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According to Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, with respect to the trials of former leaders, some Western observers were unintentionally or intentionally ignorant of the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence, notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Russian speaker; the American ...
Stalin's government feared attack from capitalist countries, [230] and many communists, including in Komsomol, OGPU, and the Red Army, were eager to be rid of the NEP and its market-oriented approach. [231] They had concerns about those who profited from the policy: affluent peasants known as "kulaks" and small business owners, or "NEPmen". [232]
Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts" that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys, or appeals, followed by a sentence to be imposed "quickly." [92] Stalin's Politburo also issued directives on quotas for mass arrests and executions. [93]
Joseph Stalin's purges and massacres between 1936 and the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany (Great Purge) had about one million victims. This list includes some of the most prominent victims along with the date of their deaths. Except where otherwise stated, the date is that on which the individual was executed by shooting.
The Stalinist regime is held together not by the organization of Soviets, Party ideals, the Politburo, or Stalin’s personality, but by the organization and technical skill of the Soviet political police, in which Stalin himself plays the role of the first policeman ... To say the NKVD is the state secret police conveys very little ...
A police state describes a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive , and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance .
The Great Purge ended in 1939. In October 1940 the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs), under its new chief Lavrentiy Beria, started a new purge that initially hit the People's Commissariat of Ammunition, People's Commissariat of Aviation Industry, and People's Commissariat of Armaments.
Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag (ISBN 0-394-49497-0), by a member of the US Embassy, and I Was a Slave in Russia (ISBN 0-8159-5800-5), an American factory owner's son, were two more American citizens interned who wrote of their ordeal. They were interned due to their American citizenship for about eight years c. 1946–55.