1. Engelsina Cheskova famously gave Stalin a bunch of flowers unannounced at a party meeting in Stalin was so taken aback he ordered posters, paintings and statues to commemorate this act. Engelsina became a minor celebrity, but her parents weren’t so lucky. Her father ‘disappeared’ and when her mother protested she was sent into exile where she died. However, when Stalin himself died Engelsina cried profusely for the loss of her beloved leader. Why did Russians feel this way?

2. At the end of 1934 Stalin launched a wave of political terror that claimed a million lives and resulted in 12 million people being sent to forced labour camps.
© The Daily Mail

3. The Terror Begins: Stalin and Yagoda, 1934-1936
Learning Objective:
- To understand and evaluate the causes of The Great Terror
Starter (5 mins):
Write a definition for the following : Use Bunce p68-9
Totalitarianism
Political terror
Purge

4. The Congress of Victors 1934
The Communist Party Congress was designed as a to celebrate the achievements of Stalin’s industrial policy
Stalin was greeted with a standing ovation after his speech and called a ‘genius’ by Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin
At the final vote of the conference, which was held to re-elect the central committee, a quarter of delegates voted against Stalin
Stalin became deeply suspicious of all the delegates who had been at the conference.
Over the nest three years, 1,000 of the 1,200 delegates had been executed.
The Congress became known as the Congress of the Damned

5. Cause of the Great Terror Specific Examples/Evidence
Explanation - how exactly did this cause the Great Terror?
Congress of Victors
Paranoia
Terror economics
The murder of Kirov
Do not complete this section until you have completed the Kirov Murder Mystery activity.

6. The Kirov Murder Mystery
Learning Objectives:
To evaluate the evidence and to decide who was responsible for the murder
What impact did the Kirov murder have on the Soviet Union?

7. The Kirov Murder Mystery
The murder of Sergei Kirov is one of the great mysteries of Russian history in the 1930s.
Robert Conquest argues in The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990, p. 37) that it was a turning point in history, which not only unleashed a terror that killed millions but also determined the future of Soviet Russia.
But it was a strange mystery because we know who the murderer was. But what were the motives for the murder and who, if anybody, arranged it?

8. Sergei Kirov ( )
Born into a lower middle-class family, Kirov lost his parents early. He trained as a mechanic, where he met activists from a nearby university.
He played an active part in the 1917 Revolution and in the Civil War as head of the Military Revolutionary Committee in Astrakhan. In 1921 he became Secretary of the Azerbaijan Central Committee and in 1923 a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
Kirov replaced Zinoviev as Party Secretary in Leningrad after he was ousted by Stalin. He was a powerful, popular and excellent orator but opposed Stalin’s policies on forced collectivisation.

9. ‘What impact did the Kirov murder have on the Soviet Union?’
The Kirov Murder Mystery
Work in pairs. Use the clues to fill in your investigation sheet.
Work in pairs to examine the sources and the clues.
Then you must come up with a hypothesis for the key question –
‘What impact did the Kirov murder have on the Soviet Union?’

10. Stalin ordered the swift execution of many opponents.
The murder of Kirov
Kirov’s death provided Stalin with an excuse to use political terror against the Communist party
Stalin ordered the swift execution of many opponents.
Stalin called on all party members to root out ‘Trotskyites’
Stalin appointed Yagoda as head of the NKVD. He investigated the murder of Kirov and the interrogation of Kamenev and Zinoviev.
Yagoda
Not to be confused with ….

11. Plenary: PEE Paragraphs
Task instructions: Bunce p72
Each person does a different factor
Write a PEE paragraph on one piece of sugar paper
Point – A direct answer to ‘What caused Stalin’s Great Terror?’
Evidence – At least three specific examples that support the point
Explanation – Explain why that factor caused the Great Terror

12. Read this:
Partly inspired by Orwell’s knowledge of the terroristic practices of Stalin’s Russia, 1984 is one of the best known fictional examples of a totalitarian regime.
Film Trailer

13. Card sort: see word document- intro to purges sorting activity
Sort the cards you have been given with your group into the following piles:
Definitions of the purges
Opposition to Stalin before 1934
The Stalin constitution of 1936
The Seventeenth Party Congress