Explain How Stalin Dealt with Opposition to His Rule in the Ussr in the 1930s

991 Words4 Pages
Explain how Stalin dealt with opposition to his rule in the USSR in the 1930s [8] By many, Stalin’s leadership was regarded as controversial and so his rule over the USSR in the 1930s was opposed numerous times; however, Stalin dealt with these attacks to his position as leader of Russia using many different tactics. There are three main ways in which Stalin dealt with opposition to his rule: * Terror: Stalin’s police state and the purges * Propaganda * Censorship Traditional reasons for the purges being introduced include the killing of Sergei Kinov, Stalin’s paranoia, Stalin’s precarious leadership situation in 1934 and the 5 year plans so there is a very good chance that they were introduced to deal with opposition to his rule. The great show trials of 1936 are a poignant example of this, the first stage involved the “cleaning out” of the top communists such as Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1936 and Bukhari, Rykov and Yagoda in 1938. This meant that any top members of the party who could all have easily been potential candidates to overthrow Stalin and take control of the USSR were outlawed and eventually killed, removing all threat. However, Stalin took things a step further by introducing the second stage, the cleaning out of all senior party members in 1937 to ensure that his opinion could not be challenged in any way. By the end of stage two, a fifth of all party members had been shot and of 1,961 delegates if the 17thg party congress 1934, 1,108 had been arrested and of 19 central committee members, over 90 were shot. Through this, Stalin had shown that he could deal with all potential threats to his leadership from the communist party members, but he also felt the need to assert his power over his people too now that he was the undoubted ruler of Russia. The purges were essentially a “cleaning out of bad things” and Stalin’s purges
Open Document