Peter Whitewood. The Red Army and the Great Terror

The historiography of the Great Purges of 1936–1938 has long been dominated by the notion that the purges—including the purges of the Red Army that began in earnest in the spring of 1937—were part of a longer-term and almost systematic process by which Stalin consolidated his hold on power. As Peter Whitewood suggests in the introduction to The Red Army and the Great Terror, the most common interpretation of the purges of the army has Stalin launching a premeditated purge of the Red Army as part of a wider “domination through terror” (2). At Stalin’s instigation, or with his sanction, tens of thousands of Red Army personnel were arrested on fabricated charges and purged from the Party; many of them would subsequently be executed or die in the Gulag camp system. In this book, Whitewood states on more than one occasion that he is challenging the notion that the purges against the military were planned over a lengthy period of time. He suggests that, instead, Stalin was convinced by the NKVD in a relatively short timeframe, measurable in weeks and months rather than years, of conspiracy against him within the Red Army involving collusion with foreign powers. Whitewood claims that it was in the light of such a conspiracy that, in “mid-1937, Stalin was compelled to take action against the Red Army” (279). Nonetheless, Whitewood suggests that Stalin’s “concerns about the reliability of the Red Army ... stretched back to the early 1930s,” and that Stalin may have had “nagging doubts about the reliability of the Red Army earlier, in the 1920s” (280). Ultimately, it seems, information being supplied to Stalin about recent conspiracy fed on longer-term suspicions and provoked action, although the timeframe over which Stalin was convinced of the need to move against the Red Army is unclear. For Whitewood, the identification of conspiracy within the armed forces then led to an intensification of the “terror” outside the military.

Ancient history · Clearance · Communism · Gulag · Peacetime · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies