POLITICAL purges have been practised throughout history. The sudden removal on April 2 by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth of his army chief of staff, Gen Randy George, follows a pattern. Before him, Hegseth sent home the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the top admiral of the US navy, the No. 2 general at the US air force, and other senior officers.

Gen George’s departure during an ongoing war is not without precedent. In the early 1950s, during the Korean War, US president Harry Truman disagreed with his senior-most commander general, Geor­­ge MacArthur. MacArthur had told Tru­m­­an that “the Korean War would be short-li­v­­ed”. On April 11, 1951, Truman, tired of MacArt­hur’s bellicose advice and insolent disobedience, relieved him of his command.

In the USSR, Stalin periodically purged his colleagues and subordinates, using the notorious L. Beria, head of his secret police (NKVD). Beria survived Stalin, but within three months was himself purged.

Later, Soviet leader N. Khrushchev was removed by his Politburo colleagues, as was the last Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev whose radical policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) proved to be his undoing. Being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 did not help him. In........

© Dawn