One should hope that the anonymous NKVD official was lying to Isaak Babel's widow when he told her that the police had burned much of their archive as the Germans approached Moscow in 1941. Until and unless such sources become available, it is impossible for a study of the Great Purges period to be definitive, and it is dangerous to venture many firm conclusions about the politics of the 1930s. Yet the press, Smolensk Archive, and other printed sources do make it possible to see the outlines of politics in the Communist Party in the period and to make some observations, suggestions, and hypotheses. This effort may well have raised as many questions as it answered, but because of the need to reexamine and rethink the Stalin period, new questions should not be out of order.

This analysis has concentrated on the center–periphery conflict within the party apparatus. This struggle is important to the political history of the thirties; and it was a substantial part of the background of the Great Purges. In addition to the material presented above, a look at Central Committee membership in the thirties highlights the importance of this tension. Indeed, the trend of representation of regional party officials in the Central Committee illustrates the rise and fall of the territorial secretaries in this decade.