State and Terror

Post-revolutionary terror in Russia is usually associated with the personality of Stalin. In fact, the intensity of terror was dictated by the logic of the survival of power, constrained on the one hand by Marxist doctrine, on the other by authoritarian tradition. So, the return to mass terror at the end of the 1920s was facilitated by the transition from the psychology of the world revolution to the psychosis of a besieged fortress. Hence the horrors of collectivization caused mainly by actions of the local authorities. The latter were helped in their own way by the townsfolk, who explained the food troubles by the actions of the rural “bourgeoisie”. The government, striving to become absolute according to the “only true” theory, needed enemies of an infernal scale – especially when it itself was in an economic impasse. In this sense, the terror of 1937 became inevitable. Subsequent waves of terror were also associated with the political maneuvering of the authorities.