Stalin's purges

Before 1932
The Russian Civil War of 7th November (25th October), 1917 to 25th October (12th October), 1922 was horrific and chaotic. Some minor skirmishes with the remnants of the White forces continued in the Far East continuing well into 1923.

The Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) on the 25th of January 1918, became a communist state in 1919 after a bloody civil war, was (like Tsarist-come-communist Belarus) annexed by Bolshevik Russia in 1921 and helped create the USSR in 1922. It was a sovereign state between 1918 and 1921. Many Ukrainians still wanted out of the USSR and/or the end of communism. The Black Army caused trouble in south eastern Ukraine from 1918 to 1921.

Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan both later figured prominently in the anti-Bolshevik movement in Central Asia and held out until 1924. There was even an attempt to set up a autonomous state in the city of Kokand. The armed national resistance in Central Asia was not completely crushed until 1934, but most of it was over by 1922-1924 after the Bolsheviks had granted them cultural, Islamic and economic privileges in the wake of some major Bolshevik victory on the battlefields.

The anti-Slavic Turkic Central Asian Basmachi movement (Russian: Басмачество, transliteration: Basmachestvo) or Basmachi Revolt was an uprising against Russian Imperial and Soviet rule by the Muslim peoples of Central Asia between 1916 and 1934.

The Caucasus Mountains were conquered by the USSR in 1922, became a puppet state in 1922 soon absorbed in to the Soviet's growing Red empire in 1924.

Mongolia became independent in 1911, was re-occupied by China in 1921, annexed in all but name in 1922 and a Soviet satellite state in 1924.

Localised armed resistance to Soviet/ethnic Slavic rule reoccurred to a lesser extent after the collectivization campaigns in the pre-World War 2 Soviet historical era. The Waffen SS Galizien-Halychyna Division and other Pro-Nazi forces would disrupt Ukraine and the Baltic States for many Years to come.

Soviet famine of 1932–33 and The Holodomor.
The Soviet famine of 1932–33 was a inevitable result of both the former civil war, poor agricultural technologies, goverment faliuer, bad weather and communist dogma.

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, "Extermination by hunger" or "Hunger-extermination"; derived from морити голодом, "to kill by starvation") was a man made famine disaster as the USSR refused to give them help and left ~2.5m-~7.5m Ukrainians to die. Similar wilful neglect hit the Kuban, Tartarstan, Moldovo, N.W. Kazakhstan and Bashkoitia with heavy loss of life outside Moldovo.

The plan
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was in a politically dangerous situation and thus feared rightfully at first and then later needlessly due to being clinically paranoid about people conspiring against him.

What became known as The Great Purge was a ruthless campaign of political repression that ran from 1936 to 1938 and involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, violence, expulsion from the Communist Party, intimidation, widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, show trialing and arbitrary executions.

The NKVD (later the KGB) and the GRU threw thousands in to the infamous Gulags.

The purges them selves
The purges involved the large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, and widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. By the end of the 1930s Stalin had succeeded in his goal of executing almost all of the former Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and/or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards.

Mid to late 1930s
First and Second Moscow Trials. Between 1936 and 1938, 3 massive Moscow Trials of former senior Communist Party leaders took place. There was a genuine fear at the time that

The American Dewey Commission, was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey, but failed to conclusively prove Trotsky's innocence in the May of 1937.

The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as The Trial of the Twenty-One, is the most famous of the Soviet show trials, because of the number and type of people involved in it including 21 leading Communist Party members. Nikolai Bukharin, was arrested in February 1937 and charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state and executed in March 1938, after a brutal show trial that alienated many Western communist sympathisers. Mensheviks, "Mensheving Idealists", the "Bloc of Rightists", Trotskyists, Ex-kulaks and other 'anti-Soviet elements'.

The Polish Operation of the Soviet security force, the NKVD, in 1937 and 1938 was a highly secret, covert, mass operation to thwart supposed Polish agents and political sympathisers in the Soviet Union during the period of the Great Purge. There were hundreds of thousands of arrests and deaths as a result of it.

The related genocide and ethnic cleansing in the mid 1940s
Stalin was disturbed by the ethnic rising in places like the western Ukraine and Estonia. Fearing the worst, all Chechens, together with several other peoples of the Caucasus, were ruthlessly deported en mass to the Kazakh and Kirghiz SSRs in 1944; and their homelands abolished. 25-33% died due to this action.

They were politically "rehabilitated" in 1956 and allowed to return a year later, the survivors lost economic resources and civil rights and, under both Soviet and post-Soviet governments.

Early 1950s
The Doctors' plot (Russian: дело врачей [tarnas:delo vrachey, "doctors' affair"], врачи-вредители [trans:vrachi-vreditely, "doctors-saboteurs"], or врачи-убийцы [vrachi-ubiytsy "doctors-killers"]) was an anti-Semitic plot by Joseph Stalin.

The newspapers Pravda and Izvestiya announced in the January of 1953 that 9 doctors, who had attended major Soviet leaders like the Central Committee secretary Andrey A. Zhdanov, who had died in 1948; had been arrested. and confessed to being part of a Soviet based Zionist plot.

With in a few weeks of Stalin's death in the March of 1953, the new Soviet leadership stated that they had no grounds to continue with the investigations and the case was dropped due lack of evidence. Soon after, the case was declared to have been faked up by Stalin and his cronies. Stalin had intended to use the resulting doctors’ trial to launch a massive anti-Semitic party purge.

A list found at the time stated Stalin was about to kill off-
 * 1) Andrei Tupolev (?)
 * 2) Sergei Korolev (?)
 * 3) Lavrentiy Beria (?)
 * 4) Artem Mikoyan (?)
 * 5) Mikhail Iosifovich Gurevich (?)
 * 6) Nikolai Bulganin (thought he was a counter-revolutionary)
 * 7) Georgy Zhukov (Jealousy and fear over his personality cult with in the Soviet armed forces)
 * 8) Georgy Malenkov (thought he was a counter-revolutionary)
 * 9) Nikita Khrushchev (thought he was a counter-revolutionary)
 * 10) Leonid Brezhnev (thought he was a counter-revolutionary)

The purges in Mongolia during the late 1930s
Mongolia was purge during the late 1930s.

The purges in Xinjiang during 1937
The Xinjiang Great Purge occurred in 1937.

The aftermath
The devastated officer core and ill equipped troops had difficulty in the 1939-1940 Winter War. Soviet numbers eventually made up for opposing Finnish wisdom. Political commissars were militerily degraded, traditional army ranks restored, 2 'political' medals scrapped and several 'real' medals for things like valour and tacticks were restored in 1940 as a way of making the Red Army a true fighting force.

The American Congress established the Baltic Freedom Day in 1982, to be remembered every June 14 in the United States.

Also see

 * House Committee on Un-American Activities
 * The Ashgabat earthquake of 1948
 * Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries
 * Slánský trial

Links

 * 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
 * 2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/russia/stalinpurgesandpraisesrev1.shtml
 * 3) http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/purges_ussr.htm
 * 4) http://gendercide.org/case_stalin.html
 * 5) http://henrypavlovich.com/Waffen-SS-Galizien-Halychyna-Division-and-Other-Pro-Nazi-Forces
 * 6) http://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/stalins-purges/
 * 7) http://historyofrussia.org/stalins-purges/
 * 8) http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSpurge.htm
 * 9) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Winter_War
 * 10) http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/winter_war.htm
 * 11) http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/winter_war_1939.htm
 * 12) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Bukharin
 * 13) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkmenistan
 * 14) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Civil_War
 * 15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basmachi_movement
 * 16) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
 * 17) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333
 * 18) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD_(1937%E2%80%9338)
 * 19) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine
 * 20) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnodar_Krai
 * 21) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adygea
 * 22) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnodar
 * 23) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact
 * 24) http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Chechens
 * 25) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot
 * 26) http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/167427/Doctors-Plot