ABSTRACT
Towards the close of 1928, when, owing to the increased economic distress, the authorities began to wage the class war with renewed energy, the policy of putting the disfranchised on short commons was pursued more vigorously than ever. A general purging or purification of the Soviet apparatus followed this unprecedented "electoral campaign". On November 30, 1928, in the "Moskovskaya Gazeta" it was announced from Smolensk that, as a result of the purification of the Soviet apparatus, 1,423 employees had been discharged, among them being sometime noblemen, landowners, high officials, the offspring of priests, merchants, and rich peasants. The subsidiary purpose of the whole campaign to "purify" the electoral register was, by involving the disfranchised in political and social discredit, to reduce as far as possible the number of mouths for which the proletarian State had to provide food, to "mitigate" the housing shortage, and to lighten the burden upon the public treasury.
