The Purge of the Communist Party

• The Communist Party was continually purged in the 1930s after the Ryutin Affair and the murder of Kirov.
• 1938 was the peak year for purges where a fifth of the Communist Party was expelled and many thousands shot.
• Old Bolsheviks were considered to be people who had joined the party before 1924 and could therefore remember a time when Stalin was not an all powerful dictator.
• Thousands of Old Bolsheviks were arrested and executed, particularly after the show trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev.
• It is estimated that less than 10% of the party membership in 1939 had joined the Party before 1920.
• Delegates to the 1934 Party Congress suffered from the purges because Kirov gained more votes for the Politburo than Stalin did.

  • Stalin fixed the result so that he and Kirov gained the same amount of nominations.
• Stalin never forgot his perceived humiliation in 1934 and when the Terror was in full swing, delegates who attended the Party Congress that year were in particular danger.

  • 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates had been arrested by 1939.
• The Terror concentrated the minds of leading Communists that loyalty to Stalin was the best way to stay in power.
• The Politburo were full of Stalin's cronies after 1929 and were unwavering in his support.

  • President of the USSR Kalinin never asked for the release of his wife who was imprisoned in a gulag between 1938 and 1945.
  • Molotov who was Stalin's closest ally stopped pleading the case of his wife who was also imprisoned.
  • Molotov's daughter declared that she had no mother on her application to join the party.
• Sergo Ordzhonikidze was a member of the Politburo who opposed the excesses of the NKVD.

  • After a heated row with Stalin, Sergo committed suicide in February 1937.
  • He was given a state funeral and his death was officially declared as a heart attack.
  • He was the last leading Communist to oppose Stalin's policies.
• There were about 2.5 million party members in 1935 but by 1939, this had fallen to around 1.5 million as a result of the arrest of over a million party members and 600,000 executions.
• New members were recruited to the party in the late 1930s.

  • These tended to be younger and better educated than pre-1930 recruits partly because Stalin was concerned with operating the Five Year Plans more effectively.
• Stalin and the Politburo were very concerned with the amount of resistance to their policies of industrialisation and collectivisation among regional party officials.
• Part of the focus of the Terror was to bring much closer central control over regional party organisations.

  • In Georgia, 2 state prime ministers, 4 out of 5 of the regional party secretaries and thousands of lesser officials lost their posts.