HIST 3203 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Class Conflict, List Of Muppets, Genrikh Yagoda
Document Summary
This was a darkest episode in soviet history in 1937 and 1938. The great purges and the great terror were used interchangeably. There were two names for events that were similar. The purge refers more accurately to removing people in political party. The terror refers to what happened to ordinary people. The purgers began in the early 1930"s, and escalated. They began with an exchange of party cards. In the early 1930"s, they decided to have a chistka, a cleaning. This would be a cleaning out of the party in the sense that people who should not be party members would be expelled. Periodically there was a weeding out of those who were deemed unfit. You had to exchange your old party card for a new one. One reason it happened was because it developed so slowly, and innocently. The party kept on having these exchanges of party cards. However, as they continued, they got more vicious.
