What Was The Connection Between Joseph Stalin And The Purgess

Stalin’s purges of 1937 were debatably one of the most horrific events of the 1900s. Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, decided that to be able to have a nation which aligned with his political ideas, he would need to eradicate those who he deemed went against these views. Stalin used the purges as a method to exercise his political control over his population and control the political spectrum. Stalin killed millions during the purges. About four years later, Hitler, the leader of Germany, conducted what is referred to today as the Holocaust. Much like Stalin, Hitler killed millions, specifically those that violated his idea of the perfect person. He targeted various groups of individuals, specifically those of Jewish heritage.
While both the Holocaust and the Purges included the mass murder of specific groups, the Holocaust is commonly the only one referred to as ‘genocide.’ Many people do not seem to think that controlling the political views of individuals through the eradication of rebels should be constituted as genocide, most notably the United Nations. Despite this, both Stalin’s Purges and the Holocaust should be considered genocides because both were centered on the extermination of certain groups that held particular
Stalin justified the purges by blaming those he convicted of actual crimes, unlike Hitler who just arrested people. Stalin killed millions, sending many more (about 14 million) to his ‘Gulags’, or concentration camps. In a time of Soviet socialism, Stalin created a secret police force called the OGPU to surveil the population and make sure no one went against his ideas. Stalin’s Gulags were used to control those Stalin saw as a threat to his regime, Shearer explains the masses of people sent to Gulags saying “Hundreds of thousands were deported or interned in camps and penal settlements. In the order that launched the mass operations, Yezhov declared it his intention to eradicate dangerous populations ‘once and for all time.’” A couple years later, Hitler started his Holocaust, an event in which he killed millions, specifically those of Jewish heritage. Even though the Purges and the Holocaust seem so similar, only the Holocaust is considered genocide under the definition of the United Nations. The United Nations only considers the extermination of groups for ‘cultural, national, religious, and racial’ motives genocide, excluding the purges. This has allowed atrocities such as The Killing Fields of Cambodia to occur because killing groups ‘with common national interests’ isn’t considered genocide. This causes these events to go unpunished. The purges allowed Stalin