We can see that Stalin and the Party were highly engaged in a campaign of misinformation in order to consolidate his power, effectively using fear to subvert his political advisories.
This idea is is expanded on in Victor Kravhenko’s autobiography, a Party defector, were he stats Stalin was destroying his personal opponents and had succeeded in forcing them to participate in their own humiliation and extinction.
Stalin was successful in his extermination of Party members. Interestingly all of those accused of the crimes openly confessed to their wrong doing, and there confessions held an air of rehearsal. Through the opening of the Soviet Archives, we now know that the both Yezhov and NKVD played a role in obtaining these confessions. The secret police would often torture and beat the accused until they were willing to read from pre-fabricated confessions. Over all nearly four-hundred thousand party members were expelled with a majority being sent to prison or executed. Stalin would extend his paranoid plot to members of the military, fearing a military coup, Stalin used the NKVD to hunt out evidence that would connect members of the military with foreign powers. Using the same brutal techniques found in the
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The Party purges, left the party weak and often in a deadlock. New membership was rare and the few elite gained considerable power, creating a large disparity between the politicians and the every day Soviets. On the other hand, the Military Purges left the army weak and unprepared to fight the second war. The extermination of the high brass left the military with few men that had effective military leadership to fight a war. Secondly, this deliberately weakened army caused the Soviet Union to lose clout in the International arena. According to the Commander in Chief of the French Army, General Maurice Gamelin, when comparing the current state of the Soviet Military to its former