Stalinist purges as the return of the revolution

Stalinist purges as the return of the revolution names a paradox at the heart of the postrevolutionary Soviet order: the purges that terrorized its ruling elite also testified to the revolutionary rupture that the new order had betrayed. In this account, arbitrary arrests and killings did not simply erase the past; they repeatedly made the regime’s unresolved revolutionary origin present within its own institutions.

The idyll and its rupture

Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burned by the sun (1994) gives this contradiction the form of a summer Sunday. In 1936, Colonel Kotov, a high-ranking member of the nomenklatura and a celebrated hero of the Revolution, spends an apparently peaceful day at his dacha with his young wife and daughter. Their gathering includes games, songs, and memories. The arrival of Dimitri, a former lover of Kotov’s wife, initially seems to extend the family’s ease: he entertains the daughter and flirts with her mother. But Kotov comes to understand that Dimitri is an NKVD agent who has come to arrest him as a traitor. The visitor’s presence turns the day’s ordinary pleasures into the prelude to a political arrest.

The force of the episode lies in the arbitrariness of the intrusion. The domestic idyll appears to represent a stabilized order in which the nomenklatura has secured its rule; the NKVD agent’s sudden intervention shatters that appearance. The calm is not simply interrupted from outside. Its vulnerability discloses the falsity of the settled order itself: beneath the tableau of security lies a system founded on betrayal of the Revolution. The scene thus makes the purge’s political meaning legible through a reversal, from family gathering to impending arrest, rather than presenting terror as an isolated excess.

The purge as a return of revolutionary guilt

The arrests of senior Party figures enact more than an effort to erase evidence of the Revolution’s origins. The accused are implicated in a deeper sense: as members of the new nomenklatura, they belong to an order that has betrayed the revolutionary project from which it emerged. The regime’s violence therefore turns inward. By repeatedly marking its own elite as traitors, it makes the founding betrayal visible inside the institutions that have replaced the Revolution.

This repetition is perverse because the charge of guilt conceals the more fundamental guilt of the new order. The purges do not simply punish actual opposition or remove obstacles to stable rule; they provide a recurring form through which the regime registers its unresolved relation to the Revolution. Their arbitrariness is politically significant: the threat reaches across the nomenklatura, so that no settled position within the ruling stratum can make the underlying contradiction disappear. The new order both consolidates itself and re-enacts the rupture it would prefer to leave behind.

The composition of the NKVD sharpened this internal conflict. Stalin recruited agents of lower social origins who could act out hostility toward the nomenklatura by arresting and interrogating senior apparatchiks. In this arrangement, social antagonism was not eliminated by the new ruling structure; it was put to work within its machinery. The purge thus joined institutional power to a displaced struggle against the elite, making the ruling class’s apparent stability dependent on recurrent attacks against members of its own ranks.

The result is a regime haunted by the revolutionary inheritance it has suppressed. Its purges are at once instruments of postrevolutionary rule and the form in which the betrayed revolutionary legacy continues to survive. They do not restore the Revolution or resolve its conflict with the new order. Instead, each recurrence inscribes that conflict again, exposing the instability beneath the nomenklatura’s claim to have brought the revolutionary process to rest.

Revolution turned inward

The purges also belong to a longer account of how the revolutionary process changed direction. The argument rejects two simple explanations: that Stalinism was merely an accidental deviation from the October Revolution, or that the Communist project was totalitarian from its beginning. It instead asks how the Revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical emergence of Stalinism can be held together. When revolution failed to expand beyond the Soviet Union, the pressure to transform society did not disappear; it was redirected inward. Forced collectivization and industrialization became substitutes for the spread of revolution abroad, while the liquidation of the kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule elsewhere.

This reversal revises the familiar comparison between Stalinism and Napoleon’s Thermidor. The attempted export of the Russian Revolution by military means belongs, in this account, to the end of the civil war in 1920, when the Red Army’s defeat in Poland checked that outward movement. The later drive to collectivize and industrialize was a different turn: revolutionary energy confined within one country was released against the structure of Soviet society itself. The revolution’s unfulfilled international horizon thus helps explain why transformation at home became so forceful, without making the later purges a simple continuation of the original emancipatory project.

The scale of domestic transformation clarifies the historical stakes. The years from 1917 to 1921 were difficult, but society remained in a broad state of emergency; the New Economic Policy then consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of social life substantially intact. The thrust beginning in 1928 directly attacked that continuity: it sought to eliminate peasants as individual owners and replace the older intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians with a new one. The contrast is captured by the example of a person leaving Moscow in 1914 and returning in 1924, who would still recognize its shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, its people in charge, whereas a return in 1934 would reveal a city whose whole texture of social life had changed.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s account locates the revolutionary sequence’s end not at the Revolution’s initial consolidation but in 1937. On this reading, the decisive Thermidor came when the great purges were curtailed before they could bring about what historians Getty and Naumov called the Party’s complete suicide. The nomenklatura then stabilized as a new ruling class. The paradox is that this stabilization interrupted the very purges through which the revolutionary inheritance continued to haunt the regime: bringing the sequence to a close protected the Party from destruction, while preserving the social order whose betrayal had made that revolutionary remainder politically troubling.

The same paradox appears in Gennadi Zyuganov’s 1996 vision of a Soviet Union that might have turned out well had Stalin lived longer, completed his final project, and reconciled the Russian state with the Orthodox Church. The imagined endpoint was a pacified regime, freed from its internal tension through a final purge. Yet the proposed route to stability would have required another immense act of purging, planned for the summer of 1953 and prevented by Stalin’s death. The desire to end the cycle therefore repeats its logic: the promised resolution depends on one more purge, even as the purges testify that the postrevolutionary order cannot simply declare its revolutionary contradiction settled.

The social reach of terror

The comparison with Fascist rule clarifies what made the Stalinist purges a return of the Revolution rather than merely another form of political repression. Under Fascism, ordinary life could continue for people who avoided opposition and were not Jewish; in the late 1930s Soviet Union, anyone could be denounced, arrested, and shot as a traitor. Nazi investigators sought evidence of actual opposition, whereas Stalinist investigators fabricated plots and sabotage. The distinction reflects two different distributions of political irrationality: anti-Semitism concentrated Nazi persecution on a targeted group, while Stalinist suspicion permeated the social body. Because the threat could reach anyone, it repeatedly turned the regime’s unresolved conflict with its revolutionary origins against the very officials and institutions that embodied its postrevolutionary order.