Towards Explaining the Changing Levels of Stalinist Repression in the 1930s: Mass Killings

Abstract

There is nothing exceptional in the fact that the Soviet government used repression. All governments use repression against those they consider to be criminals or enemies, and the use of repression tends to increase during times of war, revolution and counter-revolution. The Soviet government was born in a time of war, and had to face the onslaught of counter-revolution, political terrorism and civil war in its early years. Twenty years later it had to face the even greater onslaught of the Second World War. Throughout the intervening period the Soviet regime considered itself threatened by internal and external enemies. What requires explanation is not so much the existence of repression, but the scale, nature and timing of the specific forms of repression that took place under Stalin in the 1930s. This was a repression that led to the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of people, the imprisonment of millions more, and the destruction of many members of the regime’s own elite — and this, at a time when there appeared to be no particular danger facing the regime. This was a highly specific kind of repression that became known as ‘the Great Terror’.