Catalysts for the Great Purges

I am prepared to state that I think that two factors that caused the process of the Great Purges to expand significantly as they unfolded were: the appointment of N.I. Yezhov as head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the secret political police, to conduct the purges; and the increasing threat of Nazi Germany and the desire of the Soviet leadership to remove any possible fifth column from their midst in the event of a war with Germany.

The period of the purges during which Yezhov led the NKVD is referred to as Yezhovshchina. In reading J. Arch Getty's books on the Great Purges, I found that he tended to apply this term not just to Yezhov's leadership but specifically to the period in late 1937 during which the purge took on its most devastating character for the population in general. In part, the Purges spread most widely and affected the largest number of people in the second half of 1937 because of Yezhov's style in prosecuting the purge itself. In particular, Yezhov pursued every "lead" provided by prisoner interrogations, and prisoners tended to incriminate others readily -- particularly given the ready application of physical and psychological torture -- so it stands to reason that the circle would spread ever more widely.

As Getty writes, the Purges spread downward after having been ordered from above, and regional and local party leaders "tried to protect themselves by ordering mass expulsions and arrests of rank-and-file party members. In turn, the rank and file denounced their party bosses as enemies. It was a war of all against all, with intraparty class and status overtones."[180] What's notable here is the extent to which the process got out of the control of Yezhov, not to mention Stalin. While Stalin maintained the power and control to stop the process by removing Yezhov, while the process itself raged, it seemed to defy any sort of management. Because Stalin allowed Yezhov to continue the process, the Purges during Yezhovshchina began to take on a life of their own.

On the matter of Nazi Germany, while the beginning of the Great Purges is often identified as coinciding with the murder of Kirov, many of Stalin's considerations in the period between January 1933, when Hitler took office as Reichskanzler, and the end of the Great Purges were undertaken with an eye toward Germany's growing power, increasing rearmament, and budding strategic alliances. While I think that the Kirov assassination provided a convenient excuse to step up repression (if not directly ordered by Stalin himself), I find it difficult to ignore any number of international events during the period that posed a direct threat to Soviet power; three of the most important events took place in 1936, the same year of the first Moscow Trial: remilitarization of the Rhineland (March), eruption of the Spanish Civil War (July), and the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact (November). Moreover, the winding down of the Great Purges coincided more or less with the signing of the Munich Agreement and the seeming containment of Hitler.

Here, Stalin seems to have been of a mindset rather similar to most of the other key Soviet leaders. As Marxists, while they believed that fascism represented the final death throes of capitalism, they feared the openly violent rhetoric of the Nazi against communism. It was further known that, like themselves, foreign governments, including the Nazis, were engaging in espionage. Again, Getty makes a key point on this matter, here that even those people that Stalin eliminated as potential threats in the Purges were fearful of the international threat and would have handled it similarly if in power: "Bukharin had mentioned the necessity of clearing the political decks before a war."[141] Therefore, while Stalin was perhaps overly open to suggestion by Yezhov of conspiracies brewing among unlikely bedfellows like Trotskyists and Nazis, the threat of the latter was real, and Stalin's actions in this regard were perhaps not as unusual as we might think.
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     [1] J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2010), 180.
     [2] Ibid, 144.