Operation Barbaross An Analysis Of The Causes Of The Great Terror

On the morning of December 1st, 1934, Leonid Nikolaev walked inside the Party Headquarters in Leningrad, where he shot and killed Sergei Kirov, the head of the Leningrad Party organization. Owing to Joseph Stalin’s growing suspicion of party members, the death of Kirov opened the door for what became known as The Great Terror. By the end of 1939 over two million people were directly impacted by the purges, estimates put the death toll close to 800,000 people killed outright, and hundreds of thousands more sent to labor camps where many subsequently died. The Stalin left no stone unturned in his quest to eliminate threats to his power, The Terror swept through field and factory and impacted everyone from ordinary citizens to powerful officials. Beyond the assault on the average citizen and official, the Terror would also target high ranking military officials and the results would be costly to the Red Army, not just in lives but also in its preparedness for the wars to come. During the Russo-Finnish War, also …show more content…
After the Winter War Wipert von Blucher, the German envoy to Helsinki, concluded that the U.S.S.R. was not a first-class military power, and that Germany didn’t need to view the Soviet Union as a serious military or economic threat. Between 1937 and 1938 around seven million Soviet citizens were arrested, one million were executed, two million died in camps, and another one million were imprisoned. Taking the Purge and the Great Terror as a whole, roughly eight million people were in camps by the end of 1938. Stalin’s paranoia led him to set the Soviet Union on fire and as a result the Red Army fared poorly in the Winter War and suffered terribly at the onset of the Second World War, because it lacked quality