"Archipelago system). But from 1934 onwards, during the Great Purge, the connotations of the term changed, because being expelled from the party came to mean almost certain arrest, with long imprisonment or execution following. Sergey Kirov, leader of the Leningrad section of the Communist party, was murdered in 1934. In response, Stalin's Great Purge saw one third of the Communist party executed or sentenced to work in labor camps. Following Stalin's death in March 1953 purges as systematic campaigns of expulsion from the party stopped. In the decades after, the center's strong political control was exerted instead mainly through individualized"
"and used against Bukharin as proof of his factionalism. Zinoviev and Kamenev remained politically inactive until October 1932, when they were expelled from the Communist Party for failure to inform on oppositionist party members during the Ryutin Affair. After again admitting their alleged errors, they were readmitted in December 1933. They were forced to make self-flagellating speeches at the XVIIth Party Congress in January 1934, where Stalin paraded his erstwhile political opponents, showing them to be defeated and outwardly contrite. The murder of Sergei Kirov on 1 December 1934 was a catalyst for what are called Stalin's Great Purges, as"
"Former United Opposition leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who had read the Platform, were also expelled from the Communist Party in October 1932 and exiled to the Urals region for failure to report the incident to the secret police. Ryutin was eventually executed on 10 January 1937, during the Great Purge, which also claimed the lives of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kosior, Rudzutak, Uglanov, Yenukidze, Rykov and most of the rest of the Old Bolsheviks. Ryutin affair The Ryutin affair (1932) was one of the last attempts to oppose the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin within the All-Union Communist Party. Martemyan"
"expulsions from the party, with Stalin commanding foreign communist parties to also purge anti-Stalinist elements. During the 1930s and 1940s, NKVD groups assassinated defectors and opponents abroad; in August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, eliminating the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. In May, this was followed by the arrest of most members of the military Supreme Command and mass arrests throughout the military, often on fabricated charges. These purges replaced most of the party's old guard with younger officials who did not remember a time before Stalin's leadership and who were regarded as more personally"
"collectivization was largely completed and the worst was over. Although Bukharin had not challenged Stalin since 1929, his former supporters, including Martemyan Ryutin, drafted and clandestinely circulated an anti-Stalin platform, which called Stalin the ""evil genius of the Russian Revolution"". However, Sergey Kirov, First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee was assassinated in Leningrad in December 1934, and his death was used by Stalin as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people were to perish as Stalin eliminated all past and potential opposition to his authority. Some historians now believe that Kirov's assassination in"
"in the Cheka and the Communist Party respectively. He reportedly won Stalin's favour in the early 1930s, after faking a conspiracy to assassinate the Soviet leader that he then claimed to have foiled. By 1935, Beria had become one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates. He cemented his place in Stalin's entourage with a lengthy oration titled, ""On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia"" (later published as a book), which emphasized Stalin's role. When Stalin's purge of the Communist Party and government began in 1934 after the assassination of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov (1 December 1934), Beria ran"
"the Russian Communist Party's 17th Congress in 1934, which emphasised service to the collective over individual needs, Bronner was one of a number of public figures who changed his public utterances to match the new ethos, moving away from a humanistic approach that saw syphilitic infection as the result of misfortune and nothing to be ashamed about, towards an approach that characterised it as impeding the efforts of the party and something that carried shameful connotations. Bronner was arrested on suspicion of spying and terrorist activity during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of 1937. He was executed in 1939. Volf Bronner"
"the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialisation. Sergei Kirov, head of the Party organisation in Leningrad, was killed in 1934; some believed Stalin ordered his death. Kirov's death triggered a second crisis, the Great Purge. In 1938, out of the 28 People's Commissars in Molotov's Government, 20 were executed on the orders of Molotov and Stalin. The purges were carried out by Stalin's successive police chiefs; Nikolai Yezhov was the chief organiser, and Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Molotov were intimately involved in the processes. Stalin frequently required Molotov and other Politburo members to sign the death"
"10 July 1934, two months after Menzhinsky's death, Joseph Stalin appointed Yagoda People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, a position that included the oversight of both the regular and the secret police, the NKVD. Yagoda worked closely with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first Moscow Show Trial, which resulted in the prosecution and subsequent execution of former Soviet politicians Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936 as part of Stalin's Great Purge. The Red Army high command was not spared and its ranks were thinned by Yagoda, as a precursor to the later and more extensive purge in the Russian"
"1934 was arranged by Stalin himself or at least that there is sufficient evidence to plausibly posit such a conclusion. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged an ever-growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's murder and other acts of treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage. In February 1936, shortly before the purge started in earnest, Bukharin was sent to Paris by Stalin to negotiate the purchase of the Marx and Engels archives, held by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) before its dissolution by Hitler. He was joined by his young wife Anna Larina, which therefore opened the possibility of exile,"
"Soviet leader Joseph Stalin began the Great Purge of opposition including the Red Army officer corps, killing or incarcerating tens of thousands of high-ranking figures, often on trumped up or fictitious charges. The Red Army's fighting power was severely weakened, an observation seemingly confirmed by its relatively poor showings at the Battle of Lake Khasan in 1938 and the Winter War against Finland in 1940. Fear led people to defect or flee abroad; on June 13, 1938, Genrikh Lyushkov, Chief of the Far Eastern Department of the NKVD (Soviet secret police), crossed the border into Manchuria and turned himself in"
"against the kulaks, which has been labeled ""classicide"". As head of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that claimed to expel ""opportunists"" and ""counter-revolutionary infiltrators"". Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, though more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas. In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov. At the 1934"
"leadership of the church. However, in the late 1930s, the Soviets renewed their attacks against Church, culminating with his murder in 1938 as part of the Great Purge, and the closing of the Catholicate of Echmiatsin on August 4, 1938. The Church however survived underground and in the diaspora. The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated against members of the Communist Party, the peasantry, writers and intellectuals, and other unaffiliated persons. In September 1937 Stalin dispatched Anastas Mikoyan, along with Georgy Malenkov and Lavrentiy Beria, with a list of"
"in December 1934. Milan Gorkić Milan Gorkić or Josip Čižinski (born as Josef Čižinský, ; 19 February 1904 – 1 November 1937) was a high-ranking Yugoslav communist. He was a leader of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) in exile from 1932 until 1937 and prominent member of the Comintern. Gorkić was executed by the NKVD on 1 November 1937 during the Great Purge. Gorkić was born Josef Čižinský in 1904 into a Czech family from Austria-Hungary that had settled in Sarajevo five years earlier in 1899. At the time, Bosnia-Herzegovina was still officially a vilayet within the Ottoman Empire"
"the time, Joseph Stalin. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party and to consolidate the authority of Stalin. Most public attention was focused on the purge of certain parts of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as ""too rich for a peasant"" (kulaks), and professionals. A series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being"
"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. 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"
"1933. From this time, a rigorous ""purge"" of the party and state apparatus of non-Russians took place. The Latvian Communist Party was dissolved in 1936, its members persecuted and murdered as ""nationalists"" and ""people's enemies"". One aspect of Stalin's Great Purge was state-directed xenophobia. In July 1937 the closure of the publishing house and cultural association ""Prometejs"" and the arrest of its employees took place. The Red Latvian Riflemen were removed from the history and school books and their veteran associations were dissolved. On November 23, 1937, Nikolai Yezhov ordered the NKVD services to pool all the information gathered about"
"police). As a result, he drew the unwelcome attention of Stalin. Viewing Kirov's growing popularity as a threat to his hold on power, Stalin ordered the Soviet Secret police, the NKVD, to arrange Kirov's assassination; the GPU used a fanatic with a history of mental illness to accomplish the deed, Leonid Nikolaev. On December 1, 1934, Nikolaev shot Kirov in the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. After his funeral, Stalin blamed Kirov's assassination on reactionary elements within the Communist party. Later, in an act of supreme irony, Stalin had the Leningrad Opposition leaders and many other party officials executed on the"
"Communist Party. Zinoviev and Kamenev, in 1932, were found to be complicit in the Ryutin Affair and again were temporarily expelled from the Communist Party. In December 1934, Sergei Kirov was assassinated and, subsequently 15 defendants were found guilty of direct, or indirect, involvement in the crime and were executed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were found to be morally complicit in Kirov's murder and were sentenced to prison terms of ten and five years, respectively. Both Kamenev and Zinoviev had been secretly tried in 1935 but it appears that Stalin decided that, with suitable confessions, their fate could be used for"
"Sergey Kirov Sergei Mironovich Kirov (born Kostrikov; – 1 December 1934) was a close, personal friend to Joseph Stalin, and a prominent early Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union. Kirov rose through the Communist Party ranks to become head of the party organization in Leningrad. On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed by a gunman at his offices in the Smolny Institute. There is a widespread belief that Joseph Stalin and elements of the NKVD were behind Kirov's assassination, but evidence for this claim remains lacking. Kirov's death was later used as a pretext for Stalin's escalation of"
"by NKWD during the[Great Purge] and was sentenced to death by Kolegium Wojskowe Sadu Najwyzszego CCCP, (based on the decree CKW CCCP from 1.12.1934). He was executed by firing squadron on September 20, 1937 for ""espionage and terrorist activities, as well as, having knowledge of other members terrorist' tendencies, while participating in POW against CCCP."" The court session lasted 20 min. and execution took place on that day. He was exonerated by Russian government between 1955-1956. Stanisław Bobiński Stanisław Bobiński (; ; 1882-1937) was a Soviet communist politician, journalist and military commander of Polish origin. Born November 20, 1882 in"
"from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the U.S.S.R and hand her territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, and other preposterous charges. Even previously sympathetic observers who had stomached the earlier trials found it harder to swallow these new allegations as they became ever more absurd, and the purge expanded to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin. No other crime of the Stalin years so captivated Western intellectuals as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing. For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler,"
"wave of purges between 1929 and 1934 targeted the revolutionary generation of the party that in Ukraine included many supporters of Ukrainization. Soviet authorities specifically targeted the commissar of education in Ukraine, Mykola Skrypnyk, for promoting Ukrainian language reforms that were seen as dangerous and counterrevolutionary; Skrypnyk committed suicide in 1933. The next 1936–1938 wave of political purges eliminated much of the new political generation that replaced those who perished in the first wave. The purges nearly halved the membership of the Ukrainian communist party, and purged Ukrainian political leadership was largely replaced by the cadre sent from Russia that"
"old cadres and the rank and file of the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky had already been expelled from the party in 1927, exiled to Kazakhstan in 1928 and then expelled from the USSR entirely in 1929. Stalin used the purges to politically and physically destroy his other formal rivals (and former allies) accusing Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev of being behind Kirov's assassination and planning to overthrow Stalin. Ultimately, those supposedly involved in this and other conspiracies numbered in the tens of thousands with various Old Bolsheviks and senior party members blamed with conspiracy and sabotage which were used to explain"
"of punishment introduced legal instability and arbitrariness and were, therefore, against the interests of the Party. Their debates continued throughout 1935 and were inconclusive. With the start of the Great Purge after Sergei Kirov's assassination on December 1, 1934, Krylenko's star began to fade and Stalin began to increasingly favor Vyshinsky. Notably, it was Vyshinsky and not Krylenko who prosecuted the first two high-profile Moscow show trials of Old Bolsheviks in August 1936 and January 1937. Krylenko's ally, the Marxist theoretician Eugen Pashukanis, was subjected to severe criticism in late 1936 and arrested in January 1937 and shot in September."
"were investigated for alleged ties with oppositionists in Omsk. In 1932, the CCC investigated Medvedev on the Ryutin Affair, but he was not charged with any violations. Medvedev was purged from the party in late 1933, but he had not been a member of a party cell or possessed a party card for several years. In January 1934, Medvedev was sent into administrative exile in the far north of Russia. After Leningrad party chief Sergey Kirov was assassinated in December 1934, Stalin ordered the arrests of many former oppositionists. Medvedev was among these; in January 1935, he was returned to"
"the Chinese Communist Party. The Great Purge of 1936–1938 can be roughly divided into four periods: In the summer of 1938 Yezhov was relieved from his post as head of the NKVD and was eventually tried and executed. Lavrentiy Beria, a fellow Georgian and Stalin confidant, succeeded him as head of NKVD. On 17 November 1938 a joint decree of Sovnarkom USSR and Central Committee of VKP(b) (Decree about Arrests, Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation) and the subsequent order of NKVD undersigned by Beria, cancelled most of the NKVD orders of systematic repression and suspended implementation of death sentences."
"the imprisonment or execution of millions of people throughout the Soviet Union as alleged ""enemies of the people."" By 1938, however, the oppression had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure, economy and even the armed forces of the Soviet state, prompting Stalin to wind the purge down. Stalin had voted to appoint Georgy Malenkov as head of the NKVD, but he was overruled. In September, Beria was appointed head of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD, and in November he succeeded Yezhov as NKVD head. Yezhov was executed in 1940 and one account"
"allowed their corruption. To Stalin, the correction of such abuses of authority and economic corruption were responsibility of the secret police, the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). With the Great Purge (1936–1938), Stalin rid himself of internal enemies in the CPSU, and rid the Soviet Union of every counter-revolutionary, reactionary, and socially-dangerous man and woman who might offer legitimate, political opposition to Marxism–Leninism. In the 1937–1938 period, the NKVD arrested 1.5 million people, purged from every stratum of soviet society and every rank and file of the Communist Party, of which 681,692 people were killed as enemies of the"
"the Chinese as the KMT and the Communists had suspended their civil war and formed the desired United Front. Stalin often gave conflicting signals regarding state repression. In May 1933, he released from prison many convicted of minor offenses, ordering the security services not to enact further mass arrests and deportations. In September 1934, he launched a commission to investigate false imprisonments; that same month he called for the execution of workers at the Stalin Metallurgical Factory accused of spying for Japan. This mixed approach began to change in December 1934, after prominent party member Sergey Kirov was murdered. After"
"The NKVD attacked the supporters, friends, and family of these ""heretical"" Marxists, whether they lived in Russia or not. The NKVD nearly annihilated Trotsky's family before killing him in Mexico; the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader was part of an assassination task force put together by Special Agent Pavel Sudoplatov, under the personal orders of Stalin. In 1934, Stalin used the murder of Sergey Kirov as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people perished (see ). Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder, or at least that there was sufficient evidence"
"Stalin, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. Aleksei Stetskii Aleksei Ivanovich Stetskii (January 15, 1896 – August 1, 1938) was a Russian journalist and member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the Central Committee elected by the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Orgburo. He was head of the Leninist Culture and Propaganda Department (Agitprop) from February 10, 1934 to May 13, 1935. During the Great Purge, he was arrested on April 26, 1938 on charges of counter-revolution and later executed by"
"civilians who had been sympathetic to the White movement, or of other subversives rounded up by the OGPU. Historians estimate that over 3,000 people were executed and that tens of thousands lost their positions and privileges. Stalin ordered the next systematic party purge in the Soviet Union in December 1932, to be performed during 1933. During this period, new memberships were suspended. A joint resolution of the Party Central Committee and Central Revision Committee specified the criteria for purging and called for setting up special Purge Commissions, to which every communist had to report. Furthermore, this purge concerned members of"