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Stalin’s show trials (1936 Constitution (The 1936 Constitution changed the…
Stalin’s show trials
1936 Constitution
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The Supreme Soviet was empowered to set up Commissions, which administered most of the government.
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It also gave the people some good things such as rights to vote (but only for the Communist Party), to work, to rest and leisure, to health protection, to care in old age and sickness, to housing and education.
Political purges
Stalin used this episode to order massive purges by which anybody suspected of disloyalty was murdered, sent to prison camps, or put on public show trials at which they pleaded guilty to incredible crimes they could never have done.
In 1934, Kirov, the leader of the Leningrad Communist Party, was murdered, probably on Stalin's orders.
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Photographs and history books were changed to eliminate even the memory of people who had been arrested.
By the end of the 1930s, the Great Terror had spread to ordinary people.
Some 20 million ordinary Russians were sent to the gulag - the system of labour camps mostly in Siberia - where perhaps half of them died.
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Ethnic groups were persecuted, and Russification - the acceptance of Russian language and customs - was enforced throughout the Soviet Union.
People who had annoyed their neighbours were turned in to the NKVD (the secret police) and arrested, never to be seen again.
Praising Stalin
Everybody had to praise Stalin, all the time. Newspapers credited him with every success. Poets thanked him for bringing the harvest. People leapt to their feet to applaud every time his name was mentioned. His picture was everywhere parents taught their children to love Stalin more than themselves.
He needed to create unity, and certainly strong control was needed to modernise Russia. He was also at least homicidally paranoid.
Totalitarian dictatorship where - on one word from him - the entire Soviet Union did exactly what he said.