Between 1936 and 1938, terror would reign across the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin and his Soviet regime would commit one of the most horrible atrocities of mankind on their own people. This event was known as the Great Purge or Great Terror, in which millions of people were arrested for alleged crimes against the party. The majority of these people were innocent, however the Soviet bureaucracy would sentence them as if they were real criminals. Some would be executed promptly while others were imprisoned and died as result of their forced labor. Lydia Chukovskaya lived during this time period in the perspective as someone who saw their loved one be arrested in these purges. Chukovskaya’s husband was arrested and executed as result of the Great …show more content…
Chukovskaya’s comments on how she wanted to present the story in her novella Sofia Petrovna accurately depicts many of the Soviet government’s corruption and atrocities that Russians faced during the Great Purge and the denial many Russians had of these atrocities by the Soviet government. Chukovskaya uses the narrative of Sofia Petrovna demonstrate that during the Great Purge, the corrupt Soviet government had corrupted society as well. In the novella, the Soviet government’s corruption becomes evident when Sofia Petrovna’s son Kolya is arrested by the NKVD, or secret police. Sofia Petrovna is incredibly shocked by the news and is in disbelief because Kolya was practically the model Soviet citizen. Kolya was a member of Komsomol and had begun a promising career in engineering after his picture was shown in the newspaper Pravda. Sofia Petrovna’s disbelief that Kolya could possibly be arrested is clear when she says to herself that the police “’probably…have already released him…have seen he’s the wrong person’” (Chukovskaya 45). Sofia shows this disbelief even more when she visualizes a military officer talking to Kolya after he’s realized that they have made a mistake. The officer recognizing Kolya from his portrait in Pravda, tells him “’ a person of
Michael Boehmcke Mrs. Vermillion AP Language and Composition 16 March 2018 The Search for A Killer In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, initiating World War II, as well as laying the ground work for what became known as the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, the German extermination of millions of European Jews. In The Nazi Hunters, Neal Bascomb describes the hunt after the war for Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who oversaw the deliverance of the Jews to the extermination camps.
Throughout the existence of the Communist regime in Russia that reigned from 1918 to 1989, many cinematic productions were made to highlight certain key areas of not only the Russian Revolution, such as Sergei Eisentien's "October", but also to identify many key characteristics of the individual that is placed amidst such a transition. Aleksandr Askoldov's 1967 production of "The Commissar" is arguably the most famous film portraying the various circumstances and conditions of individuals amidst the revolution. He focuses on a female commissar named Vavilova who, along with her Red army military unit, believe firmly in the communist revolution and are engaged in a civil war with tsar loyalists and various western troops known as the White army. Whilst Vavilova represents a strong, dominant and brutish depiction of women that is made clearly apparent very early on in the film, Askoldov also presents another portrayal of women through the character of Mariya, a traditional Jewish wife and mother of six. Askoldov enhances the depiction of women through the character of Vavilova herself who, as the film progresses, seems to transform from her hard exterior shown in the beginning of the film, into a more traditional woman such as Mariya. However, whilst it is conceivable to believe that Vavilova has transformed herself due to becoming a mother and living with a simple but loving family and away from the harshness and brutality of war, Yefim, Mariya's husband, suggests that Vavilova's feminine qualities have always existed, but have always been deeply buried, "#Does putting on breeches make you a man?." This suggests that Vavilova was forced to place a hard exterior around her in order to survive s...
In the book Sofia Petrovna, the author Lydia Chukovskaya writes about Sofia Petrovna and her dreadful experiences as a widowed mother during the Russian Stalinist Terror of the 1930s. There were four basic results of the Russian Stalinist Terror: first, it was a way of keeping people in order; second, it kept Stalin in power and stopped revolutions from forming, made people work harder to increase the output of the economy, and separated families as well as caused deaths of many innocent people due to false charges.
Among 1.5 million Jews were shot to death in the most brutal way by different Nazi units. The so-called Einsatzgruppen, which operated behind the front against the Soviet Union, were
I know you 've heard of a terrible and cruel dictator taking over and killing anything and everything that gets in his way of what he wants, but you might not have heard of this tragic and historic event. The Great Terror, also known as The Blood Purges of 1936 to 1938, was a series of horrific and barbaric assassinations based on the actions of Joseph Stalin. The purges began in October 1936 and ended in November 1938. The Great Terror occurred in the Soviet Union, but mainly in the city of Moscow. The purges were killings that were directly towards government officials, political leaders, leading cultural figures, followers of those figures, and even civilians.
The red terror took place in 1918 after an attempt on Lenin’s life, the Cheka- a commission that Lenin began to stop his opposition- proceeded to murder countless civilians; with some accounts estimating the totals at up to 500,000(Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VII). In addition, this was a major development in modern slave labor, as the Cheka used Russian prisoners as slaves, these slaves were required to do unbelievably strenuous work such as dig arctic canals(Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VII). France, had a very similar time period known as the reign of terror, when the radical Jacobin party took power. This Jacobin party was led by Robespierre, a man who was adamantly against religion of any kind(Carilyle). The reign of terror began in 1973 and lead to the execution of 18,500 to 40,000 people, Robespierre was an extremely paranoid man who believed that many of his subjects were enemies to the state and had to be dispatched of (Reign of Terror: 1793-1794).
The red scare was a time where people were falsely accused of being communist spies, and would be sent to prison. If somebody hated their neighbor, a co-worker, or even a teacher they could just accuse them of being a communist spy. Some cases were even so severe as in the case with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were accused for stealing information on the atomic bomb and giving the information to the...
The Soviet system of forced labor camps was first established in 1919 under the Cheka; however, in the early 1930’s camps had reached outrageous numbers. In 1934 the Gulag had several million prisoners. The prisoners ranged from innocent pro-Bolsheviks to guilty Trotsky’s. Conditions were harsh, filthy, and prisoners received inadequate food rations and poor clothing. Over the period of the Stalin dictatorship many people experienced violations of their basic human rights, three in particular were Natasha Petrovskaya, Mikhail Belov, and Olga Andreyeva.
Nearly a million people were executed by firing squad in the period 1936 - 1939, and millions more were arrested and sent off to prison or labor camps, where most of them died. Stalin personally ordered the trials of about 44,000 and signed thousands of deaths warrants. But he also ends early release from work camps for good behavior. Seven million purges were in the labour/ death camps, also hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered. In the worst for example there was a camp called Kolyma gold-mining region in the Arctic, the survival rate was just two or three percent. Arrest from 1937-1938 was about seven million, executed about one million, died in camps about two million, in prison late 1938 about one million, in camps late 1938 about eight million. Stalin said this quote ‘Death solves all problem, no man no problem’. This relates to the purge because he must've had problems with a lot of people so that may be why he killed all those people. Almost all of the Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the 1917 Russian Revolution, or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards, were executed or exiled during this period. Leon Trotsky went into exile in Mexico, but was murdered by a Soviet
In 1934, Sergey Kirov a rival to Stalin was murdered. Stalin is believed to have been behind the assassination, he used it as a pretext to arrest thousands of his other opponents who in his words might have been responsible for Kirov’s murder. These purges not only affected those who openly opposed Stalin but ordinary people too. During the rule of Stain o...
On July 16, 1918, the Russian imperial family, the Romanovs, were executed in the basement of the Ipatiev House by the Bolshevik political party. While The Kitchen Boy, by Robert Alexander, follows the point of view of the family’s young kitchen boy during this event, along with a different possible ending to history, it also follows the boy through the poor treatment of the royal family long before they were killed. During their stay in the House of Special Purpose under control of the Bolsheviks, the Romanov family endured physical, psychological, and spiritual mistreatments.
Former U.S. President Richard Nixon once said, “Communism is never sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.” From 1919 – 1921, a hysteria over the perceived threat of communism spread like wildfire across the nation. Known as the First Red Scare, the widespread fear of Bolshevism and anarchism quickly invaded the infrastructure of the U.S. government and radically influenced the American people. American citizens, such as Sacco and Vanzetti, were convicted and found crimes that evidence showed otherwise only because they supported anarchism. The US government arrested and deported radicals only because of their political standing.
Platt, Kevin M. F. and David Brandenberger, eds. Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2006.
In the late 1930’s while the United States was going through The Great Depression the Soviet Union was going through its own turbulent times. This would be known as the Moscow Show Trials, which took place under the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The book Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler takes place during this time period. The main character Nicholas Rubashov has been imprisoned even though he always has been loyal to the goals of the party (Koestler). This showed a shift that was happening in the country and an attempt by Stalin to eliminate any possible opposition even if they were heroes in the revolution. In the text two different concepts come to light vivisection morality where the party comes before the individual and anti-vivisection morality where the individual is sacred. Rubashov in the beginning does not embrace individualism however throughout the novel he begins to adopt individualism that he refers to as grammatical fiction. Vivisection morality is never a justifiable political system. Suppressing the rights of human beings is not only inhumane but also counter productive in creating an effective and wealthy society.