State-Sponsored Mass Murder
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This research compares and contrasts two cases of state-sponsored mass murder in the 20th century: the Holocaust, which refers to the state-sponsored murder in Europe of some 12 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews, during the Nazi regime; and the Stalinist purge of some 20 million people undertaken in the USSR state during the regime headed by Josef Stalin. In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, in which an apparently stateless military attack accomplished a spectacle of mass murder and raised questions about how such an event could have happened, it may be instructive to consider that in the 20th century there were numerous examples of state-sponsored mass murder. The two most notorious--certainly the two that appear to have achieved the highest body count in the 20th century--can be found in Germany's Third Reich (1932-1945) and in the Stalinist period (1924-1953) of the Soviet state.Murders that occurred at the behest of Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia were on a continuum of positive programs of state-mandated suppression. What Bullock (969) describes as the 40-50 million premature deaths attributable to either one regime or the other that occurred in Europe between 1930 and 1953 occurred in a continental Europe that for the first half of the 20th century was marked by political instability and fierce ideological competition. One object in view, according to Bullock (966) was to "redraw the map of Europe in the twentieth century." Ideology h
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ved recruitment of urban proletariat "shock troops":
Stalin's ideological justification ofh is "socialist offensive" in terms of class war[] enabled the militants to see those whom they hounded out of jobs and homes, informed against, an condemned to death, not as fellow human beings but as "class enemies," guilty of an irredeemable crime simply by virtue of having been born into a bourgeois or kulak family (Bullock 277).
Industrial failures, such as making industrial quotas, became capital offenses subject to myriad show trials, deportations, torture, and executions.
More general oppression was occurring all the time. Religious people, intellectuals, rival socialists, former business owners--all of these were routinely arrested, deported, executed (Solzhenitsyn 49ff). By 1930 Stalin had eliminated intraparty political rivals in the USSR and had issued directives to communists around the world to engage in revolution, "in the face of the rise of Nazism and Fascism, to make the Social Democrats their principal enemy as 'social Fascists,' . . . and deliberately split the European labor movement" (Bullock 212). By the late 1930s, inside the USSR, Stalin had begun purging the Soviet military ranks of hundreds of generals and thousa
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Approximate Word count = 2330
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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