Alcsentre Calanice
Gone Fishin'
Stalin himself abandoned large-scale terror after 1938.
Although Stalin is said to a have planned another large scale, violent purge in his last years, probably directed against Soviet citizens of Jewish origin.Yeah, pretty much. What people don't really realize is that the purges never really stopped after 1938 - not even during the war - they just became more selective. This also made them less debilitating. Whether they could've been less mass purging and more selective purging is - in the end - a part of the point that is at contention in this thread.
Terror was always a core tool of the Soviet leadership all the way until Gorbachev. But mass terror was not. Rather, you had spasms of mass terror in the first two decades (during the Civil War, during collectivization, and of course during the Great Purges), punctuated and followed by a pattern of far less bloody mechanisms of terror.
It's also important to note that "purge" (obviously a euphemism) at its core just denotes the large scale expulsion of party members considered unworthy of party membership. This was combined with loss of positions of power and privileges, but in earlier purges in the 1920s and 1930s, it wasn't as inevitably tied to arrest and prosecution as in the Great Purge.