In many ways, Russia is still recovering from it, trying to deal with the fact that only a few decades ago, it inflicted on itself one of the worst holocausts in human memory" (Hochschild, 1993). Therefore, the purges were used on the one hand to discourage the people and the elites in particular from establishing a dissident opposition or a negative pole of power that could have countered the Soviet regime.

Also, another possible justification of the way in which the Soviet regime acted in that period was the complete elimination of the possible negative influences from the old regimes or more precisely of the opposing forces in Russia. More precisely, "the decade of the 1930s saw the renewal of the Soviet leading stratum. During the period the.regime progressively unburdened itself of its legacy of class prejudice and rose to its full totalitarian posture" (Unger, 1969, 2). The regime of...
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