Great Purge - Introduction

Introduction

The term "repression" was officially used to denote the prosecution of people considered as counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people. The purge was motivated by the desire on the part of the leadership to remove dissenters from the Party and what is often considered to have been a desire to consolidate the authority of Joseph Stalin. Additional campaigns of repression were carried out against national minorities and social groups which were accused of acting against the Soviet state and the politics of the Communist Party.

Most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as "too rich for a peasant" (kulaks), and professionals. A series of NKVD (the Soviet secret police) operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being "fifth column" communities. A number of purges were officially explained as an elimination of the possibilities of sabotage and espionage, mostly by a fictitious "Polish Military Organisation" and, consequently, many victims of the purge were ordinary Soviet citizens of Polish origin.

According to Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech, "On the Personality Cult and its Consequences," and more recent findings, a great number of accusations, notably those presented at the Moscow show trials, were based on forced confessions, often obtained by torture, and on loose interpretations of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code, which dealt with counter-revolutionary crimes. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was often largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas.

Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups); they were quickly executed by shooting, or sent to the Gulag labor camps. Many died at the penal labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure, and overwork. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis. One secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van.

The Great Purge was started under the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda, but the height of the campaigns occurred while the NKVD was headed by Nikolai Yezhov, from September 1936 to August 1938, hence the name Yezhovshchina. The campaigns were carried out according to the general line, and often by direct orders, of the Party Politburo headed by Stalin.

The Great Purge has provoked numerous debates about its purpose, scale and mechanisms. In the 1950s American scholars proposed a structural explanation of the Great Terror: as a totalitarian system, Stalin’s regime had to maintain its citizens in a state of fear and uncertainty, and recurrent random purging provided the mechanism (Brzezinski, 1958). Robert Conquest emphasized Stalin’s paranoia, focused on the Moscow show trial of “Old Bolsheviks”, and analyzed the carefully planned and systematic destruction of the Communist Party leadership as the first step toward terrorizing the entire population. In the mid 1980s, John Arch Getty, an American historian of the revisionist school, contested Conquest’s interpretation. He argued that the exceptional scale of the purges was the result of strong tensions between Stalin and regional Communist Party bosses who, in order to deflect the terror that was being directed at them, found innumerable scapegoats on which to carry out repressions. In this way, they demonstrated their vigilance and intransigence in the struggle against the common enemy. Thus, the Great Terror developed into a “flight into chaos” (Getty, 1985).

Historians of both schools focused on the purge of political, intellectual, economic or military elites, and the struggle between the center and regional party cliques. Mainly because of the scarcity of information on the subject, neither studied the mechanisms, organization, implementation of mass arrests and mass executions, or the sociology of the victims, who represented a much wider group than party elites or intelligentsia.

The previous theories have been fundamentally challenged by new information since the opening of the Soviet archives after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, which allowed more research in new areas of materials. Scholars have come to view the Great Purge as a crucial moment – or rather the culmination – of a vast social engineering campaign started at the beginning of the 1930s (Hagenloh, 2000; Shearer, 2003; Werth, 2003). It claimed about 1% of the USSR adult population as its victims, and many children suffered in collateral damage.