"The Great Purge" of ... what year?

In a power-consolidating campaign of terror that first targeted political opponents, government officials and SINOs — party "Stalinists in Name Only" — the eponymous Russian

dictator expanded his extermination initiative to the military, not long before the country's invasion by Nazi Germany. "No officer corps ever suffered the degree of loss , observed one historian, "that the Red Army suffered in peacetime, at the hands of its own government, [as did Russia's] during dictator Joseph Stalin’s paranoid purge."

The New York Times, 21 February 2025:

Trump fired the country’s senior military officer as part of an extraordinary Friday night purge at the Pentagon that injected politics into the selection of the nation’s top military leaders.

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a four-star fighter pilot known as C.Q. who became only the second African American to hold the chairman's job, is to be replaced by a little-known retired three-star Air Force general, Dan Caine, who endeared himself to the president when they met in Iraq six years ago.

In all, six Pentagon officials were fired, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy; Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force; and the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

The decision to fire General Brown, which Mr. Trump announced in a message on Truth Social, reflects the president’s insistence that the military’s leadership is ... out of step with his "America First" movement....

Even some of [the administration's] staunchest supporters in Congress have warned that a purge in the senior ranks of the Pentagon could cause morale to plunge.

When, in 2020, he nominated Brown to be the Air Force’s chief of staff, Trump wrote that he's "a Patriot and Great Leader."

Also from the Times, same date:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday that he was firing Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female officer to rise to the Navy’s top job of chief of naval operations, and would be looking for her replacement.

The announcement came in a statement emailed to reporters Friday night, shortly after President Trump said he was firing [Brown].

Admiral Franchetti became the 33rd chief of naval operations on Nov. 2, 2023, making her the first woman ....

The firing of a service chief such as Admiral Franchetti is vanishingly rare, though Mr. Trump fired another four-star female admiral less than 24 hours after his second inauguration.

That was Adm. Linda L. Fagan, who as commandant of the Coast Guard shattered a glass ceiling to become the first woman to lead a branch of the armed forces.

Continues the Times:

During his second administration, Mr. Trump has shown personal animus toward high-ranking military officers, both those on active duty and some who retired years ago.

Mr. Trump has suggested that Gen. Mark A. Milley, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who retired in 2023, should be executed for engaging with his Chinese counterpart during the turmoil surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection.

General Milley's offical portrait as chairman was removed from the Pentagon on Inauguration Day.

A week later, Mr. Hegseth revoked General Milley’s government-funded personal security detail, which was provided to the retired general because of the death threats he has received from Iran following the U.S. strike that killed a powerful Iranian general in early 2020.

Mr. Trump’s supporters have also threatened General Milley over his contacts with his Chinese counterpart during the first Trump administration, assuring them that the United States was not seeking to strike them, or trigger a military crisis.

Although history guarantees no cloning of its dictatorships, history's proprietors of authoritarian states have left us their group-conduct portrait of extraordinary sameness — a near uniformity of paranoia, vengeance, cronyism and unremitting cruelty in pursuit of "erasing" political opponents, government officials, party members in name only and high-ranking military officers.