Description
The scene is set with a university lecturer asking his students what was positive about Soviet life. They answer: social equality, free education and medicine, security about the future. Yet when asked about its worst feature, the reply is automatic — “Stalin’s purges.”
Historian Yuri Emelyanov asks: Why has this single phrase come to outweigh an entire social system?
In “Stalin’s Purges” of 1937-38: What Really Happened?, Emelyanov challenges the dominant narrative repeated in textbooks and media for decades. Drawing on archival research and modern Russian scholarship, he questions both the Cold War myth of tens of millions of victims and the simplified version that blames everything on one “mad tyrant.”
The years 1937-38 were undeniably tragic: over 1.3 million were arrested and more than 680,000 executed. But who were they? Were they primarily innocent Party leaders destroyed by Stalin’s paranoia? Emelyanov examines evidence demonstrating that nearly half of those repressed were former kulaks, over a quarter were repeat criminal offenders and only a minority were Communist Party members. He explores the role of regional Party bosses who demanded arrest quotas, the ambitions of NKVD chief Yezhov and the struggle surrounding the 1936 Constitution, in which Stalin proposed competitive elections. He also hypothesises why Khrushchev, in his famous “secret speech,” was eager to blame only Stalin for these events.
The book investigates alleged conspiracies, including the case of Marshal Tukhachevsky, and the resistance within the Party to political reform. It traces how factors of bureaucratic self-interest, mass hysteria and personal rivalries converged in a bloody political crisis, in conjunction with the danger of impending war and the urgency to rapidly industrialise, regardless of costs. It also confronts Stalin’s responsibility — his tolerance of excesses, reliance on flawed trials and failure to conduct a full reckoning afterwards.
A work neither marked by demonisation nor blind defence, Emelyanov presents Stalin as a calculated statesman shaped by a turbulent and highly dangerous era. By restoring an understanding based on historical complexity, he argues, we gain a clearer understanding of 1937-38, as well as how later distortions of that history shaped the self-image and ultimate fate of the Soviet Union.