.
Early on the theoretical basis of the repressions was the Leninist view of the class struggle
and the resulting notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat
. Its legal basis was formalized into the Article 58
in the code of Russian SFSR and similar articles for other Soviet republic
s.
At times, the repressed were called the enemies of the people. Punishments by the state included summary execution
s, sending innocent people to Gulag
, forced resettlement
, and stripping of citizen's rights
. At certain times, all members of a family, including children, were punished as "traitor of Motherland family members". Repression was conducted by the Cheka
and its successors
, and other state organs. Periods of the increased repression include Red Terror
, Collectivisation
, the Great Purge
s, the Doctor's Plot, and others. The secret police
forces conducted massacres of prisoners on numerous occasions. Repression was practiced in the Soviet republics and in the territories liberated by Soviet Army
during World War II
, including Baltic States
and Eastern Europe
. .
State repression led to resistance, which were brutally suppressed by military force, such as the Tambov rebellion
, Kronstadt rebellion
, and Vorkuta Uprising
. During the Tambov rebellion, Bolshevik
military forces were alledgedly authorized by Tukhachevsky
(chief Red Army commander in the area) to use chemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels. According to the witnesses accounts, chemical weapons were never actually used. Prominent citizens of villages were often taken as hostages and executed if the resistance fighters did not surrender.
government. The Red Terror was officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov
and ended in about October 1918. However Sergei Melgunov
applies this term to repressions for the whole period of the Russian Civil War
, 1918-1922.
was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms ' onMouseout='HidePop("56686")' href="/topics/Kolkhoz">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. As the peasantry, with the exception of the poorest part, resisted the collectivization policy, the Soviet government resorted to harsh measures to force the farmers to collectivize. In his conversation with Winston Churchill
Stalin gave his estimate of the number of "kulak
s" who were repressed for resisting collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported.
Bolshaya chistka) was a series of campaigns of political repression
and persecution
in the Soviet Union
orchestrated by Joseph Stalin
in 1937-1938. It involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
, repression of peasants, deportations of ethnic 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 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 (see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
).
Entire nations and ethnic groups were collectively punished by the Soviet Government for alleged collaboration with the enemy during World War II
. At least nine distinct ethnic-linguistic groups, including ethnic Germans
, ethnic Greeks
, ethnic Poles
, Crimean Tatars
, Balkars
, Chechen
s, and Kalmyks
, were deported to remote unpopulated areas of Siberia
(see sybirak) and Kazakhstan
. Population transfer in the Soviet Union
led to millions of deaths from the inflicted hardships. Koreans
and Romanians
were also deported. Mass operations of the NKVD
were needed to deport hundreds of thousands of people.
The Soviet famine of 1932-1933
was severely aggravated by the actions of the government of the Soviet Union
, such as the confiscation of food, the lack of meat, planned delivery limitations that ignored the famine, blocking the migration of its starving population, and the suppression of the information about the famine, all of which prevented any organized relief effort. This led to deaths of millions of people in the affected area.. The overall number of the 1932-1933 famine victims Soviet-wide is variously estimated as 6-7 million or 6-8 million.
Gulag: A History
, by Anne Applebaum
, explains: "It was the branch of the State Security
that operated the penal system of forced labour camps
and associated detention and transit camps and prisons. While these camps housed criminals of all types, the Gulag system has become primarily known as a place for political prisoner
s and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet state
.”
Soviet Union annexed several territories in East Europe as the consequence of the German-Soviet Pact
and its Secret Additional Protocol.
of Estonia
, Latvia
and Lithuania
, repressions and the mass deportations were carried out by the Soviets. The Serov Instructions, "On the Procedure for carrying out the Deportation of Anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia", contained detailed procedures and protocols to observe in the deportation of Baltic nationals. Public tribunals were also set up to punish "traitors to the people": those who had fallen short of the "political duty" of voting their countries into the USSR. In the first year of Soviet occupation, from June 1940 to June 1941, the number confirmed executed, conscripted, or deported is estimated at a minimum of 124,467: 59,732 in Estonia, 34,250 in Latvia, and 30,485 in Lithuania. This included 8 former heads of state and 38 ministers from Estonia, 3 former heads of state and 15 ministers from Latvia, and the then president, 5 prime ministers and 24 other ministers from Lithuania.
. Others were labeled as mentally ill, having sluggishly progressing schizophrenia
and incarcerated in "psikhushka
s", i.e. mental hospital
s used by the Soviet authorities as prisons. A number of notable dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
, Vladimir Bukovsky
, and Andrei Sakharov
, were sent to internal or external exile.
vary from 8 to 61 million
, who deeply studied this problem, considers that 66 million 700 thousand people became victims to the state repression and terrorism
from 1917 to 1959. Analogous figure — over 66 million people — was announced by Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev
, the chairman of the commission for rehabilitation of repressed persons. According to Viktor Luneyev, actual struggle against dissent was manyfold larger than it was registered in sentences, and we do not know how many persons were kept under surveillance of secret services, held criminally liable, arrested, sent to psychiatric hospitals, expelled from their work, restricted in their rights everyway. No objective counting of repressed persons is possible without fundamental analysis of archival documents. The difficulty of this method is that the required data are very diverse and are not in one archive. They are in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, in the archive of the Goskomstat
of Russia, in the archives of the MVD of Russia, the FSB of Russia
, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, in the Russian Military and Historical Archive, in archives of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, in urban and regional archives, as well as in archives of the former Soviet Republics that now are independent countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States
and the Baltics. Where, for example, can one determine the number of people shot in the second half of the 1930s and in the early 1940s in the Kurapaty
hole (estimate for them is from 30 to 100 thousand people or, by some estimates, up to 200 thousand)? Only in Belarus
. The same can be said of other mass shootings and other forms of repression of victims of Soviet regime.
take active part in meetings.
History of the Soviet Union
The history of the Soviet Union has roots in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, emerged as the main political force in the capital of the former Russian Empire, though they had to fight a long and brutal civil war against the Mensheviks, or Whites...
millions of people became victims of political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
. Culminating during the Stalin era, it still existed during the "Khrushchev Thaw
Khrushchev Thaw
The Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and...
", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents
Soviet dissidents
Soviet dissidents were citizens of the Soviet Union who disagreed with the policies and actions of their government and actively protested against these actions through either violent or non-violent means...
during the Brezhnev stagnation
Brezhnev stagnation
The Era of Stagnation, also known as Brezhnev stagnation or the Stagnation Period, refers to a period of economic stagnation under the rules of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko in the history of the Soviet Union which started in the mid-1970s.-Terminology:Various authors...
, and didn't cease to exist during Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
's perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
. Its heritage still influences the life of modern Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
and other former Soviet states.
Origins and early Soviet times
Early on the theoretical basis of the repressions was the Leninist view of the class struggle
Class struggle
Class struggle is the active expression of a class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle"....
and the resulting notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat
Dictatorship of the proletariat
In Marxist socio-political thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a socialist state in which the proletariat, or the working class, have control of political power. The term, coined by Joseph Weydemeyer, was adopted by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the...
. Its legal basis was formalized into the Article 58
Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code)
Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. It was revised several times...
in the code of Russian SFSR and similar articles for other Soviet republic
Republics of the Soviet Union
The Republics of the Soviet Union or the Union Republics of the Soviet Union were ethnically-based administrative units that were subordinated directly to the Government of the Soviet Union...
s.
At times, the repressed were called the enemies of the people. Punishments by the state included summary execution
Summary execution
A summary execution is a variety of execution in which a person is killed on the spot without trial or after a show trial. Summary executions have been practiced by the police, military, and paramilitary organizations and are associated with guerrilla warfare, counter-insurgency, terrorism, and...
s, sending innocent people to Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
, forced resettlement
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union took several forms. Though the most notorious was the Gulag labor camp system of penal labor, resettling of entire categories of population was another method of political repression implemented by the Soviet Union. At the same time, involuntary settlement...
, and stripping of citizen's rights
Lishenets
A lishenets , from Russian word лишение, "deprivation", properly translated in this context as a disenfranchised, was a person stripped of the right of voting in the Soviet Union of 1918 — 1936...
. At certain times, all members of a family, including children, were punished as "traitor of Motherland family members". Repression was conducted by the Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...
and its successors
Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies
There was a succession of Soviet secret police agencies over time. The first secret police after the Russian Revolution, created by Vladimir Lenin's decree on December 20, 1917, was called "Cheka"...
, and other state organs. Periods of the increased repression include Red Terror
Red Terror
The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as having been officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended about October 1918...
, Collectivisation
Collectivisation in the USSR
Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Stalin between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms...
, the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
s, the Doctor's Plot, and others. The secret police
Secret police
Secret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....
forces conducted massacres of prisoners on numerous occasions. Repression was practiced in the Soviet republics and in the territories liberated by Soviet Army
Soviet Army
The Soviet Army is the name given to the main part of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1992. Previously, it had been known as the Red Army. Informally, Армия referred to all the MOD armed forces, except, in some cases, the Soviet Navy.This article covers the Soviet Ground...
during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, including Baltic States
Baltic states
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...
and Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
. .
State repression led to resistance, which were brutally suppressed by military force, such as the Tambov rebellion
Tambov Rebellion
The Tambov Rebellion which occurred between 1920 and 1921 was one of the largest and best-organized peasant rebellions challenging the Bolshevik regime during the Russian Civil War. The uprising took place in the territories of the modern Tambov Oblast and part of the Voronezh Oblast, less than...
, Kronstadt rebellion
Kronstadt rebellion
The Kronstadt rebellion was one of many major unsuccessful left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War...
, and Vorkuta Uprising
Vorkuta Uprising
The Vorkuta Uprising was a major uprising of the concentration camp inmates at the Vorkuta Gulag in Vorkuta, Russia in July–August 1953, shortly after the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria. The uprising was violently stopped by the camp administration after two weeks of bloodless standoff.Vorkuta Rechlag ...
. During the Tambov rebellion, Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
military forces were alledgedly authorized by Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was a Marshal of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the Red Army , and one of the most prominent victims of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.-Early life:...
(chief Red Army commander in the area) to use chemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels. According to the witnesses accounts, chemical weapons were never actually used. Prominent citizens of villages were often taken as hostages and executed if the resistance fighters did not surrender.
Red Terror
Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the BolshevikBolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
government. The Red Terror was officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov
Yakov Sverdlov
Yakov Mikhaylovich Sverdlov ; known under pseudonyms "Andrei", "Mikhalych", "Max", "Smirnov", "Permyakov" — 16 March 1919) was a Bolshevik party leader and an official of the Russian Soviet Republic.-Early life:...
and ended in about October 1918. However Sergei Melgunov
Sergei Melgunov
Sergei Petrovich Melgunov was a Russian historian, publicist and politician best known for his opposition to the Soviet government and his numerous works on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War....
applies this term to repressions for the whole period of the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
, 1918-1922.
Collectivization
Collectivization in the Soviet UnionSoviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms ' onMouseout='HidePop("56686")' href="/topics/Kolkhoz">kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
, 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. As the peasantry, with the exception of the poorest part, resisted the collectivization policy, the Soviet government resorted to harsh measures to force the farmers to collectivize. In his conversation with Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
Stalin gave his estimate of the number of "kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s" who were repressed for resisting collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported.
Great Purge
The Great Purge ' onMouseout='HidePop("52916")' href="/topics/Romanization_of_Russian">transliteratedRomanization of Russian
Romanization of the Russian alphabet is the process of transliterating the Russian language from the Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet...
Bolshaya chistka) was a series of campaigns of political repression
Political repression
Political repression is the persecution of an individual or group for political reasons, particularly for the purpose of restricting or preventing their ability to take political life of society....
and persecution
Persecution
Persecution is the systematic mistreatment of an individual or group by another group. The most common forms are religious persecution, ethnic persecution, and political persecution, though there is naturally some overlap between these terms. The inflicting of suffering, harassment, isolation,...
in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
orchestrated by Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
in 1937-1938. It involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Purges with a "small-p" purge was one of the key rituals during which a periodic review of party members was conducted to get rid of the "undesirables"....
, repression of peasants, deportations of ethnic 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.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and population transfers
In Soviet Union, political repressions targeted not only individual persons, but also whole ethnic, social, religious, and other categories of population.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
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas (see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union took several forms. Though the most notorious was the Gulag labor camp system of penal labor, resettling of entire categories of population was another method of political repression implemented by the Soviet Union. At the same time, involuntary settlement...
).
Entire nations and ethnic groups were collectively punished by the Soviet Government for alleged collaboration with the enemy during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. At least nine distinct ethnic-linguistic groups, including ethnic Germans
History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union
The German minority in Russia and the Soviet Union was created from several sources and in several waves. The 1914 census puts the number of Germans living in Russian Empire at 2,416,290. In 1989, the German population of the Soviet Union was roughly 2 million. In the 2002 Russian census, 597,212...
, ethnic Greeks
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
, ethnic Poles
Polish minority in the Soviet Union
The Polish minority in the Soviet Union refers to people of Polish descent who resided in the Soviet Union before its dissolution, and might remain in post-Soviet, sovereign countries as their significant minorities.-1917–1920:...
, Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic ethnic group that originally resided in Crimea. They speak the Crimean Tatar language...
, Balkars
Balkars
The Balkars are a Turkic people of the Caucasus region, one of the titular populations of Kabardino-Balkaria. They are possibly Bulgars or are descended from them...
, Chechen
Chechen people
Chechens constitute the largest native ethnic group originating in the North Caucasus region. They refer to themselves as Noxçi . Also known as Sadiks , Gargareans, Malkhs...
s, and Kalmyks
Kalmyk deportations of 1944
The Kalmyk deportations of 1943, codename Operation Ulussy, was the deportation of most people of the Kalmyk nationality in the Soviet Union , and Russian women married to Kalmyks, but excepting Kalmyk women married to another nationality...
, were deported to remote unpopulated areas of Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
(see sybirak) and Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
. Population transfer in the Soviet Union
Population transfer in the Soviet Union
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 entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite...
led to millions of deaths from the inflicted hardships. Koreans
Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union
Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union, originally conceived in 1926, initiated in 1930, and carried through in 1937, was the first mass transfer of an entire nationality based on their ethnicity to be committed by the Soviet Union...
and Romanians
Deportation of Romanians in the Soviet Union
The Soviet deportations from Bessarabia were part of Joseph Stalin's policy of political repression...
were also deported. Mass operations of the NKVD
Mass operations of the NKVD
Mass operations of the NKVD were carried out during the Great Purge and targeted specific categories of people. As a rule, they were carried out according to the corresponding order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezhov....
were needed to deport hundreds of thousands of people.
The Soviet famine of 1932-1933
Soviet famine of 1932-1933
The Soviet famine of 1932–1933 killed many millions in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union. These areas included Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia...
was severely aggravated by the actions of the government of the Soviet Union
Government of the Soviet Union
The Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was the de jure government comprising the highest executive and administrative body of the Soviet Union from 1946 until 1991....
, such as the confiscation of food, the lack of meat, planned delivery limitations that ignored the famine, blocking the migration of its starving population, and the suppression of the information about the famine, all of which prevented any organized relief effort. This led to deaths of millions of people in the affected area.. The overall number of the 1932-1933 famine victims Soviet-wide is variously estimated as 6-7 million or 6-8 million.
Gulag
Gulag: A History
Gulag: A History
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the...
, by Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is a journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has been an editor at The Economist, and a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post...
, explains: "It was the branch of the State Security
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
that operated the penal system of forced labour camps
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
and associated detention and transit camps and prisons. While these camps housed criminals of all types, the Gulag system has become primarily known as a place for political prisoner
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
s and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet state
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
.”
Repressions in annexed territories
During the early years of World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
Soviet Union annexed several territories in East Europe as the consequence of the German-Soviet Pact
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...
and its Secret Additional Protocol.
Baltic States
In the Baltic countriesBaltic countries
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...
of Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
, Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
and Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
, repressions and the mass deportations were carried out by the Soviets. The Serov Instructions, "On the Procedure for carrying out the Deportation of Anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia", contained detailed procedures and protocols to observe in the deportation of Baltic nationals. Public tribunals were also set up to punish "traitors to the people": those who had fallen short of the "political duty" of voting their countries into the USSR. In the first year of Soviet occupation, from June 1940 to June 1941, the number confirmed executed, conscripted, or deported is estimated at a minimum of 124,467: 59,732 in Estonia, 34,250 in Latvia, and 30,485 in Lithuania. This included 8 former heads of state and 38 ministers from Estonia, 3 former heads of state and 15 ministers from Latvia, and the then president, 5 prime ministers and 24 other ministers from Lithuania.
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"Parasitism (social offense)
Social parasitism is a charge that is leveled against a group or class in society which is considered to be detrimental to the whole by analogy with biologic parasitism .-General concept:...
. Others were labeled as mentally ill, having sluggishly progressing schizophrenia
Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia
Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia or sluggish schizophrenia was a category of schizophrenia diagnosed by psychiatrists in the Soviet Union...
and incarcerated in "psikhushka
Psikhushka
In the Soviet Union, systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place. Soviet psychiatric hospitals were used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate hundreds or thousands of political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally...
s", i.e. mental hospital
Mental Hospital
Mental hospital may refer to:*Psychiatric hospital*hospital in Nepal named Mental Hospital...
s used by the Soviet authorities as prisons. A number of notable dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
, Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky is a leading member of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s, writer, neurophysiologist, and political activist....
, and Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...
, were sent to internal or external exile.
Loss of life
The exact number of victims may never be known and remains a matter of debate among historians. The published results vary depending on the time when the estimate was made, on the criteria and methods used for the estimates, and sources available for estimates. Some historians attempt to make separate estimates for different periods of the Soviet history. For example, the number of victims under Joseph Stalin's regimeStalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
vary from 8 to 61 million
Difficulties in counting the repressed
Russian writer Aleksandr SolzhenitsynAleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
, who deeply studied this problem, considers that 66 million 700 thousand people became victims to the state repression and terrorism
Terrorism
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...
from 1917 to 1959. Analogous figure — over 66 million people — was announced by Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev
Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev
Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev was a Soviet politician and historian who was a Soviet governmental official in the 1980s and a member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
, the chairman of the commission for rehabilitation of repressed persons. According to Viktor Luneyev, actual struggle against dissent was manyfold larger than it was registered in sentences, and we do not know how many persons were kept under surveillance of secret services, held criminally liable, arrested, sent to psychiatric hospitals, expelled from their work, restricted in their rights everyway. No objective counting of repressed persons is possible without fundamental analysis of archival documents. The difficulty of this method is that the required data are very diverse and are not in one archive. They are in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, in the archive of the Goskomstat
Goskomstat
Goskomstat was the centralised agency dealing with statistics in the Soviet Union. Goskomstat was created in 1987 to replace the Central Statistical Administration. While maintaining the same basic functions in the collection, analysis, and publicationand distribution of state statistics,...
of Russia, in the archives of the MVD of Russia, the FSB of Russia
FSB (Russia)
The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation is the main domestic security agency of the Russian Federation and the main successor agency of the Soviet Committee of State Security . Its main responsibilities are counter-intelligence, internal and border security, counter-terrorism, and...
, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, in the Russian Military and Historical Archive, in archives of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, in urban and regional archives, as well as in archives of the former Soviet Republics that now are independent countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States
Commonwealth of Independent States
The Commonwealth of Independent States is a regional organization whose participating countries are former Soviet Republics, formed during the breakup of the Soviet Union....
and the Baltics. Where, for example, can one determine the number of people shot in the second half of the 1930s and in the early 1940s in the Kurapaty
Kurapaty
Kurapaty is a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk, Belarus, in which a vast number of people were executed between 1937 and 1941 by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.The exact count of victims is uncertain, NKVD archives are classified in Belarus...
hole (estimate for them is from 30 to 100 thousand people or, by some estimates, up to 200 thousand)? Only in Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...
. The same can be said of other mass shootings and other forms of repression of victims of Soviet regime.
Remembering the victims
Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions (День памяти жертв политических репрессий - October 30, since 1991), in former Soviet republics (except for Ukraine, which has its own annual Day of Remembrance for the victims of political repressions by the Soviet regime on third Sunday of May). Members of the Memorial societyMemorial (society)
Memorial is an international historical and civil rights society that operates in a number of post-Soviet states. It focuses on recording and publicising the Soviet Union's totalitarian past, but also monitors human rights in post-Soviet states....
take active part in meetings.
See also
- Active measuresActive measuresActive Measures were a form of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services to influence the course of world events, "in addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessment of it". Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions...
- Human rights in the Soviet UnionHuman rights in the Soviet UnionHuman rights in the Soviet Union have been viewed differently, one view by the communist ideology adopted by the Soviet Union and another by its critics. The Soviet Union was established after a revolution that ended centuries of Tsarist monarchy...
- Rehabilitation (Soviet)Rehabilitation (Soviet)Rehabilitation in the context of the former Soviet Union, and the Post-Soviet states, was the restoration of a person who was criminally prosecuted without due basis, to the state of acquittal...
- Soviet political system
- Soviet lawSoviet lawThe Law of the Soviet Union—also known as Socialist Law—was the law developed in the Soviet Union following the October Revolution of 1917...
- Hitler Youth ConspiracyHitler Youth ConspiracyThe Hitler Youth Conspiracy was a case investigated by the Soviet secret police, during the Great Purge in the late 1930s. Essentially a theory in search of evidence, it nonetheless resulted in the arrest of numerous German teenagers and some in their twenties and beyond, who were accused of having...