Stalin's Purge of the Old Bolsheviks | Generated by AI
Question: Why did Stalin purge almost the entire original Bolshevik leadership? Why did these former comrades become his “enemies”?
Answer:
Stalin liquidated the Old Bolsheviks for a combination of power-political, ideological, and psychological/paranoid reasons. They were never real “enemies of the revolution” in any objective sense — most remained loyal communists — but they became mortal threats to Stalin personally and to his absolute dictatorship.
Main reasons:
- Elimination of any possible rival power base
- Many Old Bolsheviks (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, etc.) had revolutionary prestige far greater than Stalin’s. They had been famous leaders in 1905 and 1917 while Stalin was a secondary figure.
- They could theoretically challenge him or become focal points for opposition if economic crises or war weakened his position.
- Settling old political scores from the 1920s succession struggle
- 1923–1929: Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev first formed the “Left Opposition” against Stalin, then Bukharin led the “Right Opposition.” Even after they capitulated and begged forgiveness, Stalin never forgot or trusted them again.
- Total monopolization of power (the “cult of personality” project)
- By the mid-1930s Stalin wanted to be seen as Lenin’s sole legitimate heir and the infallible genius of the revolution. The surviving Old Bolsheviks knew the real history: Lenin’s 1922–23 “Testament” calling Stalin rude and dangerous, Trotsky’s role as founder of the Red Army, etc. Dead men tell no tales — so they had to disappear and be rewritten as “traitors” and “spies.”
- Paranoia and the logic of terror (self-accelerating mechanism)
- Stalin genuinely believed (or convinced himself) that opposition factions were linking up with foreign intelligence services (Germany, Japan, Poland) to overthrow him, especially after Kirov’s assassination in 1934 (which many historians think Stalin himself orchestrated or allowed).
- Once the terror began, every arrest produced “confessions” under torture that implicated more people, creating a chain reaction that eventually reached almost everyone who had ever opposed Stalin even verbally.
- Ideological justification: “The revolution must devour its children”
- Stalin used Trotsky’s old phrase (“the revolution betrays its leaders”) and turned Marxist theory on its head: as class struggle supposedly intensified under socialism, “enemies” and “wreckers” had to be unmasked constantly. The Old Bolsheviks were perfect scapegoats for forced collectivization failures, famine, and industrial chaos.
In short: they became “enemies” not because they plotted against the USSR (almost none did), but because their very existence, prestige, and knowledge of the real past threatened Stalin’s total control and god-like image. By 1939 the Bolshevik Party of 1917 had effectively ceased to exist — replaced by Stalin’s own generation of obedient apparatchiks.
References:
- The Great Terror: A Reassessment – Robert Conquest
- Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar – Simon Sebag Montefiore
- The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 – J. Arch Getty & Oleg V. Naumov