Stalin's Great Purge: Terror, Betrayal, and the Destruction of a Revolution
Paperback
Series: Blood and Power, Book 2
General World HistoryRussian HistoryWorld War II
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 22 2026
Pages: 268
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
STALIN'S GREAT PURGE is a gripping account of one of the darkest periods in Soviet history: the moment Joseph Stalin turned the revolution inward and made fear the organising principle of power.
By the late 1930s, Stalin ruled the Soviet Union through party control, propaganda, secret police, forced confession, prison camps, and terror. His rivals had been defeated, but victory did not make him feel secure. Old Bolsheviks, party officials, Red Army commanders, factory managers, borderland minorities, ordinary workers, and loyal servants of the state all became vulnerable to accusation.
The Great Purge was not a single event. It was a rolling storm of arrests, show trials, denunciations, secret orders, executions, deportations, and disappearances. Public trials turned confession into theatre. Secret police files turned suspicion into death. Families learned that a careless word, a foreign connection, a past association, or a name in another man's confession could destroy an entire life.
This book follows the road to Stalin's terror: the violence of the revolution, Stalin's rise through the party machine, the defeat of Trotsky and other rivals, the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Moscow Trials, the NKVD, the destruction of the Red Army, the spread of denunciation, and the way terror eventually consumed its own servants.
Part of the Blood and Power Series, this book examines how a revolution that promised liberation became a dictatorship built on fear, betrayal, silence, and obedience.
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