Great Purge in the USS.R.

The Soviet Union launched a large-scale campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries under the circumstances of great achievements in socialist construction which were caused by some abnormalities in the party’s inner political life.

After these fierce struggles and great turbulences between the late 1920s to the early 1930s, the political and economic situation of the Soviet Union gradually stabilized, but there were still many factors of turbulence lurking. The Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. headed by Stalin launched a large-scale campaign against the counterrevolutionaries after the assassination of Kirov on December 1, 1934, which had triggered the campaign and the Great Purge.

In January 1935, Zinoviev, Kamanev and other opposition leaders were arrested and interrogated on the charges that the defendants, under the instigation of Trotsky, had organized underground counterrevolutionary organizations such as “Leningrad headquarters” and “Moscow headquarters” to plot an assassination targeting Stalin and other Party and state leaders. Although the defendants refused to plead guilty, they were still sentenced to death in August 1936. Subsequently, a nationwide campaign of “exposing and eradicating the people’s enemies” was launched, and the scope of the campaign against counterrevolutionaries was rapidly enlarged.

February to March 1937 plenum meetings of the C.P.S.U. , Stalin made an erroneous evaluation and judgement that with the further development of socialist construction, class struggle would become increasingly fiercer, which further expanded the scope of the campaign against counterrevolutionaries. The February to March 1937 plenum of the CC was originally scheduled for Feb. 19, 1937, but had to be postponed due to the suicide of Orjonikidze one day before the scheduled opening of the meeting.

Many innocent people were arrested and executed, resulting in a large number of unjust, false and wronged trials. The 98 of the 139 Central Committee members and alternate members elected at the 17th National Congress of the C.P.S.U. were arrested and executed for irrelevant charges without normal trialing, investigation and interrogated procedures, which seriously damaged the socialist legal system and caused irreparable losses to the cause of building socialism within the Soviet Union.

In general, the Soviet Union’s campaign for the elimination of counterrevolutionaries correctly punished many counterrevolutionaries who had to be truly punished, and basically completed the tasks on this front, but also wrongly judged many innocent people, resulting in the mistake of enlarging the scope of the campaign of eliminating the counterrevolutionaries.