Great Purge
Lesson 9: 1937–1938
Introduction: Revolution Devours Its Children. By 1937, Stalin was the undisputed dictator of the Soviet Union. Yet, he felt insecure. He feared that the “Old Bolsheviks” (the men who had actually led the revolution with Lenin) remembered a time when Stalin was just a minor figure. To rewrite history, he had to eliminate the witnesses. “Great Purge” (or Yezhovshchina) was not a war against enemies; it was a war against the Party itself.
Party Purge
Eating Their Own
Stalin turned his secret police (NKVD) on the Communist Party elite.
- Target: “Old Guard.” These were the intellectuals, writers, and original revolutionaries discussed in Lesson 4.
- Logic: Stalin believed that anyone who had questioned him in the past was a potential traitor in the future. He didn’t wait for a crime to be committed; he punished the possibility of a crime.
- Numbers: Of 1,966 delegates to the Party Congress of 1934 (the most loyal communists in the country), 1,108 were arrested and shot. Stalin effectively beheaded his own organization.
Theater of Terror
Show Trials
Purge wasn’t done in secret; it was broadcast to the world as a terrifying piece of theater.
- Moscow Trials: Three major public trials were held in Moscow. Famous founders of the Soviet Union (like Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin) stood in a courtroom and confessed to impossible crimes.
- Scripted Confessions: Men who had devoted their lives to Communism suddenly admitted to being “fascist spies,” “wreckers,” and “mad dogs of capitalism.”
- Method: Why did they confess? They were physically tortured, but more importantly, the NKVD threatened their families. Stalin promised to spare their wives and children if they confessed. (He usually had the families shot anyway after the trial).
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Military Purge
Meat Grinder
Stalin feared a military coup, so he decided to destroy the Red Army’s leadership. This decision almost cost Russia World War II.
- Decapitation: Stalin executed 3 out of 5 Marshals (the highest rank), 14 out of 16 Army Commanders, and 8 out of 9 Admirals.
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Tukhachevsky
Tukhachevsky: Most famous victim was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the “Red Napoleon.” He was a brilliant strategist who was tortured and shot on fake evidence planted by Nazi intelligence (Heydrich) to weaken the Soviet army.
- Consequence: When Hitler invaded in 1941, Soviet Army was a headless giant. Experienced officers were dead, replaced by inexperienced “Yes Men” who were terrified to make a decision without Stalin’s permission.
Order 00447
Quota System
Terror wasn’t just for elites. It was industrialized for the common man.
- Order: On July 30, 1937, NKVD issued Order 00447. It set specific numerical quotas for every region in Russia.
- Categories:
Option 1:
To be shot immediately.Option 2:
To be sent to the Gulag for 10 years. - Competition: Local NKVD chiefs actually competed to exceed their quotas, asking Moscow for permission to shoot more people to prove their loyalty. It was a bureaucratic competition of murder.
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The Conclusion
Summary
Great Purge was the moment the Soviet Union began to cannibalize itself. It destroyed the “Old Bolshevik” generation, crippled the military, and traumatized the population into total submission. By 1939, the only person left from the original 1917 revolution was Stalin himself.
Sources for Lesson 9:
Primary Documents (The Evidence)
Report of Court Proceedings (1938): The Case of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites”. (Official transcripts of the Show Trials where Bukharin confessed).
Stalin’s Shooting Lists: Rasstrelnyie spiski. (Signed documents found in the archives where Stalin personally approved the execution of thousands of people by name).
Historical Analysis (The Experts)
J. Arch Getty: The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks (Yale University Press). Uses internal party archives to explain the logic.
Oleg Khlevniuk: Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (Yale University Press). A modern Russian historian using recently opened archives.
Karl Schlögel: Moscow 1937. A deep dive into what life was like in the city during that specific year of terror.
Roger Reese: Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army (University Press of Kansas). Explains the destruction of the military leadership.
Simon Sebag Montefiore: Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Knopf). Focuses on the personal lives of the killers.
Literary & Personal Accounts
Nadezhda Mandelstam: Hope Against Hope. (A memoir about living in fear of the knock on the door).
Eugenia Ginzburg: Journey into the Whirlwind. (A personal account of being purged from the party and sent to the Gulag).
