Great Purge
The Great Purge, also known as the Great Terror (name proposed by Robert Conquest), was a series of campaigns of repression in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, during which the the Soviet secret police (NKVD) arrested, tried, and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people. A minority of those who were convicted of treason were often executed. The height of the purge occurred while the NKVD was headed by Nikolai Yezhov, from September 26, 1936 to August, 1938; this period was often referred to as the "Yezhovschina". However, orders for conduct of the campaigns came from the highest level of the Soviet government, Joseph Stalin himself.
Background
The management and the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party itself contained many individuals who were not enthusiastic regarding Stalin's policies. This was apparent to Stalin because many of his party members were sluggish and slow to act or respond to his orders. (Examples: the campaign to verify Party membership cards in 1935, and resistance by statisticians to his requests that the 1937 census present more positive statistics.) Therefore a purge of the Party and the bureaucracy was announced, in an effort to put personnel in place who would follow orders without question.
The second declared goal was to eliminate "socially dangerous elements", ex-kulaks, former members of opposing political parties such as the Social Revolutionaries, criminals and former Czarist officials. Persons of this group formed the bulk of those caught up in the Terror. Typically they were accused of wreckage, espionage and anti-Soviet propaganda. Another issue was the Soviet concern with spies which Stalin declared were being infiltrated into the Soviet Union by neighboring countries.
Persecution of political opponents and enemies of workers was already in full swing: the infamous Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code) was in force since 1927. But the distinctive feature of the described period was massive and widely publicized persecutions within the Communist Party itself, hence the name of the period: the Great Purge.
In reality, the purge turned into a witch hunt and show trials based on false accusations, often based on forced self-incrimination. Nearly all accused were rehabilitated after Stalin's death.
Purge
The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression purge of the Party ranks, the Party being, of course, the Communist Party. In itself, the term was innocent enough, until the time came when being expelled from the Party was a short notice for possible imprisonment or even execution.
After the Great Purge, described below, the term "purge" gradually ceased to be a synonym of death warrant, especially after Stalin's death, but the consequences still remained unpleasant. For a party functionary it meant being delisted from the nomenklatura, and the loss of numerous perks. Rank-and-file members were left with no chance of future advancement. A wife's threat to complain to her husband's Party Committee was therefore a serious weapon in family quarrels.
Great Purge
Anyone perceived as a potential threat to the regime's authority—including some of its strongest political supporters, and most senior army officers—were systematically identified and either executed, incarcerated in the Gulag prison system, or sent into forced labour or internal exile in Siberia and other remote regions.
Many of those accused and imprisoned during this time were accused of "wrecking" (economic sabotage), of affiliation with Trotskyism and acting as agents of foreign subversion. Many local party leaders were denounced and accused of abuses of power.
The most intense period of the Purge was from 1936 to 1938, while Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was head of the People's Commisariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and Andrey Vyshinsky was a Prosecutor General of the USSR.
In Moscow, several show trials were held, to convince domestic and foreign opinion of the existence of a vast anti-Soviet conspiracy and to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewhere in the country.
Almost all of the Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the 1917 Russian Revolution, or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards, were executed or exiled during this period. Out of six members of the original Politburo during the 1917 October Revolution who lived until the Great Purges, Stalin himself was the only one who survived the Purges unscathed. Four of the other five were executed. The fifth, Leon Trotsky went into exile in Mexico, but was murdered by a Soviet agent in 1940. Of the seven members elected to Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin's death in 1924, four were executed, one (Tomsky) committed suicide and two (Molotov and Kalinin) lived. Of 1,966 delegates to the 17th Communist Party congress in 1934 (the last congress before the trials), 1,108 were arrested.
Show trials
There were four key show trials from 1936 to 1938, known as Moscow Trials: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); the Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One in March 1938.
Purge of the army
The purge of the Red Army was supported by fabricated evidence that German counter-intelligence had introduced through an intermediary, President Beneš of Czechoslovakia. This forged evidence purported to show correspondence between Marshal Tukhachevsky and members of the German high command. However the actual evidence introduced at trial was obtained from forced confessions. The purge of the army removed 3 of 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army generals, 8 of 9 admirals (the purge fell heavily on the Navy who were suspected of exploiting their opportunity for foreign contacts), 50 of 57 army corps generals, 154 out of 186 division generals, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.
This made the armed forces disorganized and devoid of experienced commanders, and left the country vulnerable to invasion. This may actually have encouraged Hitler and Nazi Germany to launch Operation Barbarossa after they learned of the weakness of the Red Army.
Mass murder
These trials, however, were only a minor part of the purges, and one of their purposes was to divert the world's attention from what was going on in the rest of the country. By the NKVD's own estimates, 681,692 people were executed during 1937-38 alone (although many historians think that this was an undercount). Millions more were arrested and sent off to Gulag prison or labour camps, where many of them died.
Estimates on the total death toll vary greatly; some historians have argued that the death toll of the Purges reached as high as 20 million.
By the summer of 1938, everyone in power realized that the purges had gone too far, and Yezhov was relieved from his head of NKVD post (remaining People's Commissar of Water Transport) and eventually purged. Lavrenty Beria succeeded him as head of the NKVD. This signaled the end of the Great Purge, although the practice of mass arrest and exile was continued until Stalin's death in 1953.
Robert Conquest in his book The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties exposed to Western readers the scale, inner works and the psychology of the events of these times, dubbed by him The Great Terror.
One of Russia's leading human rights groups, the Memorial human rights group, released a list of 1,345,796 names of people who fell victim to Stalin's purges.
Rehabilitation
The Great Purges were denounced by Nikita Khruschev who became the leader of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. In a secret speech (which was made public in the West three months later and in the Soviet Union in 1988) to the 20th CPSU congress in February 1956, Khruschev referred to the purges as an "abuse of power" by Stalin which resulted in enormous harm to the country. In the same speech, he recognized that many of the victims were innocent and were convicted based on false confessions extracted by torture.
Starting from 1954, some of the convictions were overturned. Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other generals convicted in the Trial of Red Army Generals were declared innocent ("rehabilitated") in 1957. The former Politburo members Yan Rudzutak and Stanislav Kosior and many lower level victims were also declared innocent in 1950s. Nikolai Bukharin and others convicted in the Moscow Trials were rehabilitated later, in 1988.
Further reading and references
- Robert Conquest: The Great Terror, 1968, look on ABE for this.
- Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, May 1990, hardcover, ISBN 0195055802; trade paperback, Oxford, September, 1991, ISBN 0195071328
- Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0674076087. Chapter 10: The Great Terror, 1936-1938