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.