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  1. Home
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  3. Origins of the Great Purges
  • Cited by 120
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
1985
Online ISBN:
9780511572616
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511572616
Subjects:
Area Studies, Russian and East European Government, Politics and Policy, Twentieth Century European History, History, European Studies, Russian and East European History
Series:
Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (43)
Information

Book description

This is a study of the structure of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1930s. Based upon archival and published sources, the work describes the events in the Bolshevik Party leading up to the Great Purges of 1937–1938. Professor Getty concludes that the party bureaucracy was chaotic rather than totalitarian, and that local officials had relative autonomy within a considerably fragmented political system. The Moscow leadership, of which Stalin was the most authoritarian actor, reacted to social and political processes as much as instigating them. Because of disputes, confusion, and inefficiency, they often promoted contradictory policies. Avoiding the usual concentration on Stalin's personality, the author puts forward the controversial hypothesis that the Great Purges occurred not as the end product of a careful Stalin plan, but rather as the bloody but ad hoc result of Moscow's incremental attempts to centralise political power.

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