The term "purge" in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, some 400,000 people were expelled from the Party. But from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment or even execution.

Background

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The background of the Great Purge was Stalin's and the Politburo's desire to eliminate all possible sources of opposition to the government. They sought to ensure that members of the Party would follow the orders of the center, identified with Stalin and his circle, in strict accordance with the principle of democratic centralism. Another official justification was to remove any possible "fifth column" in case of a war, but this is less substantiated by independent sources. This is the theory proposed by Vyacheslav Molotov, a member of the Stalinist ruling circle, who participated in the Stalinist repression as a member of the Politbureau and who signed many death warrants . The Communist Party also wanted to eliminate "socially dangerous elements", such as so-called ex-kulaks, former members of opposing political parties such as the Social Revolutionaries and former Czarist officials.

Repression against perceived enemies of the Bolsheviks had been a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating social control, being continuously applied since the October Revolution, although there had been periods of heightened repression, such as the Red Terror or the deportation of kulaks who opposed collectivization. A distinctive feature of the Great Purge was that, for the first time, the ruling party itself underwent repressions on a massive scale. Nevertheless, only a minority of those affected by the purges were Communist Party members and office-holders. The purge of the Party was accompanied by the purge of the whole society. The following events are used for the demarcation of the period. Bold text'''