Great Purge

The Great Purge was the violent return of a revolutionary conflict that the Stalinist state could neither resolve nor erase. Its arrests and killings threatened the Soviet leadership itself, exposing a regime whose stable order rested on the betrayal of the October Revolution. The book interprets the terror not as a simple departure from revolutionary history, but as the perverse means by which that history continued to haunt the state that claimed to have succeeded it.

Revolutionary Background and the Turn Inward

The purges belong to a longer sequence of transformation. The difficult but energetic years from 1917 to 1921 left much of the social fabric intact, while the New Economic Policy consolidated Soviet power without fundamentally remaking the lives of most peasants, artisans, and intellectuals. The thrust that began in 1928 was different: collectivization sought to liquidate peasants as individual owners, while rapid industrialization replaced much of the old intelligentsia with a new one. These upheavals aimed not only to govern society but to alter its composition.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s comparison of Moscow in 1914, 1924, and 1934 gives the scale of that change. Someone returning in 1924 could still recognize the city’s shops, offices, theaters, and many of the people in charge; ten years later, the whole texture of social life had changed. The book treats the years of the great push forward as a ruthless, yet sincere and enthusiastic, drive to create a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system. In this account, the Great Purge follows a revolutionary sequence whose social transformation had already become catastrophic, rather than appearing as an isolated eruption of state violence.

The turn inward is also explained through the revolution’s confinement within the Soviet Union. The Revolution had conceived itself as the opening of a wider European transformation, but the Red Army’s defeat in Poland in 1920 marked the failure of an attempt to export it by military means. Isaac Deutscher describes forced collectivization and industrialization as substitutes for revolution’s outward spread: the liquidation of the kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule abroad. The revolutionary energy that could not expand beyond the country was redirected toward violently reshaping Soviet society.

How the Terror Worked

In the late 1930s, the danger was not confined to people engaged in opposition. Under Stalinism, anyone could be denounced, arrested, and shot as a traitor; the threat extended through the social body and into the ruling ranks. The book contrasts this pervasive insecurity with Nazi Germany, where, despite the regime’s violence and its persecution of Jews, a semblance of ordinary life could persist for some people who avoided political opposition. In the Stalinist system, the investigators’ accusations could rest on invented plots and sabotage rather than proof of actual activity against the government.

The Party leadership was not simply observing the terror from a safe distance. The purges of senior officials enacted the regime’s own accusation against its members: as part of the new nomenklatura, they had participated in betraying the Revolution. Yet the public confession and punishment of guilt concealed the deeper historical guilt of the new order. The violence thus did two things at once: it attempted to erase traces of the revolutionary past and inscribed the betrayal of that past into the regime’s own institutions.

Stalin’s recruitment of NKVD officers from lower social origins sharpened this dynamic. These officers could act out hostility toward the nomenklatura by arresting and torturing senior officials. The purge therefore carried class antagonism into the state’s machinery, while the people exercising its power were themselves instruments of a political order formed by the Revolution’s defeat and transformation.

The Purge as a Return of the Revolution

Following Alain Badiou’s distinction, the book links Stalinist Communism, despite the horrors committed in its name, to the Truth-Event of the October Revolution. It contrasts that disastrous realization with Fascism’s staging of a supposedly authentic revolution without the same emancipatory substance. This distinction does not excuse the violence: it frames the purge as evidence of the gap between a revolutionary project and the state that claimed to embody it.

On this reading, the purges were a return of what the new order had repressed. Their ferocity testified to the regime’s radical self-contradiction: the ruling structure needed to suppress its revolutionary origins, yet repeatedly brought the betrayal of those origins back into view through arbitrary arrests and killings. The purge was therefore not only a means of consolidating rule. It was also the form in which the defeated revolutionary inheritance survived and continued to disturb that rule.

Nikita Mikhalkov’s film Burned by the Sun gives this arbitrariness a domestic setting. In the summer of 1936, Colonel Kotov, a senior Party figure and celebrated revolutionary, spends an apparently peaceful Sunday at his dacha with his young wife and daughter. Dimitri, a former lover of Kotov’s wife, arrives unexpectedly; the visit begins with games, songs, and old memories. As Dimitri charms the family, Kotov realizes that he is an NKVD agent who has come to arrest him as a traitor. The approaching arrest breaks into the domestic idyll without an evident political provocation in the scene. Its disruption makes the supposed stability of the new order look false: the peaceful surface depends on a power capable of turning an ordinary day into a trap.

Aftermath and the Unfinished Contradiction

The purges also shape the book’s account of where the revolutionary sequence ended. Fitzpatrick argues that collectivization and industrialization belonged to the Revolution’s internal dynamic, and that the sequence proper continued until 1937. Its true Thermidorian Reaction came when the major purges were cut short, allowing the Party nomenklatura to stabilize itself as a new class. On this interpretation, the terror did not simply precede a settled order; its interruption helped make that order possible.

The projected final purge reveals the instability beneath that settlement. In 1996, Communist presidential candidate Gennadi Zyuganov imagined that Soviet history might have turned out well if Stalin had lived five years longer and completed a final purge against cosmopolitanism, followed by reconciliation between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church. The book identifies the paradox in this fantasy: the promised stability would have required another immense purge, planned for the summer of 1953 but prevented by Stalin’s death. The Great Purge’s historical significance lies in that unresolved contradiction. The attempt to pacify the revolutionary state through further purging would have renewed, rather than abolished, the violence by which the regime remained haunted by its origins.