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Grifter posted:I know next to nothing about Soviet history. Reading this thread lead me to read the wikipedia article on the Stalin's Great Pure, and that is sickening. It did raise a question though. The article mentions that Staling wiped out a lot of the intelligentsia, which seems to mostly include artists (writers, poets, theater owners, etc.). Did this part of the purge also get academics? If so, how did they so quickly recover to bootstrap themselves into space in a period that's basically a generation later? The purge targeted the educated classes, who Stalin saw as too politically active. So yes, engineers and doctors and academics were purged as well. That said, writers and poets and such were generally more politically-oriented, and most of those purged were probably identified as dangers to the state before the runaway murders started. Enough educated Soviet citizens survived the purge to work during WWII to design and produce materiel in WWII. Apart from the earliest, and highest-profile targets, the purges were used as a terror tactic rather than a means to an end. If you'd like to read more about anti-intellectualism in the Soviet Union, read up about "Lysenkoism", a pretty heinous example of politicising science.
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Dec 24, 2014 05:25
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Baconroll posted:Post Stalin how long was it before the courts started to judge some cases based on evidence and were actually willing to find people innocent for 'non-political' offenses ? The show trials were meant to destroy the public image of Stalin's most powerful opponents. They were war heroes and distinguished statesmen, who were widely held in esteem by different parts of society. The whole point of locking up dissidents and torturing them was so they could reveal their treachery in a kangaroo court and shock Josef Q. Publicov. The trial of Vladimir Vladimirovich, accused horse thief, doesn't call for such measures. In fact, his trial is so politically inconsequential that nobody cared what the outcome was. The Soviet judicial system wasn't systematically engineered to produce guilt for crimes that didn't concern the state. For others, there might not be a trial at all. The judicial system wouldn't be involved in assigning guilt, especially during the most frenetic parts of the purge. I'm talking days where some NKVD goon would head off to work, murder some suspected traitors, and return to find a new NKVD man sitting in his desk, Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 12:57
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