The key defendants that were removed were Trotsky, Kamenev, Buhkarin, Yagoda and Zinoviev. This was significant in allowing Stalin to establish his personal dictatorship as they removed all of Stalin’s rivals from the 1920’s thus creating fear among the USSR showing that if you did anything that Stalin disliked, your life would be in danger, particularly because these people had been in positions of power therefore people obeyed all of Stalin’s orders. This lead to the wider terror among ordinary people. They were denounces, arrested and sent to Gulags by the NKVD. It is estimated that between 1934-8, 20 million Russians were sent to these gulags.
Collectivization was also set up to help destroy the wealthy farmers, known as Kulaks (Doc4.). Kulaks needed to be eliminated because they only cared about themselves and not for the state. Stalin had a solution for this, simply take away all of their food and starve them to death. This was known as the great purge. While the drive for collectivized agriculture was a wide going trend, kulaks needed to be destroyed.
His army also consisted of millions of poor, starving peasants with bad equipment, poor supplies of rifles and ammunition. In 1916, two million soldiers were killed or seriously wounded, and one third of a million taken prisoners. The Russian population was horrified. They considered the Tsar irresponsible for taking over the army and held him responsible for everything; as a result instability was growing at an alarming rate for the Tsar who had once held himself so assuredly in power. Nicholas II took this course of action to assure himself he still had complete control of Russia.
This event led to labor unrest, peasant insurrections, student demonstrations, as well as army and navy mutinies. Although the shooting was not Nicholas II’s fault, he was given the nickname, “ The Bloody Murderer” and stated that he was not going to make any changes for the people. This was the last major event before the Revolution of 1905 officially broke out. New councils created by urban workers in order to better organize strikes were created called Soviets. During this time, Russian cities were dying because all the workers and peasants were focused on rebelling against the government and seizing the land of their landlords, instead of working in the factories and living the life of a peasant or urban worker.
Lenin also suppressed democracy, closing down the constituent assembly in January 1918 after ‘one day of democracy’. Both the Tsars and the communist rulers also showed no hesitation in the use of secret police and mass terror. Each regime had its own secret police - the Third Section under Alexander II, the Okhrana under Alexander III and Nicholas II, the Cheka, the NKVD and the KGB under the communists. The suppression of opponents was also a common practice throughout the period. Under the term of Pyotr Stolypin as Prime Minister (1906-11), hundreds of opponents were hanged - earning the hangman’s noose the nickname - ‘the Stolypin necktie’.
At the time, the formation of political parties was illegal but despite this, they still existed. Every sector of society was represented through one of these illegal parties to act as opposition to the Tsarist autocracy. A number of parties set up used violence and terrorist activities to express their views. The Social Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats were set up to create a new society which gave power to the workers and peasants. The Social Revolutionaries were responsible for over 2000 assassinations from 1901-1905 including the Tsars uncle, Grand Duke Sergei in February 1905.
He ordered many scholars to be buried alive because they secretly kept books that weren’t allowed to be viewed. He even ordered 460 Confucianists, followers of Confucius, to be buried alive for daring to disagree with him and 700 more stoned to death by his soldiers. He confiscated weapons and implemented a harsh legal system to punish offenses. All people under Qin Shi Huang were equal before the law. People who breaks them would be punished severely.
Although Ivan calmed down in 1564 in protest, he was urged back to power and began a rule of terror never before seen in Russian history. He divided the country into two clean-cut spheres, the oprichnina was encompassing his personal domain, and the other ,the zemshchina, representing the rest. Ivan broke the power of the Muscovite boyars, exiling thousands of them to Siberia, and created a new militia. These hand-picked oprichniki, as he named them, were devoted to his orders and were encouraged to rape, loot, burn, kill and torture in the Tsar's name. They spread terror throughout Russia, culminating in the atrocious massacre of Novgorod in 1569, when as many as 60,000 citizens were tortured to death for supposedly plotting to side with
People who expressed negative thoughts about Peter's decisions were often executed before they had a chance to gain followers and rebel against the Tsar. The Streltsy, bushy musketeers and pike men, Russia's first professional soldiers, were often found at the receiving end of harsh sentences[6]. Peter the Great was bad in that he was very cruel to the people of Russia. He heavily taxed everyone, so the serfs had to pay taxes for themselves and their owners. In
The World War I was draining all of Russia’s resources. There was shortage of food throughout the country, which left people starving. At the battlefront, millions of Russian soldiers were dying, they did not possess many of the powerful weapons that their opponents had. The government under Czar Nicholas II was disintegrating, and a provisional government had been set up. In November of 1917, Lenin and his communist followers known as the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and set a communist government in Russia.