Stalin: History in an Hour

Together, the victims of the famines, Terror and the gulags – but excluding the casualties of war – add up to over 20 million individuals

The writer and Soviet dissident,

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, relates a tale from 1937 when, after eleven exhausting minutes of enthusiastic clapping, a factory director was the first to stop; he got ten years in a gulag

When Yakov, his son from his first marriage, tried half-heartedly to shoot himself, Stalin scoffed, ‘he can’t even shoot straight’. Yakov joined the Red Army during the war and was taken prisoner. When the Germans tried to trade him for a field marshal incarcerated in the Soviet Union, Stalin refused

I don’t even trust myself.’

Although his new purges never reached the horrific heights of 1937, people grew accustomed again to their neighbours disappearing overnight. Artists, writers and the intelligentsia were particularly hit as Stalin imposed his limited vision of the arts

With the end of the Second World War, Stalin’s paranoia only grew more intense as he became convinced that the West wished to undermine the East. With Hitler gone, he now considered his former allies the enemy. The US deployment of the atomic bomb against Japan in August 1945 fuelled his insecurities (the Soviet Union developed their own bomb by 1949). It was this insecurity rather than a desire to spread the word of Socialism that galvanized Stalin into maintaining a Soviet influence in a corridor of eastern countries from Estonia in the north, to Bulgaria and Albania in the south, thereby subjugating 100 million new Soviet citizens

Many of the 70 per cent that survived were immediately dispatched to the gulags on their eventual return home, along with their wives and families. ‘There are no prisoners of war,’ Stalin once said, ‘only traitors to their homeland

By December 1941, Hitler’s forces were within sight of Moscow, and Leningrad was under a siege that would last almost 900 days. Within eighteen months of war, 65 per cent of the Red Army had been taken prisoner. Stalin deemed them traitors to the motherland because they had ‘surrendered voluntarily to the enemy’. During the war up to six million Soviets were captured

From mid-1937, Stalin drew up ‘arrest quotas’ for each area of the Soviet Union, and the percentage of those arrested to be shot. But, as with the Five-Year Plans, over-fulfilment was encouraged. Terror was heaped upon terror, as people petrified of being denounced got in first with their denunciations. No crime was needed, no proof required. Guilt was of little consideration and innocence of no consequence.