How effectively did Stalin employ terror to secure economic and political control in the years 1929? Essay

1953 saw the death of Soviet Russia’s greatest leader, in a never-ending atmosphere of anxiety, betrayal and paranoia. Stalin had become the state, not through the path of diplomacy, but through tumultuous bloodshed and trickery. He held absolute power and anyone foolish enough to protest against him and his path to the ultimate communist Utopia would find them selves dead or in a forced labor camp. The roots of this ultimate power lie in the years 1929-39, where Stalin employed the ‘Great Terror’, with the purges to secure political and economic control over the Soviet state. This essay will deduce how effective the ‘terror’ was employed to secure these corner stones.

The first stage in securing an industrial base for the future was the collectivization of all farmland. All peasants were required to give up their land to the state, and so not be able to pocket any profits from their produce. This act also served as the impetus for the discrimination of the Kulaks, the so-called capitalists farmers of Russia, who would now had to be liquidated. The Kulaks had profited form the reforms of Stolypin (1906-11), and so were seen as the ‘old enemy’, holding back the achievements of the revolution. Hidden grain and land were seized and many Kulak families were beaten and killed. This served as a warning to the rest of the peasantry of the likely consequences of resisting the Soviet State. During the collectivization millions of peasants starved as they were forced to work harder and harder. The state tried to implement fierce punishments for slackers and deportations, imprisonments and executions were common.

Stalin’s great terror is inextricably linked to the purges, which he implemented to secure, and indulge his megalomania. And following on the purges were used to coax the industrial workforce to greater acts of labor for the purpose of industrialization and the war economy. In the defense of the USSR, Stalin prosecuted (in a series of public trials) industrial...