GREAT CRIMES AND TRIALS: Stalin And The Purges

By the mid-1920s, Joseph Stalin had established himself as strongman of the USSR. Soon he was building Communism ruthlessly, by putting into effect a dramatic policy of massive industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation which caused widespread unrest and misery. Stalin's response was wholesale destruction of his enemies - either at a series of show trials which almost invariable ended with a death sentence, or more secretly with arrest by the secret police and disappearance into the Gulag, the vast network of labour camps in which many millions were to die.