I'm a bit concerned about the portayal of the "Great Purge" in HoI IV

[Oriflamme]

All this "crimes against humanity" talk is nauseating. Most of us here have played CK2; I think there's a little Stalin in all of us.

Maybe the Trotskyite thing is inaccurate, but there should be some sort of penalty to not doing the Great Purge. A major reason why the Red Army fought so bitterly against Germany was out of sheer terror of the NKVD. And forgive my lack of political correctness, but it worked! I've read enough Machiavelli and have taken enough business classes to know that fear is a good motivator. Besides, it doesn't help to have dissenting voices when your country faces annihilation.

 

[Lither]

A major reason why the Red Army fought so bitterly against Germany was out of sheer terror. It doesn't help to have dissenting voices when your country faces annihilation.

A bigger reason for that though is a few things that Paradox won't include, even though their impact was as great or more than the purge.

 

[Damiani]

Hope this thread does't get closed, because it is pretty important.

In HOI3 not doing the Purge resulted in very low NU, about 50% IIRC. That seemed to be a good of enough incentive for the player. I think that the Devs only added Trotsky because it's kind of cool to have him in the game, even if it may not be terribly accurate. I don't really have a problem with it I guess, but Trotsky does seem to be a very bad effect on the USSR as shown by the first WWW Campaign, hopefully this has been tweaked a bit by now though.

 

[MGL 86]

A major reason why the Red Army fought so bitterly against Germany was out of sheer terror of the NKVD.

I disagree. A MAJOR reason Red Army soldiers fight bitterly was they were defending their homes and families.

 

[Oriflamme]

I disagree. A MAJOR reason Red Army soldiers fight bitterly was they were defending their homes and families.

Sure, and having the NKVD Internal Troops (which had an extensive record of abducting friends and neighbors in the middle of the night) right behind you is a pretty good incentive too.

I suggest you read "Leningrad: Siege and Symphony". It explains succinctly how the Great Purge permeated all aspects of life in the Soviet Union before, during, and after the war.

 

[MarcoRossolini]

Sure, and having the NKVD Internal Troops (which had an extensive record of abducting friends and neighbors in the middle of the night) right behind you is a pretty good incentive too.

I suggest you read "Leningrad: Siege and Symphony". It explains succinctly how the Great Purge permeated all aspects of life in the Soviet Union before, during, and after the war.

The memoirs I've read by Soviet troops disagree (though I haven't read that book so I cannot comment on that). There's some biases, the crimes committed in Germany (no further comment on them please) are largely hushed up or omitted - though some are open about it.
But whilst they admit the purges had been a horrific thing and had really shaken everyone, the purges had actually lessened in 1941 and things were actually pretty good prior to June 22. The worst had been in about 1938 or so for the Red Army and since then (with occasional spurts with things like the Winter War) it'd been slowly getting better.
You can only imagine their reaction then - "we just got out of the purges and you do this to us???"

Once the Bolsheviks made the war not about Stalin and Communism but about defence of the motherland, soldiers - mostly, fought much better, particularly as it became clear that the Germans were becoming even worse than the Soviets - for reasons I cannot mention. The Ukrainians in particular expected better conditions and, obviously, got far worse ones.

As a prospective game designer I find the choice of purges or no purges interesting. From a Russian history fan perspective, it's bollocks.
If anything, it should be a modifier that you start off with and have to get rid of via national focuses, the final one being "Great Patriotic war". The longer you spend with the modifier on, the more of your officers get eaten up by the purges.
In this way the player is given choices, but not good ones. You have this problem and you need to fix it whilst at the same time ensuring you achieve whatever else you want.
I think that represents the purges nicely, wasteful, distracting, damaging, and entirely unneccessary.

 

[Maizel]

The memoirs I've read by Soviet troops disagree (though I haven't read that book so I cannot comment on that). There's some biases, the crimes committed in Germany (no further comment on them please) are largely hushed up or omitted - though some are open about it.
But whilst they admit the purges had been a horrific thing and had really shaken everyone, the purges had actually lessened in 1941 and things were actually pretty good prior to June 22. The worst had been in about 1938 or so for the Red Army and since then (with occasional spurts with things like the Winter War) it'd been slowly getting better.
You can only imagine their reaction then - "we just got out of the purges and you do this to us???"

Once the Bolsheviks made the war not about Stalin and Communism but about defence of the motherland, soldiers - mostly, fought much better, particularly as it became clear that the Germans were becoming even worse than the Soviets - for reasons I cannot mention. The Ukrainians in particular expected better conditions and, obviously, got far worse ones.

As a prospective game designer I find the choice of purges or no purges interesting. From a Russian history fan perspective, it's bollocks.
If anything, it should be a modifier that you start off with and have to get rid of via national focuses, the final one being "Great Patriotic war". The longer you spend with the modifier on, the more of your officers get eaten up by the purges.
In this way the player is given choices, but not good ones. You have this problem and you need to fix it whilst at the same time ensuring you achieve whatever else you want.
I think that represents the purges nicely, wasteful, distracting, damaging, and entirely unneccessary.

Personally I would take any memoirs written at a time where discovery of anything non-comformist could mean your deportation, at the very least. with a grain of salt

 

[MarcoRossolini]

Personally I would take any memoirs written at a time where discovery of anything non-comformist could mean your deportation, at the very least. with a grain of salt

Sorry, but they're all post the fall of the Soviet Union.

 

[Maizel]

Sorry, but they're all post the fall of the Soviet Union.

Fair enough. My point still stands though.

 

[MarcoRossolini]

Fair enough. My point still stands though.

Not really, to my knowledge Boris Gorbachevsky - author of the excellent "Through the Maelstrom" has yet to face any consequences and he calls out the Soviets for all kind of things.
And in fairness, the same can be applied to certain German memoirs who claim to attempt to be trying to be trying to preserve the honour of the Wehrmacht when the reality is different - as we can see from several sources on subjects I once again cannot mention.

Anyway, my point - that the purges by that point in 1941 weren't so bad, still stands.

 

[Maizel]

Not really, to my knowledge Boris Gorbachevsky - author of the excellent "Through the Maelstrom" has yet to face any consequences and he calls out the Soviets for all kind of things.
And in fairness, the same can be applied to certain German memoirs who claim to attempt to be trying to be trying to preserve the honour of the Wehrmacht when the reality is different - as we can see from several sources on subjects I once again cannot mention.

Anyway, my point - that the purges by that point in 1941 weren't so bad, still stands.

No, in 1941 the purge (as in the great purge) was fizzling out, I agree. There were still many people arrested on the homefront, though.

 

[MarcoRossolini]

No, in 1941 the purge (as in the great purge) was fizzling out, I agree. There were still many people arrested on the homefront, though.

Absolutely no doubt there - the one incident that springs to mind immediately is in 1943 the mass deportation of Tartars to Siberia.

 

[LordOfWar16]

I think you have hit on the main problem Paradox has in framing the event. The purges certainly hurt the Soviet armed forces and economy (though to what degree as Tarroque rightly points out is debatable), so why would a human player ever go through with them? Unfortunatly at the moment Paradox has included a dissincentive for not implementing the purges that is highly problematic for the reasons I have outlined in my first post.
If you ask me, handing out certain penalties for not going through with the purges to make it an actual gameplay choice to consider is fine. It just shouldn't be framed in a way that could be construed as validating Stalins own propagander about the necessity and rightousness of the purges.

Simple, if Trotsky succeeds, you will be hit with an -40% construction speed (not production speed) penalty and the -20% national unity penalty will stay.

The effects on the purge itself are temporary, so you want to do it as soon as possible, to be recovered before the war breaks out. Purging grants you very valueable 20% of national unity, which will be very important for the war with germany. If you cant hold out until the allies open up an second front the war is basicly over for you.

 

[lekim]

Nooooo, u are wrong. He was as bloodlusty as all commies (actually Stalin was much less comiie then most of them).

Trotzky is the creator of the red army, he also contributed a lot to winning civil war in 20s and he was a Comintern guy - pushing commies everywhere, his only problem was he knew too much about mr. Stalin super insignificance before 1930s (which was destructive to Stalin godlike image). That is why he was exiled and later killed, but that is it.

If you think of a great purge, they killed everybody who knew Stalin before or who did not (i think it was even worth) and could not keep their mouths shut. It started with a couple of centralized list and then KGB (NKVD) just good bloodlusty and killed additionally up to 2m, most of the people were killed because neighbors wanted their flat, or somebody wanted their job or their wife. Grim, grim story.

Trust me I am Russian and already had some vodka in the morning Oo

I think there should be some potential advantages to keeping/getting trotsky. I'm quite certain that he favored peacefully spreading communism and improving quality of life in russia as opposed to violent spreading of the revolution and military focus. So something like:

 

[lekim]

Who is truly offended by the Great Purge these days? Moral baggage...sigh...just speaking for myself I'm sick and tired of PC and sensitivity...ugly things happen in war and under totalitarian regimes. I want the real history, not generic and sanitized.

Does not mean u need to promote things like holocaust or great purge. And yes people are still remembering that shit, especially in russia where many people still dont know what exactly happened to they grand grand parents and why.

 

[lekim]

Absolutely no doubt there - the one incident that springs to mind immediately is in 1943 the mass deportation of Tartars to Siberia.

That had nothing to do with the purge.

Tatars, Chechens and Russian Germans were moved to Kazachstan and Siberia cause Commies were afraid they will join axis as soon as they will be reach the territories where they live.

 

[BoleslavLev]

I don´t like the Great Purge NF for 3 reasons (and I already mentioned some of it in the USSR dev diary):
1) Pdx is cherry picking here. (There will be no purges in the game - except that little one in Russia.) Ok then. Now I get that historically it had a great impact, but so did many other nasty events on many other countries. We don´t have to point only at Germany. We can point at Japan, China, USSR, Yugoslavia etc.
2) It gives you 2 bad choices you have to choose between. This is frustrating + it will usually lead to finding objectively better of the 2 and then it won´t be a choice at all any more (then it will be just the same malus every time you can´t get rid of).
3) It forces you to go historic way EVEN when you know that you are commiting a crime against humanity that was also totally bad from the strategic pov. The Great Purges hurt the USSR bad - wise think would be not to do them, but here, in this one instance, Pdx is forcing you quite hard to do it by making non existing maluses (Trotsky´s coup and mali from that) to force you to shoot yourself in the leg. I will try to wrap this up in such a way that I won´t get banned (again) for talking sense:
"Having Trotsky actually posing any threat to Stalin in 1936 unless you commit The Great Purge is like having Judeo-Bolshewism plot in Germany unless you go with other NF, that is - for obvious reason - not included in the game." If you didn´t caught my drift, I am saying that it is unfair to create a boogeyman (even if it existed historically) in one state but not in the others. There were more paranoid politicians during WW2 than just Stalin.

My solution: If you want it in, leave it. I don´t mind. But don´t force me to take it to get rid of Trotsky - or at least give me another way to do it without a purge (as NFs are done, you´d probably go with it later just because you ran of the others, but maybe you don´t want to spend your first year doing this and you want to build industry - maybe). The alternative way can even be harder, I don´t mind (as long as it isn´t utterly unfair and it is a REAL DOABLE alternative). So that was my rant. It was terrible, I am sorry.

EDIT: toning it down, jsut a little bit and clarifying my grudges

 

[MarcoRossolini]

That had nothing to do with the purge.

Tatars, Chechens and Russian Germans were moved to Kazachstan and Siberia cause Commies were afraid they will join axis as soon as they will be reach the territories where they live.

Emphasis on 1943.

 

[Lord Valentine]

First of all thanks for the lively discussion!
Since there has been some argument here if the purges as such should be in the game at all, I'll add my five cents there. I'm actually all for keeping them in in some form. The purges where just such an essential element of stalinism that basically pretending they did not happen would feel a bit like an uncomfortable white-wash to me.
I am well aware that other instances of mass state violence are not depicted in the game. While as a student of history my impulse would be to show the viciousness of the period in it's totality I can absolutly understand that Paradox wants to stay away from some of them that still create very strong, in some cases even traumatic, emotional responses.
The time to approach certain tragedies of human history in the relativly casual context of a strategy game has simply not yet come.

Great purge should
- reduce manpower (by 250k-500k at least)
- reduce research speed by 10-15% for 2-3 years or until the war starts
+ increase unity +.002
+ increase political power +1
+ increase production 10% bonus

And USSR should have bad unity and political power (-.003 unity and -0.5 pp as day) triggers from the beginning of the 36 scenario. This effects should dissapear once USSR is under attack.

Great purge has nothing to do with either Trozky or Germans it is internal struggle for power and settling of the revolutionary dust.

According to the newest research I'm familiar with the number of those killed (and therefore not even counting those "merely" imprisoned) is probably in the 750.000-850.000 range, but overall I think your proposal shows a nice balanced way in which the purges could be implemented. As you have also rightly pointed out, the purges had nothing to do with any real threat to the Soviet Union in the form of a foreign plot, or even internal rebellion. Rather it arose out of not just Stalins personality but also the very structure of his rule. One of my professors has put it very well so I'll qoute one of his works here. If the language doesnt feel very elegant, that's because I've failed in adequatly translating it from it's very well structured German original:

The true novelty of the 1930s did not consist of the hegemonie of the party, but - aside from the growing importance of terror as a means of governing- in the personal dictatorship of one man over the party. "Collective leadership" did indeed make way, as Chrustchov was later to decry, for the dominance of one man in all important matters. At it's core this process could be traced back to the last politically active years of Lenin, without whose consent no important decision could be taken. But no matter how hard Stalin tried to present himself as his "heir", he wasn't Lenin. Even with all the support, which he might have received in some parts of the party and population, he could never hope to gain an even vaguely comparable authority, that would be accepted even by his critics. Rathermore he succeded in numerous struggles against party rivals and millions of ordinary people. Stalin subjugated and emasculated his real and suppposed opponents (at first not primarily through physical liqiudation), but he did not win them over. This also might explain the continuing harshness and the coming terror of his regime, which beside a certain dynamic of its own and some victims among the "old Bolsheviks" hit what it was aiming for. In this regard his dictatorship was of a different quality. It was not only in conflict with the oligarchic decision making porcess, which after Lenins second stroke had exsisted without a doubt, but emerged in a new way out of inner-party struggles that were often conducted with terroristic methods. Before the outbreak of the war Stalin embodied, not as Lenin had done, the supremacy of the party over the population in accordance with the bolshevik aspirations of the October Revolution, but rather the rule of a part of the party over the rest.
(Manfred Hildermeier, Geschichte der Sowjetunion 1917-1991 - Entstehung und Niedergang des ersten sozialistischen Staates, Munich 1998. Pages. 440-441)
However even Hildermeier concedes later that all of this was by and large allready established before the great purges and the main effect of these probably was to keep even his own followers in a continual form of terrefied subjugation.
Or as Oleg Khlevniuk put it:

Stalins policies (and correspondingly the authority he gained through his policies) could not enjoy a victory grounded in positive outcomes and therefore had to be based primarily on force and terror.
(Oleg Khlevniuk, Master of the House - Stalin and his Inner Circel. New Haven 2009. Page 37)



Also a side note on the entire: Trotzky coming back to power thing. As has allready been noted that wasent even a reomte historcial possibility in 1936 or thereafter. However neither was say America going communist, or Hitler beeing overthrown in a democratic uprising, all of which the player seems to be capable of doing if they so choose. And I'm fine with that. A few ahistoric gameplay options will keep HoI IV nice and fresh for many hours. However I think the entire Trotzky thing I think should be divested from a part in the national focus tree that is clearly routed in actual history (the purges) and be moved towards on of the alternative history ones (like the ones allowing you to go after the allies instead of the axis in foreign policy orientation for example).

 

[BoleslavLev]

Also a side note on the entire: Trotzky coming back to power thing. As has allready been noted that wasent even a reomte historcial possibility in 1936 or thereafter. However neither was say America going communist, or Hitler beeing overthrown in a democratic uprising, all of which the player seems to be capable of doing if they so choose. And I'm fine with that. A few ahistoric gameplay options will keep HoI IV nice and fresh for many hours. However I think the entire Trotzky thing I think should be divested from a part in the national focus tree that is clearly routed in actual history (the purges) and be moved towards on of the alternative history ones (like the ones allowing you to go after the allies instead of the axis in foreign policy orientation for example).

But you have to try hard to make Germany or the US communists. It makes sense to try hard to make something ahistorical and crazy. Here you have to try hard not to go ahistorical. I love the idea of Trotsky in power in the USSR. But it should be completely reversed in the game mechanics. Stalin should be just fine and if you want and really go for it, then there should be Trotsky. Instead of Great Purge there could be Trotsky Plot NF.