Stalin's dictatorship

 It can be argued that Stalin established a complete personal dictatorship in the years 1929-39 as he eliminated all those who posed a threat to him to enable him to have complete rule over the USSR. This was done through terror purges, social relativism and the personality of cult.

Firstly, through the terror he was able to remove all political opponents through the Moscow show trials. These were carried out between 1934-9 where his political opponents pleaded guilty to impossible charges of treason and then were executed. The key defendants that were removed were Trotsky, Kamenev, Buhkarin, Yagoda and Zinoviev. This was significant in allowing Stalin to establish his personal dictatorship as they removed all of Stalin’s rivals from the 1920’s thus creating fear among the USSR showing that if you did anything that Stalin disliked, your life would be in danger, particularly because these people had been in positions of power therefore people obeyed all of Stalin’s orders. This lead to the wider terror among ordinary people. They were denounces, arrested and sent to Gulags by the NKVD. It is estimated that between 1934-8, 20 million Russians were sent to these gulags. By the time…