30 July 2025, 16:15
On July 30, 1937, a turning point in the history of the USSR occurred — on this day, NKVD Operational Order No. 00447 was issued, launching the mechanism of the "special troikas" and mass extrajudicial executions.
Over the following 14 months, these bodies sentenced more than 1.7 million people to death or imprisonment. However, to consider the "Great Terror" as an aberration or deviation from the course means overlooking a key feature of the Soviet system: violence was not a byproduct of building communism; on the contrary, it became its necessary condition.
The Structural Impossibility of a Peaceful Transition
The Contradiction Between Project and Reality
The Bolshevik project initially contained an insoluble contradiction. On the one hand, it allegedly claimed to express the will of the working masses. On the other — it demanded a radical transformation of all aspects of social life in a direction that contradicted the natural inclinations and interests of the majority of the population.
Peasants, who made up 80% of the population of the Russian Empire, wanted land in private ownership, not collective (slaveholding) farms. Workers sought better working conditions and higher wages, not "war communism" with its free labor mobilization. The intelligentsia valued autonomy of thought, incompatible with the pressure of total ideologization.
The Absence of Economic Incentives
The communist economic model could not offer material incentives capable of motivating the population to voluntarily participate in the construction of the new society, since it denied private property in principle. The socialization of property deprived people of personal interest in the results of labor. Centralized planning ignored local knowledge and needs.
In these conditions, violent coercion became the only way to make the economy function. Collectivization was carried out by force precisely because no one voluntarily joined collective farms. Industrialization relied on forced mobilization of resources and labor.
The Cheka/NKVD: From Organ of Suppression to the Basis of Power
The Evolution of the Repressive Apparatus
The Extraordinary Commission, created in December 1917 as a temporary body to fight counterrevolution, quickly turned into a permanent institution of violence in power. Its successor, the NKVD, became not just a police organization but the main mechanism for governing society.
Parallels with Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina are more than appropriate here. Like the oprichniki of the 16th century, employees of the repressive organs were placed outside the reach of ordinary law and morality. They received exclusive privileges in exchange for unconditional loyalty to the regime and readiness for any actions.
Terror as a Technology of Governance
The peculiarity of bloody Soviet terror lay in its systematic and rational nature. It was not chaotic violence — it was a deliberate technology of social control. Mass repressions pursued several goals:
Elimination of Alternative Elites. The destruction of old ruling classes, the intelligentsia, the clergy — all who could propose an alternative vision of the future.
Atomization of Society. The destruction of horizontal ties between people, turning society into a mass of isolated individuals connected only to the state.
Creation of an Atmosphere of Fear. The unpredictability of repressions forced everyone to feel like the next victim, eliminating any form of resistance.
Mobilization of Resources. The confiscation of property from "enemies of the people" (usually in favor of the Chekists) and the use of slave labor of prisoners for solving economic tasks.
The Mechanism of "Breaking" a Human Being
The Destruction of Traditional Values
The Soviet system methodically destroyed all alternative sources of meaning and identity. Religion was declared "the opium of the people," family ties were undermined by encouraging denunciations, and traditional culture was replaced with ideological surrogates.
A person was to remain face to face with the state, deprived of any supports other than official ideology. This turned him into easily manageable material for social experiments.
Double Consciousness as the Norm
Terror created a special type of personality — a person with a split consciousness. Publicly he demonstrated loyalty to the regime, privately he suppressed remnants of independent thinking as best he could. This split was a necessary condition for survival, but it also made the formation of civil society impossible.
Special Troikas: The Apogee of Extrajudicial Arbitrariness
The Institutionalization of Lawlessness
The creation of "special troikas" in 1937 meant the final abandonment even of the imitation of justice. These bodies issued sentences without investigation, without the presence of the accused, often based only on anonymous denunciations or arbitrary lists.
The troikas became the embodiment of the principle "the end justifies the means," taken to the point of absurdity. Their activities were regulated only by percentage plans for repressions, handed down from above.
The Conveyor Belt of Death
In 14 months of the troikas’ work, a real industry of killings was created. 1,600 executions per day — this was the indicator not of spontaneous terror but of rationally organized extermination. The system worked with industrial efficiency, turning people into statistics.
The Systemic Nature of Repressions
The Variety of Forms of Coercion
The terror of 1937–1938 was only the most intense phase of permanent violence. The Holodomor of 1932–1933, dekulakization, deportations of entire peoples, forced collectivization — all were links in the same chain.
Each of these campaigns solved specific tasks of building socialism, but they all relied on the same principle: resistance to the system was punished by death or equivalent penalties.
Victims as a Random Sample
A peculiarity of Soviet repressions was their targeting of "random" people. Not only political opponents were repressed but also completely apolitical citizens, often illiterate peasants and workers. This turned terror into a universal mechanism of control. Everyone understood that one had to either submit or die.
But even the submissive were constantly haunted by the thought that if not today, then tomorrow, they would be taken. Why? Because it was necessary.
Conclusion: The Inevitability of Violence
The analysis of the Soviet system leads to a grim conclusion: mass violence was not a perversion of the communist idea but became its logical consequence. The only possible method for building this essentially deeply inhuman system. The attempt at radical transformation of society, which openly went against the will and interests of the majority of its members, could rely on nothing but violence and coercion.
The Cheka and NKVD turned into a "red oprichnina" not by accident — they performed the same function as Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki, suppressing resistance to the social experiments of supreme power. The only difference lay in the scale and technical capabilities.
The Soviet experience demonstrates that stillborn utopian ideological projects of total social restructuring inevitably lead to terror and violence. When reality does not correspond to theory, the regime chooses not to adjust the theory but to force reality into conformity at any cost.
Modern attempts to rehabilitate Stalinism in Russia testify that the lessons of history have not been learned. The glorification of the "efficiency" of the terrorist regime opens the road to new cycles of violence, since the logic of coercion, once launched, tends to self-reproduce.
Such a turn toward the rehabilitation of Stalinism in Russia is also quite easily explained by the destroyed resource base of the concentration camp. After almost four years of war, Moscow has run out of money to pay mercenaries, families of those who lost breadwinners, and hundreds of thousands of disabled people. Not to mention the state employees and pensioners living on Kremlin handouts. It is clear that the probability of revolt is growing, and therefore the revival, after the rehabilitation of Stalin’s cult, of "special troikas" will not be met with resistance. The population will "understand," and, as 100 years ago, will start denouncing neighbors who managed to get food somewhere, or who did not speak entirely flatteringly of the wise ruler of the concentration camp called "Russia."