Here, then, were the elements that gave the Great Purges their particular characteristics and virulence. The de-kulakisation, social order and national deportation campaigns of the preceding years formed the background for the mass repressions of the late 1930s. The mechanisms employed during the repressions of 1937 and 1938 were similar to those used earlier to contain or dispose of undesirable populations and, in 1937 and 1938, the police targeted many of the same groups. Yet it was not just the threat of class war or social disorder that generated the mass repressions of the late 1930s. The threat of war introduced a xenophobic element into Soviet policies of repression and gave to those policies a sense of political urgency. By 1937, leaders were convinced that oppositionists, working with foreign agents, were actively organising socially disaffected populations into a fifth-column force. Authorities worried that invasion, which seemed increasingly likely in the late 1930s, would be the signal for armed uprisings by these groups, as well as by potentially hostile national populations. Each of these concerns - over social disorder, political opposition and national contamination - had generated separate political responses and operational policies of repression throughout the previous years. These political fears and operational initiatives coalesced in 1937 and 1938. The various fears of Soviet leaders combined in a deadly way within the context of imminent war and invasion and generated the vicious purges of those years. Ezhov, on orders from Stalin, launched the massive purge of Soviet society in 1937-8 in order to destroy what Stalinist leaders believed was the social base for armed overthrow of the Soviet government.[20]
Stalinist leaders employed the full coercive power of the state to achieve their objectives of socialist construction. Indeed, Stalin's use of mass repression as a normal instrument of policy defined one of the distinguishing characteristics of his regime. Lenin used mass repression brutally and without hesitation during the emergency of the civil war, yet he always regarded mass repression as an extraordinary means of revolutionary struggle. Repression was not to be employed against party members or as a normal means of governance. Hence the original name of the Cheka, the chrezvychainaia kommissia, the 'Extraordinary' Commission. During collectivisation and de-kulakisation, Stalin engaged in mass forms of repression still in this manner - as part of a revolutionary class war to establish Soviet power and the dictatorship of the party. Ironically, however, the 'victory' of socialism in 1933 and 1934 not only marked the end of class war; it also ended any pretence to class-specific forms of repression. Police used administrative forms of mass repression against an ever-widening range of social and then ethnic groups. During the mid- 1930s, especially, mass repression became the primary way authorities dealt with social disorder, engaging in large-scale police round-ups and passport sweeps to cleanse cities of marginalised and other supposedly anti-Soviet social groups. By 1935, for example, police had even taken over the country's massive orphan problem, with near sole jurisdiction to sweep orphan and unsuper- vised children into police-run rehabilitation camps. Leaders used mass forms of expulsion and deportation to redistribute the Soviet population, to construct politically acceptable national identities, to protect the country's borders, to colonise land and exploit resources, and to impose public order and economic discipline on Soviet society. Stalin, in other words, turned the extraordinary use of repression against political enemies into an ordinary instrument of state governance. Stalin's use ofmass repression set his regime apart from its Leninist predecessor and from the selective use of repression employed by successive Soviet regimes.
The political police operated as the main instrument ofrepression, and one of several coercive organs centralised under the NKVD, the Commissariat of the Interior. The NKVD also included the infamous Gulag, or labour camp administration, the border guard forces, the NKVD's interior troops and the regular or civil police, the militsiia. During the 1930s, reforms took away local Soviet authority over the militsiia and subordinated the civil police to the state's centralised political police administration. This was a key part of Stalin's statist revolution and it had important consequences. Placing the civil police under control of the political police led inevitably during the decade to the merging of the two institutions and their respective functions - maintaining social order and protecting state security. As a result, the civil police were drawn increasingly into the business of mass repression, and the political police became drawn more and more into the coercive repression of day-today crimes and the resolution, through administrative forms of repression, of the country's major social problems.
The conflation of civil and political police functions was unintentional and it politicised the social sphere in a way uncharacteristic of the pre- and post- Stalin eras. It was the police, primarily through the constant campaigns of mass repression, social categorisation and deportation, which, unwittingly, became the primary institution within the Soviet state to define and reconstruct the social-geographic and national-ethnic landscape ofthe country. Police usurped and politicised many functions of the civil government. Still, it is inaccurate to describe the Soviet state under Stalin simply as a police state. The political police never attempted to gain control overthe government ortheparty. Except for a brief period during the Great Purges in the late 1930s, party officials maintained control over the police. Stalin always had final control over the NKVD. Moreover, Stalinist officials always regarded the use of special police powers as a temporary response to conditions of national crisis, even though the methods of mass police repression became, in effect, a normal means of governance under Stalin. The word in Russian that best describes the process that occurred during the 1930s is voennizatsiia, or militarisation of the state's institutions of social and civil order. Voennizatsiia was a word consciously used at the time and later by Soviet leaders to describe the martial-law or emergency-law state that Stalin built. And even though police were given sweeping emergency powers, the civil state was never entirely abrogated. Its institutions were, at least formally, strengthened by the 1936 constitution. Authorities of civil state institutions - in the procuracy, the judiciary and in local Soviet governments - continued with more or less success to assert their authority. In fact, Ezhov began to disentangle civil and political police structures even before the mass purges of the late 1930s. This process continued unevenly under Ezhov's successor, Lavrentii Beria, until the two institutions were finally and completely separated in the early 1950s. For as much as Stalinist leaders constructed the apparatus of a militarised state socialism, they also set the constitutional groundwork for a Soviet civil socialism. This was a dual heritage, which they passed on to their successors.
Conclusion
Stalin's revolution drove the USSR headlong into the twentieth century and it brought into being a peculiarly despotic and militarised form of state socialism. Ideology and political habits, as well as personality, shaped the actions of Stalin and those around him. Elements of continuity carried over from earlier periods of Soviet and even Russian history, especially from the Leninist legacy of the War Communism period. Yet the actions of Stalinist leaders cannot be explained simply by reference to some essential ideology or political practice.[21] The mechanisms of power, the policies of repression and policing and the bureaucratic apparatus of dictatorship that we know as Stalinism were unanticipated by Marxist-Leninist ideology or practice. Stalinism grew out of a unique combination of circumstances - a weak governing state, an increasingly hostile international context and a series of unforeseen crises, both domestic and external. The international context was especially important in shaping Stalin's brand of socialism. Stalin's personality gave to his dictatorship its despotic and uniquely vicious character, but the militarised aspects of Stalinism may be attributed as well to the growing fears of war and enemy encirclement. Stalin's successors struggled with the legacy left by his dictatorship, but as the circumstances passed that created Stalinism so did Stalinism. After the dictator's death in 1953, the character of the Soviet regime and Soviet society evolved in other directions.
20
For this particular argument, see Shearer, 'Social Disorder, Mass Repression, and the NKVD'.
21
Zbigniew Brzezinski,