Editing Great Purge (section)

==Background==
From 1930 onwards, the Party and police officials feared the "social disorder" caused by the upheavals of forced collectivization of peasants and the resulting famine of 1932–1933, as well as the massive and uncontrolled migration of millions of peasants into cities. The threat of war heightened Stalin's perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the potential source of an uprising in case of invasion. He began to plan for the preventive elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical "fifth column of wreckers, terrorists and spies."

The term "purge" in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people. But from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution.

The political purge was primarily an effort by Stalin to eliminate challenge from past and potential opposition groups, including the left and right wings led by [[Leon Trotsky]] and [[Nikolai Bukharin]], respectively. Following the [[Civil War|civil war]] and reconstruction of the Soviet economy in the late 1920s, veteran Bolsheviks no longer thought necessary the "temporary" wartime dictatorship, which had passed from [[Vladimir Lenin]] to Stalin. Stalin's opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption. This opposition to current leadership may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate Stalin's suspicions. He enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism.

In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and Stalin in particular, were the sole dispensers of ideology. This required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious "old guard" of revolutionaries. As the purges began, the government (through the NKVD) shot Bolshevik heroes, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and [[Béla Kun]], as well as the majority of Lenin's Politburo, for disagreements in policy. The NKVD attacked the supporters, friends, and family of these "heretical" Marxists, whether they lived in Russia or not. The NKVD nearly annihilated Trotsky's family before killing him in Mexico; the NKVD agent [[Ramón Mercader]] was part of an assassination task force put together by Special Agent [[Pavel Sudoplatov]], under the personal orders of Stalin.

In 1934, Stalin used the [[murder]] of Sergey Kirov as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people perished. Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder, or at least that there was sufficient evidence to reach such a conclusion. Kirov was a staunch Stalin loyalist, but Stalin may have viewed him as a potential rival because of his emerging popularity among the moderates. The 1934 Party Congress elected Kirov to the central committee with only three votes against, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 votes against. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged the former oppositionists, an ever-growing group according to their determination, with Kirov's murder as well as a growing list of other offences, including treason, [[terrorism]], sabotage, and espionage.

Another justification for the purge was to remove any possible "fifth column" in case of a war. [[Vyacheslav Molotov]] and [[Lazar Kaganovich]], participants in the repression as members of the Politburo, maintained this justification throughout the purge; they each signed many death lists. Stalin believed war was imminent, threatened both by an explicitly hostile Germany (now under the leadership of [[Adolf Hitler]] and his [[Nazi Party]]) and an expansionist [[Imperial Japan]]. The Soviet press portrayed the country as threatened from within by [[fascist]] spies.

From the October Revolution onward, Lenin had used repression against perceived enemies of the Bolsheviks as a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating social control, especially during the campaign commonly referred to as the Red Terror. This policy continued and intensified under Stalin, periods of heightened repression including the deportation of kulaks who opposed collectivization, and a [[The Holodomor|severe famine in Ukraine]]. Lev Kopelev wrote, "In Ukraine 1937 began in 1933," referring to the comparatively early beginning of the Soviet crackdown in Ukraine. A distinctive feature of the Great Purge was that, for the first time, members of the ruling party were included on a massive scale as victims of the repression. Due to the scale of the terror, the substantial victims of the purges were Communist Party members and office-holders. The purge of the Party was accompanied by the purge of the whole society.

[[Category:Genocidal]]
[[Category:Oppressors]]
[[Category:Xenophobes]]
[[Category:Anti-Religious]]
[[Category:Villainous Event]]
[[Category:War Criminal]]
[[Category:Terrorists]]
[[Category:Mass Murderers]]
[[Category:Conflict]]
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[[Category:Slaver]]
[[Category:Destroyer of Innocence]]
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[[Category:Political]]
[[Category:Kidnapper]]
[[Category:Assassins]]
[[Category:Liars]]
[[Category:Incriminator]]
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[[Category:Karma Houdini]]
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[[Category:Torturer]]
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[[Category:Control Freaks]]
[[Category:Russia]]
[[Category:Soviet Villains]]
[[Category:Misogynists]]
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[[Category:Supremacists]]
[[Category:Animal Cruelty]]