To date the study of the purge of the Red Army officer corps from 1937–9 has focused exclusively on the terror of the Ezhovshchina, that is, the arrest and execution of officers by the secret police of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) headed by Nikolai Ezhov for whom the period is named. Several articles and documents on the Red Army purge published in Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal and Izvestiia TsK KPSS in 1989 and 1990 have revealed that the terror was only one of two extraordinary processes that eliminated officers from the army in those years. The other, heretofore unrecognized, was expelling officers from the army and discharging them from the Communist party for associations with enemies of the people and, in 1938, for associations with foreigners, which did not necessarily result in death or imprisonment. Thousands of officers were expelled from the party as the result of independent actions by primary party organizations, and subsequently discharged from the army in an orgy of denunciations at the local level out of Moscow's control. As these two processes became interrelated, confusion added to fear and magnified the effect of the terror. Simultaneously, thousands of officers were reinstated and tens of thousands new officers commissioned, more than making up for the purged officers numerically, but not in experience, and making it extremely difficult to assess the impact of the Ezhovshchina on military cadres.