Great Purge

I

Introduction

Great Purge or Great Terror, widespread arrests and executions in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1936 to 1938, masterminded by Communist Party leader Joseph Stalin and carried out by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD (Russian acronym for People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, a predecessor agency of the KGB). Stalin’s aim was to decimate the ranks of the party and eliminate all potential opposition to his rule; the terror spread throughout Soviet society, resulting in well over a million executions and swelling the labor camps with prisoners.

II

Stalin’s Decree

Although Stalin had achieved domination over the country by 1934, he was worried about potential opposition. One possible threat was Sergey Kirov, leader of the Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) party and a popular politician who some party officials had considered as a replacement to Stalin. When Kirov was assassinated in December 1934, many suspected that Stalin had ordered NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda to arrange the murder. Although there is no documented proof of Stalin’s involvement, Kirov’s death eliminated Stalin’s main rival and gave him a pretext for arresting opposition members within the party. On the day of Kirov’s murder, Stalin issued a decree establishing a special procedure for those accused of “counterrevolutionary terrorism,” depriving them of legal rights and enabling authorities to carry out sentencing, including execution, immediately. The NKVD claimed that the Kirov murder was part of a broad conspiracy against the regime and began arresting party members, including two prominent Bolsheviks, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinovyev, who had opposed Stalin’s ascendancy to power in the 1920s.

III

The Show Trials

Kamenev and Zinovyev were tried publicly along with 16 codefendants in August 1936 in the first of a series of highly publicized show trials. The NKVD, led by Nikolay Yezhov, who had replaced Yagoda when the latter was arrested in 1936, spent months interrogating and torturing the accused, forcing their confessions to fabricated crimes against the state. The second show trial, in January 1937, featured the prominent Bolshevik Karl Radek among the more than 20 defendants. The culmination of terror within the upper party ranks came in March 1938, when 21 defendants were tried in the last great show trial. Among those accused of sabotage against the regime and other such crimes were Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov, who had led the opposition to Stalin in the late 1920s. Another prominent defendant was former NKVD chief Yagoda, who confessed to arranging the murder of Kirov. In all three show trials most of the defendants were sentenced to death and immediately executed. The high-profile trials served a propaganda purpose by creating the impression that the regime was threatened by conspiracies and by creating fear among the population.

IV

Widespread Purges

The purges, called the “Yezhovshchina” because they were directed by NKVD chief Yezhov, were broadened to target all of Soviet society. The Red Army was decimated between 1937 and 1938, with two-thirds of its officer corps arrested and many of its senior officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, executed. The assault on the Communist Party resulted in the deaths of 98 of the 139 members of the Central Committee and 90 percent of the members of republican and regional central committees. In all, more than 1 million party members were arrested and at least half perished. Meanwhile, mass police operations against the general population were launched in the summer of 1937. Stalin and Yezhov supplied NKVD officials in the republics with numerical quotas on those to be arrested. Cultural figures were especially vulnerable because the regime viewed artistic and intellectual expression with suspicion. The purges also extended to foreign Communists, who were arrested while in Moscow or in some cases eliminated abroad. Total estimates of those arrested on false political charges and either imprisoned or executed between 1936 and 1938 range from 1.5 million to 7 million. Upwards of 5 million purge victims ended up in Soviet labor camps, where conditions were so deplorable that many eventually died. Whereas earlier purges of the party had been restricted to expulsions without criminal punishment, Stalin had decided in this case that terror was necessary to ensure his absolute power.

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By late 1938 the terror had achieved its purpose and the mass arrests were stopped. Stalin had carried out a complete renovation of the Communist Party by destroying the generation who had formed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and bringing in people owing their loyalty to him. His rule was now unchallenged, but in liquidating key elements of the society he had devastated the country and left it badly prepared for Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941 during World War II.