This podcast discusses Stalin’s military purge, a part of the Great Terror which has received relatively little attention in the literature. Peter Whitewood advances a new explanation for why Stalin attacked his officer corps during 1937-38, showing that to understand the military purge the analysis needs to begin with the formation of the Red Army in early 1918. Over the course of nearly twenty years the Red Army was perceived as vulnerable to a range of threats, from hostile White Guards to infiltrated foreign agents and Trotskyist ‘counterrevolutionaries’, however Stalin consistently leaned towards restraint and resisted a crack down to secure the military. But by mid-1937 these perceived threats to the army had evolved and culminated in a very large spy scare. It was this scare, rather than any desire to consolidate his power, that finally compelled Stalin to initiate a purge of his high command.