Opposition to the Regimes

Secret Police

• Worked alongside ordinary Police• ‘Third Section’Replaced by Okhrana• 1880s to 1917: Used for spying, arresting and

imprisoning and/or exiling opposition.• 1914-1917 focus on wartime security

• The Cheka• The All Russian Extraordinary Commission for fighting

counter revolution and sabotage• Shift towards clamping down on groups considered to

be bourgeois and counter revolutionary• Victimise people because of who they were, not their

actions• “your first duty is to ask him to which class he belongs,

what are his origins, his education and his occupation. These questions should decide the fate of the prisoner”

• Execution of the Romanov family without trial• Red Terror• Use of Labour camps• Cheka disbanded after Civil War• OGPU: United State Police Administration,

under control of the CPSU

• People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) Beria in charge

• Permanent form of terror• Intensity and rigour of gathering evidence• Gulags: over 40 million people• Purged 20,000 of its own members!• MGB: Ministry for State Security and Ministry of

Internal Affairs MVD (basically same as NKVD)

The Army

• Purpose?-Fight-Crush strikes and riots-Win a civil war-Prestige-Follow policy-Enforce policy

Army in 1855

• 1.4 million men• Mostly forced serf conscripts• 25 years service• Officer class from the nobility

Alex II’s military reforms

• 1859: period of service now 15 years• 1863: Brutal corporal punishments removed• Military schools made open to all, not just nobles• In 1874, conscription extended to all groups• Russification: peace keeping role on borders• But: Bribery to doctors to declare you “unfit”

continued

1905-1917

• Period of strikes, riots, protests• Put down by the Army• WWI: failure led to desertion• MRC: Military Revolutionary Committee,

encouraged soldiers to join.

Red Army

• 5 million• Whites approx 500,000• Red Army and Cheka had to enforce War

Communism• 1921 Konstadt sailors mutinied

Army under Stalin

• Stalin used the Army to enforce economic policy: collectivisation

• Great Terror• Purge of the Army• In WWII: ‘fight to the last drop of blood’• NKVD was used to crush small about of civil

unrest• Army reduced from 3.6 million to 2.4 million after

the war

Censorship

• Alex II: policy of openness or glasnost• Daily newspapers, foreign press• 1872 Karl Marx Das Kapital published• More books published than in USA and Britain

combined by 1894• BUT government had the right to withdraw

publications that are dangerous

• Under Nicholas II• Expansion of press in particular that aimed

towards the proletariat• Reporting of the Duma• Rasputin referred to as ‘dark forces near the

throne’

• During WWI: censorship • 1917 abolish press freedom to stop counter

revolutionaries• ‘Agitation and Propaganda Department

(Agitprop) 1921’ Russian culture

• Under Stalin: • All literacy groups closed down• All work had to be produced under the banner

of ‘socialist realism’ struggle of ordinary people

• Desire to promote the ‘New Soviet Man’• Faked photographs

• Under Khrushchev CHANGE to Stalin• But SIMILAR to Alex II and Nic II• Number of books published were double that

of 1920s• Variety of newspapers

Propaganda

• Only really after 1905• Nic II promoted his

image through portraits

• During WWI increase circulation of pictures

• Under the communists• ‘Peace, bread and land’• ‘Power to the soviets’• ‘Things that must be done’• ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today’• Cult of personality: Petrograd to Leningrad• Youth organisations (pioneers)• Films, newspapers, Hero’s : Stakhanov