<P> At first it was thought 25--50% of Red Army officers had been purged; the true figure is now known to be in the area of 3.7--7.7% . This discrepancy was the result of a systematic underestimation of the true size of the Red Army officer corps, and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party . Thirty percent of officers purged in 1937--39 were allowed to return to service . </P> <P> The purge of the army was claimed to be supported by German - forged documents (said to have been correspondence between Marshal Tukhachevsky and members of the German high command). The claim is unsupported by facts, as by the time the documents were supposedly created, two people from the eight in the Tukhachevsky group were already imprisoned, and by the time the document was said to reach Stalin the purging process was already underway . However the actual evidence introduced at trial was obtained from forced confessions . </P> <P> Eventually almost all of the Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the Russian Revolution of 1917, or in Lenin's Soviet government, were executed . Out of six members of the original Politburo during the 1917 October Revolution who lived until the Great Purge, Stalin himself was the only one who remained in the Soviet Union, alive . Four of the other five were executed . The fifth, Leon Trotsky, had been forced into exile outside the Soviet Union in 1929, but was assassinated in Mexico by Soviet agent Ramón Mercader in 1940 . Of the seven members elected to the Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin's death in 1924, four were executed, one (Tomsky) committed suicide and two (Molotov and Kalinin) lived . </P> <P> However, the trials and executions of the former Bolshevik leaders, while being the most visible part, were only a minor part of the purges . A series of documents discovered in the Central Committee archives in 1992 by Vladimir Bukovsky demonstrate that there were quotas for arrests and executions as for all other activities in the planned economy . </P>

In what year did the russian revolution draw to a close