Stalin was afraid of the youth and, in a sense, even more afraid of the old party members. Stalin was familiar with all the old party members, knew their way of thinking and their aspirations. Every old party member was on the “black list” of the Central Committee of the Party and was closely watched by the General Directorate of State Political Security. On the other hand, it is not so easy to find out about the younger generation, classify them, and eliminate the revolutionary elements among them. And at the critical moment, they could become the real threat to Stalin’s tyranny. Therefore, Stalin repeatedly ordered the General Directorate of State Political Security to expand the intelligence network among the youth, especially in the factories and universities.
All of Stalin’s attempts to use the YCL and other mass organizations to control the youth were unsuccessful. Many youth groups arose spontaneously throughout the country, whose participants wanted to find answers to a series of political questions that could not be discussed openly. But the groups, whose members had no experience in underground activities, often fell into the hands of the Ministry of the Interior.
The discontent of the people, of course, was also reflected in the members of the Komsomol, especially those from working-class families. The youth watched with anguish as glaring inequalities proliferated throughout the country; the majority of the common people were half-starved, while the privileged bureaucrats were lavishly spending money. The sons and daughters of ordinary workers saw how their peers from “noble” backgrounds entered the state apparatus in attractive positions, while they themselves toiled in heavy jobs. Exploited. The Komsomol members who were recruited to build the Moscow subway worked ten hours a day, often standing in waist-deep snow. While their peers from the upper class drove around Moscow in their parents’ car. The brutal exploitation of the subway builders forced more than 800 youths to throw away their jobs, storm the central office building, throw their membership cards on the ground, and yell at those in power. This incident greatly annoyed the head of the authorities. Stalin immediately called a meeting of the Politburo. Stalin immediately called a meeting of the Politburo and asked the Moscow Party Committee to convene a plenary session to discuss this historically unprecedented strike of Komsomol members.
Lack of freedom of speech and severe suppression of opposing views. All this forced the Komsomol members to organize illegal groups to discuss important matters of personal anxiety. But the repression of the rulers soon followed: between 1935 and 1936, thousands of members were arrested. They were deported to concentration camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of young people, who were considered unreliable by the authorities, were sent to “build new cities” in those places, even though the authorities said that they were there “voluntarily”.
Unsure of the trust of the working class and other classes of people, Stalin began to look for another pillar of society, one that would support his personal dictatorship in unforeseen times. His boldest step in this direction was the restoration of the Cossack army, which had long since been destroyed by the revolution.
During the tsarist era, the Cossack army was the tsar’s fortress and the weapon of choice for suppressing the Russian revolutionary movement. The Cossack army was an independent unit of the Russian army. It contained privileges and autonomy. The Tsar himself was the commander-in-chief of the Cossack army and the Tsar’s successor was its commander-in-chief, and successive generations of Cossacks began their military studies as children, receiving a rigorous monarchical education that was the death of the revolution. The reactionary nature of the Cossacks was deeply rooted, as if they were a special kind of people. The Cossacks were ordered to carry out sieges, often drowning the spark of the revolution in blood.
After the October Revolution, the Cossacks naturally sided with the counter-revolution again. The White bandit units of Generals Karegin and Krasnov were all Cossacks, as were the Donko White Bandit Volunteers under the command of Generals Alexeyev and Kornilov. The Cossacks of Donko and Kuban were General Dunnikin’s main force, and the Cossacks of Orenburg and the Urals were Dutov’s main force. During the three-year civil war, the Cossack army fought the Red Army with extraordinary brutality, ruthlessly killing captured Red Army soldiers; all those suspected of sympathizing with the Soviet regime were also brutally murdered.
Now. Stalin restored the Cossack army and all its privileges, and even allowed the Cossack soldiers to continue to wear the same kind of uniforms they had worn during the Tsarist era. Stalin’s move was timed to coincide with the dissolution of the Old Bolshevik Association and the Society of Political Sufferers. This shows very clearly that Stalin had essentially betrayed the revolution.
December 1935. A large gathering in the Bolshoi Theater celebrates the first anniversary of the establishment of the General Directorate of State Political Security. Suddenly, all the invited delegates were stunned: a group of Cossack soldiers appeared in the third box, not far from Stalin. The soldiers were dressed in Russian uniforms with gold and silver ribbons and were quite provocative. To welcome them, a Moscow dance troupe performed a Cossack dance. Stalin and Ordzhonikidze also greeted them with applause and joy. The delegates were more interested in the resurrected Imperial Cossack officers than in the dance. The former head of the State Department of Political Security, who had done hard labor, turned to his colleagues and muttered, “When I see these people, the blood in my body starts to flow. Look, this is what they’ve done!” With that, he lowered his head to show his colleagues the scar on his head from a Cossack saber attack.
Stalin, like the Tsar, needed the Cossacks to suppress the resistance of the discontented, for it would have been difficult to find a more reliable executioner for such a task than the Cossacks.
In September 1935, the Soviet people were surprised to read in the newspapers about a government order to restore to the Red Army the rank system, which had been outlawed by the October Revolution. Previously, Red Army commanders were called by their titles: company commander, battalion commander, regimental commander, etc. This new order made the old system of military ranks obsolete. With this new order, the old set of rank titles was almost always restored. Officers’ salaries were doubled, and huge sums of money were allocated to build clubs, sanatoriums, and residences specifically for officers. And that was just the beginning. Then Stalin restored the rank of general (even though the people already hated the word “general”) and the general’s uniform. This uniform, with gold and silver ribbons, was almost identical to the pre-revolutionary one.
By introducing the rank system and granting privileges to officers, the comradeship that had developed in the army during the civil war, and which had become crippling, was completely eliminated. Stalin’s move had two purposes: First, to give the Red Army commanders a material incentive to defend Soviet power. Second, to make the people understand that the revolution and all its promises were over, and that the Stalinist system had been completely consolidated.
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