What if Stalin only purged Trotskyites and didn't let mass psychosis/tattling set in?

[Alcsentre Calanice]

Stalin himself abandoned large-scale terror after 1938.

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.

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.

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.

 

[Cudymcar]

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.

The Great Purge is not called "purge" in Russian, it's called the Great Terror.

 

[DG Valdron]

It wouldn't be the same Stalin. He was psychopathic, narrowminded, deeply incompetent, insecure and brutal. Stalin is lionized in history, but prune away the mythology, he was a tiny, deeply stupid and venal man. His excesses were not 'mistakes' they were fundamental to his petty narcissism.

 

[Julian]

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.

Studies on wartime Terror in '41-42 have placed it closer in scale to '37-38, though still smaller. 160k executions by courts/military tribunals, 30k by the NKVD Special Meeting, and at least 10k killed in the Summer ‘41 prison massacres. The last statistic is a significant understatement, as it doesn’t include all prisons and the period was quite chaotic. You also have an estimated 10s of thousands of inform extrajudicial executions, especially of Red Army soldiers in the field. ~200k-300k executed in ‘41-42 is a reasonable range, definitely smaller but a significant repressive event.

As you said, Stalinist repression - especially murder - came in waves and peaked when the perception of state danger was greatest.

I would put the last gasp of Terror as the borderland counterinsurgencies. You had 10s of thousands of “bandits” reported killed with a far smaller number of weapons captured. Combine with many reports of abuses and massacres and it’s evident that there were mass killings of civilians.

 

[Julian]

Hagenloh does a good job connecting wider trends in Soviet policing to the launch of the mass operations in Summer '37:

Ezhov's position was wholly compatible with the direction of policing during the previous several years, and it was strikingly similar to the analyses of the causes of crime promoted by Yagoda in 1934 and 1935. The ideas that recidivism was the key cause of most crime, that the majority of serious crimes could be traced to a professional core of "criminal elements," and that effective policing action required repression of the entire "criminal contingent" were central to every aspect of police work by mid-decade. Ezhov brought to the NKVD a particular focus on connections between these "socially harmful" cohorts and the threat of rebellion in time of war, and his leadership encouraged the local police to categorize existing groups of ex-convicts, expellees from regime cities, dekulakized peasants, special settlers, and petty criminals in the increasingly politicized language emanating from the center. Still, the response of the local police to these trends ensured that mass repressions, when they began in mid-1937, would be directed at the same groups of ex convicts, dekulakized peasants, and "socially harmful elements" that had been the targets of police actions in the preceding years.

Stalin's Police, page 242.

Removing Yezhov from the equation helps. Yezhov was a career Party functionary, not a Chekist. He was brought into the post by Stalin as a "fixer" to clean up what Stalin perceived as failures by the previous NKVD chief, Yagoda. Stalin did something similar when he replaced Abakumov with Ignatiev at the Ministry of State Security in '51. Ignatiev was much more moderate than Yezhov - Stalin had to chastise him about being stingy about using torture - but that didn't stop him from organizing the Doctor's Plot investigation when Stalin demanded it. So, whatever Party leader Stalin replaces Yagoda with to "clean up" the NKVD will still ultimately be implementing Stalin's ideas and goals.