The bourgeois ‘lie’ that then followed (fuelled by ‘Orwell’ and others), was that this purge of traitors was a) ordered personally by Stalin, and b) aimed at Red Army Officers who hated Stalin and wanted him removed! Stalin was the least of their worries as he possessed very little personal power (being ‘elected’ into Office), but this false story has ‘stuck’ in Western discourse and is found almost universally in explanations of ‘why’ the Nazi Germans were able to make such in-roads into the USSR in the first six-months of their 1941 attack! The fake story is that Stalin’s purges so weakened the Red Army that it was unable to perform its allotted duties when push came to shove! This is disingenuous to the power of the racist ideology Hitler propagated and the ‘new’ tactics and very good technology that Nazi Germany developed – and the fact that when all this was integrated within the German people it defeated the combined military might of Western Europe in a matter of days – with Stalin having had no direct influence over the Officer Corp of those defeated countries!
