Great Purge

The Great Purge is the name given to campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s which included purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Skepticism and denial

Some authors, who align themselves politically with Stalinism, such as Ludo Martens, maintain that the scope of the purges was greatly exaggerated and the purges themselves were a necessary means of struggle against political enemies at that time. They claim that the prevailing point of view on the purges is the result of the coincidence of the interests of the post-Stalin Soviet and Western politicians and historians: the goal of the former (Nikita Khrushchev in particular, who initiated "destalinisation") was to discredit Stalinist opposition, while the goal of the latter was to discredit the Soviet Union as a whole.

Related Topics:
Ludo Martens - Nikita Khrushchev - Destalinisation - Soviet Union

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Outright denial of Stalin's crimes, such as that of Martens and other apologists for Stalinism, should not be confused with legitimate scholarly revisions, based mainly on documentary evidence from the partially opened Soviet archives, which tend to show that some older mainstream estimates (certain death toll estimates, GULAG statistics) were exaggerated. Since the present Putin government has greatly restricted access to the Soviet archives, the full scope of what is largely considered a phenomenon on a par with the Nazi holocaust is still to be uncovered.

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