e, of course, represents the recordedtally. How many more people died without being recorded is a matter of conjecture. There is no doubt in anyone's mind that Stalin wanted to destroy any possibility of futureconspiracies. So he trumped up charges against anyone who could conceivably become amember of a regime that might make the attempt to replace his own. He did this tomaintain his power. He also did this, as his biographers are quick to point out, because hewas paranoid. Despite the upheaval of the constant purge trials, the Soviet state did notbreak down. New bureaucrats were found to replace the old. New Stalin-trained officialsfilled all top-level posts and terror became one of the principal features of the governmentitself. In the end, the purgers were also purged. They were the scapegoats used by Stalinto carry out the Great Terror. Meanwhile, Trotsky had been out of Russia for years but hecontinued to use his pen to attack Stalin in his journal, The Bulletin of the Opposition. InStalin's eyes, Trotsky could not be left free. Stalin's purges baffled nearly all foreign observers. He saw threats everywhere. Were theyreal? Leading Communists confessed to crimes against the State they never committed.Some were brainwashed, others tortured. Still others, like Nikolai Bukharin, were shot inthe head. And eventually, even Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City in 1940, an ice pickto the head. Soviet life in the 1930s, purge trials aside, was one of constant propaganda andindoctrination. Party members lectured to workers in factories and peasants in the field.Newspapers, films and radio broadcast endless socialist achievements and capitalist evil.Art, literature, film and science were politicized -- sovietized. The intellectual elite of the1930s were ordered by Stalin to become "engineers of human souls." Russian nationalismhad to be glorified. Capitalism was portrayed as the greatest of evils. Ivan the Terrible andPeter the Great were res...
