1932 to 1935 Stalin ordered a systematic party purge in the Soviet Union in December 1932, to be performed during 1933. During this period, new memberships were suspended. A joint resolution of the Party
Central Committee and Central Revision Committee specified the criteria for purging and called for setting up special Purge Commissions, to which every communist had to report. Furthermore, this purge concerned members of the Central Committee and of the
Central Revision Committee, who previously had been immune to purges, because they were elected at
Party Congresses. In particular,
Nikolai Bukharin,
Alexei Ivanovich Rykov, and
Mikhail Tomsky were asked to defend themselves during this purge. As the purges unfolded, it became increasingly apparent that what had begun as an attempt to cleanse the party of unequipped and defecting members would culminate in nothing less than a cleansing of integral party members of all ranks. This included many prominent leading party members that had ruled the regime for over a decade. At this time, of 1.9 million members, approximately 18 percent were purged (i.e. expelled from the party). Until 1933, those purged (totaling 800,000) were not usually arrested. (The few that were became the first waves of the
gulag forced labor system.) But from 1934 onwards, during the
Great Purge, the connotations of the term changed, because being expelled from the party came with the possibility of arrest, with long imprisonment or execution following.
Great Purge The most prolific period of executions occurred during the
Great Purge, from 1936 to 1938. The Central Committee Plenum passed a resolution in 1935 declaring an end to the purges of 1933.
Sergey Kirov, leader of the Leningrad section of the Communist party, was murdered in 1934. In response, Stalin's
Great Purge saw one third of the Communist party executed or sentenced to work in labor camps. Stalin induced terror among his own party and justified it with Marxist principles. Victims of the Great Purge were placed in a losing scenario regardless of what view they took. They were required to confess their transgressions towards the party and name accomplices. Although most were innocent, many chose to name accomplices either in hopes of gaining freedom or just to stop their torture by interrogators, which was ubiquitous at the time. The prisoner most often was still punished the same whether they denied their crimes, admitted them and provided no accomplices, or admitted them and provided accomplices. It made little difference as to their fate. This can be described as a one-shot,
n-person prisoner's dilemma. The punishment remained the same regardless of the terms of confession. The Great Purge was no less perilous for those few foreigners who attempted to assimilate into
Soviet culture. In one piece of literature, the author recalls a Soviet general describing the Great Purges as "difficult years to understand" for citizens and foreigners alike. These foreigners were treated much the same as Soviet ethnic minorities, and they were thought to be potential threats in the impending war.
Germans,
Poles,
Finns, and other westerners were shown the same fate the bourgeoisie had been dealt following the
end of
New Economic Policy. Punishments ranged from eviction and relocation to
summary execution.
1950s Following
Stalin's death in 1953, purges as systematic campaigns of expulsion from the party ended; thereafter, the center's political control was exerted instead mainly through loss of party membership and its attendant
nomenklatura privileges, which effectively downgraded one's opportunities in societysee . Recalcitrant cases could be reduced to nonpersons via
involuntary commitment to a psychiatric institution. ==See also==