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On a historic note, Stalin's first, bloodiest purges were also governed by quotas and the heads of various departments of the secret police (NKVD) trying to one
by DenisM 14y ago
On a historic note, Stalin's first, bloodiest purges were also governed by quotas and the heads of various departments of the secret police (NKVD) trying to one up each other, exerting pressure on their subordinates, and in the absence of judicial oversight. Stalin ended up replacing over-enthusiastic NKVD chiefs twice, and the last one, the one we remember the most and whose name, Beria, we come to associate with the oppressive force, was actually less brutal then the previous two (Yagoda and Ezhov).
- rdtsc 14y agoRemember reading in a memoir of someone who had access to the NKVD (then KGB) archives from that era. The log would go something like this: -- Dec, 14 : Found and eliminated Ivan X. -- Dec, 17 : Turns out that was the wrong Ivan X. -- Dec, 20 : Found and eliminated the real Ivan X.
- philwelch 14y ago> Stalin ended up replacing over-enthusiastic NKVD chiefs twice You know things are bad when Josef Stalin replaces you because you're overenthusiastic.
- btilly 14y agoNo, he was just following Machiavelli's advice for how a prince (ie dictator) should enforce law and order when extreme measures are called for. Namely assign the job to a henchman, and then when the deed is done, convince the people that the henchman was acting on his own, and execute the henchman: http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/churchhistory220/Lecture13/PrinceCesareBorgia.html http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/churchhistory220/Lecture13...
- philwelch 14y agoOne would surmise that if Stalin's goal was to avoid building a reputation as a brutal mass murderer, he certainly failed.
- thoughtcriminal 14y agoStalin was and will always be one of the most evil mass murderers in history. The fact he was responsible for the death of tens of millions of people in Eastern Europe is hard to fathom - but it's true. It baffles the mind how he could have got so far. It must be in part because people didn't speak up early on, either out of fear or because they were uninformed. Unspeakably sad how bad it got. They probably thought it wasn't possible. Perhaps too trusting? People today can never become complacent. Never be too distracted, preoccupied or inconvenienced to speak up and stand up against oppression. Even when the oppression is from our own elected governments.
- mjn 14y agoIt's veering a bit off-topic, but there's a fascinating historical debate on the Purges going on since the opening of many Soviet archives post-1990. Some historians (though not all) are moving away from the traditional view of Stalin as mastermind in complete control of the situation, and are putting more emphasis on machinations within the NKVD, which seems to have been the source of a lot more independent activity than we had thought, with Stalin often not appearing to be in the loop. In the strong form of the interpretation that's led some to argue that the purges were primarily a function of the bureaucratic machine, with Stalin mostly riding the wave and trying to stay on top of the chaos. In fact they argue that the traditional view, of Stalin as Machiavellian mastermind, was largely an invention of Stalin himself, who was trying to appear in complete control of the situation. Other interpretations revise the traditional view somewhat less, but most do seem to be putting more emphasis on what was going on in the NKVD.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoMakes sense. Bureaucracies are soulless moral-free machines good at crushing individuals in some mindless goal of self-perpetuation. In fact, makes perfect sense!