Did the purged people go into Gulags?
There were many purges throughout Stalin’s long reign. Many of the officials were shot. There were a lot of summary executions, and the secret police sentenced people. If you were accused, you were either killed or, yes, sent to the gulags. Many of the people sent to the gulags were actually recently released from German POW camps in WWII. Stalin didn’t trust Hitler, though he initially agreed with Hitler upon the idea of carving up Poland. Stalin didn’t trust anyone. Many of his top officials were executed. They knew too much to be sent to the gulags. Not all of the gulags were in Siberia, either. Many of them were in western Russia north of the Arctic Circle. Prisoners of war made excellent gulag labor because they were basically taken out of concentration camps where they were forced into labor and put into a gulag where they were forced into labor. Stalin feared that they might try tricks they learned from the Nazis on their fellow Russians and try to overthrow the communist govern
