Essay about The Stalinist Terror and Sofia Petrovna

In the book Sofia Petrovna, the author Lydia Chukovskaya writes about Sofia Petrovna and her dreadful experiences as a widowed mother during the Russian Stalinist Terror of the 1930s. There were four basic results of the Russian Stalinist Terror: first, it was a way of keeping people in order; second, it kept Stalin in power and stopped revolutions from forming, made people work harder to increase the output of the economy, and separated families as well as caused deaths of many innocent people due to false charges. Stalin used the media in order to convince the Russian citizens that there were saboteurs and spies within Russian population. Stalin used the secret police and military forces to carry out the arrests of so called†¦show more content†¦The media also expresses that the imprisonment of the spies is the right thing to do. Up with the banner of Bolshevik vigilance, as we are taught by the genius of the leader of the peoples, comrade Stalin! Let us root out all saboteurs, secret and open, and all those in sympathy with them(83) As Sofia Petrovna reads the Timofeyev editorial, her boss, Timofeyev, is accusing Sofia for being a saboteur because she had sympathy for Natasha being fired, another so called saboteur. Stalin and his mass media propaganda persuade Timofeyev into taking part in the terror, resulting Timoteyevs belief that what Stalin is doing is the best for the Russian country. The terror stopped revolutions from forming because whatever groups Stalin didnt agree wit h he could simply arrest the members of that group. In Timofeyevs editorial Sofia is siding with a Natasha, Natasha is thought to be a revolutionary, because Natasha wasnt said to be loyal to the communist regime, and therefore Sofia is accused of siding with a sabotager or revolutionary. The terror also kept people working harder to increase the output of the economy. Movements such as the Stakhanovite movement, squeezed greater efforts out of workers and those who fell behind usually were accused of sabotaging. This benefited the Russian economy as they attempted to catch up to Europe and America throughout the age of