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Rename and Reduce

This entry should be retitled "The Great Terror".

That is now the established and generally accepted title in Russia and elsewhere for the intense and indiscriminate period of arrests and executions between August 1937 and October 1938. The title "purge" is outdated and misleading. Evidence accumulated over the past 25 years and published in regional Books of Remembrance and online in Memorial's database of the "Victims of Political Terror in the USSR" shows that Party members were not the main targets of Yezhov and the NKVD during those 16 months.

The public aspect of the great Show Trials in Moscow overlaps chronologically with, but does not explain, the Great Terror. The two should be treated in separate articles. Arrests and executions after October 1938 should also not be described here -- that only confuses the specific nature of the Terror which culminated in Yezhov's own arrest and removal.

The figures cited in Conquest's original 1968 book and, even, in his 1990 revision are not realistic. Drawing on participant and eyewitness accounts, like Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, he tells the truth of events but the statistical generalisations both classic accounts contain do not accord with the careful research of the past quarter century. In "Crimes against Humanity under Stalin, 1930-1953" (2009), French historian Nicolas Werth, an editor of The Black Book of Communism, has recently provided a clear overview of the events of 1937-1938, based on Western and Russian research since 1990.

An English summary of what Werth wrote about the Terror is available here -- https://en.mapofmemory.org/great-terror-1937-1938 -- with a link to his original French article online.

John Crowfoot

Rustat99 (talk) 09:22, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

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Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 11:37, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

The Ukrainian purges of 1936- 1938

Wasnt there a campaign that was used in the Ukraine during that time between 1936 and 1938 that saw many Ukrainians die. Many worked to death, imprisoned in gulags, and all out executed by the Russians. The exact number is probably not known, but I've heard stories of many millions that perished during this time frame. 198.254.165.162 (talk) 05:41, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Trotsky

The article at least twice asserts that Stalin’s paranoia about Trotsky was the primary motivation for the purges but offers no evidence. Other arguments include the realisation that the new constitution, if faithfully enforced, would destroy Soviet rule due to popular anger, the idea that the failures of the five year plans were due to intensification of class struggle (and thus the work of wreckers) and an older Russian paranoia about being surrounded. Yet none of this is discussed and we are simply told it is because Stalin (who never acted alone even if he often murdered his accomplices) thought Trotsky would take his job. Not very good. 2A02:C7C:362A:E200:994E:FB3B:8FFD:6A69 (talk) 17:35, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Aren't the aspects regarding Trotsky discussed in other articles that are specifically about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky? The articles Trotskyism and Rise of Joseph Stalin for example mention that Stalin targeted Trotsky and his supporters. Nakonana (talk) 15:05, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

acts of sabotage against the Soviet government

I've tried to follow through the english-language sources, which seem to devolve to politically motivated finger-pointing on both sides, but in the end all I could find was assertions that (1) Kulaks slaughtered animals for personal consumption and barter instead of surrendering them for collectivization, and (2) Kulaks refused to plant or harvest grain for requisitioning. Which would not be normally, in English, classified as "acts of sabotage". Further, I've not been able to find clarity about the order of events or the Russian (as against English) justifications. The Russian references I've seen (Like Stalin's speech) assert hoarding and, and there are references to detecting and seizing hoards.

Anyway, that's two things I'd like to see referenced: (1) Did Russian sources at the time claim sabotage, or was that third-party propaganda (on both sides), and (2) If Russian sources at the time claimed sabotage, did they mean political sabotage or physical sabotage? 121.200.27.15 (talk) 00:29, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

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