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How did Stalin use terror and imprisonment to maintain control?

Question by Bob: How did Stalin use terror tactics and imprisonment to maintain his control?
How did Stalin use terror tactics and imprisonment to maintain his control? How did these conditions ultimately affect the citizens of the Soviet Union?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Spellbound
Stalin controlled the people through a variety of methods.

Fear, during the Great Purges a culture developed of informing on friends, loved ones, parents, neighbours and work colleagues. So people learnt not to say what they meant, but to only speak about certain things in glowing, propaganda-like ways – this was the process Orwell called “double-think” in his book 1984.

Propaganda – Soviet propaganda was everywhere, there were posters throughout the towns and villages, most films had a propaganda message and all plays and other artworks had to be produced using the Socialist Realism Style.

Fear and propaganda are blunt weapons if used on their own, so Stalin also used rewards. Party members were rewarded for their loyalty and their good service through a system of: higher wages, better apartments, better hospitals, better schools and special shops that stocked better goods than the ordinary citizen’s shops. Non-party people were also rewarded for their hard work with gifts and medals – such as Stakhanovite medals and better apartments for these shock workers.

Stalin was also the beneficiary of a genuine belief in communism by millions of Soviet citizens. People volunteered in their millions to help in some construction and agriculture projects. Programmes of literacy, free healthcare, female emancipation – they were allowed careers, education and the vote for the first time, free education for all and electrification all helped to make communism a popular ideology.

See:
Stalin, A Biography – Robert Service
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSstalin.htm

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