The Soviet Purges (Russian: Большая чистка, also known as the Great Purge, or translated as the "Great Purge", today known in Russia as the "Great Terror" period), or the "Yezhov period" (Ежовщина), refers to a campaign of political repression and persecution that broke out in 1934 under the rule of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Triggered by the assassination of Sergei Kirov, it included a purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the persecution of innocent people, a period characterized by pervasive political censorship, pervasive suspicion of "sabotage," public trials, detentions, and the death penalty.
From the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922 to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, a total of 69 years, in the history of China, this dynasty is not very long, but it is very meaningful to the Soviet people, because in these nearly 70 years, their former leader, Stalin, led the Soviet people through the Second World War and out of the war, but he also brought unprecedented disasters to the Soviet people.
Stalin was arguably the most controversial and influential leader in the history of the Soviet Union. On July 11, 1937, Moscow newspapers announced the arrest of Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other senior Red Army generals, including the founding heroes of the Soviet Union, accused of being foreign spies and plotting to launch a political seizure of power and deliberately lose the war.
Eight of the founding heroes, including Marshal Tukhachevsky, General Yakir, General Ubolevich, General Plimakov, General Edelman, General Feldman, General Kolk and General Putna, were sentenced to capital punishment and secretly executed, and two months later, Stalin convened a meeting of the remaining leaders and began a larger-scale "purge" of the good and the bad, 19 corps commanders, 13 executed; 135 division and brigade commanders, 110 killed; More than half of the military and political cadres at the regimental level have been poisoned.
How terrible is the purge that the people will dig his body out of the soil with hatred. Stalin's obsession with power and greed for power was actually revealed in Lenin's time, and in order to pursue power, Stalin had been engaged in a political struggle with Lolosky, and Stalin's open and secret struggle with Trotsky became the starting point of the Great Purge.
When Stalin seized the supreme power in the Soviet Union, all kinds of suspicions and suspicions killed all the people around him who were considered disloyal, and it was precisely because of this that the Soviet Union lost many outstanding talents and reduced the Soviet Union's military strength a lot. According to incomplete statistics, Stalin himself signed the execution decree of 681,692 people, and this is only signed by Stalin, and the number of persecuted people must have been much higher.
I believe that at that time, the Soviet people betrayed their relatives and friends every day, did inner struggle, and lived in boundless fear all day long, so this purge was really terrifying.
At the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU in February-March 1937, Stalin put forward the thesis that with the smooth development of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, the class struggle would intensify day by day. At this plenum, Stalin pointed out that there were still Japanese, German, and Trotskyist spies in the party; Molotov noted that there were "enemies of the people" within the army; Yezhov made a special report on "espionage".
Shortly after the conclusion of the February-March 1937 Plenum, the NKVD went into action at high speed, and 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of Brazzaville were arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes. Of the 139 members and alternate members elected at the 17th Party Congress, 80 percent of them were arrested and executed. Of the seven members of the Politburo elected after the 12th Party Congress in April 1923, the last Politburo member of Lenin's lifetime, Stalin put to death five others (Kamenev, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Rykov, and Tomsky) except for Lenin, who died at an early age. From 1919 to 1935, 31 members of the Politburo were elected, of whom 20 were killed.
In 1938, the third "Moscow Trial" began, and in February 1938, the Soviet Union established a special military tribunal to conduct public trials of the "Right and Trotsky clique" headed by Bukharin and Rykov. Soviet Prosecutor General Vyshinsky accused Bukharin of appointing the Socialist-Revolutionaries Kaplan to assassinate Lenin and assassinate Kirov, Minzhensky, and Gorky, as imperialist spies. Bukharin was forced to confess these crimes. In the absence of evidence, only confessions from the defendants, Judge Ulrich sentenced Bukharin and other defendants to death for "treason", and Yagoda was among them.
In addition, in June 1937, a secret trial was held in a military tribunal against a group of Soviet Red Army generals, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
Four of the six members of the Politburo during the October Revolution of 1917, with the exception of Stalin himself, were executed, and Trotsky was expelled from the party and went into exile in Mexico, where he was murdered by Soviet spies in 1940.
Four of the seven people elected to the Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin's death in 1924 were executed, Mikhail Tomsky committed suicide, Molotov and Kalinin survived. From 1934, 1,108 of the 1,166 delegates to the 17th Communist Party Congress were arrested, and almost all of them died in prison.
On November 17, 1938, the Administrative Council of the USSR and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union jointly issued the Decree on Detention, Prosecution and Interrogation, after which the secret police issued an order abolishing most of the large-scale activities of the secret police and abandoning the application of the death penalty. This is the end of the Great Purge.
After Stalin's death, Khrushchev came to power and began to expose the truth about the Great Purge. At the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, Khrushchev made a secret report (which was published a month later) in which he called the purge an "abuse of power" by Stalin and brought great damage to the country.
In the same report, Khrushchev admitted that many of the victims were innocent and that their confessions were based on false confessions after being tortured.
Beginning in 1954 a number of victims were rehabilitated, the convicted Red Army general was rehabilitated in 1957, and many other low-ranking victims and some former members of the Politburo were rehabilitated. But Bukharin and others, who were convicted in the Moscow trial, were not rehabilitated until 1988.
According to Khrushchev in his secret 1956 report "The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" and many later studies, many of these accusations, including the evidence presented at the Moscow trial, were coerced confessions or on the basis of an overly extended understanding of Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Republic (counter-revolutionary crimes). These trials were not conducted in accordance with the rules of the laws of the Soviet Union at that time, and the legal courts of the time were all replaced in these trials by a three-member jury of the secret police.
Millions of people died in the purge, hundreds of thousands were shot, and millions were forced to relocate. Many were imprisoned, tortured or sent to labour camps and gulags. Many died in the camps due to starvation, disease, harsh environmental conditions, and heavy labor. The purge began when Genrikh Yagoda was chief of the secret police, but its peak was between September 1936 and August 1938, when the head of the secret police was Nikolai Yezhov, a period sometimes referred to as the "Yezhovshchina" period. But the entire purge was led by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union headed by Stalin, and some orders were even issued directly by the Politburo.
For example, in 1937 the Politburo issued an order to exert "physical pressure" on the defendants, an order that was translated in practice as torture and unlawful murder. At the end of the purge, Jezhov was dismissed, convicted of espionage (which later proved wrong) and treason, tried, convicted, and shot.
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