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OKMO ( Opytniy Konstruktorsko-Mekhanicheskiy Otdel , 'Experimental Design Mechanical Department') was the tank design team in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s. Located in Leningrad , it produced the design of the T-26 infantry tank, of which about 12,000 would be produced. Most other designs from the bureau never saw the light of day, but it was here that Mikhail Koshkin , designer of the famous T-34 medium tank gained his early experience. The bureau was gutted in the Great Purge and broken up by the beginning of the Second World War .

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79-568: In 1930 the Bolshevik Factory No. 232 became home to the AVO-5 tank design bureau, soon renamed OKMO. In 1932, the tank department of the Bolshevik factory, became the new Factory No. 174 (K.E. Voroshilov) . This new, independent enterprise was dedicated to the mass production of T-26 tank . Janusz Magnuski says that in 1932 one of the former departments of the Bolshevik factory became a base for

158-647: A 100-ton design with 107 mm gun, four sub-turrets, and pneumatic suspension and servo-controls, called the T-41 or TG-5  [ ru ] . A slightly more practical "land battleship" was the T-35 heavy tank , designed by N. Tseits's team and inspired by the British Vickers Independent . In 1934, OKMO designed the T-43-2, a design for an amphibious tank with convertible drive—being able to run on tracks or wheels—as

237-544: A Soviet tank with "shell-proof" armour, effective against more than just small arms. The engine and gun were inadequate, and only a prototype was built. The T-100 'Sotka' was a two-turreted heavy tank prototype. It became rejected in favour of the KV-1 heavy tank . A second prototype was made as a single self-propelled gun T-100Y, later designated SU-100Y , presently displayed in Kubinka Tank Museum. The bureau started work on

316-600: A change from massive gun barrels cast in one piece to built-up gun barrels. The idea behind the state support for the foundation of the Obukhov factory was that Russia did not want to be dependent on other nations for its artillery. Later on, it was obvious that Obukhov would make copies of the Krupp designs. But in fact, Russian orders were what led to these designs in the first place, as these orders were crucial for Krupp to expand its gun manufacturing business. The Obukhov works were

395-531: A double team of interrogators. Bukharin's confession in particular became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror . His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what

474-509: A fabricated confession by the interrogators. After the interrogations the files were submitted to NKVD troikas, which pronounced the verdicts in the absence of the accused. During a half-day-long session a troika went through several hundred cases, delivering either a death sentence or a sentence to the Gulag labor camps. Death sentences were immediately enforceable. The executions were carried out at night, either in prisons or in secluded areas run by

553-425: A joint stock company led by Mr. Obukhov and aimed to produce artillery based on the Krupp examples. The factory started production in 1864. The early years of the company were very difficult. The financial base of the company was too small. What saved the company in the early years were massive advances on orders which were to be delivered. By 1864, it had received advances of 1,300,000 rubles without having delivered

632-772: A massive scale as victims of the repression. In addition to ordinary citizens, prominent members of the Communist Party were also targets for the purges. The purge of the Party was accompanied by the purge of the whole society. Soviet historians organize the Great Purge into three corresponding trials. The following events are used for the demarcation of the period: Between 1936 and 1938, three very large Moscow trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held, in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember

711-588: A number of the Soviet Union's diaspora nationalities: the Finnish , Latvian , Estonian , Bulgarian , Afghan , Iranian , Greek , and Chinese . Of the operations against national minorities, it was the largest one, second only to the "Kulak Operation" in terms of the number of victims. According to Timothy Snyder , ethnic Poles constituted the largest group of victims in the Great Terror, comprising less than 0.5% of

790-560: A piece of land on the Neva that belonged to the state and founded the Obukhov Steel Works. In this, Putilov was supported by the Russian navy. In the 1860s, Russia ordered a massive amount of Krupp guns for its field, naval and coastal artillery. These were all rifled , but the first orders were for muzzle loaders, while later orders were breechloaders . Another technical innovation meant

869-554: A possible replacement for the T-37 amphibious scout tank . It, and Moscow Factory no. 37 's competing T-43-1 were both rejected in favour of continuing T-37 production. Also in 1934, N. Barykov and N. Tseits worked with graduate students from the Leningrad Technical Institute to modernize the multi-turreted T-28 medium tank by adding a Christie suspension . The resulting T-29-5 adopted the wheel-and-track running gear from

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948-532: A single gun. In 1864, the Russian Navy Ministry then intervened, and appointed a colonel as general manager of the Obukhov Works. Engineer Obukhov remained responsible only for making crucible steel. The shareholders accepted an agreement that limited their rights. Now about 1,200,000 rubles were spent on new machinery; and staff, that had gained experience through Krupp, was hired. The interference of

1027-426: Is debated by historians, but there is consensus that Kirov's death was the flashpoint at which Stalin decided to take action and begin the purges. Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder, or at least that there was sufficient evidence to reach such a conclusion. Kirov was a staunch Stalin loyalist, but Stalin may have viewed him as a potential rival because of his emerging popularity among

1106-610: The Almaz-Antey military industrial concern, and in 2003, it became a joint-stock company , OJSC GOZ Obukhov Plant . 59°51′44″N 30°28′38″E  /  59.862165°N 30.477211°E  / 59.862165; 30.477211 Great Purge The Great Purge , or the Great Terror ( Russian : Большой террор , romanized :  Bol'shoy terror ), also known as the Year of '37 ( 37-й год , Tridtsat' sed'moy god ) and

1185-650: The BT fast tank . Further T-29-4 and T-29-1 prototypes were built in 1935, but in testing at the NIIBT in Kubinka none of these were found satisfactory. Following Soviet armoured experience in Spain, another version was built with thicker armour and a better gun—it was considered for the A-20/T-32 competition which led to the famous T-34 medium tank , but by this time was obviously outdated. (One of

1264-597: The Gulag labor camps . The NKVD targeted certain ethnic minorities such as the Volga Germans , and Soviet citizens of Polish origin, who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression. Throughout the purge, the NKVD sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear, and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions during its mass operations . In 1938, Stalin reversed his stance on

1343-632: The T-50 infantry tank in 1939, but was gutted during the Great Purge . The T-50 was handed over to the Factory No. 174 . Bolshevik Factory No. 232 Obukhov State Plant (also known Obukhovski Plant , Russian : Государственный Обуховский Завод , romanized :  Gosudarstvennyy Obukhovskiy Zavod ) is a major Russian metallurgy and heavy machine-building plant in St. Petersburg , Russia . In 1854,

1422-753: The Trial of the Twenty-One , is the most famous of the Soviet show trials, because of persons involved and the scope of charges which tied together all loose threads from earlier trials. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials, it included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites", supposedly led by Nikolai Bukharin, the former chairman of the Communist International , former premier Alexei Rykov , Christian Rakovsky , Nikolai Krestinsky , and Genrikh Yagoda , recently disgraced head of

1501-499: The Tsarist regime , former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.). They were to be executed or sent to Gulag prison camps extrajudicially, under the decisions of NKVD troikas. The following categories appear to have been on index-cards, catalogues of suspects assembled over the years by the NKVD and were systematically tracked down: "ex-kulaks" previously deported to " special settlements " in inhospitable parts of

1580-582: The Yezhovshchina ( Ежовщина [(j)ɪˈʐofɕːɪnə] , lit.   ' period of Yezhov ' ), was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938. It sought to consolidate Joseph Stalin 's power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and aimed at removing the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky within the Soviet Union. The term great purge was popularized by

1659-674: The "commission" authorized by the Politburo and gave assurances that death sentences would not be carried out. After the trial, Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants, he had most of their relatives arrested and shot. In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials , commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was set up in

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1738-416: The Bolshevik factory became a base for the new independent "Factory No. 185 (S.M. Kirov)". The OKMO, for a few months a part of Factory No. 174, moved at the same time to Factory No. 185. The new enterprise was also dedicated to the production of tanks, and because of its honorific is often confused with Kirov Factory . The main part of Bolshevik Factory remained focused on production of heavy artillery. On

1817-610: The Leningrad engineering students had been Mikhail Koshkin , the T-34's chief designer) In the 1930s, OKMO also designed a number of self-propelled artillery and antiaircraft guns, and tracked infantry, ammunition and fuel transporters, but only prototypes or trial batches of any were ever built, except for the T-26-T artillery tractor . In 1936–37 OKMO designed the T-111 (or T-46-5), the first attempt at

1896-406: The Moscow Trials to be frame-ups." In the second trial, Karl Radek testified that there was a "third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through [Trotsky's] school," as well as "semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against

1975-428: The NKVD was the largest of this kind. The Polish operation claimed the largest number of the NKVD victims: 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions according to records. Snyder estimates that at least eighty-five thousand of them were ethnic Poles. The remainder were 'suspected' of being Polish, without further inquiry. Poles comprised 12.5% of those who were killed during the Great Terror, while comprising only 0.4% of

2054-447: The NKVD and located as a rule on the outskirts of major cities. The "Kulak Operation" was the largest single campaign of repression in 1937–38, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed, more than half the total of known executions. A series of mass operations of the NKVD was carried out from 1937 through 1938 targeting specific nationalities within the Soviet Union, on the order of Nikolai Yezhov . The Polish Operation of

2133-400: The NKVD. Although an Opposition Bloc led by Trotsky and with zinovievites really existed, Pierre Broué asserts that Bukharin was not involved. Differently from Broué, one of his former allies, Jules Humbert-Droz , said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him that he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to remove Stalin from leadership. The fact that Yagoda was one of

2212-579: The NKVD. Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia , wealthy peasants —especially those lending out money or wealth ( kulaks )—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries began affecting civilian life. The purge reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938 under

2291-507: The Party, gave us this help." By the "third organization," he meant the last remaining former opposition group called the Rightists , led by Bukharin, whom he implicated by saying: I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. I knew that Bukharin's situation was just as hopeless as my own, because our guilt, if not juridically, then in essence,

2370-405: The Soviet Union and restore capitalism. These trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world, which was mesmerized by the spectacle of Lenin's closest associates confessing to most outrageous crimes and begging for death sentences: It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure and torture had been applied to the defendants. From

2449-417: The Soviet economy in the late 1920s, veteran Bolsheviks no longer thought necessary the "temporary" wartime dictatorship, which had passed from Lenin to Stalin. Stalin's opponents inside the Communist Party chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption. This opposition to current leadership may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries

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2528-500: The Soviet government desired to put Trotsky on trial during the purge, his exile prevented this. Trotsky survived the purge, though he would be assassinated in 1940 by the NKVD on the orders of Stalin. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, a power vacuum opened in the Communist Party, the ruling party in the Soviet Union (USSR). Various established figures in Lenin's government attempted to succeed him. By 1928, Joseph Stalin,

2607-763: The United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey . Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true. For example, Georgy Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place. Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov , confessed to taking part in

2686-410: The accounts of former OGPU officer Alexander Orlov and others, the methods used to extract the confessions are known: such tortures as repeated beatings, simulated drownings, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation,

2765-535: The accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was based solely on confessions. He finished his last plea with the words: [T]he monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all. Romain Rolland and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Bukharin, but all

2844-518: The accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. It was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the USSR and hand its territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, and other charges. Even previously sympathetic observers who had accepted the earlier trials found it more difficult to accept these new allegations as they became ever more absurd, and

2923-481: The assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year. The Dewey Commission later published its findings in a 422-page book titled Not Guilty . Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary, the commission wrote Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds: The commission concluded: "We therefore find

3002-524: The basis of denunciations or because they were related to, were friends with or knew people already arrested. Engineers, peasants, railwaymen, and other types of workers were arrested during the "Kulak Operation" based on the fact that they worked for or near important strategic sites and factories where work accidents had occurred due to "frantic rhythms and plans". During this period the NKVD reopened these cases and relabeled them as "sabotage" or "wrecking." The Orthodox clergy , including active parishioners,

3081-599: The country ( Siberia , the Urals , Kazakhstan, and the Far North ), former tsarist civil servants, former officers of the White Army , participants in peasant rebellions, members of the clergy, persons deprived of voting rights, former members of non-Bolshevik parties, ordinary criminals, like thieves, known to the police and various other "socially harmful elements". However, a large number of people were arrested at random in sweeps, on

3160-667: The country as threatened from within by fascist spies. From the October Revolution onward, Lenin had used repression against perceived and legitimate enemies of the Bolsheviks as a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating control over the population in a campaign called the Red Terror . As the Russian Civil War drew to a close, this campaign was relaxed although the secret police did remain active. From 1924 to 1928,

3239-407: The defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion. Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition for "confessing", a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared. This offer was accepted, but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov , and Yezhov were present. Stalin claimed that they were

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3318-527: The estimated number of "kulaks" and "criminals" in their districts. These individuals were to be arrested and executed, or sent to the gulag camps. The party chiefs complied and produced these lists within days, with figures which roughly corresponded to the individuals who were already under secret police surveillance. On 30 July 1937, the NKVD Order No. 00447 was issued, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" (such as former officials of

3397-504: The first domestic tank, the T-18 . It later became home to the AVO-5 tank design bureau, soon named OKMO , which was responsible for the T-26 infantry tank . In 1932, the tank department of the Bolshevik factory, became the new Factory No. 174 (K.E. Voroshilov). This new, independent enterprise was dedicated to the production of T-26. Janusz Magnuski says that in 1935, one of the former departments of

3476-412: The first three into fervent anti-communists eventually. To them, Bukharin's confession symbolized the depredations of communism, which not only destroyed its sons but also conscripted them in self-destruction and individual abnegation. On the first day of trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However, he changed his plea

3555-529: The guns from this factory to the end users. In 1863, the state would therefore sponsor the establishment of two new artillery factories: The Motovilikhinsk works on the navigable Kama River near Perm ; and the Obukhov-Putilov-Kudryavzev factory in St. Petersburg, later known as Obukhov. Colonel Putilov acquired a license to use Obukhov's procedure to make crucible steel in 1861. In 1863, Putilov acquired

3634-709: The historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror , whose title was an allusion to the French Revolution 's Reign of Terror . The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. Starting in 1936, the NKVD under chief Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks , government officials, and regional party bosses . Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned or executed by

3713-483: The human cost of the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture . From 1930 onwards, the Party and police officials feared the "social disorder" caused by the upheavals of forced collectivization of peasants and the resulting famine of 1932–1933 , as well as the massive and uncontrolled migration of millions of peasants into cities. The threat of war heightened Stalin's and generally Soviet perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as

3792-459: The kulaks (i.e., wealthy peasants that owned farmland) in a policy called dekulakization . The kulaks responded by destroying crop yields and other acts of sabotage against the Soviet government. The food shortage led to a mass famine across the USSR and slowed the Five Year Plan. A distinctive feature of the Great Purge was that, for the first time, members of the ruling party were included on

3871-537: The large complex was given the name Chelyabinsk Kirov Plant No. 100 (unofficially named "Tankograd"), and continued the production of Kotin's design line. In 1930, bureau oversaw design changes to the British Vickers E tank for construction as the T-26 light infantry tank , and later improvements to the T-26. In 1930 OKMO also began design studies for heavy tanks. A team led by German engineer Eduard Grote worked on

3950-552: The late stages of the Purge rather than deliberate discrimination in sentencing). The wives and children of those arrested and executed were dealt with by the NKVD Order No. 00486 . The women were sentenced to forced labour for 5 or 10 years. Their minor children were put in orphanages. All possessions were confiscated. Extended families were purposely left with nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well, affecting up to 200,000–250,000 people of Polish background depending on

4029-427: The leadership of Nikolai Yezhov , hence the name Yezhovshchina . The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party , often by direct orders of the politburo headed by Stalin. Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking , sabotage , anti-Soviet agitation , conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups). They were executed by shooting or sent to

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4108-472: The leading defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others (who were killed in NKVD prisoner massacres in 1941). Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina , was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband posthumously rehabilitated a half-century later by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988. On 2 July 1937, in a top secret order to regional Party and NKVD chiefs Stalin instructed them to produce

4187-474: The mass repression – including incarceration in the Gulag system – dropped significantly. By 1929, Stalin had defeated his political opponents and gained full control over the party. He organized a committee to begin the process of industrialization of the Soviet Union. Backlash against industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture escalated, which prompted Stalin to increase police presence in rural areas. Soviet authorities increased repression against

4266-541: The mining engineer P.M. Obukhov invented a new procedure to make crucible steel . In combination with the work of metallurgist P.P. Anosov, this crucible steel proved very useful for making cannons. In 1859, this led to the founding of the Prince Michael Artillery Works in Zlatoust . In 1860, this factory delivered its first steel cannon. A reason for the failure of this company was the problematic transport of

4345-422: The moderates. The 1934 Party Congress elected Kirov to the central committee with only three votes against, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 votes against. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged the ever-growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's murder as well as a growing list of other offenses, including treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage. Another justification for

4424-578: The navy was successful in the sense that in 1866, satisfactory models of 4-, 8-, 12- and 24-pdr guns were made, all muzzle loaders. While the Russian navy had succeeded in becoming independent for its artillery, the early Russian system for naval rifled breechloading guns remained very similar to the Prussian and early German system. In 1885, the Ministry of the Navy forced out the remaining private shareholders. During

4503-520: The new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and Stalin in particular, were the sole dispensers of ideology. This required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious "old guard" of revolutionaries. As the purges began, the government (through the NKVD) shot Bolshevik heroes, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Béla Kun , as well as the majority of Lenin's Politburo, for disagreements in policy. The NKVD attacked

4582-413: The new independent entity, named in 1935 as Factory No. 185 (S.M. Kirov) , under the direction of N. Barykov and Semyon Alexandrovich Ginzburg . The OKMO, for a few months a part of Factory No. 174, moved at the same time to Factory No. 185. The new enterprise was also dedicated to the production of tanks, while the main part of Bolshevik Factory remained focused on production of heavy artillery. Because of

4661-660: The next day after "special measures", which dislocated his left shoulder among other things. Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known that his interrogators were given the order "beating permitted", and were under great pressure to extract confession out of the "star" defendant. Bukharin initially held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down. But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with

4740-466: The other hand, Zaloga says that in 1935, after the assassination of Sergey Kirov , the whole Bolshevik Factory No. 232 was renamed "Factory No. 185 (S.M. Kirov)", yet Leningrad inhabitants continued to refer to it as the Bolshevik Factory. The Leningrad factory's historical name was restored in 1992 by the formation of a unitary enterprise, FSUE Obukhov State Plant . In the mid-1990s, Obukhov

4819-403: The party's General Secretary, had triumphed over his opponents and gained control of the party. Initially, Stalin's leadership was widely accepted; his main political adversary, Trotsky, was forced into exile in 1929, and Stalin's doctrine of " socialism in one country " became enshrined party policy. However, in the early 1930s, party officials began to lose faith in his leadership, largely due to

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4898-465: The party. In this atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, the popular high-ranking official Sergei Kirov was assassinated . The assassination, in December 1934, led to an investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of Stalin's rivals. Many of those arrested after Kirov's murder, high-ranking party officials among them, also confessed plans to kill Stalin himself. The validity of these confessions

4977-565: The passport regime", etc. were also dealt with in a summary way. In Moscow, for example, nearly one third of the 20,765 persons executed on the Butovo firing range were charged with a non-political criminal offence. To carry out the mass arrests, the 25,000 officers of the State Security personnel of NKVD were complemented with units of ordinary police, and Komsomol ( Young Communist League ) and civilian Communist Party members. Seeking to fulfill

5056-469: The population. Overall, national minorities targeted in these campaigns composed 36% of the victims of the Great Purge, despite being only 1.6% of the Soviet Union's population. 74% of ethnic minorities arrested during the Great Purge were executed while those sentenced during the Kulak Operation had only a 50% chance of being executed, (though this may have been due to the Gulag camp's lack of space in

5135-404: The potential source of an uprising in case of invasion. Stalin began to plan for the preventive elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical "fifth column of wreckers, terrorists and spies." The term " purge " in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression purge of the Party ranks . In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people. But from 1936 until 1953,

5214-558: The purge expanded to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin and Kalinin . No other crime of the Stalin years so captivated Western intellectuals as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing. For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe , Jay Lovestone , Arthur Koestler , and Heinrich Brandler , the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism, and even turned

5293-399: The purge was to remove any possible "fifth column" in case of a war. Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich , participants in the repression as members of the Politburo, maintained this justification throughout the purge; they each signed many death lists. Stalin believed war was imminent, threatened both by an explicitly hostile Germany and an expansionist Japan. The Soviet press portrayed

5372-508: The purges, criticized the NKVD for carrying out mass executions, and oversaw the execution of Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov , who headed the NKVD during the purge years. Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge (1936–1938) to be roughly 700,000-1.2 million. Despite the end of the Great Purge, the widespread surveillance and atmosphere of mistrust continued for decades. Similar purges took place in Mongolia and Xinjiang . While

5451-419: The quotas, the police rounded up people in markets and train stations, with the purpose of arresting "social outcasts". Local units of the NKVD, in order to meet their "casework minimums" and force confessions out of arrestees worked long uninterrupted shifts during which they interrogated, tortured and beat the prisoners. In many cases those arrested were forced to sign blank pages which were later filled in with

5530-655: The same honorific and the same city of location, the Factory No. 185 is often mistaken in Western sources with Kirov Plant (or Factory No. 100), notably in Sewell's " Why Three Tanks? " and works of Steven Zaloga. They were independent factories; the Factory No. 185 was a home of OKMO bureau (Ginzburg), while the larger Factory No. 100 was a home of SKB-2 ( Kotin , known for KV line of heavy tanks). In 1941, because of German threat , parts of both factories were moved to Chelyabinsk , where

5609-446: The size of their families. National operations of the NKVD were conducted on a quota system using album procedure . The officials were mandated to arrest and execute a specific number of so-called "counter-revolutionaries", compiled by administration using various statistics but also telephone books with names sounding non-Russian. The Polish Operation of the NKVD served as a model for a series of similar NKVD secret decrees targeting

5688-418: The state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin affair seemed to vindicate Stalin's suspicions. Ryutin was working with the even larger secret Opposition Bloc in which Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev participated, and which later led to both of their deaths. Stalin enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism . In

5767-569: The supporters, friends, and family of these "heretical" Marxists, whether they lived in Russia or not. The NKVD nearly annihilated Trotsky's family before killing him in Mexico; the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader was part of an assassination task force put together by Special Agent Pavel Sudoplatov , under the personal orders of Stalin. By 1934, several of Stalin's rivals, such as Trotsky, began calling for Stalin's removal and attempted to break his control over

5846-454: The term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. The political purge was primarily an effort by Stalin to eliminate challenge from past and potential opposition groups, including the left and right wings led by Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin , respectively. Following the Civil War and reconstruction of

5925-551: The whole Tsarist period, the company remained a major producer of artillery and other military equipment. On 20 June 1918, V. Volodarsky was assassinated while making his way to a meeting relating to industrial unrest in the factory. From 1922 to 1992, it was renamed Bolshevik Plant no. 232 . In the late 1920s, it became one of the two main Soviet tank factories (along with the Kharkov Locomotive Factory ), and produced

6004-604: Was a state-controlled company specialized in metallurgy and heavy machine building. Its military products included missile launching equipment, ICBM missile silos, ground equipment associated with missile systems, submarine missile launch tubes, naval guns, and submarine antenna arrays. As regards civilian products, it made castings for the electrotechnical, chemical, and shipbuilding industries. Other civilian products were fork-lift trucks, wheelchairs, smoothing irons and other home appliances, television sets, cameras, and gas and oil extraction equipment. In 2002, Obukhov became part of

6083-435: Was in written confession and refuse to go any further. The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. One observer noted that after disproving several charges against him, Bukharin "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case." He continued by saying that "the confession of

6162-414: Was nearly annihilated: 85% of the 35,000 members of the clergy were arrested. Particularly vulnerable to repression were also the so-called "special settlers" ( spetzpereselentsy ) who were under permanent police surveillance and constituted a huge pool of potential "enemies" to draw on. At least 100,000 of them were arrested in the course of the Great Terror. Common criminals such as thieves, "violators of

6241-516: Was the same. But we are close friends, and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself. That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People's Commissariat of Home Affairs. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms. The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as

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