The term "self-shuttered" escapes me. Can you clarify this activity?
This is my mistype, must be "
self-shattered".
I wanted to say that mechanism of rooting out the 'military conspiracy' once activated was very hard to stop.
I hold my personal opinion that the repressions in the army actually began in 1936 and did not coincide with the major repressions against the civilian population in 1937-1938. Or, rather, they coincided, but accidentally, since the purges of the army stemmed from the whole previous process of trying to establish control over the army and all these previous attempts to ensure transparency in the vertical of command and ensure the readiness of the old military elites to take criticism from above.
I rely on two scientific works of the Russian historian of special services,
Alexander Aleksandrovich Zdanovich, who published two monographs in the 2000s: "
Soviet State military counterintelligence: Organizational construction and cooperation with the Red Army" and "
Activities of the Cheka-OGPU organisations to ensure the safety of the Red Army in 1921-1934" For example, they are also mentioned as bibliographic sources by Stephen Kotkin in books "
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler" and "
Stalin: Paradoxes of the power".
In fact, any initiative to identify "conspiracies", as I have already mentioned, begins to self-sustain itself from a certain point. Even if you or I or the
@ObssesedNuker were teleported into the desk and chair of the People's Commissar of Defense or the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs in 1937, we would hardly be able to stop the chaos which was happening. We would simply not able to persuade anyone: what are you talking about, the day before yesterday there were enemies in the army, yesterday comrades from the NKVD found a conspiracy, but today you are saying that all this has abruptly ceased to exist? Maybe you're covering the conspiracy of enemies, comrade Commissar?
All this was superimposed on old contradictions, that every high-ranking military in the military districts on the outskirts of the country surrounded himself with his proteges and appointees who depended on him and basically supported him personally. Accordingly, after the successfully launched initiative from below, all this could indeed be submitted to the top as "an old and long-standing organization of conspirators" messages, and, what is most offensive, looking from above
it could just look like this.
As a result, as in the days of the Great French Revolution, the stream of paranoia and suspicion rose from below, was supported by constant reports from the bottom and everyone who tried to comprehend and rationalize it, was in danger of being suspected of sympathy with the conspirators who were
everywhere, everywhere, many of them being found everyday!
Until this wave of searchings of enemies under the bed did not pass several times, little could be done in order to stop it. Until fanaticism, in an effort to uproot the conspiracy, did not run out of itself, it was all uncontrollable nor from above, nor from below, it was a self-sustaining process that dried up only after a part of the army and part of the "inquisitors" ended physically. This is very similar to the Jacobin terror, to the processes of Senator McCarthy, and in principle to any witch hunt, they are all built on the same principles: they start with reasonable grounds and assumptions, the first steps seem right and justified, and then everything rolls into bloody mess, until the engine simply does not choke from self-harm, being
self-shattered.