Why did the Stalinist Terror occur when it did? Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom investigates how institutional accommodation and immediate triggers produced these tumultuous events.

Poster dedicated to Joseph Stalin. Caption reads, “The Captain of the Soviet State leads us from one victory to another!” B.E Efimov, (1933)

For most members of the public, the name Joseph Stalin evokes (if anything) the Second World War and gulags. This of course ignores major achievements—most notably industrialization—as well as a proper understanding of the failures of the period leading up to the Marshal’s death in 1953. The Stalinist Terror, though often described as a singular period from 1936/7 until 1938, was the culmination of years of economic and political buildup. Much attention has been paid to the mechanisms involved, such as denunciations, interrogation, and show trials, but far less focus has been allocated to the question of why it happened when it did.

Proximate and Non-Proximate Causes

The timing of the Terror can be attributed to two separate yet overlapping developments. These can be divided most simply as immediate triggers and institutional accommodation. To understand the timing, one needs to address both. In the case of the former, it consisted of the assassination of Sergei Kirov and various decrees issued by senior Soviet figures. As for the latter, the late 1930s was when pressures from the Five Year Plans finally caused cracks, in turn permitting decades of institutional flaws to come to the forefront in the form of the Terror.

Before progressing, what exactly was the Terror? While it was a complex phenomenon in the world’s largest country, for the sake of simplicity we will limit ourselves to the purges, arrests, and executions in the latter half of the 1930s that involved some facade of a legal framework and generally included some component of authorization. To understand the timing, it is necessary to centre this analysis around a clearly defined process, which is not possible if one relies merely on extended periods that bore witness to high mortality rates. In particular, the famine of 1932 and 1933 is excluded. Though writers like Anne Applebaum do attribute malice to the Soviet leadership,¹ it is nevertheless the case that the deaths cannot as a whole be credited to a single sustained policy of seeking the elimination of a people, aside from the kulaks. In particular, the famine was to a considerable extent an unintended side effect of collectivization and peasant resistance, among other factors, and therefore not included in this analysis.

The circumstances surrounding the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the leader of the Communist Party in Leningrad, remains disputed. Some historians such as Robert Conquest have argued that General Secretary Joseph Stalin was behind the killing, often relying on circumstantial evidence such as the fact that officials like the Ukrainian Grigory Petrovsky and the Georgian Sergo Ordzhonikidze were supportive of Kirov heading a collective leadership, thereby potentially posing a threat to Stalin.² Ultimately, the motives are to a certain degree irrelevant. Rather, the murder of Kirov permitted a rapid acceleration of the state’s effort at suppression of perceived enemies. On the night of 1 December 1934, the very same evening as Kirov’s death, the Soviet government swiftly passed an anti-terrorism law. This legislation in turn severely limited civil and judicial rights, mandated that investigations had to be completed within 10 days and that the accused were only to be informed of their trial 24 hours in advance with no legal aid, and that appeals were not to be allowed and that death sentences had to be carried out immediately.³

The enactment of new laws on the back of the Kirov murder in turn laid the foundation for what would become the Terror. While it did not reach its peak until 1937, arrests and trials were already beginning to take place. As early as 1935, in the newly created milieu, old leaders from the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition were imprisoned, though not executed.⁴ While it can be argued that because many of those arrested were not killed it was technically not part of the Terror, the fact of the matter is that the processes cannot be cleanly separated. Some, like Old Bolshevik Avel Yenukidze, were merely demoted and reassigned in 1935, yet he was in fact later executed in 1937. Ultimately, the killing of Kirov and the immediate passage of new judicial mechanisms meant that the framework became rapidly more intense. As such, a decree from 7 April 1935 extended all penalties, including execution, to 12 year olds.⁵ This radicalization was not meant to necessarily target children but rather pressure Stalin’s opponents such as figures like Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, both of whom had children.

It is hereby necessary to address what may appear to be a discrepancy. Though the Terror can trace its immediate origins to late 1934 and early 1935, it remains the case that 1935-6 witnessed a decrease in state coercion. Andrey Vyshinsky, who was the prosecutor in Moscow Show Trials and served as Procurator General of the Soviet Union, admitted to Stalin and Molotov in a letter from April 1936 that 30-35% of convictions for agitations and counterrevolutionary activities (roughly 800 cases examined) were ‘incorrect.’⁶ This was in keeping with his calls for greater reforms to legal procedures more generally. However, this, along with the declining incarceration rate for political crimes in those years, signify a quantitative decrease, not a qualitative change. Critiques such as that by Vyshinsky, which also included attacks on NKVD practices and calls for greater tolerance of ordinary citizens’ criticisms as long as it didn’t attack fundamental policy, may represent an internal political struggle. Namely, it is very well possible that this criticism was voiced in order to enhance the standing of his own agency; one way would be to limit the power of police and in turn strengthen judicial powers.

Unintended Side Effect of Industrialisation

The work edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown convincingly that the timing of the Terror is intimately intertwined with the pressures that surrounded the Second Five Year Plan. In short, managers were unable to keep up with the exact targets in the Second Five Year Plan, despite being less intense than those of the First Plan. This in turn resulted in the falsification of records as self-protective measures in order to hide issues they were facing. The unraveling of these coverups beginning in 1936 resulted in a crackdown on what Moscow perceived to be a large-scale ‘conspiracy.’

This can be seen when examining individual factories or cities like Sverdlovsk where an attempt to cover shortfalls can account for part of the state’s persecution of regional party elites. The year 1936 emerged as a crucial point in time, since it saw a slight economic downturn, which in turn led to state authorities investigating, in turn producing a cycle of arrests and denunciations. The causes for the initial decline have multiple roots, including bad weather that hurt agriculture, a decline in new capital investment, and the labor force already being stretched to the limit while problems from previous years were accumulating.⁷ Similarly, in the case of more industrialized areas, shortages in raw materials prevented machine-building factories from keeping up production, which in turn affected other industries. With the 1936 investment plan being raised 9.5% over 1935 despite the target for cost being reduced by 11%, systematic coverups became harder to conceal.⁸

In general, Moscow cared more about cracking down when production was down, thereby making 1936 a particularly sensitive year and consequently causing the Terror to occur during the latter half of the 1930s. This obsession with clamping down during economic downturns was built into the Soviet system. For example, the Commissions for Party and Soviet Control was created as a response to failures of grain collection yet by the time it was set up in 1934, the worst of the famine was over and crackdowns were not as intense as they otherwise might have been.⁹

Action, Reaction

If the Terror is to be defined as a period of state persecution, as led by the police and the NKVD, then it is important to remember that these agencies were often reacting to events rather than initiating them. This was especially true for accidents that took place in the workplace. According to a typist for the railroad workers’ union in Simferopol, if “there was a train accident, sabotage had to be traced, and a wrecker had to be found.”¹⁰ The fact that arrests were often massively concentrated in one particular place (e.g. an office or a factory) suggests that this was not about causing fear, especially if a majority were arrested. For example, in the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, 70% of journalists and writers and 80% of party and government leaders were arrested.¹¹ As a result, in some places for some professions, there were little to no arrests –i.e. it could not have been intended to cause widespread fear. Consequently, some of these mass arrests should be understood as not part of a systematic campaign under a single banner of ‘the Terror’ but rather locally produced sudden explosions of underlying tensions.

This is similarly true when examined on a macro-scale. For example, despite similar climate and topography, Kazakhstan was far more affected than Uzbekistan. As such, when attributing a cause, it is necessary to define it at times more narrowly, i.e. why did the Stalinist Terror happen when it did in a specific location? In some cases, it was not so much that it was a Stalinist Terror as opposed to simply local officials going to extremes. In the case of Turkmenistan, by the beginning of September 1937, sleep deprivation and beatings were common with detentions becoming even more arbitrary, such as men arrested for having long beards.¹² The fact that this was later condemned in an internal memo by Stalin in September 1939 highlights the fact that local terrors could at times have local causes that would not elucidate the situation for the entirety of the Soviet Union.

War Scare

Arguably the greatest, single determinative factor was the growing tensions on the international scene. Namely, there was growing instability that contributed to increasing paranoia within the Soviet Union and in particular the Soviet leadership. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine that several party officials were at least partially convinced when Stalin raised the issue of ‘capitalist encirclement’ during the February-March 1937 plenum of the Central Committee. The growing strength during this period of the states that would make up the Axis Powers is undeniable, whether it be defined by Germany in Spain, Italy in Abyssinia, or Japan in Manchuria. This included specifically anti-Stalinist manoeuvres, such as the signing of the anti-Comintern Pact in 1935.

Key here is the question of whether or not the so-called war scare was in fact sincere. Some of the actions by Stalin suggest that they were to a considerable degree genuine concerns held by the Kremlin. For example, the Soviet decision to sell their portion of the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese for a relatively small sum in 1935 could be understood as a measure to reduce tensions between Moscow and Tokyo. Additionally, by examining the effects of population resettlement it becomes even clearer that Soviet fears were not baseless. Stalin’s resettlement of ethnic Koreans did, according to the Japanese, stifle their efforts at espionage within the USSR.¹³

While the Terror occurred in the late 1930s, Soviet fears predated it by more than a decade. However, the actual breakout of the Terror should be understood as the point in which the war scare reached its climax as a product of a multi-year build-up. Though Polish leader Józef Piłsudski died in 1935, this did not mark the end of ‘Prometheanism,’ i.e. the Polish government’s attempt to weaken the Soviet Union by supporting nationalist and separatist movements from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. One of the ambitions behind Prometheanism was the creation of a cordon sanitaire as a buffer zone at the Soviet Union’s expense.¹⁴ The continued external pressure on the USSR helped determine the timing of the Terror. Though fear of Polish-backed separatism had spurred a war scare in 1926-7¹⁵, it did not produce a Terror. By the late 1930s, however, there was now a multifaceted threat that was far stronger than the one that existed in the 1920s. As such, the Terror was not caused by a singular fear but rather the culmination of years of worry.

In a more specific sense, the war scare resulted in the arrest and execution of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, which in turn led to a series of denunciations and further mass arrests that more properly define the Stalinist Terror. As Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union and later Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov would go on to remark, “[w]e were obligated in 1937 [to ensure] that in time of war there would be no fifth column.”¹⁶ May 1937 marks a qualitative turning point in the Terror whereby for the first time senior figures who had not been oppositionists began being arrested.

Tukhachevsky’s arrest points to a period of intensification and in a way explains why the Stalinist Terror became especially deadly when it did. This leads to two further questions: why were military officers arrested starting in May 1937 and why did the Terror become more fatal after this? The former can best be explained by the fact that May was, like many other dates in the Terror, merely a point in which months (if not years) of suspicions had culminated. In the case of officers, Stalin and Molotov mentioned in the February-March plenum of that year the need to vet the military. This was in part a result of testimony from military officers arrested the previous year as alleged Trotskyists who were still being interrogated as well as the fact that German disinformation began arriving by April and May 1937.

As the historians J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov note, “We still do not know why Stalin decided to decapitate the Red Army in 1937.”¹⁷ Consequently, one is left to speculate. Potential reasons include the fact that Tukhachevsky and other military leaders had frequently disagreed with Stalin’s Minister of Defence Kliment Voroshilov (including openly insulting him to his face) as well as the possibility that the army posed a potential challenge to the civilian leadership since it was, after all, armed and not necessarily as loyal to the Communist Party as the political commissars.

Top-down or Bottom-up?

The Terror could only take place when it did because there had been a process of ideological homogenization. By 1937, political rhetoric and language was almost entirely drawn from the top and then replicated in newspapers. In an example highlighted by Wendy Goldman, “[t]he resolutions adopted in March 1937 by the sixth plenum of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS), for example, were drawn directly from the platform passed by the Party’s Central Committee plenum two weeks earlier.”¹⁸ This formula of information spreading created the framework in which the Terror could finally be activated. A similar filtering down of political language existed for political crimes. Terms such as Trotskyist, fascist hireling, hidden enemy, enemy of the people, etc. increasingly became a part of everyday life in a way that wasn’t true earlier, therefore making the Terror unlikely to have broken out before.

It is necessary to acknowledge points that remain unclear. Chief amongst these is the issue of whether the fears of a supposed ‘Trotskyist-Zinovievite opposition’ was created artificially or came about organically. In January 1936, V. P. Olberg, a German communist who became a Soviet citizen, confessed to being instructed by Trotsky to assassinate Stalin.¹⁹ It is very well possible that Olberg was coerced into saying so or that he simply told them what they wanted to hear and thereby fed into the pre-existing paranoia. In the case of the former, it would suggest that the Terror was more of a conscious effort, whereas the latter would hint at arrests essentially serving as a mechanism for confirmation bias. The latter would therefore explain why the Terror became more intense as mass arrests continued and reinforced the prevailing narrative around the alleged anti-Soviet conspiracy.

Some elements of Russian, and subsequently Soviet, society enabled the Terror to break out but were more instrumental in making them possible in general rather than possible at a specific time. Formally writing to state authorities (e.g. prosecutors, newspapers, local and regional officials) was nothing new in Russia and was a practice that continued well into the 1930s. At its root, it was a mechanism that enabled the powerless to seek some form of justice yet became deadly following the murder of Kirov. As such, public denunciations, which led to investigations and as a result, also the involvement of the NKVD, required a pre-existing social infrastructure that became activated by external developments and thereby made the Stalinist Terror occur during the late 1930s.

Parallel to the above was the further development of the zaiavlenie, a formal, written declaration demanded of both party members and everyday citizens, which was required following the arrest of a family member, friend, or upon coming across allegedly compromising information or suspected enemy activity. Like the practice of contacting authorities for redress, the use of zaiavlenie did not in and of itself cause the Terror to happen when it did, but was rather reinforced by it as well as an enabling factor. As Wendy Goldman noted in her work Inventing the Enemy, the zaiavlenie, which did not have to be substantiated and for which the author was not held responsible for content, saw an increase following the first Moscow show trial, which made later purges, arrests, and executions more possible in the near-future.²⁰ The decline in discretion offered to local party officials following the death of Kirov meant that “by 1937 party organizations in the factories were focused almost exclusively on the investigation of zaiavleniia.”²¹

Conclusion

To more fully answer the question of why the Stalinist Terror occurred when it did, it becomes necessary to flesh out the scope and thereby define it both by motive, date, and geography. Once that has been acknowledged, it becomes possible to offer more precise reasons. By doing so, one can then approach the matter in a more clear-headed manner without risking overgeneralizing or overly compartmentalizing the various components of the Terror. The multifaceted nature of the killings of the late 1930s demonstrate that causes, and consequently timelines, varied between regions, between industrial sectors, as well as at differing levels of the party leadership and state apparatus. Only once one has accurately identified the various causes for the multitude of triggers that unleashed the Stalinist Terror can one examine any overarching phenomena. The Terror was not a monolithic Union-wide event with a predetermined course but rather a complex period of Soviet history that should not be reduced to a single individual or variable.

Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom is a final-year PhD student at the University of Cambridge where he has been researching contemporary European military and diplomatic history. He was previously a visiting researcher at the Swedish Defence University, Université libre de Bruxelles, and Stockholm University. He is also a freelance researcher and writer focusing on security policy and international affairs.

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Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (Penguin, 2018).
Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (Phoenix Book, 1998), 179.
Wendy Goldman, Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 32.
Stalin: Breaker of Nations, 194.
Ibid, 196.
Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia 1934-1941 (Yale University Press, 1996), 8.
Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (Routledge, 2000), 272.
Ibid, 273.
Ibid, 270.
Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 76.
Ibid, 79.
Ibid, 62.
Inventing the Enemy, 35.
Richard Szawłowski and Hanna Szawłowski, “Polish Sovietology 1918/19–1939,” The Polish Review 17, no. 3 (1972), 3–36.
John P. Sontag, “The Soviet War Scare of 1926-27,” The Russian Review 34, no. 1 (1975), 66–77.
J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks (Yale University Press, 1999), 447.
The Road to Terror, 445.
Inventing the Enemy, 25-6.
Ibid, 37.
Ibid, 29-30.
Ibid, 31.