the Leningrad party, Sergei Kirov, who was also a
member of the Politburo and hitherto a Stalin sup-
porter, among those who attempted to clip Stalin’s
wings? That December 1934 Kirov was murdered,
Stalin was implicated. That he acted as pallbearer at
Kirov’s funeral is no evidence to the contrary. The
first mass terror-wave of arrests and executions fol-
lowed. Then there was a pause, just as there had
been with collectivisation. Stalin in 1936 even pro-
mulgated a constitution guaranteeing every con-
ceivable human and civic right! It was no more
than a façade that misled only the most gullible.
Then the arrests and executions were resumed.
The years from 1936 to 1938 are known as the
Great Terror. At the end, Stalin emerged as the
undisputed dictator whom none could resist.
Stalin turned on the elite of communist society,
the party functionaries, the army officers from the
junior to the commander-in-chief, the technocrats
and managers. The world learnt only a little from
the show trials of the prominent leaders, the
‘fathers’ of the revolution, who were now paraded
to confess publicly their sins, confessions secured
beforehand by torture and threats. Not only they,
but also their wives and associates, were murdered.
Nothing like this had ever occurred before. Stalin
acted with cold and ruthless calculation. The vic-
tims of these purges have never been counted.
Dekulakisation, the famine and the purges claimed
millions of victims. No one was safe. Death, exile
or incarceration in the huge complex of labour
camps, the Gulag, was the fate of anyone who fell
under suspicion. The Gulags were not like the later
Nazi extermination camps but unbelievably brutal,
the guards sadistic. Lenin had started them to
break the spirit of the ‘enemies of the people’.
Stalin expanded the system of forced labour and
torture, inefficient even in extracting work.178 THE CONTINUING WORLD CRISIS, 1929–39
Stalin at a collective farm in Tajikistan in 1935; image of the benign dictator. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis