Stalin's Great Terror

The Great Terror, also called the Great Purge, was a campaign of arrests and executions that peaked in 1937 and 1938. It followed the murder of the Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov in December 1934, which Stalin used to attack suspected enemies. The three Moscow show trials of 1936 to 1938 forced old Bolsheviks such as Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin to confess to absurd plots and then shot them. In June 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other top generals were executed, and the Red Army lost three of its five marshals and most of its senior commanders.¹²

Stalin had built a one-party state run by the secret police, the NKVD, and by 1937 he feared hidden enemies in the party, army and society, with war with Germany and Japan looming. In July 1937 the Politburo approved NKVD Order 00447, which set quotas of people to arrest and shoot in each region, aimed at former kulaks, ex-criminals and other alleged anti-Soviet elements. Regional officials asked to raise their quotas. Further orders targeted ethnic groups, including Poles, Latvians and Koreans, who were seen as foreign agents.²³

Under NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, about 1.6 million people were arrested for political offenses in 1937 and 1938, and about 680,000 were shot, according to NKVD records opened after 1991. Hundreds of thousands more went to the Gulag. The terror ended in November 1938 when Yezhov was replaced by Lavrentiy Beria; Yezhov was later tried and shot in 1940. The victims included party officials, engineers, scientists, writers and ordinary workers and farmers. Many historians think the loss of trained officers weakened the Red Army before the German invasion of 1941, although this is debated.¹²³