Stalinist cleansings

Stalinist cleansings happened in the Soviet Union, under Stalin. People who were deemed to be unreliable, or to be members of the opposition were persecuted, and killed. It is ont known how many people were killed. Historians give numbers ranging from one million people to over 60 million people. 

in the 1920s, Joseph Stalin started to have people who opposed the Communist party be excluded from the party. He used show trials, and secret trials, where these people were either condemned to work in a labor camp, or they were sentenced to death. Commonly, torture was used to get a confession.

The Great Purge happened between 1936 and 1938. During that time, the cleansing was at its peak. About 1,000 people were executed every day. This also had an influence on other domains: As there were fewer and fewer people, it was difficult to keep the party, the administration and the military in functioning state. Because of this, Stalin ordered the cleansing to be less intense, though it never stopped.

At the start of 1948, there was another wave of cleanings: It was mainly directed against Jews in the Soviet Union. They were called rootless cosmopolitans. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded. There was the Night of the Murdered Poets. It peaked at what is known as Doctors' plot in English. It ended abruptly with Stalin's death in 1953.

For a long time, these cleansings were kept secret. They were unknown to most people. In the 1970s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published his book The Gulag Archipelago. In this book, he also talks about these cleansings. 

Category:History of the Soviet Union