Genocide: - DIIS

Motives, Mechanisms and Memories of Soviet Communist Terror
situation in the ongoing world war, a growing politico-ideological discontent
among almost all groups in Russian society, intensifi ed struggles for
national liberation among a number of non-Russian national groups in the
dying empire, and a social turbulence that included a developing peasants’
war. The outbreak of the Civil War added further to this negative
development. From this perspective, terror was primarily an expression
of a continuing brutalisation or a “cumulative radicalisation” of human
relations in the entire Russian society. Post-revolutionary Russia became,
to use a structuralist concept, a “genocidal society” in which mass violence
was regarded as a natural or normal way of solving political or other problems
that faced the new rulers.
The Great Terror
The fact that the introduction of the New Economic Politics (NEP) in
March 1921 meant a radical reduction in the use of the Bolshevik terror
machinery can be regarded as a testimony that functional and structural
interpretations have validity when trying to explain Soviet developments.
At the same time as famine was gradually eliminated, an economic politics
of compromise allowed a limited private ownership and some possibilities
for peasants to sell their products. NEP palpably reduced socio-political
tensions. It is true to say that no political opposition was allowed, but
most opposition to the Communist party had, however, been crushed. In
the NEP era, political quarrels and ideological antagonisms were mainly
enacted within the party itself.
The NEP détente did not mean that all political opposition was cleared
away and that terror was entirely abolished. In south Caucasian Georgia,
almost 4.000 people were killed in 1924 in an anti-Bolshevik revolt lead by
Mensheviks or Social-Democrats who had held political power in a short
and precarious period of Georgian independence between 1918 and 1921.
Responsible for the suppression of the revolt was the People’s Commissar
for Nationality Questions, the Georgian Joseph Stalin. 20
20 Ronald Grigor Suny (1988), The Making of the Georgian Nation. Bloomington, p. 219-25.
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