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Precision Software Appli…tions Silver Collection 1
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Precision Software Applications Silver Collection Volume One (PSM) (1993).iso
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A2RYKOV.DOC
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1992-10-06
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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
throughout World War II and until his death in March 1953.
To the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR
On March 13 [of this year] the Military Tribunal of the
Supreme Court condemned me to death by shooting. I ask for
clemency.
My guilt before the party and the country is great, but I
have a passionate desire and, I think, enough strength to expiate
it.
I ask you to believe that I am not a completely corrupt
person. In my life there were many years of noble, honest work
for the revolution. I can still prove that even after having
committed so many crimes, it is possible to become an honest
person and to die with honor.
I ask that you spare my life.
March 13, 1938
[signed] A.I. Rykov
[stamp] True copy