police state’ (p.313). Very few people were put into exile or under surveillance and an insignificant number of books were affected by censorship. Moreover, the Okhrana failed to quash opposition groups, such as the Bolsheviks, even after infiltrating them. If anything their activities unified people of different political positions against imperial rule. The secret police – the NKVD (later the KGB) – under Stalin was more repressive than the Okhrana. By 1934 Stalin had become increasingly insecure about his position as the sole authoritarian ruler of the Soviet Union. Consequently he tried to reassert his position by eliminating past and potential opposition, both outside and within the party. The NKVD was granted authority to arrest, try and execute at will those who were supposed ‘enemies of the state’, including the kulaks, the intelligentsia, members of the Red Army and even members of the NKVD itself. Repression accelerated in 1937 under Yezhov (head of the NKVD), who was extremely loyal to Stalin. Over the period of the Great Purge seven million people were arrested and one million were executed. Around one third of three million Party members were executed. By 1939 the Gulag population had reached 9.5 million. Under Stalin even his closest associates became victims, including Yezhov, who was executed in April 1939. This unprecedented period of repression underlined Stalin’s position as a totalitarian ruler. Any opposition had all but disappeared by 1939. In contrast to the Great Purge, repression under the Tsar was targeted at known groups of opposition. Historians, such as Figes (2014) and Pipes (1974) argue that the tsarist regime was therefore not all-powerful. To Pipes this reflects the fact that the Russian ruling elite had embraced Western values and institutions and did not wish to act in an ‘Asiatic’ way. From a different viewpoint, Figes (2014: 14) observes that the police had only a very limited presence in the countryside and believes this to be the ‘system’s main weakness’. In conclusion, Lord Bingham (2011: 8) observes that the characteristics of a regime that does not observe the rule of law often includes ‘the show trial’, ‘the gulag and the concentration camp’, ‘the confession extracted by torture’, ‘the midnight knock on the door’. These elements were all present in Stalin’s totalitarian state. In terms of the three pillars of autocracy that I have examined, the Stalinist regime was the more fearsome and repressive, mainly because it was driven by a totalitarian political ideology and had the characteristics of a police state. Nevertheless, an interesting question is whether Stalin’s repression had its origins in Imperial rule. It could be argued that the authoritarian rule of the Tsars laid the foundation for the Stalinist totalitarian state. Over time, the Russian people steadily grew accustomed to a weak and corrupted judiciary, political censorship and a secret police regime. The experience of democracy in Russia was brief and short lived under the 1917 Provisional Government. After that, the law was subordinated to the Communist Party and an authoritarian state. It is perhaps the case, therefore, that Russia’s long period of Imperial rule enabled Stalin to establish more effectively his own totalitarian ‘police state’ involving unprecedented abuse of the rights and freedoms of the Russian people. Bibliography J. Bromley (2002) Russia 1848-1917. London: Henemann. T. Bingham (2011) The Rule of Law. London: Penguin. Orwell Prize for Best Political Book 2011. O. Figes (2014) Revolutionary Russia, 1881-1991. London: Pelican A. Litvin and J. Keep (2005) Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the Millenium. London: Routledge. R. Pipes (1974) Russia under the Old Regime. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. S. Sebag Montefiore (2014) Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Phoenix. R. Service (2009) Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century. London: Penguin. P.H. Solomon, Jr. (2008) ‘Judicial power in Authoritarian States: the Russian Experience.’ In T. Ginsburg and T. Moustafa (editors) Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes. Cambridge University Press.
THREE UP P ER SCHOOL SHORT S TOR I E S
C. Ward (1999) Stalin’s Russia. Hodder Arnold. 2nd edition. S. Waller (2009) Tsarist Russia 1855-1917. Nelson Thornes.
Internet Sources Judiciary: http://old.nysba.org/RussiaRuleofLaw/russia-rule-of-law-002.html
HI GH NOON WI LL I AM J OYNSON ( YEAR 1 2 )
http://www.sfu.ca/international studies/moustafa.html Secret Police: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov http://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/enforcing-russian-autocracy Censorship: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/english/csbm/papers/censorship/censorship_russia.pdf
Illustration by Jack Evans (Year 13)
74
75
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs