I know of no other country where a man can breathe so freely. The song, Wide is my motherland, was written
and composed in 1936. The lyrics are ironic if you consider that
it was written in a time where the population of gulags, concentration camps, reached upwards
of one million, where there was widespread anxiety and fear and members of the Communist
party, civil servants, workers, soldiers and intellectuals were at risk of being arrested
by the secret police, the NKVD under Yagoda, in order to be sent to a gulag… or worse. Over a million people died during the Great
Purge instigated by Stalin. Prominent old Soviet officials, generals and
officers in the army and intellectuals were tortured until they confessed to crimes they,
often, had not committed. And as a spoiler: almost everyone I have talked
about in previous videos and this video was shot. Former ally of Stalin? Shot. Former ally of Stalin aiding him in opposing
other allies? Shot. The judges presiding over the show trials? Shot. The man responsible for shooting the former
allies and judges? Shot. The man responsible for shooting the man that
was responsible for shooting the former allies and judges? Shot. Yes, it was brutal. -intro- “I demand the mad dogs be shot… all of
them!” Vyshinsky, the state prosecutor of the Moscow
Trial in 1936, told the three judges of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union that the
sixteen accused in front of him ought to be sentenced to death. All of them confessed to terrorist activities
and conspiracy to eliminate the Soviet leaders. The judges agreed with Vyshinsky’s request:
all sixteen were sentenced to death. The Russian people were stunned when they
heard what these traitors were guilty of. The world…. was surprised. Among these accused men were prominent communists
such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, two Bolshevists leaders from 1917. After nearly twenty years it seemed that the
revolution started to devour its own children. We remember Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev
from part 1 and 2, first allying themselves with Stalin in order to oust Trotsky. In turn, Stalin turned on them and allied
himself with Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov, whom he would later turn against as well. This show trial would be followed by two more,
one in 1937 and one in 1938 - however these show trials merely indicated the top of the
iceberg. Between 1936 and 1938 most of the old-Bolshevist
leaders disappeared in a storm of terror, the ranks of the party were decimated and
the industry, arts, education, army and even the secret police, that carried out the orders,
were not safe. Kirov’s Murder Between 1933 and 1934 the party, numbering
three and a half million members, was purged of a million members. Stalin must have been wondering whether the
dissatisfied and moderates were secretly making plans to replace him with the young, very
popular, Sergei Kirov, currently fourth in the Soviet hierarchy. Stalin had been planning a great purge for
some time, assigning key positions to loyal followers and confidants. On the first of December 1934, Kirov was shot
on a street in Leningrad by Leonid Nikolayev. There is a near historical consensus that
Stalin knew about, if not orchestrated the assassination. The assassination of Kirov was the excuse
Stalin needed… to initiate the Great Purge. Nikolayev and thirteen supposed accomplices
stood trial. The trial did not take long, and all of them
were executed shortly after. 103 other men taken into custody that, as
far as could be traced did not have anything to do with Kirov’s murder, were put against
a wall and shot as well. This… was just the beginning The Purges Commence January 1935, shortly after Kirov’s murder,
Zinoviev and Kamenev, together with seventeen others were publicly accused of murder. They were acquitted but forced to confess
their moral and political responsibility. In secret, they were sentenced again and sentenced
to long prison sentences. The murderers of Kirov were found… and operating
resistance cells were exposed throughout the entire Soviet Union. Stalin turned on those that he deemed too
soft or distracting him from hunting dissenting party members. Avel Yenukidze, member of the Central Committee
and prominent Soviet politician, was labelled a political degenerate for being too soft. He was arrested and shot in October 1937. Maxim Gorky, founder of the art style “socialist
realism” and a great Soviet writer, in his attempts to reconcile Stalin with Zinovjev,
died under suspicious circumstances a few months later. In January 1936 all members of the party had
to renew their membership party cards to root out passive members. But then Trotsky published another article,
in which he stated his most loyal supporters were inside the Soviet Union. In July a secret party directive briefed members
about “Terrorist activities of the Trotsky - Zinovjev counterrevolutionary block” and
called for extreme vigilance. Three weeks later, Zinoviev and Kamenev appeared
before their judges. They were accused of plotting to murder Stalin,
acting on Trotsky’s orders. Kamenev confessed he had spent ten years fighting
against the party, the government and against Stalin personally. The fact that both men would be executed,
was clear from the beginning of the trial. During the trial, the court alluded to bringing
accusations against Radek, the gifted editor in chief of the Izvestia, a Soviet newspaper,
Bukharin, Tomsky and others. Tomsky, leader of the labour unions and ally
of Bucharin, chose suicide rather than interrogation by the NKVD. This act was seen as evidence of his guilt. Others, such as Bucharin, were arrested but
released due to lack of evidence. Jagoda and his secret police seemed to not
be able to get all these supposed conspirators eliminated. Stalin and Zhdanov were on holiday to the
coast of the Black Sea when Stalin sent a telegram to Moscow. “We consider it absolutely necessary and
urgent that Comrade Yezhov be appointed to head the People's Commissariat of Internal
Affairs. Yagoda has obviously proved unequal to the
task of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc." The next day Yagoda was demoted and Yezhov,
Stalin’s man, arrived with 200 men. Many of the former interrogators were arrested,
the purging machine started grinding faster and more vigorously. The radicalisation of the Purges January 1937, the second large show trial
commenced. A few months beforehand, Radek and the industrial
leader Pyatakov openly denounced the followers of Trotsky as vipers and vultures, now they
were standing trial, accused of membership of these Trotsky-ites, along with fifteen
other “We demand the vermin and all their followers be mercilessly exterminated
”, is an excerpt of what Vyshinsky, the prosecutor, said during the trial. The accused would have met with Trotsky-agents
at the Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen. The fact that this Hotel burned down before
world war one, was of no importance. Radek and three others were sentenced to long
prison terms, Pyatakov and the others were shot. Ordzhonikidze, who attempted to save Pyatakov,
was driven to suicide. Especially the death of Ordzhonikidze was
a shock, as he was one of the more likeable Soviet officials. Schlögers book Moscow 1937 dedicates multiple
pages to diary excerpts from politicians and people in the Soviet Union, reacting to the
news of his death. In March, during a plenary meeting of the
Central Committee, Stalin made it clear he wanted more purges. Bukharin and Rykov, being arrested earlier,
were expelled from the party. Jagoda, once head of the secret police, now
was “exposed” as a tsarist spy, a thief and a swindler” and subsequently arrested. The party, the government and the secret police
would not be the only victims of this purge, however. Stalin explicitly stated that the military
staff ought to be purged. During the second show trial Marshal Mikhail
Tukhachevsky, one of the most skilled commanders of the Red Army was already mentioned. The case against the army was thoroughly prepared. “Betrayal” in the army An army is a dangerous victim of a purge,
but the methods that this purge was conducted were marked by precision and psychological
attack. Many high-ranking officers were suddenly transferred
in January 1937, isolating them from their troops. In June, a giant conspiracy within the Red
Army was revealed and Tukhachevsky, along with eight other generals, were tried and
executed. The judges sentencing them were terrified,
five out of eight of them would be executed eventually. Tukhachevsky’s entire family was either
executed or sent to Gulags. In the book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,
written by Simon Montefiore, it is mentioned how Tukhachevsky’s confession is sprayed
with brown liquid, which turned out to be dried blood. The case against the eight generals was based
on falsified documents, provided by the German Sicherheitsdienst under Reinhard Heydrich,
who thought they were fooling Stalin. Among the falsified intel were documents with
signatures of Tukhachevsky, von Seeckt and Trotsky. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the archives
show that Stalin conceived this plot in order to get rid of the generals in a credible manner. Believing war was imminent, due to the rise
of Hitler in Nazi Germany, Stalin wanted absolute control of the army. The NKVD would show up unannounced at military
bases, filled their van with officers and drove off. Entire battalions disappeared. Within two years three out of five Marshals,
14 out of 15 army commanders, 167 out of 280 army corps and division commanders, all 16
army commissars and 25 out of 28 army corps commissars were eliminated. Merely one admiral out of nine survived the
purges. Books written in the 60s and 70s claim that
nearly one-third of the entire officer apparatus was purged, however, they underestimated the
size of the Red Army, in reality, the percentage was far less due to the amount of lower ranking
soldiers. The normal man Not all victims were conspirators against
the regime. Khrushchev would later declare that many “honest
communists” were among them, even the ones placed in high positions by Stalin himself,
actively fighting the Trotskyists. The loyal Genrich Eiche was stunned when he
was arrested by “a government that he had always fought for”, he would be exiled. Pavel Postyshev, a Stalinist, fanatical anti-Trotskyist
and one of the principal architects of the Ukraine famine of 1932-1933, the Holodomor,
questioned the necessity of the execution of so many. This would lead to him being arrested, accused
of being a Trotskyist, and executed. Even the conformist Rudzutaks, who never opposed
the Party’s line in the slightest and is recorded as exclaiming that even considering
if Stalin was subject to re-election was betrayal of the party, was tried and executed. Not a single part of the country was skipped. Ukraine had three party leaders eliminated
between 1933 and 1938. Nearly half of the local party secretaries
met the same fate... just in 1938 (!). Thirteen of the Ukrainian Politburo members that were
elected in April 1937, were all dead in June 1938. In Georgia, 87 percent of the local party
secretaries were replaced between 1937 and 1939, not counting thousands of civil servants,
a prime minister and his deputy, professors of the local university and prominent members
when it came to the arts. Central-Asia, Belarus, Karelia and many others
places of Russia saw the same thoroughness of the purges. Communist leaders that sought their refuge
in the Soviet Union were not spared. Bela Kun from Hungary, Remele and Neumann
from Germany and several leading Polish communists were purged. The NKVD even reached Spain, where generals,
journalists and diplomats became victims during the Spanish civil war from 1936 to 1939; even
Antonov Ovseyenko who was in charge of the purge of the Revolutionary Socialist Party
in Catalonia and stormed the Winter Palace during the October revolution in 1917, was
himself arrested and executed. Similar operations were executed in other
branches of the Soviet body - the reason: attempting to eliminate a generation of officials
that remembered Trotsky as a revolutionary hero, to eliminate men that grew up within
the European tradition and the men that used their brain - in order to end all criticism
and to remove everyone that stood in the way of absolute obedience to Stalin. (Gallery of prominent purge victims over next
bit of text) Class vigilance increased and a large number
of “enemies of the people” were exposed. People jumped to the opportunity to get rid
of superiors in order to advance their own career and to get back at old enemies. Once the class-instinct had spoken, no evidence
was required. Khrushchev would later state that once Stalin
said someone was guilty, one had to assume he was guilty and an enemy of the people. Once people appeared on these lists, all hope
was lost. The use of psychological and physical interrogation
methods was encouraged as a “justified and fitting method to interrogate the notorious
and stubborn enemies of the people”. The secret police managed to break even the
strongest of men, forcing people to incriminate innocent others, family, colleagues and friends. The population of prison camps exceeded ten
million and anyone was suspect. Solzhenitsyn has described the prison camps
in harrowing detail in the Gulag Archipelago, bringing to light the crimes against humanity
that were being committed in the Soviet Union. The Final Show Trial March 1938. The last show trial commenced. Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda and eighteen others
listened in silence to Vyshinsky and his accusations. Vyshinsky was a former Menshevist himself
and narrowly escaped a purge during the ‘20s. The twenty-one men on trial were “fascist
provocateurs”. One of the accused, Krestinsky, former secretary
of the Communist Party, refused to admit guilt during the trial. The next day, after a night in prison with
Yeshov’s men, he retracted his statement and confessed. The accusations went back all the way to 1917. Bukharin was accused of planning to murder
Lenin, Yagoda would have wanted to poison Gorky and occupy the Kremlin. Chernov, the former commissar of agriculture,
was accused of ‘mistakes’ during collectivisation. He admitted to aiming for a high mortality
rate among cattle. All men, except for three, were sentenced
to death and executed. The three others were sentenced to hard labour
in the Gulag, where all of them were murdered, most likely by NKVD officers. At the 17th party congress in 1934, one-hundred-and-thirty-nine
members of the Central Committee were elected. The following party congress in 1939 saw only
forty-one of them alive. Half of the members of the 1932 Politburo
were dead, of the original fifteen members of the Bolshevik government four died of natural
causes and nine were executed - Trotsky would be assassinated in Mexico in 1940; Stalin
was the only one left. In 1938, Lavrentiy Beria became Yezhovs deputy,
replacing him in 1939. Yezhov recognized the precursors to an imminent
arrest. His wife committed suicide, one of his protegés,
Alexandr Uspensky was arrested and executed. Yezhov drowned himself in alcoholism and rarely
showed up at work. Yezhov would be arrested in early 1939 and
executed a year later, after a secret trial in a prison and not after dragging many people
down in his fall. Ironically, Yezhov designed the prison himself,
with the floor slightly sloping downward in order for the blood to be easily washed off. Stalin showed no remorse at the 18th party
congress, stating that the purges were inevitable and the results were mainly positive. The purges cost over a million people their
lives, but they shaped a social and administrative revolution - no one dared oppose Stalin. Recap A quick recap will be given in the title screen
at the end of the video and in the description. A lot of information was given in this video
but there is a lot more information to be given surrounding this topic. I attempted to cover the most striking and
notable events in chronological order. I have made two videos previous to this one,
about the power struggle within the Communist party between Trotsky and Stalin and the years
leading up to the Great Purge. You can watch those on my channel. If you have any questions surrounding this
topic feel free to leave a comment. Thank you very much for watching this video. Until next Friday!
