Opposition to the Regimes

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Opposition to the Regimes
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Secret Police

• Worked alongside ordinary Police
• Third SectionReplaced by Okhrana
• 1880s to 1917 Used for spying, arresting and
  imprisoning and/or exiling opposition.
• 1914-1917 focus on wartime security

3

• 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

4

• 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

5

• Peoples 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)

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The Army

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

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Army in 1855

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

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Alex IIs 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

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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.

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Red Army

• 5 million
• Whites approx 500,000
• Red Army and Cheka had to enforce War Communism
• 1921 Konstadt sailors mutinied

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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

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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

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• 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

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• During WWI censorship
• 1917 abolish press freedom to stop counter
  revolutionaries
• Agitation and Propaganda Department (Agitprop)
  1921 Russian culture

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• 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

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• 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

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Propaganda

• Only really after 1905
• Nic II promoted his image through portraits
• During WWI increase circulation of pictures

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• 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, Heros Stakhanov