Great Purge

Between 1936 and 1939 the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin carried out a wave of political repression known as the Great Purge or Great Terror. The secret police, the NKVD, arrested well over a million people, among them former Bolshevik leaders, army commanders, officials, peasants, clergy and members of ethnic minorities. Official records list 681,692 executions in 1937 and 1938 alone, and scholars estimate the total death toll at around 700,000 to 1.2 million.

Stalin had defeated his rivals within the Communist Party by the late 1920s and sent Leon Trotsky into exile in 1929. The human cost of forced collectivisation and the famine of the early 1930s, including the Holodomor in Ukraine, shook confidence in his leadership among some party members. In December 1934 the popular senior party official Sergei Kirov was assassinated. Whatever the truth behind the killing, which some historians suspect Stalin arranged, it became the pretext for a mounting campaign against alleged conspirators. Stalin and his closest associates also justified the repression as the removal of a potential "fifth column" before an expected war with Germany or Japan.

Three great show trials were staged in Moscow. In August 1936 Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and fourteen others were accused of murdering Kirov and plotting against Stalin; all were shot. A second trial in January 1937 dealt with seventeen lesser figures, and a third, in March 1938, condemned Nikolai Bukharin, the former premier Alexei Rykov and even Genrikh Yagoda, the former head of the NKVD. The defendants confessed publicly, but it is now known that their confessions were extracted through beatings, sleep deprivation and threats to their families. Trotsky was sentenced to death in his absence; he was murdered by an NKVD agent in Mexico in 1940.

In June 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other senior commanders were tried in secret and shot. The purge removed three of the five marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, eight of nine admirals and most corps and division commanders. Historians now estimate that between 3.7 and 7.7 per cent of the whole officer corps was purged, but the loss of so much of the high command badly damaged the Red Army on the eve of war.

The terror reached far beyond the elite. NKVD Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 targeted former kulaks, former tsarist officials, clergy, criminals and other "anti-Soviet elements" under regional quotas. Three-person tribunals, or troikas, decided hundreds of cases in a single session, without the accused present. This "Kulak Operation" alone led to about 670,000 arrests and 376,000 executions. Separate national operations struck Poles, Germans, Latvians, Finns, Greeks and other minorities. The Polish Operation led to more than 111,000 executions, and Timothy Snyder estimates that Poles made up about an eighth of all those executed.

The peak period, from September 1936 to August 1938, is often called the Yezhovshchina after the NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. In 1938 Yezhov was replaced by Lavrentiy Beria, and a decree of 17 November 1938 halted most of the mass operations; Yezhov himself was later shot. Historians with access to the archives have shown that Stalin was closely involved throughout, personally signing lists that authorised the execution of about 40,000 people. Similar purges were carried out in Mongolia and in Xinjiang.

Relatives of the executed were often told that their family members had received ten years "without the right of correspondence". In his "secret speech" of February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced the purges as an abuse of power, and many victims, including Tukhachevsky, were rehabilitated. Bukharin was cleared only in 1988. Historians long disputed the scale of the killing, with popular estimates once ranging up to several million, but the secret-police archives point to executions in the hundreds of thousands, roughly in line with Robert Conquest's 1968 estimate.

Our 1938 map shows the Soviet Union at the height of the Great Purge.