Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Yezhovshchina - Coggle Diagram
Yezhovshchina
-
-
Purge of Party
Lower ranking party members were encouraged to criticise and denounce those who were in higher positions. Party members were unmasked by colleagues to the peasants in 1925.
Stalin made it clear that he thought traitors and spies infiltrated the party at all levels in every locality
Members were invited to confess before mass meetings and were then arrested. Some denunciated pary members in order to get their jobs or settle old socers, others to deflect criticism from themselves
Methods-Arrest, Imprisoment & Death
Most people died in prison, from tortured or were shot. Many vans marked with the words 'Meat' carried bodies to the cementeries.
Most arrests came from 11pm till 3am. NKVD officers drove in black vehicles, collecting their unwilling patients. They were either sent t oprisons or to the gulags in the north of Russia where the freezing temperatures made life unbearable
The reasons for their arrests were arbitrary such as telling jokes of Stalin. Confessions were an important part of this as it made arrests fully legitemate. When someone did not confess they killed them quietly.
-
How, when and why did The Yezhovshchina end
Stalin blamed the KNVD and Yezhov for the excesses of terror. In 1940, a hitman was ordered by Stalin to kill Trotsky and by that point all the old Bolsheviks were killed.
-
Arrests slowed down, although Central Committee members and army officers were purged well into 1939. The purges were destabilising Russian society. Administrative systems were falling apart with key personnel missing and this was having a negative impact on industrial production.