The contractual identity of officers of the Red Army from Central and Eastern Europe during the Great Purge in the USSR
The contractual identity of officers of the Red Army from Central and Eastern Europe during the Great Purge in the USSR

Summary/Abstract: The period of Great Purge in the USSR was an important moment for the officers of the Red Army, a moment in which their declared nationality became particularly contractual. It did not depend on their individual choices, but on subjective assessments of the RKKA party and personnel authorities as well as the Soviet state police – the NKVD. It was these institutions that ruled, quite freely interpreting the facts, what nationality any given person was. This often decided person’s dismissal from the ranks of the armed forces but could also be a pretext for much more serious repression – imprisonment and even death. It resulted from the fact that the Great Purge quickly acquired strong national feature. Representatives of the nations who inhabited Russia, and later the Soviet Union, and after the first world war their countries became a part of “capitalist camp”, turned out to be particularly suspicious and therefore, were the first victims of oppression. It was easier for the political bodies of the Red Army and functionaries of the NKVD to consider the representatives of non-Soviet nations as suspects of various offenses.

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