“General Purge” of the State Apparatus in 1929–1932 as Manifestation of a Party State legitimacy Crisis

Abstract

During the post-revolutionary phase, the Soviet state transformed into a terrain of “permanent purges”, different in their purposes, forms and results, which have established a bridgehead for discrimination overgrowing into a state repressive system. Soviet propaganda and scientific discourse assessed “purges” as a tool of necessity to raise the professional level of the administrative apparatus. In current studies, a “general purge” is typified as one of the mechanisms to strengthen the Stalin’s regime. The paper substantiates the approach to administrative “purges” at the time of the “Great Turn” in the context of studying the systemic crisis of legitimacy of Party institutions in their relation with core social groups. The main intent of administrative “general purge” was to retain the power of the “corporate core” of oligarchic-type (manifestation of protective function) by means of sociopolitical mobilization of the confrontational type with multidirectional vectors. Therefore, new groups were drawn into the management sphere from the principal social basis (through “proletarianization”, “system of promotion”) and simultaneously it was accompanied by elimination of the so-called “former”, “non-Soviet”, “old” specialists. Thereby, both the officially announced goal (raising the level of managerial effectiveness of the government and enhancing its social legitimacy) and the hidden aim (securing its own bureaucratic core of power in spite of high personnel turnover and drop-out) proved out of reach. The conflict of principles of doctrinism and pragmatism during this campaign undercut its effectiveness as a crisis-response measure.