On Stalin's Purging of the Red Army

It was off the charts in its paranoia in that, while a military coups was entirely possible in the '30s, Mr. Stalin not only purged some 47,000 officers (most of whom there wasn't a shred of evidence against - Tukhachevsky, for example - and always via a show-trial), a significant number of those people were either shot in the head or sent off to Siberia where they ended up dead there due to starvation, torture, overwork, and/or exposure.............................................................................And it didn't stop there, either, people. It has also been alleged (by multiple historians; Robert Conquest, Jim Powell, just to name a couple) that Stalin arrested approximately one quarter of the Soviet Military Council and that a significant majority of these folks either committed suicide or were murdered in cold blood by Stalin's goon-squads. Of course, the most ironic case of all was the fact that even Stalin's number one killing machine, Yerzov, himself got swept up in the paranoia and was eventually shot between the eyes as well.......Any damn person with a pulse, basically.