Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
series of political events
Purges of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union (Russian: "Чистка партийных рядов", chistka partiynykh ryadov, "cleansing of the party ranks") were Soviet political events, especially during the 1920s, in which periodic reviews of members of the Communist Party were conducted by other members and the security organs to get rid of "undesirables".
Such reviews would start with a short autobiography from the reviewed person and then an interrogation of them by the purge commission, as well as by the attending audience. Although many people were victims of the purge throughout this decade, the general Soviet public was not aware of the purge until 1937.
Although the term "purge" is largely associated with Stalinism because the greatest of the purges happened during Stalin's rule, the Bolsheviks carried out their first major purge of the party ranks as early as 1921. Approximately 220,000 members were purged (i. e. expelled from the Party). The Bolsheviks stated as justification the need to get rid of the members who had joined the party simply to be on the winning side. The major criteria were social origins (members of working classes were normally accepted without question) and contributions to the revolutionary cause.
The first Party purge of the Joseph Stalin era took place in 1929–1930 in accordance with a resolution of the XVI Party Conference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.