Stalin in Control During the second half of the 1920s, Joseph Stalin set the stage for gai

                              Stalin in Control


     During the second half of the 1920s, Joseph Stalin set the
stage for gaining absolute power by employing police repression
against opposition elements within the Communist Party.  The
machinery of coercion had previously been used only against
opponents of Bolshevism, not against party members themselves. 
The first victims were Politburo members Leon Trotskii, Grigorii
Zinov'ev, and Lev Kamenev, who were defeated and expelled from
the party in late 1927.  Stalin then turned against Nikolai
Bukharin, who was denounced as a "right opposition,"  for
opposing his policy of forced collectivization and rapid
industrialization at the expense of the peasantry.  
     Stalin had eliminated all likely potential opposition to his
leadership by late 1934 and was the unchallenged leader of both
party and state.  Nevertheless, he proceeded to purge the party
rank and file and to terrorize the entire country with widespread
arrests and executions.  During the ensuing Great Terror, which
included the notorious show trials of Stalin's former Bolshevik
opponents in 1936-1938 and reached its peak in 1937 and 1938,
millions of innocent Soviet citizens were sent off to labor camps
or killed in prison.  
     By the time the terror subsided in 1939, Stalin had managed
to bring both the party and the public to a state of complete
submission to his rule.  Soviet society was so atomized and the
people so fearful of reprisals that mass arrests were no longer
necessary.  Stalin ruled as absolute dictator of the Soviet Union