Consequences - Soco-economic/political/military

Political - Stalin’s position

• Emerged from the Terror in a position of supreme power

• Absolute control over the party and the population, full dictator

Political - Party control and leading members

• All executed

• Party controlled through show-trials

• Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Trotsky expelled or executed later on

Political - The Central Committee

• Before 1936 it controlled party membership, now lost all remaining power

• 1/3rd of Party purged by end of 1938

• New members obedient to Stalin

Political - Congress

• 1939 Congress was completely subservient to Stalin

• Compared to 1934 Congress that was confident to challenge Stalin over rapid industrialisation and Kirov was most popular

Socio-economic - Number of direct victims

• Total of 800,000 arrested from summer 1937 to November 1938

• Many taken to gulags

Socio-economic - Impact on society

• Order 00447 turned neighbours and colleagues against each other

• Denunciations made to gain favour with the NKVD

• Atmosphere of fear permeated society that made the Terror self-escalating

Socio-economic - impact on white-collar workers

• Scientists, managers, administrators + teachers, engineers and specialists targeted

• Purged at a time when rapid industraliation needed their expertise

Socio-economic - Bolshevik families

• Political acts had personal consequences

• Many leading Bolsheviks had family who were victims, including Stalin

Socio-economic - National minorities

• Suffered greatly e.g. Koreans, Poles and Germans, Jews and Muslims

• Hundreds of thousands of non-Orthodox, non-ethnically Russian Soviet citizens were affected

Socio-economic - some benefits

• Some benefits from forced labour

• Digging of canals such as the Baltic-White Sea Canal

• ‘Shake up’ of managers gave opportunities to workers to get promoted

Military - Officers affected

• ~23,000 officers were shot or dismissed

• Around half of the officers in the army, navy and airforce were either imprisoned or shot

• Tukhachevsky executed + 7 other generals

• 11 war commissars, 3 out of 5 Marshalls of the USSR and all 8 admirals as well as their replacements were killed

Military - Red Army supply + demand

• Red Army increased from around 1mill in 1936 to 4mill in 1941

• But not enough officers to lead them

• Therefore, 11,000 were later released from prison

Military - Failures in war

• Big task to find and train a large number of officers

• Therefore many war failures in early period of 1941 can be somewhat attributed to the purges