What were Stalin's main reasons for the Great Purges?

Question

The Great Purges, the Terror, the Show Trials... Why did he do it?

Answer 1

Mainly to maintain an iron fisted control over the Communist Party
by killing off anyone who was deemed a threat or even someone ambitious. It was done to keep everyone in line, consolidate his power and to send a message that everyone was under sucisipion. The purges were carried out by the internal State Security , the domestic arm of the KGB and was ruthlessly carried by Joseph Beria whom I like to call, Stalin's personal assassin.

Answer 2

Stalin Purges

Answer 3

in order to create a perfect worker state the violent subterfuge that spawned it need to be erased. Much of Stalin's purges were aim at this end. First he got rid of rivals second he got rid of those who knew the lies that were used to convict the rivals. then the NKVD officials who got rid the others, then the military. once all these were gone it was thought he could write his own history with glorious outcomes and wondrous beginnings. Stalin was a petty criminal for most of his life before the revolution, also a rapist, spy for the Czar's secret police ( the Okrana) and he went to school to be a priest. also look in the book (the great terror ) by Robert Conquest. also the Hoover Institution at Stanford has the Okrana files released by KGB in 1994 or 5 to Joe Dewyer he's serious authority on the subject, He's a nice guy and one of the world authorities on the subject,

Answer 4

Moscow is among the greatest towns in the world. Is just a town that's grown quickly in new decades, and, as a result, comprises high-rise suburbs bordering a comparatively lightweight historical heart with lots of interesting ancient architecture. The most crucial host to Moscow may be the Red Square that has been for centuries, the center and heart of Russia. Here, you can go to the Century St. Basil's Cathedral, one of the very most famous items of structure on the planet and the constructivist chart of Lenin's Mausoleum. Red Square is definitely a wealthy place in icons of Russia's turbulent and fascinating past.

Answer 5

Great Purges

Answer 6

Not remotely. How exactly are you expected to prove or disprove such a claim using a single sourced, obviously biased by the author's chosen field of study? All his facts are related to propaganda. Th secret police and the direct support of the local party apparatus had little to do with propaganda. These two things are what cemented Stalin's power, not propaganda.

Answer 7

Mainly to prepare the country for the upcoming war with Germany. Collectivism creates many unhappy people. After having lost the civil war, these unhappy people understood that direct confrontation was momentarily impossible and decided to infiltrate the party and wait for the first opportunity to sabotage the party and contribute to a restauration process. Collaboration with Germany was considered ae dream opportunity to reverse communist policies. Stalin got rid of them, which contributed to USSR victory.

Answer 8

Stalin was paranoid, and was willing to kill millions in order to keep himself in power, and the Soviet state functioning as he believed it should. Millions were killed when they refused to sell their land to the government, millions were killed due to conditions in the Gulags, thousands were killed for not meeting production quotas or even showing up late to work.

Only around 10,000 people, all higher officials within the communist party, were given show trials. Most people either disappered into the Gulags or were unceromoniously dragged off and shot dead by the secret police and other organizations.

Answer 9

Some historians believe that Stalin was telling the truth when he claimed that he had evidence that the army was planning a military coup at this time. Leopold Trepper, head of the Soviet spy ring in Germany, believed that the evidence was planted by a double agent who worked for both Stalin and Hitler. Trepper's theory is that the "chiefs of Nazi counter-espionage" led by Reinhard Heydrich, took "advantage of the paranoia raging in the Soviet Union," by supplying information that led to Stalin executing his top military leaders.

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The political purge was primarily an effort by the center faction of the Party, led by Stalin, to eliminate opposition from the Party's left and right wings, led by Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, respectively. Following the Civil War and reconstruction of the Soviet economy in the late 1920s, the "temporary" wartime dictatorship which had passed from Lenin to Stalin seemed no longer necessary to veteran Communists. Stalin's opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption. These tendencies may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. Regardless of how much momentum they gained, in 1932 the NKVD warned Stalin that an underground Trotskyist network numbered in the millions and sought to forcibly unseat him from power.[citation needed] The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate the fears of Stalin's clique. He therefore initiated 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 communist ideology. This necessitated the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious "old guard" of revolutionaries. Communist heroes like Tukhachevsky and Béla Kun, as well as Lenin's entire politburo, were shot for minor disagreements in policy. The NKVD were equally merciless towards the supporters, friends, and family of these heretical Marxists, whether they lived in Russia or not. The most infamous case is that of Leon Trotsky, whose family was almost annihilated, his son being assassinated in Paris, before he was killed himself in Mexico by a Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader.

Another official justification was to remove any possible "fifth column" in case of a war, but this is less substantiated by independent sources. This is the theory proposed by Vyacheslav Molotov, a member of the Stalinist ruling circle, who participated in the Stalinist repression as a member of the Politburo and who signed many death warrants. Stalin's vehemence in eliminating political opponents may have had some basis in, and was definitely given official justification by, the need to solidify Russia against her neighbors, most notably Germany and Japan, whose governments had previously invaded, and now openly threatened, Soviet territory. A famous quote of Stalin's is "We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in 10 years. Either we do it, or they crush us." The Communist Party also wanted to eliminate what it perceived as "socially dangerous elements", such as ex-kulaks, ex-"nepmen", former members of opposing political parties such as the Social Revolutionaries, and former Czarist officials. Finally, some of the executed were petty criminals. Stalin felt that, since socialism had liberated the working class and offered reasonable employment to all, anyone still engaging in a "criminal" lifestyle 15 years after the revolution was a wrecker, and their existence was a detriment to the entire state.

Repression against perceived enemies of the Bolsheviks had been a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating social control, being continuously applied since the October Revolution, although there had been periods of heightened repression, such as the Red Terror, the deportation of kulaks who opposed collectivization, and the Holodomor. A distinctive feature of the Great Purge was that, for the first time, the ruling party itself underwent repressions on a massive scale. Nevertheless, only a minority of those affected by the purges were Communist Party members and office-holders.[citation needed] The purge of the Party was accompanied by the purge of the whole society. The following events are used for the demarcation of the period.

* The First Moscow Trial, 1936.
* Introduction of NKVD troikas for express implementation of "revolutionary justice" in 1937.
* Introduction of Article 58-14 about "counter-revolutionary sabotage" in 1937.

Answer 10

He was paranoid that someone would usurp his position and take his power. Plus, he felt threatened from "other groups" of people (i.e. Jews).