Thanks for that Doc. As I pointed out before, it was a brutal regime run on fear and repression, and fear of Stalin and of failure was such that wholesale executions were common, especially in the early months when Stalin lost the plot. They also had punishment regiments where often the men were poorly equipped, yet expected to lead attacks and walk through minefields to clear them. When these men died in their thousands that was not a purge, just callousness. It is difficult for us to envisage the barbarity that existed, but what you referred to was reprisals for failure, and not on the same scale as a purge which is of a far greater magnitude. I pointed out that 40,000 approx officers were either executed or removed in 1937 and 1938 and ALL the admirals. Solzhenitsyn in Gulag recounts how at an early purge, one in two railway engineers were purged because Stalin argued they were conspirators because they had made the trains heavier than they need be so that the railtracks would wear out quicker.(That is from memory, the figure may have been even higher) That is the scale of a purge.

Edt'd
I took another look and the second extract is about those who had been in German captivity and were released after the war and subsequently not trusted. That would place it outwith are time period. The first extract is getting there, but as I said above, it shows up Stalin's paranoia and callousness and the brutality of his regime where failure was punishable by death. When you take into account the three battalions of trainee officers who charged tanks, unarmed, killing many thousands, plus the many. many thousands who were fated to virtual certain death in punishment regiments, for some possibly slight failure of duty, then the first extract makes sense. It was not a purge, just the brutality that was always present. Al did say two 'specific' purges, and it may be he had this incident in mind, although it is not clasified as a purge, and a search on google for Red Army purges omits any mention of it, but seems to record all other purges.