It would be hard to argue that compared to other central and eastern European post-communist countries, united Germany failed to establish justice for victims of the GDR: lustration and purges were comparatively intensive and extensive, without deteriorating into the kind of witch-hunts that Poland experienced a few years back.
More purges, and more boot-licking, are expected to follow, with Mugabe's bash presenting an excellent and timely opportunity for the latter.
Precisely because of this tension at the heart of the Communist movement, the most dangerous place to be at the time of the 1930s purges was at the top of the nomenklatura: in the space of a couple of years, 80% of the Central Committee and the Red Army leadership was shot.
Many expect further purges of Islamists, including veterans of the jihad in Afghanistan, whose militias General Mangoush had licensed, elevating their leaders to high office.In this section The regime digs in Will they ever go home?
In 1936 Stalin told his officials that the following year's census would find a total population of 170m a figure that took no account of his slaughter of millions in famines and purges.
Before and after it, Stalin's purges were severe.
It was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union (suffering terribly in famine, purges and war), coming into being as an independent nation only in 1991; before then it had existed as a country of sorts only for a brief spell after the Russian Revolution.
The station is immensely popular in Budapest, especially after purges of independent-minded journalists at the state broadcast media.
He set out to restore the party's reputation by urging economic development and rehabilitating senior victims of the purges.
De Gaulle's struggle to impose himself in allied eyes as the legitimate resistance leader; collaboration with Vichy and the subsequent purges after liberation in 1944; the eventual denunciation by French Marxists of Stalin after 1956: each was fiercely contested.
Random (and so far soft) purges, a ban on foreign bank accounts and anti-American hysteria may be mere half-measures, but even they may be too extreme.
