The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials held in the Soviet Union at the instigation of Joseph Stalin between 1936 and 1938 against Trotskyists and members of Right Opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union suffered upward of 8 million combatant deaths and many more due to famine and disease—perhaps about 20 million.

Many workers died from exhaustion, while others were physically assaulted or shot by camp guards. Historians estimate that at least 10 percent of the total Gulag prison population was killed each year.

Stalin and the CPSU blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as ‘kulaks’ (Russian: fist), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as a class.

The ‘collectivization’ of agriculture, in 1955-56 in China, and after. 1929 in Russia, marked the transition from a private to a pre- dominantly collective system of agricultural ownership, production. and distribution; it was probably the most important event in the.

The combination of the elimination of kulaks, collectivization, and other repressive policies contributed to mass starvation in many parts of Soviet Ukraine and the death of at least 7 to 10 million peasants in 1930–1937.

Kulak, (Russian: “fist”), in Russian and Soviet history, a wealthy or prosperous peasant, generally characterized as one who owned a relatively large farm and several head of cattle and horses and who was financially capable of employing hired labour and leasing land.

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Kolkhoz, also spelled kolkoz, or kolkhos, plural kolkhozy, or kolkhozes, abbreviation for Russian kollektivnoye khozyaynstvo, English collective farm, in the former Soviet Union, a cooperative agricultural enterprise operated on state-owned land by peasants from a number of households who belonged to the collective and …

The 1905 revolution was spurred by the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, which ended in the same year, but also by the growing realization by a variety of sectors of society of the need for reform. Politicians such as Sergei Witte had failed to accomplish this.

Instead they blamed the Tsarist ministers and officials. This demonstration of factory workers was brutally put down by Russian soldiers. Up to 200 people were killed by rifle fire and Cossack charges. This event became known as Bloody Sunday and is seen as one of the key causes of the 1905 Revolution.

Hundreds of unarmed protesters were killed or wounded by the czar’s troops. The massacre sparked the Russian revolution of 1905, during which angry workers responded with a series of crippling strikes throughout the country.

The situation climaxed with the October Revolution in 1917, a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection by workers and soldiers in Petrograd that successfully overthrew the Provisional Government, transferring all its authority to the Soviets.

The policy of War Communism, in effect since 1918, had by 1921 brought the national economy to the point of total breakdown. The Kronshtadt Rebellion of March 1921 convinced the Communist Party and its leader, Vladimir Lenin, of the need to retreat from socialist policies in order to maintain the party’s hold on power.

The Civil War caused the Bolsheviks to adopt a more severe economic policy known as War Communism, characterized chiefly by the expropriation of private business and industry and the forced requisition of grain and other food products from the peasants.

War communism is the name for the economic policies that introduced to Russia in 1918 by Vladimir Lenin, leader of Russia from 1917-24. War Communism was introduced for many reasons. However, the most important ones were: to feed and supply the hungry Red Army of Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War.

End of NEP The USSR abandoned NEP in 1928 after Joseph Stalin obtained a position of leadership during the Great Break. Accordingly, Stalin imposed collectivization of agriculture. Land held by the kulaks was seized and given to agricultural cooperatives (kolkhozes and sovkhozes).