Soviet Union during Stalin: Purges and Terror - Source Exercise

This exercise will be included in your homework grade for this grading session. You can
use your textbooks or the internet for the supporting evidence.
Source 1 Peter Kenez: A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Kirovs assassination was followed by thousands of arrests and hundreds of executions. In the
following period of terror, mass murder was carried out on different levels. The most
spectacular were the trials of ex-leaders of the Bolshevik Party, Lenins comrades. With a few
exceptions, the entire leadership of the revolution was exterminated. The first to be tried were
Zinoviev and Kamenev for moral responsibility and, of course, they were found guilty. In
a closed trial they were sentenced to five years in prison. The next act was a second ZinovievKamenev trial in August 1936; with them were tried major figures of the left opposition.
This was the first of the great show trials that the Stalinists were to stage repeatedly in the
following years.
Source 2 Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994)
On 29 July 1936, the Central Committee sent a secret letter to all local party organizations
On the terrorist activity of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite counter-revolutionary bloc stating that
former Oppositionist groups, which had become magnets for 'spies, provocateurs,
diversionists, White guards, [and] kulaks' who hated Soviet power, had been responsible for
the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party leader. Vigilance- 'the ability to recognize an
enemy of the party, no matter how well he might be disguised' - was an essential attribute of
every Communist.This letter was a prelude to the first show trial of the Great Purges, held in
August, in which Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev, two former Opposition leaders,
were convicted of complicity in Kirov's murder, and sentenced to death.
Question 1: What do source 1 and 2 suggest about the reasons for the start of the Great
Purge? What were the actual reasons ? (6 points)
Question 2: How valuable is Source 1 for historians studying the Great Purge and Great
Terror? What are its limitations? (2 points)
Question 3: How valuable is Source 2 for historians studying the Great Purge and Great
Terror? What are its limitations? (2 points)
Source 3 - Historian Anne Applebaum notes some of the crimes for which people were
arrested in her book Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor Books, 2003)
The father of Alexander Lebed, the Russian general and politician, was twice ten minutes late
to work for his factory job, for which he received a five-year camp sentence. At the largely
criminal Polyansky camp near Krasnoyarsk-26, home of one of the Soviet Unions nuclear
reactors, archives record one criminal prisoner with a six-year sentence for stealing a single
rubber boot in a bazaar, another with ten years for stealing ten loaves of bread, and another
a truck driver raising two children alonewith seven years for stealing three bottles of wine

he was delivering. Yet another got five years for speculation, meaning he had bought
cigarettes in one place and sold them in another. Antoni Ekart tells the story of a woman who
was arrested because she took a pencil from the office where she worked. It was for her son,
who had been unable to do his schoolwork for lack of something to write with.
Question 4: What does this extract say about the extent of terror in USSR? How do you
explain it? (5 points)
Question 5: How valuable is Source 2 for historians studying the Great Purge and Great
Terror? What are its limitations? (2 points)
Source 4 Political cartoon on Gulag. Source unknown.

I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What did you do?
Question 6: What is the message conveyed by the cartoon? (3 points)
Total: 20 points