The great purge was it really as bad as western historians say it was? Was it necessary and or justifiable?

Stalin was a real ass dude but he had some…issues that become increasingly worse with time. This however is not the main reason for the cannibalization of his own apparatus, the sad reality is that both Iosef and the autistic austrian hippie were constantly being played like a fiddle by british intelligence

There were two layers to the "great purge"; the legitimate purge of the Trotsky-Zinoviev left bloc, and the illegitimate Yagoda-Yezhov terror, carried out by fascist sympathizers who Stalin had executed for their crimes.

Stalin didn't allow Yezhov to do it. Once he found out what he was doing through Beria he had him executed.

Not at all
No
No

Yes, the great purge was horrible, but it's still going on. Every year another 10 million gets added to the total death toll of communism.

Stalin was right to purge the officer corps. It was full of czarists and reactionaries. A former white Russian general got spared, and what did he do? Betrayed the Soviet Union to Hitler, feeding the Nazi high command Intel and advising them on Barbarossa and misdirecting the red army counter attack efforts.

Purge was justified.

...

The USSR won the Winter War, and the Finns conceded more territory than was ever demanded by the Soviets

it's a common tactic among anti-communists to cry about "muh k/d" whenever confronted with the fact that they kept losing against communists.
whenever you bring up the Winter War, they say "t-the Finns killed more people though!"
whenever you bring up the Vietnam War, they say "t-the Americans killed more people though! a-and we like, completely fucked them up with agent orange and napalm! t-take that!"
whenever you bring up Rhodesia they say "t-the based whites killed more people though!"
i've even seen people say that "they didn't even wan't to win! they just wanted to test weapons and kill more people!"
it's pathetic really, they must be seething about getting cucked.

There is this thing called "tactical defeat, strategic victory" The USSR achieved it's strategic objective of putting a bufferzone between Finland and Leningrad and they did it with acceptable causalities, and thats what matters, life is not CoD with K/D ratios.