The purges in the USSR started in the mid-1930’s and continued throughout the late 1930’s. Joseph Stalin had shared power with Zinoviev and Kamenevin the time after the death of Lenin (1924) and he had no intention of ever being put in that position again. By the mid-1930’s Stalin believed that the Bolshevik Party ‘Old Guard’ (members who had been there from the early days) represented a threat to him and unless he did something about them they would remove him from power. Stalin suspected everyone who had any semblance of power and he wanted them dealt with. For the purges to start Stalin wanted to give the process a degree of legal legitimacy (make it look like what he was doing was within the laws of the country). In December 1934, the popular party head of Leningrad, Sergei Kirov, was murdered. What part Stalin played in this remains an issue that historians are not fully agreed on. Stalin, adhering to his policy of making the whole issue look legitimate, asked the Politburo for their support to purge the party so that certain elements could be removed. The Politburo gave Stalin their support for this and the purges began.
The first people rounded up were labelled ‘Trotskyites’. They were put in prisons run by the NKVD (the secret police, formally the Cheka) who, according to the very few that survived this experience, used both physical and psychological torture to gain information about other ‘traitors’ to the cause. The NKVD also did what it could to get signed confessions out of those they dealt with. Stalin himself upped the ante when he signed a decree that made families liable for the crimes committed by their husband or father. Children aged 12 could also be executed under this decree. Basically no one was safe. However, the people that had good reason to be very fearful were those who Stalin believed were a challenge to his position and one of the most common charges made against an arrested person was plotting to kill Stalin. The NKVD needed a confession and they proved very adept at their work. One member of the NKVD stated that given the time he could get anyone to sign a confession that they were “the king of England". Given the nature of the work they did, there are no clear figures for the number of people arrested by the NKVD. If anyone enquired, then they themselves would have been viewed as suspect in the extreme.
In keeping with Stalin’s desire to maintain an air of legality to the purges, major figures were given the ‘luxury’ of a public trial – the so-called show trials. A guilty verdict at the end of these stage-managed trials was an inevitability. Many signed a confession knowing that what they had confessed to was wrong. In his book “Darkness at Noon" Arthur Koestler commented that many in NKVD prisons saw death as the best way out of life in these prisons and signed confessions knowing that they were in effect signing their own death warrants but death was a swift way out. To what extent this is true is impossible to know as no one survived their execution! Some did survive NKVD prisons and the gulags and later wrote about their experiences (such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich") and what unites all of these books is the appalling life they must have led while in these establishments while they had to live with the knowledge that an early release was all but impossible. For them death must have seemed a release. But for Stalin a signed confession was like a trophy to parade among the people as proof of his suspicions of their treasonable behaviour.
In the course of Stalin's rule, at least 20 million political opponents were killed or exhiled to Siberia. This Purges allowed Stalin not to just to eliminate any opposition, but to give the impression to those around him that he was willing to go to any lengths to keep himself safe. For many staying quiet and being obedient was the only option, as even his family members were effected.