The political system which existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin was a system of terror. The purges of the 1930s sent millions of Russians to their deaths or to the Gulags, the population was scared of the secret police, the NKVD, the forced collectivization of agriculture had wiped out a part of Russian society, the Kulaks. The show trials of the thirties had firmly established Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union. What requires investigation is how far was this regime of terror a new entity in the Soviet Union or how far it was a continuation the state set up by Lenin after the Russian revolution in 1917.

The regime set up by Lenin did have a secret police, the Cheka and it was authoritarian, especially in the the years after the revolution and the civil war. There was forced grain requisitioning during the period of War Communism and political enemies were exiled. That is by no means in question. The difference is that during the Leninist years there was not the wholesale slaughter of millions of Soviet citizens as there was under Stalin in the 1930s. It can be argued therefore, that Stalinism was partly the outcome of Leninist political practice bec

The NKVD, or secret police, played, it can be argued, the greatest role in the terror of the 1930s. The huge network of informers meant that the population were in constant fear of each other as well as the state machine. anyone was a potential NKVD informer even close family members, Hosking writes,

Some topics in this essay:
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