“The Great Terror”1935-1938

In Soviet history

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By Sonja Haugaard Christensen

Master of philosophy

University of Aarhus

ContentsPreface..........................................................3Lenin’s strokes..................................................4Stalin and Trotsky...............................................6Industrialization................................................7Stalin’s cult....................................................8The Great Purge.................................................10Stalin’s bloodthirstiness.......................................11Conclusion......................................................12Bibliography....................................................14

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Preface One of the most difficult periods of Soviet history to comprehend

and one of the most complex and controversial, is the period of

mid-1930s, when the Stalinist regime subjected the Soviet

population and especially the Communist party, to unprecedented

levels of violence. The horrifying events from 1935-1938 led to

total destruction of the Leninist party. Why did Stalin elect to

pursue such policy against the party over which he enjoyed almost

total control? Why did he resort to such brutal and merciless

cruelty? According to history the roots of the Great Terror extend

back to the earliest period of Soviet rule. In following

argumentation I shall focus on the circumstances, which lead to

the most terrifying period of Soviet history the in light of the

book The Great Terror by Robert Conquest. The book was published in

1968 and revised in 1990. It originally relied on unofficial

sources, but with the release during Gorbatjov`s glasnost of long

– secret archival material, the author rewrote his study. He added

many new details but retained his original conclusion, that the

terror was largely the product of Stalin’s personal ambition, his

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vindictiveness, and his thirst for glory, adulation, and

unrestricted power.

A common explanation is that Stalin suffered from a debilitating

mental disorder, that he was deranged. The traditional view has

been to hold Stalin solely responsible for the terror, whether

sane or insane. The recent opening of Soviet archives has,

however, provided controversial interpretations of the dark

period. MacKenzie, David and Cuurran W. Michael: A history of the Soviet

Union and Beyond, 2002: 473 According to Conquest it is first now, we

have enough information to establish almost everything past

dispute. The Terror is the immediate present of the 1990s and a

political and human issue in the USSR. At the same time it is the

most critical and striking agenda of the world today. The period

of Khrushchev has brought new evidence in conjunction with the

earlier unofficial reports, to give the history of the period in

considerable and mutually confirmatory detail. Much of it remained

however deducted with occasional gaps or inadequately verified

probabilities and precluded certainty. (Preface) Conquest, Robert: The

Great Terror, 1990

The Great Terror of 1936 to 1938 did not come out of the blue.

Like any other historical phenomenon, it had roots in the past. It

would no doubt be misleading to argue, that it followed inevitably

from the nature of Soviet society and of the Communist Party. It

was, itself a means of enforcing violent change upon that society

and that party. But all the same it would not have been launched

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except against the extraordinarily idiosyncratic background of

Bolshevik rule; and its special characteristics, some of them

hardly credible to foreign minds, derive from a special tradition.

The dominating ideas of the Stalin period, the evolution of the

oppositionists, the very confessions in the great show trials, can

hardly be followed without consolidation of the dictatorship, the

movement of faction, the rise of individuals, and the emergence of

extreme economic policies. Conquest, Robert: The Great Terror, 1990:3

Lenin’s strokes After Lenin suffered his first stroke on 26 May 1922, he cut off

to a certain degree from immediacies of political life,

contemplated to unexpected defects which had arisen in the

revolution he had made. He had realised, that he failed to

convince the broad masses, which he remarked to the Party’s Xth

Congress in March 1921. Just before his stroke he had noted “the

prevalence of personal spite and malice” in the committees charged

with purging the Party. After his recovery he remarked “We are

living in a sea of illegality” and observing “The Communist kernel

lacks general culture; the culture of middle classes in Russia was

“inconsiderable, wretched, but in any case greater than that of

our responsible Communists” In the autumn he was criticizing

carelessness and parasitism, and invented special phrases for the

boasts and lies of the Communists: “Com-boast and Com-lies”. In

his absence, his subordinates were acting more unacceptably than

ever. In his “Testament” he made it clear that in his view Stalin

was, after Trotsky, “the most able” leader of the Central

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Committee. When Lenin turned to Trotsky for support in his last

attempts to influence policy, Trotsky failed to carry out his

wishes. The “Testament” was concerned to avoid split between

Trotsky and Stalin. In his last articles Lenin went to attack

“bureau tic misrule and wilfulness, “spoke of the condition of the

State machine as “repugnant, and concluded gloomily, “We lack

sufficient civilization to enable us to pass straight on to

Socialism although we have the political requisites.” “The

political requisites” – these were precisely the activity of the

Party and governmental leadership which he was condemning in

practice. Over the past years he had personally launched the

system of rule by a centralized against – if necessary – all other

social forces. He had created the Bolsheviks, the new type of

party, centralized and disciplined, in the first place. He had

preserved its identity in 1917, when before his arrival from exile

the Bolshevik leaders had aligned themselves on a course of

conciliation with the rest of the Revolution. There seems little

doubt that without him, the Social Democrats would have reunited

and would have taken the normal position of such a movement in the

State. Instead, he had kept the Bolsheviks intact, and then sought

and won sole power - again against much resistance from his own

followers.

It is clear from the reports of the meeting of the Central

Committee nine days before the October Revolution in 1917, that

the idea of the rising “was not popular”, that “the masses

received our call with bewilderment”. Even the reports from most

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of the garrisons were tepid. The seizure of power was, in fact, an

almost purely military operation, carried out by a small number of

Red Guards, only partly from the factories, and a rather larger

group of Bolshevized soldiery. The working masses were neutral.

Then in the Civil War which followed, by daring and discipline a

few thousand comrades (the effective central core if the Party at the timeof the October Revolution is estimated at 5,000 to 10,000, a third of whom were

intellectuals) imposed themselves on Russia, against the various

representatives of all political and social trends, and with the

certain prospect of joint annihilation if they failed. The “Old

Bolsheviks” among them had the prestige of the underground years,

and the evident far-sightedness which had led them to form such a

party gave them a special blue print: the myth of the Party and

the source of its leading cadre’s right up to the mid- 1930s, was

the underground struggle. But the vital force which forged in

those concerned an overruling Party solidarity was the Civil War,

the fight for power. It transformed the new mass Party into a

hardened and experienced machine in which loyalty to the

organization came before any other consideration. Conquest, Robert: The

Great Terror, 1990:3-4

When the Civil War ended, the Mensheviks and Socialist

Revolutionaries Quickly began to gain ground. The rank and file of

the trade unions turned away Bolsheviks. And as the failure of the

first attempt to impose strict State control of the economy became

obvious. Lenin began to realize that to continue on those lines

would lead to ruin. He determined on the economic retreat which

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was to be the New Economic Policy. But with this admission that

the Bolsheviks had been wrong, the way as open for the moderate

parties, to which the workers were already turning, to claim

political power. Lenin had established the Party all the seeds of

the centralized bureaucratic attitude. The Secretariat, long

before Stalin took it over, was transferring Party officials for

political reasons. Sapronov had noted that local Party committees

were being transformed into appointed bodies, and he put the

question firmly to Lenin: “Who will appoint the Central Committee?

Perhaps thinks will not reach that stage, but if they did, the

Revolution will have been gambled away” (Sapronov, speech to the IXth

Party Congress) Conquest, Robert: The Great Terror, 1990:5-7

In destroying the “democratic” tendency within the Communist

Party, Lenin in effect threw the game to the manipulators of the

Party machine. Henceforward, the apparatus was to be first the

most powerful and later the only force within the Party. The

answer to the question “Who will rule Russia?” became simple “Who

will win a faction fight confined to a narrow section of the

leadership?” Candidates for power had already shown their hands.

As Lenin lay in the twilight of a long decline from his last

stroke, striving to correct all this, they were already a grips in

the first round of the struggle which was to culminate in the.

Stalin and TrotskyIt was in the Politburo, that the decisive confrontations took

place. Over the following years Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev,

Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were to meet death at the hands of the

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only survivor, Stalin. Trotsky was the first and the most

dangerous of Stalin’s opponents. On him Stalin was to concentrate,

over the years, the whole power of his immense capacity for

political malice. The personal roots of the Great Purge extend back

to the earliest period of Soviet rule, when the most bitter of the

various rivalries which possessed Stalin was centred on the man

who seemed, at least to the superficial observer, the main

claimant to the Lenin succession, but who, for the reason, roused

the united hostility of the remainder of the top leadership.

Trotsky’s revolutionary record, from the time he had returned from

abroad to become President of the St. Petersburg Soviet during the

1905 Revolution, was outstanding. His fame was European. In the

party however, he was not as strong as his repute suggested. Right

up to 1917, he had stayed clear of Lenin’s tightly organized

Bolshevik group and operated, with a few sympathizers, as an

independent revolutionary, though in some ways closer to the

Mensheviks. His own group had emerged with the Bolsheviks in June

1917, and he had played a decisive role in the seizure of the

power in November that year. But he was regarded as an outsider by

most of the Old Bolsheviks

Trotsky was quite isolated in the Politburo. His greatest strength

was his control of the War Commissariat. An old Trotskyite later

took the view, that Trotsky could have won in 1923, if he had held

his base in the army, and personally appealed to the Party workers

in the great towns. Trotsky did not do so, because his victory

would then have meant a sure split in the Central Committee, and

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he hoped to secure it by negotiation. Ciliga, Anton: The Russian Enigma,

London, 1940:86 But this was the wrong arena. Trotsky’s weaknesses as

a politician were demonstrated: ……the great intellectual, the great administrator, the great orator lacked one quality

essential – at any rate in the conditions of the Russian Revolution – to the great political

leader. Trotsky could fire masses of men to acclaim and follow him. But he had no talent for

leadership among equals. He Could not establish his authority among colleagues by the

modest arts of persuasion or by sympathetic attention to the views of men lesser intellectual

calibre than himself. He did not suffer fools, and he was accused og being unable to brook

rivals. Carr, E.H. Socialism in One Country, London, 1957:151

Trotsky’s self-dramatization and conviction that he would triumph

by more personal superiority, without having to condescend to

unspectacular political actions, was fatal. A devastating comment

from an experienced revolutionary sums it up: “Trotsky, an

excellent speaker, brilliant stylist and skilled polemicist, a man

cultured and of excellent intelligence, was deficient in only one

quality: a sense of reality. Milovan, Djilas, The New Class, London,

1957:50 Stalin left the fiercest attack on Trotsky to his allies.

He insistently preached moderation. When Zinoviev and Kamenev

urged the expulsion of Trotsky from the Party he opposed it. He

said that no one could possibly “conceive the work of the

Political Bureau….without the most active participation of Comrade

Trotsky”. Pravda 18 December 1923. But his actions were far more

effective than his allies` words. His secretariat organized the

disposal of Trotsky’s leading supporters. Rakovsky was sent to the

Soviet Legation in London, Krestinsky on a diplomatic mission to

Germany, others to similar exile. Hereby Trotsky was isolated and

outmanoeuvred with little trouble. His views, which had already

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been in conflict with those of Lenin, were officially condemned,

and by 1925 it was possible to remove him from the War

Commissariat. Conquest, Robert: The Great Terror, 1990:7-9

Industrialization By 1928 Stalin had ousted Trotsky and the Left opposition had

taken major steps away from Lenin’s collective leadership and

freer intraparty debate. Moving toward personal rule, Stalin acted

to secure predominant power over party and state by crushing the

Right opposition and purging other colleagues of Lenin who

retained influential positions. He manipulated the Lenin cult and

created the monstrous myth of his own omniscience. To secure

awesome power, the Stalin regime crushed passive opposition from

the peasantry and secured control over the countryside by forcibly

collectivizing agriculture. With the rapid industrialization of

the Five Years Plans, it won support from a growing working class.

A seemingly monolithic state swallowed society as most Soviet

citizens became state employees, subject to increasing party

supervision and controls. After all significant opposition had

seemingly been overcome; Stalin launched the Great Purge of 1936-

1938, which eliminated the Old Bolsheviks and left his minions

apparently triumphant over a purged party, army, and state, and

over supine and frightened populace. Recent specialized studies

notes J. Arch Getty, have revealed that policymaking in the early

Stalin years was often uncertain and tentative. Like Hitler,

Stalin employed an indirect, sometimes erratic “formula of rule”

in the 1930s. Differences of opinion persisted within the party,

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and Soviet administration was chaotic, irregular, and confused. In

the Stalin political system, theory and practice were often

totally at odds. The federal system and Construction of 1936 gave

national minority and the Soviet people the appearance of self-

government and civil rights; actually power, although inefficient,

resisted primarily in a self-perpetuating party leadership in

Moscow. Did Stalin’s aims and methods derive from Ivan the

Terrible? Was he a loyal Marxist and true heir of Lenin dictions,

as was claimed officially? MacKenzie, David and Cuurran W.

Michael: A history of the Soviet Union and Beyond, 2002: 462-473

Stalin’s cultA growing personality cult aided Stalin’s drive to dominate the

party and rule the USSR. Launched cautiously at the 14th Congress

in 1925, it developed notably after Stalin’s 50th birthday

(December 21, 1929), celebrated as a great historical event. In

contrast with Lenin’s modest unassuming pose, the Stalin cult by

mid-1930s took on grandiose, even ludicrous forms. During the

Purges in 1937 N.S. Khrushchev, Stalin’s eventual successor,

declared slavishly:

These miserable nonentities wanted to destroy the unity of the party and the Soviet state.

They raised their treacherous hands against Comrade Stalin…., our hope; Stalin, our desire;

Stalin the light of advanced and progressive humanity; Stalin our victory. (Quoted in E.

CrankShaw, Khrushchev’s Russia 1959:53)

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Within the party, the area of dissent narrowed and then

disappeared. As Stalin crushed the left in 1926-1927, it became

clear, that he would exclude factions or individuals who opposed

his personal authority. Though Trotsky and the rest were stripped

of influential positions, they still underestimated Stalin.

Trotsky’s expulsion from the USSR in 1929 brought predictions that

power would pass to a triumvirate of Bukharin, Alexis Rykov, and

A.P.Tomskii, who appeared (mistakenly) to dominate the Politburo

selected after the 15th Congress. Once the Left had been broken,

Stalin adopted a moderate stance, and split with the Right led by

Bukharin. The Stalin-Bukharin struggle developed behind the scenes

during growing economic crises: Better-off-peasants (kulaks),

taxed heavily by the regime, within their grain from the market.

Whereas Bukharin favoured further concessions to the peasantry,

including raising state grain prices, Stalin began urging strong

action against the kulaks and officials who sympathized with them.

Denouncing the still unnamed opposition for blocking

industrialization, Stalin used his control of the Secretariat and

Orgburo to remove Bukharin`s supporters from key party and

government posts. Belatedly contacting Kamenev from the broken

Left, Bukharin warned “He (Stalin) will still strangle us.” He

added:

Stalin is an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to the preservation of his power. He

changes his theories according to whom he needs to get rid of at any given moment….He manoeuvres

in such a way as to make us stand as the schematics. (Quoted in L. Deutscher, Stalin (London 1949:314)

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By early 1929 Stalin attacked the Right openly and told at a

Politburo meeting, “Comrades, sad though it may be, we must face

facts: a factional group has been established within our party

composed of Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov” it is blocking

industrialization and collectivization. Stalin won majority

support in the Politburo, bypassed the Moscow leaders, and broke

their resistance. In April 1929 the Central Committee condemned

the Right and removed its leaders from their posts; in November

they surrendered, recanted their views, and brought themselves a

few years of grace. Open political opposition in the party ended,

but during 1932-1933 Stalin faced grave economic and political

crises. Forced collectivization had brought on famine and hunger

in the cities and provoked widespread nationalist opposition

especially among Ukrainian peasants. As Stalin’s popularity fell

to its nadir, Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition declared abroad: “In

the view of the incapacity of the present leadership to get out of

the economic and political deadlock, the conviction about the need

to change the leadership of the party is growing. “Trotsky

reminded his readers of Lenin’s “Testament”, which had urged

Stalin’s removal as general secretary. In November 1932 after

Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s second wife spoke out about famine

and discontent, the overwrought Stalin silenced her roughly, and

she apparently committed suicide. Victor Serge notes that Stalin

submitted his resignation, but none of the Politburo’s obedient

Stalinist members dared accept it. Finally V.M. Molotov said,

[“Stop it - stop it. You have got the party’s confidence,”] and

the matter was dropped.

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Stalin surmounted this personal danger and the economic and

political crises in the country. Opposition remained unfocused,

confused, and leaderless. In 1932 Stalin had Kamenev and Zinoviev

expelled from the party and exiled to Siberia, but after more

abject recantations, they were allowed to return. After similar

admissions of guilt, other Old Bolsheviks received responsible

posts. They might have tried to kill Stalin, but who would rule in

his place? Even Trotsky declared, [“We are concerned not with the

expulsion of individuals but change of the system.”] Stalin

temporarily adopted a moderate, conciliatory course. His speech of

January 1934 called for consolidating earlier gains and

inaugurated a brief period of relative liberalism. Within the

Politburo the youthful and popular Leningrad party chief, S.M.

Kirov, backed by Voroshilov and Kalinin, supported concessions to

the peasantry and an end to terror; hard-liners such as Molotov

and Kaganovich opposed them. During 1934 Stalin apparently waved

indecisively between the groups.

The Great PurgeThis interlude ended with Kirov`s murder in December 1934. The

supposed assassin, Nikolaev and his accomplices were promptly

apprehended, tried secretly, and shot. They were described

officially as Trotskyites working for the clandestine, foreign-

directed United Centre, which had allegedly plotted to kill Stalin

and other top leaders. Zinoviev and Kamenev, supposedly implicated

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in the plot, were sentenced to penal servitude. Ominous changes

proceed in the political police. Early in 1934 the secret police

(GPU) which had gained a sinister reputation was dissolved. Its

tasks were assumed by the People’s Commissariat of Internal

Affairs (NKVD), which combined control over political, regular,

and criminal police. Henrikh Iagoda, its first chief, perhaps

fearing that Kirov`s liberal line threatened his power, may have

engineered the assassination at Stalin’s order. NKVD employees

were highly paid and obtained the best apartments and other

privileges.

This “state within the state” maintained a huge network of

informers, kept dossiers on millions of persons, and spied on all

party agencies. Special sections watched the NKVD`s own regular

personnel, whose members were expected to show loyalty first to

the NKVD and only secondarily to the party. Special NKVD courts,

exempt from control by government or judicial agencies, were set

up to conduct secret trials. While surface calm prevailed, Andrei

Zhdanov, Kirov`s successor as Leningrad party chief, conducted a

ruthless purge there, deporting tens o thousands of persons to

Siberia, and the NKVD prepared the greatest mass purge in history.

In May 1935 a Special Security Commission was created to

investigate all party members, “liquidate enemies of the people”,

and encourage citizens to denounce suspected

counterrevolutionaries and slackers. Its members included Stalin,

N.I. Yezhov (later head of the NKVD), and Zhdanov, Andrei

Vyshinskii, subsequently chief prosecutor of the public trials.

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That spring 40 members of Stalin’s personal bodyguard were tried

secretly for conspiracy, and “terrorists” were hunted in every

party and Komsomol (Young Communist League) agency. As the rapidly

growing NKVD justified its existence by under covering

conspiracies everywhere, Stalin ordered careful surveillance even

of Politburo Members.

Stalin’s bloodthirstinessA reign of terror was unreleased, dwarfing that of the French

Revolution. Perhaps that precedent had previously deterred Stalin,

who once remarked, “You chop off one head today, another one

tomorrow…What in the end will be left of the party?” Unlike the

French case terror in Russia reached its murderous peak two

decades after the Revolution. The French terror claimed about

40,000 victims; Stalin’s from 1935-1938 killed hundreds of

thousands and sent millions into exile. In 1989 demographer Paul

Robeson, Jr., estimated that the USSR during the Stalin era had

about 29, 3 million “excess deaths” from terror and famine. Stalin

not the NKVD initiated the Great Purge and approved executions of

prominent figures. The party had to become an impregnable fortress

to safeguard the country and the gains of socialism from foreign

and domestic enemies. Stalin added: As long as capitalist

encirclement exists, there will be wreckers, spies, diversionists,

and murderers in our country, sent behind our lines by the agents

of foreign states.” The Soviet found this distorted view credible.

Purged were over 70 percent of the Central Committee members and

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candidates chosen in 1934. The purges reached downward into the

general populace as friends and relatives of those purges who were

arrested. Thousands of ordinary citizens were denounced orally or

by poison-pen letters, often out of jealousy and meanness, of

crimes they had not and could not have committed.

For two years (1937-1938), most of a helpless population lived in

abject terror of sudden arrest and deportation. Special targets

for arbitrary arrests included former members of other political

parties and former White soldiers, priests, intellectuals

(especially writhers), Jews and other national minorities in

Russian towns, and professionals who had been abroad. Many

ordinary workers and peasants were also denounced and forced to

confess to imaginary crimes against the state. Stalin even issued

orders to arrest a percentage of the population. His

bloodthirstiness grew as members of all social groups were rounded

up. Why this terrible bloodbath? Stalin’s chief motive suggests

the British scholar Isaac Deutscher, was to destroy those who

might lead an alternate regime or criticize his politics. This

strategy required killing or exiling party and military men

trained by purged leaders, then rebuilding the chief levers of

Soviet power: the party, the army, and the security forces. The

general public may have been involved deliberately to create the

climate of fear essential to Stalin’s total control. Arctic and

Siberia supplied a reason for mass deportation of workers and

peasants. Perhaps Stalin became utterly mad, making pointless he

search for rational explanations. Certainly casualties were too

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great to be justified by ordinary political or social aims. Robert

Conquest’s estimate of about 8 million purge victims in camps by

1938, plus another million in prisons, seems reasonable. During

1930s huge NKVD Empire of forced labour camps and prisons, begun

in the White Sea area under Lenin and described graphically in

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, mushroomed in European

Russia and Siberia. MacKenzie, David and Cuurran W. Michael: A

history of the Soviet Union and Beyond, 2002: 462-466

Conclusion While Lenin was alive the revolution could be said to be following

an essentially European course. The leading Bolsheviks, with the

exception of Stalin, had drunk deeply at the fountain of European

culture. Many of them new German and read Marx in the original and

were well versed in ideological controversies. Lenin did not think

that the revolution could survive unless there was a parallel

revolution in at least some of the advanced capitalist countries.

Stalin however favoured practical and pragmatic administration,

and the intellectual and theoretical approach to politics

gradually disappeared. Tucker, R.C., ed. Stalinism: essays in historical interpretation,

W.W. Norton, 1977. Enormous attention was paid during the Stalin era

to the correct formulation of Marxist-Leninist thought. It had to

reflect experience because it was very difficult to encapsulate it

completely.

The 1930s was a period of great optimism, when it was thought that

an individual enveloped in a controlled environment and fed the

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correct ideological vies would quickly be transformed into the new

homo sovieticus. However during the Stalin lifetime things changed. He

saw every citizen as having an allotted role to play. All he

wanted from Soviet citizens was the outward manifestation of

obedience and he saw himself in the mould of Peter the Great.

Schapiro, Leonard: The communist Party of The Soviet Union, Eyre & Spottiswoode,

1960. One may dismiss Stalin as a tyrant, as an evil man whom the

USSA could have done without. On the other hand, it is possible to

argue that he rendered the Soviet people a service which may

eventually be seen as his achievement. It is quite possible that

had the USSR not gone through the forced industrialization of the

1930s, she would have succumbed to the German onslaught of 1941.

Rauch, G.A. von: A History of Soviet Russia, rev. edn. Praeger, 1958

Our view of Stalin is still influenced, to a considerable extent,

by his main protagonist, Trotsky. He would not allow that Stalin

had many political gifts. Trotsky described Stalin as incapable of

thinking logically and possessing no creative imagination, and

although he did not dismiss him as a total nonentity he only

grudgingly conceded that he was a mediocrity. According to

Trotsky, the circumstances made the man. Stalin’s rice to power

was not based on human qualities; it resulted from functioning of

an inhuman machine, the bureaucracy. Stalin concentrated on the

darker sides of human character and had little interest in

cultivating human virtues. Economically Stalin was building

socialism, but politically he was destroying it. McCauley, Martin:

Stalin and Stalinism, Longman Group Ltd. UK 1983:72

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BibliographyCiliga, Anton: The Russian Enigma, London, 1940:86

Conquest, Robert: The Great Terror, Stanford 1990

Crankshaw, E, Khrushchev’s Russia 1959

Deutscher: Stalin, London 1949

McCauley, Martin: Stalin and Stalinism, Longman Group Ltd. UK 1983:

MacKenzie, David and Cuurran W. Michael: A history of the Soviet Union and

Beyond, Wadsworth gr. 2002

Rauch, G.A. von: A History of Soviet Russia, rev. edn. Praeger, 1958

Schapiro, Leonard: The communist Party of The Soviet Union, Eyre &

Spottiswoode, 1960.

“СТАЛИН” Здвард Радзинский, Изддтельтво ВАГРИУС 1997

21

Tucker, R.C., ed. Stalinism: essays in historical interpretation, W.W. Norton,

1977.

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