Harder to fathom is the Great Terror of 1937-1938, when more than 1.5 million people were arrested and nearly 700,000 executed, including hundreds of thousands of loyal party members and state officials. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images The Great Terror Photograph: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images The rationale was that establishing control of food supplies was essential to support industrialisation and rearmament – tasks made more imperative by Hitler’s rise. Peasants were the largest category of victim, with millions killed, deported or starved to death during the drive to forcibly collectivise Soviet agriculture. In the 1930s, however, Stalin was peerless in his deployment of mass terror to destroy both real and imagined enemies of the Soviet regime. But in this he was no different from other communist leaders, such as arch-rival Leon Trotsky, whose defence of “Red Terror” he applauded. Stalin’s propensity to use political violence had come to the fore during the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution. Stalin’s paranoia was political and ideological, honed by the isolation of the Soviet state and the siege mentality required to survive in a hostile capitalist world. Stephen Kotkin’s key insight in the first volume of his groundbreaking biography was that Joseph Stalin’s personality was moulded and driven by the politics of ruthless class war in defence of the revolution and the pursuit of communist utopia.
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