The Soviet Union under Stalin 1041ers of the Polish Communist Party were liquidated in Moscow in 1938
after having been invited there by Stalin.
The first of the great show trials—staged before audiences and
cameras—took place in 1936, the last in March 1938, when Bukharin and
the remainder of the Right Opposition faced judges who sometimes
appeared to be more nervous than they. Those on trial were forced to sign
confessions in court, where sympathetic foreign observers sometimes
nodded in agreement to absurd accusations. Children—who could be exe
cuted at age twelve—were encouraged to denounce their parents for crimes
against the state. At least 680,000 people were sentenced to death in 1937—
1938 and probably about 1 million people were executed in the camps (in
addition to those who died of harsh conditions).
The poet Osip Mandelstam (1889-1938) mocked Stalin with a poem
that he read to friends in 1933. He noted the rumor about Stalin’s origins
in Ossetia, in the mountains of Georgia, and, as dictator, related the enor
mous weight of his words:
We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
But where there’s so much as half a conversation
The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders—
Fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung,
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.Mandelstam was arrested in 1934, sent to a camp for three years, and,
after returning to Moscow, arrested again and sentenced to five years hard
labor in another camp. There, in 1938, he died or was executed.
Estimates of the number of prisoners in labor camps, colonies, and pris
ons have ranged from about 1.5 million to 7 million. These included an el
derly woman sentenced to camp terms for having said “if people prayed
they would work better.’’ Increasingly paranoid, Stalin’s long arm reached
far beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union to force Communist parties
in Spain, France, and other nations to purge those who disagreed with his
policies. Stalin’s agents caught up with Trotsky, who had gone into exile in
1929 and lived outside Mexico City, and stabbed him to death with an ice
pick as he sat in a garden in August 1940.
The purge of the “national deviationists,” accused of nationalist senti
ments, for example in the Muslim lands of Central Asia, was an economic