this world doesnt deserve us.

    • @cfgaussian
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      2 years ago

      The Purges of the late 1930s. They affected mostly the officer class and the party itself. A few generals got purged for being counter-revolutionary, either having monarchist or fascist sympathies, or for taking part in the Trotskyist plot aka the Zinoviev-Kamenev bloc. Purged didn’t always mean killed, more often than not it meant demoted, fired or expelled from the party.

      The argument could be made that a few talented former Tsarist generals and officers were lost, but this happened several years before the war, there was some time to promote and train new talent, and it was preferable to having a politically unreliable, potentially seditious fifth column inside the army and the government during an existential war, that could induce mutinies or defections.

      Also, saying that it was Stalin who did it is oversimplified and reductive, there was an entire leadership apparatus, plus the NKVD itself had a lot of power to act independently and sometimes presented false information to the leadership. There were excesses and abuses with politically motivated false accusations by various opportunists like NKVD chiefs Yagoda and Yezhov, themselves eventually tried and executed.