David Shearer's Irony Regarding The Great Purges

About 75 to 80% those executed during repression in the Soviet Union were sentenced in the Yezhovshchina (Werth page 7). Including dekulakization campaign in the early 1930s and the 1942-1943 years of repression within World War Two. This is no coincidence that during the Yezhovshchina all of the national operations by the NKVD. This supports Shearer’s argument that policing in the 1930s was “unprecedented for a peacetime period” and that methods of terror including execution and deportation were being used on mass. Deportation was used as a way to manage populations, and over 6 million people were deported between 1930 and 1953. Werth stated “Its (deportation) goal was not to eliminate this or that race or ethnic group, but rather to eradicate any form or manifestation of ethnic or national particularism that might hamper the project of constructing a community of
On the other hand Nicholas Werth is a classical liberal historian financed by Stanford University, who is very open with his distrust of communism, therefore will not look at the repression in a sympathetic way and will often focus on the roles of powerful individuals. Firstly this could explain why Shearer believes that repression was class based and Werth ethnicity based, due to the political inclinations of the historians. Although both come to a similar conclusion regarding internal cohesion as the main motivation of the repression, they hold different opinions on how internal cohesion was maintained and will ultimately hold different biases when forming their arguments. In spite of this it is clear that given the evidence shown so far that the purges were motivated by maintaining internal cohesion to a very large