Abstract

The punitive measures employed by the Soviet authorities were primarily used to create a system of society management based on fear. Furthermore, repressions in the USSR were one of the main methods employed in the power struggle and they allowed to resettle thousands of people to scarcely populated regions of Russia without additional cost, expanding the system of corrective labour camps, which in turn provided non-paid workers for the realisation of massive social and economic endavours. Repressions in Kazakhstan were introduced in stages, following the main directions of the social, economic and national policy of the communist party and the state. An analysis of the repressive policy under the Soviet regime reveals 9 stages of wide-scale repressions in Kazakhstan. As a result of the “Bolshevik genocide”, Kazakhstan was deprived of its national political, cultural, scientific, technical and engineering elites as well as of the affluent peasantry – the most creative and independently thinking part of the society. Between the late 1930s and the mid 1940s deported to Kazakhstan were members of various nations: the Koreans, the Polish, the Germans, the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, the Meskhet Turks, etc. The scale of resettlement was unprecedented even in the USSR. In one day hundreds of people were displaced from their settlements on a basis of vague charges; tens of thousands of them died during the resettlement. Common for all the stages of repressions are several key moments. Most often subject to repression were the most outstanding people, ones endowed with initiative, having their own position and capable of defending their point of view. The ideological framework for the program of repressive actions were the words of V. Lenin about “the Red Terror as a response to White Terror” and later the theory of J. Stalin on the class struggle exacerbating with the progress of the socialist society, which needed to be fuelled with the presence of a factual “enemy presence.” It is impossible now to find a scholar that would be able to estimate the number of victims of the political repression in Kazakhstan. A conclusion based on the archival sources points to the fact that the repressions were not only conducted on a mass scale, but also that they were methodically planned.

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