What is the Great Purge in the history of USSR ? When did Great Purge take place ?
The era, which was referred to as the period of Great Purge or Great Terror and started with Moscow Trials, paved the way for Joseph Stalin to be the only man in the Communist Party. During this political liquidation movement between 1936 and 1939, hundreds of thousands of people were shot or disappeared without any trace. According to Russian sources announced in 1988, 1.5 million people were killed during this period, while millions had to endure unforgettable suffering.
For a period of more than 25 years, starting in the 1930s, the Soviet system displays immutable characteristics in terms of its social and political qualities. It is Josef Stalin who made his political and ideological mark on this period, where even open socialist opposition was not possible. The characteristics of this period, in which the “truths” in every field, from philosophy to the economy, from philology to history and genetics, were determined by Stalin, continued its influence after his death.
This effect is not limited to the countries in which the Marxist-Leninist parties came to power after the Soviet Union and World War II. The ideological / political and organizational framework drawn by Stalin, as decisive in the shaping of these country regimes, has been the main axis of the socialist movement in the world for a long time.
Approaches that consider this phenomenon as an extension of the tradition of “Slavic spirit” and the “despotic state” of the eastern societies, as well as the views on “the roots and analysis of Stalin and the phenomenon of Stalinism” which began to be “the logical result of Leninism” and consider it as an “ideology and model of economic development”. By linking it to Stalin’s personality, it is possible to observe the understandings that explain it as “a deviation from Marxism-Leninism”. On the other hand, it would not be wrong to seek the origin of this phenomenon in Russia’s economic and social backwardness and in the “peasant problem”, that is, under the conditions peculiar to this country as a whole.