Why Was Stalin's Purges So Successful?

Stalin has been blamed for many atrocities. Next to Hitler, he’s seen as the megalomaniac dictator of World War Two. Stalin’s purges were a brutal solution to Stalin’s problem yet it was a solution. Without the purges, It’s doubtful Russia would have been able to stand in their later years during World War Two and beyond. How were the purges so successful?

Stalin used his position as a leader to force the country to improve. As said in ("Of Russian Origin”) Stalin believed that the country had to be united - with him as leader - if it was to be strong. Stalin also calculated that the Soviet Union only had 10 years to catch up with the Western world in terms of industrial growth before Germany invaded, which was highly plausible. Russia’s heavy

After that was the Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937). As told in (Scales, Diann, "Stalin and the purges")This time the accused were charged with plotting the forcible overthrow of the Soviet government with the aid of Germany and Japan, While also planning the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. The third trial was of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937). (Scales, Diann, "Stalin and the purges) informs us that there actually was no trial held. The Party press merely declared that the eight generals were accused of espionage on behalf of Germany and Japan, anti-party conspiracy, cooperation with Trotsky, and plotting the territorial dismemberment of the USSR. Finally there is the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938. The defendants were charged with the usual combination of treason, espionage, diversion, terrorism and wrecking as said in (Scales, Diann, "Stalin and the purges"). One of the men on trial here was head of the NKVD, Henry Yagoda. The NKVD was how stalin was able to arrest so many people. The NKVD was Stalin’s secret police in Russia. They were watching for anyone who spoke poorly of him to arrest them. The NKVD was able to spread fear through their force which led to

So people like writers, intellectuals, and artists are a major threat to Stalin. They could try to sway public opinion of Stalin being a perfect man through their works. So Stalin censored their work and arrested them. The poet Osip Mandelstam was one such writer and was arrested for reciting his famous anti-Stalin poem Stalin Epigram to his circle of friends in 1934. Another example would be theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold who was arrested in 1939 and shot in February 1940 for supposedly spying for Japanese and British intelligence. Jan Sten who was a philosopher and deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute and was Stalin’s private tutor when Stalin was trying hard to study Hegel’s dialectic. Sten died in a prison cell because Stalin declared him one of the chiefs of Menshevizing idealists. After spreading his power and inserting fear into the people he ruled over, how did the purges