Terror in Stalin's Final Years (1941-53)

Stalin autherised execution of top ranking officers

39,000 army officers and 3,000 navy officers 1941

purged military intelligence

blamed for German invasion

Officiers sent to Gulags for performing badly then released as they were running out

List of citizens drawn up by NKVD who sympathised Germans

Kalayks- 53,000 survived in Siberia

Checkers- 460,000 exiled but it failed and they were burnt alive- hostile to Germans

Yalta Conference- 1.5 Million Soviet soldiers sent to Russia after being prisoners of war

Soldiers were interrogated then sent to Gulags for breaking orders or being supposed spies

Suspicious of former allies

Believed Jews were cosmopolitan 

1945-1951 from 12% to 4% seniour management were Jews

1949- called it the 'Island in the Pacific'

Thousand Leningrad Party Members sacked

200 arrested and charged as traitors

Confessions under 'Conveyer Belt System' 

Final years of life, Stalin increasing concerned that someone was trying to kill him

His physician, Professor Vladimir Vinogradov, arosed suspicion, when he suggested that Stalin cure to ill-health would be to reduce workload

After this Vinogradov and 30 others like him were arrested, NKVD charging them with the assaination of leading members of the communist party andd plotting to poison Stalin

Stalin died before things could escalate, the doctors were then released