the Gulags. It was the secret police, known as the NKVD, who acted upon Stalin's orders that the population feared most of all. The Kulaks, who were middle-class Russians, were forced out of their way of life and as a result agricultural production was rapidly reduced. The show trials of the thirties had firmly established Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union.
             However good Stalin's achievements were we cannot forget the horrific fear and pain that the Russian proletariat were put through under his regime. Stalin was one of the few national leaders to commit war crimes against his own country in the purges of 1936, 37 and 38.
             From 1934 to 1939 Stalin ordered a series of executions and imprisonments, largely directed towards people within his own government. Half of the members of the first Council of Peoples Commissars were executed in 1938. Some government officials executed were accused of being Nazi agents or sympathizers, while others were accused for planning to overthrow the Soviet government. Members of the Left Opposition who were allowed to return to the party after accepting Stalinism were soon executed; those who remained abroad were hunted down and killed. Also executed were people belonging to the right-wing of the party (Bukharin and others). On pg 332 in the book Stalin, Works Stalin says at a speech in Red Square.
             "Comrades, sad though it is, we have to record the fact that within our Party a separate Bukharin group has been formed, consisting of Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov. The Party knew nothing of the existence of this group before -- the Bukharinites carefully concealed its existence from the Party. But now the fact is known and evident."
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