Extent of anti-Stalin conspiracy in the 30’s?
And what to read on it that’s not unapologetically stalinist.
Just to be safe I should preface this by saying this isn’t a shitpost or apologia, just a question in good faith. Don’t smite me.
I’ve recently had a conversation about the purges with my history teacher prompted by a Bukharin tome he owns, printed during the Perestroika. He’s lived in Moscow his whole life and worked as a historian here for most of it. The one thing he stressed about his experience working on the topic is the secrecy of the archival data concerning it.
From his words, due to the “legal” specificity of the process the purges were documented officially and quite thoroughly, even if most charges were phony. Many records still exist in archives but are almost all indefinitely off-limits to anybody who wishes to write about or study them, with those who do get access to them having to sign non-disclosure. He told me that despite his negative stance on Stalin’s actions throughout his time in power, he can at least see the motivation for pretty much all of them, except for the Great Terror on the scale that it happened. The power struggle itself would prompt repression of the party leadership and army higher-ups, but hardly the jailing or execution of 2 million people.
It got to the Tukhachevsky case, which more or less kicked off the worst of it, and the accusation of his conspiracy with German high command based on forged documents and his 140-page confession/report extracted under torture (once again never made public). The teacher said that while the defeat plan stuff is obviously counterfeit, he believes Stalin's had genuine fear of a possible Trotsky-adjacent coup plan against him based in part on Tukhachevsky’s sympathies for expulsed Bolsheviks allegedly expressed during his time abroad in 1936, hence why the case was started in the first place. He said it kinda drives him insane that it’s such a central part of Soviet history, yet people are denied from all the vast direct sources on it, and versions based on the scraps we do have are conflicting.
So yeah, in absence of actual NKVD archival info, wtf was going on in the higher levels of the party and army in the 30’s? What information should we even go off of? Was there even a genuine chance of a coup by ’35? If so, who of the casualties in the upper echelons could’ve had connections to it? Did the opposition have broad enough sympathies? If Stalin was the driving force behind the purges, surely in his head he must’ve had some reason to think he needed to do them on such a psychotic scale, beyond concentration of power.
Once again, I’m not saying Stalin’s actions were justified in any way, just not to fall into reverse great man theory. He did a lot of dumb shit, but I think he was more or less lucid during it, unlike what the schizoid paranoia of the Yezhovshchina would suggest. Help me understand him. If what I said is dumb, explain why, also happy holidays to everybody on the sub.
