The+Great+Purge

The Great Purge 1934

As Joseph Stalin began his terrible reign over the USSR, many riots and uprisings began to spring out all across the country. In order to maintain a totalitarianistic regime Stalin devised the Great Purge as a campaign of terror to reinstitute his control over the USSR. Launched in 1934, the Great Purge was a series of "show trials." In its most simplest of ways Stalin turned against the Communist Party and began wrongly accusing some Bolsheviks, and any other person who threatened his power as being an enemy of the state, publicly tried for crimes against the state, and publicly executed based of fabricated evidence from the Russian Secret Police. People would be arrested, tried, and executed or sent to forced labor camps, called gulags. The main idea of having these show trials was to show the world that under the communist regime, Stalin is correctly running his nation, and that their form of the judicial system is as fair as any. Stalin purged anyone from great military leaders who showed nothing but devotion, to peasants and rioters. Many of the actual purges were behind the scenes works, for the arrests and murders did not stop at the show trials for the USSR and Stalin, but for a long time it was all that the West could see. Many people could have been arrested and shot on the street with the civilians of the USSR useless to protest. After the purges ended in 1939 a death toll was estimated time and time again, but unfortunately, due to untrustworthy recording and lost information we can still only estimate numbers. It is thought that some 1.8 million people died including those tried and executed, shot on the street, and those who died shortly after being released from the gulags. Many believe that the Russian Secret Police falsified dates and numbers in order to cover their trails and hide the true atrocity of Stalin's Great Purge. Killing so many during the Great Purge actually gave Stalin the desired affect, he had gained total and complete obedience from the USSR, but in the long run he had doomed himself for the strong military leaders who were killed during the purges were needed later during World War II.