USM Open Source History Text: The World at War: World History 1914-1945Main MenuIntroduction: A Mural as WindowOn Diego Rivera's Detroit IndustryThe World Around 1914, Part I: the Journey of Young GandhiThe World Around 1914, Part II: The Era of Nationalism and Imperialism (1848-1914)The First World WarThe Long Russian Revolution (1917 – 1929)The Decline of the West? Europe from 1919 – 1929A New Middle East: The Rise of the Middle East State SystemChina Between Qing Collapse and WWIILatin America Between Boom and Bust (1911-1929)Africa Under Colonial Rule: Politics and Race from 1914‐1939The United States from The First World War to the Great DepressionThe Great DepressionThree Varieties of Radicalism in the 1930s: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Imperial JapanThree Responses to Modernity: Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Saud, and Getulio VargasThe Second World WarSeth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c
Stalinist Terror
12017-07-17T21:58:21-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c192372plain2017-09-19T08:47:12-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929cThe Stalinist “Show Trials” of old Bolsheviks displayed the power of Stalin’s terror. One by one, former leaders of the Bolshevik Party, the former heroes of the revolution, confessed to trying to undermine the Soviet state, and of being disloyal or even treasonous. Leon Trotsky, the former head of the Red Army and the Comintern, fled abroad, where he was hunted down and assassinated by Stalinist agents in Mexico City. In the meantime, the system of the Gulag, the Soviet forced labor camps, processed millions of people, like the young Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was literally taken from the front lines as a soldier in WWII and transported to the Gulag for expressing weariness about the Soviet military effort and the army’s commanding officers. He and millions of others were caught between two crushing stones, Hitler’s war machine in the west and the Gulags in the east. These stones decimated the eastern European and Russian populations in the 1930s and 1940s, resulting in around 40 million Russian deaths. These were truly desperate times for the Russian civilization population.
